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

by Hanzi Freinacht

Your perspective or opinion always has a systemic limit, a breaking point; it always breaks down under its own weight, just like any engine, organism or economic system.

There is no “default position” to which you can revert, no way of “just being normal”. Ours is a meat-eating, animal-exploiting, cruel, capitalist, alienating, unfair, oppressive, unscientific, undemocratic, unsustainable society. If you partake in it, you are complicit in its crimes, mistakes and vices.

Natural hierarchies are different—no exploitation is inherent to the hierarchy; it builds on a universal argument that benefits all parties, and it is limited to the specific area in which that benefit can be argued for.

The fourth principle is that the hierarchy does not transmit to other, irrelevant areas or power relations. They should not give “halo effects”. For instance, that you are at a higher cognitive stage than me, doesn’t mean you should get lower taxes or sleep with my wife.

You are thereby in effect creating a hierarchy yourself: The people who have your opinion are placed “above” the people who don’t—it’s better to be against hierarchy than to be for it, right? The very preference creates a two-step hierarchy, in a sense.

You are obliged to describe all the relevant stages, how they relate to one another, and you must always admit that there can be higher stages than your own, stages that you don’t yet understand. Rather counter-intuitively, hierarchy, understood correctly, serves openness and humility towards the perspectives of others.

And when you reveal enduring, deep-seated developmental structures that describe vast, qualitative differences between real people, it tends to make some feel elated and others degraded—most of us are, after all, not at the highest stages of human development.

What does it feel like to recognize that someone I know genuinely understands deeper aspects of reality than I do? Or that I am less morally developed than another person, a person who adheres to values and ideals that are lost on me? That my mind is more or less permanently incapable of doing what you do routinely? It hurts, quite simply.

So—to deal with these issues, we have to be very emotionally sensitive to everyone involved. The sensitivity of this topic is probably, by the way, the main reason that this field of research hasn’t gone farther: Nobody wants to be an insensitive prick.

And in order to understand the stages of human development you must admit that they are, at least in some ways, hierarchically ordered. Thus, dealing with hierarchy is not a “necessary evil”; no, it is simply an evil to refuse.

Hierarchy, correctly understood, serves the greater good. Again, this only holds true, of course, if we follow the eight principles outlined above.

Most people, the vast majority, stall in their (hierarchical stage) development relatively early during adult life. Most of us never experience any profound shifts of worldview or perspective after adolescence, let alone increases in the overall complexity of our thinking and behavior.

such phases should not, under any circumstances, be confused with the developmental stages we are speaking of here.

Developmental stage explains a lot of why a person acts like she does: her reasoning, morality, aesthetics, leadership style, close relationships, values, income (even more than class background), and much else. Whereas the psychiatric diagnoses are only good at understanding behaviors in a smaller part of the population (those who have the diagnoses), the stage theories help us understand “normal” behavior in society at large.

So what is “a stage” anyway? It is an equilibrium at a certain degree of complexity, a form of self-supporting balance within your mind, brain, organism

You go from simple black-and-white thinking, to complex and nuanced thinking, and from there to finding new simplicities in the form of underlying, universal, guiding principles: towards what you might call a “second simplicity”.

Clare Graves’ model, developed and popularized by Don Beck and Chris Cowan as Spiral Dynamics, in which people are thought to belong to “vMemes” (value memes) that are named with color codes,

They smash together different forms of development into one and the same model, and force these (interrelated but still distinct and often independently developed) dimensions into the same stages. This is because they fail to distinguish between the dimensions of development with sufficient clarity.

So you have people whose brains are very quick and efficient—but without necessarily climbing to the more abstract forms of thought and behavior of higher vertical complexity.

There is a hierarchy between sentences and single words—and the sentences are more powerful.

The super-intelligent folks of world history are the ones who happen to have both exceptionally high IQ and MHC stage

This means that, as stage 10 Abstract thinkers, we will very often respond to the world around us in simplified manners: in black-and-white, either-or ways.

As stage 10 Abstract thinkers, we cannot see the general rules that govern when our abstractions should apply,

This means that we will tend to focus on one single variable and want to either increase or decrease its quantitative value: less immigration, lower taxes, more love, more dialogue, less greed etc.

Thinkers of each stage have this kind of complexity bias. Complexity bias means that we intuitively prefer forms of reasoning that correspond to our own stage of complexity.

Outliers, which points out the great significance that unusual, exceptionally talented people called “outliers” have in society’s development—although he quickly and famously points out that such people always have good circumstances, that they put in 10 000 hours of practice, and always rely upon some help of their friends.

solved or have different possible solutions). But most people can pass these tests? Yes, of course: under the circumstances where someone is walking us through the steps. But does our brain spontaneously and repeatedly create thoughts that relate to such systems? In about

So one way to spot them is simply to ask them questions about their opinions: If there are few rules of thumb and clear conclusions, but much weighing of different factors, it may be stage 12 Systematic.

The point is that the stage 13 Metasystematic thinker is capable of comparing the general properties of systems, naming these properties and reasoning about when they generalize or not.

How much can you adjust the different variables so as to increase their alignment? We are now introducing an invented meta-systematic term: alignability.

There is a long stretch between the stage 10 Abstract concept of “blefuscity” and the Stage 13 Metasystematic concept of “alignability”.

We have also made conceptual leaps: from discussing relatively concrete and small matters, to grasping a wider world.

Downward assimilation means that, because of our ability to share a common language, you can take a word, symbol, sentence or even an attitude, that originated at a higher order of complexity, and still use

In societies like Sweden, it is popular, especially among the younger citizens, to speak about things like “norms”, “structures” and “identity”. However, only a minority tend to be able to actually understand these concepts at stage 12 Systematic or above.

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, the opposite is true: an “is” cannot be derived from and “ought”. That something factual doesn’t rhyme with a moral intuition we have, doesn’t make it fictional.

Higher cognitive stage folks aren’t necessarily “right” about things.

And again, stage doesn’t mean skill—you still have to learn things from others even if you have higher cognitive stage.

In a good democracy the more complex answers to life’s problems can emerge, answers that are more inclusive to a multiplicity of interests and perspectives. In a poor democracy, the lowest common denominator sets the limit.

the German meaning of the word “real” is more closely related to “factual necessity” than the English connotation “opposite of unreal” or “not fake”.

This also means that people who, for instance, did not have a modern symbolic toolkit available, could still be at the highest cognitive stages, as was the case with Plato and Aristotle.

To invent a whole symbolic universe takes a civilization, and the metamodern symbolic toolkit is yet being born.

So even if a person happens to be at a high cognitive stage and is developed in other regards (state and depth, as you will see), this doesn’t mean that they magically gain access to the symbolic worlds of future civilizations.

just like Plato, Aristotle, Aquinas or Newton. They were each way ahead of their times, but they did not magically have access to chaos theory, network theory or the p...

There is a difference between installing an entire symbol-stage and downloading more content at that stage. With time the content can easily take up more space on a hard drive than the program, but the installed program still determines how well the content files can be used, if at all.

Beyond all human affairs, beyond all of our dramas and passions, lies something far more absolute, a reality more real than our everyday lives.

But, and this is a big but, this also means that no king, ruler or wielder of power can have any ultimate authority beyond serving the universal truth.

But what truth? There is always one true path set for us by the prophets—even in the relatively open-minded faith of Jainism—and the other perspectives are ultimately false. This creates a blind spot of humongous proportions: ethnocentricity, i.e. that you only see the perspective and interests of one ethnic group, culture or civilization.

the One Truth is false, it also means that the reality itself that I live in, that the one source of good, love and hope in this harsh world, is nowhere to be found—that the justification for all my morality is false.

In its grasp for universality, this kind of code creates a mindless defense of its own particularity, where the deviant and the stranger are harshly discriminated against and punished.

Instead of setting us on a search for universal truth, it says it already has the Truth and installs the inquisition; it suppresses all other perspectives in zeal and missionary madness. And as it reaches for mercy and kindness in the name of the poor and wretched, it creates justifications for kings and bishops to rule us and fool us.