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We live, essentially, in a retarded world. Our value systems do not correspond to the society we live in. Our ways of seeing, sensing, feeling, acting and understanding do not correspond to the very society that we ourselves have created. This glitch is lethal. And this is the issue of our age: to develop the political psychology of the world population. Unfortunately, stimulating such political-psychological development is an enormously tricky matter.
Development in each of the four dimensions I have presented adds to your overall effective value meme.
Higher state (average, median, minimum and maximum) adds to your effective value meme because it means that you live in a lighter world, which gives you the emotional fuel to accept a more universalistic and less selfish view of society. This is necessary in larger and more complex societies. Greater depth adds to your effective value meme, because it makes you relate to more profound and universal aspects of reality and existence, which is also increasingly necessary in a globalized internet age.
The Metamodern value meme is less judgmental; it seeks to integrate elements from all the former ones; it sees partial truths in all of them; it wants to integrate them in one grand synergistic scheme, and seeks to accommodate them—to create a society in which traditional, modern and postmodern people live together harmoniously.
The second characteristic is that they value inner dimensions much more. So you will find that people of this value meme seek to create more authenticity and intimacy in work organization, to democratize institutions with clever social innovations, to promulgate mindfulness and meditation practices, to emphasize more philosophical and existential issues in their work. They will tend to be very process-oriented, trying to involve people in interactive processes a lot more.
ways that are cancerous to the ecosystems and the whole biosphere. The glory of the world and its greatest sorrows have the same source: developmental imbalances—the fact that some things develop ahead of others and that some parts are always lagging behind. And it is these strange glitches and paradoxes that propel the world in its non-linear, dialectical journey towards greater beauty, tragedy and mystery. To understand the world, you must not only understand development, but the fundamental role that developmental imbalances play in the universe.
Can you see now that development matters? That inner dimensions matter? Can you see that we need to balance science and cognitive complexity with inner growth—and vice versa?
But if I had to choose one, I would go with state. We need to, above all, improve the subjective states of all humans. It is the only dimension that is ethically unproblematic to wish for people.
Our ability as a society to support the growth into higher stages is not only an ethical imperative—as our current societies are full of inexcusable suffering—but a requirement for our emerging global society to thrive and survive.
The new game of life looks a lot like this: Whoever has mastered the most perspectives when she dies, wins.
into so many fractions and factions. Metamodernists define themselves through the struggle of value memes against value memes: It’s not if you’re Right or Left that matters the most, but how complex your thinking is.
To see that inner experience—and the direct development of the subjectivity of organisms—is crucial to all things, and is perhaps the main ingredient lacking in the perspective of the modern world; acknowledging inner experience is often the golden key to managing society’s problems.
To believe that we can always synthesize the knowledge we have about society to some kind of overarching narrative, a meta-narrative, but that this metanarrative is never taken to be a complete synthesis, but rather always a self-critically held, but necessary protosynthesis.
Collective intelligence is simply the ability of a group or society to solve problems and respond to collective challenges.
To adopt a depth psychology stance towards humanity, seeing that her consciousness is transformable by changing her fundamental sense of self and sense of reality. This is achievable through psychoanalysis (or “schizoanalysis”) and love relationships as well as athletic, aesthetic, erotic, intellectual and spiritual practices—where contemplative mysticism stands out as a very valuable path.
