Nordic Ideology: A Metamodern Guide to Politics, Book Two
Rate it:
Open Preview
22%
Flag icon
The Law of Jante is a set of attitudes that subtly devalue and ignore people who aspire towards greater achievement, fame and excellence. It is usually taken to be a distinctive cultural trait of Scandinavians, often contrasted with the more self-expressive American culture. But I would suggest that it in fact is the beginnings of a new emotional regime, the Sklavenmoral-regime, in which people are less shamed for their weaknesses, and more for their strengths and ambitions.
22%
Flag icon
Today it’s considered bad taste to display one’s social status by driving flashy cars or wearing expensive jewelry, it’s an absolute no-go for successful persons to talk about how much smarter and hardworking they are than common people, and even prime ministers, pop stars and royalty are expected to display humility and self-depreciation and constantly need to avoid giving the impression they believe they are “better” than others.
22%
Flag icon
Trump’s unabashed boasting just isn’t as cool in New York and Silicon Valley as it is in Alabama.
22%
Flag icon
When a society advances to the later stages of modernity and people become less controlled by shame, more people also begin to strive for “self-actualization” to a greater extent (as we’ve see in Maslow’s hierarchy of needs). The question then presents itself within society: Who will get to be truly unique and expressive, and who will be left with a bland, “mainstream” existence within the frames of the conventional economy? In other words, because life in these societies is “all about” self-actualization, this—rather than wealth and status—becomes a touchy subject. It is increasingly on ...more
23%
Flag icon
Because people generally compete less to become “respectable” and more to be “special”, the emotional regime of Sklavenmoral enters the stage. Consequently, people start to adapt by finding subtle ways of avoiding the envy of others, or else others will be unwilling to cooperate with them and may withhold social recognition. And, of course, without the cooperation and recognition of others, you can hardly hope to be successful—and you are relegated back to the ranks of mainstream people. Dreams and aspirations are fed to the Sklavenmoral-regime and its feast of losses.
23%
Flag icon
The rise of the Sklavenmoral-regime may very well be an underlying factor which explains the increased level of narcissism in the general population during the last decades, as first famously observed in Christopher Lasch’s 1979 book The Culture of Narcissism
23%
Flag icon
And today we are witnessing the rise of a global culture seemingly obsessed with narcissism and humility because we’re afraid we ourselves aren’t that special. A core reason for why narcissism is on the rise, both psychologically and culturally, is that we are entering a Sklavenmoral-regime. Narcissism is simply the flipside of this emotion.
23%
Flag icon
the painful doubts Sklavenmoral has sown in us. It is an unproductive defense against the subtly experienced envy of others.
23%
Flag icon
Again, all of these emotions exist in all societies and all people, but the social logic governing everyday life still varies substantially: What hidden negative emotions are guiding your life choices and everyday interactions?
23%
Flag icon
Understanding the role of envy—and its sister emotions of jealousy (envy in the realm of love) and schadenfreude (the subtle satisfaction procured from another’s defeat or misery)—is paramount for navigating the coming period and to serve real emancipation at a societal level.
23%
Flag icon
Simply, the overwhelming opportunities the global markets can offer—and the fact that a lucky few can rise to yet greater heights of fame, significance and prominence in such a larger system.
23%
Flag icon
What the classics tell us, and modern psychology’s sparse findings seem to suggest, is that we mostly experience our own envy as righteous anger. We feel a: “Why ya little…!” We quite easily become symbolically invested in the failure of others’ dreams and aspirations. Whenever another person tells us about a dream or a great project we don’t quite buy or agree with, a part of us almost automatically becomes invested in their failure.
23%
Flag icon
This is symbolic investment in another’s failure—we wish for their failure not because of the results of another’s struggle for a better world, but because of what their success would symbolize and imply about ourselves. It is a rather frightening dynamic; suddenly, we may start preferring that someone fails to save a million lives, just to save our own sense of chosenness and immortality. That’s how trivial and automatic envy can be. We don’t see it coming. We don’t admit to feeling it—mostly, not even to ourselves.
23%
Flag icon
am suggesting, then, that society is breaking through the chains of shaming and contempt, but that we are hitting a great glass ceiling of Sklavenmoral and envy. This envy will likely target not primarily the power, wealth and attention of the fortunate. No. It will go after a much subtler and more sensitive aim: the highest inner potentials of our fellow human beings. Little pins in that voodoo doll. Nothing hurts our sense of “chosenness” and immortality more than the manifest sublimity of another’s soul. Not only that they are successful, but that they are idealistic, good-hearted, ...more
23%
Flag icon
All of us long for power in some sense; all of us are born creators. To deny this is game denial. To defend suffocating inequalities is game acceptance. To accept this game of life and to evolve it—is game change. This, I believe, is one of the greatest challenges of the times ahead: So many beautiful minds and hearts will emerge to rise to the challenges of the coming period, and so many will work—unconsciously but connivingly—to stop them.
23%
Flag icon
installing “humility” (veiled Sklavenmoral) into the birthing heroes and heroines, suffocating them in their sleep. The enviers won’t know why they’re doing it; they’ll just act with a strange perceived “moral outrage” that eats at their hearts. If I am roughly correct about this future diagnosis, it means that we’re in for a lot of subtle, icky, sly conspiring.
23%
Flag icon
And this in turn will unleash narcissism:
23%
Flag icon
Where does it leave us then? We need to develop a corresponding level of introspective skills in as many members of society as possible. We need to be able to really look inwards. To bust our own bullshit. We must develop greater interpersonal trust, but we must also, on a profound level, become more trustworthy.
23%
Flag icon
How, then, do we beat envy and emancipate ourselves from the Sklavenmoral-regime? I suggest three angles of attack: First, to improve our shared general skills of introspection, so that we can “bust our own bullshit”; second, to make it visible and to name it, so that more people can see it coming and not so easily be taken by surprise; third, to help each of us integrate and own our deeply held will to power—more on this towards the end of this book.
24%
Flag icon
We must purify our souls and intentions so as not to hate or envy the greatness of one another. To be able to share in the glory and mystery of life.
24%
Flag icon
May the message ring: ‘I wish you power. I wish you greatness and superiority. I wish you transcendence.’”
24%
Flag icon
And yet, I must confess the naivety of the theory of freedom I have thus far proposed. Because even freedom does not set us free. Once we manage to cast off the fear, shame, guilt and Sklavenmoral of society’s conditioning, we are left with no forces pressuring us to do anything; no pre-given maps of meaning and no extrinsic motivations. Where there’s a whip, there’s a way, they say—playing of course on the saying “where there’s a will, there’s a way”. But without the whip, we may well lose our way—perhaps forever.
24%
Flag icon
For all its terrible and visceral materiality, our slavery to negative social emotions at least protects us from the responsibility of being creators of our own lives or co-creators of the world. 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. And in slavery to Sklavenmoral, we need not take responsibility for our own highest dreams and ...more
24%
Flag icon
The truth is that once we have traveled the long road to freedom, we are back at the very point where we started: at fear, at sheer terror.
24%
Flag icon
no mercy is found: reality itself is a canvas. Blank. Blank. Blank. Bam, motherfucker. Go create. No excuses. Ever. Because you’re free. Suddenly, like on a bad psychedelic trip, you find yourself lost in the hall of mirrors, with no beginning and no end of “the self” vis-à-vis “the world”. Just pure creation and full, unyielding responsibility for the universe. This whole “crossroads of fact and fiction” business just got eerily real.
24%
Flag icon
The terrible truth is this: freedom is struggle; freedom is terror; it is the terror of facing pure chaos, the pristine meaninglessness of reality, the vastness of potential, and the weight of the responsibility that follows.
24%
Flag icon
A keen observer of this predicament was Erich Fromm, the Freudo-Marxist social psychologist who wrote Escape from Freedom back in 1941 as a commentary upon the rise of nazism and other authoritarian movements. To embrace freedom, Fromm argued, human beings must have the proper spiritual support—we need to practice to be able to recreate ourselves at higher levels of individuation. We must grow as human beings in order to manifest positive freedoms (“freedom to”), lest we retreat in fear and try to recreate the imagined safe havens of the past. That’s what totalitarianism and reactionary ...more
24%
Flag icon
Kegan argues that the “self” progresses from a stage of a norm-conforming “Socialized” mind to a “Self-Authoring” mind, which in turn—in a small minority of adults—can make way for a yet higher “Self-Transforming” mind.
24%
Flag icon
Even if I don’t subscribe to this theory at the level of individual analysis, I do think it has something to say at an aggregated, societal level.
24%
Flag icon
If our societal freedom is not matched by a corresponding level of personal development, we are terrified by the freedom gained.
24%
Flag icon
novelist Steven Pressfield. In his book The War of Art, he vividly and intimately outlines the enemy of all artists: what he calls “resistance”. How many of us can truly overcome the resistance to create?
24%
Flag icon
Simple procrastination can also be an escape from freedom. Pressfield points out it is this denied and undealt-with inner resistance that shows up as an urge, not only to deny our own higher potentials, but to unproductively criticize and try to smother it in others—what I have called Sklavenmoral (and its two cronies, envy and narcissism).
24%
Flag icon
But to get at the heart of the matter we must recognize that a profoundly free society would be one where all of us become artists in the most general sense. We would all have to bear the terrible burden of creation that Pressfield describes. And by yet another tragic and ironic twist of fate, it just so happens that we live in a digital capitalist society in which every corner and every moment and every shelf is overflowing with excuses, distractions, quick rewards and new promises. How many ways are there not to lose our focus and sense of direction? It’s even worse than that; it is the case ...more
24%
Flag icon
Digital weapons of mass distraction. Higher freedom from extrinsic emotional pressures must grow in pace with higher stages of inner development, lest we be doomed to deceive ourselves into new sugarcoated escapes from freedom.
25%
Flag icon
Not only must negative freedoms be matched by positive opportunities; both of these must be matched by a corresponding degree of inner growth.
25%
Flag icon
Co-creative citizenship—society at large, its arenas, institutions and functions feel and effectively are as your own home and you feel comfortable and entitled to participate in any part of it. Viewed from this perspective, it is clear that the majority of citizens even in the “most free” countries of today are quite far from the highest reaches of freedom. If you consider countries such as Sweden, Germany or the US, most people have a freedom level of “5” according to this scale, while significant minorities have freedom levels of 1-4: trafficking victims, illegal immigrants, kids stuck with ...more
25%
Flag icon
conceivable that we could create societies in which much larger portions of the population climb the ladder by one or two steps, and where there are smaller pockets of oppression.
25%
Flag icon
If a person is no longer constrained by such negative emotions, but still remains socially and ethically functional, I would argue that she is approaching a more profound existential freedom, one that Nietzsche personified in the concept of the Übermensch. As we noted, this Übermensch can only come into being if there is sufficient inner personal development: self-discipline, intrinsic motivations, a strong compass, self-knowledge—and the four dimensions of psychological development: cognitive complexity, access to the right symbolic maps of the world, higher inner states and greater inner ...more
25%
Flag icon
A better translation may thus be “the trans-human”, a category that reaches through and goes beyond what we normally think of as human existence. In this interpretation, the Übermensch is not a superhuman comic hero, but rather a person who lives relatively unrestrained by the normal dynamics of everyday life as we commonly experience them.
25%
Flag icon
the Übermensch, which renders the very concept of freedom obsolete. Human beings long to be emancipated—the Übermensch wants to be unleashed.
25%
Flag icon
A life form unrestrained would begin to consciously self-organize in ways that create higher subjective states, greater existential depth, grasping for greater complexity. It would gaze deeper into the universe and recreate it, while recreating herself in the image of the order of the cosmos.
25%
Flag icon
We would co-create worlds and we would co-destroy them. And we would bear the heavy burden of such responsibility.
25%
Flag icon
Art conquers everyday life and subdues its tamed structures to a radical creativity. The wild. We become poets. And the poet acts; to create relative utopias, to pursue dangerous dreams.
25%
Flag icon
We have already noted that negative rights (“freedom from”) are less complicated than positive rights and entitlements (“freedom to”). It is easier to draw consistent lines for what people may not do to one another (physical abuse, theft, imprisonment, enslavement, and so forth) than for what we are obliged to do for one another (help in times of need, secure basic subsistence, provide education, healthcare, and so forth).
26%
Flag icon
My freedom depends on the inner workings of your thoughts and emotions, and vice versa.
26%
Flag icon
Without emotions of guilt and shame, it is difficult to see how we could make societal life function at all. And only highly functional societies can be expected to develop greater freedom. So freedom within a society always has to build upon un-freedom, upon an increasingly intimate form of self-organizing control.
26%
Flag icon
We have to wrestle with freedom as a common good, as something emanating from our everyday interactions with one another, with our environment and our “selves”. Freedom flows not only from institutions, but also from intimate and personal relationships. Your freedom does not begin where my freedom ends; that’s an illusion based upon the underlying assumption that human beings are sealed containers, that we are individuals, indivisible atoms.
26%
Flag icon
Hence, your freedom begins not at my imagined outward border, but at the center of my heart. Once you understand this, you can also see that equality is part and parcel of freedom’s development as equality determines the nature and quality of our relations.
26%
Flag icon
there are great developmental differences between us, with some people advancing to higher stages of adult psychological development than others: some have more complex thinking, more universal values, more refined relationships to life and existence.
26%
Flag icon
A limited version of the value of equality is the idea of “meritocracy”, or the “equality of opportunity”. According to this ideal, the aim of pursuing equality is one of removing all obstacles for people to achieve what the traits of their character would “naturally” let them “deserve”.
1 5 10