Fight Like An Animal

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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 episode was going to be about.