Fight Like An Animal
Fight Like An Animal explores the intersection of behavioral science and political theory, aiming to understand human political conflicts through innate behavioral drivers. Each episode analyzes contemporary crises from a biological and evolutionary perspective, offering new insights into why we fight. The podcast provides bibliographies and resources for further study, and is supported by patrons.
Episodes
Children of the Wasteland: Experimental Biology vs. Global Catastrophe ch.4
Chapter Four: The Depth-Seekers. After life on Earth almost ended in a mass extinction ~250 million years ago, single-celled photosynthetic plankton evolved that mineralize carbon to make exterior shells. When they die, they drop to the bottom of the ocean, and this carbon becomes geologically stable. This ushered in an age of greater climate stability. One of the most important of these marine or
Children of the Wasteland: Experimental Biology vs. Global Catastrophe ch.3
Chapter Three: Rise of the Xenobots. Can life be persuaded to take novel forms and behaviors that stabilize the Earth system? The only way to find out is to find out. Let's look to the strange frontiers of experimental biology for a framework of inquiry. Two kinds of so-called biobots have been constructed, one from embryonic frog cells and one from human lung cells. These cellular collective
World-Self-Void-Marx-Lenin: Interview with Adam of Subjective Conditions
What does it feel like, in our bodies, to be in a Marxist reading group or an anarchist direct action collective? What unexamined stories, from our profoundly traumatizing experiences of development, do we carry into political organizing structures? What relational patterns do we experience in situations ranging from families to graduate school that we then repeat, using new language and frames of
Children of the Wasteland: Experimental Biology vs. Global Catastrophe ch.2
Chapter Two: The Poison Eaters. In this chapter, we examine some possible experimental biology-assisted climate interventions, such as mineralization of rapidly-produced biomass. We then return to the question of massive, rapid methane release from undersea deposits, journeying to a place called Hydrate Ridge off the coast of Oregon, where two very different organisms form a symbiotic association
Children of the Wasteland: Experimental Biology vs. Global Catastrophe ch.1
Chapter One: Will the Wasteland Blossom? Here we search for synthetic biology-assisted interventions into runaway climate change and other catastrophic Earth changes. Our first chapter looks at the current state of climate science, and the schools of thought within it. We look at the physical metaphors we use to think about planetary change, such as “thresholds” and “collapse,” and how they constr
Deceive Like an Animal pt. 2: Narcissist vs. Machiavellian Death Match
The structure of a society is the sum of the different kinds of agency different kinds of people exercise. Here we tell a story of the rise of the current intrigue-riddled, paranoid state of the world by examining the roles played by four individuals. Each is a case study in a distinct political personality. One, Noel Field, who we will call the Idealist: a pious Quaker activist whose naivete enta
Deceive Like an Animal pt. 1: How the Nazis Won WWII
How did we come to live in such an intrigue-riddled, spook-haunted world? In this two-part series, we tell a story about the ascent of the post-WWII espionage establishment, and the permanent sense of crisis and unreality it has created. We tell this story through the lens of revolutionary biology, examining a few of the different political personalities involved: the critics, the pawns, and the c
No Option but Sabotage: Interview with Thomas Zeitzoff
Thomas Zeitzoff's No Option but Sabotage: The Radical Environmental Movement and the Climate Crisis explores the tumultuous past and uncertain present of movements for a habitable Earth. In this interview, we explore the data he gathered, showing trends in the intensity and frequency of different kinds of ecological action. And we explore the myriad factors his many interviewees cited as shap
The Visitors: Tangles of Strangeness
We're not exactly asking what the true nature of the UFO phenomenon is. It's more like we're asking how people form the beliefs they do (which turns out to be a pretty good way to structure an inquiry into the true nature of something). What does being exposed to lots of stories about encounters with UFOs and their occupants, from people who are clearly emotionally impacted by those
The Visitors: Story War
In this episode, you will find the only valid interpretation of the UFO phenomenon in the world. It involves: how psychological experiments conducted by humans on other species are structurally similar to what we call paranormal; how propaganda is best understood as the selective curation of truth to create false impressions; how some spooks got the guy from Blink-182 to hype the kids on secret mi
Without a Shot Fired
In this episode, we examine a simplified scenario—that of a total social revolution without a single shot fired—to illustrate real dynamics at work in our complex world. Across human and other animal societies, power is often maintained not with outright aggression, but with threat display. Crucially, some kinds of threats are only functional when they remain implicit, or are communicated clandest
We Are Alive!
We introduce the new Fight Like An Animal-adjacent project Defending the World Tree: A Journal of Animist Awakening, from Severed Branches Press, and describe the ceremony we are trying to spread. Using our Jan. 18 Day of the Forest Defender event as an example, we discuss ways to transmute grief and trauma into collective agency. Then we complete our examination of the structure and nature of rev
Survival Revival
All social change is ultimately biological change. We present a framework, called an alliance of phenotypes, for thinking concretely about societies in this way. It involves a ten-item trait inventory called RAMBO-BAMBI, which is intended to bring relevant variables out of the hazy periphery of consciousness and into explicit focus. In other words, it is a way of telling more complex stories about
Survival Ecology
What would a truly resource-minimum, viable human ecology—viable in the sense that we are fed, warm, and dry—look like? What proportion of the current system is useless economic activity, and what proportion is useless economic activity entangled with legitimate human need? Environmental policy documents don't answer these questions, but they do provide information that helps us to craft a vi
A Body with Many Selves
Those of us who understand the world cannot exercise power, while those who exercise power cannot understand the world. We have all fractured, but in different ways. Weaving together recent papers on the psychological correlates of scientific divisions, we ask: Why are lawyers and business majors so over-represented in elected offices? Why are engineers 17 times more likely to engage in authoritar
A World with Many Centers
We celebrate the following three things: One, the animist revival currently sweeping the land. Two, a completed book with a tangible publication trajectory. Three, the form of ceremony, with all its diverse manifestations in various cultures, usually simply called shaking, as explicated in Bradford Keeney's book Shaking Medicine: The Healing Power of Ecstatic Movement. We contrast this type o
Love to the Fighters
Sometimes, we just have to stop fighting and ask if it's really worth it. Or wait: I guess we won't know unless we fight. In this episode, we briefly touch on the emotional reality of confronting the 212th phase of the apocalypse, and the horrifying truth that it's worse, in some ways, than the 211th phase was. Then, we examine the bewildering combination of crisis and opportunity p
REVBIO201: Four in-person classes
On four consecutive Sundays, beginning April 27, Arnold will teach some of the fundamentals of revolutionary biology. Classes take part in Kenilworth Park, in Portland, OR, from 6-8pm. Much of this will be summary of material covered in podcasts, but there will also be some novelties that are specific to this place and the actions we might take in it.
The Story Is the Way
This episode returns to the question of how to escape the freeze response so many of us are having to the world's many horrors. We live in stories, but we don't necessarily acknowledge that we do. What happens when we consciously embrace this aspect of our psychology, and seriously ask ourselves: what story are we in? We introduce a still-developing paradigm called Storyfinding: a proces
Tree Worship Revival
Is it a coincidence that the authoritarian system currently being imposed is fundamentally an outgrowth of religion? And what does that mean? Is religion inherently concerned with the “supernatural,” or is it an organized way to access collective meaning and purpose? In this episode, we examine what religion gives a political movement it otherwise tends to lack: a way of generating cohesion and lo
Revolutionary Mythology: The War for the Vision Space
The fog of collective resignation we are stumbling through has changed the stories we tell. As we perceive, with increasingly painful clarity, that our society cannot resolve the catastrophes it produces, we enter an era of aimless narrative drift. Atmospheric carbon dioxide accumulates in proportion to Mission Impossible sequels. Stories are losing their vitality because, no matter how many cars
Embodied Politics
Now that the first book deriving from this podcast is complete, it feels less ridiculous to say it. The purpose of this project has always been to create a truly new political tendency, as different from any extant one—arguably more so—than, say, monarchism is from liberalism, or liberalism from anarchism. The distinction, as Arnold argues in Revolutionary Biology: Embodied Politics for Global Sur
Primitive Permaculture: Interview with David Lauterwasser
Arnold talks with David of Feun Foo Permaculture and Rewiliding and An Animist's Ramblings. An anarcho-primitivist, David has been making a case for expanding the cultures this political tendency uses as models for life outside civilization. Feun Foo is an experiment in adapting, to the modern context, practices of small-scale, forest-dwelling cultivation which have enabled a great diversity
FLAA 2050: Patrolling the Wasteland (preview)
Looking back from 2050, this episode examines a core communications strategy revolutionary movements began to employ in the late 2020s: the production of really good movies. With 2028's Patrolling the Wasteland as a case study, we examine the storytelling method of kosmentoria. Kosmentoria translates directly to “world in story,” but specifically means using dark or tragic contexts to convey
How to Tell If Someone Is Hitting You
A dominance hierarchy is a social structure where some people are allowed to hit you, and you're not allowed to hit back. It is defined by a sustained, institutionalized asymmetry of aggressive-submissive interactions. This skewed distribution of aggression enables a skewed distribution of resources and opportunities. Modern history has ostensibly been an epic conflict between different polit
Taming the Apocalypse with Dr. Shane Simonsen
Dr. Shane Simonsen returns to talk about his new book Taming the Apocalypse, a vision of humanity's potential as “the universal symbiont,” facilitating new pathways for evolution. Ranging from the immediately viable to the highly speculative, the projects described in Taming all eschew the industrial science model in favor of a more participatory, low-tech, and reverential paradigm. Could nov
We Are Fighting a War to Keep Our Hearts Alive
Is it time to give up? Was it already time to give up in 2020, or 2012, or perhaps even 1999? We usually justify our answers to these questions purely in terms of their rational foundations. But our reasoning is embodied, and variation in the details of our embodiment produce very different relationships to hope, despair, and the place one finds beyond them. In this episode, we examine the disorie
Vivimancer pt. 2: Brain Waves
In 2015, Thorstein Grunwald began a mythic undertaking. He sought extreme states of consciousness for the purpose of making scientific discoveries about the earth's carbon cycle that would allow for interventions in runaway climate change. Science already had a very long legacy of progress through the spontaneous visionary experiences of its practitioners, but Grunwald was one of the first pe
Sub-Self, Meet Meta-Self: Notes on The Emerging World Mind
You've heard a million times that the history of life on earth is one of systems tending toward ever-increasing complexity, but in this episode, we argue evolutionary history is best conceptualized as one of ever-expanding boundaries of selfhood. In so doing, we apply a unique lens to questions with concrete strategic implications which have vexed environmental politics for generations: is th
Jesus of Nazareth and the Biology of Defeat
What does it say about a society if it venerates the image of someone being executed by the state for sedition? In this episode, we trace the improbable evolution of Jesus of Nazareth from fervent revolutionary to apolitical, transcendental being. We situate his trajectory in the cross-cultural tradition of prophetic liberation movements, from southeast Asian hill tribes to North American pan-indi
The Biological Singularity Is Near pt. 1
We are clearly reaching the end of this phase of human civilization. Does that mean that evolution's broad trend towards increasing complexity, scale, and self-awareness is also dying? Many futures are possible, and in this episode, we speculate about one that continues the evolution of ever-greater complexity. Exiting the fantasy of a “sustainable” extraction-based economy, we instead imagin
Social Complexity after the Machines: Interview with Dr. Shane Simonsen
Rejecting both the empty promise of a future of magically sustainable resource extraction and a return to what has already been, Dr. Shane Simonsen examines possibilities for social and ecological complexity based only on biology and the human imagination. In his Zero Input Agriculture blog, Going to Seed podcast, and Our Vitreous Womb fiction series, Dr. Simonsen explores a set of themes strongly
Metanoia: How Worldviews Change
Fight Like An Animal has engendered a group, and that group has in turn engendered a new podcast called Metanoia: How Worldviews Change. Metanoia, which means "a transformative change of heart," examines why most people are so utterly unresponsive to witnessing the world die, while a few of us are deeply burdened. Abandoning Enlightenment notions of undifferentiated rationality, Tanner
Vivimancer pt. 1: The Water Carrier (excerpt)
Perpetually replenishing his organs by inducing his cells to behave like those of an early embryo, Arnold continues the 100th year of his podcast. In Fight Like An Animal 2120: Vivimancer, we examine the end of the Machine Age and the subsequent Biological Revolution, providing both an introduction for new practitioners and a history of the practice of vivimancy, which translates to “life magic,”
Seeds of the World Tree: Programs of Revolutionary Biology and Evolutionary Politics
Fight Like An Animal has generated an incredible audience consisting of rigorous thinkers who possess deep empathy. These traits, which are too rarely combined in political movements and institutions, mean that we have the potential to collaborate on truly novel, worthwhile projects. Thus is born, friends, the World Tree Center for Evolutionary Politics and Global Survival. World Tree applies the
Social Cohesion vs. the Internet vs. the Establishment vs. the Earth
A wide-ranging conversation between Arnold and Daniel of What Is Politics? concerning the prospects for social transformation in this dreamlike age of epistemic fracture. We talk about the impact of declining social cohesion on traditional modes of political organizing; whether the internet can do anything other than make people stupid and crazy; and how lessons from evolutionary biology and anthr
#66: A Saboteur's Moon Sheds No Light (excerpt)
Before this podcast began, a nascent version of Fight Like An Animal 2050 was called A Saboteur's Moon Sheds No Light, broadly following the same narrative trajectory of revolutionary transformation amidst ecological collapse. A variety of video, text, and music was produced for the project. As a companion to the most recent episode, and as a way to formally say goodbye to the phase of my lif
The Ashes of the World Tree: On Grieving and Fighting
Our worldviews emerge from our psychologies, from embodied states of being. In an effort to describe my framework for understanding social possibility beyond ecological tipping points, I have decided to tell a story. The story is of my life over the course of seven years, of the integration of past traumas, nomadic revolutionary politics, unmitigated grief, unsuccessful attempts at de-escalation,
Metamorphosis pt. 3.3: Your Body Is a Map of the Sky
We examine the neurobiological changes that brought archaic Homo sapiens into behavioral modernity, despite negligible changes in brain size. We see how complex symbolic capacities are embedded in anatomy and behavior, and describe the human brain's progressive change to a more globular shape, the increase in our neural density, and the expansion of the parietal lobe, a part of the brain rele
Metamorphosis pt. 3.2: Integration across Landscapes and Brain Regions
We continue the story of humanity's journey to modern thought and behavior, examining how a mosaic of both cultural and anatomical traits existed throughout Africa for ~200 thousand years. Then, this patchwork of cultures and anatomies fused, a process of integration that is also reflected in increasing brain connectivity. We see how isolated populations lose traits, but connected ones genera
Metamorphosis pt. 3.1: The Rupture in the Fabric of Reality Model of Human Cognition
We continue to assess our future evolutionary prospects, this time picking up the story of the human journey where Homo sapiens emerges. Anatomically modern humans have existed for ~300 thousand years, but modern behavior is only evident starting ~100 thousand years ago. We examine this evolutionary process by describing humanity's unique capacities as an intensification of traits we share wi
Metamorphosis pt. 2: The Cognitive Evolutionary Avant-Garde
We assess the future of our evolutionary journey by asking what it was like, experientially, to be at the forefront of ancestral human cognition. We examine the role of choice in human evolutionary history, describing expression changes in synaptic genes of the prefrontal cortex as a key driver of our cognition, and see how such changes are driven by behavior, by our ancestors choosing to live at
Metamorphosis pt. 1: The Age of Mutual Incomprehension
This series examines the future of the human evolutionary journey. Can we adopt behaviors other than the ones that are driving us to chaos, misery, and collapse? Building on the notion of developmental plasticity as the core driver of evolution we established in Revolutionary Biology, we examine the feedback loop between technology and biology that characterizes our journey to extinction. Each soc
The Incompetent Authoritarianism of Vladimir Lenin
Having grown up in a time when anarchism was the ubiquitous form of revolutionary politics, Daniel of What Is Politics? and Arnold talk with bewilderment about the current proliferation of authoritarian leftism. Heavily referencing the amazing A People's Tragedy: The Russian Revolution 1891-1924, we discuss the persistent myth that the Bolsheviks in some sense planned the Russian Revolution o
Revolutionary Biology pt. 2: The Development and Evolution of Sasquatch
As an illustration of the extraordinary plasticity of our species, we examine the story of Zana, whose genetics, described in a 2021 paper, establish her as a member of a modern human population. Zana, who was captured living wild in the Caucasus Mountains in the 19th century and held in captivity for forty years, was two meters tall, covered in hair, superhumanly strong, lacked speech, slept nake
Revolutionary Biology pt. 1: Nature vs. Nurture vs. Synthesis
Nature vs. nurture thinking simply makes no sense: an entity can only respond to its environment via evolved capacities. Nonetheless, this binary reasoning is persistently attractive to the human mind, and is present in the theoretical foundations of all the major political tendencies. In this episode, we explore the persistent harm to our politics caused by an inability to reason about biology, a
The Raven Politics of Terra Incognita
A uniquely stand-alone episode of the Fight Like An Animal 2050 fictional series usually reserved for Patreon, here we describe a future in which insights from anthropology and biology on the ecological determinants of social structure are used by revolutionaries to create a society capable of survival. Combining the rapidly developing possibilities of synthetic biology with the long-standing anth
Narcissists, Strongmen, and Technocrats pt. 2
(01/01/2022) Why are states incapable of navigating the ecological crisis? We progress to the third of our six explanatory levels for comprehending any sociopolitical condition—species-typical behavior—in pursuit of answers to this question, describing the process of state formation as the imposition of a dominance hierarchy onto an existing social form. We contrast this with the standard narrativ
Narcissists, Strongmen, and Technocrats pt. 1
We examine a scientific case for revolution: the claim that modern societies are forms of dominance hierarchy that grant power to people with extremely narrow frames of awareness, who are incapable of grappling with the crises that beset us. Reading from the unnamed Fight Like An Animal book, we examine a tripartite psychology: that of the Narcissists, Strongmen, and Technocrats, corresponding, re
Glitching Is the New Tweaking (excerpt)
(12/05/2022) This episode of Fight Like An Animal 2050 tells the story of the initial meetings, in 2025, at which a strategy was conceived for dismantling the I-5 Commerce and Security Zone, appropriating its resources, and thus saving the west coast from annihilation. We learn more about the early exploits of the I-5 saboteurs, the initial publishing efforts of the Scientific Militant, the epide
Myth, Science, Power
(11/17/2022) Why is it that apocalyptic cults have been such a common aspect of the human experience, but are largely absent from our apocalyptic present? Does global collapse inherently invoke a mythical frame of awareness, and if so, what is the role of science in helping us navigate collapse? Here, we continue our examination of the relationship between science and political power, describing t
Red Sky, Black Snake: Eight Strategic Theses from Standing Rock
In celebration of the anniversary of the killing of Custer, to prepare for revolutionary efforts against the theocratic authoritarian regime which has taken over the US, and in hopes of a holy war against the forces that are destroying life on earth, Arnold describes lessons learned at, or illustrated by, the pipeline struggle of 2016-7 at Standing Rock. When moments of uprising occur, how do we g
#52: Varieties of Scientific Revolution pt. 2
In order for scientists to start a revolution, the case for revolution must emerge from the scientific process. But that process is heavily influenced by the underlying psychologies which produce the different worldviews found in different disciplines and sub-tendencies within disciplines. We introduce a coarse classification of distinct segments of academia and distinct segments of the power str
#51: What We Sang in the Mountains to Greet the Gentle Rain pt. 2 (preview)
(05/22/2022) The story of the epochal changes of the 2020s, told in 2050, continues. This episode tells the story of west coast forests in the 2020s and the three preceding decades, and the institutional inertia that existed with regard to fire. We examine the insane technical literature generated by environmental law, the failure of wildfire behavior modeling, the formation of parallel institutio
Varieties of Scientific Revolution pt. 1
The year is 2250, and the participation of humanity in the global ecosystem is shaped by a council of scientists contemplating, with considerable reverence and humility, the various paths before us. How did we get here from the exceptionally stupid place we are in now? In this series, we will examine the relationship of science to power--this time, we'll examine the ideological discipline tha
What Is Politics? Interview with Daniel pt. 2
We discuss the many determinants of hierarchy and equality, and many other aspects of social form, in the cross-cultural record over time. We examine patrilocal residence and gender inequality, scarcity and abundance (and dispersed vs. concentrated abundance) of food resources, intergroup threat and its impact on intragroup dynamics, culture as a means of not going insane from having too many choi
What We Sang in the Mountains to Greet the Gentle Rain pt. 1 (preview)
In 2050, weary beyond reckoning but not quite dead, Arnold recounts the crises of the 2020s and the revolutionary changes they gave birth to: the synthetic biology and modular technology that allowed economies to localize and food to be produced amidst ecological calamity, the fires that gave birth to an ecstatic movement, the epic street battles over the construction of the I-5 security wall, and
What Is Left Authoritarianism?
In this episode, we examine the relationship between psychological variation, social role differentiation, and power, presenting a tripartite scheme of Strongmen, Technocrats, and Narcissists: societies with supposedly radically different politics tend to converge on similar outcomes because the same types of people end up in the same roles. At the same time, we examine the world through the bewil
What Is Politics? Interview with Daniel pt. 1
It's easy enough to use exquisitely rarefied, niche terminology to talk about politics, but do we even have a foundation of shared definitions for the really common terms, like left and right, or market and state? Or, for that matter, the very term politics? In his podcast What Is Politics? Daniel argues that we don't, and does the hard work of defining terms that have meant everythin
Return to the Circle
If last episode described how we become trapped in a suicidally destructive feedback loop between biology and technology, this one is devoted to escape. Again examining societies and their politics in terms of brain hemisphere differences, we look at the role of empathic embodied communication in catalyzing social rupture, in scenarios such as dancing epidemics and riots. We examine the depth and
Philosophy or Schizophrenia?
Why is the world looking more and more like the paranoid delusions of 19th century mental patients? Why do political systems of disparate ideologies converge on the same nightmarish outcomes, always accompanied by cheerful rhetoric about the scientific perfection of society? Is it easy to distinguish the philosophy of Descartes from the ramblings of a psychotic? This episode is a mashup of Iain Mc
Prison and Other Stories (excerpt)
Arnold's father, George, comes to visit, and tells stories of hanging out with a revolutionary pachuco poet, covering himself in tattoos at age eleven, breaking out of jail on multiple occasions, growing up with gangsters, using burglary as a means to redistribute wealth around the neighborhood, getting strung out, getting shot at by the police, starting a performance troop in San Quentin, an
Life Is Holy War pt. 2: Asymmetries of Aggression
We continue our mashup of political psychology, the biology of aggression, and left-right brain hemisphere differences, in the latter case guided by Iain McGilchrist's The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World. We examine how themes of holism and context vs. reduction and utilitarianism in brain hemisphere processing styles relates to political percept
Life Is Holy War pt. 1: Two Stories about a Mountain
In this, the most wild journey we have undertaken thus far, we examine the notion that reality consists of a tension between opposites reflected at any given level of analysis, from the big bang to the evolution of brain hemispheres with irreconcilable modes of processing to right-left political division. Arnold reads from the book he is writing, Fight Like An Animal: In Search of a Science of Sur
The Life and Death of Radical Environmentalism
As grief and terror about the ecological crisis intensifies, it seems increasingly curious that for many years a radical environmental movement—based on a deep sense of connection with, and rage on behalf of, all life on earth—existed, but is now largely silent. Neither a history nor an assessment of strategies, this episode is an examination of the perceptual framework that animated this movement
Destroying the World Destroyers
Because it couldn't possibly be more clear that existing political systems are committed to behaviors that will cause our extinction, one has to ask: can we just sabotage the fossil fuel economy out of existence? In this episode, we assess three answers to that question, and the underlying psychologies that produce them. One, the fossil fuel industry's, or in any case their proxies in th
Ethnogenesis pt. 4: Becoming a People in Terra Incognita
In this episode, we conclude our broad sweep of human history, venturing fearlessly into the truly tangled wilderness of variables mediating the relationship between technology and hierarchy. We critique Graeber and Wengrow's The Dawn of Everything as a frame for our journey, examining the relationship between civilization, domestication, and human evolution; the cross-species relationship be
Times I Got Stuck in Albuquerque
Just for fun and for absolutely no other reason whatsoever, a very high, very post-surgical Arnold relates a youthful tale of desert, night and madness: A tale which will do nothing whatsoever to describe how acorn woodpeckers provide insights into the relationship between hierarchy and technology, or how population density affects strategies of evasion, or anything else he thought his next episod
Ethnogenesis pt. 3: Sacrificial Child Gods and Social Complexity
Assuming a continuous legacy of political struggle from the earliest stages of human evolution to conflicts over power today, we speculate about the politics of societies in the distant past. We discuss the relationship between risky human migrations and political perception, ancient cities without states and states without cities, confrontation and evasion as two strategies against hierarchy, the
Ethnogenesis pt. 2: Evolutionary Anarchism
In this episode, we examine not how biology pervades politics, but how politics pervades biology: how the course of evolution has been shaped by millions of years of what can only be described as political struggle. We examine two types of ethnogenesis in human ancestors and other primates, fissioning events and internal changes in social structure, and how the formation of new cultures is sometim
Ethnogenesis pt. 1: Hill Tribes Are Like Street Kids
When we speak of revolution, aren't we are ultimately speaking of the creation of a different culture? And if so, how plausible or meaningful is it to imagine deliberately crafting a culture? In this episode, we begin to examine the long history of cultures on the margins of civilization as political projects, which are often misconstrued by states (and their ethnographers) as archaic remnant
Addiction, Madness, Despair pt. 3: Despair
But seriously: is there any point to doing anything at all? Or is the world truly just going to end so soon we really might as well just kind of reach for whatever or whoever kills the pain and stop paying attention? In this episode, we examine what it means to come to terms with the crossing of climate tipping points, the dreamlike nature of the way the news babbles about collapse, the landscape
Addiction, Madness, Despair pt. 2: Madness
We examine the hopelessly subjective and highly contentious (one could perhaps say psychotic) process by which the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, the so-called bible of psychiatric disorders, has been constructed. Relying heavily on Gary Greenberg's The Book of Woe: The DSM and the Unmaking of Psychiatry, we also discuss the consequences the DSM has both for individua
Addiction, Madness, Despair pt. 1: Addiction
As we emerge from quarantine and reveal to one another our many wounds, Arnold describes a recent, months-long period of psychological rupture as a narrative frame for an inquiry into the relationship between addiction, madness, despair and revolutionary social possibility. In this episode we examine the dubious origins of 12-steps programs like Alcoholics Anonymous in hallucinatory christianity,
Heal Like An Animal: Interview with Joshua Sylvae pt. 3
In this episode, Arnold asks Joshua a series of truly fundamental questions to which no one has decisive answers: questions about whether large-scale shifts in how we conceptualize our suffering are possible, and whether and to what extent this would inform possibilities for a less destructive society. We discuss the role of narcissism in creating coercive political systems, trauma and psychologi
Believing You're Trapped in a Simulation Is the New Punk Rock (preview)
We continue our examination of the revolutionary period of 2032-3, relying heavily on the psychographic researcher Sarah Kessler's book The Internet Is a Map of the Human Mind: On Technology and Psychological Diversity to examine the internet subculture of simulants, who believe (or claim to believe) that the universe is a simulation. We see how in a politics of undifferentiated appeals, simu
Group Mind pt. 6: Suburban Holy War
We continue the examination of the post-materialist shift, and the emergence of increasingly niche subcultures, that we began in The World Is a Lot Like the Internet. In this episode, we examine its implications for projects of political transformation. Relying heavily on Robert Putnam's Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community, we examine how traditional organizing strat
Scientific Militant pt. 3 + Aggression and Specialization pt. 2 (preview)
In this episode, a 72-year-old Arnold reflects on how our species and the global ecosystem managed to survive to 2050. We discuss the Interstate 5 Security and Commerce Zone, and the revolutionary events of 2032-3 that brought down the I-5 wall. We examine the Scientific Militant's efforts to take control of industrial infrastructure to sequester CO2, and the distinctly psychographic approach
Group Mind pt. 5: Everybody Loves a Narcissist
In this episode, we take a rollicking journey through the minds of narcissists, the emergence of states, and the seemingly intrinsic relationship between authoritarianism and insane belief systems. We explore how individual personality variation affects group dynamics, and in particular, how a certain type of person is to be found in all times and places who wants to be in charge. Relying heavily
Group Mind pt. 4: The World Is a Lot Like the Internet
In this episode, we examine the way the internet is changing us through the lens of evolved group psychology. We follow the trajectory of increasing social differentiation that technology facilitates, and see how Ronald Inglehart's The Silent Revolution predicted events like the Jan. 6 capitol riots in the 1970s. We explore the tendency toward niche self-expression that emerges from post-WWII
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