Fight Like An Animal

In celebration of the anniversary of the killing of Custer, to prepare for revolutionary efforts against the theocratic authoritarian regime which has taken over the US, and in hopes of a holy war against the forces that are destroying life on earth, Arnold describes lessons learned at, or illustrated by, the pipeline struggle of 2016-7 at Standing Rock...

In order for scientists to start a revolution, the case for revolution must emerge from the scientific process. But that process is heavily influenced by the underlying psychologies which produce the different worldviews found in different disciplines and sub-tendencies within disciplines.  We introduce a coarse classification of distinct segments of academia and distinct segments of the power structure, which, by sheer coincidence, are both tripartite schemes...

(05/22/2022) The story of the epochal changes of the 2020s, told in 2050, continues. This episode tells the story of west coast forests in the 2020s and the three preceding decades, and the institutional inertia that existed with regard to fire...

The year is 2250, and the participation of humanity in the global ecosystem is shaped by a council of scientists contemplating, with considerable reverence and humility, the various paths before us...

We discuss the many determinants of hierarchy and equality, and many other aspects of social form, in the cross-cultural record over time. We examine patrilocal residence and gender inequality, scarcity and abundance (and dispersed vs...

In 2050, weary beyond reckoning but not quite dead, Arnold recounts the crises of the 2020s and the revolutionary changes they gave birth to: the synthetic biology and modular technology that allowed economies to localize and food to be produced amidst ecological calamity, the fires that gave birth to an ecstatic movement, the epic street battles over the construction of the I-5 security wall, and the seizure of industrial facilities in Portland, by those who had fought the construction of...

In this episode, we examine the relationship between psychological variation, social role differentiation, and power, presenting a tripartite scheme of Strongmen, Technocrats, and Narcissists: societies with supposedly radically different politics tend to converge on similar outcomes because the same types of people end up in the same roles. At the same time, we examine the world through the bewildering lens of a 2021 paper making a rare journey into the psychology of left authoritarianism...

It's easy enough to use exquisitely rarefied, niche terminology to talk about politics, but do we even have a foundation of  shared definitions for the really common terms, like left and right, or market and state? Or, for that matter, the very term politics? In his podcast What Is Politics?  Daniel argues that we don't, and does the hard work of  defining terms that have meant everything at some point or another, to somebody or another...

If last episode described how we become trapped in a suicidally destructive feedback loop between biology and technology, this one is devoted to escape. Again examining societies and their politics in terms of brain hemisphere differences, we look at the role of empathic embodied communication in catalyzing social rupture, in scenarios such as dancing epidemics and riots...

Why is the world looking more and more like the paranoid delusions of 19th century mental patients? Why do political systems of disparate ideologies converge on the same nightmarish outcomes, always accompanied by cheerful rhetoric about the scientific perfection of society? Is it easy to distinguish the philosophy of Descartes from the ramblings of a psychotic? This episode is a mashup of Iain McGilchrist's The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western...