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. We examine the depth and complexity of non-linguistic communication, the hyper-legalistic and ostensibly rational dialogues about religion of the Middle Ages, the fundamental symmetry between processes of traumatic integration at the individual level and revolution at the collective level, frameworks for confronting fear in various cultures, and the psychology of abuse in creating acquiescence to the power structure.     

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 World and James C. Scott's Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed, examining the brain science of authoritarian high modernism, the ideology Scott describes as uniting Lenin with Le Corbusier. From the clearcut to the resettlement camp to the factory farm, from the sterile visions of the urban planner to the disembodied eye which frequently appears in the drawings of psychotics, let us examine the nightmare world we inhabit: the world of the left brain hemisphere trapped in itself...

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, starting a performance troop in San Quentin, and having a public ethical dialogue about suicide in the prison library with someone sentenced to life without parole. Father and son commiserate and laugh about their first arrests, both at age eight, what it's like to go through withdrawals in jail, the posturing of gangsters, and the fundamental similarity of the many forms of lockup this society has to offer. To unleash the dizzying entirety of this episode, check out https://www.patreon.com/biologicalsingularity 

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 processing styles relates to political perception, and examine descriptions from all three literature domains of empathy, bonding, gesture, expressivity, behavioral flexibility, fear, anger, and aggression. Then, we examine the bizarrely persistent cross-cultural record of what is perhaps best described as aggression towards the left half of the body by the right, reflected in everything from synonyms for the terms left-right to body modifications that impair or injure the left side. Finally, we examine the subordination of cultures with a broader purview by cultures concerned primarily with domination. In each case—left-right political difference, brain hemisphere processing dynamics, and culture change—we see how a particularly useful understanding is in terms of asymmetries of aggression.  

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, Fight Like An Animal: In Search of a Science of Survival, telling two stories of a mountain, which reflect the right and left hemispheres' respective modes, but which are also strongly suggestive of egalitarian and authoritarian world views. We explore the surprising notion that the very terminology of right and left to describe political orientations might be an instance of the brain hemispheres conceptualizing themselves, and thus set ourselves up to explore the bizarrely rich history of people and whole cultures seeming to intuit the divided nature of their beings. Finally, we examine a few examples of how a feedback loop between biology and technology can cause left hemisphere processing to become ascendant, with catastrophic consequences.   

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 the perceptual framework that animated this movement. Starting with the observation that despite objectively worsening conditions, ecological sabotage used to be much more common, we examine the relationship between worldviews and tactics; the useless (and equally pervasive) construct of nature vs. humanity; the embodied experience of unity with all life; the baffling complexity of fighting for a survivable climate rather than a specific place; and the notion of the right and left brain hemispheres engaging in a long-term evolutionary war, in which the emergence of Earth First! could be described as one battle.   

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 industry's, or in any case their proxies in the field of security studies. Two, the mainstream climate movement's, albeit a unique faction of it, represented by the Andreas Malm book How to Blow Up a Pipeline. Finally, the radical environmental movement's, as represented by a literature review I wrote in 2016. In the end, we'll see how worldview and tactics/strategy are deeply related, and how the climate justice narrative doesn't motivate the same confrontational behavior as the radical environmental narrative. 

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 evolution; the cross-species relationship between social form and costly infrastructure; the trend toward technological mass society in early human evolution; the post-materialist shift in the upper Paleolithic; and the conditions necessary for escape cultures. We search for inferences about contemporary revolutionary efforts, examining how strategies of evasion involve social disaggregation and strategies of confrontation involve social cohesion, and emerge from the complexity with an overarching thesis: the strategic advantage of egalitarianism is in its greater capacity for social comprehension. 

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 evasion, or anything else he thought his next episode was going to be about.  

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 and evasion as two strategies against hierarchy, the monumental architecture of hunter-gatherers, the relationship between abundance and hierarchy from a cross-species perspective, the psychological tendencies evident in certain varieties of social science narratives, the notion of cultural behavioral patterning reflecting the personalities of the people who create new cultures, and the dreamlike beauty of the stone age graves of physically abnormal children. Along the way, we are looking to decouple variables like hierarchy and social complexity, sedentism and agriculture, and egalitarianism and cooperation, charting a course to ask more concretely and precisely about the relationship between technology and hierarchy.