Nordic Ideology: A Metamodern Guide to Politics, Book Two

by Hanzi Freinacht

cultivation of a non-judgmental and non-competitive “gym culture”; the transformation of public spaces with more available outdoor facilities for physical exercise; combating stress and ergonomic strains of office life and work life in general;

increase of leisure time to pursue physical and mental training—and so forth.

And as human bodies are strengthened, so are human dignities salvaged and human potentials released.

It has been shown in a growing body of recent research that social exclusion and rejection activate similar patterns in the brain as physical pain.

we find that human lives are lived in profoundly unequal emotional surroundings. Some of us wake up relatively carefree many mornings and experience positive rewards as the results of our actions, while others live out their lives in considerably more painful and impoverished inner landscapes. This is a form of inequality: emotional inequality.

different subjective “states” at every moment of our lives. To be alive is to feel like something: stable wellbeing, or nagging discomfort, or nightmarish valleys, or even spiritual and blissful heights of subjective experience. Such states are very volatile; they can change from moment to moment, but some people certainly live in higher states than others.

Is not the aim of all struggles for equality, after all, to guarantee that people can live rich and wonderful inner lives, rather than impoverished and suffocating ones? What could be a greater privilege than having a fundamental sense of “okay-ness”, even a sense of meaning, enchantment and wonder, throughout one’s life?

Society, in this view, is a vast, interconnected fabric of suffering and bliss, pulsating and reverberating with multitudes upon multitudes of lived experiences. Can this fabric be consciously and actively developed? Yes, it can.[65] It is the goal of political metamodernism to extend compassion, or at least solidarity, to this whole fabric of hurt and bliss, to society in its complex entirety, to the co-emergent inner worlds of countless millions.

But the point is that emotional hurt and lower states do have great costs over a lifespan. It has been shown, for instance, that bad parenting can knock 20 years off your life expectancy.[66]

We literally become dumber and make more short-sighted decisions when we are poor or under economic stress: we eat less healthy, invest less intelligently and we even score lower on IQ tests.

There is good reason to believe this principle of a scarcity mindset extends well beyond economic decision-making and that it is equally valid in other areas of life: love, dating

Inner states and emotions are at the center of how inequality is reproduced across all of its dimensions.

Even if our emotions are products of economic, social and physiological inequalities, there are, roughly speaking, two forms of services that can be offered: 1) the eliciting and boosting of positive emotions and 2) the support towards successfully coping with, integrating and transmuting negative emotions. In a listening society, the deeper welfare of the future, we can and should create institutions and structures that work against emotional inequality—not, of course, by making the happy miserable to even out the playing field, but by strengthening our psyches so as to deal with difficult emotions.

But emotions can be targeted even more directly. For example, all children could be offered simple forms of counseling during their school years, which would help many of them from being taken over by destructive emotions during their early lives and onwards. Schools could use exercises of “positive psychology”,

The issue here is only to raise awareness of the question of emotional inequality so that the political discussion can begin, and so that it can enter the political agenda.

Ecological inequality includes such things as access to fresh air, clean water, lush vegetation, beautiful scenery, healthy and non-toxic food, clean living spaces—even sunlight. In many large Chinese cities, a lot of people hardly see the sun, and millions die as a result of air pollution.

in California, it has been shown that blacks and Latinos on average breathe in 40% more air pollution than whites—which naturally affects physiological equality and thus all the rest of it.[67]

informational inequality, the divide between the haves and have-nots of information and knowledge.

Those stuck at the bottom of the “attentionalist economy” are perpetually distracted from projects of self-empowerment.

Tinder can have literally 800 pages worth of very sensitive personal information if you’ve been on it for a few years. Hence, informational inequality works through many different mechanisms. One such mechanism revolves around the powers of producers and large companies over consumers, with the latter by necessity having lesser access to relevant information, thus being easily manipulated in a myriad of ways. And this dissymmetry of informational access plays out in a corresponding manner within the political arena as wealthy groups gain disproportionally large political influence and misuse state institutions to protect their interests, shaping media landscapes and curtailing the transparency of decision-making and bureaucracies.

whereas the less complex thinkers and less technically apt fall prey to fake news, misinformation and waste their attention, time and money on things that don’t accumulate good results in their lives.

economic, social, physiological, emotional, ecological and informational capital. Taken together with concepts such as cultural and sexual capital, these can be said to constitute a person’s or group’s total capital (or lack thereof). Most observers have failed to recognize total capital. And this means they have failed to defend and develop real equality.

The six dimensions of inequality.

cymatics—an area of study at the cross-section of music, mathematics and the physics of waves. The basic idea of cymatics is this: If you play a sound at a certain frequency over a fluid or a membrane with powder on it, a sound-wave induced pattern appears in the medium

Inequality is always caused by an act of measurement, by a beholder who judges the beheld as inferior, be it our “self” or one another.

It suffices to mention that the observer herself must be part of the equation of any deeper and more radical equality.

Equality, stage one, is the struggle to make people more equal, to even out the real, visceral differences between us: the rich and the poor, the privileged and the underprivileged, the powerful and the disempowered, the enfranchised and the disenfranchised, the respected and the despised.

We need to let some societies—nations, city hubs and local communities—become nodes in the network that is the intermeshed transnational, metamodern, world order.

Equivalence goes deeper than that. It is the struggle for people to truly feel as equals, that we are of equal value or worth.

equivalence, the genuine sense of equal worth. Such an embodied sense would protect us not only from many exploitations and injustices, but also from many venues of self-blame and inferiority.

Equanimity goes deeper still. It is the spiritual and psychological struggle to give up our deeply seated tendency to judge and evaluate ourselves and others in the first place.

snatched the term from Buddhist teachings in which “equanimity” is practiced as a mental stance of accepting our mental and bodily states as well as our life situations and ongoing events. As such it is linked to higher subjective and spiritual inner states and can only be achieved in a society in which the average inner state is much higher and the social logics of everyday life are governed as little as possible by the underlying negative emotions of the spectrum of judgment. Equanimity doesn’t mean that we give up discernment; we still need to evaluate the behaviors, ideas and efforts of one another. It just means there is a fundamental sense of “okay-ness”, of acceptance—that our differences and inequalities no longer remain such a big deal.

Acceptance, in this sense, is the negative side of love. When we love someone fully, it is not only that we cherish their strengths and potentials, but that we accept their weaknesses and struggles.

higher goal of societal development is not so much to achieve “perfect equality”, but rather to render the very struggle for equality obsolete. Equality, equivalence and equanimity—there is the progression, from leveling the unfair differences between us, to adopting a more profound sense of value for all, to letting go of our strange human obsession with impossible comparisons, ultimately rendering equality itself obsolete.

Because they can still show up momentarily, in limited settings, for shorter periods of time, in small incubators within our personal relationships and some of the metamodern internet tribes out there. They might not stabilize or spread, but only flicker past us during our lives. But as such they can remind us of the deeper meaning of equality, and thus subtly steer the development of the world-system. In such settings, where equanimity reigns, creativity must be held higher than equality.

spirituality and self-improvement are in effect magnifying glasses of class distinctions. Here’s what I mean. If you are already in a position of financial security, good access to information and cultural sensitivity to frauds and trends, you can partake in high quality meditation courses and self-development programs that are scientifically supported and help you learn new things about yourself. This will generally improve your life quality further and make you more socially, emotionally and economically proficient.

At the top of this scale you find what I call integralists (after the followers of Ken Wilber’s elaborate “integral spirituality”). These folks are the relatively privileged ones who adopt difficult and esoteric teachings and subtle body practices, and drill them arduously for years—and who manage to keep a scientific worldview (uhm, relatively) intact in the process. Their thinking and life experience are enriched and they develop greater existential depth and higher subjective states, even to the point where they themselves can sell these services at favorable prices. They are enriched across the scale. The middle segment we can call the yoga bourgeoisie. These might dabble in a little astrology and quick-fix “life-changing” courses and eat some silly supplements, but by and large they are still energized by their spiritual practices and are comfortable enough economically to do so with good conscience. They might believe in a little magic here and there, but they generally understand that they should keep such discussions to themselves and don’t spoil their professional lives in the process. And then, on the low end of the scale, we have what I call the astrology precariat.[72] Here the magic beliefs of desperate people result in a heightened vulnerability, which leads to a cruel commercialization of the human soul.

And then you just spent the last year paying healers to help you when what you really needed was to get your life and finances more organized. And you end up even more desperate and gullible. People in the astrology precariat very often suffer from severe mental illness and distress—and often end up in psychiatric care (psychiatrists can attest to the prevalence of people with borderline syndrome who have been exploited by quacks and con artists).

Yet I would hold that they, in fact, are keys to transforming society, even beyond equality, taking us closer to equivalence and equanimity. However, I would be wary of any attempt to center the transformation of society on spirituality and self-improvement alone.

Spirituality and inner self-improvement are heavy drugs; they are indeed a double-edged sword. Today, they have become a magnifying glass for inequality and class stratification; tomorrow, inshallah, they can become universal tools of empowerment, emancipation and universal solidarity. Would it be so strange if, at the enigmatically silent depths of our human (or posthuman) hearts and minds, we will find deeper equality?

Norms regulate what is normal behavior, and thus which behaviors are repeated as habits.

Norms are simple rules, injunctions, ideals and taboos that steer our behavior in everyday life, all attached with weighted penalties and rewards.

They are—with the words of the classical anthropologist Margaret Mead—that which divides the “pure” from the “impure”. As such, the norms of different societies can seem quite arbitrary or even silly to members of other societies or cultures.

Examples of norms from contemporary Western societies entail such things as: don’t talk about too personal or “private” things in professional settings, don’t be racist, don’t be a pedophile, don’t have sexual relations with animals,

From a critical and social-scientific perspective, it is obvious that different norm systems can be more or less compatible with different societal and economic systems. For instance, democratic norms of free speech and tolerance are generally very useful to large, complex societies that need to process large amounts of information and coordinate the actions of many millions of people. Strong family norms and loyalty to one’s parents can be useful in traditional agrarian societies—for

All norms come with calibrated rewards and penalties of different kinds. If you cheat on your husband in the wrong culture you get disowned by your family and perhaps even stoned to death. It might even count as cheating if you were raped.

But the norm systems of course change over time, and this can happen either through unconscious processes

deliberate struggles on behalf of social movements and what sociologists call “moral entrepreneurs” (folks who invest their lives into changing norms). The simplest and clearest example of such norm development is perhaps the major shift in Western societies from homophobia to acceptance of LGBTQ+ rights.

The norms shifted from punishing people for being gay, to punishing people for being homophobic.

This “development of the norm system” may in part be explained by the general shift to higher average effective value meme in the population, with more people at the modern and postmodern stages.