The Metamodern Aristocracy

The following is a slightly edited extract from Hanzi Freinacht’s book ‘The Listening Society: A Metamodern Guide to Politics, Book One’. This is the first book in a series on metamodern thought, a work of popular philosophy that investigates the nature of psychological development and its political implications. What you will read below is from the chapter about new and important agents on the political playing field such as process based parties, metamodern activists, transnationalism and the emergence of the metamodern aristocracy.

The metamodern aristocracy is a class of people who have a combination of fact­ors in their psych­ological, existential and cognitive constitutions that allow them to play a certain role on the new historical world stage of the metamodern age. But they are also people of social, economic and cult­ural privilege, who have the time, energy and emotional fuel to expend for ab­stract endeavors such as devel­oping the future of the world-system.

What we are looking for is a nicer, softer, more nuanced and flexible form of Leninism, an avant-garde, or vanguard, of people who recognize and align with some of the deep structures and long-term attractors of our age, and who cooperate trans­­nationally to bring about profound changes in global society. These people have little else in common than a meta­modern perspective. They find each other in a variety of settings, often through the internet.

The Leninist idea of a global, progressive movement with its own power playing, radical vanguard is not all bad. The vanguard just needs a much clear­er under­standing of the development of society, and of developmental psych­ology, than what Lenin and his contemporaries had. And we need a code of ethics that they lacked – starting with non-violence and a com­mit­ment to understand, empathize with and listen to others.

The members of this group have to love power. But not the power of self over others; rather, the power of selves and others, the power to self-organize in complex fashions – transpersonal power. Not your power or mine, but yes, the brutal capability to coordinate living systems, to make events come into being. What we think of as oppressive power is really an expression of im­balances of power, between rich and poor, privileged and deprived, hum­ans and non-human animals. The world does not have too much power, but too much power­lessness. If we have pathological, sickly wants for pow­er, it is because we are really power­less. Lovers of transpersonal pow­er seek the empowerment of selves and others – realizing that power and freedom are sisters. Super­ficial readings of social philo­so­phers such as the Frankfurt School (or their fellow traveler Erich Fromm) can make us believe that power in itself is patho­logical. But in reality, even the softest souls and most tender bleeding hearts must long for power.

The metamodern aristocracy doesn’t work according to a linear plan about what will come (like those damned communists). They just share some com­m­on conceptual maps, personal traits, perspectives and political senti­ments. This makes them difficult to spot with the naked eye. They are a loose net­work of people who recognize each other and who share some common over­arching perspectives. They work together in a myriad of different ways – lending resources and support for the development of ideas, arranging key events, starting businesses and other organizations or projects, and affect­ing policy making.

Who are these Metamodern Aristocrats?

Who are the members of the metamodern aristocracy, these soft-hearted lovers of transpersonal power? And how are they different from the general members of the world population? The Swedish philosophers Alexander Bard and Jan Söderqvist suggest that the information age is creating a new class of “netocrats”, people who govern and control value creation on the internet and related media, where attention, rather than money, is the primary value. They further suggest that there are three forms of netocrats that ally with one another: the new kind of social entrepreneurs, the web-savvy philosophers who understand the deeply dynamic and transient nature of things (called “eternalists”), and the networkers who actively and deliberately make them­selves into central, conn­ecting nodes within this new multi­dimensional web of people, per­spect­ives and opportunities.

Because these netocrats are not after money anymore, or have enough of it, they “imploit” (rather than exploit) people and resources. Like me; I sit here in a beautiful house, without much concern about who owns the place. All I care about is peace and quiet and a powerful mountain view that makes me feel like Nietzsche. I am an aristocrat in the sense that I can be as eccen­tric as I like, in a morning robe on a late afternoon. The pri­mary driver in my life is not food on the table, or even a struggle for interests, but an ethically fueled playful­ness and sense of adventure, con­cerned to a large extent with directing people’s time, emotions and attention towards novel ideas. To imploit means to use things for their subjective, existential and non-exhaustible value – in a way, to play with them.

Not bad. That might account for what the metamodern aristocrat is like, at least to some extent. But I would be wary of applying a class analysis and equating the metamodern aristocracy with “netocrats”. The metamodern arist­ocracy are people who have a combination of two things: great privilege and high personal development.

The privilege I speak of is high “total capital” (a concept I elaborate in further detail in my book, Nordic Ideology), meaning that we are not necessarily rich in the conventional sense, but that we have enough opport­unities and support around us to do pretty much whatever we want with our lives (so, total capital is a combin­ation of social capital, cultural capital, economic capital, emotion­al capital, sexual capital and good health). High total capital means that you can live your life relatively unafraid.

The second part, about personal development, is that we have “high” effect­­ive value meme (the meaning of which we you can read more about in my book The Listening Society). In a word, it just means that these people are genuinely progressive and have the values of a global, sustainable internet age civil­ization. But who are they as persons?

We are playful eccentrics of various sorts. We are screwed-up and brilliant million dollar babies; people who have somehow fallen outside of the normal meaning making processes of everyday life – without breaking apart – and for whom there is no going back to a bourgeois lifestyle. You will find meta­modern swashbucklers, mavericks, hackers, intellectual revolver men; subtle enemies of the bourgeois lifestyle (in which you are supposed to take life very seriously, especially your job, but never serious­ly aspire to truly change the world).

The metamodern aristocracy is the playful vanguard of a new form of soc­iety in which people are free in a deeper sense than what everyday life in modern society normally allows. Something picks up speed, gains mom­en­tum; the aristocracy acts with the kind of elegant conviction that can flow only from an embrace of the paradoxical and complex nature of reality.

What does the Metamodern Aristocracy do?

The meta­modern aristocracy is teaming up worldwide and conspiring to change the functioning of the global world-system. They are “hacking the world-soul”, as it were, injecting doses of metamodern DNA into key areas of society, hi­jacking the political, economic and cultural systems of modern life in order to bring about a more fair, transparent, sustainable and caring future.

To these aristocrats it is simply obvious that today’s world is undemo­cratic, unscientific and primitive. But they don’t rage and revolt against it. They surf it, ride its waves, and implant bits of metamodern cultural code deep into the structures and dynamics of society. They work together with, in tandem with, the existing political movements, businesses, NGOs and govern­ments. In a way, you could say that they manipulate and con­spire, but it is a very democratic and transparent form of manipula­tion, and a very non-linear and open-ended form of conspiracy, taking place within a very loose network.

To con–spire means to breathe together. The conspiracy is to educate and seduce humanity into taking the path towards a more existential and sustain­able civilization. To educate and to seduce – these two words come from the same Latin root. To this playful aristo­cracy, the world stage is a great, multi­dimensional puzzle, where the aim is to find unexpected synergies that work in the direction of human development – by way of playing, educating, seduc­ing. They don’t press their agenda on others, but they tickle the dialectic pro­cesses to see what emerges, having strong intuitions about in which direct­ions it might go. Often, this is done thr­ough art and cultural expression, hint­ing at new pers­pect­ives and poten­tials. Just by breathing the same air, the fresh air of a pot­ential – but not predetermined – future society.

Metamodern thinking involves an increased acceptance of the para­doxical nature of things. All this talk of aristocrats rests upon a central paradox of political metamodernism: the deep, unyield­ing struggle for greater egalitarianism, inclusion and demo­cracy – together with a renewed tolerance towards and understanding of hier­archy and elitism.

On the one hand, the new global vanguard is emerging; that is just a fact of life. And it must recognize itself as such in order to be fully effic­ient. On the other hand, the metamodern aristocracy fails its own moral standards if it does not work for a much more democratic, transparent and open world – it loses all legitimacy without a deep commitment to egalitarian values and the dignity of all humans and non-human animals.

So the metamodern aristocracy is not anywhere “high up”, at great dist­ance from others, hoarding privileges from within certain organiza­tions. Rather, its const­ituting principle is nothing else than the spontan­eous self-organization of a new layer within the world-system – a cultural development pertaining to the globalized information age. They are simply the people who live meta­modern lives, with metamodern values, within the still predomin­antly modern world-system. But as such, they do have an important role to play.

As all other social groups, the metamodern aristocracy is both good and bad. Don’t blame me for telling you about their existence. No shooting of messengers, please. We do exist, and we do have a role to play, and that role can and should be recognized with all its risks and uncert­ainties. I don’t mean to glorify or exaggerate it, but there it is.

The metamodern aristocracy isn’t actually going to rule the world. We’re going to tweak it, somewhat, in a favorable direction. And it’s going to be fun. It already is.

So What about You?

Are you part of this aristocracy? Your reading this text is a way of test­ing just that. If your reading goes smoothly and what I say is intuitive to you, and you recognize the things I am speaking of, you’re a candidate. If you are also part of a vast, diverse transnational network and you have more ideas for changing the world than you can possibly act upon, and your everyday life revolves around making some of these things happen – you’re it.

For most readers, you’re not it, and that’s okay. It’s still advantageous for you to know about the existence of the metamodern aristocracy, just like you can benefit from knowing about other groups in society, such as the precariat, the cultural creatives, the hackers or the ultra-rich.

I suppose this text and my books are a bit of an invitation to participating in the meta­modern aristocracy, to be a co-creator of the new society. So I lay down the analytical bricks, but you get to build the castle (and of course, chall­enge the ideas and develop them). If I’m Marx, you get to be Lenin. If I’m Jesus, you get to be Mohammed, who really meant business with this thing about God’s kingdom. If I’m Rousseau, you get to be Robespierre.

Just promise me three things. You won’t send peasants to death camps, you won’t conquer North Africa – and please don’t behead the king.

No, I’m serious. It’s up to you to make these things happen in the world, by means of starting cool companies, visionary think-tanks, becoming prime minister or something similar. But if it ever comes to killing anyone or doing anything else nasty and harmful in the name of these ideas, just forget about it. Forget I told you about this and disown the whole thing. We’re exploring ideas. We’re being open-minded and curios about the potentials. But we are not laying down “the one path”, and if it ever leads us in the direction of killing, lying, cheating, torturing – we need to drop it and think again. It’s not worth it. And if my ideas press you towards such conclusions, we can be certain I was mistaken all along.

The more serious questions and matters you play with, the greater the moral demands. Almost all political ideas have led to atrocities. As I write this down, I can almost feel the mutilation of innocents going on in closed prisons, somehow non-linearly emanating from my fingertips.

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Hanzi Freinacht is a political philosopher, historian and sociologist, author of ‘The Listening Society’, ‘Nordic Ideology’ and the upcoming books ‘The 6 Hidden Patterns of History’ and ‘Outcompeting Capitalism’. Much of his time is spent alone in the Swiss Alps. You can follow Hanzi on his facebook profile here, and you can speed up the process of new metamodern content reaching the world by making a donation to Hanzi here.