Nordic Ideology: A Metamodern Guide to Politics, Book Two

by Hanzi Freinacht

To try to eradicate the game is only a form of individual or collective repression, and it will always produce pathological results—namely oppression. Whatever game you want to repress—like capitalism—this can only be done by activating a grosser level of game—like the game for political totalitarian power. Communist states repressed the mechanisms of “games for profit” by playing a much crueler game for political power. But oppression is not the worst part of game denial. Oppression can be toppled; evil reigns can end. No, the worst part is that denying the existence of the game means that the game cannot be described, taught and learned. The game is hidden away, made taboo. Hence, game denial is in the service of the privileged elite,

Feminism! If only men were kind and polite and respected women and stopped using “master suppression techniques” (as described by the social psychologist Berit Ås) and didn’t greedily enjoy the oppression of women by means of patriarchy, this would make society fair, women unafraid of sexual assault, work-life satisfying and intimate relations much more functional. Game denial, again: For this line of reasoning to compute, displays of male prestige, status and power must stop being sexually and emotionally alluring to women and hence desirable to men. As long as these traits are found desirable (as plenty of experimental research suggests is the case: women genuinely prefer high-status, in some sense “dominant”, males), men can only stop using at least some strategies for social self-advancement at their own expense. The games of everyday life are denied. A wave of spirituality and “higher consciousness” will transform the world! In one way, this is very advanced and complex, in another way, very simple: a kind of perennial wisdom, that people wake up to a simple but profound message of love and acceptance! Game denial: This one (or any version of “millenarianism”) is quite common in more spiritually inclined people, but also, by analogy, in socialists and environmentalists.

playful, creative schooling system which emphasizes growth and joy rather than the dull reciting of facts! No discipline needed! Ever! Game denial.

If only people learned about animal suffering, they would support the end of animal slavery! Game denial.

Interfaith dialogue will bring an end to religious conflicts! Game denial. No military intervention is ever needed or justified! Game denial.

It’s not always easy to tell game denial apart from more legitimate forms of idealism. A rule of thumb, however, is that game denial very often arrives in the company of her twisted little sister: moralism—being subtly (or not so subtly) judgmental and self-righteous. The alliance between game denial and moralism works in cunning ways. They help each other staying in the background,

Not believing in game denial and its ubiquitous presence is in itself a form of game denial. The reason people do all the game denial is often that it is a useful tool for them to win the small struggles in everyday life: for moral worth, for admiration, for power, money, sex and status—or just to avoid shaming and judgment, or to have the solemn pleasure of shaming and judging others. Ironically, it is because people are always in a game that they can win by denying its existence.

It is as if many of the progressive intellectuals are “bribed” by the social rewards they can attain by taking part in game denial. These are emotional and cognitive bribes that distort thinking processes, discourses and truth seeking. Real kindness needs to make sense; it needs to compute. If the numbers don’t add up, they simply don’t. Hence, any kindness that does not compute is a disguised form of evil.

There’s a real world out there, a practical world of real people, and real limitations. Ahh. “Like ‘me’, the no-bullshit conservative. The good person is not whoever can dream up the nicest fantasy and have us drive off a cliff in search of it, but rather those who can look at the real world, be strong enough to face it—and from there on, try to do what’s best and most realistic given the circumstances.”

“pickup artist”, i.e. a man who has become a professional at seducing women:

“Juggler”, as is the nom de guerre of this fellow, tries to “tell it like it is”. He tries to face up to the inherent challenges of life, ones that cannot be brushed aside with idealistic visions and wishful thinking. In short: he accepts the game of life (in this case seduction) and tries to take its consequences.

And since nationalism and Trumpism are the least kosher and most difficult to publicly defend, people even hide supporting them when asked in polls (which, by the way, is likely a major reason that polling has begun to be less accurate lately). When they do support the Trumps of the world, they often add in small excuses, justifications, hedgings, accounts and disclaimers: “Well, I don’t like Trump, I just thought we should shake things up a bit” and so forth.[24]

But I have argued elsewhere that reality consists of more than “actuality”; that a deeper and fuller reality lies in the realm of what is possible. And the conservatives have a strong tendency towards accepting the games of life in their current, actual form in a way that disregards the very real potentials for alternatives and change. I have said that crimes against reality are crimes against humanity. But crimes against potentiality are also crimes against humanity, and against all life on our planet—against all beautiful futures. Game acceptance also kills. In fact, these killing grounds are far greater and more brutal than the ones of game denial. Game acceptance means to prostrate before the game and take it as a law of nature in its current form, denying that the game can and must evolve. Or, more often, the game accepter holds that real and substantial changes are only ever possible in a distant and irrelevant future. This makes us justify illegitimate force and injustice.

Besides, I can’t help I won. Don’t hate the player, hate the game!” But game acceptance really loves the game and hates the player—correction—hates the player who happens to get the short end of the stick. The billions of enslaved, tortured and murdered animals under global industrial farming find no heroic defenders among the game accepters. The unjust international order which keeps the global South exploited and subjugated is defended under the auspices of “free markets”. The losers of everyday life—the unintelligent, the ugly, the sickly—they all deserve what they get. The central principle of game acceptance is hence: That which could be is not, and hence it should not be. As David Hume warned us already in the 18th century, this is a fallacy—deriving an “ought” from an “is”. That something is the case doesn’t mean is should be the case. At its most extreme, game acceptance goes beyond the existing games of life to invent fictitious ones so that we may revel in what “necessary evils” these games demand of us: “Western culture is trying to destroy the Arab world and undermine all of Islam. Ergo we must stop them by ramming airplanes into buildings full of innocent folks!”—or “The Jews are plotting to destroy Germany!

embodied form of game acceptance. Especially those of us who have had high social status during our upbringing and reflexively assume we can win out in any confrontation that shows up can be tempted to think all such confrontations are necessarily good and just. Losers get what they deserve; that’s not just an idea, but a felt bodily experience that sets our mind up for game acceptance.

Game acceptance, at its most extreme, murders a lot more people than does game denial. But it doesn’t stop there. The worst crime of game acceptance is that it blocks legitimate, necessary and very possible change. The game accepter remains serial killer calm in the face of glaring injustice.

Before we go on, I should note that neither game denial nor game acceptance is a consciously held perspective.

They constitute subtle forms of self-deceit. The moment game denial and game acceptance are recognized for what they are it becomes apparent that they cannot be sustained. Everyone will vehemently deny their own game denial or game acceptance and claim to be a responsible “game changer” if confronted. What then, is game change? It is the productive synthesis of game denial and game acceptance: you accept that life is a game and you resolve to work to change it.

The question is not “game, or no game”, but the nature of our relationship to the game and the evolution of its rules. Games produce dynamics of interaction. They give life in samsara a temporal, fleeting meaning: maybe we can be winners, or at least avoid being losers, or at least hide we “really are” losers.

The major objective of the metamodern political project is to change the rules of the game. Our simple message is that everyday life as we know it can and must evolve. The game change position holds: Life is a plus-sum game with possible win-wins. Life is also often a zero-sum game with lose-win. Life is sometimes even a tragic dilemma of lose-lose. But the rules of the game can change, evolving into more win-win, less lose-win and less lose-lose. Nobody actually ever “deserves” to lose games and suffer defeat or humiliation.

All injustices in the world are caused by the playing of games. Humans and other beings have no choice but to partake in games. In the last instance, no injustice or suffering is ever excusable or tolerable.

And more fundamentally—it is you. Winning in life is fun. But it’s just not enough. Classical liberalism, neo-liberalism, conservatism, capitalism and fascism are all based upon accepting the game and an attitude of “may the best player win”. They are all defenders and upholders of injustice, cruelty and suffering that just cannot be ethically justified. So what if I win? In a deeper sense, you have still lost. You must change the games of life. That is the only result that counts. That is the only victory worth keeping, because it includes everybody.

Don’t hate the player, and don’t hate the game either. We need to love the game, learn to play it—and change it, because we love the players.

As we shall see in the coming chapters, game change is a developmental affair. It has to do with making advances into higher stages of societal development.

You can’t just develop society by means of “imposing” a certain political system or changing people’s values. Game change occurs by means of systemic change, psychological development of the populations, changes in habits and behaviors, and through cultural development.

Don’t you ever dare tell me that dramatic and positive change is not possible. If you can’t change people’s behaviors, you might change something in the systemic incentives. If that isn’t possible, you can always bring up new issues and find ways to change the cultural discourse. If that fails, you can always find a few people and help them develop their values so that they can form a new competitive social structure. There is always a “chink in the armor”.

We are looking to create new contexts, new historical situations where what was impossible before now becomes possible.

Thus: Let go of game denial and game acceptance—and go for game change. The idea is not to eradicate competition from life, but to transform and refine the nature of competition in all aspects of life: on the labor market, in work culture, in the political deliberations and elections, in the games of love, sex and family, in peer groups and in research and education.

Counter-intuitive as it may sound to many, more complex societies need more intimate mechanisms of control. This is because greater volumes of more complex human agencies and interactions are coordinated as society progresses to more advanced stages. You cannot reverse this trend without paying a very high price; namely, disorder and disintegration. Rather, the increasing intimacy of control must be made fair, balanced and transparent—as you will see.

Origins of Political Order (vol.1) and Political Order and Political Decay (vol.2).[27] Fukuyama argues there are three major ingredients of a modern liberal democracy: A meritocratic state bureaucracy (where people are loyal to society as a whole, not only to their family or clan) Accountability of the government (with a strong civil society capable of self-organizing and sometimes resisting the power of the state) Rule of law (i.e. that laws are upheld and the government is restrained by the same laws as everyone else) As we see today, some countries display all three characteristics (Western democracies), some display two (Latin American countries have states and accountability but generally a weak rule of law) and some display only one (like China, which has only a strong state bureaucracy and a limited form of rule of law).

anthropologist Marshall Sahlins.

The anthropologist Elman Service famously proposed four major stages: bands, tribes, chiefdoms and states.

polity, viewed as an emergent pattern of governance among humans, keeps evolving in ways that increase the monitoring and control of human behaviors by reaching into deeper layers of the human soul and putting it under deliberate, collective control. We are looking at the development of social order. It is furthermore, I argue, this increased control that makes possible the civil liberties, human rights and liberal culture we currently enjoy. Order, freedom and equality go hand-in-hand. As with all three-part marriages, it’s not always simple; but the three need each other.

modern state has emerged in three subsequent stages: 1) the early modern state, 2) the nation state, and 3) the welfare state—and how we are now approaching the metamodern state, 4) the “listening society”.

As the aristocracy was favored at the expense of bankers and merchants, it lead to long-term fiscal crises and eventually to the French Revolution. Even in France’s strong, absolutist bureaucracy, the attractors determined history’s course: that its ancien régime of absolutist feudal monarchy was doomed.

rule of law, optimize taxation, support and stimulate businesses, increase manufacture, ally the state to the merchant class and hence create a simple form of polity enfranchisement in broader layers of the population, establish a class of bureaucrats and simple forms of accountants who made possible a kind of “national economy”.

What you see, in other words, is an expansion of the level of control the state holds on people’s everyday lives.

increased the ability of larger groups to cooperate in more complex ways. This does not mean that whatever king is most despotic has the greatest advantage. On the contrary, the less monolithic states and rulers become more powerful because that’s how the polity successfully manages the most information, coordinates the greatest quantity of behaviors, and enfranchises the highest number of agents.

French philosopher Michel Foucault takes off in his studies of power and control in modern society. Writing primarily in the 1960s and 70s, his important insight was to point out that control also grows as modern society progresses: that everything—from trade flows, to births and deaths, to bodies, to inner organs, to sex and sexuality, to gender, to time management, to city landscapes—becomes increasingly subjected to minute control, monitoring and standardization.

Today, more than ever, we are being controlled by a multitude of sources that lie beyond our conscious consent—at a greater distance from us. These sources of control are much less tangible than our former feudal bonds. It is not, then, the power of the king that grows, but the volume and density of power itself that increase.

power as an emergent property of the self-organizing system that makes governance of a more complex society possible.

But the nation state grew in full only during the 1800s, beginning from the most industrialized countries, notably Great Britain. The industrialization processes unfolded in what has roughly been described as “Kondratiev waves” (after the early Soviet economist Nikolai Kondratiev)—waves of new technologies that were introduced, expanded for a period of time and eventually came to form the basis of the economy.

As industrial (and colonial) capitalism increasingly coordinates people’s time and attention across time and space through the emergent patterns we call the firm, the company, the corporation, or just “business”—so does a corresponding coordination occur at the level of the state’s monopoly of violence.

In this period you have processes such as the creation of a national narrative, a heroic story (often involving, among other things, gathering around a charismatic leader, inventing a semi-mythic past, and sometimes killing off some poor minority that happens to stand in the way and offer a convenient common enemy and/or scapegoat for mounting social and economic problems), spreading literacy, homogenizing language and scrapping local identities, instituting market laws and standardized court systems, getting rid of large parts of corporal punishment, gradually increasing the emotional and economic enfranchisement of larger groups into the state (vote for bourgeois men as well as conscription into the armies), i.e. turning people into “citizens”. And, of course, there is schooling: turning kids into pupils and pupils into citizens. “Everyone” learns to read and write.

When citizens begin to read, gather in smaller spaces, communicate more easily, and have more in common in terms of interests and sorrows, a “civil sphere” is born. People download a whole mental world of “ongoing events” fitting within a greater story, shared largely by any random person you meet on the street. Memes (ideas and cultural patterns) spread more easily.

And with the nation state and the civil sphere, “the individual” can be born since our “selves” no longer remain as intimately tied up with our clan, our family, our land.

teachers, doctors, professors, engineers, lawyers, administrators, accountants, scientists, military officers. Then you direct the awesome power that emerges as all of these specialists collaborate.

The extent of differentiation and specificity of the modern professions were staggering. And then all of these people, competencies, forms of knowledge, forms of control, were unleashed—upon nature, yes, but even more so, upon the human soul:

The birth of a nation is dangerous business because of the great powers unleashed when an emergent pattern coordinates millions of people’s time and attention.

serve. But if you look at his political regime: citizen enfranchisement, nationalism, standardization, rationalization, homogenization, the modern legal system (called Code Napoleon)—this is certainly a herald of, and model for, the modern nation state.