Nordic Ideology: A Metamodern Guide to Politics, Book Two

by Hanzi Freinacht

Indeed, the process of “socialization”—when we grow up and become members of society by internalizing how to talk, behave and so forth—can be described as the learning of a host of behaviors that serve to avoid negative consequences; from the most concrete habits of not walking on red and safely navigating the melee of cars and pedestrians on the streets, to the subtlest ones like knowing when not to speak our minds and pretending not to notice when someone spits when they talk.

There appears to be no specific “neurological fingerprint” in the brain as different emotions arise, or even a specific physiological pattern. You get angry, and it can mean anything from tension to release to calm seething. In other words, emotions are much more complex than our everyday language can grasp;

Point being: Even if I go on talking about a set of “negative emotions”, we should recognize that these can be delineated, described and known in any number of ways, with different results.

did you know that “blue” didn’t really exist until the Egyptians came up with a word for it? That the older parts of the Bible are devoid of blue seas and skies, and that rural cultures in Angola still to this day lack a word for blue and that members of these can’t even recognize the color, taking it for green?

We must acknowledge that we as a society need negative emotions to regulate our behavior. But at the same time we need to remember that negative emotions aren’t predefined by nature; that it is we, as a collective, who make others experience shame and guilt, and that these emotional regimes can be more or less justified, be more or less in tune with the current societal conditions. Negative emotions like shame, guilt and envy are socially dependent; they don’t emerge autonomously in a given person, but are always derived from society’s norms, values, routines—and

For instance, a society where gays feel ashamed about their sexuality, women feel guilty about their perceived shortcomings as mothers, their lacking beauty and their inadequate careers, and men feel envious about the supposedly higher social status of others, is a more oppressive society than—all other things equal—one in which these emotions are less prevalent. People who have their lives controlled by such emotions are simply less free than those who do not. There are different emotional regimes in different societies.

If you buy the hypothesis of ever-present negative emotions being avoided through our choices and interactions, you can see that these emotions, and the reasons we may have for feeling them, set the limit for our degrees of freedom.

Emotions are social by nature, especially in humans. I feel something, pleasant or unpleasant, because of how you treat me or interact with me. If I’m turned down, I feel shame; if I’m scolded, I feel guilt; if I’m threatened, I feel fear.

If freedom is emotional, and emotions are social, it must thus be apparent that freedom is a “collective good” in the sense that economists use the term. Because emotions are social, and freedom depends upon emotions, freedom is social, and thus collective. The degree to which I can enjoy freedom largely depends on a long chain of interactions in everyday life, on how you and everyone else act, think and feel.

There is, in this sense, an economy of emotions, where my feelings are profoundly interconnected with yours.

This economy can be productive, or corrupted, have great ecological fallout (the joy of one being the misery of another); it can be lean or heavy-going, fair or unequal, effective or ineffective—just like the conventional economy of goods and services. In this sense, our emotions have an inescapably transactional side. Negative emotions targeting me often cost me something. And which negative emotions you have towards me also make a great difference: If you disdain and shame me, it’s after all more manageable than if you’re in a hateful frenzy against me and threaten my physical safety. Hence the collective emotional reactions of my surroundings largely determine the severity of my shackles—or conversely, the heights of my freedom. Since we avoid the negative emotions, since we avoid different forms of judgment by self and others, we are always being steered by an emotional regime, a regime present in every interaction—hidden in plain sight.

Sklavenmoral; the “internalized envy of others” (which relates closely to what Nietzsche called “slave morality” in German; with the risk of bending the Nietzschean term, I will use this word). These four emotions target our self, or “ego”: “I could die!” or “I am a loser!” Each of the four has a corresponding emotion when they target someone else, the other, when they target “you” or “alter”—as

contemporary Denmark is “more free”, is that people are avoiding different sets of emotions in their everyday lives than in 13th century Mamluk Egypt.

The relatively higher freedom in the Nordic countries is closely related to a more tolerant and acceptant emotional regime than in e.g. Russia or Pakistan.

The freedom to be gay, but without the freedom from shame, fear and physical abuse, is, after all, no freedom at all.

Hence, you can think of these emotions as the spectrum of judgment. It should be clear that the emotional development of a population plays a major part in determining how free life de facto is: We can, collectively and (in)dividually, climb or descend this spectrum of judgment. These emotional regimes regulate our behavior by making us avoid repercussions from others: 1) fear impels us to avoid hatred and violent aggression, 2) guilt to avoid moral judgment, 3) shame to avoid contempt, and 4) Sklavenmoral impels us to avoid that others feel envious of us.

because we do avoid them, we remain in their grip. They constitute the invisible machinery that lets everyday life in any society run smoothly; indeed, that makes any society functional at all. Again: The avoided negative emotions are, as it were, hidden in plain sight.

Sklavenmoral has, to my knowledge, only been theorized in Jungian terms—often in “integral” and New Age circles—as the “golden shadow”. The golden shadow is an expression of disowned greater potentials within ourselves which can lead us to idealize others, or to envy their talents.

The “emotions” I’m talking about here are more deeply layered processes within ourselves: we love our families, are ashamed of our positions in society, are embittered by perceived injustices or disappointments and so forth.

An important side to this is that the ego-emotions (fear, guilt, shame and Sklavenmoral) all partly depend on their “alter” counterparts (hatred, judgment, contempt and envy). If my mind is full of contempt towards fat and poor people, then I’m more likely to target myself with these emotions, feeling shame if I should become fat and poor myself.

I have internalized a shame- and guilt-regime and begun to avoid certain behaviors. As you can see, the “ego” and “alter” versions of the emotions are intimately connected.

All of this lands us in what might look like a paradox: On the one hand, all societies rely upon these negative emotions—and our elaborate, learned, often subtle behaviors to avoid them—on the other hand, they limit the freedom of each and every person and the expressions of our relationships in all aspects of life. Yet everyday life doesn’t work without sanctions. Sometimes we do need to condemn people for their actions. The question, then, is not how to get rid of these negative emotions altogether, but how to develop them. The answer to the dilemma is, again, a developmental-sociological perspective; the insight that freedom is a collective good—that we are freed together, or not at all, and that this is a matter of collective, or rather “transpersonal”, development.

The lack of freedom is, in this sense, largely invisible. And yet it is there. Our shackles insert themselves even prior to our conscious thoughts, prior to our choices made, our values formed, prior to the formation of our personality and sense of self. Freedom is a collective concern, yes, but it is also intimate and relational. Hence: transpersonal. Yet this is no reason to despair; rather, it impels us to ask for higher freedom, for another kind of freedom

The spectrum of judgment follows a certain logic or order. fear trumps guilt, guilt trumps shame, and shame trumps Sklavenmoral (the internalized envy of others).

Fear relates to maintaining physical safety by avoiding rage, hatred and aggression, i.e. to the first, basic needs according to Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. Guilt relates to being a worthy member of a community, to showing one’s moral worth and value, that one is qualified to participate in society in the first place—so it has to do with belonging. Shame relates to being an esteemed and recognized member of our in-group; we feel ashamed when we do not consider ourselves worthy of respect, the opposite of which is pride and self-esteem. And Sklavenmoral relates to our higher aspirations and longings, holding us back from self-actualization, productive self-expression and ultimately from self-transcendence.

different emotional regimes correspond to different stages of societal development, and that they follow the hierarchical logic described by Maslow: During early civilization, security remained the main concern in most people’s everyday lives; hence the fear-regime was the most dominant. Then, as states grew stronger and increasingly managed to protect the life and property of citizens, the need for belonging became a more prominent issue, in turn making the guilt-regime the dominant one. And in modern societies, where the majority enjoy the privilege of being considered good citizens and no longer worry whether they’re seen as sinners or heathens, self-esteem has become a greater concern in many people’s lives, which has opened the door for the shame-regime to take over. And today, in the most developed parts of the world, a new trend towards greater acceptance of people’s differences and perceived flaws is increasingly making the shame-regime less prominent. As a result, a growing number of people tend to be more concerned with the higher emotional need for self-actualization. This is a development of increased freedom: first we liberate ourselves from fear of violence, then we liberate ourselves from the guilt of not being deserving members of society, and finally, as we’re seeing today, we’re liberating ourselves from the shame of not being perceived as good enough.

most of us, most of the time, do enjoy the freedom to do and say what we damn please without risking physical abuse or social ostracism.

The main emotional regime is hence based on fear. If you remove the fear of the warlord, or the fear of outside threats the warlord is protecting you from, society falls apart—as has happened many times throughout history. The earliest state structures can therefore be said to be governed by the fear-regime.

At the time of Hammurabi, fear simply remained the most efficient means available to governments to regulate people’s behavior.

Supplementing a fear-regime with a guilt-regime offers notable competitive advantages to the governments who master it competently. Guilt is, first of all, more “cost-efficient” than fear. Coercing people into following the law and paying their taxes requires expensive weapons and soldiers. Paying a priest to tell folks they’ll accumulate bad karma and go to hell if they don’t behave nicely can be done rather cheaply.

Fear is a rather rudimentary means of regulating behavior: “do this, don’t do that, or else!” Given the high costs of maintaining the trustworthiness of the “or else”, it’s only economically viable to limit its use to things such as ensuring that people don’t kill each other or steal each other’s property. Threatening people with force if they won’t treat one another kindly or help each other in times of need just isn’t very likely to work. Religious leaders like Jesus and the Buddha argued against the rule of sheer force and recast the theologies of their times in more egalitarian and forgiving terms: The God of the New Testament is less fear mongering and more forgiving than the one in the Old Testament—Yahweh was originally the deity of war in the pre-Judaic Hebrew pantheon. But the God of the New Testament is still more demanding when it comes to honest devotion and purity of intentions. And the Buddha places greater emphasis on personal responsibility for one’s own enlightenment.

The guilt-regime can even be militarily advantageous. The traditional Japanese warrior code, the Bushido, let the minds and bodies of the Samurai be trained to let honor and loyalty trump the fear of pain and death. Such codes of honor and valor work by disciplining the mind and letting guilt (and shame) defeat the more basic emotion of fear.

The etiquette became increasingly refined as Western Europe modernized.

From these observations, linked to an analysis of the political developments at the courts, Elias formulated his theory of the civilizing process

“dignified” or “cultured” or “civilized” demeanor of ordinary citizens in urban life. Elias shows us how the strong norms of cleanliness (showering, showing up at work in a ironed shirt every day, eating carefully, avoiding to let out bodily sounds or odors, keeping our homes neat and tidy) make an entrance and take root as modern society emerges. The fact that these norms hold people so firmly in their grip today can be seen as a result of this civilizing process. And the way we keep a polite distance, respect the privacy of strangers and generally keep our neurotic thoughts to ourselves can also be seen as outflows of this emotional regime. If anyone breaches any of these codes without a good excuse (I’m a comedian; this is a bachelor party; this was a social media experiment or flashmob; you’re on Candid Camera!; this is a therapy session, etc.), they do so at the risk of being viewed as weird, creepy or at least very unreliable. Instead of fearing the warlord, or feeling guilty before God or the community, modern people self-regulate

Of course, shame exists in pre-modern societies as well, but it does not have the same degree of pervasiveness and importance as a regulator of everyday life interactions.

Again, it’s not that fear and guilt entirely disappeared; it’s just that they have been pushed further into the background. Fear and guilt are still the means used by the justice system to prevent people from breaking the law, but this plays a minimal role in most people’s lives.

Modern society depends on a much greater amount of daily interactions among a higher number of people than in any earlier society.

This is quite important when millions of strangers with different beliefs, values, social status and interests must go about their daily business with one another in a hectic and stressful urban environment without ending up in quarrels and fights all the time. And it is something the fear- and guilt-regimes just aren’t suitable for.

During World War One, for instance, there was a clear difference between the propaganda posters of the Germans (emphasizing loyalty, honor and sacrifice) and those of the slightly more modern British and Americans (emphasizing the shame of being the only man not at the front, being a girlish coward “Gee, I wish I were a man, I’d join the navy!” or asking “Are you a man or are you a mouse?” or showing a picture of people contributing to the war effort, asking the viewer “What are you doing?”).

The way the British government used the shame-regime to bolster its military capabilities during the First World War is actually similar to how modern companies make us buy their products. Commercials often rely upon an elaborate balance between eliciting desire and shame.

You see, the struggles for “freedom” change at each stage. Initially, the fear-regime was contested by various monopolies on violence that challenged each other in mortal combat to determine who should be feared,

Then, as the fear-regime waned in favor of the guilt-regime with the great world religions and wisdom traditions, the struggle began to define and redefine what kind of guilt-regime should prevail: who does God condemn, what should be seen as sin, whose moral teachings should we follow, and so on.

Today, as we’ve killed God and freed ourselves from sin, the great struggles for freedom revolve around the issue of defining the mechanisms of shame and stigma: enter the queer movements, feminism, the recent #metoo phenomenon, in which women cast off the shame of revealing sexual abuse, campaigns against slut-shaming, fat-shaming, stigmatization of people with disabilities, you name it. They all seek to alter the everyday games of shame and acceptance.

And when modern societies hold their leaders responsible for scandals and misuses of power, it is the role of the media to publicly shame them. This form of behavioral sanction is more common than outright legal prosecution.

Freedom, as we have now established, is not a question of either or. We will never reach the point of absolute freedom, and never will the quest for higher freedom come to an end. Whenever we obtain one form of freedom, another kind appears at the horizon.

Freedom is inherently a highly developmental matter. It follows, as we have seen, a pattern of subsequently obsoleted forms of emotional control we humans exercise upon one another as we interact in society.

what lies beyond the emotional regimes that prevail today; an inquiry into how the current shame-regime is gradually waning in favor of an emerging Sklavenmoral-regime.

Modern society entails a kind of “civilizing process”, as Norbert Elias observed, by which new forms of behavioral regulation come online. What Elias did not see coming, however, was the wave of in-formalization (i.e. customs and relations getting less formal) that takes place in late modern societies. Following the 1950s, social life has taken a distinct turn towards the “casual” and informal, but this was not apparent back in 1939 when Elias wrote The Civilizing Process.

Most telling is perhaps, again, the gay movement, which named itself “Pride”—the direct opposite of shame. In the advanced stages of modern society, people have been working to emancipate themselves from some parts of the shame-regime.