Fight Like An Animal

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, scarc…

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…

In this episode, we examine the relationship between psychological variation, social role differentiation, and power, presenting a tripartite scheme of Strongmen, Technocrats, and Narcissists: societ…

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 ma…

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 i…

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 …

Arnold's father, George, comes to visit, and tells stories of hanging out with a revolutionary pachuco poet, covering himself in tattoos at age eleven, breaking out of jail on multiple occasions, gro…

We continue our mashup of political psychology, the biology of aggression, and left-right brain hemisphere differences, in the latter case guided by Iain McGilchrist's The Master and His Emissary: Th…

In this, the most wild journey we have undertaken thus far, we examine the notion that reality consists of a tension between opposites reflected at any given level of analysis, from the big bang to t…

As grief and terror about the ecological crisis intensifies, it seems increasingly curious that for many years a radical environmental movement—based on a deep sense of connection with, and rage on b…

Because it couldn't possibly be more clear that existing political systems are committed to behaviors that will cause our extinction, one has to ask: can we just sabotage the fossil fuel economy out …

In this episode, we conclude our broad sweep of human history, venturing fearlessly into the truly tangled wilderness of variables mediating the relationship between technology and hierarchy. We crit…

Just for fun and for absolutely no other reason whatsoever, a very high, very post-surgical Arnold relates a youthful tale of desert, night and madness: A tale which will do nothing whatsoever to des…

Assuming a continuous legacy of political struggle from the earliest stages of human evolution to conflicts over power today, we speculate about the politics of societies in the distant past. We disc…

In this episode, we examine not how biology pervades politics, but how politics pervades biology: how the course of evolution has been shaped by millions of years of what can only be described as pol…

When we speak of revolution, aren't we are ultimately speaking of the creation of a different culture? And if so, how plausible or meaningful is it to imagine deliberately crafting a culture? In this…

But seriously: is there any point to doing anything at all? Or is the world truly just going to end so soon we really might as well just kind of reach for whatever or whoever kills the pain and stop …

We examine the hopelessly subjective and highly contentious (one could perhaps say psychotic) process by which the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, the so-called bible of psychi…

As we emerge from quarantine and reveal to one another our many wounds, Arnold describes a recent, months-long period of psychological rupture as a narrative frame for an inquiry into the relationshi…