Fight Like An Animal
by World Tree Center for Evolutionary Politics
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
Episodes
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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…
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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...
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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...
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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…
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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....
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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…
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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...
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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...
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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:...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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…
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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#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...
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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…
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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…
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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...
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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...
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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…
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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...
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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,...
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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…
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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…
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About this show
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
Hosted by
World Tree Center for Evolutionary Politics