The Incompetent Authoritarianism of Vladimir Lenin

05/11/23 • 85 min

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 in some sense planned the Russian Revolution or deposed the Czar; ask why Ukrainian peasants succeeded in briefly defending an agrarian anarchist society while Russian peasants did not; and discuss the importance of having any idea what is happening around you if you want to run a country. But first! Arnold frames this discussion by reading from a draft of his book about the psychology of charismatic authoritarians, a psychology that unites everyone from Lenin to Trump, Hitler to the leader of the New Age cult he grew up in. Be sure to check out the highly complementary video on Daniel's channel on Why the Russian Revolution Failed.

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

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 hair, superhumanly strong, lacked speech, slept naked outside all winter, could crush bones with her teeth, swam in rivers during their full spring flood, and could outrun a horse. She was described by the many locals who were familiar with her as an Almasty, or Sasquatch. Building on early biological descriptions of two species of human and the contemporary evidence on feral children, we postulate that our own developmentally delayed, self-domesticated form of humanity has—as is the case among other species for whom developmental change has been central to their evolution—a developmentally accelerated, wild form, induced by a lack of care in early development, and that reproducing populations of such individuals are what we know as Sasquatch.

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Metamorphosis pt. 1: The Age of Mutual Incomprehension

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 characterizes our journey to extinction. Each social system, we find, elicits only a subset of the range of evolved human potentials, and the one we inhabit fracture us, so that we express only a tiny portion of our abilities. We apply these themes of freeze and fracture across a wide range of situations pertinent to our converging crises: the epistemic fracture that makes communication impossible; the compartmentalization of painful realities at the heart of both individual trauma responses and societal dismissal of ecological crisis; the social role specialization that gives power to certain kinds of people; the narrow awareness and fixed beliefs characteristic of those who are running our lives; and the agonizingly narrow confines of the hall of mirrors from which we must escape if we are to see the world as it is.