Nordic Ideology: A Metamodern Guide to Politics, Book Two

by Hanzi Freinacht

That the very social fabric of everyday life can and must be intelligently developed is the essence of political metamodernism.

Order, freedom, equality and norms—all of these evolve and stabilize around certain attractor points.

Appendix B. There you find a theory chapter that is more over-arching, discussing “the four fields of development”—i.e. how psychology, behavior, culture and economy develop together.

intuitive understanding of the way the future exerts a kind of gravitational effect upon the present; that developments in the present in certain ways are pulled towards the unrealized potentials of the future.

Gandhi saw the world was headed towards universal principles like democracy, human rights, racial equality and rule of law, which inevitably would render colonial rule ethically indefensible, even to the colonizers themselves. This enabled him to understand how India could be freed in a peaceful and democratic manner; he knew that history—the long-term attractors—was on his side.

If you still don’t get it: Attractors make you smarter. Gandhi’s understanding of the attractor of a democratic society and national sovereignty enabled him to “push the right buttons” at the right time so that colonial rule could be ended without firing a shot.

By getting the attractor right, Gandhi grasped the golden opportunity that had dawned in his time: that freedom could be obtained, not by threat of physical force, but simply by holding his colonial overlords to the same principles they themselves had sworn allegiance to. Brilliant.

In this first part of the book, we familiarize ourselves with some important attractors: the future state, higher freedom, deeper equality. It will make us smarter, together. In the second part, we’ll engage in the risky, exciting business of “state crafting”, or, indeed, “society crafting”. We are going to look at how six new forms of politics together form a greater whole; how they can and must balance each other out. Each of these six forms of politics comes with major potential risks, so you can’t just do one or two of them without major negative consequences. Indeed, by their very logical structure, they must go together, or not at all. That’s why they form an attractor point.

Montesquieu’s “separation of powers”, presented in his 1748 treatise The Spirit of Laws.

This tripartite separation of powers still informs all democratic constitutions in the world today. Well done, my good Baron. You hit upon an attractor. But today we are dealing with a more abstract form of governance that concerns wider as well as more intimate spheres of human life. So the issue naturally becomes more complex: Instead of a three-part division of powers, we need six dimensions; each new power being balanced by no less than five others.

His prevailing intuition was that power, whenever unchecked and unbalanced by other powers, is detrimental to freedom. He had no studies to show it, no empirical evidence by today’s standards. No “proof” he was correct. And yet many of us now live in societies governed, at least partly, by Montesquieu’s principles.

Technically speaking, an “attractor” is a pattern or equilibrium that under certain conditions is very likely to emerge and stabilize within a dynamical system, such as a society. We went from hunter-gatherer societies to agriculture—in Eurasia and the pre-Columbian Americas separately—because agriculture was an attractor. We electrified the world, because electricity was an attractor. We all started using interconnected computers, because digitization was an attractor.

But some choices are just much more likely to be made than others.

As such (given that certain choices have proven so abundantly preferable to others), wouldn’t it be fair to claim that our choices, on a collective level, tend to form certain patterns that are more likely to emerge than others; that we are destined to decide between a limited range of societal models whenever they become possible? After all, there are a million ways to organize society. Yet human societies tend to be remarkably similar at any stage of historical development.

Even Nazi Germany claimed the German people to be the highest sovereign. And the brutal dictator Gaddafi also put great efforts into explaining how he had made a special deal with the Libyan people.

The modern democratic state is not the only attractor, but it is certainly one of the most competitive ones.

What structures are most likely to survive and outcompete other structures under the currently emerging historical circumstances?

Such a system of thought must be inherently logical, like the tripartite division of powers—or else it can hardly be sustainable as a new equilibrium. What you need to do is to learn to see this attractor, how it is inherently logical, how and why it gets its competitive edge. This attractor is the lodestone of the navigator, allowing us to blaze new paths for society, because we can see—not quite where we are going—but which directions do exist: where is north and where is Mecca?

But instead of “north” and “Mecca”, we are dealing with another dimension by which we can navigate: the stages of development; each stage being an attractor for society to stabilize around.

The people who recognize the attractors of course don’t have all the answers to the questions of life and society; they just have an extra hint on how to navigate in each unique situation that surfaces.

The “virus strategy” proposed here works differently. We are not really targeting the constitution and designing “a system” you can “establish” by promulgating certain laws. We are talking about cultivating new processes that target culture itself and the developmental psychology of everyone; about creating a more existentially apt and emotionally sensitive civilization—a listening society.

Getting it right is just as important as not getting it wrong. The wrong theory can and will land us in a sea of troubles. Marxism comes to mind. Of course, Marxism has been an incredibly productive intellectual field for the last century and a half, but Marx’s attempt to identify the attractors of historical development was simply not satisfactory. Society did not follow the fundamental dynamics he proposed, nor did it develop through the stages he and his followers imagined. The mistakes of this theory killed about a hundred million people during the 20th century—however indirectly. And of course, all things are both good and bad.

False assumptions mass murder people (like climate change denial) and correct ones save millions (like correct preemptive action against climate change). Montesquieu was successful in identifying the tripartite division of powers. If Marxism ended up killing people, how many lives has Montesquieu’s theory saved—if we understand the question in an indirect, non-linear sense? How about liberal democracy, human rights, market economy, free enterprise, the welfare state; how many lives have these saved, how many have they improved? What would have happened if these ideas had not taken hold? What about feminism and environmentalism? What about animal rights? You do the math.

I hold that our current society is based on a number of false assumptions; a number of sacred cows must be brought to the slaughter house and shown little mercy (said by a vegan, mind you). I hold that these false assumptions can and will kill or otherwise harm millions—in indirect, non-linear ways—because they do not match the new dynamics of a global, digitized, postindustrial society.

Radicalism tends to build fortresses in the skies that collapse and backfire when imposed upon the complexities of real life.

The tendency of humans to think we can understand the complexity of our own societies and “plan them” has led to huge mistakes, the communist experiments being only the clearest example. Instead, society should self-organize through the interactions of many independent players who engage on a free, unobstructed marketplace (as well as in other arenas).

But it is, ultimately, a lazy stance and it quickly leads to dead ends.

Back in the days, until the 18th century, European ships had to navigate the seas with latitude but no longitude. You wouldn’t know how far east or west you were. There simply were no clocks available that could keep the time on board a ship as it kept waving back and forth. That Britannia so easily ruled the waves in the 19th century had a lot to do with the British inventing a “marine chronometer” before anyone else.

The study of self-organizing systems has been called many things—and it stretches across many sciences. One of its early names, the one used at the influential Macy Conferences back in the 1950s, was cybernetics; the word’s root comes from Greek for “navigator”. You navigate history, just as history navigates you. This makes you a part of the self-organization of global society. This book helps you to become a part of the self-organization of the “metamodern” layer of societal development.

So even if there are some arrows that point history in certain general directions, this is not the same as saying this and that will happen.

What we are trying to do in this book is to take the vague currents currently forming in the Nordic countries and flesh out a more coherent and clear Nordic ideology, to be manifested in a few progressive societies and eventually spread to other parts of the world. There are paths society can take, and some of these are more logical, coherent, viable and conducive to human flourishing than others. We should find these paths and travel them together. Dreamers must learn to steer by the stars.

this should not blind us to the circumstance that modernity largely solved all of the major problems of pre-modern society. Yup, pretty much all of them. For most of recorded history, child mortality was high, starvation commonplace, slavery institutionalized, serfdom ubiquitous, wars frequent, violence a part of everyday life, monarchical oppression unquestioned, disease rampant, poverty the rule, literacy low, cruel norms limiting individual freedom prevailing—and so forth. Yes, all of these miseries exist in the modern world too. In absolute numbers, some of them are perhaps worse than ever as the world population is so much larger. On the other hand—and this is the point here—all of these problems have decreased dramatically in relative terms.

So modernity, with all its technological and social advances, has practically solved all of the problems of all earlier societies: famine, disease, oppression, war, poverty, lack of education, slow and dangerous transportation, superstition. Yes, even war; even if we count the world wars, the risk of being killed by another human being was statistically smaller during the 20th century than at any time before. Steven Pinker wrote an often-cited book about it in 2011, The Better Angels of Our Nature, and then another one in 2018, Enlightenment Now.

the new emergent properties problems. At a bare minimum, there are three such problems: ecological unsustainability, excess inequality, and alienation and stress.

Such knowledge can make our relative poverty even more bitter and insufferable than the harshness of pre-modern life. Indeed, it is one of the most robust findings of social science that income inequality correlates with violent crime, within countries and even more so between countries.[16]

The third category I’ve called “beauties lost”. It entails all the good things that were prevalent in pre-modern societies, but for different reasons diminished as societies became modern. A good example is “community”, or what the classical 19th century sociologist Ferdinand Tönnies called Gemeinschaft

In all pre-modern societies, people got together and sang, pretty often too. The individualism and performance oriented attitudes of modern life somehow nudge us to shut up, unless we’re alone in the shower or partake in a formally organized choir. Music gained, but singing lost.[17] Another example of a beauty lost is “simplicity”; that life had a kind of directness and straightforwardness which allowed a certain modest satisfaction. Other such beauties lost are the “connection to the soil”,

But the romantic and nostalgic longing lends itself to exaggeration—to overvaluing an imagined past, a yesteryear that never quite happened. What we should do instead is simply to acknowledge that all societal progression into later and “more advanced” stages entails some beauties lost, and that there may be good reasons to figure out how some of these can be regained and reincorporated without trying to turn the clock back.[18]

We have reached new heights and hence we can begin to tackle higher issues.

The first “new-heights issue” is tied to alienation, but still distinct from it: the lack of meaning and fulfillment.

The second new-heights issue has to do with struggle and heroism; how can we align our own petty lives with the overarching story about humanity, the world and even the cosmos?

The third higher issue pertains to gender equality and freedom of identity: Can we be sexually emancipated, not only in the sense that we can be women with equal rights as men, but that we can be truly sexually and emotionally fulfilled? Can we experience erotic fulfillment and intimacy both at once?

The fourth and last higher issue is animal rights. Of course, a big part of the problem with the abuse of animals has to do with modern phenomena such as industrial farming. Animal suffering is exacerbated by modernity, even with the increased legislations for “animal welfare”.

So, sorry for tricking you into thinking we had only two categories of problems under modernity. We have four, these being: Residual problems (left-overs from before modernity). New emergent properties problems (caused by modernity). Beauties lost (qualities from earlier societies lost under modernity). New heights reached (problems that simply weren’t viable to try to solve before, but now have come within our reach).

A society can be described as metamodern if, and only if, all of the problems of modernity have been more or less resolved, meaning that they have been reduced by at least a power of ten.

So I’ll say it again. We go ahead with sincere irony, pragmatic idealism, informed naivety and magical realism—to entertain the potential of a relative utopia. In the end, we still live in a tragic universe; as we noted in Book One, existence has us “eternally by the balls”.

Here’s my suggestion: At its fundamental core, societal progress is about “game change”; it’s when the background rules of life’s interactions—everyday, normal interactions—change and evolve. Progress is when the game of life becomes fairer, kinder, more transparent, more inclusive, more forgiving, more sustainable, more rational, more fulfilling. Game change is a good thing. But it is, paradoxically enough, the bastard child of two evils: game denial and game acceptance.

Game denial is, to this day, rampant. And its victims are not necessarily dead; it has victims in all walks of life, all scarred by unsustainable and unrealistic social relations, expectations and moralistic impositions of “what ought to be” upon what “actually is”. Crimes against actuality are crimes against humanity, against all life on our planet.

You pretend that the world works by rules which it does not. Game denial can show up in so many ways because life is always open to interpretation and reinterpretation.

Game denial means to hate the game and try to eradicate it. It can take the form of liberal political correctness or, in its extreme form, crude communism.