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January 10 - January 28, 2020
equilibrium: An uncompromising acceptance of the market economy. An equally uncompromising acceptance of the welfare state. A gradual adaptation to the pressures of economic globalization, with a focus on economic growth, liberal markets and international competitiveness. An approximate 50-50% mixture of public bureaucracy and private enterprise, usually with a slight tilt towards private (Sweden, for instance, collected 50.4% of GDP in taxes at its peak in 1999, which had gone down to 43.0% by 2015). An uncompromising acceptance of basic liberal values. A rhetorical minimum of ecological
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Individual people have increasingly complex identities, interests and ideologies (mixing, for instance, feminism with Christianity and online privacy concerns or whatnot), making them harder to represent in coherent political parties. Politics deals with more and more complex financial, legal, social, political, technological and ecological realities—thereby landing more power in the hands of non-elected bureaucrats and experts and making public discourse more difficult and filled with distorting simplifications.
The party system we know, with a Left and a Right, is a product of the classes of an industrial society, where a majority of everyday activity was based around partaking in the production and distribution of industrial goods. The same can be said about the electoral system itself; it is constructed to house class-based parties. In the postindustrial, digitalized and globalized economy, where the most revenue is cycled through rather abstract services, we no longer have the same class division; we no longer have the same social strata that the parties were designed to represent. Social mobility
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First of all, don’t be fooled by the fireworks, the displays of rhetorical and practical disputes of the politicians, who have every interest in maintaining the image of deep divisions and conflicts, an interest shared by the media who work hard to create drama concerning relatively small differences. And secondly, admit defeat. Socialism (or anarchism) is not going to happen. And there is no national resurgence of organic community coming our way. There will be no night-watchman state and libertarian utopia where the public sector is all but removed. There will be no ecological-spiritual
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Another way to look at the issue is from the perspective of the individual voter and her interaction with the political system. She is faced with a situation in which party politics gradually loses much of its meaning and lure.
Three perceptions of the political realm become deeply ingrained. First, that politics is boring. Secondly, that it is difficult, requiring expert knowledge of e.g. sustainability, energy or finance. And third, that our efforts won’t make any difference either way.
Because the electorate senses that there is no real debate and no real class struggle going on, they begin to demand a more deliberative form of politics (deliberative democracy is when people talk to one another and reason their way to a common ground based on mutual respect and understanding).
The individual cannot know his or her interest in advance. Political interests are becoming vaguer and more complex—and thereby more closely related to one another in unexpected ways. The ambiguity of life and our positions in society makes it all but impossible to form stable interest-based parties.
co-development: the ability to, together with others, responsibly explore the new landscapes of risks and possibilities that are opening up.
Liberal representative democracy, because it is approaching its own ideals, has slowly begun to render itself obsolete.
The most important line is drawn between the old society and the new. A majority of the population still do not realize that they no longer live in a national, industrial society. They don’t see that the identities and narratives of the modern industrial age simply don’t apply anymore. These people are of course especially concentrated to the conservative and populist movements.
In fact, the old Left is helplessly blind to the fundamental shifts that are taking place in society. They perceive, quite incorrectly, that a nostalgically held solidarity is being attacked by neoliberal corporate greed—when in reality post-materialist values of happiness, quality of life and self-development are booming at the expense of materialist values.
Market, state and civil life are becoming intermeshed in a myriad of ways.
Such parties are indicative of new progressive strata of the population, representing the groups we can call the triple-H: hipsters, hackers and hippies. The triple-H people are not just annoying; they are also the main agents within crucial sectors such as IT, design and organizational development. The sociologist Richard Florida called them the creative class.
On the Right, especially the green libertarian Right, you are more likely to find the growing yoga bourgeoisie.
They have found that money is not the answer to a happy life and therefore begin to cultivate self-awareness, authenticity and intimacy—often in and around yoga parlors, tantra group settings, contact improvisation dance, improvisation theatre, self-help courses and coaches, and to some extent the Burning Man festival and its wider cultural sphere.
Progressive movements host people working against the values of the national industrial society, taking on a transnational perspective.
A major task in these groups is to achieve a transition to an ecologically sustainable society. They don’t resist Green Social Liberalism, but try to expand it and build it on a transnational level. They are also much more likely to be good co-developers, valuing personal traits such as listening and humility in the face of others’ perspectives.
The progressives have the opposite profile: city-dwelling young women with higher education (and more gay people).
The trenches—and the cruel, grinding wars—are present even within each single person, even within our own bodies and minds.
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.
Do not be fooled by recent surges of nationalist sentiment. Even the nationalists of Sweden have become a softer, more liberal and greener version of their continental European sisters.
We are witnessing the rise of the digitalized, globalized, transnational, postindustrial society—and its discontents.
They combine software development with cultural capital and social capital, i.e. with a sensitive knowledge of the culture and age we live in, with a rich understanding of its symbols.
They also, notably, embody these new thoughts by creating music, fashion, movies, books and games that embody these new values and ideas—and by their own taste in fashion, art and lifestyle.
The hippies, then. I concede that this is a silly use of terms, as the word “hippie” was originally derived from the word “hipster”.
The hippies here are not quite the same as the hippies of old: the starry-eyed New Agers who looked to astrology, crystals, transpersonal psychologies and gurus, but rather people with highly developed skills in meditation, contemplation, bodily practices, psychedelics, diets and physical training, profound forms of intimate communication and sexuality and simple life wisdoms that apply to our day and age. You will find more rational and research based approaches to psychedelics, communities for self-development and eco-village living, science-driven meditation and stress release practices,
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Somewhat strange bed-fellows, these three, hackers, hipsters and hippies. What, then, unites the triple-H population? One thing is that all three groups share an alternative relationship to work and the market: They are all driven by what psychologists of work call intrinsic motivation and self-realization, rather than extrinsic motivation, such as monetary rewards, consumption and security.
a subtle revolution of cultural capital.
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.
For these people, the wage labor treadmill (and conventional work life) hinder the lives that they want to live, rather than being a source of security and empowerment.
precariat—people in economically and socially precarious situations, at the fringes or outside of the conventional labor market. Oftentimes, it is up to the family or the state to support this growing reserve army of “failed” triple-H folks.
The triple-H populations suffer from a number of things that aren’t an issue to most people. These are: uncertainty of levels of expectations, bullshit, empty networking.
This is the revolving door between the creative class and the precariat;
expectations minus realities is how you calculate a major factor of ill mental health and human misery (what Durkheim famously called anomie).
Still, you never quite know if you are the bullshitter or the hero, or if you are being sold utter bullshit. “Empty networking” is a wasteful activity that most triple-H people know all too well: those many coffees and lunches had, Skype conferences held and evenings attended that never really led anywhere.
In a country like the US, the discontents of globalization are strong enough to put up a real fight. This is why you see a polarization here, rather than the victory of Green Social Liberalism.
The US is caught in the middle, split in half, as it were—and it can develop in either direction. It is unavoidable that the discontents of globalization will run the show here and there for periods, but their political programs really have very little to offer in terms of improving people’s lives and transitioning to a new stage of societal development.
This may or may not “cause unemployment” (a question that is likely to look sillier by the year),
So-called posthumanist thinkers are radically challenging humanity’s biased view of herself in relation to the other animals and the rest of reality, taking us beyond the anthropocentric (human-biased) perspectives we have hitherto lived by.
Even if wildlife fauna isn’t necessarily happier than domesticated animal life, the exploitative behavior towards non-human animals must be seen not only as unsustainable but also, and primarily, as ethically inexcusable.
And the global capitalist system is based upon perpetual growth. But we have yet to see economic growth without increased exploitation of natural resources—resources that are already overused by a wide margin.
When a multiplicity of things explode all at once, in a multidimensional crisis-revolution, our linear models of the world rarely work out—they
We need stories about stories. Meta-narratives.
an extremely social, extremely libertarian and extremely green society.
Deliberately and carefully cultivate a deeper kind of welfare system that includes the psychological, social and emotional aspects of human beings,
generativity—i.e. the propensity of society as a cultural, economic and social-psychological system to, on average and over time, generate the conditions for psychological thriving and growth to occur.
So the basic idea is to institute six new forms of politics that continuously and very deliberately work with the psychological and cognitive development of human beings, our relationships to one another, and our relations to society at large (these are presented in Book Two, Nordic Ideology). These are not “solutions”—although I will suggest more than a few practical policies as well—but rather open-ended processes.
Should we really make people happy? Is it a viable goal for society? People sometimes make the distinction between hedonic happiness (pleasure, enjoyment, fun) and eudemonic happiness (meaning, purpose in life, and peace of mind). Both of these can be supported for the long-term development of each person as well as society as a whole. Supporting happiness means relieving suffering, which also means improving the quality of human relationships.
It is a matter of increasing people’s autonomy and sense of independence, not the contrary. High levels of challenge and high support give the best learning outcomes, and the best learning outcomes give the most sustainable positive results—this is educational psychology 101.
