Nordic Ideology: A Metamodern Guide to Politics, Book Two

by Hanzi Freinacht

This puts the conservative at a constant rhetorical disadvantage; you generally tend to sound less nice.

Which is quite annoying—a tired and irritated look on the conservative’s face unmistakably presents itself when liberals and radicals go on, performing their moral braggadocio and “virtue s...

But crimes against potentiality are also crimes against humanity, and against all life on our planet—against all beautiful futures. Game acceptance also kills.

And just as there is an embodied form of game denial, so there is an embodied form of game acceptance.

Game acceptance, at its most extreme, murders a lot more people than does game denial. But it doesn’t stop there. The worst crime of game acceptance is that it blocks legitimate, necessary and very possible change.

closer look. Life is unfair because relations between sentient beings are layered in games for scarce resources. Through resources (of whatever form) we can reach for the sublime and approach our fundamental, unknowable God-nature:

In human beings socialized within complex tribes or societies, death is defied by the extension of the idea of ego—my name, my recognition, my ideas, my deeds, my sacrifice, my devotion, my children, my ancestors, my style, my monument, my love, my passion.

The major objective of the metamodern political project is to change the rules of the game.

Life is a plus-sum game with possible win-wins. Life is also often a zero-sum game with lose-win. Life is sometimes even a tragic dilemma of lose-lose. But the rules of the game can change, evolving into more win-win, less lose-win and less lose-lose.

Successful changing of the game is that which: produces more winners in life, produces fewer losers, softens the fall of the losers, increases the rewards of the winners, and makes people act kindlier and more fairly while playing the game.

As we shall see in the coming chapters, game change is a developmental affair. It has to do with making advances into higher stages of societal development.

Figure: Game change. See Appendix B for more on these different fields of development: system, psychology, behavior, culture.

Can you see how the inner development of people is interlinked with the development of society as a whole? That society’s function

fundamentally relies upon the personal development...

You can’t just develop society by means of “imposing” a certain political system or changing people’s values. Game change occurs by means of systemic change, psychological development of the populations, changes in habits and behaviors, and through cultural development. These fields—system, p...

“Without order, nothing exists, Without chaos, nothing evolves.” —From the rap text to Heavy Metal Kings, by Jedi Mind Tricks.

Fukuyama argues there are three major ingredients of a modern liberal democracy: A meritocratic state bureaucracy (where people are loyal to society as a whole, not only to their family or clan) Accountability of the government (with a strong civil society capable of self-organizing and sometimes resisting the power of the state) Rule of law (i.e. that laws are upheld and the government is restrained by the same laws as everyone else)

I wish to introduce a simple but exceedingly pervasive rule in the development of the state: the rule of increasing intimacy of control.

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

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.).

We have the possibility of creating a society in which we are happier, healthier and more of us have more universalistic values and strivings in our everyday lives. Such a society would be more stable and less prone to crisis—economic, political, social or ecological. It would be more resilient.

So after the welfare state, the next attractor ahead is yet another major increase in the intimacy of control: 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. Utopian? Yes, in a relative sense.

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”).

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. Accordingly, this was an analysis of what Durkheim called “differentiation” and integration.

Erich Fromm, the 20th century social psychologist, argued that the development of human personalities evolve as each person finds an individual path and relationship to life, which in turn always reasserts more universalistic values and strivings. Fromm used the word “individuation”—but since I believe in the “dividual” rather than the “individual” I’ll stick with “dividuation”.

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.

As such, modern society suffers from a chronic lack of deeper and more complex forms of integration. Societal development spurs the growth into higher stages of personal development, but higher stages of development create an increasing pressure upon society to break the prevailing alienation.

But—and this is a big but—every attempt to create more intimate integration risks becoming a new source of oppression.

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 make our organizations more personal, some of us feel stuck in more personal issues and conflicts in which our vulnerabilities become all too apparent. When we create greater transparency, some feel more surveilled.

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. We must be allowed to live as whole human beings. We need to live fuller lives. We need to be able to show up as a vulnerable, real person at work, and do work that is meaningful to us in terms of our values and views of society.

Integration is necessary for more complex societies to function, but it can always, sooner or later, become controlling or even icky and creepy.

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 must acknowledge that we as a society need negative emotions to regulate our behavior.

There are different emotional regimes in different societies.

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.

So once the highest Freedom House rating has been achieved, we are left with the momentous task of increasing freedom by developing how people truly feel, and specifically how we feel about and relate to one another.

Freedom is a collective concern, yes, but it is also intimate and relational. Hence: transpersonal.

This is the hierarchy of negative emotions: fear, then guilt, then shame, then Sklavenmoral. By collectively climbing this hierarchy, we reach higher freedom.

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.

even the rich and powerful. Hence, there is a progression from fear-regimes, to guilt-regimes, to shame-regimes. At each stage it can be argued that the degrees of personal freedom grow. But at each stage you also get another struggle, another playing field—another kind of freedom.

world, we’ll notice that pride and self-glorification seem to have gone terribly out of fashion in recent years—Trump’s unabashed boasting just isn’t as cool in New York and Silicon Valley as it is in Alabama.

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 everyone’s mind: How can I be special, rise above the herd? Why does that person get to be special? What exactly determines who is special and who is a boring mainstream person?

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.

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.

It is difficult to imagine a society run by fear and guilt in which a significant part of the population would feel as deeply enmeshed cozy co-creators of the whole of culture (levels 7-9)—or even as dignified and protected citizens (level 5).

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 depths (intimate knowing of both the light and darkness of existence).

Übermensch is usually translated as “superman”, but this translation is somewhat misleading. There is a distinction in the German language between different uses of the word