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

by Hanzi Freinacht

Political metamodernism is built around one central insight. The king’s road to a good future society is personal development and psychological growth.

So we’re looking for a “deeper” society; a civilization more socially apt, emotionally intelligent and existentially mature.

There are three different parts of political metamodernism: 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. A society in which everyone is seen and heard (rather than manipulated and subjected to surveillance, which are the degenerate siblings of being seen and heard). 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, and seeks to improve the general climate of political discourse: “I develop if you develop. Even if we don’t agree, we come closer to the truth if we

create better dialogues and raise the standards for how we treat one another.” 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. It is called the Nordic ideology because its early sprouts are cropping up in and around Scandinavia. It includes a vision of six new forms of politics, all of which work together to profoundly recreate society. 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 ...

We are likely to see new and unexpected forms of societies emerge, for better or worse. It is in this regard that the Nordic countries offer an interesting case. If we truly want to understand the development of the global economy and the emergence of its political, cultural and socio-psychological landscapes, we should not confine our analytical gaze to the aftermaths of the Arab Spring or the struggling Kurdish state. In this coherent world-system, we should look for the locations where people have the preconditions to write new values on new tablets.

In this perspective it becomes apparent that the Nordic countries are by far the most progressive societies that the world has ever seen. It is here that we are most likely to find the values and worldviews that best correspond, in functional terms, to a complex, digitalized, global, transnational, post-industrial society. (Now don’t get cocky and patriotic on me, you stupid Swedes, it’s not about you being better than anyone else.)

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.[21]

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.

We are witnessing the rise of the digitalized, globalized, transnational, postindustrial society—and its discontents. The nationalist resurgence is only that: the outdated, the outgunned, the outmaneuvered. That does not make the confusion and suffering of the losing side any less real.

other sensitivities towards our day and age) can be considered as such. 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. You’ll

The hipsters I refer to produce the many symbols that help us to orientate ourselves in, make sense of, and find meaning in the global, digital age. Here you find a wide array of artists, designers, thinkers, social entrepreneurs, writers and bloggers. They develop the ideas of posthumanism, transhumanism, complexity and network researchers, participatory forms of politics and social movements, critique

The hippies are the people who produce new lifestyles, habits and practices that make life in postindustrial society happier, healthier and, perhaps, more enchanted. 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.

So the hippies are becoming a force to recon with because they provide social and personal technologies for maintaining health, happiness, community and a sense of enchantment to an increasingly strange and alienating world. Sometimes, this takes the form of vegan diets, sustainable lifestyles, organic farming for self-sufficiency, and relative withdrawals from modern life.

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. This means that they work by another social and economic logic than any of the old groups in industrial society. Of course, this is an outflow of postmaterialist and highly individualized societies, in which significant parts of the population have the luxury to think much less about how to pay the bills and more about how they can change the world. Bangladesh is not full of triple-H; California is. Because of the idiosyncratic nature of their many endeavors, the triple-H folks find it hard to “fit in” within the classical, hierarchical and meritocratic organizations.

Which brings us to the third thing that unites the triple-H: their common vested interest as a postindustrial class. In this sense, these people are the real “creative class”.

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.

You see a corresponding pattern of polarization if you look across countries. Some are dominated by the discontents of globalization, like Russia. Hence, polarization is not only a fact within countries, but also between countries. The US is caught in the middle, split in half, as it were—and it can develop in either direction.

Today we are experiencing an era in which several extremely far-reaching revolutions of technology, thinking and behavior are occurring simultaneously. For better and/or worse, profound changes are very likely to take place in the coming decades.

Look at the rapid changes of organizational structures, where the forms of creative work have formally exploded—some examples being LEAN, AGILE, SCRUM, sociocracy, holacracy, the whole Art of Hosting movement and Frederic Laloux’s Reinventing Organizations.[24]

We need directions, but these directions must necessarily be of an abstract, open-ended nature. We don’t need cookbooks; we need general ideas on how to create good cookbooks, so to speak. We need stories about stories. Meta-narratives.

Deliberately and carefully cultivate a deeper kind of welfare system that includes the psychological, social and emotional aspects of human beings, so that the average person, over the length of her lifespan, becomes much more secure, authentic and happy (in a deep, meaningful sense of the word).

We are talking about 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. We are not talking about shoving some formula for the good life down everybody’s throat. We’re talking about creating likelihoods for good conditions.

The fact that happiness isn’t everything, doesn’t make it into nothing. Happiness still matters very much if you want to understand the problems of society. A growing host of research from the field of “positive psychology” and other fields, including strands of medicine and epigenetics, shows that happiness is good for you. A

Let’s return to the main argument. People are hurting as hell. It matters. We should do something to make them happier, if we can.

The suffering and stunted development of our citizens are not individual concerns, but matters of utmost importance to society as a whole. They are deeply political, ecological and economic matters. The stunted development caused by emotional suffering affects the individual’s quality of life as well as basic societal concerns such as security, public health and the stability of our institutions.

We desperately need a deeper kind of welfare, beyond the confines of material welfare and medical security—a listening society, where every person is seen and heard (rather than made invisible and then put under surveillance). How can this be achieved?

We are speaking about conscious and deliberate social-psychological and cultural development.

The listening society saves the welfare system, by being much more efficient and socially sustainable than our current system, thereby being more affordable in the long run.

What we are talking about is the deliberate, long-term management of deep, complex, social-psychological issues.

What is lacking in our day and age is the ability for people to manage complex problems that require patience, knowledge, oversight, creativity, mutual trust and friendly co-operation across sectors, scientific disciplines, cultures and subcultures. In a phrase: the management of complexity. Or, with a term we shall get back to, we require greater collective intelligence.

Collective and personal meaning-making is another big part of this. People need to be able to create their own life stories, their own narratives about the world, to find their own meaning.

The listening society is, plainly, much more powerful in a digitalized global economy, than is the capitalist liberal democracy.

human development drives economic growth.

It works through two major mechanisms. The first mechanism is that people learn the skill of self-awareness, calming their own minds and not overreacting. That is of course useful in all walks of life. The second mechanism—and perhaps the more important one—is that it changes your mental and emotional state then and there.

Emotional intelligence, Goleman-style, includes: Self-awareness: the ability to know one’s emotions, strengths, weaknesses, drives, values and goals and recognize their impact on others while using gut feelings to guide decisions. Self-regulation: involves controlling or redirecting one’s disruptive emotions and impulses and adapting to changing circumstances. Social skill: managing relationships to move people in the desired direction. Empathy: considering other people's feelings especially when making decisions. Motivation: being driven to achieve for the sake of achievement.

Metamodern principles are already inherent to the contradictions of modern society; late modern society is pregnant with metamodernism. People need irony in order to build interpersonal trust based on self-knowledge, humor and critical thinking. Only when such trust is in place can we successfully gather around a meaningful struggle for something greater than ourselves, like the climate crisis. There, another ironic quirk of our age: Irony brings trust. And trust crowns a winner.

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. It also means that you have a general way of thinking where the nation state or region are not the primary categories of society, but rather just tools or train stations in a longer journey of the historical development of governance, of human self-organization.

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.[48]

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 (“transpersonal” is explained in the following chapter). Not your power or mine, but yes, the brutal capability to coordinate living systems, to make events come into being. What we think of as oppressive power is really an expression of imbalances of power, between rich and poor, privileged and deprived, humans and non-human animals.[51]

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

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. We consist of many different influences, roles and perspectives, within a multitude of contexts.

I am offering a related bid for anti-individualism: the transpersonal perspective. 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. This takes the unique lived experience of each human being very seriously. Such lived experience is taken to be the very foundation of society: if there is anger or love in our hearts, if there is peace in our minds, and if all manner of psychological issues have been properly dealt with. Such things determine if we turn out engaged world citizens, mindless consumers or bitter reactionaries. 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.

So this lands us in 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 ...

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...

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.

and press itself upon social and political reality. The truth is that you don’t have the truth; that you never will. And even if you turn out to be right about something, there will always be a time when your opinion is outdated or at least incomplete.

later. Your perspective or opinion always has a systemic limit, a breaking point; it always breaks down under its own weight, just like any engine, organism or economic system.

Once you choose totality, once you begin to see society as a whole, liberal innocence is lost.

Okay, so before we go on, you should know that stage-based adult development theory puts your mind on crack.

here. Real philosophy is a chainsaw up your guts. And in this book, we are chainsawing the world-soul like it’s Friday the 13th.