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

by Hanzi Freinacht

Reality is much more than the facts of the matter. The real reality resides at the crossroads of fact and fiction. It is born precisely at the point where our imaginations, the stories we tell ourselves, meet the facts of the world and put them into context. Political metamodernism becomes real by the rebellious act of telling a good story, a story that will both haunt and reward its listener.

Mixing fact and fiction is of course what children and the insane do. But upon closer inspection, it becomes clear that everybody does it. The question is only how consciously and productively it is done.

Most political intellectuals, from Nancy Frazer to Milton Friedman, from Noam Chomsky to Arne Næss, put on these silly garbs to try to look serious and scientific, while they are all still emotionally invested in their ideas and have tearful (fictional) stories about what makes their own perspective the right one and themselves into the humble hero and servant of truth. I am hereby taking off that silly mask. And so should you, frankly. But how do you throw off the mask? By admitting that you are wearing it—and then using it more deliberately.

So where are the major political visions? Seriously. Where are they? The Left works only to maintain the welfare state, the Greens to maintain the sustainability of our current civilization, the libertarian Right to boost economic growth and the nationalist or conservative Right seeks to maintain the old nation state in the face of immigration and globalization. All of these movements and ideologies are stuck in the mindset of party politics that evolved from industrial society, with its classes and issues. None of them actually offer us anything new, or anything that might substantially improve our lives in a way that would compare to the building of the modern liberal democracy with a market economy and welfare state.

For good or bad, people are going to vote differently, educate differently, work differently, live and travel differently—even love and socialize differently. We will have different ideas about the world and our place in it. Just being alive will feel different.

Political metamodernism is built around one central insight. The king’s road to a good future society is personal development and psychological growth. And humans develop much better if you fulfill their innermost psychological needs. So we’re looking for a “deeper” society; a civilization more socially apt, emotionally intelligent and existentially mature.

The Listening Society—which is the welfare of the future, a welfare that includes the emotional needs and supports the psychological growth of all citizens.

Co-Development—which is a kind of political thinking that works across parties, works to keep ego-issues and emotional investments and biased opinions in check,

The Nordic Ideology—this is my name for the political structure that would support the long-term creation of the listening society and make room for co-development.

A large part of this has to do with how to defend citizens from new sources of oppression that can emerge as a side-effect of a “deeper” society. These new forms of oppression are generally of a more subtle and more psychological kind than what we have seen in the 20th century.

I have increasingly come to believe that political metamodernism is exceedingly useful for addressing society’s ailments, such as: the multifaceted ecological crisis; the instability of the economy; the excessive global inequalities;

So basically, a metamodern society is defined as one which has “solved” the problems of modern society, much like modern society “solved” the problems of pre-industrial, traditional society (dramatically reducing poverty, disease, wars, serfdom, slavery and misuse of monarchical power).

Coming of age was for me to a large extent a process of making peace with this sadness—and a deeper, fundamental anxiety that came with it. It was a long, painful, existential and—dare I say—spiritual journey. And in that process I paradoxically found what appears to be a sustainable source of happiness and meaning. The aching heart itself became the main engine of my life’s work. In its mature form, that solemn sadness extended. It became a sense of the tragedy of the world, of the suffering of others, and perhaps even more, an awareness of beauty lost, of potentials that never materialize.

A true writer, on important topics, can hold no illusions of intellectual and social innocence. Thoughts and perspectives are so important that they are worth every bit of the harm caused to others. The harm caused has to do with developmental psychology as we shall discuss further in the chapters of the second part of this book. Writing this book is something of a vulgar act, like showing too sexually explicit images to a small child. Some—or most—people are just not ready to receive the messages herein.

Over the years I have seen so much pain associated with wrestling the metamodern perspective. People get obsessed, they resist, they rage, they condemn, they belittle, they self-censor and find reasons to feel terribly affronted. I acknowledge that this is because my theories deeply insult the prevailing moral intuitions that people have. I spit straight in the face of their political identities, both on the Left and Right, from anarchists to conservatives. It is the solemn duty of the philosopher to piss on all that you hold dear and sacred, to show you that your gods are false.

These are people who know when to follow, when to criticize and when to revolt and take the lead. They are children who love to play.

So welcome, co-creator, I am at your mercy. As a certain Zarathustra spake: “Companions the creator seeks, not corpses, not herds and believers. Fellow creators the creator seeks—those who write new values on new tablets.

And the worlds of mice and men are political worlds. Politics means games for power. Power matters in all aspects of life. Who makes the calls? Who is considered morally pure and sexy? Who gets to be smart and respectable, or to be the cool, romantic rebel?

What else must we achieve with this book? You are to be equipped with a multidimensional political-psychological-developmental map of our time.

You see, politics is continuous not only with the ritualized forms of knowledge that we call “science”, but perhaps even more with the “common sense” of everyday life. Social theory is where science and common sense meet, where you discipline your mind and use the best scientific findings you can come across—but you still have to build upon your common sense in order to make assumptions about society, politics and social reality.

Much more than we realize it, science is a whore dressed up as queen, a jester posing as king. We don’t recognize how easily it is bought and sold and how often it makes fools of us before the whole royal court.

Somehow, despite all the key understandings that our civilization has unraveled during the last century, showing that knowledge is contextual beyond anything we might previously have imagined, people persist in the driest scientific naivety. They are ruled by a jester and a whore. Science is a very powerful method—or set of methods—for understanding the world. But real human beings, participating in all manner of everyday situations, base their worldviews and political opinions on much more than science. Simply because we damn well have to.

So, to be very clear, if you are like most people, you have been overestimating your own “scientificness” to a preposterous extent. And if I want to propose a social theory, my measure of success is not whether or not I have “solid proof”, but simply whether or not I am less mistaken, perverted and uninformed than you are. If my mode of thinking is less wrong than yours, my social theory is valuable.

Your secure “rational worldview” is a lie that you have been telling yourself—for emotional reasons, more often than analytical ones.

None of these positions can be proven or disproven, but they can be criticized from other positions that are more complex, more scientifically informed, more comprehensive, nuanced and coherent—and less wrong.

The moment that I try to convey metamodern thoughts, however, double-binds start occurring with an almost frightening predictability. The mental resistance that people harbor towards metamodernism is immense. Thereby, the psychological tricks that people use to quickly brush it aside show up at every corner. The double-bind works simply by holding the presented ideas to impossible standards, ones that your currently accepted views couldn’t match either.

The more radical the new idea, the more painful it is to accommodate. When fundamental modes of thought are challenged—such as your very sense of self, your sense of reality and your basic ethics—your mind starts playing tricks on you. You are tempted to use self-deceit to get out of the uncomfortable situation, so that you can promptly return to more familiar territories.

But if the speaker does begin from the specifics, you throw a sly smirk and say “Oh, here is a naive one, who thinks that you can just change things in society without knowing the greater context.” The specifics are a slippery slope; you can always ask for more until it becomes incomprehensible or until the speaker runs out of knowledge about technical details. Effectively, you have locked out any possibility of learning anything new. Congratulations.

The humble seeker thrives in ambiguity, in questions rather than answers, in cracks in the puzzle, in exceptions rather than rules, in minute details and relations, in subtle whispers and the non-obvious. Or so he tells himself. Here’s the humanities student, the posthumanist, the Nietzschean, the Deleuzian, the Foucauldian, Derrida-fans or even just Heidegger people, cultural theorists and some deep ecologists or Taoists. They are offended by the certainty of the speaker, and by the very fact that her thoughts can be systematized, organized and lead to concrete conclusions.

Your system looks like this: All “open, subtle thinkers” are morally and intellectually superior to all “rigid system builders”, and thereby all system builders have false conclusions. Of course, this is very convenient for you, since if the system builder is not rigorous and systematic, you can brush the speaker off for that reason instead.

“spiritual purity”. Here you attack and degrade the speaker because she is not spiritual enough, because she “thinks too much” or “tries to force her intellect upon the world”. The problem with this is of course that the speaker can never prove her spiritual value to you (this being a subjective quality). You force upon her your own vague definitions of what you “sense” in her. This means that you feel empowered and superior to her and morally entitled to cut past her message, to stop listening to her. If she insists on trying to explain her point, you view it as further evidence of your own superiority. If she follows your lead and stops trying to think so much, you also take it as proof of your own spiritual superiority and that you thereby had nothing to learn from her in the first place. Indeed, she must listen to you, in order to attain the “spiritual purity” that you think that you already have. This last double-bind is by far the nastiest one.

the second and the third double-binds can be combined into an especially mean concoction called “organic growth”, where you consider yourself wiser than the speaker because she does not let things “grow organically”.

It is a general prejudice we have, based on unreflectively held Platonic ideas and Cartesian divisions of reality, that ideas are somehow pure form, that they don’t need feelings, embodiments, dramatic performances and personalities to be real.

all great ideas come with lived moods, visions and rituals. Metamodern ideas are no different; they arrive at the scene with a certain form of audacity, bordering on aristocratic arrogance. There is an existential tinge, a kind of adventurous but gentle sense of vastness that grips the heart and mind of the afflicted. You see complex patterns unfolding in the strangest dance, universality in every event, open horizons, and a depth—as if everyday phenomena became astronomical mysteries revealed by the Hubble telescope. There is a sense of connectedness,

I relate to you as what Deleuze called a dividual, full of different parts, of different voices and drives working in different contexts. You are not only the rider of the elephant, your conscious and rational mind, but also the elephant itself, full of contradictory urges, ambitions, dreams, fears, doubts and hunger. To convey my message, I must sometimes speak to your rational mind, sometimes to the elephant itself, and sometimes to the relationship between the two. And you are even the very path that the elephant tramples, a path that other people have cut by teaching you this language, these values and habits. I sometimes write to other people than you specifically, and then take up your thread again. Sometimes I speak to others through you, beyond you as an individual person. I relate to you transpersonally, meaning that I meet you not as one single, rational individual, but as the cross-section of the beautiful and terrifying depths of your inner life and the conflicts and potentials inherent in the social, economic and cultural fabric of the digitalizing world.

You are, fundamentally, the world-soul itself; and you are simultaneously speaking and listening as you read these words. Future readers will understand this better than contemporary ones. This intimate, transpersonal way of co-creating the world builds upon the acknowledgement that I exist within you, and that you exist within me—in a paradoxical hall of mirrors. It is an inescapable conclusion. The hall of mirrors replaces the notion of you being one, single individual reader, who reads this one, single atom of a writer.

You see, the distance-creating irony and sarcasm are what allow me to be perfectly honest and genuine with you, to be absurdly sincere and thereby ridiculously vulnerable. Metamodernism is the marriage of extreme irony with a deep, unyielding sincerity. These two sides are in superposition to one another.

I begin by telling you that I’m going to fool you and fuck your wife, make her come like Vesuvius, just to get your attention, and only then do I reveal what this is actually about: universal solidarity with all sentient beings, from all perspectives. But if I would have said that right away, it would have bored you, made you suspicious—or both.

It is within the framework of this extreme level of order—and the far progression of the dynamics inherent to modern society—that the revolution occurs.

Most often, in most parts of the world, society tends to be much more tumultuous, especially during periods of rapid change and technological expansion. But for a host of different reasons, this particular part of the world, not only Sweden but also the rest of Scandinavia, managed to develop a full-blown postindustrial economy with more or less the whole of the population on board, under relatively stable circumstances. This caused the cultural values of the population to change during the last part of the 20th century, and the political landscape shifted accordingly, subtly but radically.

It can be no coincidence that the most stable parts of the world, the parts that have had a wealthy and equitable economy for a long time, also have the “most modern” worldview among their populations. In fact, the Nordic countries have sped up in this direction during the last two decades, in the same period as they have become countries of immigration, accepting large numbers of people from more traditional societies.

None of this should be controversial. Some parts of the world seem to “develop” values ahead of others and thereby acquire “progressive” values, which in turn grant different advantages on the global market. After all, why should we expect all seven billion of us to alter our values in perfect unison with one another? And why should we expect all value systems to be of equal status on the global scene of cultural prestige?

And third, the “paradox” has more or less been solved by economists who have pointed out that happiness follows economic growth, but only logarithmically (you have to double income to get one more point of happiness,

All this—with some ifs and buts—is just to say that human happiness, in these countries, is being decoupled from money and other material wealth. Stop a moment to consider the implications of that. Use of natural resources and technology: Another way of looking at it is that material resources are very efficient for creating happiness when the population is poor, but then becomes less efficient once you reach the level of a wealthy, liberal democracy. So increasing economic output gets lower payoff in terms of human happiness, once modern industrial society is established to a certain degree. In terms of natural resources, which we are already greatly overusing, this means that we would need a few extra planets to make the people of Sweden happier by use of material wealth

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.

When it fully blooms, liberal democracy (with a parliament, parties, market economy and publicly funded welfare) merges with Green Social Liberalism. This is why Green Social Liberalism is no longer just an alternative among others, but a meta-ideology.

they are against immigration, of course, but the way they legitimize such resistance is by claiming that immigration threatens the welfare state and the liberal values of native Swedes, often revolving around women’s rights, and sometimes even gay rights.

All the political parties are delivering the same goods, more or less.

The Left, both academic and populist, is thrilled to be shocked by how “ultraliberal” society has become, and its adherents somehow always manage to mention Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher as a kind of transcendental prime mover, explaining how the world took a wrong turn based on corporate lies and blinding neoliberal ideology. The Right, and by that I mean the socially conservative elements of society, is equally thrilled to be appalled by what appears to be an endless onslaught of political correctness, relativism, multiculturalism, and the excessive softness of the nanny welfare state. As I mentioned, the neo-fascists like to call it the victory of “cultural Marxism”. What we are hearing are scattered remnants of the voices of the alternatives to Green Social Liberalism that existed under industrial modernity.

There is no “center” in any strict, analytical sense. What we have is one victorious meta-ideology, one recipe for society that has beaten its competitors when it comes to functionality and rhetorical edge. It is this meta-ideology that is disguised as a “center”, as being the sensible, moderate form of politics. The “middle” is a position that under other circumstances would have appeared as extreme.