K Holes and Primate Violence

Some thoughts on the history of the Earth and how we reached this precipice

I am contemplating launching a new online seminar: What the Fuck Do We Do Now? This would be a four-week program confronting America’s slide into authoritarianism and the weakness of resistance. We’ll cut through illusions, explore why opposition keeps failing, and develop real strategies—building resilience, creating communities of support, and fighting back with narratives, memes, and practical tools to thrive in chaos. Please let me know if this idea appeals to you and if you would want to be part of it. You can respond in the comments or email me - Daniel.pinchbeck@gmail.com . All feedback is greatly appreciated!

In an effort to temporarily escape the spectacle of America’s rapid self-immolation, I recently went to a French chateau for a five-day festival celebrating sex positivity and consciousness exploration, writing about it for Playboy. Now I am back home, in New York City. Once again, I find it impossible to fully confront what is happening, but also impossible to turn away and ignore it, as much as I would love to do it.

I fell into one amazing K hole recently. I don’t know why people have such bad things to say about K holes. I think K holes are great. I intend to seek out more of them. In my K hole, I found all sense of boundaries dissolving. It was like being a fetus in the womb, with no sense of where the physical limit of my body or Psyche ended and the rest of the world began.

In this infantile condition of boundary-less-ness, my conscious mind was still working in some orthogonal way. I started to think about the first repression forced on the small child which brings them into the social world, namely, toilet training. Toilet training marks the beginning of socialization, the transformation of a free-flowing biological process into a consciously regulated act. Freud saw in this stage the beginning of psychopathology: the individual learns to repress, to control, to hold back.

The human becomes a civilized animal by way of inhibition, by learning to submit to authority. Discipline easily leads to psychological distortion. Much of what eventually becomes neurosis, obsession, or anxiety has its roots in toilet training. For the rest of our lives, we seek to manage instinctual desire and primal urge through various forms of repression, manipulation, and control.

The initial repression we undergo in toilet training is then compounded by the repression of our free-flowing sexual curiosity as children and adolescents. As Wilhelm Reich wrote in his now-very-relevant The Mass Psychology of Fascism, “The suppression of natural sexuality in the child, in particular of its genital sexuality, makes the child apprehensive, shy, obedient, fearful of authority… it produces, by inhibiting curiosity and sexual thinking in the child, a general inhibition of thought and of critical faculties… the goal of sexual suppression is that of producing an individual who is adjusted to the authoritarian order.” Reich theorized that repression around bodily impulses (via toilet training and repression of preadolescent sexual expression) leads to the development of muscular and psychological “armor.” This “character armor” rigidifies the psyche, making it more prone to obedience and less capable of spontaneity or critical thought.

While in my warm and happy K hole, I then thought about Trump and Putin, who were meeting in Alaska at that time. I reflected on how these very annoying, psychologically damaged and unattractive psychopaths were able to do such incredible, perhaps fatal, damage to the world and humanity as a whole. This reminded me of Richard Wrangham and Dale Peterson’s Demonic Males: Apes and the Origin of Human Violence. The book showed that men forming coalitions for organized violence and murder is an evolutionary legacy from our chimpanzee heritage. Among chimpanzees, groups of males form raiding parties that cross into neighboring territories to ambush, maim, and kill rivals; this behavior systematically expands territory and access to females.

Wrangham and Peterson argue that humans inherited this same predisposition: Socially bonded male groups tend to use violence against outsiders as a way of consolidating power, controlling resources, and ensuring reproductive advantage. Across cultures and eras, from tribal warfare to modern armies and street gangs, the pattern recurs—men unite with their kin or comrades, define others as enemies, and act with often shocking cruelty. What we see in our world today—the increase in war, militarization, masked ICE raids, and organized male-dominated violence—is not a cultural aberration. It is a deep imprint of our primate past. The civilizational structures we developed through the repression and sublimation of the libido led to the mass, mechanized slaughter we are seeing in our world today.

In my K hole, I then went further back, to the evolution of primates, early mammals, and back to multicellular micro-organisms who developed efficient means of symbiosis and cooperation to build up the large structures that later differentiated and meshed together to become the organs in our bodies. I was struck by the argument made in Spontaneous Evolution by Bruce Lipton and Steven Bhaerman, which proposed that domination and aggression will eventually get out-competed by symbiosis and cooperation — they see this paradigm playing out in nature, again and again, and believe eventually it will be the case with human society. However, in the end that may happen on much longer time-scales than our individual lives allow us to experience.

For instance, a tree is a much longer-lasting and more successful form of life than a human being. We’ve been around for a few hundred thousand years and are already in imminent danger of self-extinction. Trees have been here for fifty million years. They are miracles of symbiosis, providing shelter and support for many forms of life from fungi to insects to worms to squirrels, snakes, birds, and so on. A tree provides massive eco-systemic benefits while humans — in our current developmental stage — function as agents of entropy and biospheric ruin.

I find some aspects of America’s rapid Fascist collapse to be incomprehensible to rational analysis, even as we experience it happening with its familiar narrative logic (reminiscent of 1930s Germany). I have an intuitive sense we are undergoing an evolutionary bifurcation, a threshold event for our species — something unavoidable, with deep roots in the most primitive aspects of our brains and physiology. I would like to consider this neutrally, from a few different angles.