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

by Hanzi Freinacht

I am hereby taking off that silly mask. And so should you, frankly. But how do you throw off the mask? By admitting that you are wearing it—and then using it more deliberately.

All of these movements and ideologies are stuck in the mindset of party politics that evolved from industrial society, with its classes and issues. None

In which direction can and should our society evolve? Is that an unreasonable question? I don’t think it is. I think it’s deeply unsettling that we, as humanity, are not having that conversation.

“metamodern” stage of development. It is aiming to outcompete liberal democracy as a political system, outcompete all of the political parties and their ideologies,

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

So we’re looking for a “deeper” society; a civilization more socially apt, emotionally intelligent and existentially mature.

A society in which everyone is seen and heard (rather than manipulated and subjected to surveillance, which are the degenerate siblings of being seen and heard).

“I develop if you develop. Even if we don’t agree, we come closer to the truth if we create better dialogues and raise the standards for how we treat one another.”

the Nordic ideology because its early sprouts are cropping up in and around Scandinavia. It includes a vision of six new forms of politics, all of which work together to profoundly recreate society.

there is an intimate connection between understanding how humans grow and evolve—intellectually, cognitively and emotionally—and how good or bad society is going to be.

a metamodern society is defined as one which has “solved” the problems of modern society, much like modern society “solved” the problems of pre-industrial, traditional society (dramatically reducing poverty, disease,

Writing this book, I live alone in a house in the French speaking part of the Swiss Alps. I am borrowing it from a wealthy man and his family—I believe he is a billionaire, but I didn’t ask. This man is a self-made ex-banker, physicist and philosophical explorer, who for some time has been a supporter of my ideas.

writing is never a humble thing to do, taking up monologue for hours on end; speaking, speaking with no interruption or reply. And when you speak about society, especially with analytical rigor, you sometimes hurt people.

people put up psychological barriers to protect themselves from the pain of sharp ideas that challenge their convictions and emotional investments.

“freedom” and “development”. In fact, you care about them quite passionately, and you are probably more willing to die for them than any patriot ever was for his nation, any revolutionary for her cause.

Developmental blindness—meaning that you consistently fail to see the developmental stages of human beings, animals and societies. Inner dimensions blindness—meaning that you consistently fail to take into account the subjective dimensions of life and how they fundamentally shape society and reality

philosophy is more than that—it is: How you view the world (ontology, “what is really real” and epistemology, “how to know stuff”); and your place in it (your idea of a “self”), and what is right and wrong (ethics or ideology).

Academia is more suitable for small, incremental advances in ground research and most ground-breaking innovation occurs in other sectors.

You may have to perform the darkest rituals, commit the gravest heresies, in order to invoke forbidden phantoms: Farewell respectability (I never loved you), hello new truths, welcome new perspectives.

none of them can offer you the understanding you get in this book. You cannot get it from the brilliant neo-Marxists, not the impressively data-driven, digitalized complexity economists, not the ecology and sustainability-oriented economists, not the animal rights theorists, not the chaos theory researchers at the Santa Fe Institute, not the postmaterialists (as in the philosophical school) and “new materialists”, posthumanists, transhumanists, postconstructivists, speculative realists, cybersemioticians, enactivists and neurophenomenologists, or even from the other metamodernists who work with cultural theory and art.

Think about it. Did anybody ever “prove”, by means of scientific method, that human rights are good? Did they prove that liberal, representative democracy—with capitalism, courts, prisons, schools and a welfare state—is the best form of governance and economy?

Much more than we realize it, science is a whore dressed up as queen, a jester posing as king.

But if you let your inner inquisition and thought-police control your input at a too early stage, you are bound to miss goldmines and hidden treasures with jewels you couldn’t dream of.

The main obstacles to understanding these ideas are psychological ones: allergic emotional overreactions, prejudices, investments in beliefs, envy, fear, confusion and self-deceit.

I relate to you transpersonally, meaning that I meet you not as one single, rational individual, but as the cross-section of the beautiful and terrifying depths of your inner life and the conflicts and potentials inherent in the social, economic and cultural fabric of the digitalizing world.

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.

Kids who grow up there nowadays often start working seriously only at around 30, after having travelled the world, studied (paid for by government), played computer games and gone to music festivals.

When Mary Wollstonecraft, the English mother of first wave feminism, travelled Sweden in 1796, she wrote in her famous Letters Written in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark about the appallingly low status of women in these societies, how barbaric it all seemed. Until the early 1700s, the Swedes were arguably the most blood-thirsty, warmongering people in Europe.

If you zoom out to a couple of hundred years ago, and look globally, the trend becomes clear. The Swedes and Danes would have been conservative peasants back then, comparable perhaps with today’s Afghans.

So the rapidly globalizing economic world-system has produced some pockets where the values and worldviews of a more global, digitalized civilization seem to have taken stronger hold, and they just happen to be in the Nordic countries.

Societal progression is when lasting conditions of stability and abundance allow for changes in the games of everyday life to occur: in the workplace, in dating, in friends’ groups, at home

The games of everyday life become milder, more sensitive, fair and forgiving as a result.

Easterlin Paradox, named after the economist Richard Easterlin who wrote a book chapter about “economics and happiness” in 1974. The paradox is that wealthy countries seem to stop increasing their level of happiness. Happiness follows economic growth but flattens out in rich countries even if they keep becoming richer.

happiness follows economic growth, but only logarithmically (you have to double income to get one more point of happiness, so if you make the scale logarithmic you can actually plot it as a linear increase).

That explains why you get a flattening curve: First you add two dollars to someone who only make one dollar a day, and happiness goes up a lot. But when you already have a thousand bucks a day, adding two more makes no difference.

On another note, increasing happiness may be “more worth” when you go from 1 to 2 (on a self-reported scale of 1-10) than when you go from 7 to 8—which

increasing economic output gets lower payoff in terms of human happiness, once modern industrial society is established to a certain degree.

Norway-Sweden is again a good example: People are about as happy in the two countries despite large GDP differences.

In a word, people are becoming post-materialist.[14] Extra wealth is simply a less efficient strategy for people to achieve fulfillment and happiness in these societies.

When people have security, good food, a nice place to live, education and okay personal relations, they begin to want more vague and immaterial things for themselves and their families, such as self-development, happiness and meaning.

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.

To be a respectable, democratic, liberal citizen is increasingly synonymous with being a green social-liberal.

Their conservative program must be dressed up in social-liberal robes in order to survive at all: they are against immigration, of course, but the way they legitimize such resistance is by claiming that immigration threatens the welfare state and the liberal values of native Swedes, often revolving around women’s rights, and sometimes even gay rights.

In other words: This is nationalism and social conservatism under the banner of Green Social Liberalism.

In the Nordic countries of today there is no real public discourse about where society is headed, no real tug-of-war pulling in different directions. There are just superficially different varieties of Green Social Liberalism.

There will be no night-watchman state and libertarian utopia where the public sector is all but removed. There will be no ecological-spiritual awakening spontaneously growing from the goodness of your heart.

The voter expects her representative politicians to listen more carefully, to co-develop political solutions by taking on multiple perspectives. Nothing is more common in Denmark or Sweden than the complaint that politicians bicker too much and too artificially about too superficial things.

Such parties are indicative of new progressive strata of the population, representing the groups we can call the triple-H: hipsters, hackers and hippies.

On the Right, especially the green libertarian Right, you are more likely to find the growing yoga bourgeoisie. The yoga bourgeoisie are rich and successful urban dwellers, usually working in the private sector. They have found that money is not the answer to a happy life and therefore begin to cultivate self-awareness, authenticity and intimacy—often in and around yoga parlors, tantra group settings, contact improvisation dance, improvisation theatre, self-help courses and coaches, and to some extent the Burning Man festival and its wider cultural sphere.

The more artsy, creative, well connected, socially intelligent, emotionally developed, idealistic, digitalized, diversified and educated you are—the more likely you are to be a rising star of the new society.