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Fight Like An Animal

World Tree Center for Evolutionary Politics

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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21 episodes
Avg 1 hr 19 min
English

Episodes 21

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Thursday · 54 min
Children of the Wasteland: Experimental Biology vs. Global Catastrophe ch.3
Chapter Three: Rise of the Xenobots. Can life be persuaded to take novel forms and behaviors that stabilize the Earth system? The only way to find out is to find out. Let's look to the strange frontiers of experimental biology for a framework of inquiry. Two kinds of so-called biobots have been constructed, one from embryonic frog cells and one from human lung cells. These cellular collectives become autonomously mobile, begin differentiating, and take on novel problems to solve. We can't know what problems they will solve without exposing these new biological entities to new settings and developmental influences. Work in bioelectricity is showing how cellular collectives make decisions about things like anatomy through the same signaling logic as in brains and nervous systems, just on slower timescales—leading researchers to speak of scale-free cognition. So we can also say we don't know what kinds of cognition biobots, or any other biological entity, will exhibit until we experiment. Bioelectric perturbation is creating new body plans in multi-cellular organisms. This is one example of how experimentation with new forms of life does not require or necessarily imply genetic engineering. If you like strange news from the far reaches of science, this episode is for you.
September 3 · 1 hr 54 min
World-Self-Void-Marx-Lenin: Interview with Adam of Subjective Conditions
What does it feel like, in our bodies, to be in a Marxist reading group or an anarchist direct action collective? What unexamined stories, from our profoundly traumatizing experiences of development, do we carry into political organizing structures? What relational patterns do we experience in situations ranging from families to graduate school that we then repeat, using new language and frames of reference, when we try to save the world? What does it mean to be a revolutionary, in terms of the core relational and perceptual shifts we wish to effect in ourselves and others? Do political groups kinda resemble cults sometimes? In this episode, Arnold and Adam speak about their highly overlapping experiences of political engagement and philosophical reflection. Adam, a psychotherapist and social worker with an extensive background in Marxist theory and practice, is the host of the Subjective Conditions podcast, which returns from hiatus this fall, focusing on “the mind and the body under capitalism.” His other projects include the Red Library podcast, the Capillaries theory blog, and a forthcoming book called Saturn's Maw, draft chapters of which are spread between Capillaries and his psychotherapy website.
August 22 · 43 min
Children of the Wasteland: Experimental Biology vs. Global Catastrophe ch.2
Chapter Two: The Poison Eaters. In this chapter, we examine some possible experimental biology-assisted climate interventions, such as mineralization of rapidly-produced biomass. We then return to the question of massive, rapid methane release from undersea deposits, journeying to a place called Hydrate Ridge off the coast of Oregon, where two very different organisms form a symbiotic association to metabolize methane. This seafloor filtration is similar to an organ like a kidney, keeping the concentration of a certain substance within a manageable range. If it is overwhelmed, can we assist it? In search of answers, we look at the biology of methane-consuming species, or methanatrophs, and one of the wilder frontiers of current biology: that of the biobots, the “novel constructs” that are not exactly organisms but are definitely alive.
August 14 · 44 min
Children of the Wasteland: Experimental Biology vs. Global Catastrophe ch.1
Chapter One: Will the Wasteland Blossom? Here we search for synthetic biology-assisted interventions into runaway climate change and other catastrophic Earth changes. Our first chapter looks at the current state of climate science, and the schools of thought within it. We look at the physical metaphors we use to think about planetary change, such as “thresholds” and “collapse,” and how they constrain our ability to speak of the dynamic range of conceivable futures. We examine the sparse and contradictory literature on one particularly distressing climate feedback: the possibility of massive undersea methane release, discussing recent science indicating methane destabilization is quite possible in the near-future. We also examine the biology of the seafloor methane-sulfate transition zone, where a symbiotic association of microbes consumes methane from destabilized hydrates, maintaining atmospheric equilibrium. It is here we will begin a speculative case study in stabilizing the climate system with techniques at the forefront of experimental biology.
May 5 · 1 hr 16 min
Deceive Like an Animal pt. 2: Narcissist vs. Machiavellian Death Match
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.
May 1 · 1 hr 3 min
Deceive Like an Animal pt. 1: How the Nazis Won WWII
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.
April 14 · 36 min
No Option but Sabotage: Interview with Thomas Zeitzoff
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?
April 7 · 48 min
The Visitors: Tangles of Strangeness
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.
February 26 · 2 hr 33 min
The Visitors: Story War
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.
January 21 · 1 hr 35 min
Without a Shot Fired
In this episode, we examine a simplified scenario—that of a total social revolution without a single shot fired—to illustrate real dynamics at work in our complex world. Across human and other animal societies, power is often maintained not with outright aggression, but with threat display. Crucially, some kinds of threats are only functional when they remain implicit, or are communicated clandestinely. In other words, there are times when surrendering or fighting are both bad options, but it is still possible to communicate to an adversary that attacking will result in unacceptable losses. This lands us in the terrain of what is formalized as game theory, but experientially familiar from a wide range of scenarios, from calculations by soldiers about whether to obey orders to calculations by commanders about how far they can push soldiers: the world of theorizing about other people's theories about your theory of their likely intentions and behavior.
January 13 · 2 hr 2 min
We Are Alive!
We introduce the new Fight Like An Animal-adjacent project Defending the World Tree: A Journal of Animist Awakening, from Severed Branches Press, and describe the ceremony we are trying to spread. Using our Jan. 18 Day of the Forest Defender event as an example, we discuss ways to transmute grief and trauma into collective agency. Then we complete our examination of the structure and nature of revival movements, and their fundamental role in shaping societies throughout human history. We examine case studies with widely variable outcomes—beneficial, neutral, and tragic—from Europe to Africa to North America, relying on the classic 1956 paper “Revitalization Movements” as a guide. From the catastrophic absurdity of the children's crusade of 1212 to the Shawnee Prophetstown movement whose legacy lives on today, we see how cultural revivals can mobilize great energy, but still require coherent political strategy. Finally, we end with some punk rock revival preaching.
Oct 6, 2025 · 2 hr 8 min
Survival Revival
All social change is ultimately biological change. We present a framework, called an alliance of phenotypes, for thinking concretely about societies in this way. It involves a ten-item trait inventory called RAMBO-BAMBI, which is intended to bring relevant variables out of the hazy periphery of consciousness and into explicit focus. In other words, it is a way of telling more complex stories about the world than we frequently do. We use two events, which occurred on successive nights, to illustrate the diversity of initiatives that emerge from this way of thinking. One event featured the Survival Ecology presentation from last episode; the other is best described as punk rock revival preaching. The Survival Ecology research will be used in communications appealing to one population's psychological needs for security and stability. The preaching was intended to bring out a different group of people's best, and wildest, selves. We use this as a minimal illustration of fluidly transitioning between modes of being, to best engage different political personalities in different ways.
Sep 27, 2025 · 1 hr 6 min
Survival Ecology
What would a truly resource-minimum, viable human ecology—viable in the sense that we are fed, warm, and dry—look like? What proportion of the current system is useless economic activity, and what proportion is useless economic activity entangled with legitimate human need? Environmental policy documents don't answer these questions, but they do provide information that helps us to craft a vision. Utilizing Oregon's consumption-based greenhouse gas inventory—which looks at all energy use to meet in-state consumption, regardless of where that energy use occurs—we throw out some numbers. We estimate that less than 5% of current economy activity is essential. A very significant proportion of that is wrapped up in heating, cooling, and cooking. We then examine ways to meet these basic human needs. Having a concrete vision of this nature allows us to contemplate rapid shifts, whether out of a conscious choice to stop destroying the world or because the global economy ceases to function.
Aug 21, 2025 · 1 hr 46 min
A Body with Many Selves
Those of us who understand the world cannot exercise power, while those who exercise power cannot understand the world. We have all fractured, but in different ways. Weaving together recent papers on the psychological correlates of scientific divisions, we ask: Why are lawyers and business majors so over-represented in elected offices? Why are engineers 17 times more likely to engage in authoritarian political violence than would be expected from their presence in the population? Why are social sciences majors so much more likely to participate in egalitarian political violence? We examine three psychologies, with correlated social role specializations and approaches to knowledge. We use the academy to illustrate these psychologies, calling them Technics, Science, and Literary Experiments. We then ask what the adventure of becoming more integrated beings looks like. In the process, we discover how conscious awareness of the multiple selves we contain characterizes both psychosis and the mystical experience—that the distinction is less one of logical structure than emotional tone. To overcome our fracture, we must become able to confront the strangeness of being a single body that contains many selves.
Aug 11, 2025 · 1 hr 16 min
A World with Many Centers
We celebrate the following three things: One, the animist revival currently sweeping the land. Two, a completed book with a tangible publication trajectory. Three, the form of ceremony, with all its diverse manifestations in various cultures, usually simply called shaking, as explicated in Bradford Keeney's book Shaking Medicine: The Healing Power of Ecstatic Movement. We contrast this type of ceremony with a set of tendencies described by Louis Sass in his brilliant work Madness and Modernism: Insanity in the Light of Modern Art, Literature, and Thought. Sass argues that schizophrenia is a limit case—the most extreme manifestation of—perceptual changes experienced by all industrialized peoples. While its manifestations are extremely diverse, he claims the shared foundations of these perceptual changes are social disconnection, lack of agency, and loss of direct immersion in experience, in favor of analyzing experience—a turning of attention to attention itself. We examine how industrialization caused a steep decline in the ritual traditions of rural Europe, and a simultaneous building boom in psychiatric hospitals. If we know the world in three phases—intuition, analysis, and integration of the two—perhaps we can think of pre-modern politics, with qualifications, as the intuitive, and the modern, “scientific” conception of politics as the analytical. All that's left is the synthesis: a return to our bodies and shared reality, with all the wisdom we have gained in the first two phases.
May 21, 2025 · 44 min
Love to the Fighters
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.
Apr 21, 2025 · 12 min
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.
Mar 24, 2025 · 1 hr 32 min
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.
Mar 1, 2025 · 1 hr 49 min
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.
Jan 3, 2025 · 2 hr 7 min
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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