Nordic Ideology: A Metamodern Guide to Politics, Book Two

by Hanzi Freinacht

Never mind winning every debate. Sun Tzu said it: “Victorious warriors win first and then go to war, while defeated warriors go to war first and then seek to win.”

Don’t mind every petty argument. Don’t get caught in justifying political metamodernism and the Nordic ideology to the modern mind; that would be like justifying liberal democracy to the Spanish inquisition. Of course they will think you are hopelessly vague, spineless and/or totalitarian.

And how do you stop any one part from controlling all the others? You make sure as many perspectives as possible are empowered in an open-ended process. You make sure there are information flows to tear down any one governing logic that would assert itself. And you make sure the best possible processes are cultivated for such resistance to take place. Mobility, flow, multiplicity, sometimes gory dispute—these are the pillars of truth.

As such, political metamodernism is both the ideology that is the closest to fascism and the one most in opposition

Fascism is the opposite of refined democracy: it is pure dominance and submission. It is speed, excitement, violence, blood, iron, autonomy, force, will, power. It is untamed—erotic in the deepest sense of the word.

Fascism was and remains a feverish boy room fantasy. But psychologically, for all its immature lies and manipulations, it honored the fact that a part of us is always susceptible to such a dreamy will for greatness. We cannot truly “grow out of it”; only deny it. The world is not enough.

The point is merely that the same underlying fascist impulse is there.

is: Political metamodernism shares a part of that same demonic quality, which comes from owning the unapologetic striving to take the hero’s journey.

And I guess that right there is the ultimate litmus test for the metamodern mind. The metamodern mind sees that all nodes in the great weave of life long for power, for expansion, for fuller expression. And it sees that competition—just as love and trade—is an irremovable element of social reality itself.

It is a reflection of your own disowned green little devil, of your disowned will to power, and the resentment you feel when someone else expresses so clearly and straightforwardly what you have hidden away from view. You’re the sell-out, not me.

How do I know that? I know it simply because I understand that power and freedom are sisters; creation is power. So any time you want to change or create anything, you must have a will to power, and any time you make a power claim, there will be adversaries who have different ideas, ideals and interests, and thus you have to own up to that adversity and you have to try to win. And without a wish to change or create anything, you can have no morality; no wish to strive for the good. Hence: pure morality requires a pure will to power. Your denied will to power is immoral, and that’s what you feel reflected in yourself when you watch me unfold without apology.

That’s your green little devil talking: your disowned longing for greatness.

Your green little devil is transpersonally connected to mine, just as your mind is to mine.

Power is transpersonal because all creation is co-creation, and all emergence is relational—and power, ultimately, is the will and capacity to freely create; it is the will of potentials to emerge as actualities.

will to power. Nice Guy. Stop being a hypocritical inquisitor or witch-hunter and admit that you want shitloads of delicious power—and then be kind to people.

And that’s the space from which metamodern politics can emerge—from the trust that you will use your power kindly and I will use mine kindly, for mutual benefit and mutual goals; in a network of shared will to transpersonal power.

And here is the really cool part. Listen now. Once you admit you want shitloads of delicious power, that you crave pure co-creation, and you see and accept that same will in all other creatures—a profound sense of equality descends upon your soul; I guess you could say “equanimity” as we mentioned earlier.

At the heart of the will to power rests the most radical egalitarianism and universalism. This is what allows us, among other things, to study stages of adult development in a truly non-judgmental, accepting and non -competitive manner. The competitive element of life beco...

exchange, solidarity and trade; God doesn’t love one ...

Seriously, try it. Embrace your inner princely darkness. The green little devil stops whispering at the outer rims of your mind; it goes quiet. Your moral outrage ceases to murmur. Silence is there. And with silence comes clarity. And with clarity comes a more sustainable and authentic goodwill and kindness.

You recognize the simple truth that everybody is just super-vulnerable and utterly pathetic—yes, Hanzi too—and that the dynamics of everyday life force us to pretend to have dignity and to try to look like we know what we’re doing, and that’s why we want power. That’s why you want power, too. We’ll just admit the whole thing, no more obfuscation. From there on we can play together in sincere irony and informed naivety.

Energy is movement, and movement is dangerous; all becoming is also destruction. Entropy.

keeping some kind of shared map. It is okay to let glimmers of New Age spirituality—and traditional paths in general—inform and inspire us. They must, however, never govern us, lest we will inherit all their pathologies, albeit in a magnified and yet more toxic version. These are dangerous dreams.

There’s a koan to stay with: What is north of the North Pole?

Our best defense against new totalitarianisms is to find ways of looking inwards to engage with our necessary but dangerous dreams in transparent and democratic ways where a multiplicity of perspectives (and perspectives of perspectives) balance out and dissipate their explosive concentrations of power. We must create institutions that support higher stages of personal development. And to do that without it being totalitarian, we need to improve the processes of democratic governance.

Don’t label people by stages and developmental traits. Speculate a bit about people’s developmental stage, sure, talk about it when mutual trust is there, but never ever use stage as an argument against anyone, and never ever try to discredit anyone on account of the developmental stage you perceive them to embody. Don’t

Good societies are created by A) correct analysis, B) smooth information processing for the coordination of human agency, C) the dynamic balancing of different powers—and D) the dialectical conflict and mutual interdependence between different political interests and ideas.

It is hard to overstate how crucial it is to raise the average effective value meme. The most brilliantly designed constitution and all the best democratic institutions in the world are null and void if the majority of the population subscribe to a Viking warrior ethos; e.g. gravitating towards the Faustian value meme. Likewise a listening society cannot fully materialize as long as the vast majority remains firmly imbedded within a modern, rationalistic worldview.

best way to manage international relations. It affects the extent of your care and consideration towards others; the number of people and other sentient beings you include in your circle of solidarity. While people subscribing to higher value memes tend to be more concerned with the well-being of all humans, in all countries, no matter their background, people at lower value memes tend to have a much smaller circle of solidarity, usually those within their own country, often only of a certain kind, and rarely non-human animals unless they’re considered pets.

Our values are derived from our level of psychological development and play a critical role in the way societies evolve. It sets the limits for how far society can progress, and it determines how well our societies function at the current technological level.

The different value memes can be seen as kinds of political-psychological stages of development. Larger and more complex societies require higher value memes in the population in order to function and be sustainable.

The dynamic here is fairly simple and intuitive in a way. If a society is doing well and the games of everyday life become milder, fairer and more forgiving, people have the luxury to think in more universalistic, far-sighted, nuanced and complex manners.

Okay, back to the murder mystery. Why did communism kill a hundred million people? What was the murder weapon? It was the developmental imbalances between the four fields of development.

What we’re looking at is a disparaging challenge to our very biology: We are creating a society which we are biologically unequipped to grasp and thrive in. Up until now, people have been smart enough for society. These days we are, as it were, running out of cognitive fuel.

We’re not sufficiently cognitively complex to productively relate to the society that we ourselves have created—or rather, the society that has emerged, self-organized, as the complex result of our ongoing interactions.

Luckily, there is a lot that can be done about this matter. One part of it has to do with “transhumanism” (changing humanity via genetics and technology) but that topic falls outside the scope of this book and is discusse...

One of the main differences between pomos (postmodernists) and the “memos” (metamodernists) is that the latter include the perspectives of the earlier value memes and empathize with them (since the memos have a developmental, hierarchical perspective which the pomos don’t). The pomos just think there is something wrong with moderns and traditionalists, and that they need to “open up”, stop being so dogmatic and greedy, or that the spell of “bourgeois ideology” must be broken and so forth.

Reason Two: Socialist values require postindustrial abundance. But the problems with socialism don’t end there.

Reason Three: There simply aren’t enough pomos around to uphold the Postmodern value meme throughout society. For people to function within a postmodern society, you would need to have a culture that corresponds to this value meme.

But other than that, you must have vast cohorts of artists, writers, poets, filmmakers, professors and others who recreate and transmit this cultural code—being critical, inclusive, multiperspectival, and all the rest of it—who make these ideas and symbols active and alive within society.

It’s the obvious fact that we have an economic and technological world-system that has advanced far ahead of the three other fields of developed.

We live in an increasingly global, transnational, digitized, postindustrial world-system, with an increasing number of “disruptive technologies”, i.e. inventions that redefine people’s lives dramatically. But we lack a corresponding global, transnational, digitized, postindustrial system of governance. So the system goes tits up and creates large pockets of economic, social and cultural losers around the world: the working and middle lower classes in affluent societies, the exploited poor in poorly governed and failed states, the animals suffering under industrial farming, climate change refugees and other desperate migrants, the disenfranchised urban immigrant populations in ghettos and banlieues, the tribal and traditionalist religious populations who suffer from confusion and alienation, the fish and other aquatic animals, the biosphere itself. But these issues would be self-regulating if the populations, economic agents and leaders of the world were up to pace with recent developments. The crux is that we are not. That’s the issue. That’s what’s wrong with the world. We lack a cultural sphere and understanding of our time, an overarching narrative that matches this new economic and technological order of the world. We, as global humanity, lack the corresponding value meme. And we display behaviors that are unsustainable and downright destructive, given the current systemic

circumstances. In other words, we have fallen behind in cultural, psychological and behavioral development. As noted in Book One, we live in a “retarded world”; we have developed too sl...

Thus, we must orchestrate an extensive moral, emotional and cultural development. I am not saying, as some idealistic observers think, that we should “follow our hearts” and “return to our moral intuitions and shared values”. Rather, the point is that our moral intuitions and shared values betray us; they can and must evolve.

It is an ironic twist of fate that, in order to solve the hard and large problems of the world-system, we must learn to look inwards—into our emotional lives and into the nature of our intimate relationships with ourselves, one another and our place in the universe. And we must do so, not as an individual

political issue that involves all members of society.

Studying the rules of the game and teaching them to as many as possible (Sun Tzu’s Art of War, Machiavelli’s The Prince, Neil Strauss’ The Game etc.). This actually makes the game fairer because it works against game denial and towards a more even distribution of knowing the rules of the game. But emphasizing this side alone can land us in the cynicism of game acceptance.

Change the game settings by changing the supply of resources. In richer societies where resources are more equally distributed, the games of everyday life are generally less cruel since people have more of what they need and thus feel less tempted to take advantage of others.

Change the game framing by changing ethical discourses. What is considered acceptable or not in order to get ahead in the daily games of life can be altered by making new ethical guidelines more prevalent; and if everyone tends to follow the same rules, people will be more inclined towards “playing nice”. Even who

is to be considered a “loser” can be changed, for instance by making it okay to be poor or uneducated. Evolve the game by increasing cognitive capacity for social perspective taking (higher cognitive stage and value meme, as described in Book One). This makes the whole game fairer, where people at higher cognitive stages accept John Rawls’ “veil of ignorance” (not knowing who in society you will be). Yet higher levels of complexity breed even more refined games, like accepting solidarity with all sentient beings and making room for different kinds of consciousness in the public. Amassing stronger and wider monopolies of violence (states can uphold the rule of law, but the lack of global polity or transnational governance sets limits for how far solidarity through rule of law can reach). A big and strong monopoly of violence stuck in a crude game can of course cause a lot of relative suffering (Fascist states caused more suffering than representative republican, capitalist, meat-eating societies, even if they managed to amass considerable monopolies of violence). But a strong state simply makes it more likely that interpersonal misdeeds are penalized, that people’s lives and property are protected, and hence that losing in the games of everyday life doesn’t entail death or absolute poverty. And last but not least, changing the lived relationship to life and death through increasing contemplative insight, hence changing the needs and wants the games are played for. This chan...