Nordic Ideology: A Metamodern Guide to Politics, Book Two

by Hanzi Freinacht

That the very social fabric of everyday life can and must be intelligently developed is the essence of political metamodernism.

“The listening society” is the name for a vision of the future welfare system which expands and deepens the current universal welfare programs by addressing the higher psychological needs of human beings such as belonging, esteem and self-actualization—a welfare system determined to ensure that as many as possible don’t feel lonely, socially inferior or trapped in meaningless lives.

The central idea is that by cultivating a listening society, we can not only create much happier human lives, but also dramatically spur the psychological development of larger parts of the population into the higher stages.

If the last book gave you an introduction to developmental psychology, this book presents you with a developmental sociology, and then links it to a concrete political plan of how you change society.

It shows you how the Nordic ideology—or political metamodernism—eats all of the existing ideologies alive.

There is a masochistic side to most of us. We all love displays of power. Power feels real and substantial, somehow. People with poor self-knowledge tend to deny this drive in themselves; but if you watch their actual behaviors, their self-deceit becomes apparent. In fact, the deniers of power tend to be the most hysterically power hungry. Anarchists and moralistic far lefties come to mind. Power is very erotic, and in our fantasies, erotic or not, we display it in different forms: unhindered, determined agency, being in the right, showing great conviction, putting up heroic resistance, sporting impressive self-control, the earning of respect, the eliciting of admiration, displays of towering wisdom and equanimity, the inspiring of awe and perhaps even envy or fear. All of this stuff is ultimately about power, and the possession and expression of power. Democracy, deliberation and good citizenship, alas, are just not as exciting as power and hierarchy. And our erotic minds exercise great influence upon what we find worthwhile in terms of time, energy and attention. This is a paradox not only in writing, but as many psychologists have observed, in society and human relationships at large: especially in gender relations, love and sex.

But one thing remains the same: the transpersonal stance. I am not an individual. I am much larger than that. I am a thousand voices crisscrossing and whispering within, from my earliest biological impulses to my some 10,000 year history of civilization, to my unconscious drives and weaknesses, to my spiritual capacities which link me to the skies and the unyielding mysteries of the cosmos itself. And so are you.

Many of the great change-makers in history, whether we’re talking about political figures such as Mahatma Gandhi or entrepreneurs like Steve Jobs, seem to have had an intuitive understanding of the way the future exerts a kind of gravitational effect upon the present; that developments in the present in certain ways are pulled towards the unrealized potentials of the future.

Without knowing the attractors, you are destined to miss the starting gun. Gandhi saw the world was headed towards universal principles like democracy, human rights, racial equality and rule of law, which inevitably would render colonial rule ethically indefensible, even to the colonizers themselves.

Technically speaking, an “attractor” is a pattern or equilibrium that under certain conditions is very likely to emerge and stabilize within a dynamical system, such as a society.

But instead of “north” and “Mecca”, we are dealing with another dimension by which we can navigate: the stages of development; each stage being an attractor for society to stabilize around.

revolution). The “virus strategy” proposed here works differently. We are not really targeting the constitution and designing “a system” you can “establish” by promulgating certain laws. We are talking about cultivating new processes that target culture itself and the developmental psychology of everyone; about creating a more existentially apt and emotionally sensitive civilization—a listening society.

studying major societal attractors is a good thing when your analysis is correct, and it’s a bad thing when you’re wrong.

Potentials become realities in part because we recognize them and act upon them.

At the same time that doesn’t mean life has become “perfect”. So today’s developed societies really are utopian, but only in a relative sense. This is the both-and of development. They are utopian as compared to what came before. But that doesn’t mean today’s society has no problems. In fact, it has two very distinct kinds of problems: Residual problems New emergent properties problems

The residual problems are the percentages left here and there of the pre-modern stage of development: not all people are protected from curable diseases, some live in areas controlled by mobsters and are thereby still oppressed, some slavery still goes on (30 million de facto slaves is a figure people often bring up), and some people still starve or otherwise suffer from poverty.

society: the new emergent properties problems. At a bare minimum, there are three such problems: ecological unsustainability, excess inequality, and alienation and stress.

Notwithstanding that these are, on an individual scale, preferable to the wars, droughts and pestilences of yore, they are still quite serious. Sustainability issues like climate change, ecological collapse, mass extinction—not to mention the looming threat of nuclear holocaust and other increasingly tangible doomsday scenarios (haywire AI or nanotech, biological warfare)—can potentially cause miseries worse and more irreparable than even the black plague.

estrangement and existential angst—causes young people to suffer depression and commit suicide to an unprecedented degree. It causes people to live meaningless and empty lives amidst what superficially looks like freedom and abundance; lives in which we become increasingly stressed out and often experience burnout. I remember

our industrial productivity: sustainability because we produce and consume more than our ecosystems can endure, inequality because this wealth is distributed in a series of “scale free networks”, where the most central positions gain a larger proportion of the wealth, and alienation because of the abstractness and distance that shows up between our everyday activities and their benefits for ourselves and others: Many of us lose a sense of meaning, purpose and direction. (Of course, there’s a lot more to the story on each one of these, but we’re just sketching here to get on to the point).

The paradise of yesterday is great, but it carries with it a number of unexpected pathologies that need to be dealt with in tomorrow’s relative utopia.

The third category I’ve called “beauties lost”. It entails all the good things that were prevalent in pre-modern societies, but for different reasons diminished as societies became modern.

A good example is “community”, or what the classical 19th century sociologist Ferdinand Tönnies called Gemeinschaft (modern life, at least in its later urbanized stages, generally offers little cozy, genuine community in which you continuously relate to a wider group of family and neighbors).

Music gained, but singing lost.[17]

Another example of a beauty lost is “simplicity”; that life had a kind of directness and straightforwardness which allowed a certain modest satisfaction. Other such beauties lost are the “connection to the soil”, appreciation of the small things—perhaps a well-crafted tool—or the via contemplativa of monastic life; the calm, ascetic life in service of spiritual goals. You get the picture. These “beauties

With each beauty lost, a part of us is left empty and aching.

What we should do instead is simply to acknowledge that all societal progression into later and “more advanced” stages entails some beauties lost, and that there may be good reasons to figure out how some of these can be regained and reincorporated without trying to turn the clock back.[18]

The fourth category of problems is more important. We can call it “new heights reached”. There are problems that are perhaps not directly caused by modern life, but whose solutions only now come within reach.

We have reached new heights and hence we can begin to tackle higher issues. The soul always wants more; it is never contented. You

never get to the end; there is always a new horizon after this one, and another.

What are these new issues then, these “new heights”? I would like to mention four of them. The first “new-heights issue” is tied to alienation, but still distinct from it: the lack of meaning and fulfillment. What happens in a society where you already have food, shelter and abundance? People begin to worry that they might be squandering their lives; that they may not be makin...

The second new-heights issue has to do with strug...

How can we be something else, something more, than just an average Jane or Joe consumer? Now that we have relative safety and autonomy, how can we make it worthwhile? Once we have achieved a comfortable villa life, there is still, lingering in our hearts, a visceral longing for greatness within us. How can we transcend ourselves; how can we serve something greater so that our lives become imbued with crisp, clear moments of intense aliveness?

The third higher issue pertains to gender equality and freedom of identity: Can we be sexually emancipated, not only in the sense that we can be women with equal rights as men, but that we can be truly sexually and emotionally fulfilled? Can we experience erotic fulfillment and intimacy both at once? Can we be gay, transgender, or otherwise experiment with and create our sexual and gender identities? Women’s liberation and the other gender/sexuality issues have come within our grasp in modern societies, but they are not conclusively solved by it. The fourth and last higher issue is animal rights. Of course, a big part of the problem with the abuse of animals has to do with modern phenomena such as industrial farming.

Animal suffering is exacerbated by modernity, even with the increased legislatio...

Residual problems (left-overs from before modernity). New emergent properties problems (caused by modernity). Beauties lost (qualities from earlier societies lost under modernity). New heights reached (problems that simply weren’t viable to try to solve before, but now have come within our reach).

A society can be described as metamodern if, and only if, all of the problems of modernity have been more or less resolved, meaning that they have been reduced by at least a power of ten.

In other words, metamodern society is defined as one in which the problems that emerged in modernity—lack of sustainability, excess inequality, alienation and stress—have been resolved. So that’s what we’re going for. Fucking utopia. Fucking relative utopia, that is.

residuals of the modern problems: still some inequality, environmental issues and alienation (whereas the pre-modern residuals are reduced by yet another order of magnitude); 2. and yes, there will be new, emergent problems caused by metamodern society itself (some of which we will discuss in this book in an attempt to preempt them); 3. and yes, some beauties of modern life will be lost along the way; 4. and yes, new dark clouds will form on the horizon, new bold challenges to civilization that come within our grasp.

societal progress is about “game change”; it’s when the background rules of life’s interactions—everyday, normal interactions—change and evolve. Progress is when the game of life becomes fairer, kinder, more transparent, more inclusive, more forgiving, more sustainable, more rational, more fulfilling.

Yet, many of us frequently fall victim to what I call “game denial”: the inability to perceive, or a negligence of, the logical and behavioral rules that regulate human relations. Game denial is when you ignore or “wish away” certain uncomfortable truths regarding human relations and how reality works. Or simply when you deny the realities of life and forcefully impose your own “ought” upon what “is”.

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.

A Universal Basic Income that would cover a lower middle-class wage, the sooner the better! It would free all, and a creative explosion of solidarity would occur, and we would usher in a golden age of love and innovation! Game denial: The labor market is a complex game of power relations and for people to sustainably perform less-than-rewarding but crucial tasks (e.g. cleaning blood off hospital

floors), there must be a complex system in place of penalties, hierarchies and rewards. If you wreck this system, welcome to the Soviet Union. Stalinism next. Or worse. (Not saying that all such initiatives are game denial, but many are.)

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.

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 first victim of game denial is the truth.

Crimes against actuality are crimes against humanity and all life on our planet.

Speaking one’s perceived hard truths often makes you sound like a douchebag.