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

by Hanzi Freinacht

we, as a global society, are falling behind in our developmental psychology.

We live, essentially, in a retarded world. Not then, an evil world, a fallen world, a world of greed and capitalism, a world out of touch with Mother Nature, a crude materialist world—but a retarded world.

To understand the world, you must not only understand development, but the fundamental role that developmental imbalances play in the universe.

Generally speaking, the soft-edged folks—who prefer vagueness over certainty, openness over boundary-making, and wholeness over parts—are the ones who out-depth and/or out-state their own complexity and code.

the magic residual, i.e. that people have seen greater depth, mystery and beauty in the world than their cognitive minds—and their available symbolic codes—can handle. Thus, there is a glitch, a developmental imbalance, through which magical beliefs and other superstitions can sneak in.

If there is magic in the world, anyone who you believe has more contact with this magic than you do, gains arbitrary power over you. You surrender your own mental faculties to them, and from there on, very bad things can and will happen. It is the royal road to totalitarianism.

Most of all, this kind of fuzzy thinking makes it difficult to think correct, complex, analytical thoughts: It can hinder your successful management of complexity.

But there is another kind of developmental imbalance that is just as harmful: reductionism. The prickly people. It is when you out-complex and out-code your own depth and state.

Whereas the harm in magic beliefs is quite obvious, reductionism is harmful in a more subtle way. It is when your mind picks everything apart and uses its intellect in a much-too-instrumental manner. The world appears too dead, to...

Our reductionist, manipulative minds have gone haywire. Nothing is sacred or divine. And this process of reducing the world to dead parts hinders holistic insight: it hinders higher states and the development of greater depth.

The world strives for an always-impossible balance. Reality is always in a perturbed state, always far from equilibrium; indeed, always broken. And so are we.

all the major philosophers clearly share two things: high cognitive complexity and great depth. This separates them from mystics, yogis, sages, saints and prophets, who have great depth and high states (but not complexity)—and from major scientists and inventors who have high complexity (but not necessarily great depth).

The philosopher’s stone is simply the cross-section of great depth and very high complexity (stage 14 Paradigmatic and above).

There was an unmistakable softness in his eyes, a glow, an idealism, a kind of love—or wisdom, perhaps.

can’t help but to think that our emerging global society needs more people like Andrew—but who are also politically progressive, complex thinkers and who don’t rely upon mythologies derived from symbol-stage D Postfaustian.

Can we create a society in which people can have that depth and inner glow without relying on things like traditional Catholicism?

But if I had to choose one, I would go with state. We need to, above all, improve the subjective states of all humans. It is the only dimension that is ethically unproblematic to wish for people. If we want to make them “more complex” or the like, it implies we want to change them to suit the needs and demands of others. But higher state just means we wish each other well.

The main idea of metamodern politics is to create a listening society that mitigates the suffering of “normal” life and uses a wide range of social technologies and political strategies to support the psychological growth of all citizens.

It is quite apparent that a safe, efficient and technologically advanced society which takes care of its citizens seems to spur growth into higher value memes.

When you tell them that their developmental view is elitist, they point out that a vast majority of the population feels extremely alienated by your own values, but that metamoderns at least allow for a developmental path that leads to their own position.

Note, however, that the real difference between postmodernists and metamodernists is that the latter have solidarity with the perspectives of others.

And so, they will understand that a normal postmodern person has struggled all her life to find some meaning and a moral compass in this dark world.

She doesn’t judge capitalist society, or conservative Christians, or even the terrorist bombers. She sees that only by understanding their perspectives—and synthesizing them so that they can work together, or at least find

The postmoderns end up alienating a vast majority of normal modern people, making them feel confused, insulted and frustrated. And once that has gone on for a long while, the majority revolts and begins voting with Trump and the nationalists. Non-postmodern people begin to feel a subtle sense of revenge when somebody speaks out against political correctness.

Because it doesn’t work, that’s why. Most people are of other value memes, and they really don’t want what you want. And because you cannot get most people on board, because you confuse, alienate and even disgust them, they won’t cooperate.

You have postmodern young Western women, walking down the streets of Calcutta, wondering why the postfaustian and poverty-stricken Indian men stare at them. (Because, in their social universe, the freely moving young woman makes very little sense and it creates a both intensely alluring and deeply frustrating feeling, one that nags their very sense of reality.)

We are living in the age of the great stretching out. Never before has there been such intense and close contact between so many different value memes.

Metamodernists define themselves through the struggle of value memes against value memes: It’s not if you’re Right or Left that matters the most, but how complex your thinking is.

To accept and thrive in the paradoxical, self-contradictory, always incomplete and broken nature of society, culture, and reality itself.

To assume a genuinely playful stance towards life and existence, a playfulness that demands of us the gravest seriousness, given the ever-present potentials for unimaginable suffering and bliss.

To see that science is always contextual and truth always tentative; that reality always holds deeper truths. All that we think is real will one day melt away as snow in the sun.

To understand that different sciences and paradigms are simultaneously true; that many of their apparent contradictions are superficial and based on misperceptions or failures of translation or integration.

To be anti-essentialist, not believing in “ultimate essences” such as matter, consciousness, goodness, evil, masculinity, femininity or the like—but rather that all these things are contextual and interpretations made from relations and comparisons. Even the today so praised “relationality” is not an

To see the dynamic interplay of the universal and the particular, where for instance humans in more complex societies become more individualized, which in turn drives the development of more complex societies where people are more interdependent and more universal values are needed to avoid collapse.

To recognize that potentials and potentiality, rather than facts and actualities, constitute the most fundamental or “more real” reality. What we usually call reality is only “actuality”, one slice of an infinitely larger, hypercomplex pie. Actuality is only a “case of” a deeper reality, called “absolute totality”. To explore visions of panpsychism, i.e.

To see that inner experience—and the direct development of the subjectivity of organisms—is crucial to all things, and is perhaps the main ingredient lacking in the perspective of the modern world; acknowledging inner experience is often the golden key to managing society’s problems.

To create art and architecture that allude to the depth and mystery of existence, without putting it “in your face” or trying to tell you what to think or what is real.

To support a democratic, intersubjective, participatory, scientifically supported, peer-to-peer created spirituality, rather than traditional paths, teachers, gurus or authorities.

To have a nomadic view of social life; knowing that our “self” is part of a social flow, a journey—and that we are becoming more tribal and nomadic in the internet age with our virtual identities.

To understand that technology is not neutral, not just “a tool in our hands”, but that it adopts its own agenda and logic, shaping and steering history.

To adopt a depth psychology stance towards humanity, seeing that her consciousness is transformable by changing her fundamental sense of self and sense of reality.

see that in the transpersonal perspective, individual people cannot really be blamed for anything. All moralism is meaningless. This translates to a radical acceptance of people as they are; a radical non-judgment that can also be described as a civic, impersonal and secular bid to love thy neighbor.

I have chosen not to write a philosophy book, but a book about political psychology. In a way, we’re doing a “show it don’t tell it”, by revealing some of the muscle that this new paradigm has.

Postmodernism was antithetical to a lot of what the modern age had brought; it was concerned with being an antithesis, with questioning what we take for granted. Metamodernism instead sees itself as a synthesis of modernism and postmodernism—or rather, a protosynthesis, (a “proto”-synthesis because it acknowledges that whatever story we tell ourselves, it must be inconsistent and temporary).[173]

Basically, metamodernism is keeping the postmodern suspicion of progress and “grand narratives” (science, socialism, etc.) but bringing in the modern hope and sense of direction through the backdoor, as vaguely suggested open potentials.

which is the main focus of this book, a political dimension—a certain analysis of our time which points to how society is evolving and how we as a society can and should reasonably proceed, a vision of what politics we need.