Fight Like An Animal

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. 

The podcast explores the shift towards niche subcultures and self-expression in politics, facing challenges from declining social cohesion. It discusses a proposal for applying marketing strategies to revolution, the emergence of political tensions in suburbia, and the importance of engaging niche identities for mass involvement in societal change.

In this episode, a 72-year-old Arnold reflects on how our species and the global ecosystem managed to survive to 2050. We discuss the Interstate 5 Security and Commerce Zone, and the revolutionary events of 2032-3 that brought down the I-5 wall. We examine the Scientific Militant's efforts to take control of industrial infrastructure to sequester CO2, and the distinctly psychographic approach they took to revolution. And we examine the formation of Green Spear Security Services, which militarily defeated the I-5 Security Forces, from the perspective of the aggressive differential theory of left-right politics and the tension between specialization and synthesis in complex societies. From this perspective, we attempt to answer the question of why prospects for egalitarian revolution, by means of physical force, seemed to gasp their last dying breath in the 1960s and 70s. Find me on Patreon to unlock the full dizzying scope of this episode: https://www.patreon.com/biologicalsingularity  

In this episode, we take a rollicking journey through the minds of narcissists, the emergence of states, and the seemingly intrinsic relationship between authoritarianism and insane belief systems. We explore how individual personality variation affects group dynamics, and in particular, how a certain type of person is to be found in all times and places who wants to be in charge. Relying heavily on Boem's Hierarchy in the Forest: The Evolution of Egalitarian Behavior, we examine the notion that egalitarian societies are such because of collective efforts to subdue those with authoritarian tendencies. In this manner, we create a more variable account of human nature, rejecting the notion that sociopolitical structure automatically emerges from a given mode of subsistence, and thus indicate a wide range of potential future societies.   

In this episode, we examine the way the internet is changing us through the lens of evolved group psychology. We follow the trajectory of increasing social differentiation that technology facilitates, and see how Ronald Inglehart's The Silent Revolution predicted events like the Jan. 6 capitol riots in the 1970s. We explore the tendency toward niche self-expression that emerges from post-WWII material abundance, and how the right-wing is finally having its 1960s.  

In our last discussion, Joshua described cross-species uniformities in responses to traumatic experiences, and how he works to help people access their evolved capacities for recovery. In this episode, we discuss why  our society sees such escalating levels of psychological distress and the utter discontinuity between innate human needs and the structure of the modern world. We discuss our species-typical developmental trajectory (as characterized by the hunter-gatherer childhood model), the psychological function of initiation rites, debates about whether children are being coddled or brutalized by current social conditions, adulthood, loneliness, agency, and more.  

Unlock the entire episode at https://www.patreon.com/biologicalsingularity The year is 2050, and I have been making this podcast for 30 years. In this episode, I continue with the themes first developed in the Biology of the Right-Left Divide, using the revolutions of the mid-2030s to illustrate how social conditions amplify innate differences. We focus on two ways the social-technological trajectory is changing us: specialization (i.e. the development of hyper-competence in some domains at the expense of any competence in others) and behavioral changes resulting from alterations to the brain's reward circuitry, a consequence of living among so many easy, compulsive pleasures. We build a foundation for examining how these two types of change interact with the biology of aggression, and thus determine the nature of human dominance hierarchies.