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

by Hanzi Freinacht

The scientific method, and the instruments that go beyond our perceptions, help us “lose our senses”: because our senses betray us. They were only evolved to see and relate to a thin slice of reality, as was our reasoning mind.

And at each level, the same Baconian scientific method (invented by Francis Bacon) reigns supreme. There is only one reality, one truth carved in stone. In physics.

We leave behind the private revelations, the ones found in remote caves after forty days of solitude, and bring forth the public revelation—that which can be confirmed by every human being by virtue of her own senses, reason and rationality.

Man can think for himself, and for the first time, in universal knowledge, he meets his fellow as an equal: the informed citizen is born.

And we find the real heavens, conquering the skies, crossing space itself, landing on the moon, and bringing salvation through the ingenious advances of medicine—medicine that works; better than any of your prayers ever did. We feed the people of the world; we create untold abundance.

A universe which has no pre-given meaning, which is just pristine, open meaninglessness and where we ourselves have to create meaning—be it scientific exploration, political struggle, artistic expression or just comfort, love and fun—is so much more exciting.

But what I cannot forgive, dear compadre, is the use of false scientific authority for dubious purposes and disgusting religious cop-outs: the purple and turquoise glowing “subtle energies” and “quantum healing” of New Age charlatans, always selling us self-help books and worthless gems, always turning our attention away from the real issues of life.

And when their gods fail them, they come crawling to our modern hospitals, begging for a cure that only painstakingly hard-earned science can grant them.

Even an idea in physics, such as the hydrogen atom, is only accessible to you through the use of socially constructed symbols.

You’ve been living the illusion that you’re beyond illusions.

You never stopped believing in God, you punk. You only pushed Him backstage by means of a simple negation.

For instance, if only what is intersubjectively verifiable ever counts as universal, and therefore as real and important, what happens to all of those who cannot partake in the intersubjective discussion? Like the animals—or poorly educated people. You can’t ask the animals, but does that mean they don’t have subjective experience?

And it is in the cracks and ruins of your world, in a perpetual questioning and criticism, that humanity is truly emancipated.

The problem is that you are not nearly modern, scientific or secular enough. It is because your ideas of science, objectivity and reality are too limited, because they have too much lingering stuff of religions left in every nook and cranny, that you keep creating a world of narrow-mindedness and self-deceit.

When you vote you often go with the Left or the Greens—and in some cases with intellectual forms of libertarianism. But whenever any of these powers come close to government, the same modern, bureaucratic structures reemerge.

All of your projects have fallen to the ground, without any of them deeply changing society. There have been some shifts, yes, but we still live in what must be seen as a modern society: still capitalist, alienating, unequal and ecologically disastrous.

The problem you have, dear pomo, is that you fail to construct or suggest anything useful or durable, because you are only truly interested in being an anti-thesis to the existing society.

your “multiplicity of perspectives” is limited to an epistemological one (views of knowledge and how it is attained)—it is never an ontological multiplicity (viewing reality itself as shifting according to perspectives).

You have to try to construct a synthesis from all that you know from the earlier symbol-stages, in order to create a society that solves the three major problems of modern life: the excessive global inequalities, the alienation or neurotic anxieties of modern life, and ecological unsustainability.

Here’s what I believe: To have solidarity with someone, you must also have solidarity with their perspective.

If you deny the differences of developmental stage, you also fail to recognize something important: that to be in position to critique someone, from their own premises, is to act from a position of superiority—from a position of power.

We must learn to listen to another person and to see with her eyes and to merge our reality with hers, to see how her perspective is a real, ontological, part of reality.

Note that even in the animosity between the symbol-stages you can see a certain progression—as the earlier stages are more insensitively hostile to one another. Symbol-stage D Postfaustian simply kills deviants and threatens with hell for eternity; symbol-stage E Modern despises the former but certainly lets them live; and symbol-stage F Postmodern mocks and condemns modernity but not more than that; whereas symbol-stage G Metamodern teases postmodernism a bit, but then seeks synthesis and reconciliation between all of the former symbol-stages.

but I feel a little hope for humanity when I see this pattern: unfolding tolerance, acceptance, inclusivity and universality (however bumpy the ride).

The cognitive requirements for successfully operating the symbol-stages increase with one MHC stage per symbol-stage.

And whatever reality we are currently experiencing as self-evident and true, it can always, in a sense, be awakened from.

The reason we need to be scientific and objective is that, in the last instance, it serves a sense of truth and meaning, and it can help us change life for the better—or prevent us from making it worse.

The capacity of consciousness, of a living organism, to experience, seems to be unimaginably vast—if not endless. What does a small child experience when she has longed for her mother, felt abandoned, and is suddenly embraced by warmth and unconditional, caring love?

And as “we, the universe” self-organize into living, conscious beings—albeit organisms with transient bodies and fleeting experiences—we begin to see the world, feel it, taste it and know it. We begin to know ourselves. The fabric of bliss and suffering comes alive, and we can no longer stay indifferent.

When the world is conscious, when it sees and feels, it also cares.[119]

We should note, moreover, that the inner landscapes are transformable—not only by means of Bildung (cultural and educational refinement), but also, and primarily, by felt and embodied encounters with the beauties, mysteries and tragedies of life itself

The possibilities of the inner realm are far greater than the combined experience of world history, of the history of all life on our planet. The unfathomable potentialities of inner experience; this is serious business.

I further posit that we all sometimes feel better and sometimes worse—and that each moment has some kind of sum or totality of how we feel.

There is a sum or totality of inner experience in every now.

Magnificence, majesty, vastness, greatness, splendor, love, joy, clarity, openness, compassion, certitude, flow, jubilation, playfulness, fullness, enlightenment, lightness, peace, presence, power, realness, humility, freedom, creation, freshness, birth, wonder, victory, serenity, divinity, purity, meaning, unity, union, communion, uniqueness, chosenness, awe, fulfillment, insight, grace, refinement, subtlety, simplicity, gratefulness, substance, radiant emptiness.

They are all expressions of higher subjective states. Higher states are the lived, experienced moments in which reality itself becomes crisp, clear, self-evident: when there is a deep inner silence and the experience of life itself emerges in full.

It is possible to have pleasant experiences that don’t touch upon higher states, and it is possible to have high states during moments of great anger and sadness.

the overall subjective state of the organism is not its emotions. It is something more fundamental.

lower states are the moments of existence when reality “lacks wholeness”: when there is split and brokenness and separation in our experience; when reality is lost and a formless, chaotic confusion reigns, together with untruth.

They all indicate some kind of prisons of the soul, anathema to a free and full life in peace.

Seen from a behavioral perspective (where you study the patterns or rules of behaviors of organisms from the outside, without regard to their inner life), states are more fundamental than emotions.

Organisms don't really seek or avoid certain emotions, but they seek to raise the level of their subjective state and avoid low states.[130] Most of the time, most of us live our lives in

A fundamental difference between states and stages is that each stage transcends and includes the earlier stages (as is the case in the stages of cognitive complexity as well as the symbol-stages), whereas states transcend and exclude the lower states.

We see and recognize different aspects of reality depending on which subjective state we are in. Thus

“Spirituality” is a catch-all phrase for those human activities, experiences and practices which concern the three highest categories of subjective states—and the perspectives on life and the world that flow from such states (and the elaboration and teaching of these perspectives).

The lower states truly are prisons: comfortless expanses of pain, filth and degradation.[133]

A simple way of saying this is that higher median state makes life lighter; it makes it easier to get up in the morning. Have you ever fallen happily in love?

The higher one’s state, the wider and more relaxed one’s perspective: At higher states we see ourselves, the world, and our place in it more clearly.

What does a higher state person look like? It is someone who simply has a sense of peace within, a natural flow in their everyday activities and their life as a whole. I give you Doctor Ride-High.

He is a medical doctor in his mid-thirties who has spent many years working eagerly with physical exercise, yoga, meditation, reading and listening to wisdom teachings, optimizing diet, taking part in psychotherapy, artwork, love relationships and sex to achieve higher subjective states.