Fight Like An Animal

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.

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, the increase in our neural density, and the expansion of the parietal lobe, a part of the brain relentlessly dedicated to integration. We see how we conceptualize social interactions, tools, and environments by projecting our own bodies externally, blurring the ostensible boundary between world and self. Finally, we examine the putative mythologies and rituals of ancient African peoples, reconstructed from contemporary hunter-gatherers, with their emphasis on fusions of identity and flows of power between social categories. 

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 evolutionary process by describing humanity's unique capacities as an intensification of traits we share with other animals. We look at the ritual behavior of chimpanzees, the symbolic world of Neanderthals, and the increasingly elaborate sequences of abstraction that characterize human thought. We examine how for millennia human societies developed and lost traits repeatedly, in regional cycles of cultural growth and collapse, until 100 thousand years ago ... something happened. 

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 increasing brain connectivity. We see how isolated populations lose traits, but connected ones generate feedback loops of characteristically human tendencies: tolerance, social comprehension, communication, behavioral flexibility, and mobility all encourage one another. We also introduce the notion of the vocabulary of temperaments, the features such as neurotransmitters and brain regions shared by complex animal life, giving us a common language of rapid, novel responsiveness to environmental conditions, henceforth official Fight Like An Animal nomenclature. 

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 of our cognition, and see how such changes are driven by behavior, by our ancestors choosing to live at the limits of their cognitive abilities. We examine the embodied metaphors on which abstract thought is based, the original function of the brain region that was recruited for language, and the drawbacks to inhabiting a symbolic world. Does the experience of meditation parallel the greater self-control our ancestors found with an enlarging prefrontal cortex? Were those who saw beyond the confines of ancestral human abilities treated as outsiders, as deviants so often are? Finally, what would it be like to live at the limits of our abilities, and thus promote further evolution, today? What limits would we seek to transgress? We offer a tentative answer in the abandonment of worldviews based on psychological need, in favor of simply seeing the world as it is, confronting any horrors that emerge along the way.