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

by Hanzi Freinacht

14. Paradigmatic Stage (mid-twenties and above, if at all) Can deal with several very abstract metasystems to create new ways of thinking of the world, new paradigms, new sciences or branches within sciences. Has a fractal way of thinking, so that the universal principles found are applicable to many different levels of analysis and phenomena. Prevalence unknown, but if the pattern holds and every stage seems to increase with about a standard deviation[86], it should be a little more than one adult in a thousand in a normal population, mostly at ages 25+. This makes it rare, but still some three million people in the world (one thousandth of the functional adults above 25). Although the stage is theoretically formulated, there is no reliable test for it.[87]

This is also in line with what Noam Chomsky’s linguistic theory would suggest; that we should view language as a biological property of humans.

older Western sources, from the early 20th century or the 19th century, the word “intelligence” is sometimes used synonymously with “consciousness”, which is an unfortunate mistake, one that sometimes haunts everyday parlance to this day.

This, among other things, has implications for the whole “intelligent machines” debate.

IQ-tests will primarily measure horizontal complexity

“intelligence” should perhaps be seen as a combination of horizontal and vertical complexity.

Why then aren’t all the high IQ folks over at Triple Nine Society doing the same as von Neumann? Because they don’t also have exceptionally high cognitive MHC stage, that’s why. Their “cognitive pyramids” are wide but not necessarily tall.

when it comes to spiritual or existential development, von Neumann was about average, like the most of us. He was exceptionally intelligent, but probably not exceptionally “wise”.

The order of complexity is not the same as “difficulty”, which is much more context bound.

Abstract thinker will simply insist upon having both: more dialogue and less time-consuming squabble. This is the less complex form of both-and thinking:

different methods for depending on

At this stage we don’t really produce our own theories or solutions, simply following the rules and habits set out by others. We can of course still be intelligent (high IQ), artistic, imaginative, skilled and so forth.

The high esteem that “interdisciplinarity” holds within academia these days is really a vaguely formulated grasp for stage 13 Metasystematic solutions.

Stage 12 Systematic thinkers will tend to have less rigid opinions but more rigid argumentations. So one way to spot them is simply to ask them questions about their opinions:

Stage 12 Systematic thinkers tend to believe that the world consists of systems and their properties. So you find a strong bias towards explanations of this kind: structures, patterns, regularities, the economy, the biological body, Darwinian evolution, the gender norms and so forth.

there is no self-regulating feedback cycle directly present between our economic and technological expansion and the ecosystems upon which we depend. This lack of feedback means that we have to drive the ecosystem to collapse before the market self-adjusts. We must thereby create some other feedback, e.g. by means of policy, public awareness or cultural development.

could start seeing the people around me (and myself) with their help. And an almost terrifying pattern emerged: People, including colleagues and loved ones, seemed to never—never-ever—produce ideas or thoughts above a certain stage, even if they were “smart” and skilled in many ways.

But if mhc is really a fancy way of describing ratio/thinking as opposed to intellectus/intuition, even a less rationally developed person might out-create a highly mhc-developed person

The ideas are always reused versions of things others have said, or simply applications of these ideas, or at most a small, often rather questionable, tweak to someone else’s theory.

Yes, but isn't that a product of the idea of dividuals, Batesons "ecology of mind", where we're all having each others thoughts?

you can take a word, symbol, sentence or even an attitude, that originated at a higher order of complexity, and still use it. Your use of that symbol will then inevitably follow the logic of your own stage, but it might still bring some meaning with it, and you can perhaps partake in conversations that would otherwise lie beyond your own stage of complexity. The complex symbol is assimilated “downwards”.

The example of CSR-talking, sometimes even awarded for by businss press ec, greedy-and/or-unsatiable-as-usual business people with planetary unsustainable life styles

102]

This footnote is the most profound insight so far in this book. Don't fall in love with a theory. Fall in love with something alive instead, I assume Gregory Bateson would have said. Is Hansi in love with MHC, a very partial theory of people and the workings of society and existance? MHC, in my eyes, bears resemblance with it's creator - a highly rational and seemingly non-emphatic personality. To divine ones ones characteristics as the highest form of intellect is the oldest mindfuck in the history of Great White Thinking Men.

Through language and interaction you create a “scaffold” that helps the other person to partake in behaviors that would otherwise be beyond his or her cognitive stage.

A Memetic Machine that nudges the general unenligthened population towards less egocentric and more planetary oriented ethics?

The common language also “stores” structures and patterns for us to use, so that a certain thought or behavior becomes more easily attainable.

As I have observed while learning to program. Code snippets and patterns encoded in ready made code Libraries such as Scikit-learn or Seaborn is a helpful sort of cognitive scaffolding that prevents cognitive overload of details when trying to grasp the general ideas of (data) science.

scaffolding is the other side of the coin of “downward assimilation”; when we grasp for notions that are out of our cognitive depth, we also stretch our minds, and we come under the influence of thoughts and ideas that would otherwise be beyond us.

This reasonining is not a valid argument that predicting e.g. the MHC-level of a person from linguistic patterns in their digital footprints is impossible. Rather that what is needed is more context; averages, more situations, non-linguistic indicators such as job, life style etc

We simply misinterpret the MHC stages because of their dependence on contexts and interactions.

Yes, Hansi is aware of the context problrm

we have three more dimensions of adult development (code, state and depth), and also IQ, specific skills, different levels of education, psychological health, and different ways to evaluate each other’s smarts.

And this is where Hansi's theoretical framework seems to go down the same boundless rabbithole as Wilbers Integral Theory. Yes it might be more correct in several aspects, but is it operationizable (if that is even a word) in a social or political contextin competition with stage 11 (?) guiding principles and rules of thumb that might be faster and morr intelligable for the grass roots?

and even to wear that skeptical conclusion as a badge of anti-reductionist honor, as a mark of our own open-mindedness, humility and spirituality.

Or jadedness, perhaps even cynicism about Great White Male thinking systems.

Types are those things that really are beyond hierarchical comparison, indeed “same, same but different”.

I agree and also warn about unconciously putting Ordered logical type (E.g. Jungs serious and concerned Intuitive-Thinking) over chaotic feeling (e.g. Funloving and concrete caring Sensing-Feeling) in the ethical-emphatic sense.

If you are to prove that stage theories are wrong, you are obliged to puncture the so far solid research program of the adult development,

If you want to "punctuate" the reverse; e.g. The chaotic and experience based wisdom of parenting you either have to convince a billion non-priveledged parents or, which costs a lot less, slam a research report in their heads via mass media.

Good luck with that.

Exactly. As Wilber points out - their is a epistemological hegemony favouring empirical science over introspection, hermeneutics and the like subjective knowledge production approaches since the Enlightenment. Hansi might get priveledges handedto him from Rationality biased business people and indirectly from the same people via academic funding as long as he favours objective modes of knowledge production and conventional wisdom theories such as Big Five and soon maybe MHC and proclaims an official intellectual distance to truly holistic and therefore questionable from all sides in the culture wars thinkers such as Wilber or maybe a Fritjof Capra or other Buddhist-Physcisist type of thinkers.

Listen, the fact is that people are of different cognitive stages, plain and simple. Deal with it, and use it for something good.

OK, now we're talking. Funny how the defensive tone of the previous paragraphs provoces a confrontational tone in me, the reader.

If you have kids, you may have noticed how surprisingly often these keen little creatures can correct us, in spite of their “lower” cognitive stage.

Exactly. Hansi is aware of this Occasional non-rational superiority, good

The point is to create processes in which people’s perspectives make up a part of a larger whole, a whole which resides at a higher order of complexity.

Like when you try to manage a communal apartment house with a communal kitchen and a communa garden. ;-) /the secretary of the economic association Aengsviksgarden

cognitive development seems to be relatively inherent to the single person, what about the language structures that the same person has available?

Did my dinner presentation about linguistic analysis of Spiral Dynamics at Maria Dolores house, which Daniel (and Tomas Bjoerkman) attended and Daniel high-jacked to tell about this coming book influence him to Put such an emphasis on the problem with language as a proxy for cognitive style?

There is something real in the logic of how each symbolic universe is constructed, and this realness forces the direction of human history.

“History developing in a certain direction? Pah! Surely Hanzi has not been paying attention in university history class the last few decades. We all know that is nonsense!”

Think about it: What comes first—the wheel, the combustion engine or the airplane? Could we imagine a “historical contingency” in which the airplane would come first?

Is there a Realdialektik to this, a logical directionality, or is it just me?

We are speaking of the evolutionary development of memes (non-biological cultural patterns that spread through communication)—where some memes can only show up in more complex societies.

Memetics

there is a dialectical development inherent to the symbols of culture, and that this makes it possible to arrange the metamemes (or cultural logics that people follow) into several stages.

There is always a rough, underlying story (narrative) about reality from which humans operate, from which they create new “code”, new knowledge.

The scientific modern metanarrative makes me go on a quest to find mind patterns in digital footprints?

they don’t really make the distinction between cognition and language, but that’s the idea they’re all getting at without quite catching it. They all smash the different dimensions of development together into one single sequence.

Important. The downward assimilation and scaffolding ideas are reasonable objections to the notion that cognition and language are inseparable.

he instead reduces development to it (in his model, you become “ultramodern” as you reach the postformal stages, so his model in effect stops at modernity).

The fact that someone is at stage 13 Metasystematic (or even above), does not mean that they use a Metamodern symbolic toolkit when describing the world.

As can be seen in experience and empirics analyzing twitter texts; a lot more prople use words like complexity or systematic than can reasonable be at that stage. Even well-known stupid people (no names please) use words above their level e.g. Sustainability or even strategy

The vast majority of prominent scientists in the world today, while often cognitively being at MHC stages 13, 14 and even 15, still primarily rely on the modern symbolic toolkit.

But isn't that because a higher level transcends and INCLUDES the former ones?

The majority of people with access to postmodern code accordingly use a “flattened” and simplified version of it.

people are very likely to use simplified interpretations of e.g. political metamodernism.

Good, Hansi is aware of that

People at MHC stage Abstract 10 or below also tend to misinterpret and simplify modern science.

As seen in the popularist scepticism of new findings from researchers via tabular press

The code is its own developmental dimension, not to be confused with the cognitive hardware. And it is developed collectively through the ongoing use of language throughout history, then “downloaded” by the single human organism, who then uses her MHC stage (and, as we shall see, the two other dimensions of development) to interpret the code,

stage 12 Systematic thinkers to gravitate towards symbol-stage F Postmodern (critical thinking, counterculture, etc.);

The Eco-Hippie professor

Am I being teleological? Nay. All I am saying is that there is a pattern or logic inherent to this kind of development, and that this pattern can be described. It’s the same as saying that when a child grows, they will become taller and gain weight. That’s it.