Nordic Ideology: A Metamodern Guide to Politics, Book Two

by Hanzi Freinacht

The second protagonist is the public school. That many, then most, then all people go to public schools, is a development so radical and pervasive that it really has no counterpart in history.

Millions of people taught and taught, and disciplined and manipulated for years on end. This even includes physical education for military purposes and public health.

other contenders for the protagonist role of the nation state. The police is one.

But who were the police officers expected to discipline? The workers, of course—another contending protagonist in the history of the nation state.

To this day, all over the world, our criminal justice systems and policing target the lower classes of society.

The bourgeois class existed already in the early modern period. But it was only with industrial capitalism that the proletariat emerged in full.

The central insight here is that the sheer volume of political power increases. People begin to be freed from their immediate social surroundings (your extended family and vocation) and to be integrated instead in a more abstract common social reality: the nation state. Your individuation as a unique person is married, as it were, to your integration into a nation.

In other words: You no longer buy power with mercenaries, because power lies in the minute control of the soul. The greatest power—the greatest force of birth, creation and destruction—lies beyond the early capitalist structures, beyond the human agency coordinated by money.

In the 20th century this tendency towards greater intimacy of control takes on yet another level of magnitude. With the emergence of the welfare state, built “on top of” the nation state, forms of coordination and control that hitherto had been unimaginable become reality. The strangest part is perhaps that the dramatic expansion of the state’s control mechanisms happens so effortlessly, so inconspicuously.

In the US, for instance, income taxes went up dramatically from 1935 (14.6%) to 1940 (40.7%), due to the war effort. After the war taxes stayed at that level, even slowly increasing (by 2015 it was 46.5%).[30] What you see here is a vast expansion of the capacity of the state to collect taxes in an orderly fashion over longer periods of time—earlier forms of states had simply not permeated the economic life of society to any comparable extent. Also, the economies were much larger, so the de facto revenues were increased by powers of ten. What, then, is this increased revenue used for? Enter the minions of the welfare state: social workers, psychologists, sociologists, statisticians, public health officials, urban planners, more doctors and nurses and assistant nurses, dentists, accountants, economists, political scientists, public relations experts, employment counselors, more teachers, liberal professors—and, of course, administrators, administrators, administrators.

competencies in everyday life: how to measure us, how to avoid conflict, how to nudge us in different directions, how to steer conversations, how to elicit replies from us.

Similar findings are present in other police ethnographers like Loïc Wacquant, Abby Peterson and William Ker Muir. The security and social services serve us, but they also control us. Serving one person often means controlling another’s behavior. Welfare and control, to a large extent, go hand-in-hand.

In Sweden today, this “free” society, the state keeps almost everyone in school for twelve years, gets involved with broken families, brokers toxic marital relations, teaches us about safe sex, sexuality and gender equality, peers into the very cavities of our bodies: the mouth, the vagina, feeling through our breasts for cancerous lumps, recommends us what to eat, funds our smaller newspapers, supports us in getting our lazy buts to the gym, treats our madness—if necessary, force-feeding the non-compliant patient with drugs and liquid nourishment. Is this level of control not approaching what George Orwell imagined in his novel, 1984? And yet—strangely—the people of Sweden (and other welfare states) hardly seem to mind.

But it doesn’t have to be oppressive. For the most part it isn’t. Rather, what we see is a steady expansion of social rights or positive freedoms.

Positive freedoms deal with the things people are legally bound to give you, if you ask: basic education, healthcare, a subsistence minimum. Not then the “freedom from”, but rather, the “freedom to”

All of this leads us back to Michel Foucault and his observation that modern society has gradually expanded the system’s control over every aspect of everyday life. His answer to this dilemma was to muster a staunch, intellectual resistance: to criticize and unmask power wherever possible. This, of course, only offers us an anti-thesis, and no clear pathway ahead, no visions for society.

Basically, again, we see that the increasing intimacy of control works in tandem with the evolution of a more complex society.

What would happen if it—the massive control apparatus of the welfare state—was entirely removed, by a magic spell, next Monday morning? Would people be more free, or less? Less.

The pattern over history is clear: more complex societies have more intimate mechanisms of control.

The issue is not to avoid any control, but to avoid bad, unscientific, corrupt or despotic control.

That is what the vision of the listening society promises: creating an even more sensitive welfare system on top of the existing one. The welfare state is insufficient when it comes to match the sheer complexity of the period we are now entering (transnational, global, postindustrial, digitized, etc.).

No doubt, once political metamodernism grows, it will split into a right wing and a left wing—but these factions will still be relative allies when compared to the modern ideologies of socialism and libertarianism. The most important issue at hand, however, is to recognize this pattern in the first place and to raise it as a political, social and economic issue of primary importance and urgency: the cultivation of a higher form of welfare, of a listening society.

a listening society where the inner lives of all citizens are supported, where many more of us reach the later stages of personal development, and where there is much less alienation, loneliness and misery.

A strange matter of affairs under this increasing intimacy of control is that populations don’t really seem to become more complacent and homogenous as it unfolds.

In larger and more complex societies, people seem to develop more individualized personalities, values and worldviews, not less. Or to be more specific and analytically correct, we could say that people in more complex societies develop more dividualized selves (borrowing the term “dividual” from Gilles Deleuze, which replaces the “individual”). An important aspect of this is that people develop into higher value memes and, despite their apparent individualism, also seem to develop more universalistic, inclusive and non-sectarian values.

dynamic, dialectical and painful dance between two poles: (in)dividuation and integration, an idea that has been proposed—albeit in simpler forms—by many theorists. The classical sociologist Émile Durkheim famously observed that modern society progresses by increasing the differentiation of the division of labor, which in turn makes each person work with more and more individualized tasks, hence developing more unique skills and experiences. These unique contributions are then integrated with each other in a more refined economy.

richer, larger and more complex societies offer much greater opportunities for people to develop unique experiences, skills, ideas, relationships and perspectives. Societies that integrate larger quantities of human activities, natural resources and flows of information create fertile soil for the growth of a myriad of human perspectives and experiences.

The tragedy of the matter is that this increasing dividuation also entails a corresponding difficulty for each of these unique souls to find ways to really match their inner drives, hopes, motives, ethics, skills and distinctive gifts with the world around them. If you identify as a farmer, a family member and a good Christian, these identities are relatively simple to act upon and it is rather easy to have them accommodated by your social surroundings. If you instead become a vegan whose greatest talent is to write poetry and criticize society, your family members and colleagues are less likely to be as accommodating.

Hence, more and more people simply feel alienated. It is not really that the world has become a colder, lonelier place. It’s just that the integration of these many unique souls is a more complicated and difficult matter. Because people have come farther in their dividuation, more people also feel estranged, lonely and subtly dissatisfied.

Sometimes we are at least partly successful in these strivings and feel we have “finally found a home”: in a particular social network of likeminded activists, in the expressions of certain forms of music, anti-establishment sub-cultures, more personally sensitive forms of business management and so on. We find ways to reintegrate our new selves into correspondingly new social settings. But by doing so, we have again increased the integration of society. We end up creating new and even subtler forms of oppression. From there on, we can dividuate even further, starting the painful cycle again:

whole army of sensitive souls who feel unseen and misunderstood.

The road to greater freedom and higher development of the self is a beautiful—but also tragic and ultimately very lonely—journey.

every attempt to create more intimate integration risks becoming a new source of oppression. Whenever people try to relate to one another at a deeper and more intimate level, including larger parts of our authentic emotions and inner selves, to some it may become suffocating and pressuring. New oppression—albeit on a higher, subtler level. When we, for instance, create new playful ways of organizing our corporations, in which everyone is invited to partake more authentically, we also share larger parts of our inner selves and are expected to show up more “fully” and to be more emotionally involved. But some are bound to not quite “feel it” and will necessarily feel pressured and subtly manipulated.

New oppression. When we democratize governance and more people get involved in decision-making, many of us feel stuck in endless discussions. When we introduce mindfulness and yoga at work, some will feel they are expected to waste their precious time with meaningless woo-woo.

When we create greater transparency, some feel more surveilled. New oppression. When we use “nudging” to promote sustainable and prosocial behavior, some will feel that others are pulling their strings.

people can easily feel drawn in farther than they had expected or wanted. When spiritual and “self-development” communities create more intimate ways for people to share their inner lives, some feel pressured to overshare and end up having their intimate secrets used against them. When we feel alienated, we seek reintegration. Metamodern politics, and the listening society, must empower people to reintegrate the parts of life that have been spliced into shards: the personal, the civic and the professional.

Integration is necessary for more complex societies to function, but it can always, sooner or later, become controlling or even icky and creepy. This is the tragedy at hand: a painful wheel turning from integration, to oppression, to resistance and emancipation, to greater dividuation and alienation, back to new integration.

Socialism is largely an integrative movement, seeking to create greater integration by means of democratically governed bureaucratic measures, working against alienation—beginning already with the pre-Marxist socialists. Libertarianism and neoliberalism defend the rights of the individual against oppression, but they largely lack an understanding to balance out the alienating effects of modern society and its way of turning everything into a matter of money, material gain and calculated exchange. Fascism and populist nationalism can be viewed as integrative over-reactions to the alienation of modern society, seeking to revive obsolete forms of community and belonging (corresponding to earlier value memes). And ecologism is largely an integrative movement, seeking to reintegrate human life into the biosphere and often into local communitarian initiatives.

metamodern view is to support the necessary reintegration of highly dividuated modern people into deeper community—or Gemeinschaft—but to do so with great sensitivity towards the inescapable risks of new, subtler forms of oppression. Hence, the task is to balance out and support the forces of integration and dividuation.

Rather, I would like to suggest the possibility of yet higher forms of freedom being achievable through the transition from a modern society to a metamodern one. My basic argument is this: People are only as free as they really feel in their everyday lives.

some people wake up in the morning feeling they have control over their lives, while others are driven by fear and shame, constricted in so many subtle or complicated ways.

Is a person freer if she gets to follow her dreams and work towards goals and ends that are genuinely inspiring, rather than having to work only to pay the bills? Is a person freer if she dares to speak her mind in every situation, rather than feeling she has to hold back in order to avoid the judgment and disdain of others?

From this viewpoint, the Nordic countries are not conclusively “free”. Rather, these societies have the prerequisites for higher freedom. Freedom House rating 1 is where the path to true human emancipation begins—not where it ends.

The basis for this theory is the idea that freedom must be felt and embodied by the citizen in order to be real. Hence, we look for support in the sociology of everyday life and, more specifically, in the sociology of emotions.

Let us speak about another kind of freedom; one that begins in chains, slavery and fear, in the wailing tears of a billion years’ history of life—and ends as a democratic, inclusive dance of spontaneous becoming.

anatomy of freedom must always follow the anatomy of human emotions. The most solid way of introducing emotions into the study of freedom is to start from a negative: Can we imagine a concept of freedom that would completely exclude all emotions? Can we be free while being controlled by a paralyzing terror or shame? Not really.

A simple but powerful way to do this is to study how different negative emotions can and do constrain people’s freedom.

key idea in Goffman’s work was that people collaborate in each everyday situation to keep it going, to define what is going on, to keep up appearances. We “save each other’s faces” by avoiding topics or withholding comments, we ignore small mishaps even if everyone noticed them, we stretch our backs and put on a face before we enter a friend’s house, we conceal our nose picking and stained underwear, we find ways to subtly neutralize and diminish painfully obvious differences of class and status.

Everyday life, in which we go about our business and seek to attain our goals, is only made possible because there is a huge underlying machinery that checks any attempt to break out of it.

You can go to the shanty towns or slums in India or the favelas in Brazil, and most people will act in a recognizable manner: avoiding to shame themselves, avoiding to be of hassle (unless it’s a desperate salesperson or a robber), saying hello before they speak, taking turns in conversations, displaying some dignified demeanor and signs of cleanliness. Sure, the norms vary, but some of the mechanisms are undeniably the same. Yet shame is not the only emotion humans habitually and unreflectively avoid. There are, of course, a host of other negative emotions that steer our everyday choices and interactions: fear, guilt and the envy of others. We are all programmed with a huge battery of behaviors that masterfully avoid all such negative emotions.