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

by Hanzi Freinacht

Inner dimensions blindness—meaning that you consistently fail to take into account the subjective dimensions of life and how they fundamentally shape society and reality

Political “progressivity” is a rather strange notion. The idea presupposes that there can be a certain form of “historical progression”, a goal or at least direction towards which humanity can and should evolve. It presupposes, furthermore, that there is a “background space” with preset measures and markings in it, denoting both directionality and distance of social development.

Our current society is designed to achieve growth of industrial output and redistributing its spoils. Future society must expand upon today’s society’s way of functioning; its institutions must be geared towards achieving more psychological goals. More goals of the soul.

If a country goes farther left it loses in the face of international competition for capital; if it goes farther towards liberalization, it suffers social paralysis and protests; if it retracts civil liberties (gay marriage, etc.) it loses valuable economic agents; if one ignores the environment or the plight of foreigners one loses the rhetorical battles for moral high-ground.

Whereas money, in the Nordic countries, is scattered relatively evenly across the representatives of the old society and the new, cultural capital is certainly not. The more artsy, creative, well connected, socially intelligent, emotionally developed, idealistic, digitalized, diversified and educated you are—the more likely you are to be a rising star of the new society.

Because cultural capital is becoming more powerful than economic (as a means of organizing and coordinating people’s actions and behaviors), the cultural capital can be traded for money or other valuable resources at a favorable rate. Hence, bit by bit, cultural capital is beginning to dominate economic capital in the new digital, postindustrial age.

A new organizational paradigm? A revolution in how we apply datamining to new problems? A major innovation or a technical detail? A profound global movement or a club for self-admiration? Because there is so much understanding and context needed in all these projects, they may be difficult to explain, and sometimes you may need to find ways to package and sell them. In plain English, you need to wrestle the doubts and accusations that it’s all just bullshit. And, needless to say, the majority of the work of the triple-H population is undeniably so. The reason that it’s so valuable to society is just that some of it isn’t bullshit and even a small percentage of genuine innovations of software, culture or lifestyle can have a huge impact. Still, you never quite know if you are the bullshitter or the hero, or if you are being sold utter bullshit.

Authentic happiness includes hedonism (pleasure, fun) and eudemonia (meaning, contentment) as well as the productive and responsive acceptance of pain and sorrow.

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 are leaving behind the economy in which you were defined by your profession. Increasingly, people are defined and acquire their social value through a wider array of identities, including civic, personal, aesthetic and existential ones.

Confident, happy people, who can manage more abstract and long-term goals, and who are more self-secure and thus better at taking in negative feedback (and adjusting to new information), will simply outcompete other people in the scramble for capital and central positions in the new world economy.

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.

The more primitive and stupid your ideas about society, the cruder your “bad-guy theory” will be. To the Nazis, the bad-guys are the Jews, plain and simple. To the nationalist conservatives, the bad-guys are not necessarily Arabs, but certain problematic aspects of their culture and religion. To the modern libertarian, the bad-guys are laziness and lacking sense of responsibility—and all those pesky leftwing control freaks. To the Left it is capitalism. To the critical sociologist it is power structures. To the ecologist it is industrialism and a consumer society disconnected from the ecological systems.

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”. This is the point zero of political understanding. If you have this feeling, you know nothing. The point is that everybody already is like you—a very limited, vulnerable, hurt, single human being with almost infinite distortions and blind spots, working from within the narrow frames of her emotions, intellect and experience. And that is exactly why the world is a complete, utter mess. And because the world is a mess, you are a mess. You cannot trust yourself and your current conceptions and ideas.

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.

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. This certainly includes students of sociology, the often idealistic young people I’ve had the pleasure of teaching. Instead, people will recast these concepts at stages Abstract 10 and Formal 11. Norms are taken to mean “social rules that create inequalities” and are always seen as bad. “Structures” become a kind of evil spirits that can be exorcized by the sufficiently faithful followers of the Left, often with linear interpretations of “feminism” as a good essence that you can apply to anything in order to purify it from evil—the more of it, the better. And “identity” comes to mean self-confidence, rather than the interactive construction of a “self” as discussed by the classical social psychologists.

Physics becomes chemistry becomes biochemistry becomes biology becomes psychology becomes sociology. With each step you lose some elegance and precision—but this is only because of the imperfection of our knowledge. 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.

Frankly, women have been more liberated by the pill and other advances of medicine, than by postmodern theory.

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.

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. Isn’t the realization of privilege at the core of your beliefs? Did you really believe that you were an underdog barking at the powerful? You have been a highly privileged, well-informed elitist kicking downwards all along. You, my dear pomo, armed with vast amounts of cultural capital and superior perspectives, belong to the highest strata of global society, the upper class of late modernity—so you should better acknowledge your privilege and take some responsibility for including the perspectives of your fellow citizens. The pomos are in positions of power, more so than George W. Bush ever was.

The same goes for pretty much all the gurus. They have high state perspectives—the ones that are authentic gurus, that is—but they mistake these existential perspectives for authority on all sorts of other issues. As do their followers.

At a subtle level, the reductionist feels a vague aggression towards reality and existence: “Was this all?” You gain a sense of satisfaction, a faint feeling of revenge, from exposing reality for the meaningless, dead piece of indifferent shit that it really is. You pick it apart and see that there is always hardness beneath the softness, selfishness beneath the love, mechanics beneath the wonder, and so forth. The reductionist mind is blind to the greater whole, blind to serving a deeper principle of life. It becomes a cancer: Thinking, thinking, serving small and selfish desires by turning all of existence into an extraction project. And why not? Reality is dead, meaningless dirt. And I will use my hard, effective reason to show that all that glitters is only ever grime. But at least I will get what I want.