Fight Like An Animal

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 enta...

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 c...

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 shap...

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...

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 mi...

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 clandest...

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 r...

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...

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 vi...

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 so over-represented in elected offices? Why are engineers 17 times more likely to engage in authoritar...

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...

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 p...

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 proce...

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 lo...

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...

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 Sur...

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...

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...

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 polit...

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 no...

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 disorie...

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 pe...

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 th...

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-indi...