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

by Hanzi Freinacht

The fact that happiness isn’t everything, doesn’t make it into nothing.

We just need to get some people off their high spiritual and existential horses, so that we can get on with the argument without being stuck at point zero due to tiresomely pretentious attempts at profundity.

It has been shown in large, influential studies that happiness tends to transmit through networks; a happy friend within a mile tends to make you happier—a

There is a great fabric of relations, behaviors and emotions, reverberating with human and animal bliss and suffering, a web of intimate and formal relations, both direct and indirect.

My lacking human development blocks your possible human development.

We are interconnected: You cannot get away from my hurt and wounds.

Metamodern politics aims to make everyone secure at the deepest psychological level, so that we can live authentically;

We desperately need a deeper kind of welfare, beyond the confines of material welfare and medical security—a listening society, where every person is seen and heard (rather than made invisible and then put under surveillance).

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 are speaking about conscious and deliberate social-psychological and cultural development.

I could have changed social reality, thereby changing the lives of these fellow beautiful creatures under God. It was me all along. It always will be. This is the commitment of the metamodern activist.

One must act according to one’s abilities to change the collective, given that one understands the mechanism that causes harm, and that one knows what actions can reasonably be taken. This moral obligation includes political activism.

The more you understand how society’s ills are caused by the psycho-social environment (i.e. the interplay of people’s inner lives and the arenas of everyday life) the more obliged you are to change and develop these realities.

Everybody should have the benefit of talking to a kind, listening professional therapist while growing up (just think of how the number of molestations would drop, how kids would treat each other better, how family life would improve).

Everybody should get a year off once in a lifetime to go look for new purpose in life and make tough life decisions under professional care and support—in a kind of secular monastery.

Everybody should be trained in social and emotional intelligence so that conflicts arise less often and, when they do arise, are handled more productively.

Everybody should have a proper sexual education from early on, knowing things such as how to tackle early ejaculation, tensions in the vagina, sexual rejections, making approaches in a charming but respectful manner, how to handle competition and how to handle pornography or sexual desires that diverge from the norm.

The point is that we need to shift the whole fabric of social reality, making the mental and emotional background noise of anxieties and fears less prevalent and making everyday life in general saner and kindlier.

The listening society saves the welfare system, by being much more efficient and socially sustainable than our current system, thereby being more affordable in the long run.

A country (or other society) must first have reached a point in the development of its political discourse in which a solid majority supports liberal, social and green values, allowing these to be used as a common ground to start from.

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.

We need people who are much more socially and psychologically functional for this new society to run smoothly in all of its crazed beauty.

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.

People need to be able to create their own life stories, their own narratives about the world, to find their own meaning. Life conditions no longer force you to go out and plow the field to feed your family and society no longer offers (and/or forces upon you) a coherent worldview written down by the gods—although

It is a major challenge for people to stay sane in this world full of contradictions, temptations, distractions and stressful yet devilishly vague demands.

We are leaving behind the economy in which you were defined by your profession.

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.

The listening society is, plainly, much more powerful in a digitalized global economy, than is the capitalist liberal democracy.

Would their stories have turned out differently had they not spent their lives with a vague sense that their mother didn’t love them? Or if there would have been steady support offered early on? If they knew how to talk about and deal with emotions? I can’t help but wonder.

But even at the top, there is confusion and existential emptiness: drugs, sexual addictions, materialism, vanity—you know the drill.

Think about it—given that so many people live in such broken worlds, should it surprise us that we cannot handle transnational challenges such as climate change, globalization, poverty and the disruptive effects of technological innovation? Am

My favorite example is meditation in schools. Basically, you can teach kids to meditate in schools and you see not only lower rate of bullying and sick-leaves (among teachers especially), but also better school results, and most of all, better psychological health and the development of more pro-social behaviors.

as reducing class size has proven to be one of the least cost-effective way of improving the quality of education)

When a school in New Haven, Connecticut, required yoga and meditation classes three times a week for its incoming freshman, studies found that after each class, students had significantly reduced levels of cortisol, a stress hormone, in their bodies.

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 (more lush green often does the trick).

He meant that human development and civil liberties could be drivers to lift populations out of poverty.

Looking at social intelligence, you can show that people are at dramatically different levels of skill when it comes to correctly recognizing the feelings of others, that their brains light up more or less when they see happiness or suffering (this part seems to depend a lot on genetics).

One of the central findings of this research program is that a group’s collective ability to solve problems and perform tasks is not strongly correlated to the average and maximum IQ of the members (although there is a small correlation).

Both sides are partly right. The world really is a tragic and grim place, and yes, society really has made great progress in important respects. But you need to see both these sides simultaneously to get out of the grid-lock.

And if you insist on being grateful for all the wealth and progress, you are stopping yourself from reacting against things that are obviously still unjust and terribly wrong with the world—such as climate change, global poverty and animal slavery.

Nobody knows where it’s going, or why. We don’t even know where we would like it to go. There’s no grown-up out there, looking out for us. Nobody’s home. It’s just one big, glorious chaos engine; busy, busy spawning all manner of unimaginable creatures, existences, relations, exquisite beauties and excruciating tragedies.

The party also has political content, of course, a program with things they want to change, but this was subsequently crowd sourced by its members after the party got founded. Most central to the party’s founding and organization is still the how, rather than the what.

This is a sign of transpartisanism—the principle of seeing the interchange of all parties as vital to democracy, and to seek to implement one’s policies by means of affecting the other parties (rather than antagonizing them).

We will acknowledge when we have no answer to a question or when we make mistakes. We will be curious about each and every person with whom we are debating.

the Left and Right no longer represent clearly defined class interests, and people long for a more honest and nuanced discussion.

This balancing of sincerity and irony gives progressive movements (like The Alternative) a great competitive advantage in the media and on the political stage—a sharp edge.

Irony brings trust. And trust crowns a winner.

Issues such as universal freedom of migration, international security, terrorism, internet policing, climate crisis, ecological sustainability, stabilizing international finance and banking, global poverty, basic material security, basic income, labor rights, human and animal rights all share one fundamental trait: they are transnational by nature. They all function through borders and beyond nations.

The first is that we are increasingly facing problems that are not solvable at the national level. The second is that there are a growing number of “societies” that don’t correspond to nation state constructs, such as dynamic economic regions built around major transnational cities—with