Sometimes, we just have to stop fighting and ask if it's really worth it. Or wait: I guess we won't know unless we fight. In this episode, we briefly touch on the emotional reality of confronting the 212th phase of the apocalypse, and the horrifying truth that it's worse, in some ways, than the 211th phase was. Then, we examine the bewildering combination of crisis and opportunity presented by our dark overlords being even more crazy and stupid than they used to be. We touch on the perils of trying to apply the past to the present, the ways the federal government is becoming like the Coalition Provisional Authority in post-invasion Iraq, and examine how dynastic power becomes even more impulsive and incoherent as the generations progress. Throughout it all, we think about the difference between stories born solely of emotional need and stories born of assessing as many relevant variables we can find.
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REVBIO201: Four in-person classes
On four consecutive Sundays, beginning April 27, Arnold will teach some of the fundamentals of revolutionary biology. Classes take part in Kenilworth Park, in Portland, OR, from 6-8pm. Much of this will be summary of material covered in podcasts, but there will also be some novelties that are specific to this place and the actions we might take in it.
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12:11
The Story Is the Way
This episode returns to the question of how to escape the freeze response so many of us are having to the world's many horrors. We live in stories, but we don't necessarily acknowledge that we do. What happens when we consciously embrace this aspect of our psychology, and seriously ask ourselves: what story are we in? We introduce a still-developing paradigm called Storyfinding: a process of successively iterating new stories out of the same sets of facts. It involves storytelling, but also inhabiting the story one tells. One creates a script of some kind and physically acts it out, assessing one's response, and veers into a different, connected story as many times as necessary. Arnold describes a remarkable transformation experienced in the process of making a movie about Storyfinding. While elements of the process are not yet entirely clear, this experience indicates it may help people understand the stories they have been telling themselves, and decide what story about the future they want to be in.
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1:32:50
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1:32:50
Tree Worship Revival
Is it a coincidence that the authoritarian system currently being imposed is fundamentally an outgrowth of religion? And what does that mean? Is religion inherently concerned with the “supernatural,” or is it an organized way to access collective meaning and purpose? In this episode, we examine what religion gives a political movement it otherwise tends to lack: a way of generating cohesion and low-level mobilization that is more enduring than any particular project, campaign, or strategy. And we examine a particular practice—the identification of particular trees as the living axis of a community—as a conceivable answer to a host of interrelated strategic questions: How do we find each other outside the death spiral of social media? How do we generate the open-ended possibilities of a long-term action camp or occupation? What can people do that requires relatively little time or effort, but helps create a framework for the coordination of many diverse actions? While unabashedly embracing reverence for life, this episode is a concrete strategic analysis culminating in a clear call to action.
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1:49:08
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1:49:08
Revolutionary Mythology: The War for the Vision Space
The fog of collective resignation we are stumbling through has changed the stories we tell. As we perceive, with increasingly painful clarity, that our society cannot resolve the catastrophes it produces, we enter an era of aimless narrative drift. Atmospheric carbon dioxide accumulates in proportion to Mission Impossible sequels. Stories are losing their vitality because, no matter how many cars explode in them, they fail to describe a path away from our depression, disconnection, precariousness, and loss of shared meaning. In this episode, we ask whether a new mythology might arise from our current mire, and what its characteristics might be. Along the way, we examine the human penchant for hallucinating and dreaming about insects that control reality, the psychology of the outsider, the cross-species biology of adolescent dispersal from the birth group, why there are so few movies about healing from trauma, how embodied experience generates insights independent of any information it provides, and the 19th century Russian novel that arguably created more revolutionaries than any non-fiction.
Fight Like An Animal searches for a synthesis of behavioral science and political theory that illuminates paths to survival for this planet and our species. Each episode examines political conflict through the lens of innate contributors to human behavior, offering new understandings of our current crises. Bibliographies: https://www.againsttheinternet.com/ Support: https://www.patreon.com/biologicalsingularity
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