Nordic Ideology: A Metamodern Guide to Politics, Book Two

by Hanzi Freinacht

über—it can mean “over” or “above”, but it can also mean “th...

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...

the Übermensch, which renders the very concept of freedom obsolete. Human beings long to be emancipated—the Übermensch wants to be unleashed.

This is not a question of fantasy or theoretical speculation, but indeed a real and empirical one, even if the answer at this point remains hypothetical. If these regimes that control us weren’t there, but we were still highly functional members of a global society, what would we do? What would we be? I’ll tell you what I think. 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.

head-on into the mysteries of existence, not as individuals, but as an evolving global network of posthuman transindividuals, living in volitionally organized virtual tribes. Unhinged, uninhibited, we would explore with rapacious curiosity, play with religious fervor, worship with trembling devotion, fuck like beasts—dissolving our very sense of self into the crystal-clear night. Serving beauty and mending tragedy, we would dance, fight and laugh our way towards more terrifying heights and depths of consciousness, manifesting pristine universal, impersonal love—a love that fathoms and embraces reality, and all sentient beings, with mathematical precision. We would co-create worlds and we would co-destroy them. And we would bear the heavy burden of such responsibility.

At the top of this edifice we call civilization, when this tower of Babel touches the skies, a profoundly familiar call echoes through all of us: the call of the wild. This is the alpha and omega point. Before civilization, there is the wild, the untamed, the naked. After civilization, there is the wild, the untamed, the naked. But this time the call echoes into higher complexity and into the terrifying emptiness of outer space. Freedom must be hard and it must be wild.

Hence, your freedom begins not at my imagined outward border, but at the center of my heart.

And there would really be no excuses in a perfect meritocracy. You got every opportunity, and you still ended up getting the short end of the stick. You’re a bloody loser and you know it. You can’t blame anyone but yourself.

It’s a meagre vision for society because it ignores the fact that people are not equals. Any deeper equality is not possible unless we address this issue. 3. RECOGNITION FROM THE RECOGNIZED

Equality can be developed; it can evolve. At the most universal level, equality is deepened when the games of life are developed. Recognition cannot be forced

Deeply felt equality is an emergent property of society’s self-organization, of its power relations, of people’s opportunities, of second chances given, of freely available information, of education and feedback processes governing people’s lives, of people’s degree of emotional and social intelligence, of people’s physical stature, and so forth. And the depth of our equality affects all aspects of society—just as inequality harms every aspect of society and ultimately limits our freedom.

the economic, the social, the physiological, the emotional, the ecological and the informational. Let us briefly describe them one by one.

The economic inequality within rich countries, such as the US or the European countries, has been rising. This is largely due to the pressures of globalization where many jobs have been outsourced to low-income countries and immigration from poorer countries have created downward pressures on low-paying jobs.

The world at large is becoming richer at an astounding pace.

In a smaller world, say a tribe of 150 people, you can never really get much richer than anyone else. But when there are billions

of interacting people, those who gain the most central positions in the economy can become very, very rich. This

Social inequality is, of course, yet more difficult to address than economic inequality. After all, money and material resources can be transferred from one person to another, but friendships, trust, respect and inclusion cannot; they are not “given”, but only elicited through different behaviors and interactions.

We cannot change the logic of the global economic order overnight, but we can certainly shape and design organizations and institutions that generate a higher likelihood for social equality. In schools, we can have meditation training (which elicits more pro-social behaviors on a day-to-day basis), collaborative learning games in which all kids get to contribute to the greater whole, carefully designed (and non-sexual) massage sessions where kids touch one another in a friendly manner across the hierarchies, playgrounds designed for inclusive games, training in social and emotional intelligence, extended sexual education, and so forth.

Within affluent welfare societies like Sweden, the struggle for material equality is often really the struggle for social equality in disguise. In such societies, it is not that people are actually starving, but rather that lacking economic wealth can negatively affect their status and hinder their inclusion into social events. You even hear nurses, school teachers and police officers say: “It’s not that I really need that much money. I just want my paycheck to properly validate my work and effort.”

Each stage represents a quantitative difference that causes a qualitative shift.

The ethical issue of treating monkeys like this aside, the researchers made an interesting finding that was unavailable to the sociologists: that the quality of the immune system of the monkeys depended on their position in the social hierarchy. If

So if you’re low status, you also get sick. Hey,

that there is an inescapably physiological side to inequality. It

really goes both ways—other forms of inequality, such as economic and social, can have negative physiological consequences, and disadvantageous physiological states or traits can in themselves be sources of other inequalities.

Again, there is a physiological, deeply embodied, side to inequality—and it reaches all the way down to the biochemical level, affecting long-term processes that steer our lives and shape society. As biological creatures, we are not equals. Inequality, your position in the social hierarchies, sticks in your body: victories,

successes and social validation are embedded in your spine, into your body posture, into your very DNA. And so are losses, failures and rejections, real or imagined. Dominance hierarchies go far back in evolutionary psychology; we can see that animals of all kinds have confrontations, and hormones change depending on who wins, with changed ensuing behaviors as a result.

Without delving deeper into the discussion, let us simply name a few possible such measures: widespread training in posture and physiotherapeutic practices such as “basic body awareness” as proposed by Jacques Dropsy and Gertrud Roxendal; training in uses of body language (which has been shown to affect emotions and degrees of confidence and assertiveness); the facilitation of making healthy food choices that favor slow metabolism, stress tolerance and resilient bodies; the 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; the expansion of physical and bodily labor rights to protect from physical harm; the increase of leisure time to pursue physical and mental training—and so forth.

All of these things can and do interact with other forms of inequality and empower millions of perpetually disempowered human bodies. And as human bodies are strengthened, so are human...

Social exclusion is like a slap in your face. This is a real thing: You subject someone even to a small slight or rejection, and not only do they experience pain, they also become more vulnerable to such pain in the future, and their emotional state is pushed towards vengefulness and envy—even increasing the propensity towards physical aggression.[63]

Poverty taxes cognitive resources and causes self-control failure. 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.

When we feel like crap, we get stuck in a scarcity mindset. This is a form of emotional inequality.

You feel good, you space out, you have the time to contemplate life, and so forth.

On the other hand, what is more empowering than peace of mind? More empowering than a heart in love with life itself?

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. We should offer good emotional support, training and services to all citizens from the day they are born until their dying breath. If you care about the real, fundamental equality and dignity of humans, no other conclusion is possible or justifiable.

For instance, again, we can affect emotions by developing body postures and body language, by training social and emotional intelligence, by making sure good meditation practices are taught, and by making

healthy food more available—for instance, intake of vegetables has been shown to protect against depression, as has physical exercise. But emotions can be targeted even more directly.

Even if all emotions are, in some cosmic last instance, “okay”, we really shouldn’t wish for ourselves or our fellow citizens to be trapped by fear, shame, guilt, aggression and envy.

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.

I have now presented six forms of inequality: economic, social, physiological, emotional, ecological and informational—all

This is how cymatics work. You should do a web search for sassier images and videos of this mesmerizing phenomenon.

The different social dimensions of life can be brought to resonate, as it were, with each other; a “deeper resonance” can chime through society and everyday life.

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.

spirituality and self-improvement are in effect magnifying glasses of class distinctions.

It is tempting, from a classical Left perspective, to think spirituality and self-improvement are simply nonsense and offer no path towards deeper equality. 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. This would only lead to an exacerbation of inequality in its most profound and venomous sense.

It’s just that the norm system changed, and thus changed the behavioral incentives. And when incentives changed, people unconsciously changed their own deeply held values in less than a generation.

When it comes to gradual and honest inner growth, humans are slowly awakening gods. When it comes to the shifting of norms, we are lemmings.

Norms follow interests and incentives.

We are now approaching a more comprehensive model of “cultural game change”. There is the development of: higher effective value memes within the population, the major shifts of gear between different orders of state emergence and the intimacy of control, emotional regimes (degrees of freedom), and the struggle for deeper equality, encompassing an increasing portion of the six dimensions of equality, and cultural changes to the system of norms.