I have seen a remarkable film of captive beavers imprisoned in a bare, unfurnished cage, with no water and no wood. The beavers enacted, 'in a vacuum', all the stereotyped movements normally seen in natural building behaviour when there is real wood and real water. They seem to be placing virtual wood into a virtual dam wall, pathetically trying to build a ghost wall with ghost sticks, all on the hard, dry, flat floor of their prison. One feels sorry for them: it is as if they are desperate to exercise their frustrated dam-building clockwork.
It is also true that if you leave a politician in a cage, he will eventually start to build a constituency out of thin air. He may even go as far as to manipulate the phantom relationships he has conjured to become a sort of pathetic dictator, a father of thin air.
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