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

by Hanzi Freinacht

Basically, there are a growing lot of issues and people and cities that just don’t fit into the nation state.

The cultures evolve; the forms of governance, languages and economies continuously transmute.

The metamodern aristocracy doesn’t work according to a linear plan about what will come (like those damned communists). They just share some common conceptual maps, personal traits, perspectives and political sentiments. This makes them difficult to spot with the naked eye.

Jan Söderqvist suggest that the information age is creating a new class of “netocrats”, people who govern and control value creation on the internet and related media, where attention, rather than money, is the primary value.

there are three forms of netocrats that ally with one another: the new kind of social entrepreneurs, the web-savvy philosophers who understand the deeply dynamic and transient nature of things (called “eternalists”), and the networkers who actively and deliberately make themselves into central, connecting nodes within this new multidimensional web of people, perspectives and opportunities.

The metamodern aristocracy are people who have a combination of two things: great privilege and high personal development.

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).

If you are also part of a vast, diverse transnational network and you have more ideas for changing the world than you can possibly act upon, and your everyday life revolves around making some of these things happen—you’re it.

society cannot be viewed solely as “collective structures” or “networks”, either, because that would make us blind to the deeply lived and felt perspectives and experiences of singular human beings—and to the fact that the collective structures are largely defined and determined by such deep, psychological processes within each one of us.

dividuals, i.e. that we all are in fact part of one another and affect one another. We consist of many different influences, roles and perspectives, within a multitude of contexts.

there is anger or love in our hearts, if there is peace in our minds, and if all manner of psychological issues have been properly dealt with. Such things determine if we turn out engaged world citizens, mindless consumers or bitter reactionaries.

this deeply human and personal experience is in turn created by societal processes that are largely invisible to each single person, and accessible only through a profound and systematic sociological and psychological analysis of society.

from the idea of the individual (vs. “the collective”), to simply seeing society as an evolving, interlinked set of transindividuals.

Each human being is viewed as an open and social process, a whirlwind of participation and co-creation of society. Society as a whole is viewed as a self-organizing system which creates such transindividuals who are in turn able to recreate society.

Because the terrible truth is that Breivik is you and me. He is a direct result of the society we create and uphold every day. He is not an alien force. He is that kid from school who came back and killed our kids. It’s all interconnected. We are all interconnected.

The answer to the horror show that Breivik unleashed is to be found deep within ourselves.

We are more than individuals; we are much larger beings. This is why, in a transpersonal perspective, I can say in all sincerity: Death to the individual. Long live the dividual—or the transindividual.

Now if you program the rings and crosses to only have a slight preference for moving closer to their own kind, patterns will soon emerge and stabilize: patterns of dramatic segregation. And not only that—in some cases a somewhat lower level of preference your own kind can cause a more segregated chessboard.

They’re just a little racist. The dramatic segregation is an emergent property of the system as a whole.

it becomes apparent that you can’t really blame the individual behaviors of the many people who interact, and you can’t really identify an evil “power structure” out there, which you can just get rid of and things will be fine.

the rules of the game generated racism and discrimination (rather than the racism of the police officers themselves).

that racism is an emergent pattern; a phenomenon that emerges not through the actions of individual people, but as a result of the interactions of many different people.

Now ask yourself—and be honest—do you yourself have a slight tendency to spontaneously like good-looking people better? If your honest answer is yes—and it is—this means that you have just explained a large part of our super-sexist woman-objectifying urban landscapes.

This small, relatively innocent urge within yourself is what grows through complex interactions and creates a terribly sexist society that nobody wants and many of us are suffering from.

In the future, people will look at these beliefs, being Left or Right, much as we today look at medieval beliefs such as being Christian or Muslim.

One needs to recognize that these are not inherent essences or givens. They can all be good or bad, depending on the context—and more pertinently, they are all good and bad.

One: markets, politics and personal relations are not clearly differentiated; two: in modern society these three spheres gain a great measure of independence from one another; three: in metamodern society, these three spheres are being re-integrated, ideally without any one of them dominating or contaminating the other two.

The growing re-integration of these three different spheres of social life—the civic (politics, democracy, bureaucracy, public), the professional (market exchange) and the personal (the civil sphere, family life, communities)—requires of us a kind of political thought that does not take one of the dimensions as fundamental or inherently superior to the other two.

Instead of having “three dimensions”, you can have fractions of dimensions (one-and-a-half dimensions, and so forth); that’s where the word “fractal” comes from.

No matter how profoundly symbiotic and loving a relationship, there is an element of struggle.

At its heart, metamodern political thought fully accepts and acknowledges these three dimensions of social life: solidarity, trade and competition (and their intertwined, fractal nature).

So instead, we begin to look for how solidarity, trade and conflict can develop together, into new forms of social life—and indeed, how they have developed throughout history.

Other people, hopefully often (but certainly not always) the ones better informed than myself, have rewritten me and recoded me in a thousand ways—most of which happened outside of my conscious awareness, but not necessarily outside of theirs. And, most likely, the same goes for you.

Is it not obvious that, whatever you think and believe today, it cannot be fully correct or acceptable from some future vantage point, where better knowledge is on the table?

Indeed, the very fact that we manage to take ourselves this seriously, when we are almost certain to be utterly blind, confused and downright mistaken about so many, so fundamental issues, can only be described as a form of madness.

the non-linear process. The simplest definition of a non-linear system is that the output (outcome) is disproportional to the input (the effort made). More

both the mind and society are ecosystems. They self-regulate, self-reproduce, keep up a certain “homeostasis” for periods of time, and then they either develop or crash through crisis.

the ecosystem as a whole develops as a result of many autonomous parts that both compete and cooperate in complex (indeed, as I have said, fractal) ways.

So our goals and efforts evolve; they always turn out to be something different than we initially think.

Without noticing it, we continuously and repeatedly squeeze non-linear phenomena into linear models that our minds are more comfortable with—a kind of analytical violence stemming from the crudeness and developmental simplicity of our minds.

The cardinal of all such linear models in politics the belief that “if only people were like me, had my opinions, the world would be alright”.

What then, can we trust? We can—or, at least, we have to—trust the processes that come out of our communication with one another, given that such processes are fair, open, without excessive emotional pressures and are conducted in a shared language.

So in metamodern, non-linear politics we don’t work according to a certain plan going from A to B, but we see the larger, deeper structures of an evolving global society and we play the game of life in accordance with the long-term trends of that picture, in order to increase the likelihood of certain desirable events to occur.

What we hailed as liberal democracy was never based on deliberation about the common good, but rather on the dialectic between conflicting interests, checked in a dynamic power balance.

Before that, we never had democracy in any deeper, qualitative sense anyway. The whole system was built around the fact that our interests were at odds. You couldn’t actually unite “the people” or “let the people rule”.

Democracy and freedom, as we have known them thus far, are born from the very fact that we are and remain largely divided into the classes of industrial society, nationally and globally.

The divisions, not the unity, that made possible the party system we know as “liberal democracy”, are breaking down.

When you take up that thread, when you begin to deliberate about the evolution of society as a whole, you must admit that your own position on an ideological scale must always be partial, inherently harmful and limited in some respects.

There is something endearing, almost cute, about being so blinded by the current forms of liberal democracy, that you think that you can take one position within it, and it just so happens to be the right one.

Modern people are “religious” in a corresponding way; they believe that the people born and raised in their position in society have the “correct” beliefs and values;