Best World Tree Center For Transformative Politics Podcasts (2024)

1
How to Tell If Someone Is Hitting You 1:40:37

1M ago1:40:37

1:40:37

A dominance hierarchy is a social structure where some people are allowed to hit you, and you're not allowed to hit back. It is defined by a sustained, institutionalized asymmetry of aggressive-submissive interactions. This skewed distribution of aggression enables a skewed distribution of resources and opportunities. Modern history has ostensibly …

1
Taming the Apocalypse with Dr. Shane Simonsen 1:44:20

3M ago1:44:20

1:44:20

Dr. Shane Simonsen returns to talk about his new book Taming the Apocalypse, a vision of humanity's potential as “the universal symbiont,” facilitating new pathways for evolution. Ranging from the immediately viable to the highly speculative, the projects described in Taming all eschew the industrial science model in favor of a more participatory, …

1
We Are Fighting a War to Keep Our Hearts Alive 2:01:02

5M ago2:01:02

2:01:02

Is it time to give up? Was it already time to give up in 2020, or 2012, or perhaps even 1999? We usually justify our answers to these questions purely in terms of their rational foundations. But our reasoning is embodied, and variation in the details of our embodiment produce very different relationships to hope, despair, and the place one finds be…

1
Vivimancer pt. 2: Brain Waves 3:14

5M ago3:14

3:14

In 2015, Thorstein Grunwald began a mythic undertaking. He sought extreme states of consciousness for the purpose of making scientific discoveries about the earth's carbon cycle that would allow for interventions in runaway climate change. Science already had a very long legacy of progress through the spontaneous visionary experiences of its practi…

1
Sub-Self, Meet Meta-Self: Notes on The Emerging World Mind 2:31:22

8M ago2:31:22

2:31:22

You've heard a million times that the history of life on earth is one of systems tending toward ever-increasing complexity, but in this episode, we argue evolutionary history is best conceptualized as one of ever-expanding boundaries of selfhood. In so doing, we apply a unique lens to questions with concrete strategic implications which have vexed …

1
Jesus of Nazareth and the Biology of Defeat 2:38:39

10M ago2:38:39

2:38:39

What does it say about a society if it venerates the image of someone being executed by the state for sedition? In this episode, we trace the improbable evolution of Jesus of Nazareth from fervent revolutionary to apolitical, transcendental being. We situate his trajectory in the cross-cultural tradition of prophetic liberation movements, from sout…

1
The Biological Singularity Is Near pt. 1 2:16:45

11M ago2:16:45

2:16:45

We are clearly reaching the end of this phase of human civilization. Does that mean that evolution's broad trend towards increasing complexity, scale, and self-awareness is also dying? Many futures are possible, and in this episode, we speculate about one that continues the evolution of ever-greater complexity. Exiting the fantasy of a “sustainable…

1
Social Complexity after the Machines: Interview with Dr. Shane Simonsen 1:46:38

1y ago1:46:38

1:46:38

Rejecting both the empty promise of a future of magically sustainable resource extraction and a return to what has already been, Dr. Shane Simonsen examines possibilities for social and ecological complexity based only on biology and the human imagination. In his Zero Input Agriculture blog, Going to Seed podcast, and Our Vitreous Womb fiction seri…

1
Metanoia: How Worldviews Change 7:34

1y ago7:34

7:34

Fight Like An Animal has engendered a group, and that group has in turn engendered a new podcast called Metanoia: How Worldviews Change. Metanoia, which means "a transformative change of heart," examines why most people are so utterly unresponsive to witnessing the world die, while a few of us are deeply burdened. Abandoning Enlightenment notions o…

1
Vivimancer pt. 1: The Water Carrier (excerpt) 5:23

1y ago5:23

5:23

Perpetually replenishing his organs by inducing his cells to behave like those of an early embryo, Arnold continues the 100th year of his podcast. In Fight Like An Animal 2120: Vivimancer, we examine the end of the Machine Age and the subsequent Biological Revolution, providing both an introduction for new practitioners and a history of the practic…

1
Seeds of the World Tree: Programs of Revolutionary Biology and Evolutionary Politics 47:19

1y ago47:19

47:19

Fight Like An Animal has generated an incredible audience consisting of rigorous thinkers who possess deep empathy. These traits, which are too rarely combined in political movements and institutions, mean that we have the potential to collaborate on truly novel, worthwhile projects. Thus is born, friends, the World Tree Center for Evolutionary Pol…

1
Social Cohesion vs. the Internet vs. the Establishment vs. the Earth 1:45:58

1y ago1:45:58

1:45:58

A wide-ranging conversation between Arnold and Daniel of What Is Politics? concerning the prospects for social transformation in this dreamlike age of epistemic fracture. We talk about the impact of declining social cohesion on traditional modes of political organizing; whether the internet can do anything other than make people stupid and crazy; a…

1
#66: A Saboteur's Moon Sheds No Light (excerpt) 2:15

1+ y ago2:15

2:15

Before this podcast began, a nascent version of Fight Like An Animal 2050 was called A Saboteur's Moon Sheds No Light, broadly following the same narrative trajectory of revolutionary transformation amidst ecological collapse. A variety of video, text, and music was produced for the project. As a companion to the most recent episode, and as a way t…

1
The Ashes of the World Tree: On Grieving and Fighting 3:01:04

1+ y ago3:01:04

3:01:04

Our worldviews emerge from our psychologies, from embodied states of being. In an effort to describe my framework for understanding social possibility beyond ecological tipping points, I have decided to tell a story. The story is of my life over the course of seven years, of the integration of past traumas, nomadic revolutionary politics, unmitigat…

1
Metamorphosis pt. 3.1: The Rupture in the Fabric of Reality Model of Human Cognition 1:49:45

1+ y ago1:49:45

1:49:45

We continue to assess our future evolutionary prospects, this time picking up the story of the human journey where Homo sapiens emerges. Anatomically modern humans have existed for ~300 thousand years, but modern behavior is only evident starting ~100 thousand years ago. We examine this evolutionary process by describing humanity's unique capacitie…

1
Metamorphosis pt. 3.2: Integration across Landscapes and Brain Regions 1:12:37

1+ y ago1:12:37

1:12:37

We continue the story of humanity's journey to modern thought and behavior, examining how a mosaic of both cultural and anatomical traits existed throughout Africa for ~200 thousand years. Then, this patchwork of cultures and anatomies fused, a process of integration that is also reflected in increasing brain connectivity. We see how isolated popul…

1
Metamorphosis pt. 3.3: Your Body Is a Map of the Sky 2:03:03

1+ y ago2:03:03

2:03:03

We examine the neurobiological changes that brought archaic Homo sapiens into behavioral modernity, despite negligible changes in brain size. We see how complex symbolic capacities are embedded in anatomy and behavior, and describe the human brain's progressive change to a more globular shape, the increase in our neural density, and the expansion o…

1
Metamorphosis pt. 2: The Cognitive Evolutionary Avant-Garde 2:49:25

1+ y ago2:49:25

2:49:25

We assess the future of our evolutionary journey by asking what it was like, experientially, to be at the forefront of ancestral human cognition. We examine the role of choice in human evolutionary history, describing expression changes in synaptic genes of the prefrontal cortex as a key driver of our cognition, and see how such changes are driven …

1
Metamorphosis pt. 1: The Age of Mutual Incomprehension 2:06:00

1+ y ago2:06:00

2:06:00

This series examines the future of the human evolutionary journey. Can we adopt behaviors other than the ones that are driving us to chaos, misery, and collapse? Building on the notion of developmental plasticity as the core driver of evolution we established in Revolutionary Biology, we examine the feedback loop between technology and biology that…

1
The Incompetent Authoritarianism of Vladimir Lenin 1:25:24

1+ y ago1:25:24

1:25:24

Having grown up in a time when anarchism was the ubiquitous form of revolutionary politics, Daniel of What Is Politics? and Arnold talk with bewilderment about the current proliferation of authoritarian leftism. Heavily referencing the amazing A People's Tragedy: The Russian Revolution 1891-1924, we discuss the persistent myth that the Bolsheviks i…

1
Revolutionary Biology pt. 2: The Development and Evolution of Sasquatch 2:05:28

1+ y ago2:05:28

2:05:28

As an illustration of the extraordinary plasticity of our species, we examine the story of Zana, whose genetics, described in a 2021 paper, establish her as a member of a modern human population. Zana, who was captured living wild in the Caucasus Mountains in the 19th century and held in captivity for forty years, was two meters tall, covered in ha…

1
Revolutionary Biology pt. 1: Nature vs. Nurture vs. Synthesis 3:28:44

1+ y ago3:28:44

3:28:44

Nature vs. nurture thinking simply makes no sense: an entity can only respond to its environment via evolved capacities. Nonetheless, this binary reasoning is persistently attractive to the human mind, and is present in the theoretical foundations of all the major political tendencies. In this episode, we explore the persistent harm to our politics…

1
The Raven Politics of Terra Incognita 59:00

2y ago59:00

59:00

A uniquely stand-alone episode of the Fight Like An Animal 2050 fictional series usually reserved for Patreon, here we describe a future in which insights from anthropology and biology on the ecological determinants of social structure are used by revolutionaries to create a society capable of survival. Combining the rapidly developing possibilitie…

1
Narcissists, Strongmen, and Technocrats pt. 2 1:07:44

2y ago1:07:44

1:07:44

(01/01/2022) Why are states incapable of navigating the ecological crisis? We progress to the third of our six explanatory levels for comprehending any sociopolitical condition—species-typical behavior—in pursuit of answers to this question, describing the process of state formation as the imposition of a dominance hierarchy onto an existing social…

1
Narcissists, Strongmen, and Technocrats pt. 1 1:22:26

2y ago1:22:26

1:22:26

We examine a scientific case for revolution: the claim that modern societies are forms of dominance hierarchy that grant power to people with extremely narrow frames of awareness, who are incapable of grappling with the crises that beset us. Reading from the unnamed Fight Like An Animal book, we examine a tripartite psychology: that of the Narcissi…

1
Glitching Is the New Tweaking (excerpt) 4:14

2y ago4:14

4:14

(12/05/2022) This episode of Fight Like An Animal 2050 tells the story of the initial meetings, in 2025, at which a strategy was conceived for dismantling the I-5 Commerce and Security Zone, appropriating its resources, and thus saving the west coast from annihilation. We learn more about the early exploits of the I-5 saboteurs, the initial publish…

1
Myth, Science, Power 1:40:44

2y ago1:40:44

1:40:44

(11/17/2022) Why is it that apocalyptic cults have been such a common aspect of the human experience, but are largely absent from our apocalyptic present? Does global collapse inherently invoke a mythical frame of awareness, and if so, what is the role of science in helping us navigate collapse? Here, we continue our examination of the relationship…

1
Red Sky, Black Snake: Eight Strategic Theses from Standing Rock 2:03:28

2+ y ago2:03:28

2:03:28

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…

1
#52: Varieties of Scientific Revolution pt. 2 1:39:33

2+ y ago1:39:33

1:39:33

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 o…

1
#51: What We Sang in the Mountains to Greet the Gentle Rain pt. 2 (preview) 3:55

2+ y ago3:55

3:55

(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. We examine the insane technical literature generated by environmental law, the failure of wildfire behav…

1
Varieties of Scientific Revolution pt. 1 1:40:44

2+ y ago1:40:44

1:40:44

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. How did we get here from the exceptionally stupid place we are in now? In this series, we will examine the relationship of science to power--this time,…

1
What Is Politics? Interview with Daniel pt. 2 48:06

2+ y ago48:06

48:06

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. concentrated abundance) of food resources, intergroup threat and its impact on intragroup dynamics, culture as a m…

1
What We Sang in the Mountains to Greet the Gentle Rain pt. 1 (preview) 3:48

2+ y ago3:48

3:48

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 o…

1
What Is Left Authoritarianism? 2:12:13

2+ y ago2:12:13

2:12:13

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…

1
What Is Politics? Interview with Daniel pt. 1 1:14:48

2+ y ago1:14:48

1:14:48

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 def…

1
Return to the Circle 1:37:51

2+ y ago1:37:51

1:37:51

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 danc…

1
Philosophy or Schizophrenia? 2:04:09

2+ y ago2:04:09

2:04:09

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 o…

1
Prison and Other Stories (excerpt) 3:18

2+ y ago3:18

3:18

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, growing up with gangsters, using burglary as a means to redistribute wealth around the neighborhood, getting strung out, getting shot at by the police, st…

1
Life Is Holy War pt. 2: Asymmetries of Aggression 1:32:17

2+ y ago1:32:17

1:32:17

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: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World. We examine how themes of holism and context vs. reduction and utilitarianism in brain hemisphere p…

1
Life Is Holy War pt. 1: Two Stories about a Mountain 43:57

3y ago43:57

43:57

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 the evolution of brain hemispheres with irreconcilable modes of processing to right-left political division. Arnold reads from the book he is writing, F…

1
The Life and Death of Radical Environmentalism 1:59:39

3y ago1:59:39

1:59:39

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 behalf of, all life on earth—existed, but is now largely silent. Neither a history nor an assessment of strategies, this episode is an examination of th…

1
Destroying the World Destroyers 1:29:11

3y ago1:29:11

1:29:11

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 of existence? In this episode, we assess three answers to that question, and the underlying psychologies that produce them. One, the fossil fuel indust…

1
Ethnogenesis pt. 4: Becoming a People in Terra Incognita 3:06:15

3y ago3:06:15

3:06:15

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 critique Graeber and Wengrow's The Dawn of Everything as a frame for our journey, examining the relationship between civilization, domestication, and human…

1
Times I Got Stuck in Albuquerque 42:21

3y ago42:21

42:21

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 describe how acorn woodpeckers provide insights into the relationship between hierarchy and technology, or how population density affects strategies of ev…

1
Ethnogenesis pt. 3: Sacrificial Child Gods and Social Complexity 2:17:31

3y ago2:17:31

2:17:31

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 discuss the relationship between risky human migrations and political perception, ancient cities without states and states without cities, confrontation an…

1
Ethnogenesis pt. 2: Evolutionary Anarchism 1:53:36

3y ago1:53:36

1:53:36

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 political struggle. We examine two types of ethnogenesis in human ancestors and other primates, fissioning events and internal changes in social structure…

1
Ethnogenesis pt. 1: Hill Tribes Are Like Street Kids 56:13

3y ago56:13

56:13

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 episode, we begin to examine the long history of cultures on the margins of civilization as political projects, which are often misconstrued by states…

1
Addiction, Madness, Despair pt. 3: Despair 1:06:57

3+ y ago1:06:57

1:06:57

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 paying attention? In this episode, we examine what it means to come to terms with the crossing of climate tipping points, the dreamlike nature of the w…

1
Addiction, Madness, Despair pt. 2: Madness 1:57:18

3+ y ago1:57:18

1:57:18

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 psychiatric disorders, has been constructed. Relying heavily on Gary Greenberg's The Book of Woe: The DSM and the Unmaking of Psychiatry, we also discuss the…

1
Addiction, Madness, Despair pt. 1: Addiction 1:04:16

3+ y ago1:04:16

1:04:16

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 relationship between addiction, madness, despair and revolutionary social possibility. In this episode we examine the dubious origins of 12-steps programs like Al…

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