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. Eac...
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
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.
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2:07:05
Embodied Politics
Now that the first book deriving from this podcast is complete, it feels less ridiculous to say it. The purpose of this project has always been to create a truly new political tendency, as different from any extant one—arguably more so—than, say, monarchism is from liberalism, or liberalism from anarchism. The distinction, as Arnold argues in Revolutionary Biology: Embodied Politics for Global Survival is biological coherence. The misconception that biology implies a lack of plasticity is present, in one form or another, in all our existing politics. This manifests in its outright rejection in some traditions; in others, it manifests in arguments about what human social behavior is “really” like. What is lacking, in every case, is an understanding that every human potential has an underlying biology, which we must understand in order to affect which potentials manifest. This is the essence of embodied politics. In this episode, we briefly examine the path to this book's completion, hear the first chapter, “The World Is Dying and So Are Our Stories about Saving It,” and get an update on future projects emerging from Fight Like An Animal and the World Tree Center for Evolutionary Politics.
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43:53
Primitive Permaculture: Interview with David Lauterwasser
Arnold talks with David of Feun Foo Permaculture and Rewiliding and An Animist's Ramblings. An anarcho-primitivist, David has been making a case for expanding the cultures this political tendency uses as models for life outside civilization. Feun Foo is an experiment in adapting, to the modern context, practices of small-scale, forest-dwelling cultivation which have enabled a great diversity of societies—from highland Southeast Asia to the Amazon—to live in ecological equilibrium. An Animist's Ramblings is a blog which, among other things, advocates for taking political lessons from small-scale horticulturalists and delayed-return hunter-gatherers. Primitivism has often faltered for its lack of clear answers to the question: “knowing what we know, how should we live?” David is helping to guide these politics into a more applied, experimental, and fluid manifestation. We speak of the multi-dimensional nature of domestication; the awe-inspiring visits of elephants to Feun Foo; the personality variation of chickens; the strange and varied diet one ends up adopting subsisting off the land; and the need for a unified sense of identity among those who have rejected the mechanistic worldview, regardless of precisely how that identity manifests politically.
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2:12:11
FLAA 2050: Patrolling the Wasteland (preview)
Looking back from 2050, this episode examines a core communications strategy revolutionary movements began to employ in the late 2020s: the production of really good movies. With 2028's Patrolling the Wasteland as a case study, we examine the storytelling method of kosmentoria. Kosmentoria translates directly to “world in story,” but specifically means using dark or tragic contexts to convey beautiful or hopeful truths. We examine how the hierarchies we inhabited made kosmentoria films to validate themselves, focusing on the theme of the “lone renegade cop obsessed with justice.” Our own films undermined the idea that any small group of people should exercise a monopoly on violence, but they were far from utopian visions. Instead, they positively leaned into some of the more appalling aspects of life, while conveying a core truth: no matter how terrible everything gets, it's never a good idea to stop defending yourself. This “fictional” episode bridges two episodes from the “real,” 2020s version, of Fight Like An Animal: “How to Tell If Someone Is Hitting You,” on the nature of dominance hierarchies, and the forthcoming “Revolutionary Mythology.” To hear the episode in its entirety, please visit Patreon.
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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