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

by Hanzi Freinacht

an apparent paradox: To really see the singular human being, to really respect her rights and uniqueness, we must go beyond the idea of the individual; we must see through it and strive to see how society is present within each single person as well as in the relationships through which she is born as a “self”. We go from the idea of the individual (vs. “the collective”), to simply seeing society as an evolving, interlinked set of transindividuals. This is the transpersonal perspective. It’s not just that we are each a billiard ball that “interacts” with other people. We co-emerge. Or, as the physicist-philosopher Karen Barad has put it: we intra-act.

cranially conjoined child twins (meaning that their heads are partly physically merged into one) from Vancouver, Krista and Tatiana Hogan, who seem to be able to pass visual impressions to one another directly through their brains: You can ask one girl what the other sees and she will know.

Nowhere can you find a single, individual “self”; it’s always connected to everything around us.

The idea of the listening society serves the transindividual: The human being is seen as more than a unique, separate life story. The idea of the transindividual sees the human being as inseparable from her language, her deep unconscious, her relations, roles, societal positions, values, emotions, developmental psychology, biological organism and so forth. Each human being is viewed as an open and social process, a whirlwind of participation and co-creation of society. Society as a whole is viewed as a self-organizing system which creates such transindividuals who are in turn able to recreate society.

It is by looking at deep psychological issues, the inner development of each of us, and how such properties are generated within society, that we address the core of society’s problems.

Because the terrible truth is that Breivik is you and me. He is a direct result of the society we create and uphold every day. He is not an alien force. He is that kid from school who came back and killed our kids. It’s all interconnected. We are all interconnected. Obviously Breivik is an extreme example of social deviance, but he emerges in continuity with the rest of us. Somehow, we are made of the same stuff. The answer to the horror show that Breivik unleashed is to be found deep within ourselves.

Our failure as a society to see this interconnectedness is the real explanation that people flip out and become murderous Nazis. None of the other perspectives can stop the next Breivik; only a transpersonal perspective can. To serve the individual—or the collective—is thus increasingly becoming regressive and harmful. “The individual” and “the collective” are analytically faulty positions. We are not simply balancing individual and collective interests; we are attacking both in the name of the transindividual. To see human beings as “individuals” in an obviously interconnected and co-evolving universe is not only poor social philosophy. It is an unforgivable insult to the greatness of the human soul. We are more than individuals; we are much larger beings. This is why, in a transpersonal perspective, I can say in all sincerity: Death to the individual. Long live the dividual—or the transindividual.

If you look at the pattern that emerges, you would think that these rings and crosses must be really racist. But that’s not necessarily the case. They’re just a little racist. The dramatic segregation is an emergent property of the system as a whole.

Reiner contended that categorical discrimination—the one we generally think of when it comes to police racism—is the least powerful mechanism. In other words, Reiner was telling us that the rules of the game generated racism and discrimination (rather than the racism of the police officers themselves).[55]

With the view from complexity you see, again, that racism is an emergent pattern; a phenomenon that emerges not through the actions of individual people, but as a result of the interactions of many different people.

Surely it must be the social power of males and patriarchy, allied to capitalism, that subjects us to this treatment? Well, think about it. If only some people are only a little more likely to buy things when the person on the commercial is more good-looking, this means that the companies that have more good-looking people in their ads will sell a little more. And in the long run, they will outcompete those that don’t.

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.

But there is really no reason to assume that the invisible hand only does benevolent things. The moment we look away, it can also subject us to racism, sexism and environmental degradation. The view from complexity may seem less exiting than images of a villainous patriarchy or the grim towers of capitalism.

But here’s the deal. 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. To the metamodernist, there are almost no bad-guys left, nobody and nothing to blame: not even an impersonal structure. With the view from complexity, there is only the painstaking tweaking of many small things that can help us fix the failures of our society and mitigate the tragedies of existence. Fighting the power structures and killing the Jews might be more exciting. But it won’t solve our problems, I’m afraid.

Jonathan Haidt shows us how liberal and conservative values seem to match each other and create a sum greater than its parts.

On the surface, metamodern politics and the Nordic ideology, with its Green Social Liberalism 2.0 and the vision of the listening society and a vast expansion of welfare into the social-psychological realms of life, might look like a far-left project. And, in many ways, it is. We are, after all, looking to dramatically increase the quality of welfare that each citizen enjoys. But note that we have not said anything about how, through which mechanisms, such a development takes place: by democratically controlled state bureaucracy, by market solutions or the civil sphere (or, more likely, by synergistic development of all three).

For instance, do “free markets” work more or less efficiently than state bureaucracies? The answer depends on what area of society we are studying,

prejudices. To a priori assume that democratic control through public bureaucracy is more efficient, fair and morally superior to a “free market” solution is simply nonsensical. It is a religious belief in the negative sense of the word. In the future, people will look at these beliefs, being Left or Right, much as we today look at medieval beliefs such as being Christian or Muslim.

It all depends on what institutions, levels of psychological development, technologies and information processes we have available—and which area of social life we are discussing.

A large part of this issue is to transcend one’s own political allergies. Let’s try out a few words, allergies of the Left: market, power, capitalism, authority, profit—and of the Right: radical, social, feminism, revolution, public.

One needs to recognize that these are not inherent essences or givens. They can all be good or bad, depending on the context—and more pertinently, they are all good and bad. It just makes relatively little sense to “hate” or “be against” such vague and open categories as “the market”. It limits your thinking. It makes you dumb.

The three systems depend upon one another for their functioning, for their very existence.

In some important ways, the systems have become more independent from one another under modernity, during the last 200 years or so. As Weber’s classical sociology established, the genius of modernity, the spirit of modern society, is its ability to tease out different dimensions of social reality from one another: 1. the rational/scientific objective truth, 2. the subjective/personal aesthetic, and 3. the interpersonal/moral realm. You can’t burn someone at the stake for making a scientific claim anymore.

However, such a teasing out (with a fancier word: differentiation) of the different dimensions of social life is never complete. The systems interpenetrate. They continue to affect one another. When a modern society fails to differentiate these three spheres, this brings all kinds of social diseases:

But the glory of modernity has a dark side: In the meantime we become split up; the same person is a family member, a citizen and a professional. These spheres of life are kept at a certain distance from one another. This is one of the major sources of alienation in modern society. In sociology, this nasty baby goes by many names (all of which catch slightly different meanings): fragmentation, the postmodern condition, the corrosion of character, and so forth. But society is now shifting past this stage. In our days, democracy, markets and the civil sphere are finding new ways of saturating one another.

So you need to keep three stages in mind. One: markets, politics and personal relations are not clearly differentiated; two: in modern society these three spheres gain a great measure of independence from one another; three: in metamodern society, these three spheres are being re-integrated, ideally without any one of them dominating or contaminating the other two. Examples of this re-integration abound. Let’s mention just a few: Market mechanisms applied to public sector organization;

The growing re-integration of these three different spheres of social life—the civic (politics, democracy, bureaucracy, public), the professional (market exchange) and the personal (the civil sphere, family life, communities)—requires of us a kind of political thought that does not take one of the dimensions as fundamental or inherently superior to the other two. We must see the totality of social and political life. This is what it means to go beyond Left and Right, and this is the philosophy which allows us to update the Nordic ideology into effective metamodern politics.

At a very trivial level it is of course easy to see how no one political movement or direction can be the eternally “correct” one.

The philosophical principle of metamodern politics is as simple as it is elegant. This principle holds that social life is of fractal nature, and that society consists of three interdependent dimensions that always repeat themselves but ultimately depend on one another: solidarity, trade and competition.

The unstated, irrational belief that people have, is that one of these three dimensions somehow makes up a higher truth than the other two. The Left somehow believes, in a subtle but pervasive manner, that solidarity is the highest truth. The libertarian Right believes that trade is the first principle. The conservative and the fascist believe in their hearts that fierce competition lies beyond the other two, that it ultimately defines social reality. The metamodern political activist makes no such mistake, has no such prejudices, and recognizes that each of these three beliefs is equally dishonest and violent against the nature of reality.

Now look at any relationship, let’s stay with a friendship. Does it not contain at least an ounce of competition? Does it not contain trade, an exchange where both parties gain something valuable? In fact, if there is no gain at all for one party, it is difficult to imagine how the friendship could be sustainable. Would a one-sided friendship not amount to exploitation? And does the definition of a friendship not subtly exclude the non-friend—which again means that it relies upon competition?

At its heart, metamodern political thought fully accepts and acknowledges these three dimensions of social life: solidarity, trade and competition (and their intertwined, fractal nature). As such, it avoids the self-imposed blind spots of the Left and Right, going beyond them as analytical categories.

You can play the same game with another, related triad: equality, freedom and order. They sometimes work against one another, sometimes create synergies—but they cannot even exist without one another.

Another foundational metamodern principle holds that you must continuously doubt your own ideological position. People are good at reconstructing their past, telling themselves that they always had this or that opinion or worldview. In reality, people are a lot more flexible, adjusting as we go along in order to fit the norms. How on Earth did everyone (at least in the Nordic countries) go from being homophobic to being pro-gay rights in just a few decades? We all neatly and discreetly changed our views when new social pressures arose. Look very honestly at yourself—how many of your current views did you really hold ten years ago?

I have already mentioned the bizarre notion of one ideology or movement or just a relative direction such as “left” or “right” being “the correct one”. In retrospect, it is quite obvious that the grinding of different ideas and perspectives against one another has been necessary for today’s “correct” opinions to evolve—including the ones that you currently hold to be correct. The dialectic that unfolds through the interactions of different perspectives seems to be an integral and necessary part of each political movement. There can be no Left without a Right. The Left needs the Right, would be impossible without it; it would lose all energy and meaning without this polarity. To see that perspectives and movements co-evolve doesn’t mean that you cannot choose sides. Some people still turn out to be right, and others mistaken. But one group or movement or perspective is never continuously correct in all conceivable ways. The metamodernist can choose sides only from a transpartisan position—you understand that there is always a larger process that goes beyond and through your current ideological, partisan position. There is always something to learn from the other parties, even from your most bitter adversary. And your purposes are often best served by using the interplay of different parties and perspectives, rather than by taking one monolithic path.

We are not only speaking of fields of expertise. We can all readily admit that the heart surgeon has skills and understanding that we lack, or that a physicist has insights that would put us to shame were we to discuss how sound waves function. But other than that, we tend to take our more common everyday understanding of reality, ourselves and society as relatively correct.

Indeed, the very fact that we manage to take ourselves this seriously, when we are almost certain to be utterly blind, confused and downright mistaken about so many, so fundamental issues, can only be described as a form of madness. We are all staring at the incomprehensible, absurd mess that is reality—and with the glazed eyes of mad conviction, we somehow manage to believe that we really get it. Preposterous, really. Socrates, as you know, taught that the wisest of the Greeks is he who realizes that he knows nothing (which was himself, by the way). There are Chinese proverbs and Confucian teachings to the same effect. Socratic unknowing saturates the metamodern understanding of politics. This principle necessitates a certain approach to all matters social and political: the non-linear process.

A cute way of saying this, that a lot of people like, is that both the mind and society are ecosystems. They self-regulate, self-reproduce, keep up a certain “homeostasis” for periods of time, and then they either develop or crash through crisis.

The point is that the ecosystem as a whole develops as a result of many autonomous parts that both compete and cooperate in complex (indeed, as I have said, fractal) ways.

So our goals and efforts evolve; they always turn out to be something different than we initially think. This is why we need to engage in non-linear politics.

People have a strong propensity towards linear thinking. Non-linear thinking often befuddles us; it just seems counter-intuitive. But our intuitions betray us.

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.

In other words, we can partake in non-linear politics, where we simply know that whatever we think we are working for is going to turn out to be something entirely different and that we are going to need the best possible democratic processes for this dialectic to play out successfully. So in metamodern, non-linear politics we don’t work according to a certain plan going from A to B, but we see the larger, deeper structures of an evolving global society and we play the game of life in accordance with the long-term trends of that picture, in order to increase the likelihood of certain desirable events to occur. Metamodern activists relentlessly make naive efforts to do great things, things that are unlikely to occur at each attempt, but almost certain to occur in the long run, somewhere, somehow. This may feel a little bit pathetic and embarrassing at times.

The more correct, abstract and complex your map of reality, the greater non-linearity you can afford in your thinking and agency, since you hook up with deeper and more universal structures of how society is evolving. That is how it works: The Heracles, Prometheus or Achilles of our age is whoever can think the most abstractly and act the most non-linearly—those who can live with and skillfully handle uncertainty and not be paralyzed by it. To do so, one must manage to stay determined even when the expected paths and results are largely unknown.

That being said, we still need a sense of direction. So we go ahead to sincerely building a listening society, a deeper kind of welfare, a new kind of politics and economy. We go ahead with informed naivety, with an ironic smile at our own self-importance.

Metamodern political thinking constitutes a breach with liberalism and liberal democracy as we know them. We can no longer take the stance of the liberal innocent. It is this innocent that has to die. We must hereby issue a fatwa; shoot on sight. The liberal innocent holds a few deeply seated beliefs that hail from the modern, industrial view of life, existence and society—beliefs that I contend are outdated and increasingly harmful. The first such belief is that one can hold a “pure” or “correct” ideological position within a parliamentarian party system; that one can be “on the right side” of things, the Left, the Right or something similar. But this is increasingly becoming an untenable position. As I have argued, liberal democracy cancels itself the same moment as its ideals are approached.

In reality, liberal democracy in industrial society has been a party-political trench war between working class (worker, employee) and bourgeois (industry, professional, consumer, share owner) interests. Industrial society, its classes and categories, has spliced aspects of us into different shards, from which political identities have been formed.

What we hailed as liberal democracy was never based on deliberation about the common good, but rather on the dialectic between conflicting interests, checked in a dynamic power balance. It is only when industrial society fully blooms into postindustrial society (and education levels rise dramatically and class distinctions and the categories of class become blurred), that liberal democracy begins to live up to its own mythos as a deliberation between equal citizens. In such societies we begin to observe a situation in which arguments and reasoning of informed citizens actually do matter.

But that democracy is losing ground is a superficial analysis, an illusion. Truth be told, democracy (as the rule of informed, deliberating citizens) is only becoming real once society develops past the trench wars of industrial class parties.

The divisions, not the unity, that made possible the party system we know as “liberal democracy”, are breaking down. So when democracy begins to fulfill its promise of a people ruling itself through deliberation—it ironically wrecks the whole game that we know as party politics, around which our democratic system is built, because the necessary party division interests break down. By its dialectic development, by the logic of its own productive contradictions, liberal democracy cancels itself. In this strange new state of affairs we have every reason to engage in an open-ended, democratic dialogue and deliberation with one another—to do “real” democracy, more according to the classical and Habermasian ideals. But the system of governance is still running on the engine of a modern, industrial society.