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September 23 - September 30, 2017
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The goldilocks conditions for revolution are to be found at just the right distance from the financial and industrial world centers, in a place where everything functions and runs smoothly: in Scandinavia. In the Nordic countries we are beginning to see clear patterns of metamodern politics at play.
The goldilocks conditions for revolution are to be found at just the right distance from the financial and industrial world centers, in a place where everything functions and runs smoothly: in Scandinavia. In the Nordic countries we are beginning to see clear patterns of metamodern politics at play.
But within the larger central economies, including the newly emerging Asian metropolises, we are still far away from the landscapes of metamodern politics.
there is (at the time of writing) nowhere in the world a movement properly informed by an explicit and clear metamodern ideology. But metamodernism’s fingerprint is unmistakably there.
The Nordic countries are extremely ordered societies, even today under the pressures of globalization and immigration. It is within the framework of this extreme level of order—and the far progression of the dynamics inherent to modern society—that the revolution occurs.[6] Deep changes of the social, economic, political and behavioral structures are happening at an accelerating pace, because this is the only place in the world that runs smoothly enough to allow it.
That’s it.[9]
See footnote.
Inglehart–Welzel cultural map of the world.
We are headed towards a world with more cosmopolitan values; values which according to Inglehardt and Welzel’s own analysis work better in modern society.
The games of everyday life become milder, more sensitive, fair and forgiving as a result.
It should be noted that the development of people’s fulfillment and happiness becomes less tied to material wealth once a certain level of wealth has been achieved, and that this has an important role to play in the new political landscape. There are different ways of seeing this: through happiness research, as the utility of natural resources expended and as the growth of post-materialist values in the population.
Extra wealth is simply a less efficient strategy for people to achieve fulfillment and happiness in these societies.
This offers a plausible explanation for why cultural matters such as gender, identity, leisure and long-term issues such as sustainability, gain a stronger foothold in these countries.
My argument is that, for society to achieve these goals, it must be qualitatively different from how society is constructed today. Our current society is designed to achieve growth of industrial output and redistributing its spoils. Future society must expand upon today’s society’s way of functioning; its institutions must be geared towards achieving more psychological goals. More goals of the soul. One Meta-Ideology Has Already Won
What I mean is that we have passed into a postindustrial and digitalized age where new political rules apply—and where metamodern politics becomes increasingly viable.
An uncompromising acceptance of the market economy. An equally uncompromising acceptance of the welfare state. A gradual adaptation to the pressures of economic globalization, with a focus on economic growth, liberal markets and international competitiveness. An approximate 50-50% mixture of public bureaucracy and private enterprise, usually with a slight tilt towards private (Sweden, for instance, collected 50.4% of GDP in taxes at its peak in 1999, which had gone down to 43.0% by 2015). An uncompromising acceptance of basic liberal values. A rhetorical minimum of ecological awareness.
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The party system we know, with a Left and a Right, is a product of the classes of an industrial society,
The question is no longer which society we want—one vision has won by walk-over, and it allows no alternatives—but rather, who will be most proficient at getting us there.
You can give up on all of that nonsense. Those were whispers of another time. Let them die hard.
The voter expects her representative politicians to listen more carefully, to co-develop political solutions by taking on multiple perspectives.
Political interests are becoming vaguer and more complex—and thereby more closely related to one another in unexpected ways. The ambiguity of life and our positions in society makes it all but impossible to form stable interest-based parties.
Nordic politics is crystallizing around what we may call “the Nordic ideology”—a concept we will explore and deepen in the following book. In this ideology people increasingly value co-development: the ability to, together with others, responsibly explore the new landscapes of risks and possibilities that are opening up. Everybody knows the politicians cannot deliver full-blown libertarianism or socialism. So at least let’s hear them speak honestly, and let them listen to one another, and listen to me, the voter.
They don’t recognize that they are playing the wrong game altogether. The game has shifted.
Progressive movements host people working against the values of the national industrial society, taking on a transnational perspective. They work to transform their countries (or cities or regions) into nodes within a larger community of states (or cities, or regions), where information is free, production of cultural goods is central, and creativity is paramount.
They don’t resist Green Social Liberalism, but try to expand it and build it on a transnational level.
lonely, frustrated rural men and an increasing number of discouraged successful, independent city women who never seem to find a satisfying match.
What, then, unites the triple-H population? One thing is that all three groups share an alternative relationship to work and the market: They are all driven by what psychologists of work call intrinsic motivation and self-realization, rather than extrinsic motivation, such as monetary rewards, consumption and security.
they all rely more upon cultural capital (and to some extent social capital) and less upon economic capital.
the cultural capital can be traded for money or other valuable resources at a favorable rate.
Creative capital seems much more scarce or limited. Only a select few would be able to participate. Those at the forefront would benefit greatly such as the bit coin miners during its first year or two. But much like if we introduce something similar to UVI, this alleviating the financial burden and creating a larger creative class, this creative capital Will begin to take on a different meaning. Something like podcasting which was very original and creative and it's first 5 to 10 years has become a commercialized product in a lot of ways, at least in the popular presentations of podcasts from larger corporations. Those with their economic capital can easily buy out the creative capital.
the wage labor treadmill (and conventional work life) hinder the lives that they want to live, rather than being a source of security and empowerment.
What the triple-H people often don’t understand, however, is that most people do not function like them and do indeed still find meaning and security in the conventional work life—even the ones who don’t like their jobs find structure and context to their lives and earn a much valued paycheck. The demands for basic income are hence often premature and naive, not least because they overlook the developmental psychology of the population (which I present in part two).
“Uncertainty of expectations” has to do with the extreme differences of responses that can be produced by their work. If
The Multidimensional Crisis-Revolution
Another name for the response to post-modernist society.
Today we are experiencing an era in which several extremely far-reaching revolutions of technology, thinking and behavior are occurring simultaneously. For better and/or worse, profound changes are very likely to take place in the coming decades.
Similar to Harari's take on things.
anonymity
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The mathematicians are teaching us that most things in reality emerge through chaos and complexity and that so many of our modes of thought are outdated and dangerous,
reality as emerging through chaos applies to the psychological etc facets
However mysteriously terrifying and sublime our age may be, we must remain sober, clear sighted, responsible.
Just consider that right now, this moment, there are a million people out there, working eagerly on something that the rest of us don’t yet quite understand—knowing, knowing that “this will change everything”. If even one percent of them are not mistaken, we will literally have thousands of discoveries, inventions and insights that, each one by itself, changes society in profound and unexpected ways. Even if some of the things I have mentioned turn out to be exaggerated or based on misconceptions, the totality will certainly be something dramatically new and different as the world-system
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Such an endeavor would simply not have been possible to undertake during the industrial age of mass media and bureaucracy. But the game has changed. New opportunities have surfaced as a result of the informational revolution, as a result of the cultural development of society and—as we shall see—because of the increasingly powerful sociological and psychological technologies at hand, reaped primarily from behavioral science.
This is my core focus for the future of a better society.
Deliberately and carefully cultivate a deeper kind of welfare system that includes the psychological, social and emotional aspects of human beings, so that the average person, over the length of her lifespan, becomes much more secure, authentic and happy (in a deep, meaningful sense of the word).
generativity—i.e. the propensity of society as a cultural, economic and social-psychological system to, on average and over time, generate the conditions for psychological thriving and growth to occur.
What we think of as “normal life” is simply too harsh and cruel on our psyches, too demanding and full of insoluble dilemmas. We thereby, from childhood and onwards, become mutilated versions of our fuller potentials. Because of these many wounds, scars and arrested developments, we fail to become truly kind, intelligent an open-minded.
six new forms of politics
As a society, we haven’t fully admitted to ourselves and one another just how sensitive, how utterly emotionally vulnerable, we really are. The aim here is to make this embarrassing truth publicly obvious, so that we can together reshape society thereafter—until even the most sensitive among us can blossom; indeed, until the truly sensitive become our kings and queens.
The happiness of human beings—again, in a deep, psychological sense of the word—serves the common good.
Psychologically speaking, we want a radical acceptance of pain, so that we can deal with it much more productively and create happier (and less miserable) lives for people and animals. But to truly accept the pain of life and deal with it, we require a lot of comfort, support, security, meaning and happiness. This is also what the “posttraumatic growth” researchers claim, i.e. the folks who look into how people gain positive, life-changing insights in the wake of personal crises.[29]
The Fabric of Hurt and Bliss
Let us clarify the diagnosis of late modern society, the central feature of our predicament: There is a shared, complex fabric of psychological hurt and bliss that determines our common lives and futures. Our wounds and insufficient developments do not stay with ourselves—they transmit to other people, often in unexpected and indirect ways. The suffering and stunted development of our citizens are not individual concerns, but matters of utmost importance to society as a whole. They are deeply political, ecological and economic matters. The stunted development caused by emotional suffering
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The answer is to be found in that we today know so much about the human mind, the brain, and the human being in her totality: her psychophysiology, her behavioral responses and patterns (including economic behaviors), her emotions, her relationships, how to make her happy, how to decrease the likelihood of psychiatric disorders, how to prevent family tragedies, how to support her in the developmental stages of childhood, adolescence and adulthood, how to support (and to some extent increase) her intelligence and creativity, how to help her to heal after hurt and loss, how to support her
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