Fight Like An Animal

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.

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.

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. 

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. 

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. 

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. 

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. 

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. 

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.

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.