Fight Like An Animal

In order for scientists to start a revolution, the case for revolution must emerge from the scientific process. But that process is heavily influenced by the underlying psychologies which produce the different worldviews found in different disciplines and sub-tendencies within disciplines.  We introduce a coarse classification of distinct segments of academia and distinct segments of the power structure, which, by sheer coincidence, are both tripartite schemes. In the former: technics, literary experimentation, and science. In the latter: narcissists, strongmen, and technocrats. We examine how these tribes within academia can be defined by statistical ideological bias, epistemology, relationship to manipulation of the physical world, and degree of representation in settings of institutional power, relying heavily on Gambetta and Hertog's Engineers of Jihad: The Curious Connection between Violent Extremism and Education.  We describe how institutional power is inhabited by technocrats and narcissists from the technics echelon of the academy, and how this implies that the civil resistance model, a default paradigm for ecological activism, is flawed. 

(05/22/2022) The story of the epochal changes of the 2020s, told in 2050, continues. This episode tells the story of west coast forests in the 2020s and the three preceding decades, and the institutional inertia that existed with regard to fire. We examine the insane technical literature generated by environmental law, the failure of wildfire behavior modeling, the formation of parallel institutions by scientists, synthetic biology approaches to enhancing photosynthesis, the psychological foundations of various scientific models, how the internet is a map of the human mind, and the ecstatic religious movement that took to the blackened mountains to plant trees in the epic fires of 2025-6.  Visit https://www.patreon.com/biologicalsingularity for the dizzying entirety of this episode.

The podcast delves into the relationship of science to power, highlighting the ideological discipline that hindered climate scientists from acting earlier. It explores the need for a revolution in scientific thinking, criticizing the current civil resistance model. Chapters touch on scientists advocating for change, reflections on political engagement, and the impact of division of labor in workplaces. The intersection of physics, climate crisis, and power dynamics is also discussed.

We discuss the many determinants of hierarchy and equality, and many other aspects of social form, in the cross-cultural record over time. We examine patrilocal residence and gender inequality, scarcity and abundance (and dispersed vs. concentrated abundance) of food resources, intergroup threat and its impact on intragroup dynamics, culture as a means of not going insane from having too many choices, territoriality under different ecological scenarios, the ability to escape existing social arrangements, monotheistic prophets in cattle-herding cultures, and more. Watch Daniel's videos here: https://www.youtube.com/c/WHATISPOLITICS69/featuredOr listen here: https://www.listennotes.com/podcasts/what-is-politics-worldwidescrotes-OQXC56wtuz0/ or wherever you find your podcasts.

In 2050, weary beyond reckoning but not quite dead, Arnold recounts the crises of the 2020s and the revolutionary changes they gave birth to: the synthetic biology and modular technology that allowed economies to localize and food to be produced amidst ecological calamity, the fires that gave birth to an ecstatic movement, the epic street battles over the construction of the I-5 security wall, and the seizure of industrial facilities in Portland, by those who had fought the construction of the wall and were beginning to evolve into the legendary I-5 saboteurs, for use in an ecology of survival. Visit https://www.patreon.com/biologicalsingularity for the dizzying entirety of this episode. 

Delving into left authoritarianism, the podcast explores power dynamics through the lens of narcissism and the convergence of different societies on similar outcomes. From Marxist cults to genital shrinking in West Africa, it critiques cancel culture commentary, highlights the need for alternative academia, and teases upcoming discussions on strategic solutions.

It's easy enough to use exquisitely rarefied, niche terminology to talk about politics, but do we even have a foundation of  shared definitions for the really common terms, like left and right, or market and state? Or, for that matter, the very term politics? In his podcast What Is Politics?  Daniel argues that we don't, and does the hard work of  defining terms that have meant everything at some point or another, to somebody or another. We talk about what led him to this work, the ideological discipline in academia, the ways in which both postmodernism and reductive materialism have mostly made everybody more confused and unable to exercise political agency, the political implications of hunter-gatherer studies, and his epic, marathon critique of the book The Dawn of Everything.  Watch his videos here: https://www.youtube.com/c/WHATISPOLITICS69/featured Or listen here: https://www.listennotes.com/podcasts/what-is-politics-worldwidescrotes-OQXC56wtuz0/ or wherever you find your podcasts. 

If last episode described how we become trapped in a suicidally destructive feedback loop between biology and technology, this one is devoted to escape. Again examining societies and their politics in terms of brain hemisphere differences, we look at the role of empathic embodied communication in catalyzing social rupture, in scenarios such as dancing epidemics and riots. We examine the depth and complexity of non-linguistic communication, the hyper-legalistic and ostensibly rational dialogues about religion of the Middle Ages, the fundamental symmetry between processes of traumatic integration at the individual level and revolution at the collective level, frameworks for confronting fear in various cultures, and the psychology of abuse in creating acquiescence to the power structure.     

Why is the world looking more and more like the paranoid delusions of 19th century mental patients? Why do political systems of disparate ideologies converge on the same nightmarish outcomes, always accompanied by cheerful rhetoric about the scientific perfection of society? Is it easy to distinguish the philosophy of Descartes from the ramblings of a psychotic? This episode is a mashup of Iain McGilchrist's The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World and James C. Scott's Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed, examining the brain science of authoritarian high modernism, the ideology Scott describes as uniting Lenin with Le Corbusier. From the clearcut to the resettlement camp to the factory farm, from the sterile visions of the urban planner to the disembodied eye which frequently appears in the drawings of psychotics, let us examine the nightmare world we inhabit: the world of the left brain hemisphere trapped in itself...

Arnold's father, George, comes to visit, and tells stories of hanging out with a revolutionary pachuco poet, covering himself in tattoos at age eleven, breaking out of jail on multiple occasions, growing up with gangsters, using burglary as a means to redistribute wealth around the neighborhood, getting strung out, getting shot at by the police, starting a performance troop in San Quentin, and having a public ethical dialogue about suicide in the prison library with someone sentenced to life without parole. Father and son commiserate and laugh about their first arrests, both at age eight, what it's like to go through withdrawals in jail, the posturing of gangsters, and the fundamental similarity of the many forms of lockup this society has to offer. To unleash the dizzying entirety of this episode, check out https://www.patreon.com/biologicalsingularity