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

by Hanzi Freinacht

So this group is growing in importance because it offers us the software solutions that can only come from great creativity combined with cultural capital and digital know-how.

The hipsters are becoming more powerful because it is becoming increasingly difficult for most of us to grasp and navigate the society of the present age—and they offer us the tools for doing so.

The hippies are the people who produce new lifestyles, habits and practices that make life in postindustrial society happier, healthier and, perhaps, more enchanted.

So the hippies are becoming a force to recon with because they provide social and personal technologies for maintaining health, happiness, community and a sense of enchantment to an increasingly strange and alienating world.

But the activism always reinserts itself into the mainstream; it always comes back with a will to engage with others—not least via social media. The sorts of hippies we are talking about here are generally highly educated and rely upon knowledge of medicine, physiology and psychology.

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.

Because of the idiosyncratic nature of their many endeavors, the triple-H folks find it hard to “fit in” within the classical, hierarchical and meritocratic organizations.

Rich hipsters? How does that work? Because cultural capital is becoming more powerful than economic (as a means of organizing and coordinating people’s actions and behaviors), the cultural capital can be traded for money or other valuable resources at a favorable rate.

Which brings us to the third thing that unites the triple-H: their common vested interest as a postindustrial class. In this sense, these people are the real “creative class”.

For these people, 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.

the triple-H population generally support ideas of basic income: This would insulate them against falling into precarious situations and emancipate them in the face of demeaning bureaucratic control.

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.

it has been known that expectations minus realities is how you calculate a major factor of ill mental health and human misery

“anti-hipster movement”, placing bitter stickers downtown public spaces, attacking the hipsters. People feel a vague sense of confusion, inferiority and disgust at these new segments of the population, who displace large parts of the existing people: their

Of course, large parts of the world preferred Clinton to Trump, but the Nordic countries certainly shout with the best of them.

Given the dramatic changes of the last twenty years, and that these have been accelerating and becoming all the more radical, we are looking at an entirely new form of society. The amount of information is growing at what appears to be an exponential rate—and yes, here “exponential” is the correct term. The same goes for the total of computational power available, with the possibility of quantum computing becoming increasingly tangible.

The growing ability to manipulate structures at the atomic level—and the tremendous drive in scientists to successfully do so—can create all manner of useful substances with incredible properties from virtually no raw material.

We have an ongoing genetics revolution, nearing the possibility to manipulate and shape the human genetic code—which just took a giant leap with the CRISPR technology (Clustered Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats)—allowing

China, India and Brazil blazing into world prominence, their vast populations rising above poverty (whereas the middle classes of Western societies are shrinking and new poverty growing),

a myriad of small institutes, organizations and even festivals such as New Economics Foundation, Alter Ego, Edgeryders, the RSA (Royal Society for the encouragement of Arts, Manufacturers and Commerce), the Ekskäret Foundation, Tellberg Foundation, World Academy, and so forth. Such platforms gather progressive global elites (in a wider sense of the term), tech savvies, researchers and activists, to overview and discuss the dramatic ongoing changes.

The physicists are giving us an entirely new view of reality, called string theory, where potentiality is real and multiple universes may be possible.

So-called posthumanist thinkers are radically challenging humanity’s biased view of herself in relation to the other animals and the rest of reality, taking us beyond the anthropocentric (human-biased) perspectives we have hitherto lived by.

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, since we are oblivious of the non-linear patterns and relationships that matter the most.

Even if wildlife fauna isn’t necessarily happier than domesticated animal life, the exploitative behavior towards non-human animals must be seen not only as unsustainable but also, and primarily, as ethically inexcusable.

The scientists tell us that we have entered a new geological epoch, the anthropocene, in which humanity shapes the environment more than volcano eruptions and erosion.

How many beautiful, privileged people have I not heard whisper to me, late at night, that if it were up to them, they would never have been born; that they are angry with the world; that they were let down; that they live with guilt and self-doubt; that their friends and families are hypocrites? These are signs of the alienation suffered by modern human beings.

We live in a time of “peer-to-peer digitalized nano-bio-tech employed by means of virtual 3D to solve energy problems to address climate change”—and so forth. All of this is happening simultaneously, day by day, in one great web of interacting, evolving nodes.

When a multiplicity of things explode all at once, in a multidimensional crisis-revolution, our linear models of the world rarely work out—they cannot take on so many different variables (and variables with qualitatively different properties) and their mutual interactions.

We are talking about 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.

People sometimes make the distinction between hedonic happiness (pleasure, enjoyment, fun) and eudemonic happiness (meaning, purpose in life, and peace of mind). Both of these can be supported for the long-term development of each person as well as society as a whole. Supporting happiness means relieving suffering, which

It’s not that pre-modern societies are any better, but today we have more options available, which lends us greater moral responsibility.

Isn’t it unethical, or at least distasteful, to want to build a more kind, listening and inclusive society in the developed economies, when we should in fact be focusing on redistribution of wealth and more acute suffering? There are three answers to this.

The first answer is that we can and should do both, so that the poor do become richer, but once they have become so, life can actually be happy—which was the point all along.

The third and by far strongest argument is that the world-system is evolving a whole; each part affects every other part.

So one of the best things that we can do for the good of the world is to make sure that the richest and most privileged people have enough psychological security not to worry about how fancy their cars are or if they look a little fat, so that they can instead expend time, attention, energy and resources as genuinely concerned world citizens—which would benefit everyone immensely.

People are hurt and afraid at a subtle psychological level—and are therefore self-absorbed, incapable of taking on larger perspectives and incapable of acting upon the very real long-term risks that are threatening our global civilization.

When I talk about this vision of a deeper welfare, people will often bring up the argument: “Oh, but if you make people genuinely happy, society would stop functioning, because we need people to be anxious consumers (so they keep spendin’ it!) and act out of fear of losing their jobs (so they keep workin’ it!) for things to run smoothly.”

Immanuel Kant set up for us, to treat every human being as an end in and of herself—never as a means for somebody or something else.

The Nordic countries have happy populations relative to others—and this appears to work in tandem with a highly functional and ordered society (producing plenty of poetry and crime novels too, for what it’s worth).

The happiness of human beings—again, in a deep, psychological sense of the word—serves the common good. Deep suffering can have positive effects (there is an increasingly promising clinical literature on “posttraumatic growth”), but most of the time it causes lasting traumas and costs the hell out of society in terms of social work, criminality, unrest, poor health—the list goes on.

And psychological mutilation causes suffocated souls that never get to blossom and share their unique gifts and longings with the world.

That life is too easy and hurts too little is just very rarely the problem. Don’t worry. Life is going to hurt, alright, even if we dramatically improve upon its quality.

What we are looking for is not an army of spoiled fools, incapable of taking responsibility or enduring pain. We are not looking for a non-acceptance of the suffering of life (which only brings more misery), but for a profound acceptance of life as it is.

But to truly accept the pain of life and deal with it, we require a lot of comfort, support, security, meaning and happiness.

The point is that “normal life” causes immense harm to so many people; it just happens on a subtle and non-obvious level.

The critics conflate all talk of human happiness with cheap commercial self-help books and unbridled individualism: one big, hot summer party on Ibiza.

They think that striving for happiness implies what I later in this book call “the denial of tragedy”. Sometimes they also mistake sincere commitment to the happiness of others for the worship of the happy/successful person and a corresponding disdain for the unhappy/unsuccessful person—which

Secondly, and more importantly, people are rather consistent in their ideas about what makes them unhappy (social degradation, harm to the body, etc.), which again underscores that we can prevent misery in order to create happiness and vice versa.

The fact that happiness isn’t everything, that it isn’t the only worthy personal and societal goal, doesn’t mean that it’s nothing and no worthy goal.