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

by Hanzi Freinacht

And this knowledge is growing by volumes every day. There is increasing evidence that many different factors work together to help a human being flourish or to let her fall apart. In medicine this insight is called the “biopsycho-ecological paradigm”.[32] In psychology it is similarly called the “bio-psycho-social model”. In politics and welfare policy we can call it the listening society, which is the deeper form of welfare that metamodern activists strive to achieve. Political metamodernism is the rebellious act of taking this vast knowledge into our hands—and to boldly shape it into usable politics; into wonderful but dangerous “social technologies” that can be used to fundamentally improve the lives of a majority of the citizens. This is to be achieved within the time frame of a few generations. We are not talking about a dramatic revolution from one day to another, or an attempt to “set things straight once and for all”, or the sudden “waking up” of everyone. Nor are we talking about a utopia in any naive sense. We are talking about painstaking, slow reforms that nevertheless can be expected to have substantial effects on the quality of life of our fellow citizens—over longer periods, and on average. We take the most useful of the scientific knowledge into our hands, and begin the long path of using a multiplicity of slow, open, transparent democratic processes, with the goal of reshaping all parts of society: schools, the workplace, higher education, the market, heal...