Nordic Ideology: A Metamodern Guide to Politics, Book Two

by Hanzi Freinacht

Integrity is the measure of how well your psyche is integrated. That’s it. Lack of integrity is when

Transpersonal integrity, in turn, builds upon not only how well the different parts of our inner selves are integrated, but how well all of us jive with one another, and how all of us jive with society around us. And all of this involves some pretty uncompromising soul-searching on the behalf of everyone. With a transpersonal perspective, it is clear that you can often see unconscious motives and drives in me and affect my actions outside of my own awareness—and vice versa. We are not autonomous, sealed containers, each with a God-given will of our own, but open and multilayered systems. Hence, in the last instance, what counts is not personal integrity (because that will always only be a surface phenomenon) but transpersonal integrity: our shared and intersecting inner depths.

Point being: we’ll never have a harmonious, kind and functional society without extensive inner work being done by many or most of us on a regular basis.

How does one reel in such chaotic states of mind and integrate them with one’s everyday self? Daniel Siegel has argued that a healthy mind is an “integrated” mind (and shown plenty of evidence to back this fundamental principle up). In his vocabulary, that means a balance between successfully “differentiating” mental phenomena from each other and then “linking” them together in more organized ways, seeing their interrelations. This line of thinking of course has a lot in common with the developmental perspective proposed in this book and its prequel.

We become civilized and we subtly go batshit crazy.

The mysterious relationship between madness and civilization has a name: increasing complexity.

And handling greater complexity in the world requires not only new ideas; it requires a kind of spiritual development of the average person. It should hence be a societal goal to develop not only higher subjective states in each of us, but also to help more of us develop and integrate greater inner depths, and—if possible—to develop our ability to think more abstract thoughts, to cognitively grasp and relate to more complex realities. This can be described in the following graph:

If this is correct, the conclusion should be clear: We need a society that helps more of us to marry high effective value meme to inner peace and stability, to mental health.

Emancipation politics, the politics of defending (in)dividual rights and increasing the degrees of freedom, seeks to counteract the new forms of oppression that can and will occur as the intimacy of control increases.

Higher freedom is paradoxically married to greater and more intricate forms of control. If you throw out all complex coordination of behaviors, you don’t get absolute freedom, but simply fragmentation and alienation; things painfully falling apart.

The common denominator would be that people are somehow subtly oppressed, in the sense they are being held back, pressured into things, feel suffocated and manipulated, or just aren’t treated in a dignified manner.

The idea of Emancipation Politics is to create a permanent framework for society’s ongoing debate and dialogue about freedom and oppression: If new forms of oppression emerge, in whatever subtle or obvious guise, there should be a forum for bringing this to the public eye and a framework within which new solutions and responses can be discussed and devised.

The answer, then, is not to avoid deeper integration of human agency and further development of the intimacy of control, but to put the struggle for deep emancipation—a principled defense of dividual rights—at the heart of this development. Failure to do so can and will set us on a drifting course towards totalitarianism.

Integration and (in)dividuation are in a

perpetual dance. Emancipation Politics can never by itself create higher (in)dividuation. You can’t “do politics” on someone and make them advance to a higher stage of personal development. Such processes of development must always belong to the person or group the...

Such things cannot be controlled or governed. But Emancipation Politics can stop the systemic suffocation of such instances of (in)dividuation.

process, awaits higher freedom, ready to bloom—more so than on top of any barricades I can think of. Questions that must be answered on a yearly basis are such as: What unhealthy and unwanted dependencies do people feel control their lives? In what contexts are people afraid to speak their honest opinions, and for what reasons? In what contexts are people being held back from legitimate initiatives and through what means does such holding back take place? What levels of personal (in)dividual freedom do different groups of the population have, if we use the 1-9 scale suggested in chapter 5 of this book?

What hooks and points of leverage do people have upon one another and how do these things play out in their lives? In what contexts are people being limited by bureaucracy and red tape? In what contexts have single persons or small groups been rolled over by collective or stronger group interests? In what contexts do people show obvious unwillingness to take personal responsibility, and what are the mechanisms causing such learned helplessness? What uses of authority can and should be questioned within policing, criminal care, healthcare, psychiatry, education and social work? In what contexts are people being manipulated and treated as means to an end? In what contexts do people feel pressured by civil society and family relations, and what are the consequences?

peers. Your freedom doesn’t start at my outer border, but at the center of my heart. You try to express a new interest or idea, but you’re pushed aside, ridiculed, threatened or silenced. You try to affirm your autonomy, but people use whatever leverage they have over you to put you in your place. You try to start a business, but your competition sabotages your efforts. All of these are direct, interpersonal forms of oppression. They cannot be viewed as originating from the system, or from culture at large (even if they do of course interact with these categories), but simply from the behaviors of others—from specific bullies in all their forms and guises. A society full of bullies and oppressors is, naturally, less free than one in which we don’t play such roles in the lives of one another. An Emancipation Politics worth its name should work to reduce the prevalence and severity of such bullying and oppression throughout all of society.

No, the level of scientificness of society can only be measured by the density and complexity of the meshwork of intersubjective verification and falsification. Fundamentally, that’s what it means: the degree to which we—collectively as a society consisting of a network of people referring back and forth to one another—manage to check, double-check and triple-check the information, suppositions, methods, claims and ideas of one another, and the quality, efficiency and systemic optimization of said checks. A peer-reviewed society? Yes, why not—given that the peer-review system itself is criticized and upgraded.

The society of the future, metamodern society, must be a society closer to the approachable but always unattainable truth.

On the contrary, the radical insight that all truths are constructed, relative and multifaceted leads us towards a more profound relatedness to the collective seeking of truth: The ability of a society to manage, evaluate and coordinate the greatest possible number of injunctions into the truth is a measure of how truthful that society is.

In short, we must “truth” society. It must be properly truthed. It needs a good and thorough truthing. I give you… the ten-fold path to enlightenment! Enlightenment 2.0, that is.

The Ministry of Empirical Politics would evaluate, survey, rate and publicize the degree of evidence-based practice in all areas of public sector work and civil service.

Empirical Politics would aim to improve the quality, relevance and reliability of science, throughout all branches.

a cultivation and development of the critical meta-discussion about science and its role in

We should increase the number of networked contacts and exchanges between the scientific fields—there’s that magic word interdisciplinarity (or crossdisciplinarity)—as well as between the sciences and the industries, both private companies, social entrepreneurs,

the public sector and other agents.

increasing the average ability for critical thinking and logical reasoning in the general population.

the founding of crosschecking media institutes.

the support of a co-developmental political culture.

the development of the precision and reliability of everyday language.

population. Ontological security is a term coined by the sociologist Anthony Giddens, and usually refers to “the sense of order and continuity in regard to an individual’s experience”.

The point here is, as noted earlier, that our commitment to truth and our ability to challenge our own opinions and conceptions depend upon how safe we all fundamentally feel in the universe. By strengthening this sense of security, we serve truth-in-society at its most essential level.

We need to find ways to be better at sticking to empirically sound assessments of reality.

Metamodern society takes that fundamental code, our very own perspectives, into its own hands, and shapes it, just as it shapes nature; metamodernism is the historical point when society becomes conscious of itself.

that the very concept of “man” and its underlying presuppositions will only last for a while and is already being replaced by other ideas of the fundamental protagonist in the universe: self-organization and consciousness, categories beyond any anthropocentric and humanistic biases. And

It is the conquest, if you will, of inner space.

development. There is no clear beginning or end to the relationship of culture to culture/nature itself: It is like a serpent in a ring, biting its own tail, an ancient symbol also called the “the ouroboros” (sometimes it’s a dragon biting its tail). The Klein bottle is another image that comes to mind (the mathematical image of a “bottle containing itself” first presented in 1882 by Felix Klein). Or, if you like another image less imbued with occult or mathematical symbolism: a dog chasing its own tail.

This is arguably more in tune with the multicultural societies of today’s post-colonial, global world, but it still suffers from a number of inadequacies: it’s overly preoccupied with details and smaller histories, more concerned with picking apart established conceptions than creating new ones, and it offers little help to navigate a hypercomplex, ever more technological advanced and increasingly interconnected global civilization on the brink of ecological collapse.

but the postmodern “smash approach” leaves us with a “history in pieces”. It urgently lacks meta-narratives to link the many pieces together.

Daniel Quinn’s 1992 novel Ishmael (in which a telepathic gorilla guru teaches the protagonist about the mythical and limited nature of the stories that “modern, rational man” tells himself).

We will move from simply being ruled by culture, to both governing culture and being governed by

it—thereby reshaping the direction of the evolution of all life on our planet.

Resonance. This has become a growing theme among leading thinkers and researchers of our day, from Nancy S. Love’s 2007 book on political theory, Musical Democracy; to Barbara Fredrickson’s neurological studies of interpersonal resonance where people’s affection and trust are shown to grow as they successfully and repeatedly resonate in terms of brain activity while interacting with one another (popularized in her book Love 2.0); to Daniel Siegel’s theory of inner health and growth; to the rise of studies of complex systems and ecologies. And then there’s the parallel discussion about coherence, which touches upon similar themes. I could go on; it’s a thing, and it’s emerging across the sciences.

The master pattern is not brought to life through one harmonizing totalizing “plan”, but through a number of processes pushing against each other, refining, challenging and defeating each other.

This process sets in motion the generation of a self-aware and self-organizationing political culture, the hallmarks of metamodern society; a society that gazes deeper into its own structures, its own becoming, its own citizens, its own future and place in the universe.

Without a conscious self-organization of human activity to improve and optimize inner development, humans will never be able to enter into free and creative association with one another.

rather

Hence, any truly anarchist society, loyal to the goals set by Bakunin, must be shaped to support the inner growth of all citizens.