Fight Like An Animal searches for a synthesis of behavioral science and political theory that illuminates paths to survival for this planet and our species. Each episode examines political conflict through the lens of innate contributors to human behavior, offering new understandings of our current crises. Bibliographies: https://www.againsttheinternet.com/ Support: https://www.patreon.com/biologicalsingularity
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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 entangled him in a plot that got a truly astonishing number of people tortured and killed. Two, C. Wrigh...
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 conspirators. We examine how ritual deception is a common instrument of domination in traditional soc...
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 shaping the movement's trajectory, from the distinct phases of the punk scene to the psychological shifts tha...
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 encounters, do to someone? What if they tell stories that are similar enough to corroborate one another, but too d...
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 military programs; how almost every definitive story about the nature of UFOs amplifies some accounts ...
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 clandestinely. In other words, there are times when surrendering or fighting are both bad options, but it is...
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 revival movements, and their fundamental role in shaping societies throughout human history. We exami...
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 the world than we frequently do. We use two events, which occurred on successive nights, to illustr...
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 vision. Utilizing Oregon's consumption-based greenhouse gas inventory—which looks at all energy use to meet...
This episode delves into the profound fractures within society and individual psychology, correlating academic disciplines like engineering and humanities with distinct attitudes and propensities for political violence. Drawing on personal experience and scientific literature, the host argues that our inability to fluidly navigate our "multiple selves" hinders both comprehension and effective action, ultimately suggesting practices like ecstatic shaking as paths toward integrated being and power.
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 of ceremony with a set of tendencies described by Louis Sass in his brilliant work Madness and Modernism:...
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 try...
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 inh...
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 w...
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, precariousnes...
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 presen...
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 ...
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 valid...
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 betwe...
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...
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...
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 ...
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 h...
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 mys...
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, ...
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...
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'...
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. I...
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 ...
