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...

Reaching deeper into the human soul (and organism), supporting its inherent capacities for development, is dangerous business. It can easily lead to breaches of the private and personal sphere, to subtle but pervasive forms of oppression. But it is, as we shall see in the next book, a path that we have already travelled along at least since the 17th century; and it is becoming increasingly necessary, given how our technology is evolving.

Such a deeper expansion of social welfare—seeing to that all citizens (or as many as practically possible) grow up genuinely healthy and emotionally well-developed—is both possible and necessary.

This core philosophy of meta-modernism is Tillich's answer to the ailments of society of his time and a response to capitalism and its discontents. The protestant principle is a secular idea. Or trans-secular. It involves the struggle or the valiant attempt to retain this perspective at all times...once the core of its function is forgotten, objective realities are set into their places. Ones great ideas are anothers nightmares...anyone can be a part of this principle (beyond class, any divisions of human-ness). The Protestant principle provides the possibility for understanding the paradoxical character of anticipation as it is found in the proletariat, and, besides this, it has the power to guard against a distortion that threatens all anticipation, i.e., utopianism. The attitude of anticipation develops into utopianism if it is allowed to lose its essential dialectical character and is held as g a precise and literal intellectual anticipation—an anticipation that at some time in the future is to be replaced by a tangible, objective possession. The thinultimately referred to in all genuine anticipation remains transcendent; it transcends any concrete fulfillment of human destiny; it transcends the otherworldly utopias of religious fantasy as well as the this-worldly utopias of secular speculation. And yet this transcendence does not mean that distorted reality should be left unchanged; rather it looks forward to a continuous revolutionary shattering and transforming of the existing situation. Thus proletarian anticipation involves a real change in proletarian existence, a real shattering and overcoming of capitalism. But it does not and cannot involve the bringing-about of a situation that is exempt from the threat that always confronts human existence. Tillich "Protestant Principle and the Prolitariat Situation" in The Protestant Era

relationships. There would be more human

Tillich writes that it is "transcendantly necessary"

What is lacking in our day and age is the ability for people to manage complex problems that require patience, knowledge, oversight, creativity, mutual trust and friendly co-operation across sectors, scientific disciplines, cultures and subcultures. In a phrase: the management of complexity. Or, with a term we shall get back to, we require greater collective intelligence.

So basically, for people to function well as participants in the new economic landscape, the demands for psychological wellbeing and good social networks have become greater. A deeper welfare is necessary, one that increases our average psychological health and wellbeing and thereby our functionality in this bizarre new global society. We need to be stable, flexible, mature versions of ourselves, because we spend our lives playing on an increasingly complex and multi-dimensional arena, where social skills and the quality of our relations make all the difference.

We are leaving behind the economy in which you were defined by your profession. Increasingly, people are defined and acquire their social value through a wider array of identities, including civic, personal, aesthetic and existential ones. This has two major implications.

Firstly, people will need much more emotional support in order to grow into maturity and to be able to play with the many possible and confusing identities—instead of taking them too seriously, or clinging to one job description and be crushed if one is suddenly out of work. As mentioned in the parallel discussion above, this necessitates a deeper form of welfare that supports self-knowledge and a rich life beyond the labor market.

Secondly, many new professional roles need to be invented to match the transformations of labor, as robotization and digitalization progress. “New jobs must be created”, to speak that horrid language of our current leadership. Many of these jobs can and should be concerned with the meaningful activities involved in creating a listening society (a huge amount of work is needed helping kids, designing public spaces, supporting life stage transitions, improving upon diet, organizing citizen deliberation, evaluating and developing all of the above, and so...

The deeper welfare system is necessary because, without it, you will be outcompeted by other, more listening societies, where citizens truly do thrive. Luckily for the future of humanity, this dynamic sets the world-system on a positive feedback cycle towards greater sensitivity and care, rather than a race to the bottom.

Could more of these people be much more psychologically healthy? Could we create and reproduce a society in which the average human life experience is more emotionally satisfying and spiritually productive?

Now imagine if the average person in all of these interconnected stories had been actively supported to deal with the challenges of life. It may not have “saved” everyone from suffering, hurt and degradation. But yes, everyone would have had a better chance to live a dignified life and to treat others better. We would live in

a less broken world.

For instance, giving all kids access to simpler forms of talk-therapy can dramatically reduce depression and suicide rates

Or you can make people run at maximum heart rate for a few minutes, and their wellness and immune system will be boosted for the entire day. Or you can give people more nuts, berries and green vegetables, which reduces long-term risks of depression and facilitates healthy aging. Or you can make people participate in games in which they share and cooperate, which increases their propensity for pro-social behavior. Or you can develop sexual education dramatically, which makes people less prone to sexual violence and more likely to form productive relationships. Or you can use carefully and professionally guided forms of massage and other non-sexual touch to increase oxytocin levels in the brain and make people treat one another better and thus uphold social orders in a more egalitarian manner. Or you can change the surroundings in the inner cities to that they promote meetings between strangers and generally feel less stressful

The point is, we as a society have not yet developed to a stage where these deeper issues—issues that affect all aspects of life and society—are part of our general social, economic and political awareness. In terms of money, such long-term investment, if properly supported by science, can be extremely cost effective. And yes, it can boost the economy, as the average person gains more trust, better social relations and becomes happier. The great economist Amartya Sen coined the term “development as freedom”. He meant that human development and civil liberties could be drivers to lift populations out of poverty. Psychological and social development can—and will—lift us out of spiritual and emotional poverty.

It is best to have a tangible future to strive towards. This is truly seeking realistic, logical solutions based on science and more science, with some societies leading to way. We all want to survive, yet we all need to learn to want all others to survive, even if it means sacrificing money, time and effort to make the changes.

Might we have a goldmine here in terms of long-term effects on welfare? I think we might. Too bad we as a society aren’t looking in the right direction.

Two major factors seem to determine the smarts of the group as a whole: 1) The average social intelligence of the members (again, rather than IQ). This means that groups containing higher percentage of women generally do better, even up to 100% women, as women commonly have a slight advantage over men in this area. This holds true even if people interact online only by text chats. 2) The structure of the group. More evenly distributed talking time, more total communication, less of a clear leader, more democratic decision making, moderate level of diversity among group members when it comes to personality, etc.

Similar to the Quaker process

discuss this subject in greater detail in my other book, Outcompeting Capitalism.

Aren’t these first world problems, far removed from the plights of most of our fellow world citizens?

you need to see both these sides simultaneously to get out of the grid-lock.

it is a matter of understanding that society is both very, very good and simultaneously very, very bad. Reality is rich. It has room for plenty of extremes. It has multitudes of contradictions. We must increasingly learn to live and deal with such paradoxes.

who's playfulness.

The privilege I speak of is high “total capital” (a concept we get back to in Book Two, Nordic Ideology), meaning that we are not necessarily rich in the conventional sense, but that we have enough opportunities and support around us to do pretty much whatever we want with our lives

(so, total capital is a combination of social capital, cultural capital, economic capital, emotional capital, sexual capital and good health). High total capital means that you can live your life relatively unafraid.

the only way to have prevented this from occurring would be if people like Breivik were simply much less likely to emerge in the first place.

Argument for the rational acceptance of the causes of and ability to change the terrorist mindset.

What we can do, however, is to make sure that the average person is happier and healthier, has better relationships, better self-knowledge and more support.

To serve the individual—or the collective—is thus increasingly becoming regressive and harmful. “The individual” and “the collective” are analytically faulty positions. We are not simply balancing individual and collective interests; we are attacking both in the name of the transindividual.

The pattern that emerges is that you go from earlier stages with simpler, more black-and-white and mechanical or linear ways of functioning, towards being more self-critical, more nuanced, diverse, and—a recurring theme—towards more dialectical forms of thinking and acting. Some developmentalists make it their trademark to talk about how fabulous dialectical thinking is, the kind of thinking pioneered by Hegel and extended by Theodor Adorno, where you become less rigid in your thought structure

But remember what David Hume taught us: an “ought” cannot be derived from an “is”. The fact that something happens to be true doesn’t make it right in a moral sense. Likewise,

It does not force specific events upon the world, of course, but it does compel society to develop in some directions rather than others:

This chapter isn’t really about how societies develop such memes—you’ll find a thorough discussion of this in one of my other books (The 6 Hidden Patterns of World History), which discusses the historical development of “meta”-memes, i.e. the overall patterns that set the logic for what memes can be expected to show up at a certain stage of societal development.[105]

For instance, just consider the metameme of secular modern life, which in fact originates in Renaissance art through the Scientific Revolution of the 17th century and the Enlightenment of the 18th century. At the beginning of the 20th century, amidst the full melee of cars and electric lights, most people were still adherents of traditional religions and worldviews. Hundreds of years after the emergence of a metameme that is so strong it mercilessly shreds its way through history, most people still haven’t downloaded its cultural code. Even today, the majority of the world’s population, by quite a margin, still operate primarily with pre-modern cultural code.

So we have stages and codes...this is similar to spiral dynamics. So how does it differ from stages? This states that there is a cognitive stage development and a symbolic development. Don't they go hand in hand? The cognitive is solely individual; the symbolic is cultural (and maybe more). I like the metaphor of zooming in on a certain quadrant then continuing with the quadrants within the specific quadrant.

Only when postmodernism has been around for decades, can metamodern symbols start breaking through and become part of society.

the symbolic development of the individual person.

Each of them is a kind of underlying structure of the symbolic universes that constitute our lived and shared realities. So each one of them roughly have an ontology (theory of reality and what is “really real”), an ideology (“theory of what is right and good”) and an identity, an idea of who or what the self is. Basically, the metamemes have an idea or story about reality in what is sometimes called 3rd, 2nd and 1st person.[106]

there is a kind of connection between the overall development of cognitive stage and of the development of symbolic toolkits available in language—the development of society.

The vast majority of prominent scientists in the world today, while often cognitively being at MHC stages 13, 14 and even 15, still primarily rely on the modern symbolic toolkit.

Remember, remember: The code is its own developmental dimension, not to be confused with the cognitive hardware. And it is developed collectively through the ongoing use of language throughout history, then “downloaded” by the single human organism, who then uses her MHC stage (and, as we shall see, the two other dimensions of development) to interpret the code, either simplifying it, or using it in accordance to its logic—or, in rare cases, developing it further.

cognitive development should be highlighted. We have already noted that there is a non-obvious, dynamic relation between MHC stage and symbol-stage; they can support or thwart one another, etc. It should still be noted, however, that higher MHC stage makes the “installment” and “downloading” of a higher symbol-stage of code more likely—given

The answer is no. None of this implies either teleology (that nature or God or whatever “wants” certain things to happen) or determinism (that it is already determined exactly what will happen).

All I am saying is that there is a pattern or logic inherent to this kind of development, and that this pattern can be described.

It’s not that nature or God “wants” height, weight or an increased number of people, it’s simply a description of important aspects of these forms of growth.

we have not said anything about what effects or meanings these patterns may have. Depending on other issues, such as technological development, ecological crises, etc., the developmental sequences can play out in any number of ways and come to have any number of meanings in history.

Even today, a large proportion of all adults, globally speaking, still subscribe to one religious faith or another—or at least to monolithic and mono-perspectival traditions of one country or culture. While certainly not in majority within e.g. the Nordic countries, this type of code is still the most installed and downloaded one in human organisms. While most of our institutions are perhaps informed by modern thinking, humanity, demographically speaking, still mainly runs on the symbol-stage D Postfaustian code.

Physics becomes chemistry becomes biochemistry becomes biology becomes psychology becomes sociology. With each step you lose some elegance and precision—but this is only because of the imperfection of our knowledge.

Still though, I’m not going to judge you. If you really need that lullaby, go ahead; who am I to pass judgment? Because after all, it’s up to the individual.

You see, the problem isn’t that you are too modern, too scientific or too objective. The problem is that you are not nearly modern, scientific or secular enough. It is because your ideas of science, objectivity and reality are too limited, because they have too much lingering stuff of religions left in every nook and cranny, that you keep creating a world of narrow-mindedness and self-deceit. Your “enlightened liberation” and “progress” become vulnerable to any number of hidden, arbitrary, unfair and particularistic power structures. While you say that you are fair and impartial, you in fact end up serving power and oppressing the weak.

Exit Newton. Enter Foucault. Michel Foucault, the leading French philosopher of the 1960s and 70s, is perhaps the most emblematic of the innovators of the postmodern cultural code.[111] The philosophically most stringent one is probably Jacques Derrida. Actually, let’s quote Derrida himself: “Instead of singing the advent of the ideal of liberal democracy and of the capitalist market in the euphoria of the end of history, instead of celebrating the ‘end of ideologies’ and the end of the great emancipatory discourses, let us never neglect this obvious macroscopic fact, made up of innumerable singular sites of suffering: no degree of progress allows one to ignore that never before, in absolute figures, have so many men, women and children been subjugated, starved or exterminated on the earth.”[112]