The Rat Park experiments are fascinating to me, in part due to the parallels in my own life. When I lived in a desert town with a part-time job and very few things to do, my alcohol consumption was much higher - not nonfunctionally so, but (at its highest) a couple of drinks a day on average, occasionally more when I was out with friends. I even ran a cocktail blog for a while, since I figured if I was going to devote so much time to a hobby I should at least do something productive with it. Now, between living in a city and working in the gig economy, I'm so busy that I hardly have time to drink. Sometimes I'll have a beer at the end of a long day; occasionally I'll have two drinks at a party, but that's becoming increasingly rare. Given how much of my work and recreation is physically oriented, waking up hungover is a serious liability, heh.

I've had similar observations on the need for a charismatic leader to unite groups of people. Not just small groups, either; I don't think it was coincidence that the great historical empires united under a single charismatic leader (Alexander the Great, Genghis Khan, Vladimir Lenin) all took a turn for the worse after the death of said leader. People, especially large groups of people, tend to be uniquely vulnerable to appeals made by charismatic and powerful people; but that only lasts so long as the person is still around to make those appeals. It's one of the reasons I try not to grumble about the inefficiency of our government; deliberative government is inefficient by nature, but that very inefficiency protects us from the abuses of power an individual might indulge in, as well as carrying us forward generationally.