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

by Hanzi Freinacht

Two major factors seem to determine the smarts of the group as a whole: 1) The average social intelligence of the members (again, rather than IQ). This means that groups containing higher percentage of women generally do better, even up to 100% women, as women commonly have a slight advantage over men in this area. This holds true even if people interact online only by text chats. 2) The structure of the group. More evenly distributed talking time, more total communication, less of a clear leader, more democratic decision making, moderate level of diversity among group members when it comes to personality, etc.

Somehow it might seem frivolous, or even insolent, to speak of a “listening society”, of deeper care for the citizen and the higher human needs such as fulfillment and existential insight, in the midst of a world in crisis, with such great risks and so much poverty, conflict and suffering.

Both sides are partly right. The world really is a tragic and grim place, and yes, society really has made great progress in important respects. But you need to see both these sides simultaneously to get out of the grid-lock. If you don’t allow yourself to explore what positive feedback cycles are possible, you are also stopping yourself from looking at realistic paths ahead. Because, after all, the world really has changed many times before—so why not again?

And if you insist on being grateful for all the wealth and progress, you are stopping yourself from reacting against things that are obviously still unjust and terribly wrong with the world—such as climate change, global poverty and animal slavery.

What, then, is the way out of this grid-lock? Fundamentally, it is a matter of understanding that society is both very, very good and simultaneously very, very bad. Reality is rich. It has room for plenty of extremes. It has multitudes of contradictions. We must increasingly learn to live and deal with such paradoxes.

Again, it is because the world is both a wonderful and terrible place, because humanity is both divine and depraved, that the only sane and respectful attitude towards society is to be both critical and optimistic.

No issue is too grand for you. Why would it be? This world is your experiment as much as everybody else’s. You are the creator.

One such agent is the process oriented party, exemplified here with the Danish party The Alternative.

Apparently the Danish public was ready for a “party about nothing”. Instead of being based on a readymade political program, the party was formed around a set of principles and values for how to conduct good political discourse and dialogue. The party also has political content, of course, a program with things they want to change, but this was subsequently crowd sourced by its members after the party got founded. Most central to the party’s founding and organization is still the how, rather than the what.

The Alternative has its electoral and organizational base mainly in the urban creative class—the triple-H (hipsters, hackers and hippies) as well as some yoga bourgeoisie; these social groups we discussed in chapter 2. Thereby, the party can employ a lot of its cultural muscle to compete in the world of mass and social media—not least with the help of gifted designers working for free, people who are sensitive to cultural trends and currents.

It is, in a way, the party of artists and their often eccentric, playful, post-materialist lifestyles.

In a way, you could say that The Alternative represents the revolution of cultural capital against economic capital.

A happy, kind-looking 20-year-old reported to the rolling TV-cameras that there is no need to cheat, because “there is room for everyone”.

As in the 2011 Metamodernist Manifesto (which I discuss in the appendix) we can see “informed naivety”, or “pragmatic idealism”—terms explicitly used by the Alternativists, although coined independently from metamodernist scholars.

most central tenets of the party are a set of six core values: courage, generosity, transparency, humility, humor, and empathy.

This is where you can see metamodern logic in action. The party has rather loose policies, but does not shy away from holding its members to strict “dogma” when it comes to behavior and demeanor. Indeed, you will find this structure nowhere within the Left or the environmental movement, where beliefs in specific policies dominate but everyone would nevertheless be deeply allergic to words such as dogma, or prescriptions for people’s behavior. Neither could you find anything like it in the many NGOs informed by more postmodern thinking.

commended the different qualities and perspectives of all the other parties—including their ideological Nationalist adversaries. This is a sign of transpartisanism—the principle of seeing the interchange of all parties as vital to democracy, and to seek to implement one’s policies by means of affecting the other parties (rather than antagonizing them). The Alternative can be described as a transpartisan movement.

Hence, this approach speaks to the tendency of the electorate to be increasingly disenchanted with the ongoing debates in postindustrial party politics. It targets a deep nerve within the population of a liberal democracy, where the Left and Right no longer represent clearly defined class interests, and people long for a more honest and nuanced discussion. A party like The Alternative can only pop up once there is a significant population with a certain set of values, norms and social skills. If you scratch the surface of this party, it is both highly egalitarian (spreading power, including people in dialogue, etc.) and built on the implicit creation of new hierarchies.

implicitly saying that they must be able to understand and see the perspectives of others, but don’t expect the same treatment in return. A subtle hierarchy is being introduced. When they say that they will accentuate values, they are in fact saying that they will hold a more abstract and general level than others in their thinking. Another subtle hierarchy.

We need to simultaneously deal with increasingly clear and well-defined hierarchies, and we need society to become more democratic and inclusive. The people who end up on top in this strange new hierarchy are the most democratic ones—the people who have the personalities, skills and cultural codes necessary to create social settings that are more inclusive and nuanced.

And political metamodernism is fundamentally a sensitive balancing of sincerity and irony. This balancing of sincerity and irony gives progressive movements (like The Alternative) a great competitive advantage in the media and on the political stage—a sharp edge.

The marriage of irony and sincerity helps us to take the perspectives of others: the racist, the exaggerated feminist, the conservative. Each ironic position you play with is simultaneously saturated with sincerity, which means that you can honestly be with their feelings and values while still being in opposition to them. This saves a lot energy that would otherwise be expended on anger and resentment and it helps creating mutual understanding or even unexpected alliances and synergies. It helps you play the game of politics. Strangely, it is much easier to defeat someone if you honestly care about them and see the world with their eyes, stand in their shoes.

People need irony in order to build interpersonal trust based on self-knowledge, humor and critical thinking.

There, another ironic quirk of our age: Irony brings trust. And trust crowns a winner.

the world is slowly becoming transnational. An important feature of The Alternative is that it was founded as a transnational movement from its very beginning. In practice, this means that the day-to-day politics are not led by the party leader, Uffe Elbæk, who instead travels the world, building a wide and diverse network.

Transnationalism whispers something under its breath: the long-term, approximate aim of dismantling the modern nation state, at least as we normally think of it. I don’t think that is what the Alternativists are explicitly about these days, but it certainly lies in the extension of their cosmopolitan, world-centric, ecological political program (with slogans such as “a Denmark that is good for the world”). Issues such as universal freedom of migration, international security, terrorism, internet policing, climate crisis, ecological sustainability, stabilizing international finance and banking, global poverty, basic material security, basic income, labor rights, human and animal rights all share one fundamental trait: they are transnational by nature. They all function through borders and beyond nations.

Basically, there are a growing lot of issues and people and cities that just don’t fit into the nation state. The state can remain, of course, as a kind of administrative and democratic “train station” in a larger meshwork of governance:

To be clear, the transnational way of thinking first of all means that “metamodernists know no borders”, that the ethics and values are world-centric, or perhaps cosmo-centric.

This also means that you refrain from over-essentializing nationalities and ethnicities. Frenchness, Chineseness, Arabicness, the Nordic ideology, the German ideology—it’s all nonsense; just temporary, contingent patterns, cutting through water.

“imagined communities”, continuously being reimagined.

So you can use the features of any one culture or nation state or form of governance, but the goals remain world-centric. The metamodernist does not hate or despise nations or nationalism. It’s just that they are treated instrumentally; a nation is only worth anything to the extent that it serves all humans; indeed, all animals. We seek to hijack these structures, to remote-control them for purposes that lie beyond them.

The metamodern aristocracy are people who have a combination of factors in their psychological, existential and cognitive constitutions that allow them to play a certain role on the new historical world stage (see the developmental models in the second part of this book). But they are also people of social, economic and cultural privilege, who have the time, energy and emotional fuel to expend for abstract endeavors such as developing the future of the world-system.

These people have little else in common than a metamodern perspective.

The Leninist idea of a global, progressive movement with its own power playing, radical vanguard is not all bad. The vanguard just need a much clearer understanding of the development of society, and of developmental psychology, than what Lenin and his contemporaries had. And we need a code of ethics that they lacked—starting with non-violence and a commitment to understand, empathize with and listen to others. The members of this group have to love power. But not the power of self over others; rather, the power of selves and others, the power to self-organize in complex fashions—transpersonal power

Lovers of transpersonal power seek the empowerment of selves and others—realizing that power and freedom are sisters.

Because these netocrats are not after money anymore, or have enough of it, they “imploit” (rather than exploit) people and resources.

To imploit means to use things for their subjective, existential and non-exhaustible value—in a way, to play with them.

The metamodern aristocracy are people who have a combination of two things: great privilege and high personal development. The privilege I speak of is high “total capital” (a concept we get back to in Book Two, Nordic Ideology), meaning that we are not necessarily rich in the conventional sense, but that we have enough opportunities and support around us to do pretty much whatever we want with our lives (so, total capital is a combination of social capital, cultural capital, economic capital, emotional capital, sexual capital and good health). High total capital means that you can live your life relatively unafraid.

personal development, is that we have “high” effective value meme,

They are “hacking the world-soul”, as it were, injecting doses of metamodern DNA into key areas of society, hijacking the political, economic and cultural systems of modern life in order to bring about a more fair, transparent, sustainable and caring future.

Metamodern thinking involves an increased acceptance of the paradoxical nature of things.

I suppose this book is a bit of an invitation to participating in the metamodern aristocracy, to be a co-creator of the new society. So I lay down the analytical bricks, but you get to build the castle (and of course, challenge the ideas and develop them). If I’m Marx, you get to be Lenin.

A lot of people don’t care much about philosophy. Philosophy means the love of truth (or knowledge, more precisely). It is not a specific activity, but the foundation of your reality. You can either be a co-creator of it, or you can be a dog, letting your philosophical reality be created for you by your masters. No offence meant to dogs.

This idea thereby creates a series of smaller “whole” systems, “individuals”, each being a “life project” that ties together many different societal processes into one seamless fabric: childhood, personal life, education, work, family, political opinions, and so on. By use of this idea, modern society finds a golden mean that addresses the dilemma between the whole and the parts: Within each single individual, the many processes of society come together into a whole.

After five years, all mass in our body has been exchanged (at least more than 99%). The life story about our “individual self” is always just that: a story. There really is nothing to our individuality that makes us very unique: All of our wants, dreams, words and ideas come from the social environment.

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)?

such deeper layers of the psyche are fundamentally intertwined with the collective structures of society. For instance: how everyday life in school is, how the labor market is, how love and sex function (or don’t),

the collective structures are largely defined and determined by such deep, psychological processes within each one of us. The French philosopher Deleuze proposes that we should see society as made up by dividuals, i.e. that we all are in fact part of one another and affect one another.

The transpersonal perspective holds two seemingly opposed, but in reality complementary, positions. The first position is to see society as determined by the deep, inner lives—the most personal relations and tender emotions—of human beings.

The second position is that this deeply human and personal experience is in turn created by societal processes that are largely invisible to each single person, and accessible only through a profound and systematic sociological and psychological analysis of society.