Fight Like An Animal

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 presented by our dark overlords being even more crazy and stupid than they used to be. We touch on the perils of trying to apply the past to the present, the ways the federal government is becoming like the Coalition Provisional Authority in post-invasion Iraq, and examine how dynastic power becomes even more impulsive and incoherent as the generations progress. Throughout it all, we think about the difference between stories born solely of emotional need and stories born of assessing as many relevant variables we can find. 

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. 

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 process of successively iterating new stories out of the same sets of facts. It involves storytelling, but also inhabiting the story one tells. One creates a script of some kind and physically acts it out, assessing one's response, and veers into a different, connected story as many times as necessary. Arnold describes a remarkable transformation experienced in the process of making a movie about Storyfinding. While elements of the process are not yet entirely clear, this experience indicates it may help people understand the stories they have been telling themselves, and decide what story about the future they want to be in.

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 low-level mobilization that is more enduring than any particular project, campaign, or strategy. And we examine a particular practice—the identification of particular trees as the living axis of a community—as a conceivable answer to a host of interrelated strategic questions: How do we find each other outside the death spiral of social media? How do we generate the open-ended possibilities of a long-term action camp or occupation? What can people do that requires relatively little time or effort, but helps create a framework for the coordination of many diverse actions? While unabashedly embracing reverence for life, this episode is a concrete strategic analysis culminating in a clear call to action. 

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 explode in them, they fail to describe a path away from our depression, disconnection, precariousness, and loss of shared meaning. In this episode, we ask whether a new mythology might arise from our current mire, and what its characteristics might be. Along the way, we examine the human penchant for hallucinating and dreaming about insects that control reality, the psychology of the outsider, the cross-species biology of adolescent dispersal from the birth group, why there are so few movies about healing from trauma, how embodied experience generates insights independent of any information it provides, and the 19th century Russian novel that arguably created more revolutionaries than any non-fiction.

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 Survival is biological coherence. The misconception that biology implies a lack of plasticity is present, in one form or another, in all our existing politics. This manifests in its outright rejection in some traditions; in others, it manifests in arguments about what human social behavior is “really” like. What is lacking, in every case, is an understanding that every human potential has an underlying biology, which we must understand in order to affect which potentials manifest. This is the essence of embodied politics. In this episode, we briefly examine the path to this book's completion, hear the first chapter, “The World Is Dying and So Are Our Stories about Saving It,” and get an update on future projects emerging from Fight Like An Animal and the World Tree Center for Evolutionary Politics. 

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 of societies—from highland Southeast Asia to the Amazon—to live in ecological equilibrium. An Animist's Ramblings is a blog which, among other things, advocates for taking political lessons from small-scale horticulturalists and delayed-return hunter-gatherers.  Primitivism has often faltered for its lack of clear answers to the question: “knowing what we know, how should we live?” David is helping to guide these politics into a more applied, experimental, and fluid manifestation. We speak of the multi-dimensional nature of domestication; the awe-inspiring visits of elephants to Feun Foo; the personality variation of chickens; the strange and varied diet one ends up adopting subsisting off the land; and the need for a unified sense of identity among those who have rejected the mechanistic worldview, regardless of precisely how that identity manifests politically. 

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 beautiful or hopeful truths. We examine how the hierarchies we inhabited made kosmentoria films to validate themselves, focusing on the theme of the “lone renegade cop obsessed with justice.” Our own films undermined the idea that any small group of people should exercise a monopoly on violence, but they were far from utopian visions. Instead, they positively leaned into some of the more appalling aspects of life, while conveying a core truth: no matter how terrible everything gets, it's never a good idea to stop defending yourself. This “fictional” episode bridges two episodes from the “real,” 2020s version, of Fight Like An Animal: “How to Tell If Someone Is Hitting You,” on the nature of dominance hierarchies, and the forthcoming “Revolutionary Mythology.” To hear the episode in its entirety, please visit Patreon.

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 political ideas, but from this biological perspective, it has been awfully monolithic: mostly a conflict between dominance hierarchies that are justified with different language. Moreover, because reasoning is embodied, and subordination generates a distinct embodied state, we often have trouble seeing how coercion pervades our everyday life, or conceiving of other ways of being. In this episode, we see how biological parsimony is the most fundamental counter to the justifications of the state that academics and laypeople alike tend to employ: dominance hierarchies do not exist in any other species for the reasons they are claimed to exist in humans. Species occupy a wide despotic-egalitarian continuum, and this continuum is not also one of social complexity or social order. We also sketch how a robust parallelism of social formations capable of exercising violence is necessary to prevent any one of them from gaining despotic power. Relying on the same logic of fluid alliance formation and fission that states have long employed, we describe a society in which each individual is the epicenter of a unique configuration of armed force, each of which must act as a counter-power to every other. 

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 novel microorganisms someday convert cellulose to starch, allowing humans to eat trees? Ant colonies form a symbiotic association with us to ferment tempeh? Elephants partner with us to create new forms of dispersed agroforestry? Cockroaches someday be involved in constructing shelters? Dr. Simonsen draws on his own experiences, creating a novel staple-producing tree species and many other hybrids, to speculate about futures as radically distant from Star Trek as they are from Mad Max. We also discuss how work done on the margins of a society can suddenly become relevant when that society confronts crisis, converting scientific knowledge to stories which can be told around fires, and his efforts with World Tree to make local languages illegible to authorities.

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 disoriented haze that seems to have descended over so many of us, and sketch the preliminary foundations of a new psychological trait: Heart Refuses to Die (HRD). To understand HRD, we explore a dopamine-mediated trait, found in all inventories of individual psychological difference, that affects activity and motivation. Differences in individual dopamine systems imply truly fundamental questions about the relationships between biology, behavior, and social structures. Why do we find the same realms of temperamental variation across species separated by hundreds of millions of years of evolution? Why are some humans psychologically more like some octopuses than they are like some other humans? What does it mean to speak of “species-typical behavior” when this is taken into consideration? We conclude by adding a number of other dimensions of individual difference to our very tentative psychometric of Heart Refuses to Die. Somewhere along the way, we examine how different types of people thrive in nomadic vs. sedentary societies, the lack of a major new political tendency in recent history, and how people with larger social networks also tend to end up in the emergency room more often. 

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 people with any real success in deliberately, systematically seeking such visions. A decade after he began this work, Grunwald began to collaborate with the World Tree Center for Evolutionary Politics and Global Survival. As World Tree enters its 100th year of existence, we reflect on the few years of friendship and collaboration we shared with him before he was killed in combat in the 2030s. In the process, we examine how the reassertion of the centrality of the observer in science was essential to the politics of ecological survival that emerged to reshape the world in that decade. The entire dizzying scope of this episode can be experienced on Patreon. 

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 the trend toward increasing scale and complexity in human societies intrinsically bad? Is nature whatever humans aren't doing? Can we exert conscious influence on ecosystems and revere them at the same time? We make a case for a politics in alliance with the broad tendency of life on earth to increase the scale of the “self,” arguing that while people have clearly lost hope in the revolutionary mythologies they invented out of psychological need, this particular mythology of expanding selfhood is real, and therefore durable. Somewhere along the way, we note how the power exercised in extractive hierarchical societies precisely recapitulates the logic of cancer: when the perceived boundaries of the “self” shrinks, cells (or people) begin treating the systems of which they are a part as “other.” We also see how central nervous systems evolved repeatedly in different animal lineages, complex cell anatomy resulted from organisms failing to digest what they had eaten, octopus arms might be independently conscious, and domestication can be broken down into sub-components by relevant brain system. To top it all off, Arnold cries just a little at the very end. What more could you possible ask for? If your answer is “a video where a bunch of very interesting people who met through Fight Like An Animal talk about some of these same themes,” here's a link to a video called Scientific Animism: The Computational Boundaries of an Octopus.

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-indigenous movements, and alongside other Jewish messiahs, such as the bandit chief Hezekiah and the mysterious sorcerer known only as “the Egyptian.” What all of these eclectic figures—some with a military orientation, some who primarily relied on miracles—had in common was a singular devotion to national liberation. That these politics came to be repurposed for an ostensibly apolitical mythology—a story of sacred victimhood, in which dying is winning—helps us to understand one of the many feedback loops between culture and biology that characterizes contemporary life. It helps us understand how we have become confined to an increasingly narrow range of our evolved potentials, bereft of any sense of real agency—how we come, in other words, to inhabit the biology of defeat.

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 imagine a human society based solely on life itself, where organisms do what is now done with gas-fired kilns, table saws, and circuit boards. We examine the diversity of the metabolisms which are currently evolving in synthetic biology laboratories, and how a novel organism might alternate between photosynthesizing and devouring toxic waste in the process of, for instance, growing into a house. Careful to delineate near-term possibility from developments which would require a scientific (and likely social) revolution, we look from the strange world of self-healing buildings and robots animated by heart cells which we currently inhabit to a much stranger one, in which houses walk and computing is biological. This episode largely focuses on establishing a realm of possibility, saving more conceptual and ethical issues for its sequel, where we ask: what would be like to adopt an ethic in which life existed for its own sake, but in which humanity actively intervened to promote life's maximum abundance, diversity, and evolutionary potential?

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 overlapping with those of Fight Like An Animal. He imagines futures in which the human evolutionary trend toward diminished reactive aggression has resulted in a nearly complete loss of the fear of death, hybridizes plants on his experimental farm in an effort to develop subsistence ecologies which will thrive after the age of machines, and looks for ways to condense the bewilderingly complexity of current scientific knowledge into fables or other narratives that can be concisely transmitted when we return to telling stories around fires. In this episode, we talk about the long decline we are currently witnessing as an epoch of amazing opportunity for shaping the trajectory of the future; examine the frontiers of biological innovation, including his incredibly low-cost and low-tech methods of transgenic experimentation; evaluate evolution's propensity for hybridization between totally unrelated species; and much more. 

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 Millen and Arnold Schroder introduce their search for the embodied, experiential variables which shape people's paths to a state of meaningful ecological responsiveness.  In the first episode, Tanner describes his unique path: how the lack of meaningful inquiry into possible human societies in academia disillusioned him; how childhood trauma and the exigencies of survival led him to disengage from broader realities, and concern himself with accumulating income playing poker; how winning a fortune provided the sense of safety necessary for him to begin exploring his perceptions of reality; how remembering his sexual abuse allowed him to come to terms with other unbearable truths. Metanoia #1 is available as a video and the audio only version is here.

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,” a form of synthetic biology in which direct interaction with living systems replaces technology. In this episode, we describe the water carrier, an organism which desalinates the Pacific ocean with the same proteins found in human cell membranes, transports the water through its long cylindrical body to eastern Oregon, and gives birth to a vast forest operating at 100% photosynthetic efficiency, one of many such systems which radically shift the ratio of atmospheric to biological carbon. We examine the means by which vivmancers visualize and affect the status of such organisms, down to the molecular level, via signals which travel through modified neurons and specialized connective tissues, and thus describe the endless meditation by which a vivamancer unifies with another organism, sensations traveling through vast oceans and distant mountains into a human body.  Full episode can be found on Patreon. 

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 central logic and worldview of the podcast to six strategic initiatives, comprising institutions of both research and parallel governance. Find out about the Embodied Political Cognition Collective and its new podcast/video series Metanoia: How Worldviews Change, collecting narratives of transformations of temperament and corresponding belief systems. Hear about what appears likely to be Arnold's first formal contribution to the scientific literature, the beginning of an attempt to generate the revolutionary process described in so many Scientific Militant fiction episodes. And learn, as well, friends, about four other programs of revolutionary biology and evolutionary politics whose indomitability of spirit, scope of ambition, and elegance of conception could not possible be relegated to the confines of mere episode description.

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 anthropology apply to our utterly novel environment. Somewhere along the way, we talk about the biology of the naked mole rat, whose societies resemble the “civilizations” of social insects; the Goldilocks magnitude of crisis, that creates political possibility without starving everyone to death; the methodological horror show of evolutionary psychology that talks about genes “for” complex behavioral traits; how the fragmentation of knowledge by academic discipline enables hierarchy; and how the inverse correlation between social dominance and social comprehension means its best not to use big words when talking to venture capitalists. A good deal of what is discussed here provides a problem statement for which the next episode provides tentative answers. 

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 life in which they were produced, here are two artifacts of these early efforts. The first is a script for a video segment, a conversation between the I-5 saboteurs Ingrid Harris and Jacob Ingersoll (really more of a monologue by Ingersoll, which Harris acts appalled by; the intent was to capture the banter of nomadic direct actionists who spend all their time in a car together). The second is a rap song! This was not intended to be released on its own terms, but to be material for media analysis that was going to pervade the project—conversations about the art that was associated with this revolutionary movement as a way to convey the story of that revolutionary movement. The full beauty and terror of this episode and others like it can be yours for as little as $1/mo. on Patreon.

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, kidney failure, cancer, and the reading of a ceaseless torrent of scientific papers. This story, I hope, conveys the embodied state of being from which my perspective emerges, which I try to describe in contrast to the overly categorical thinking I frequently encounter with respect to our social-ecological crisis. I believe this thinking reflects feelings of helplessness which are mistaken for the products of rational deliberation. My hope in describing my own journey is to convey that my sense of possibility is not simply the result of unwillingness to cope with despair. I attempt to illustrate this by describing key aspects of my worldview, from an emphasis on efforts to increase CO2 flux out of the atmosphere to an earnest belief that some of the recurrent barriers to revolution are not nearly as impossible to overcome as is often imagined.

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 relentlessly dedicated to integration. We see how we conceptualize social interactions, tools, and environments by projecting our own bodies externally, blurring the ostensible boundary between world and self. Finally, we examine the putative mythologies and rituals of ancient African peoples, reconstructed from contemporary hunter-gatherers, with their emphasis on fusions of identity and flows of power between social categories. 

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 generate feedback loops of characteristically human tendencies: tolerance, social comprehension, communication, behavioral flexibility, and mobility all encourage one another. We also introduce the notion of the vocabulary of temperaments, the features such as neurotransmitters and brain regions shared by complex animal life, giving us a common language of rapid, novel responsiveness to environmental conditions, henceforth official Fight Like An Animal nomenclature. 

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 with other animals. We look at the ritual behavior of chimpanzees, the symbolic world of Neanderthals, and the increasingly elaborate sequences of abstraction that characterize human thought. We examine how for millennia human societies developed and lost traits repeatedly, in regional cycles of cultural growth and collapse, until 100 thousand years ago ... something happened. 

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 the limits of their cognitive abilities. We examine the embodied metaphors on which abstract thought is based, the original function of the brain region that was recruited for language, and the drawbacks to inhabiting a symbolic world. Does the experience of meditation parallel the greater self-control our ancestors found with an enlarging prefrontal cortex? Were those who saw beyond the confines of ancestral human abilities treated as outsiders, as deviants so often are? Finally, what would it be like to live at the limits of our abilities, and thus promote further evolution, today? What limits would we seek to transgress? We offer a tentative answer in the abandonment of worldviews based on psychological need, in favor of simply seeing the world as it is, confronting any horrors that emerge along the way.

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 social system, we find, elicits only a subset of the range of evolved human potentials, and the one we inhabit fracture us, so that we express only a tiny portion of our abilities. We apply these themes of freeze and fracture across a wide range of situations pertinent to our converging crises: the epistemic fracture that makes communication impossible; the compartmentalization of painful realities at the heart of both individual trauma responses and societal dismissal of ecological crisis; the social role specialization that gives power to certain kinds of people; the narrow awareness and fixed beliefs characteristic of those who are running our lives; and the agonizingly narrow confines of the hall of mirrors from which we must escape if we are to see the world as it is.

(05/10/2023) 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 or deposed the Czar; ask why Ukrainian peasants succeeded in briefly defending an agrarian anarchist society while Russian peasants did not; and discuss the importance of having any idea what is happening around you if you want to run a country. But first! Arnold frames this discussion by reading from a draft of his book about the psychology of charismatic authoritarians, a psychology that unites everyone from Lenin to Trump, Hitler to the leader of the New Age cult he grew up in.

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 naked outside all winter, could crush bones with her teeth, swam in rivers during their full spring flood, and could outrun a horse. She was described by the many locals who were familiar with her as an Almasty, or Sasquatch. Building on early biological descriptions of two species of human and the contemporary evidence on feral children, we postulate that our own developmentally delayed, self-domesticated form of humanity has—as is the case among other species for whom developmental change has been central to their evolution—a developmentally accelerated, wild form, induced by a lack of care in early development, and that reproducing populations of such individuals are what we know as Sasquatch. 

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, and the many forms our confusion takes, particularly focusing on the eternally recurrent assumption that the more unvarying a behavior is, the more “biological” it is. We examine the Cold War ideological conflicts that pushed theorists on both sides of nature-nurture controversies to rigid—and not infrequently absurd—extremes, and see how phenotypic plasticity is reasserting itself in biology after decades of suppression, replacing outdated forms of evolutionary theory that involve genes “for” behaviors and ignore the means by which traits develop. In so doing, we assert the biology of social revolution: a description of the human capacity for behavioral variability that exists because of, rather than in opposition to, evolution.

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 anthropological paradigm of egalitarian hunter-gatherers, our story envisions a world in which technology is used as a means of creating a surplus for everyone, in an evenly distributed fashion, negating the ability to concentrate resources on which human dominance hierarchies depend. We examine the subsistence strategies of societies in Papua New Guinea and highland Southeast Asia to validate the claim that, rather than the wild or domesticated status of food resources, what is salient in determining social form are their spatial distribution, abundance, and predictability. We relate these resource characteristics to the fluidity of social formations which seems to be decisive in enabling egalitarianism among foragers and cultivators alike. Never eager to neglect a cross-species framework, we also examine the extremely fluid social formations of transient ravens, the sacred animals of this podcast.

(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 narratives of states (and many social scientists), which describe dominance hierarchy as necessary for social complexity, surveying the extensive evidence that sedentism, agriculture, and urbanism always precede the formation of states. We describe the cross-cultural and cross-species modes of egalitarian power that prevent aspiring autocrats from attaining dominance, the unique degree of cooperation found in despotic and egalitarian human societies alike, the role of costly infrastructure in generating social cohesion, the psychosocial profiles of despots, the relationship between civilization and domestication, the chaos of meaningless violence states claim to protect us from as an evolutionary dead end found in no species, the biological mechanisms that generate social stability by ritualizing aggressive displays and diminishing the need for actual violence, and the factors shaping social organization in species ranging from leafcutter ants to lions, woodpeckers to chimpanzees. 

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, respectively, to charismatic, coercive, and technical power. In each case, we also identify an egalitarian counterpart to these hierarchical modes. We argue that a coherent sociopolitical analysis requires six levels of description that exist in a relation of reciprocal influence: 1) ultimate evolutionary causes; 2) proximate mechanisms of trait construction; 3) species-typical behavior; 4) individual variation; 5) environmental conditions; 6) culture and politics. We then examine the first two of these levels in our assessment of the relationship between individual variation and power, describing mechanisms of developmental difference, the genetic regulatory hierarchy, individual difference as continua of reactivity, the cross-species durability of personality constructs, the lack of personality trait optima, and much more. 

(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 epidemic usage of a drug called glitch, the experiential predictors of support for various scientific theories, the emergence of alternate economies as the old one crumbled in the first global famine, and introduce a new element into our story: the guerrilla cannabis growers who began to produce food in the mountains, beyond the control of the I-5 administration and its centralized infrastructure, in a continuation of the legacy of escape agriculture that has characterized state-evading peoples throughout much of history.  To experience the entire, bewildering scope of this episode, please find me on Patreon.

(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 the inherent tension between specialization and egalitarianism, local and global survival strategies, rigorous and empirically-grounded inquiries which nonetheless have a mystical quality, the modes of awareness science often attempts to exclude (which continually reassert themselves nonetheless), and the revolutionary potential of structures for meeting human needs outside of the extant economy.

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 gain the organization necessary for our strategies and tactics to evolve faster than those of the police? For as much as the police will inevitably surveil us, do they really have any idea what they're looking at? What is pipeline construction like? When is it time to concentrate, when is it time to disperse, and how do we coordinate diffuse conflicts? Is there an optimum of risk and difficulty for protest to progress into revolution? Are trainings, so often eschewed by more radical movement elements, the best way to organize people? These are some of the questions we ask in this episode. 

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 structure, which, by sheer coincidence, are both tripartite schemes. In the former: technics, literary experimentation, and science. In the latter: narcissists, strongmen, and technocrats. We examine how these tribes within academia can be defined by statistical ideological bias, epistemology, relationship to manipulation of the physical world, and degree of representation in settings of institutional power, relying heavily on Gambetta and Hertog's Engineers of Jihad: The Curious Connection between Violent Extremism and Education.  We describe how institutional power is inhabited by technocrats and narcissists from the technics echelon of the academy, and how this implies that the civil resistance model, a default paradigm for ecological activism, is flawed. 

(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 institutions by scientists, synthetic biology approaches to enhancing photosynthesis, the psychological foundations of various scientific models, how the internet is a map of the human mind, and the ecstatic religious movement that took to the blackened mountains to plant trees in the epic fires of 2025-6.  Visit https://www.patreon.com/biologicalsingularity for the dizzying entirety of this episode.

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 that prevented climate and ecological scientists from speaking up and acting out sooner, and the rupture of that discipline as our crisis deepens. Our guide to that discipline will be the brilliant book Disciplined Minds: A Critical Look at Salaried Professionals and the Soul-Battering System that Shapes Their Lives by physicist Jeff Schmidt. We'll examine the ways that professional training of all varieties, including in the physical sciences, is ideological, requiring a narrowing of focus and a willingness to perform alienated labor in hierarchies; how science needs a revolution reintegrating the observer and the observed; and how ultimately the civil resistance model being employed by groups like Scientist Rebellion cannot withstand scrutiny: a scientific description of the nature of the current power structure has yet to be articulated. 

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 choices, territoriality under different ecological scenarios, the ability to escape existing social arrangements, monotheistic prophets in cattle-herding cultures, and more. Watch Daniel's videos here: https://www.youtube.com/c/WHATISPOLITICS69/featuredOr listen here: https://www.listennotes.com/podcasts/what-is-politics-worldwidescrotes-OQXC56wtuz0/ or wherever you find your podcasts.

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 the seizure of industrial facilities in Portland, by those who had fought the construction of the wall and were beginning to evolve into the legendary I-5 saboteurs, for use in an ecology of survival. Visit https://www.patreon.com/biologicalsingularity for the dizzying entirety of this episode. 

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 bewildering lens of a 2021 paper making a rare journey into the psychology of left authoritarianism. Somewhere along the way, we examine similarities between Marxist and New Age cults, an epidemic of genital shrinking through magic in West Africa, the real and the imagined in the overabundant genre of cancel culture commentary, and the need for a parallel project to that of institutional academia.  

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 everything at some point or another, to somebody or another. We talk about what led him to this work, the ideological discipline in academia, the ways in which both postmodernism and reductive materialism have mostly made everybody more confused and unable to exercise political agency, the political implications of hunter-gatherer studies, and his epic, marathon critique of the book The Dawn of Everything.  Watch his videos here: https://www.youtube.com/c/WHATISPOLITICS69/featured or listen here: https://www.listennotes.com/podcasts/what-is-politics-worldwidescrotes-OQXC56wtuz0/ or wherever you find your podcasts. 

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 complexity of non-linguistic communication, the hyper-legalistic and ostensibly rational dialogues about religion of the Middle Ages, the fundamental symmetry between processes of traumatic integration at the individual level and revolution at the collective level, frameworks for confronting fear in various cultures, and the psychology of abuse in creating acquiescence to the power structure.     

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 McGilchrist's The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World and James C. Scott's Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed, examining the brain science of authoritarian high modernism, the ideology Scott describes as uniting Lenin with Le Corbusier. From the clearcut to the resettlement camp to the factory farm, from the sterile visions of the urban planner to the disembodied eye which frequently appears in the drawings of psychotics, let us examine the nightmare world we inhabit: the world of the left brain hemisphere trapped in itself...

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, and having a public ethical dialogue about suicide in the prison library with someone sentenced to life without parole. Father and son commiserate and laugh about their first arrests, both at age eight, what it's like to go through withdrawals in jail, the posturing of gangsters, and the fundamental similarity of the many forms of lockup this society has to offer. To unleash the dizzying entirety of this episode, check out https://www.patreon.com/biologicalsingularity 

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 perception, and examine descriptions from all three literature domains of empathy, bonding, gesture, expressivity, behavioral flexibility, fear, anger, and aggression. Then, we examine the bizarrely persistent cross-cultural record of what is perhaps best described as aggression towards the left half of the body by the right, reflected in everything from synonyms for the terms left-right to body modifications that impair or injure the left side. Finally, we examine the subordination of cultures with a broader purview by cultures concerned primarily with domination. In each case—left-right political difference, brain hemisphere processing dynamics, and culture change—we see how a particularly useful understanding is in terms of asymmetries of aggression.  

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 Survival, telling two stories of a mountain, which reflect the right and left hemispheres' respective modes, but which are also strongly suggestive of egalitarian and authoritarian world views. We explore the surprising notion that the very terminology of right and left to describe political orientations might be an instance of the brain hemispheres conceptualizing themselves, and thus set ourselves up to explore the bizarrely rich history of people and whole cultures seeming to intuit the divided nature of their beings. Finally, we examine a few examples of how a feedback loop between biology and technology can cause left hemisphere processing to become ascendant, with catastrophic consequences.   

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. Starting with the observation that despite objectively worsening conditions, ecological sabotage used to be much more common, we examine the relationship between worldviews and tactics; the useless (and equally pervasive) construct of nature vs. humanity; the embodied experience of unity with all life; the baffling complexity of fighting for a survivable climate rather than a specific place; and the notion of the right and left brain hemispheres engaging in a long-term evolutionary war, in which the emergence of Earth First! could be described as one battle.   

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 the field of security studies. Two, the mainstream climate movement's, albeit a unique faction of it, represented by the Andreas Malm book How to Blow Up a Pipeline. Finally, the radical environmental movement's, as represented by a literature review I wrote in 2016. In the end, we'll see how worldview and tactics/strategy are deeply related, and how the climate justice narrative doesn't motivate the same confrontational behavior as the radical environmental narrative. 

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 between social form and costly infrastructure; the trend toward technological mass society in early human evolution; the post-materialist shift in the upper Paleolithic; and the conditions necessary for escape cultures. We search for inferences about contemporary revolutionary efforts, examining how strategies of evasion involve social disaggregation and strategies of confrontation involve social cohesion, and emerge from the complexity with an overarching thesis: the strategic advantage of egalitarianism is in its greater capacity for social comprehension.