The Listening Society: A Metamodern Guide to Politics, Book One

by Hanzi Freinacht

The real reality resides at the crossroads of fact and fiction. It is born precisely at the point where our imaginations, the stories we tell ourselves, meet the facts of the world and put them into context.

Political metamodernism is built around one central insight. The king’s road to a good future society is personal development and psychological growth.

It is the solemn duty of the philosopher to piss on all that you hold dear and sacred, to show you that your gods are false.

You absolutely do care about these things and it is intellectually and morally indefensible not to—even if you may have good reasons to prefer other words than “freedom” and “development”.

If my mode of thinking is less wrong than yours, my social theory is valuable.

is a general prejudice we have, based on unreflectively held Platonic ideas and Cartesian divisions of reality, that ideas are somehow pure form, that they don’t need feelings, embodiments, dramatic performances and personalities to be real. But nothing could be farther from the truth. From the poetic crystal clarity of mathematics, to the dense, solemn vengefulness of communism and the fresh, sprinkling hope of environmentalism, all great ideas come with lived moods, visions and rituals.

What we begin to see is a strange paradox. Liberal representative democracy, because it is approaching its own ideals, has slowly begun to render itself obsolete.

What we are seeing is not really a wave of nationalism rising across Europe or a socialist utopia lost to neoliberalism. We are witnessing the rise of the digitalized, globalized, transnational, postindustrial society—and its discontents.

The suffering and stunted development of our citizens are not individual concerns, but matters of utmost importance to society as a whole.

We are failing to evolve humanity to a maturity matching her newly won powers over nature that the information age (or rather: the multidimensional crisis-revolution) brings.

We simply haven’t advanced to that stage of thinking—a stage where you see that the inner development of each person is intrinsically connected to the development of society as a whole.

Both sides are partly right. The world really is a tragic and grim place, and yes, society really has made great progress in important respects. But you need to see both these sides simultaneously to get out of the grid-lock.

The definition of metamodernism in a few crisp sentences.

The marriage of irony and sincerity helps us to take the perspectives of others: the racist, the exaggerated feminist, the conservative. Each ironic position you play with is simultaneously saturated with sincerity, which means that you can honestly be with their feelings and values while still being in opposition to them.

Strangely, it is much easier to defeat someone if you honestly care about them and see the world with their eyes, stand in their shoes.

The metamodernist does not hate or despise nations or nationalism. It’s just that they are treated instrumentally; a nation is only worth anything to the extent that it serves all humans; indeed, all animals.

The inner life of the singular citizen is married to the collective structures of society, and vice versa.

To a priori assume that democratic control through public bureaucracy is more efficient, fair and morally superior to a “free market” solution is simply nonsensical.

Another foundational metamodern principle holds that you must continuously doubt your own ideological position. People are good at reconstructing their past, telling themselves that they always had this or that opinion or worldview. In reality, people are a lot more flexible, adjusting as we go along in order to fit the norms.

Extremely important learning.

There is always something to learn from the other parties, even from your most bitter adversary. And your purposes are often best served by using the interplay of different parties and perspectives, rather than by taking one monolithic path.

Your perspective or opinion always has a systemic limit, a breaking point; it always breaks down under its own weight, just like any engine, organism or economic system.

Another very important learning

Natural hierarchies are different—no exploitation is inherent to the hierarchy; it builds on a universal argument that benefits all parties, and it is limited to the specific area in which that benefit can be argued for.

The necessity of "good" hierarchies

not understanding the hierarchical stages of human development leaves you more judgmental, more prejudiced, more arrogantly narrow-minded, less competent to understand and empathize with others, and less likely to successfully interpret and predict behaviors (and the events in society).

Very important for postmodernists!

Complexity bias means that we intuitively prefer forms of reasoning that correspond to our own stage of complexity.

A related idea is confirmation bias - be very wary of these biases!

Such relativization is in fact an inversion of what 19th century colonial thinkers did when they “stageified” different types (human races) into dominator hierarchies (white above black, etc.). Just as the Europeans invented false and arbitrary stage theories to justify their colonial political stances, so do people today invent false and arbitrary type theories to defend their political stances (ignoring the relevant research results of stage theories)—to defend ideals of equality.

Postmodernists awake!

In the future of democracy cognitive stages may have an important role to play. But the point is not to exclude the voices of all the stage 10 Abstract and stage 11 Formal thinkers—that would be unethical and sure to backfire dramatically. The point is to create processes in which people’s perspectives make up a part of a larger whole, a whole which resides at a higher order of complexity.

Have we, the moderns, lost spirituality? No, we are more spiritual than the people of traditional religions ever were. We are enlightened. The traditions speak of God and divine universals, of heaven and the individual soul. But we find the true universals, the SI base units, the reality beyond our senses—and in its dazzling elegance and unfathomable vastness, our universe is far greater, more awe-inspiring, beautiful and mysterious than yours.

The greatness of modernism.

Dear pomo, you have been monolithic in your embrace of multiplicity, narrow-minded in your attempts at open-mindedness, judgmental in your non-judgment, hierarchical in your anti-hierarchy. In a few words, your problem is not that you have been too critical, postmodern and mulitiplistic—you have not been nearly critical, postmodern and multiplistic enough.

This explains the contradictions of postmodernism well.

you deny the differences of developmental stage, you also fail to recognize something important: that to be in position to critique someone, from their own premises, is to act from a position of superiority—from a position of power.

hold, then, that other things, such as the economic system, science and logic, even the development of our brains and symbolic universes, are only of value insofar as they translate into or otherwise affect subjective experiences.

respect for science does not necessitate that we turn the world into a dead object, the universe into a machine. And, in fact, to see the subjective realm, and to describe its landscapes, however provisionally, is an important tool for understanding politics and the development of society.

For the radical modernists.

We see and recognize different aspects of reality depending on which subjective state we are

What spiritual teachers like Rupert Spira, Eckhart Tolle and Jiddu Krishnamurti will tell you, is that you are “already enlightened”: that there is something you can stumble upon and recognize as self-evident. This is called non-duality; that you stop feeling separated from everything in the world around you

Goodness. This is Vivekananda's Vedanta philosophy...

It is a good thing that such skepticism exists: Otherwise anybody could just claim to be enlightened and receive a following of credulous slaves. But it is also a problem, because it makes us take the development of higher subjective states much less seriously than we ideally should.

The first sentence is for modernists, the second for postmodernists..

it means that I am nothing without you. I am born through you, and I must live, ultimately, in service of you. It is the recognition that, fundamentally, I love you—that love is a fundamental faculty and a realization rather than a specific feeling.

Light depth is the acquaintance with higher states and dark depth is the acquaintance with lower states.

In mainstream society, we generally pretend to have less depth than we really do.

Yes, that's why I feel baffled around most people :)

large host of the problems of today’s world are of this nature; they are developmental imbalances. The world is a terrible mess because the world-system we live in corresponds to a very high effective value meme, while almost all of the world’s population is still left at earlier effective value memes.

Note that your effective value meme is very often “skewed”. For instance, a stage 13 Metasystematic thinker, who has installed the symbol-stage E Modern code, will tend to have higher effective value meme than a stage 10 Abstract thinker who has installed the same code.

Every society has a kind of gravity point, depending on its overall development: an effective value meme towards which the members of that society tend to gravitate.

Explains in a sentence why and how India, the US and Sweden are different (as representatives)

The Metamodern value meme is less judgmental; it seeks to integrate elements from all the former ones; it sees partial truths in all of them; it wants to integrate them in one grand

People of other value memes, like the exploitative boards of major corporations, even folks like the fundamentalist terrorists, are not seen as evil. They are, to put it bluntly, developmentally challenged. Retarded.

Indirectly, the person who thinks this way understands the distinction between people and ideas...

Metamodern ideology: The mission is to help humanity and other creatures develop in a harmonious and sustainable manner. You strive for solidarity with all beings and their perspectives. This means that you don’t judge people because of their opinions.

DON'T JUDGE PEOPLE BECAUSE OF THEIR OPINIONS

By and large, you can spot the Metamodern value meme in people who have successfully internalized all of the postmodern values and thinking, but also add a developmental perspective and begin to value inner growth and authenticity to a much higher degree.

The postmodern mind seeks to include all voices, but only insofar as those voices say things that are acceptable to the postmodernists themselves.

Why postmodernism is, relatively speaking, NONSENSE

The postmodern mind believes in there being such things as “power structures”, “ideology”, “postcolonialism”, “patriarchy” and “discourses”. The metamodern mind sees beyond these explanations; it understands that the postmodern mind is still being essentialist, i.e. that it believes in essences which are inherent to these invisible forces.

Secularism isn’t really about religion vs. non-religion, or spirituality vs. non-spirituality; it is about expanding the ability to question and recreate reality.

when light-modern Trump draws on postfaustian ethnocentric values he is being regressive; when Jesus did a postfaustian critique of Roman oppression, he was being progressive. And when Jefferson was planning the modern US constitution, the gods held their breath as humanity took a great leap forward. Same value memes—very different meanings.

Very important, for postmodernists...also for New Atheists

All according to the metamodern dictum: after deconstruction must follow reconstruction.

Deconstruction = postmodernism, Reconstruction = metamodernism

person can be happy and productive at any value meme. The issue here is that bigger, more complex civilizations with access to more powerful technology require people to be at higher effective value memes in order to be sustainable.

The mainstream modernists can’t really tell the difference between the postmodern and the metamodern. But the metamodernists are still a bit less annoying than those postmodern hipster snobs and creepy yoga hippies (because the metamodernists have solidarity with the modern perspective).

Here, I suddenly knew why I like metamodernism more than postmodernism.