Fight Like An Animal

In this episode, we conclude our broad sweep of human history, venturing fearlessly into the truly tangled wilderness of variables mediating the relationship between technology and hierarchy. We critique Graeber and Wengrow's The Dawn of Everything as a frame for our journey, examining the relationship between civilization, domestication, and human evolution; the cross-species relationship between social form and costly infrastructure; the trend toward technological mass society in early human evolution; the post-materialist shift in the upper Paleolithic; and the conditions necessary for escape cultures. We search for inferences about contemporary revolutionary efforts, examining how strategies of evasion involve social disaggregation and strategies of confrontation involve social cohesion, and emerge from the complexity with an overarching thesis: the strategic advantage of egalitarianism is in its greater capacity for social comprehension. 

Just for fun and for absolutely no other reason whatsoever, a very high, very post-surgical Arnold relates a youthful tale of desert, night and madness: A tale which will do nothing whatsoever to describe how acorn woodpeckers provide insights into the relationship between hierarchy and technology, or how population density affects strategies of evasion, or anything else he thought his next episode was going to be about.  

Assuming a continuous legacy of political struggle from the earliest stages of human evolution to conflicts over power today, we speculate about the politics of societies in the distant past. We discuss the relationship between risky human migrations and political perception, ancient cities without states and states without cities, confrontation and evasion as two strategies against hierarchy, the monumental architecture of hunter-gatherers, the relationship between abundance and hierarchy from a cross-species perspective, the psychological tendencies evident in certain varieties of social science narratives, the notion of cultural behavioral patterning reflecting the personalities of the people who create new cultures, and the dreamlike beauty of the stone age graves of physically abnormal children. Along the way, we are looking to decouple variables like hierarchy and social complexity, sedentism and agriculture, and egalitarianism and cooperation, charting a course to ask more concretely and precisely about the relationship between technology and hierarchy. 

In this episode, we examine not how biology pervades politics, but how politics pervades biology: how the course of evolution has been shaped by millions of years of what can only be described as political struggle. We examine two types of ethnogenesis in human ancestors and other primates, fissioning events and internal changes in social structure, and how the formation of new cultures is sometimes equivalent to what we call in the modern world political revolution. Along the way, we see the evolutionary trajectory away from certain forms of hierarchy and aggression in humans and bonobos as the result of conscious agency exerted by ancestors of those species, present a bimodal view of aggression, and examine how even in despotic species (and human social arrangements) power is ultimately highly distributed. Finally, we examine more evidence for the inverse relationship between aggression and social cognition, framing egalitarian political struggle as a struggle for comprehension.   

When we speak of revolution, aren't we are ultimately speaking of the creation of a different culture? And if so, how plausible or meaningful is it to imagine deliberately crafting a culture? In this episode, we begin to examine the long history of cultures on the margins of civilization as political projects, which are often misconstrued by states (and their ethnographers) as archaic remnants rather than deliberate efforts at state evasion. While this history will ultimately take us through millions of years of evolution, we will start by drawing out the parallels between northern California's back to the land movement--a culture we are all well aware was deliberately crafted as a political choice--and hill tribes, as described in James C. Scott's masterful The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia.

But seriously: is there any point to doing anything at all? Or is the world truly just going to end so soon we really might as well just kind of reach for whatever or whoever kills the pain and stop paying attention? In this episode, we examine what it means to come to terms with the crossing of climate tipping points, the dreamlike nature of the way the news babbles about collapse, the landscape of variation in ecological perceptions, and taking control of the world's infrastructure to begin the very uncertain experiment of halting feedback loops that have already been triggered as a revolutionary strategic frame.  

We examine the hopelessly subjective and highly contentious (one could perhaps say psychotic) process by which the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, the so-called bible of psychiatric disorders, has been constructed. Relying heavily on Gary Greenberg's The Book of Woe: The DSM and the Unmaking of Psychiatry,  we also discuss the consequences the DSM has both for individuals who accept its narratives about the nature of their suffering and for the prospects for social transformation. Somewhere along the way, we talk about secret societies that exert control through claims to exclusive knowledge in traditional cultures, optical illusions that only occur among industrialized people, and the ways captive animals go insane.    

As we emerge from quarantine and reveal to one another our many wounds, Arnold describes a recent, months-long period of psychological rupture as a narrative frame for an inquiry into the relationship between addiction, madness, despair and revolutionary social possibility. In this episode we examine the dubious origins of 12-steps programs like Alcoholics Anonymous in hallucinatory christianity, the neuroscience of addiction, and the relationship between addiction and pain. We also explore the fundamental unity of the changes to neural circuitry that result from exposure to drugs or exposure to all the other hyper-potent reward stimuli that consumer civilization has to offer.  

In this episode, Arnold asks Joshua a series of truly fundamental questions to which no one has decisive answers: questions about whether large-scale shifts in how we conceptualize our suffering are possible, and whether and to what extent this would inform possibilities for a less destructive society.  We discuss the role of narcissism in creating coercive political systems, trauma and psychological distress in traditional societies, the mythical dimensions of both individual and collective healing, and much more.   

We continue our examination of the revolutionary period of 2032-3, relying heavily on the psychographic researcher Sarah Kessler's book The Internet Is a Map of the Human Mind: On Technology and Psychological Diversity to examine the internet subculture of simulants, who believe (or claim to believe) that the universe is a simulation. We see how in a politics of undifferentiated appeals, simulants would be unreachable, but how the revolutionary coalition targeted messages to subcultures with radically different perspectives, managing to engage people in a project to save the world who didn't even believe the world existed. Find me on https://www.patreon.com/biologicalsingularity to unlock the full bewildering extent of this episode.