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

by Hanzi Freinacht

But the reason that political metamodernism must go beyond the idea of the individual, and “see through” the individual person, is not just philosophical, not just a matter of being correct in an analytical sense. It has profound practical and political implications. The idea of the individual was a smart solution under the circumstances that modern, industrial society produced. In today’s globalized information society, however, when the problems of society are of a much deeper and more complex nature, the idea of the individual tends to blind us to the problems as well as to their solutions. The idea of the “individual” no longer fulfills its function as an effective unit of society’s self-organization. As a solution to the problems of society, it no longer does its job. This is because the problems of society increasingly stem from deep layers of the psyche—and their interactions with the world—that are hard to access for us as individual persons. How do you make the average person trust her fellow citizens more? How do you make those same fellow citizens more trustworthy in the first place? How do you make people have genuine solidarity with all people and animals (which, truth be told, most of us simply don’t have)?