Nordic Ideology: A Metamodern Guide to Politics, Book Two

by Hanzi Freinacht

It is rather, and primarily, a whole world of interrelated mechanisms of controlling and coordinating people’s bodies, minds, personalities and behaviors.

Michel Foucault

Gilles Deleuze,

(such as Art of Hosting and Theory U),

post-communist societies of Eastern Europe? No it’s not.

emotional regime than

As a result, whole cities and villages all over Britain were emptied of young men at the beginning of the war even though conscription had not been introduced yet.

million lives”, and we don’t play along, what does their relative success imply about us? If they then do begin to succeed in their plans, this

than the manifest sublimity of another’s soul.

To deny this is game denial.

To defend suffocating inequalities is game acceptance.

To accept this game of life and to evolve it—...

The enviers won’t know why they’re doing it;

What if no profound and more spiritually satisfying carrot of “intrinsic motivation” presents itself to match all the carrots of immediate gratification? We may unexpectedly find ourselves choosing the Pleasure Palace and its Dark Playgrounds of infomercials and virtual reality over truth and meaning; endless distractions, spectatorship, consumption, perpetually unfinished wound-licking, ever refined excuses, and procrastination, procrastination, procrastination. Endless fast carbs, endless gratification at the expense of meaning and dignity. Oh, the digital vanilla prison—oh, the candy cotton hell! For all its terrible and visceral materiality, our slavery to negative social

In actual slavery under penalty of death, at least we need not take any real responsibility for our own selves, beyond obedience. In slavery to guilt, we need not construct our own morality. In slavery to shame, we need not find our own path in life; only comply with what the neighbors might think.

have described an important aspect of the fear of freedom. A keen observer of this predicament was Erich Fromm, the Freudo-Marxist social psychologist

have

We must learn to discipline ourselves—to crack the code of how inner self-discipline is taught and acquired.

And people will only give you recognition if they are unable to take it from you, i.e. if there is a power balance in place.

Cows “give” us milk but receive no recognition because they are powerless in our bovine-oppressive society.

Recognition is a networked tagging game; a game of performances and displays.

Admiration, attraction and respect are things that occur automatically, as a result of our emotional, social and cultural wiring.

Ours is a tragic universe, where universal love cannot be the simple answer.

Any attempt to be genuinely loving of the unloved will prove unsustainable.

And we all know, perhaps apart from the unconditional love of mothers for their children, that all that matters in life, at the most sensitive and intimate level, can be taken away from us. Hence, we cannot give our care and recognition freely.

(why should the footballer be recognized when great poets like “myself”

It leads us to give unhelpful and unsolicited advice,

Recognition cannot be forced to be given, nor can it be redistributed like material wealth, nor can it be force-fed to the starving. But, again, the fact that equality is paradoxical, and perhaps cannot be “achieved” in any absolute sense, doesn’t mean it cannot develop and grow.

the economic, the social, the physiological, the emotional, the ecological and the informational.

widespread training in posture and physiotherapeutic practices such as “basic body awareness” as proposed by Jacques Dropsy

Gertrud Roxendal; training in uses of body language (which has been shown to affect emotions

(while subtly excluding the less fortunate),

Is not the aim of all struggles for equality, after all, to guarantee that people can live rich and wonderful inner lives,

Society, in this view, is a vast, interconnected fabric of suffering and bliss, pulsating and reverberating with multitudes upon multitudes of lived experiences.

And it certainly doesn’t mean that we no longer care about inequalities and injustices—which Buddhism is often accused of by the Left.

envy.

spirituality, especially of the New Age kind, is a dangerous distraction from “real” societal issues and social engagement—and that self-improvement courses offer an “individualization”

spirituality and self-improvement are in effect magnifying glasses of class distinctions.

proficient. But if you are on the opposite end of this class spectrum—and you have little money, little access to good information, little ability to critically evaluate wild claims and promises, and generally find yourself in a more desperate situation (in a “scarcity mindset”)—you are likely to be sold ineffective magic gems, expensive diet supplements, fortune teller services, astrological consulting and all manner of harmful bogus ideas

Your spiritual beliefs simply make you vulnerable to crude exploitation.

Far from all people have a rich spiritual life, but in the minority who does adopt spiritual worldviews, class differences are increased.

And then, on the low end of the scale, we have what I call the astrology precariat.[72] Here the magic beliefs of desperate people result in a heightened vulnerability, which leads to a cruel commercialization of the human soul.

conspiracy theories, aliens, ghosts, past lives, “healing”, alternatives to vaccine, Scientology, divination—the

precariat

And then you just spent the last year paying healers to help you when what you really needed was to get your life and finances more organized.

even beyond equality, taking us closer to equivalence and equanimity.

The suggested developmental models show us non-linear attractor points.

Modern politics leaves us severely underequipped at productively addressing these new life conditions that technological progress, global interconnectedness and existential threats to civilization bring about.

sooner rather than later? I don’t think it is. Hence—remember: millions of lives at stake. At non-linear, long-term stake, but still.

“the view from complexity” which sees self-organizing chaos and fractals (rather than focusing on social power structures). Phew.