Fight Like An Animal

Dive into the fascinating evolution of selfhood and its implications for environmental politics. Explore how societal complexity might not be intrinsically negative and whether nature exists outside human influence. Discover insights on consciousness, the critique of Silicon Valley's hype, and the interconnectedness of life. The discussion emphasizes our active role in ecological health and proposes a hopeful outlook, advocating for collective agency in addressing modern challenges.

This podcast explores the evolution of Jesus of Nazareth from revolutionary to apolitical figure, examining the political implications of his crucifixion. It delves into the different types of Messianic figures in Jewish religion and the concept of collective redemption in political movements. The podcast also discusses the depoliticization of Christianity, the evolution of Christian beliefs, and the biology of defeat in both arthropods and vertebrates.

Explore the potential of synthetic biology and the evolution of human ecology. Discuss the concept of life-based material production, customizable biological technology, and integration of technology into living spaces. Delve into the role of developmental bioelectricity and the potential of DNA as a storage medium. Consider the ethical implications of genetic modification and rapidly developing human capacities.

Dr. Shane Simonsen, an expert in social and ecological complexity, discusses the decline of reactive aggression, low-cost methods of transgenic experimentation in agriculture, the power of short stories, and the potential of local food systems and algae production in this fascinating podcast.

Metanoia: How Worldviews Change is an engaging podcast that explores the reasons why most people are unresponsive to the world's problems. The hosts discuss their unique paths that led them to question reality and become ecologically conscious. They also introduce the importance of frameworks for discussing worldviews and the project of transforming perceptions to address the ecological crisis.

Learn about vivimancy, a form of synthetic biology that replaces technology with direct interaction with living systems. Explore the water carrier organism, which desalinates the Pacific ocean and gives birth to a forest with 100% photosynthetic efficiency. Discover how vivimancers visualize and affect these organisms down to the molecular level. Reflect on meditation, survival, evolution, and connections, as well as the incorporation of others and the synthesis of genetic sequences.

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 both research and parallel governance. Find out about the Embodied Political Cognition Collective and its new podcast/video series Metanoia: How Worldviews Change, collecting narratives of transformations of temperament and corresponding belief systems. Hear about what appears likely to be Arnold's first formal contribution to the scientific literature, the beginning of an attempt to generate the revolutionary process described in so many Scientific Militant fiction episodes. And learn, as well, friends, about four other programs of revolutionary biology and evolutionary politics whose indomitability of spirit, scope of ambition, and elegance of conception could not possible be relegated to the confines of mere episode description.

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 do anything other than make people stupid and crazy; and how lessons from evolutionary biology and anthropology apply to our utterly novel environment. Somewhere along the way, we talk about the biology of the naked mole rat, whose societies resemble the “civilizations” of social insects; the Goldilocks magnitude of crisis, that creates political possibility without starving everyone to death; the methodological horror show of evolutionary psychology that talks about genes “for” complex behavioral traits; how the fragmentation of knowledge by academic discipline enables hierarchy; and how the inverse correlation between social dominance and social comprehension means its best not to use big words when talking to venture capitalists. A good deal of what is discussed here provides a problem statement for which the next episode provides tentative answers. 

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 companion to the most recent episode, and as a way to formally say goodbye to the phase of my life in which they were produced, here are two artifacts of these early efforts. The first is a script for a video segment, a conversation between the I-5 saboteurs Ingrid Harris and Jacob Ingersoll (really more of a monologue by Ingersoll, which Harris acts appalled by; the intent was to capture the banter of nomadic direct actionists who spend all their time in a car together). The second is a rap song! This was not intended to be released on its own terms, but to be material for media analysis that was going to pervade the project—conversations about the art that was associated with this revolutionary movement as a way to convey the story of that revolutionary movement. The full beauty and terror of this episode and others like it can be yours for as little as $1/mo. on Patreon.

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 past traumas, nomadic revolutionary politics, unmitigated grief, unsuccessful attempts at de-escalation, kidney failure, cancer, and the reading of a ceaseless torrent of scientific papers. This story, I hope, conveys the embodied state of being from which my perspective emerges, which I try to describe in contrast to the overly categorical thinking I frequently encounter with respect to our social-ecological crisis. I believe this thinking reflects feelings of helplessness which are mistaken for the products of rational deliberation. My hope in describing my own journey is to convey that my sense of possibility is not simply the result of unwillingness to cope with despair. I attempt to illustrate this by describing key aspects of my worldview, from an emphasis on efforts to increase CO2 flux out of the atmosphere to an earnest belief that some of the recurrent barriers to revolution are not nearly as impossible to overcome as is often imagined.