Fight Like An Animal

This series examines the future of the human evolutionary journey. Can we adopt behaviors other than the ones that are driving us to chaos, misery, and collapse? Building on the notion of developmental plasticity as the core driver of evolution we established in Revolutionary Biology, we examine the feedback loop between technology and biology that characterizes our journey to extinction. Each social system, we find, elicits only a subset of the range of evolved human potentials, and the one we inhabit fracture us, so that we express only a tiny portion of our abilities. We apply these themes of freeze and fracture across a wide range of situations pertinent to our converging crises: the epistemic fracture that makes communication impossible; the compartmentalization of painful realities at the heart of both individual trauma responses and societal dismissal of ecological crisis; the social role specialization that gives power to certain kinds of people; the narrow awareness and fixed beliefs characteristic of those who are running our lives; and the agonizingly narrow confines of the hall of mirrors from which we must escape if we are to see the world as it is.

Having grown up in a time when anarchism was the ubiquitous form of revolutionary politics, Daniel of What Is Politics? and Arnold talk with bewilderment about the current proliferation of authoritarian leftism. Heavily referencing the amazing A People's Tragedy: The Russian Revolution 1891-1924, we discuss the persistent myth that the Bolsheviks in some sense planned the Russian Revolution or deposed the Czar; ask why Ukrainian peasants succeeded in briefly defending an agrarian anarchist society while Russian peasants did not; and discuss the importance of having any idea what is happening around you if you want to run a country. But first! Arnold frames this discussion by reading from a draft of his book about the psychology of charismatic authoritarians, a psychology that unites everyone from Lenin to Trump, Hitler to the leader of the New Age cult he grew up in. Be sure to check out the highly complementary video on Daniel's channel on Why the Russian Revolution Failed.

As an illustration of the extraordinary plasticity of our species, we examine the story of Zana, whose genetics, described in a 2021 paper, establish her as a member of a modern human population. Zana, who was captured living wild in the Caucasus Mountains in the 19th century and held in captivity for forty years, was two meters tall, covered in hair, superhumanly strong, lacked speech, slept naked outside all winter, could crush bones with her teeth, swam in rivers during their full spring flood, and could outrun a horse. She was described by the many locals who were familiar with her as an Almasty, or Sasquatch. Building on early biological descriptions of two species of human and the contemporary evidence on feral children, we postulate that our own developmentally delayed, self-domesticated form of humanity has—as is the case among other species for whom developmental change has been central to their evolution—a developmentally accelerated, wild form, induced by a lack of care in early development, and that reproducing populations of such individuals are what we know as Sasquatch. 

Nature vs. nurture thinking simply makes no sense: an entity can only respond to its environment via evolved capacities. Nonetheless, this binary reasoning is persistently attractive to the human mind, and is present in the theoretical foundations of all the major political tendencies. In this episode, we explore the persistent harm to our politics caused by an inability to reason about biology, and the many forms our confusion takes, particularly focusing on the eternally recurrent assumption that the more unvarying a behavior is, the more “biological” it is. We examine the Cold War ideological conflicts that pushed theorists on both sides of nature-nurture controversies to rigid—and not infrequently absurd—extremes, and see how phenotypic plasticity is reasserting itself in biology after decades of suppression, replacing outdated forms of evolutionary theory that involve genes “for” behaviors and ignore the means by which traits develop. In so doing, we assert the biology of social revolution: a description of the human capacity for behavioral variability that exists because of, rather than in opposition to, evolution.

A uniquely stand-alone episode of the Fight Like An Animal 2050 fictional series usually reserved for Patreon, here we describe a future in which insights from anthropology and biology on the ecological determinants of social structure are used by revolutionaries to create a society capable of survival. Combining the rapidly developing possibilities of synthetic biology with the long-standing anthropological paradigm of egalitarian hunter-gatherers, our story envisions a world in which technology is used as a means of creating a surplus for everyone, in an evenly distributed fashion, negating the ability to concentrate resources on which human dominance hierarchies depend. We examine the subsistence strategies of societies in Papua New Guinea and highland Southeast Asia to validate the claim that, rather than the wild or domesticated status of food resources, what is salient in determining social form are their spatial distribution, abundance, and predictability. We relate these resource characteristics to the fluidity of social formations which seems to be decisive in enabling egalitarianism among foragers and cultivators alike. Never eager to neglect a cross-species framework, we also examine the extremely fluid social formations of transient ravens, the sacred animals of this podcast.

(01/01/2022) Why are states incapable of navigating the ecological crisis? We progress to the third of our six explanatory levels for comprehending any sociopolitical condition—species-typical behavior—in pursuit of answers to this question, describing the process of state formation as the imposition of a dominance hierarchy onto an existing social form. We contrast this with the standard narratives of states (and many social scientists), which describe dominance hierarchy as necessary for social complexity, surveying the extensive evidence that sedentism, agriculture, and urbanism always precede the formation of states. We describe the cross-cultural and cross-species modes of egalitarian power that prevent aspiring autocrats from attaining dominance, the unique degree of cooperation found in despotic and egalitarian human societies alike, the role of costly infrastructure in generating social cohesion, the psychosocial profiles of despots, the relationship between civilization and domestication, the chaos of meaningless violence states claim to protect us from as an evolutionary dead end found in no species, the biological mechanisms that generate social stability by ritualizing aggressive displays and diminishing the need for actual violence, and the factors shaping social organization in species ranging from leafcutter ants to lions, woodpeckers to chimpanzees. 

We examine a scientific case for revolution: the claim that modern societies are forms of dominance hierarchy that grant power to people with extremely narrow frames of awareness, who are incapable of grappling with the crises that beset us. Reading from the unnamed Fight Like An Animal book, we examine a tripartite psychology: that of the Narcissists, Strongmen, and Technocrats, corresponding, respectively, to charismatic, coercive, and technical power. In each case, we also identify an egalitarian counterpart to these hierarchical modes. We argue that a coherent sociopolitical analysis requires six levels of description that exist in a relation of reciprocal influence: 1) ultimate evolutionary causes; 2) proximate mechanisms of trait construction; 3) species-typical behavior; 4) individual variation; 5) environmental conditions; 6) culture and politics. We then examine the first two of these levels in our assessment of the relationship between individual variation and power, describing mechanisms of developmental difference, the genetic regulatory hierarchy, individual difference as continua of reactivity, the cross-species durability of personality constructs, the lack of personality trait optima, and much more. 

(12/05/2022) This episode of Fight Like An Animal 2050  tells the story of the initial meetings, in 2025, at which a strategy was conceived for dismantling the I-5 Commerce and Security Zone, appropriating its resources, and thus saving the west coast from annihilation. We learn more about the early exploits of the I-5 saboteurs, the initial publishing efforts of the Scientific Militant, the epidemic usage of a drug called glitch, the experiential predictors of support for various scientific theories, the emergence of alternate economies as the old one crumbled in the first global famine, and introduce a new element into our story: the guerrilla cannabis growers who began to produce food in the mountains, beyond the control of the I-5 administration and its centralized infrastructure, in a continuation of the legacy of escape agriculture that has characterized state-evading peoples throughout much of history.  To experience the entire, bewildering scope of this episode, please find me on Patreon.

(11/17/2022) Why is it that apocalyptic cults have been such a common aspect of the human experience, but are largely absent from our apocalyptic present? Does global collapse inherently invoke a mythical frame of awareness, and if so, what is the role of science in helping us navigate collapse? Here, we continue our examination of the relationship between science and political power, describing the inherent tension between specialization and egalitarianism, local and global survival strategies, rigorous and empirically-grounded inquiries which nonetheless have a mystical quality, the modes of awareness science often attempts to exclude (which continually reassert themselves nonetheless), and the revolutionary potential of structures for meeting human needs outside of the extant economy.

In celebration of the anniversary of the killing of Custer, to prepare for revolutionary efforts against the theocratic authoritarian regime which has taken over the US, and in hopes of a holy war against the forces that are destroying life on earth, Arnold describes lessons learned at, or illustrated by, the pipeline struggle of 2016-7 at Standing Rock. When moments of uprising occur, how do we gain the organization necessary for our strategies and tactics to evolve faster than those of the police? For as much as the police will inevitably surveil us, do they really have any idea what they're looking at? What is pipeline construction like? When is it time to concentrate, when is it time to disperse, and how do we coordinate diffuse conflicts? Is there an optimum of risk and difficulty for protest to progress into revolution? Are trainings, so often eschewed by more radical movement elements, the best way to organize people? These are some of the questions we ask in this episode.