Fight Like An Animal

Assuming a continuous legacy of political struggle from the earliest stages of human evolution to conflicts over power today, we speculate about the politics of societies in the distant past...

In this episode, we examine not how biology pervades politics, but how politics pervades biology: how the course of evolution has been shaped by millions of years of what can only be described as political struggle. We examine two types of ethnogenesis in human ancestors and other primates, fissioning events and internal changes in social structure, and how the formation of new cultures is sometimes equivalent to what we call in the modern world political revolution...

When we speak of revolution, aren't we are ultimately speaking of the creation of a different culture? And if so, how plausible or meaningful is it to imagine deliberately crafting a culture? In this episode, we begin to examine the long history of cultures on the margins of civilization as political projects, which are often misconstrued by states (and their ethnographers) as archaic remnants rather than deliberate efforts at state evasion...

But seriously: is there any point to doing anything at all? Or is the world truly just going to end so soon we really might as well just kind of reach for whatever or whoever kills the pain and stop paying attention? In this episode, we examine what it means to come to terms with the crossing of climate tipping points, the dreamlike nature of the way the news babbles about collapse, the landscape of variation in ecological perceptions, and taking control of the world's infrastructure to...

We examine the hopelessly subjective and highly contentious (one could perhaps say psychotic) process by which the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, the so-called bible of psychiatric disorders, has been constructed...

As we emerge from quarantine and reveal to one another our many wounds, Arnold describes a recent, months-long period of psychological rupture as a narrative frame for an inquiry into the relationship between addiction, madness, despair and revolutionary social possibility. In this episode we examine the dubious origins of 12-steps programs like Alcoholics Anonymous in hallucinatory christianity, the neuroscience of addiction, and the relationship between addiction and pain...

In this episode, Arnold asks Joshua a series of truly fundamental questions to which no one has decisive answers: questions about whether large-scale shifts in how we conceptualize our suffering are possible, and whether and to what extent this would inform possibilities for a less destructive society...

We continue our examination of the revolutionary period of 2032-3, relying heavily on the psychographic researcher Sarah Kessler's book The Internet Is a Map of the Human Mind: On Technology and Psychological Diversity to examine the internet subculture of simulants, who believe (or claim to believe) that the universe is a simulation...

We continue the examination of the post-materialist shift, and the emergence of increasingly niche subcultures, that we began in The World Is a Lot Like the Internet. In this episode, we examine its implications for projects of political transformation...

In this episode, a 72-year-old Arnold reflects on how our species and the global ecosystem managed to survive to 2050. We discuss the Interstate 5 Security and Commerce Zone, and the revolutionary events of 2032-3 that brought down the I-5 wall. We examine the Scientific Militant's efforts to take control of industrial infrastructure to sequester CO2, and the distinctly psychographic approach they took to revolution...