Fight Like An Animal

The structure of a society is the sum of the different kinds of agency different kinds of people exercise. Here we tell a story of the rise of the current intrigue-riddled, paranoid state of the world by examining the roles played by four individuals. Each is a case study in a distinct political personality. One, Noel Field, who we will call the Idealist: a pious Quaker activist whose naivete entangled him in a plot that got a truly astonishing number of people tortured and killed. Two, C. Wright Mills, who we will call the Renegade: a motorcycle-riding sociologist whose 1956 book The Power Elite informed subsequent revolutionary movements. Three, John F. Kennedy, who we will call the Celebrity: a man who was no stranger to Dark Triad traits, but who lacked the monumental propensity for deception of his rivals in the national security establishment. Four, Allen Dulles, who we will call the Councilor: a man who lacked the charisma of true celebrity, but who ultimately succeeded in his power struggle with Kennedy. We examine how people with extreme psychologies can often outmode others because of their very rarity, enabling them to concoct strategies no one sees coming. And, using cross-species comparison, we see how psychological traits vary so massively in part because there really is no evolutionary optimum, contradicting the idea of species-typical psychology—and by extension, species-typical social structure.

How did we come to live in such an intrigue-riddled, spook-haunted world? In this two-part series, we tell a story about the ascent of the post-WWII espionage establishment, and the permanent sense of crisis and unreality it has created. We tell this story through the lens of revolutionary biology, examining a few of the different political personalities involved: the critics, the pawns, and the conspirators. We examine how ritual deception is a common instrument of domination in traditional societies, and how a very similar psychology is involved in what we call false flag operations today. We look at the truly shocking prevalence of the Dark Triad traits—Machiavellianism, Narcissism, and Psychopathy—in human populations, and the difficulty more empathetic and honest people have coming to terms with this reality. We do this by focusing on the story of how former CIA chief Allen Dulles, a paradigmatic case study in Machiavellianism, helped create a clandestine Nazi power structure that survived and thrived after World War Two.

Thomas Zeitzoff's No Option but Sabotage: The Radical Environmental Movement and the Climate Crisis explores the tumultuous past and uncertain present of movements for a habitable Earth. In this interview, we explore the data he gathered, showing trends in the intensity and frequency of different kinds of ecological action. And we explore the myriad factors his many interviewees cited as shaping the movement's trajectory, from the distinct phases of the punk scene to the psychological shifts that come from living at long-term forest blockades. Throughout it all, we orient to that one great question we all know we can't definitively answer and know we must keep asking: what happens next?

We're not exactly asking what the true nature of the UFO phenomenon is. It's more like we're asking how people form the beliefs they do (which turns out to be a pretty good way to structure an inquiry into the true nature of something). What does being exposed to lots of stories about encounters with UFOs and their occupants, from people who are clearly emotionally impacted by those encounters, do to someone? What if they tell stories that are similar enough to corroborate one another, but too different to add up to any stable, coherent picture? We examine the long history of researchers, after years of immersion in the details of many cases, coming to the conclusion that the UFO phenomenon is real, but deceptive about its own nature. 

We focus on one particularly compelling argument for this position: the bewildering number of supposedly crashed or malfunctioning crafts people have encountered over the years. Could vehicles capable of interstellar travel really keep getting tangled up in power lines and crashing into mountainsides? Are all the astonished crowds who see such things really just telling versions of the same idiosyncratic lie, in an unbroken chain down the centuries? And if neither of these scenarios sound very plausible, where does that leave us? Perhaps we might feel deceived. But there are so many ostensible crashes, involving such a bewildering diversity of UFOs and their pilots, that it almost feels less like being lied to, and more like, paradoxically, being told we're being lied to. Perhaps there's just no making sense of any of this. Or perhaps to make sense of it, we need to examine the nature of our own attempts to communicate with, and conduct research on, other species.

In this episode, you will find the only valid interpretation of the UFO phenomenon in the world. It involves: how psychological experiments conducted by humans on other species are structurally similar to what we call paranormal; how propaganda is best understood as the selective curation of truth to create false impressions; how some spooks got the guy from Blink-182 to hype the kids on secret military programs; how almost every definitive story about the nature of UFOs amplifies some accounts while excluding others; and how people have been leaving us written records of UFOs all over the world since antiquity, describing them in a wide variety of tones, from casual bewilderment to embarrassment to religious awe, always utilizing existing concepts like lamps and moons to describe what they were seeing.