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The following is a slightly edited extract from Hanzi Freinacht’s book ‘Nordic Ideology: A Metamodern Guide to Politics, Book Two’. This is the second book in a series on metamodern thought, a work of popular philosophy that investigates the nature of psychological development and its political implications.

There has been great confusion, especially among observers on the pol­i­tical Left and other progressives, as to which role spirituality and related forms of self-improvement play in postindustrial society. The most common understanding is perhaps still that spirituality, esp­eci­ally of the New Age kind, is a dangerous distraction from “real” societal issues and social engagement—and that self-improve­ment courses offer an “ind­ividual­ization” of societal ills and injustices. Such practices are often seen as allies to neo-liberal capitalism as “the individual” only has herself to blame and her own mind to work on: “don’t protest, just go home and meditate”. I should especially address the issue as my own work —which focuses much on the inner development of the population—can be subject to similar reac­tions.

I would suggest another understanding of the relation between spiritu­ality and class, one that will need to remain on the hypothetical level until we can study it with relev­ant data: namely that spirituality and self-improvement are in eff­ect ma­­g­nifying glasses of class distinctions.

Here’s what I mean. If you are already in a position of financial sec­urity, good access to information and cultural sensitivity to frauds and trends, you can partake in high quality meditation courses and self-devel­opment programs that are scie­ntifically supported and help you learn new things about yourself. This will generally improve your life quality further and make you more socially, emotionally and econ­om­ically pro­ficient.

But if you are on the opposite end of this class spectrum—and you have little money, little access to good information, little ability to critically eva­luate wild claims and promises, and generally find yourself in a more des­perate situa­tion (in a “scarcity mindset”)—you are likely to be sold inef­fective magic gems, expensive diet supplements, fortune teller ser­vices, astrological consulting and all manner of harmful bogus ideas (like “The Secret”, the idea that you can “materialize” wealth by thinking of money, thro­ugh “quantum mechanics”). All of this makes you waste valuable time, money, atten­tion and resources on stuff that further impoverishes your life. Your spiritual beliefs simply make you vulnerable to crude ex­ploi­tation.

So you have a scale of class—understood in its widest sense—that is magn­ified by the growth of spiritual practices and self-improvement in soc­iety. Far from all people have a rich spiritual life, but in the minority who does adopt spiritual worldviews, class differences are increased.

 

At the top of this scale you find what I call integralists (after the follo­wers of Ken Wilber’s elaborate “integral spirituality”). These folks are the relatively privileged ones who adopt difficult and esoteric teachings and subtle body practices, and drill them arduo­usly for years—and who man­age to keep a scientific worldview (uhm, relatively) intact in the process. Their thinking and life experience are enriched and they develop greater exist­ential depth and higher subjective states, even to the point where they themselves can sell these services at favorable prices. They are enriched across the scale.

 

The middle segment we can call the yoga bourgeoisie. These might dabb­le in a little astrology and quick-fix “life-changing” courses and eat some silly supplements, but by and large they are still energized by their spiritual practices and are comfortable enough economically to do so with good conscience. They might believe in a little magic here and there, but they generally understand that they should keep such discussions to themselves and don’t spoil their professional lives in the process.

 

And then, on the low end of the scale, we have what I call the astrology precariat.[ii] Here the magic beliefs of desperate people result in a height­ened vulner­ability, which leads to a cruel commer­cial­ization of the hum­an soul.

In a capitalist society, made hyper-commercialized with the advent of the in­ter­net, disempowered people are made to believe in the worst ima­gin­able non­sense, and there really is no end to the venues of exploitation: conspi­racy theories, aliens, ghosts, past lives, heal­ing crystals, alter­natives to vaccine, Scientology, divination—the list goes on, and there is no end to the supply side and the inhuman cynicism with which it is tooted, pack­aged and sold.

But the hopes and aspirations of the astrology precariat are betrayed as no quick-fixes materialize beyond some initial placebo. And then you just spent the last year paying healers to help you when what you really needed was to get your life and finances more organized. And you end up even more desperate and gullible. People in the astrology precariat very often suffer from severe mental illness and distress—and often end up in psych­iatric care (psychiatrists can attest to the prevalence of people with bord­er­line syndrome who have been exploited by quacks and con artists).

 

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.

Spirituality and inner self-improvement are heavy drugs; they are inde­ed a double-edged sword. Today, they have become a magnifying glass for in­eq­ual­ity and class stratification; tomorrow, inshallah, they can be­come uni­versal tools of em­pow­­er­ment, emancipation and universal sol­idarity.

Would it be so strange if, at the enigmatically silent depths of our hum­an (or posthuman) hearts and minds, we will find deeper equality?

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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.

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[i]. At the top of postindustrial society you have groups emerging who are rich in all of these forms of capital put together. The Swedish philosophers Alex­ander Bard and Jan Söderqvist have suggested the new “masters of the internet” should be called netocrats. These are the small groups who are most proficient at benefitting from the World Wide Web and thus constantly gain an upper hand in the informational economy; not neces­sarily be­cause they have the best tech­nical skills, but because they under­stand the social and cultural logic of the internet most intimately. In The Listening Society I proposed that the growing triple-H populations (hackers, hip­s­ters and hippies) are gaining influence across the board and increasingly are becoming im­portant agents in the new economy. You might also call them the crea­tive class, with a broader, more est­ablished (and more scor­ned) term. Franco Berardi, of the Italian Marxist “autonomist” school, has suggested the term cognitariat—the class distinguished by its relation to abstract symbols.

At the bottom of postindustrial society you don’t really find a wide “proletariat” any longer. You find people who are just disenfranchised in a general manner; who are in an economically, socially and otherwise pre­car­ious situation. They are perhaps best denominated with a term made famous (but not invented) by the economist Guy Standing: the pre­cariat. However, on the low end of informational and cultural capital you also find a lot of people who are relatively economically comfortable, but never really get to participate meaningfully in the postindustrial soc­iety of social media spec­t­acles and exciting events. These growing groups are contin­uously redu­ced to a position of consuming the ideas, ima­ges and spectac­les produced by others, hence Bard and Söderqvist call them the consum­tariat.

Regarding the “regressive” voters of present-day USA (who voted for Donald Trump), there has been much discussion whether they constitute an economically disempowered segment of the population. Is this a revolt of the lower classes, or is it the bigotry of the privileged?

The answer is clear: They are not all economically poor, but they have lower cultural and informational capital than “progressive” voters. Trump voters largely belong to the consumtariat, the relative underclass of a post­industrial int­er­net society.

Hence it is clear that the class struggles of our day and age have already shifted. It’s not that financial capital and economic class no longer matter —it’s just that it’s no longer the only game in town and that other forms of class distinctions are growing in importance. Rightwing pop­ulists can help these groups take back the spectacle, the center stage of society—at least for a while—and thus reaffirming the sense of meaning and em­pow­erment that flows from it.

[ii]. The term “precariat” is discussed in the endnote above.

The following is a slightly edited extract from Hanzi Freinacht’s book ‘Nordic Ideology: A Metamodern Guide to Politics, Book Two’. This is the second book in a series on metamodern thought, a work of popular philosophy that investigates the nature of psychological development and its political implications.

Credit goes to the talented Berlin-based artist Sina Goge for the artwork used in the thumbnail picture.

There’s a clear link to ideas of quantum physics, entanglement and en­act­ment here: The “object” of inequality is non-local and interdepend­ent with the observer. But let’s not delve deeper into it at this point. It suffices to mention that the observer herself must be part of the equation of any deeper and more radical equality.

Instead, I would like to propose a simple stage model to address this issue. Not that the farther stages of equal­ity are any­where within reach in the present world, but just to understand where we might be heading long-term, insh­allah.

 

Equality, stage one, is the struggle to make people more equal, to even out the real, visceral differences between us: the rich and the poor, the pri­v­ileged and the underprivileged, the powerful and the dis­empow­ered, the enfranchised and the disenfranchised, the respected and the despised.

The six dimensions of equality all play into this struggle. There is an al­most infinite amount of work to be done as obviously unjust inequali­ties saturate every aspect of our lives. The greatest inequality is of course the global divide between rich and poor—and thus, this must be our first and fore­most focus.

In practical terms, we are so far from any form of global equality that we must also strive towards more local forms of equality; rela­tive equality within the borders of countries. This is in order to curb the des­truct­ive effects of inequality upon each society so that these may deve­lop in stable manners that serve the emergence of a transnat­ional, global order which is fairer and more adaptive than our current morass of global governance (or lack thereof).

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. Of course, this cannot happen un­less people in these societies develop postmodern and metamodern val­ues, and that can only happen if there isn’t rampant inequality across all six dimen­sions.

Equality means making people more equal—in a sense, more alike. This is the classical understanding of equality within social­ism and all mod­ern ideologies. It is the kind of underlying assumption that still drives almost all the research into inequality—and all the practical policies to­wards the same end.

 

Equivalence goes deeper than that. It is the struggle for people to truly feel as equals, that we are of equal value or worth. After all, the very notion of equality is ridden with paradoxes. Ulti­mately, we cannot be equal since we are not alike. In fact, we are so very different from one another that even a theoretical state of “perfect equality of opportunity”, a perfect me­ritocracy, (and the even yet more impossible “equality of inform­ation”) would serve to highlight our differences and legitimize our inequa­lities.

Is there a way out of this paradox? There might be. What if equality could run so deeply that we genuinely feel as equals, in the sense that we are all world citizens and sentient beings? This is equivalence, the genu­ine sense of equal worth. Such an embodied sense would protect us not only from many exploitations and injustices, but also from many venues of self-blame and inferiority.

Such equivalence has already, to a certain extent, become reality thro­ugh one of the great modern projects: liberal democracy, in which we are equal before the law, cast equally valid votes and so forth. Equivalence is also, in extension, the utopian or spiritual goal of socialism.

Modernity holds that people are endowed with sacred and inviolable, natural rights—unfortun­ately yet to be extended to other animals—and as such endowed with some kind of basic dignity.[i] We are “all humans”, “all individual citizens of the state”, “all workers of the people’s republic”, and so forth.

But in reality, the disempowered, disenfranchised, disdained and emo­tionally impoverished find little solace in this “formal” or legal idea of equi­val­ence. It goes some way to make us feel like equals, but in pract­ice, we hardly feel like dignified equals of one another.

If there could be a deeper form of equivalence, one that is felt and em­bodied by many more of us, this would work against the paradoxes of equ­ality. If we genuinely felt the equal value of ourselves and others, many of the corrosive effects of inequality would certainly be mitigated. We could accept our differences and still feel as dignified equals.

Can we awaken in ourselves and one another a profound sense of dig­nity inherent to every human? This must be a goal that lies beyond for­mal, legal and material equality. Hence, equivalence is a higher stage than simple equality.

 

Equanimity goes deeper still. It is the spiritual and psychological strug­g­le to give up our deeply seated tendency to judge and evaluate our­selves and others in the first place. You could say it’s about tran­scending “the spectrum of judgment” (the scale of negative emotions) al­together, or to become less enthralled by the need to possess a com­paratively positive self-image—an ego.

I snatched the term from Buddhist teachings in which “equa­nimity” is practiced as a mental stance of accepting our mental and bodily states as well as our life situations and ongoing events. As such it is linked to high­er sub­jec­tive and spiritual inner states and can only be achieved in a soci­ety in which the average inner state is much higher and the social logics of everyday life are governed as little as possible by the underlying negative emotions of the spectrum of judg­ment.

Equanimity doesn’t mean that we give up discernment; we still need to evaluate the behaviors, ideas and efforts of one another. It just means there is a fundamental sense of “okay-ness”, of acceptance—that our diff­erences and inequalities no longer remain such a big deal.

And it certainly doesn’t mean that we no longer care about inequalities and injustices—which Buddhism is often accused of by the Left.

In practice, true equanimity would only be conceivable in a state of profound material, emotional, social and existential abundance. So it’s not really a conceivable goal for society anytime soon. It would be a society in which we obviously are not equals, but where that still—and strangely—is okay; where everyone “is okay”, where people are not only tolerated but acc­epted.

Acceptance, in this sense, is the negative side of love. When we love someone fully, it is not only that we cherish their strengths and potentials, but that we accept their weaknesses and struggles. Such love can be found in some of the best families and long-lasting marr­iages.

Dare we ask of our­selves, for the future of humanity, to aspire for such an accept­ance of all creatures under the sun? Here we return to the core of Christianity and other world religions. In a state of genuine non-hierar­chical non-judgment, our ineq­ua­lities can be treated more product­ively as differ­ences—and nothing more.

Of course, equanimity of this kind would mean the end of that para­doxical phan­tom still haunting us: envy. When we no longer judge our­selves, we are no longer obsessed with the strengths and weaknesses of one another. And what lies beyond a life of fear, guilt, shame and Sklaven­moral; beyond hatred, judgment, disdain and envy?

There it is again, waiting for us, the crazy Nietzschean moustache: the Über­mensch, the attractor point that draws us beyond the category of hum­anity and its limitations.

Perhaps, in the future, we can stumble upon it. Inshallah. And, as with freedom, we can begin to see that the higher goal of societal development is not so much to achieve “perfect equality”, but rather to render the very struggle for equality obsolete.

Equality, equivalence and equanimity—there is the progression, from leveling the unfair differences between us, to adopting a more profo­und sense of value for all, to letting go of our strange human ob­session with impossible comparisons, ultimately rendering equality itself obso­lete.

But if the latter two are so dis­tant, are they not merely a distraction from humanity’s struggle for a more realistic equality? They can be. Why, then, have I presented them here?

Because they can still show up momentarily, in limited settings, for shor­t­er periods of time, in small incubators within our personal relation­ships and some of the metamodern internet tribes out there. They might not stabilize or spread, but only flicker past us during our lives. But as such they can remind us of the deeper meaning of equal­ity, and thus subtly steer the dev­elopment of the world-system.

In such settings, where equanimity reigns, creativity must be held high­er than equality. The long­ing for equality must not get in the way of creat­ive processes that can help us achieve human flourishing in the first place. We must become lovers of the will to power—the power of our­selves and one another to create and to transcend.

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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.

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[i]. In embryonic forms, this was alrea­dy the case within traditional religions such as Christianity and Buddh­ism. “We are all children of God with unique souls”, “We are all born into a perfect human rebirth”, etc.

The following is a slightly edited extract from Hanzi Freinacht’s book ‘Nordic Ideology: A Metamodern Guide to Politics, Book Two’. This is the second book in a series on metamodern thought, a work of popular philosophy that investigates the nature of psychological development and its political implications. This is the final post in a series on six forms of inequality. In the green box to the right, you can find the links to the full series.

The digital divide is, however, not always a straightforward issue of “inter­net access”. For instance, white US children spend on average 8.5 hours daily in front of a screen, while Hispanic and black children spend about 13 hours (wat­ching more TV, playing video games, social media etc.), with obvious negative effects upon physical and mental health as well as psycho-social development. The relationship to inform­ation and IT also reinforces inequalities.  Those stuck at the bottom of the “attentio­nalist econ­omy” are perpetually dist­racted from projects of self-empower­ment. The quality of their inform­ation flows and resulting world­views de­terio­rates, which feeds into economic and social capital: time is “wasted” and the ability to recognize emotional cues in facial ex­pression shrinks with ex­cessive screen-time. Too much screen-time also seems to increase the likeli­hood of developing ADHD, which in itself makes it diff­icult for you to economize that cardinal resource: your atte­ntion.[i]

At a more fundamental level, access to useful and reliable information is one of the greatest consequences of economic inequality. Financially strong actors will know the markets, prices, tax evasion strategies and so forth to a much greater extent than the weaker ones.

The well-positioned can buy expertise and process much larger flows of information, which plays out against the weak in favor of the strong. In its most salient form, this is true of the large internet com­panies, who own and manage vast quantities of personal informa­tion about people—incre­asingly knowing not only the markets, but the beha­viors of citizens and consumers, often much better than we know ourselves. Tinder can have literally 800 pages worth of very sen­sitive personal information if you’ve been on it for a few years.

Hence, informational inequality works through many different mech­an­isms. One such mechanism revolves around the powers of producers and large companies over consumers, with the latter by necessity having lesser access to relevant information, thus being easily manipulated in a myriad of ways.

And this dissymmetry of informational access plays out in a corres­pon­ding manner within the political arena as wealthy groups gain dispropor­tionally large political influence and misuse state institutions to pro­tect their interests, shaping media landscapes and curtailing the trans­parency of decision-making and bureaucracies.

And beyond that you have the general pattern that some people thrive in the information age, being able to critically evaluate and access vast am­ounts of information and creating vibrant networks of highly skilled coop­erators, whereas the less complex thinkers and less tech­nically apt fall prey to fake news, misinformation and waste their attention, time and money on things that don’t accumulate good results in their lives. This mechanism exacerbates the other forms of inequality, where the less edu­cated and more emotionally desperate are more easily exploited.

It is difficult to see how this rampant informational inequality can be curbed, but it certainly plays a part through its interactions with the other forms. We could imagine a future where internet access is readily avail­able and free around the globe and where basic education would equip us with at least some basic informational savvy, networking skills and critical judg­ment. We may also envision the growth of transnationally enforced infor­m­ational rights of world citizens.

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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.

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[i]. Rideout, V. J, Foehr, U. G., Roberts, D. F., 2010. “Generation M²: Media in the Lives of 8- to 18-Year-Olds.” Kaiser Family Foundation.

About deteriorating emotional intelligence, see: Yalda, T. U. et al., 2014. Five Days at Outdoor Education Camp Without Screens Improves Preteen Skills with Non­verbal Emotion Cues. Computers in Human Behavior, vol. 30, pp. 387-92.

About ADHD, see: Swing, E. L, et al, 2010. Television and Video Game Exposure and the Development of Attention Problems. Pediatrics, vol. 126:2, pp. 214-21.

The following is a slightly edited extract from Hanzi Freinacht’s book ‘Nordic Ideology: A Metamodern Guide to Politics, Book Two’. This is the second book in a series on metamodern thought, a work of popular philosophy that investigates the nature of psychological development and its political implications. This is the fifth post in a series on six forms of inequality. In the green box to the right, you can find the links to the full series.

Of course, this kind of inequality is closely tied to the global economic order. The rich can choose to live in nicer and cleaner envir­on­ments, buy heathier products, go on hikes or health resorts, and so on. This, natu­rally, translates into other stratifications, such as race and ethnicity; for instance, in the US, in California, it has been shown that blacks and Lati­nos on average breathe in 40% more air pollution than whites—which naturally affects physiological equality and thus all the rest of it.[i]

And the rich parts of the world generally transpose the most environ­mentally destructive production processes and industries to the poorer parts. Citizens living in poor areas of urban India have fewer choi­ces in terms of healthy food and environments. This of course in turn affects all other aspects of inequality: economic, social, phy­siological and emotional.

Even if the expansion of “rights” is far from always the best and most practical way of protecting people’s interests, we should at least discuss the possibility of introducing ecological rights of citizens and/or commu­nities. Rights can lead to rather rigid forms of governance and they are difficult to relate to in terms of cost/benefit analysis, but some­thing along these lines may offer productive venues for future global poli­cies.

As it is relatively easy to see and understand this aspect of inequality, I will not dwell further upon it; suffice to say it is a crucial part of equa­lity, that it is an issue that divides the rich world from the poor, and that it interacts with differences of socio-economic class. And even if a new glo­bal order is needed for this to be seriously addressed, there is of course much that can be done at the local level.

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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.

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[i]. Union of Concerned Scientists, 2019. “Air Pollution from Vehicles in California”. Downloaded from www.ucsusa.org on Feb 22^nd 2019.

The following is a slightly edited extract from Hanzi Freinacht’s book ‘Nordic Ideology: A Metamodern Guide to Politics, Book Two’. This is the second book in a series on metamodern thought, a work of popular philosophy that investigates the nature of psychological development and its political implications. This is the fourth post in a series on six forms of inequality. In the green box to the right, you can find the links to the full series.

If we zoom in yet another step on the intimate and embodied pro­cesses of inequality, we find that human lives are lived in profoundly un­equal emo­tional surroundings.

Some of us wake up relatively carefree many mornings and experience positive rewards as the results of our actions, while others live out their lives in considerably more painful and impov­erished inner land­scapes. This is a form of inequality: emotional inequality.

And, as the network sociologists Fowler and Christakis have fam­ously shown, such emotions are collective goods, as for instance happ­iness and life satisfaction cluster in networks of peo­ple.[ii] If your friend is happ­ier, so are you more likely to be.

This is probably because of different mechanisms: that happy people make others happier, that people who are doing better generally are hap­pier and have the luxury of choos­ing friends and partners who are also doing well (while subtly excluding the less fortunate), and that other life factors make people clus­ter together into happy and unhappy seg­ments of soc­iety.

In The Listening Society, I labored to show that people—and other living creat­u­res—are in different subjective “states” at every moment of our lives. To be alive is to feel like something: stable wellbeing, or nagging discomfort, or nightmarish valleys, or even spiritual and blissful heights of subjective exp­erience. Such states are very volatile; they can change from moment to moment, but some people certainly live in higher states than others.

The totality of our experience is never quite “neutral”. Imagine the great difference, in terms of real-life outcomes, between people who live their lives in lower states and people who live in higher ones.

Would such emotional workings not be the very foundation of equa­lity and inequality? Is not the aim of all struggles for equality, after all, to guarantee that people can live rich and wonderful inner lives, rather than impoverished and suffocating ones?

What could be a greater priv­ilege than having a fundamental sense of “okay-ness”, even a sense of meaning, enchantment and wonder, through­out one’s life? And what could be a greater injustice done to us than hav­ing our lives filled with embitterment, resentment, self-hatred—or even sheer existential terror?

I also argued in The Listening Society that “subjective states” are more fundamen­tal than emotions. But this, of course, doesn’t mean emotions don’t mat­ter. In an earlier post I argued that freedom is always related to emotions, consciously felt or lying dormant in the back­ground but still steering our everyday actions and interactions. Society, in this view, is a vast, inter­connected fabric of suffering and bliss, pulsating and reverbe­rating with multitudes upon multitudes of lived experiences. Can this fabric be con­sciously and actively developed? Yes, it can.[iii]

It is the goal of political metamodernism to extend compassion, or at least solidarity, to this whole fabric of hurt and bliss, to society in its com­plex entirety, to the co-emergent inner worlds of countless millions.

Let’s take a look at how emotions are unevenly and unfairly distributed among human organisms (and non-human animals). If a person is happ­ier and more energetic, this plays out in every aspect of her life. The happy person has an easier time getting things done since the reward feed­back loops are more functional. This means she will be able to produce better results for herself as well as others, which means she will be more respec­ted and gain greater recognition, attain a better self-image and there­­by boosting her sense of meaning and happiness.

Conversely, the sad and depressed person doesn’t get emotional re­w­ards for perfor­ming tasks, which wrecks the positive behavioral feed­back loops. In fact, she gets emotional punishment for most of the things she does, which makes it so much harder to make an effort to change her situ­ation.

This very easily leads to anxiety, fear, shame, embarrassment and self-hatred—which paralyzes her and makes her strivings seem futile. And she is less fun to be around, which in turn makes her lonelier.

These proposed mechanisms are of course simplifications, but they are firmly established in behavioral science. You also have lots of folks who are very active and productive but still struggle with feelings of anxiety and lacking meaning; consider the many empty treadmills that bourgeois life can put us through.

But the point is that emotional hurt and lower states do have great costs over a lifespan. It has been shown, for instance, that bad parenting can knock 20 years off your life expectancy.[iv]

Here’s another example. In an influential 2013 book called Scarcity, the behavioral economists Mullainathan and Shafir presented ample evi­dence of a “scarcity mindset”. 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.

On the flipside, you can see how affluent popul­ations tend to develop higher value memes and post­materialist (non-con­sumerist, environment­alist, etc.) values over time, as has been the case in e.g. the Nordic coun­tries. You feel good, you space out, you have the time to contemplate life, and so forth.

There is good reason to believe this prin­ciple of a scarcity mindset ex­tends well beyond economic decision-making and that it is equally valid in other areas of life: love, dating (where dating coaches also warn of a dest­ructive scar­city mindset, using the exact same term), social recog­ni­tion, mak­ing one’s opinions and values heard, and so forth. So inequal­ity of any kind likely produces emotions and general mindsets that steer our many dec­isions and hence our lives. Inner states and emotions are at the center of how in­equality is reproduced across all of its dimensions.

Our streams of thought, our very streams of consciousness, look very different from each other, often steered by emotions. How evenly is sha­me distributed in the population? What about fear and self-hatred? Frust­ration and bitterness?

Even if all of us exper­ience these emotions, there are large segments of the population whose very lives are run by these. And how many of us get to feel satisfied, proud and stimulated on a daily basis? And when the insecure, the nervous and the grief-stricken encounter the laid-back, the com­fortable, the happy—what are all other, more superficial, forms of equality ultimately worth? How much easier is it not to dominate, exploit and manipulate the emo­tionally impoverished? On the other hand, what is more empow­er­ing than peace of mind? More empowering than a heart in love with life itself?

Whereas all of these emotions of course emerge in larger contexts, in our living conditions and social-psychological circumstances as well as in our personal biological and genetic constitutions, it is not impossible to directly influence and steer the emotional development of human beings.

Even if our emotions are products of economic, social and physio­log­ical inequal­ities, 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.

Some of the possible political measures that have been mentioned abo­ve, under social and physiological inequality, feed into the struggle for emo­tional equality. 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. For example, all chil­dren could be offered simple forms of counseling during their school years, which would help many of them from being taken over by destruc­tive emotions during their early lives and onwards. Schools could use ex­ercises of “posi­tive psychology”, and the general framework of schooling could be desig­n­ed to elicit more positive emotions. We could have greater poss­ibilities for adults to take a year off and work on their emo­tional issues and con­cerns, with places of rest and recluse. And people could be trained to bet­ter man­age conflicts and rejections, which severely affect our emo­tional wellbeing and development. At the national level, we could start measur­ing the pre­valence of different emotions and present public stat­istics to guide public discourse.

The issue here is not to pan out all the solutions—thousands are poss­ible, with so many social technologies that must be inven­ted, implemen­ted, evaluated and refined; and the sky is the limit. The issue here is only to raise awareness of the question of emotional ineq­uality so that the poli­tical discussion can begin, and so that it can enter the poli­tical agenda.

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. Such emotions exacerbate inequalities and suffering in more ways than we could hope to name or think of.

—

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.

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[i]. Weir, K., 2012. “The Pain of Social Rejection”. American Psychological Asso­ci­ation: Monitor of Psychology, vol. 43(4).

[ii]. See Fowler, J. H., Christakis, N. A., 2008. Dynamic spread of happ­iness in a large social network: longitudinal analysis over 20 years in the Fra­mingham Heart Study. British Medical Journal—a study in which 4739 individuals were followed from 1983 to 2003.

[iii]. An important aspect of this—which I leave out in this discussion—has to do with using technology to develop the states of human beings. Consider the following quote from a report on an “Effective Altruism” event in San Francisco:

“I got to talk to people from the Qualia Research Institute, who point out that everyone else is missing something big: the hedonic treadmill. People have a certain baseline amount of happiness. Fix their problems, and they’ll be happy for a while, then go back to baseline. The only solution is to hack consciousness directly, to figure out what exactly happiness is—unpack what we’re looking for when we des­cribe some mental states as having higher positive valence than others—and then add that on to every other mental state directly. This isn’t quite the dreaded wire­heading, the widely-feared technology that will make everyone so doped up on techno-super-heroin (or direct electrical stimulation of the brain’s pleasure centers) that they never do anything else. It’s a rewiring of the brain that creates a ‘perpetual but varied bliss’ that ‘reengineers the network of transition probabilities between emotions’ while retaining the capability to do economically useful work.”

See: Alexander, S., 2017. “Fear and Loathing at Effective Altruism Global 2017”, published online 16^th of August at Slate Star Codex. (www.slatestarcodex.com)

[iv]. There is even a documentary film, produced by James Redford, Resilience (2017) which lays all of this out in detail.

The following is a slightly edited extract from Hanzi Freinacht’s book ‘Nordic Ideology: A Metamodern Guide to Politics, Book Two’. This is the second book in a series on metamodern thought, a work of popular philosophy that investigates the nature of psychological development and its political implications. This is the third post in a series on six forms of inequality. In the green box to the right, you can find the links to the full series.

The monkey researchers could reverse the social order of the rhesus monkeys by letting them into the terrarium in another sequence. 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 you came in last, and hence had the lowest status, your im­mune system was much weaker. And this could be reversed if the resear­chers intervened to chan­ge the social order again.

In other words, the social hierarchy of the monkeys determined some of their biological characteristics, even down to the biochemical level—social stress affects the expression of almost 1,000 genes. Probably, the mech­­an­ism at play here is that lower ranking mon­keys feel more stress and anxiety, which sets up their system for responses to more immediate threats (high cortisol levels and other stress respo­nses), which then takes its toll on more long-term biological processes such as the imm­une syst­em.[i] Oh, and it’s not just macaques by the way—the Stanford primato­logist Robert Sapolsky has found the same pattern in ethological studies of freely roaming ba­boons in Africa.

So if you’re low status, you also get sick. Hey, I told you it’s a cruel world out there.

Point being, of course, 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. There is any number of studies to show dif­ferent aspects of this, not only within the animal realm but among hu­m­ans as well.

For instance, taller people make more money. People in rich countries tend to grow taller than people in poor countries. Fat people are kept at farther physical distance by slim people during everyday interactions, and distance is spontaneously kept between people of different social status. Good-looking people have happ­ier lives. Disabled people suffer from stig­ma, are discriminated against, and are thus limited beyond the inher­ent limi­tations caused by their disabilities. Poor people have worse health and worse medical care, in turn affecting economic success. People with higher status are touched more, which protects from stress, which boosts health and long-term performance. People in higher social classes eat better and do more effective workout and have less physically strenuous jobs. It even seems that women’s mens­truation cycles fall into sync, where the dominant woman of the group leads the others (there’s not quite con­sensus on that one). And more dominant men smell better to ovulating wo­men, espec­ially if the women are young, fertile and already in a stable relation­ship (likely because natural selection has favored moder­ate amo­unts of infidelity).

Okay, that last one gets a reference, just because.[ii] You can look all of this stuff up if you like. There’s lots of it.

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.

Your entire habitus scents of dominance or sub­mission, of confidence or insecurity, of power, pride and prestige or of tense frustration, shame and the accumulated disdain of others. Inequality lives in and through human and animal bodies. And society’s institutions can work to exa­cer­bate or combat this inequality.

The sociologist Catherine Hakim has even proposed that there may be such a thing as “sexual” or “erotic” capital, which suggests a correspond­ing form of inequality in society.[iii] There is good reason to take Hakim’s idea seriously as it is well known and proven that richer men end up with women of greater fecundity, and that sex and sexuality certa­inly play a part in the stratifications of human rela­tions.

I do, however, feel that the categories of social, physiological and—as we shall see—emotional inequality together may give a fuller and more com­prehensive account of these dynamics. In other words, I view sexual capital as an emergent subcategory of these three. But certainly, it deserv­es atten­tion: How held back and beaten down are we by sexual and rom­an­tic reject­ions?

So both economic and social inequality leave deep physiological traces; and these in turn reproduce inequalities in any number of ways. The mech­anisms and causal feed­back loops of physiological inequality can be many different ones, epi­genetics (the ongoing activation and deactivation of genes) only being one frontier to explore.

The different forms interact. At the most basic level, malnourishment hinders opt­imal physical and cognitive growth, and thus perpetuates pow­er­­­less­ness, sub­mission and poverty. This has been common know­ledge for dec­ades and is part and parcel of studies of econ­omic develop­ment and foreign aid.

There are, however, also studies of aff­luent countries that reveal the deeply seated inherited physiological ineq­ual­ities that repro­duce themsel­ves over gene­rations. I would like to men­tion two such bodies of work: the so-called Whitehall studies and the Canadian stu­dies of (epi-)gen­etic de­generation due to childhood adversities.

The Whitehall studies (there are two of them) looked at over 18,000 Brit­ish male civil servants for a period of ten years. The first studies were conducted from the 1960s to the 1980s, but they have had follow-ups to this day, and they look espe­cially at factors that could explain cardio­vascular diseases and mortality rates. And lo and behold, these studies heralded an entry of social science into medicine and vice versa: Men of lower rank died off more quickly than those of higher rank. Lower rank­ing grade was asso­ciated with a number of risk factors, including obesity, smoking, reduced leisure time, lower levels of physical activity, higher blood pressure and higher prevalence of under­lying illness.

“Whitehall II” found that additional factors affect health across a life­span: the way work is organized, work climate, social influences from out­side of work, influences from early life, and health be­haviors.

There is no escape from the marriage between social and natural or clin­ical sci­ence, for one thing. And there is, moreover, no escape from the phys­iological dimension of inequality.

The second body of work is the Canadian studies of epigenetics and population epigenomics (how genes are affected by demographic and so­cial factors). The global leadership of this field consists of a rather wide research community of senior medical scientists, more than I can name here. This wide network has been doing truly groundbreaking and pro­foundly relevant work when it comes to understanding physio­log­ical inequality. The studies suggests, among other things, that “DNA meth­yl­ation” (bas­ic­ally, our genetic ag­ing) increases in kids whose parents were stressed out dur­ing preg­n­ancy and/or their children’s early childhoods.[iv] You can look at a fifteen-year-old and see their gene express­ions are dif­ferent from more privileged peers—and more like those of older people—if their parents went through some rough times when they were little. You get scarred at the molecular level for things that happ­­e­ned before you can remember.[v]

This is true not only at the individual level, but also at the level of whole schools and larger communities. And we have already seen that lower social status can stress people out, as can economic insecurity. What we may be looking at here is thus a very intricate and intimate form of inequ­ality reproducing itself. But more research is needed—and the Cana­dians are providing it.

All of this points us towards a discussion about which measures could reasonably be taken to reduce physiological inequality. Whereas this issue is not generally on the political agenda, there have been some interesting developments during the 20^th century. One simple such is that dental care was offered to many more citizens, especially in social demo­cracies like Sweden. Social-democratic leaders took to heart the struggle to im­prove the teeth of poor children, and while their reforms perhaps did less to improve and equalize oral health than the simple proliferation of tooth­brushes and tooth paste, they did let all school kids flush their teeth with fluorine and largely managed to decouple shiny white teeth from dist­inc­tions of class. To this day, it is even a common measure for muni­cipalities in Sweden to pay for entire sets of synthetic teeth for the home­less so as to improve their overall health and decrease their physio­logical stigma. Such measures generally get thumbs up in social work scholarship, but they are of course expensive and thus have difficulties securing sust­ained public fund­ing.

The question is to which extent physiological inequalities are caused by other inequalities—of wealth and status—and to which extent the oppo­site is true, i.e. that physiological differences cause other inequalities. And the question is which physical inequalities can be chan­ged through politi­cal and social measures and which ones remain largely immutable. We cannot, of cour­se, make a person with Down syndrome score high on IQ tests or make a person who lost her legs in an accident sudd­enly grow her limbs back. But many measures are, indisputably, possible to take, many phy­siological factors and developments can be affected by con­scious des­ign, both on a day-to-day basis, and over the course of a lifespan—with profound implications for public health, physical and men­tal. And such physiological or bio-social factors hint at a wide can­opy of measures that can affect and reduce the complex reproduction of in­equal­ity through­out society.

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 dignities salvaged and hum­an potentials released.

—

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.

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[i]. Snyder-Mackler N. et al., 2016. Social status alters immune regulation and res­ponse to infection in macaques. Science. 354 (6315):1041-1045.

[ii]. Havlicek, J. S., Roberts, C., Flegr, J., 2005. Women’s preference for dominant male odour: effects of menstrual cycle and relationship status. Biology Letters. April 4, 2005.

[iii]. Hakim, C., 2011. Honey Money: The Power of Erotic Capital. London: Penguin Press.

[iv]. O’Donnell, K. J., Chen, L., MacIsaac, J.L., McEwen, L. M., Nguyen, T., Beckmann, K. et al, 2018. DNA methylome variation in a perinatal nurse-visitation program that reduces child maltreatment: a 27-year follow-up. Transl Psychiatry, vol. 8(1).

[v]. Gonzalez, A., Catherine, N., Boyle, M., Jack, S. M., Atkinson, L., Kobor, M. et al. 2018. Healthy Foundations Study: a randomised controlled trial to evaluate boil­ogical embedding of early-life experiences. BMJ Open, vol. 8(1).

The following is a slightly edited extract from Hanzi Freinacht’s book ‘Nordic Ideology: A Metamodern Guide to Politics, Book Two’. This is the second book in a series on metamodern thought, a work of popular philosophy that investigates the nature of psychological development and its political implications. This is the second post in a series on six forms of inequality. In the green box to the right, you can find the links to the full series.

Besides his closest family, he doesn’t have any friends, let alone roman­tic partners. This isn’t because he’s not a nice person. He is quite friendly and rather intelli­gent, has some style going on, a somewhat rugged guy with tattoos who sometimes draws female atten­tion. He lives on consider­ably more resour­ces and money than most people during their stud­ent years, but he lacks something else: to be considered as a social equal and to be recognized as a friend.

By the look of it, this shouldn’t be very difficult to fix. Can’t he join a club and make some friends there? Can’t he go on online dating and find a partner? But no, he cannot. All of his old friends have subtly abandoned him. They sometimes say they will call or come visit when in town, but when push comes to shove, they never do. It’s just him, and his dog—every day, each day of the year, for years on end. And sometimes dinner at his mother’s house, but she won’t be there forever. Loneliness.

If this doesn’t qualify as a severe form of inequality, I don’t know what would. If this guy goes to the local pub and musters the courage to sit down with a party of strangers, he will very soon be asked “what he does”. And if he doesn’t want to spend his evening with odd evading answers or unsust­ainable lies, he will need to say he doesn’t have a job. The next question that presents itself is “why”. And that’s even more difficult to answer: “I have schizophrenia”. But that’s not the end of it. If it comes out, or is in­tu­ited, that this is a lonely man with no friends, he will evoke no interest or sympathy in his interlocutors. They will physically turn their backs on him—literally speaking—and find reasons to end the conversa­tion shortly. Rejection, rejection, rejection.

And this isn’t about money. If he had the same apartment, the same fin­ancial means, even being unemployed—but had lots of friends, con­tacts, fun stories about what he has going on and interesting things to say, then he would be welcomed. His illness has put him in a position where he has low social capital. From this position he has no references to make in any new social situation he finds himself; and in this manner, his social poverty reproduces itself and isolates him from his fellow human beings.

This is of course only one example of a wider and deeper phen­omenon of social inequality. Social capital comes in many com­plex forms: number of friends, in turn how well connected and popular these friends are, the depth and stability of those friendships, personal charm, good family rela­tions, professional contacts, socio-economic status, being “cool”, enjoying the trust and admiration of people, having sexual appeal, being respect­ed for one’s achievements, having many good stories to tell, being able to make fun and interesting events happen, and so forth.

Social capital of this kind can describe both a person and a society. A person who has higher social capital is one who always gets invited, who is welcome, for who doors are always open, and who can count on the supp­ort of others. A society with higher social capital can boast greater inter­­personal trust, higher levels of solidarity and greater propensity to help stra­ngers, trust in institutions and lower corruption, greater voter turn­out, more cooperation and lesser destructive competition—and gen­erally fe­wer people who are lonely and left to fend for themselves.

Social inequality exists not only in the human world, but can readily be observed in the animal kingdom. Different primates organize in groups where social status varies according to their species and environments, some animals being more egalitarian than others. In humans, if economic inequality doesn’t show up to significant degrees in small tribes of a 150 people, social inequality certainly does. And it is, of course, very painful for the deprived.

In larger human societies, social inequality can have very numerous and more com­plex causes. It interacts, unsurprisingly, with economic in­equality. If you have more contacts who trust, respect or even admire you, it becomes much easier to earn money as well. And if you earn money, it becomes eas­ier to be an interesting friend, romantic partner and so forth. But bey­ond economics, social inequality also follows the larger dominator hier­archies and stratifications of society, such as ethnicity, race, gender, sexu­ality, class, soc­ial stigma (like disabilities) and what the sociologist Bourdieu fam­ously called hab­itus, i.e. how you subtly express your stand­ing in soci­ety through gest­ures, taste, lang­uage use and so forth. It’s just easier to be a cool white male New Yorker in flashy clothes than to be a black disabled wo­man in a small town wearing Walmart clothes.

So this is what social inequality looks like; here’s a “sociogram” of 63 Chinese children in a class of 6^th graders. They can nominate other kids as friends (arrow).[i]

All kids nominate at least two friends, but not all kids are nominated. Far from all children who are nominated by someone nominate them back. As you can see, there is a clear pecking order where some kids are at the center and even enjoy the prestige of being friends with the popular ones, while others are sidelined all but completely. They are also at the longest distance from the most popular ones.

Such spontaneous processes self-organize automatically throughout soc­­iety based on the ongoing interactions of people. And then they cryst­alize and reinforce themselves: The people at the center of the social clust­ers have innumerable advantages over those at the peripheries. What a cruel world!

It is insufficient to focus only on econ­omic in­equality when said pro­cesses of social stratification remain present. Social inequality is just as cyn­ical and harmful—and visce­rally felt—as its eco­nomic counterpart. It is not difficult to see, moreover, that social in­equal­ities also can have far-reach­ing econ­omic consequences.

In modern societies, such social inequality comes in two related but dist­inct flavors: the socio-economic status dominant in adult life, and the micro-social status or “coolness” or “popularity” dominant in adol­es­cent life and youth culture. The first is of course tied to such things as prof­ess­ional status, success and achievement, while the second is tied to per­sonal expression, taste, fashion and lifestyle, and it remains an im­por­tant factor for social and mating success throughout one’s lifespan.

With­in the creative class­es and other “culturally refined” segments of society, cool­ness in terms of aesthetics, education and taste are closely tied to economic success. In postindustrial societies, “cool­ness” tends to be­come yet more pronounced—where hipsters, hackers and hipp­ies often awake bitter resentment in the rest of the population with their flagrant di­splays of “refined” expressions of art, lifestyle, conversa­tion topics and fashion.

The long-term egalitarian goal must be, of course, to make such things as fashion and taste matter less for people’s social recognition and dignity. So we are not only looking to remedy the “hidden injuries of class” (as the sociologist Richard Sennett famously termed it), but also “to end the reign of cool”.

Social inequality harms people. When more pronounced, we can ex­pect a number of distortions of the games of everyday life. People are like­ly to become tenser and less relaxed, more scheming and strategic in their friend­ship forma­tions, less likely to challenge norms and habits, more soc­ially com­petitive, more prone to slander and mock one another, and more prone to take anti-social measures to check or reverse the social pres­tige of rivals. People will judge the ideas and opinions of one another less by merit and more by status, and there is less of a stable foundation for democratic ideals and solidarity in general. How afraid are we not of losing our social ties, or to be scorned and looked down upon? When it comes to social status, people are suckers—and for good reason, too.

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.

However, as strange as it initially may appear, we can often do more about social inequality than about its economic counterpart, and such mea­s­ures can often combat inequality more profoundly and effectively. 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.

In society at large, we can apply vaguer and corresponding measures, not least creating a layer of social support (by trained professionals) for the truly exclu­ded ones, who can then be coached to greater social com­petence and be encour­aged in their attempts. The sexual games can chan­ge if the aver­age person is more soc­ially and emotionally func­tional—and of course, norms can evolve to­wards less materialistic values, and unnece­s­sary tab­oos and stigma can be breached so that people are generally more acc­ept­ing of differences. For instance, in a more postmaterialist culture, being “unem­ployed” can be less of a big deal as people can be offered a wider range of oppor­tunities to create positive social identities beyond their employment stat­us and pro­fession—identities that reach deeper into the personal, civic, spiritual and aesthetic realms, echoing the words of the Young Marx:

“Assume man to be man and his relationship to the world to be a human one: then you can exchange love only for love, trust for trust, etc. If you want to enjoy art, you must be an artistically cultivated person; if you want to exercise influence over other people, you must be a person with a stimu­lating and encouraging effect on other people.”[ii]

Even if the Young Marx writes with the “humanist”[iii] perspective of his time, and even if it smacks of romantic game denial, his vision is certainly a compelling one. Can we create a society in which people’s exchanges are free from irrational and distorting hierar­chies such as different levels of wealth?

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.”

In such societies, it may well be time to more directly address the more complex, touchy—and embarrassing—issue of social inequality. This is not only a question of extending a vague “inclusion” of minorities and misfits, but also, and primarily, an issue of changing the games thr­ough which everyday life plays out. An important part of this is to help people become more socially competent and empowered.

Going back to my young relative with schizophrenia, he doesn’t need to be included because people feel sorry for him—he needs skills, resour­ces and occa­sions to be genuinely valuable to others so that they will be happy and proud to call him a friend or a lover. This, in turn, would save society a lot in terms of his worsening medical condition and by letting him be of service to others.

To conclude, here’s an example of how a scale of people’s social capital might look like: The richer you are, the more you can “afford” to act out­side of norms, comfort zones and so forth. How many bridges can you afford to burn?

1. You can burn 90+ percent of your bridges without significant loss of subjective wellbeing, after recovering from the loss (famous people: even complete stran­g­ers will find you valuable and want to keep you alive and well).
2. You can burn more than half your bridges without significant loss of subjective wellbeing.
3. You can lose any one major field (professional, group of friends) of your life but still thrive.
4. You can lose any one major bridge within any one major field but still thrive.
5. You can lose any one major bridge but still manage at a lower level of subjective wellbeing.
6. You cannot afford to lose any major bridge without a dramatic drop in wellbeing and the risk of crisis/depression increases.
7. You have very few real bridges and must constantly worry about keeping them.
8. You have very few bridges and feel a pressing fear of losing them very often (“social precariat”).
9. You lack major bridges and live in crisis (“social precariat nightmare”).
10. You lack bridges and support structure to handle crisis (pariah, everyone shuns you, and even social workers privately look down upon you while helping).

Each stage represents a quantitative difference that causes a qualita­tive shift. That’s how capital and inequality work. You get more of som­ething, and once you have a certain amount, the whole game shifts and your outlook on life changes. Just shifting one or two steps on this scale puts you on a whole other map, in a differ­ent world.[iv]

—

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.

—

[i]. Zhang, F. et al. 2014. Friendship quality, social preference, proximity prestige, and self-perceived social competence: Interactive influences on children’s lone­liness. Journal of School Psychology. 52(5).

[ii]. Marx, K., 1844. “The Power of Money” in Economic and Philosophical Manu­scripts.

[iii]. I’m not a fan of humanism, as discussed in the Appendix of Book One, as I view humanist ideas as unproductively anthropocentric and non-transpersonal. But of course, in the 19^th century, this kind of thinking is to be expected.

[iv]. Of course, it’s a crude map with deliberately vague definitions, and depending on how we feel any given day we might interpret our situations differently along the scale. But I think it does its job: to highlight that social inequality is a scale that endows some with security and happiness and creates social insecurity and unhappiness for others.

 

The following is a slightly edited extract from Hanzi Freinacht’s book ‘Nordic Ideology: A Metamodern Guide to Politics, Book Two’. This is the second book in a series on metamodern thought, a work of popular philosophy that investigates the nature of psychological development and its political implications. This is the first post in a series on six forms of inequality. In the green box to the right, you can find the links to the full series.

There is, in the public debate, considerable confusion regarding the ques­tion whether economic inequality has been rising or falling during recent decades. On the Left, the idea that inequality is rising remains an almost religious tenet. A famous 2013 book by Thomas Piketty, Capi­tal in the Twenty-First Century, showed that a small group—the “top one per­cent”—has been amassing an increasingly larger portion of the wealth sin­ce the turn to neo-liberal economic pol­icies, begin­ning with the Rea­gan-Thatcher era around 1980, and that this is larg­ely a global trend. This trend is much more pronounced if you look at the top 0.01%, which has led many to believe that rising econo­mic inequal­ity is an uncontroversial fact. But there is more to the story as so often is the case with these things.

We are witnessing a few interrelated trends that have to do with econ­omic globalization, the lack of transnational governance, rapid economic growth and techno­logical advancement. These factors taken together cre­a­te a more complex picture. Let’s take a look:

• The overall economic inequality of the world is falling, with the global Gini coefficient reaching a peak around the year 2000 (the most unequal distribution of income). It has since begun to decrease somewhat, largely due to the impressive economic growth of coun­tries like China, India and Brazil where large new middle classes have emerged. In­equality within these countries has also increased as not all members of society have been successfully in­clu­ded. Still, if we are to believe the forec­asts of an influential 2008 Goldman Sachs report, two billion more people should have joined the global middle class by 2030, and thus far, at the time of writing, the numbers have not disappointed.[i]
• 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. This means the middle and working classes of these societies have become more pressured since they are competing with­in a much larger world economy. Many jobs have also been automated, and countries have been less able to maintain generous welfare spend­ing and high taxation as many corporations have become more trans­national and thereby been able to move their profits and activities to countries with lower taxes. Taken toge­th­er, this means the general experience of “nor­mal people” in rich countries is that inequality is growing. As these popul­ations still largely dominate the global discourse, “the nor­mal Western­ers”, this has become the leading narrative.
• Absolute poverty (living on less than two dollars a day) has been falling sharply due to economic growth around the world. An important aspect here is also that technological advancements have made it possible to get more value for less money. For instance, getting a smartphone, which contains many em­pow­ering technologies, is much less expen­sive than getting a camera, a computer, a telephone, and a GPS. Writing an email is less expensive than mailing a letter, reading Wikipedia is less expensive than buying books or news­papers, and so forth. Internet trade and large retail warehouses like Walmart have also increased the efficiency of distribution and thereby made many consumer goods much cheaper. The world at large is becoming richer at an astoun­ding pace.
• And yes, Doctor Piketty, a small proportion of the global population has been amassing a growing share of the wealth. This is the result of two fundamental factors: globalization and technological progress. Glob­alization (increasing trade, communication and foreign direct invest­ments) conn­ects all of us into one bustling economy of seven going on eight billion people. 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 is due to what network theo­rists like Albert-László Barabási call “non-random networks”, i.e. that the central positions always have more connections to make use of. Add to this some central technologies that are difficult to create, but many people want or need, and you have set up a cocktail for small groups to become incredibly wealthy. This is reinforced by the dynamics of the digital economy and its large platforms which tie millions of market agents to the same central nodes, which grants the advantages of “big data” to the central agents.

Thus, the interconnected world market is creating a situation where global inequality is decreasing, poverty is decreasing, but inequality is increa­sing within countries, and small transnational elites are becom­ing much, much richer than the rest of us.

You can see it all summed up in this one graph, taken from Our World in Data:[ii]

 

You can see how, in 1970, there were a rich world and a poor one (the two bumps on the 1970 distribution). By 2000, however, this had changed into one large, even global, pyramid with more peo­ple at the top and fewer at the very bottom. The rich countries no longer offer the same “buffer” against in­equality within their borders—now we are all part of the same competitive mega-structure that is the global market.[i]

Which conclusions can be drawn from this analysis? An obvious one is that inequality is increasingly a global issue, and thus more of a transnati­onal con­cern than a national one. This means that economic inequality—for all its importance and for all of its harmful effects—cannot readily be tack­­­led by means of classical Left economics of redistribution within the singular state. If you raise the taxes and redistribute wealth too vigorously within one country, this does not only necessitate the exclusion of foreig­n­ers, but it also scares away global capital. Hence, we need effective global systems of redistrib­ution. In order to reach a point where serious global redistrib­ution is possi­ble, we would require a larger systemic shift to­wards global govern­ance.

And to get there we need significant proportions of post­modern and metamodern people around the world. And these peo­ple only show up in significant numbers within the postindustrial stra­ta of the world eco­nomy, which makes any prospect of establishing such a world order un­achievable for the foreseeable future as it won’t be possible without vit­al economies such as China and India.

This is not to say that income redistribution is futile: Stronger econ­om­ies with functional institutions can still perform relatively extensive such meas­ures. But redistribution by means of taxes and social security is just not sufficient to counter the extremely powerful trends that drive the world economy: globalization, non-random network effects, techn­ol­ogical adv­an­cements and unregulated transnational mark­ets. How­­ever, as I will discuss in the following posts, there are other ways to decrease the viscerally felt ine­quality between human beings. In fact, I would argue, that an exagg­erated focus on economic inequality leaves us with an im­pov­erished vis­ion of what equality really is.

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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.

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[i]. Another version of telling this story is the famous graph by econ­omist Branko Milanović’s “elephant curve”. Source: The American Prospect, using data provided by Branko Milanović. It’s called the “elephant curve” because it looks like an elephant. The graph has been discussed at length in Milanović 2016 book, Global Inequality.

[i]. “The middle three quintiles (i.e. excluding the top and bottom 20%) in terms of country incomes could be responsible for 57% of global GDP in PPP terms, up from only 31% [in 2008] (and climb from 15% to 43% in USD terms). This group, which will be dominated by a subset of the BRICs and N11 (China, India, Brazil, Egypt, Philippines, Indonesia, Iran, Mexico, Vietnam) will matter more and more for global spending patterns.”

See: Wilson, D., Dragusanu, R., 2008. The Expanding Middle: The Explo­ding World Middle Class and Falling Global Inequality. Goldman Sachs: Global Econo­mics Paper No: 170.

[ii]. Originally from an OECD report: van Zanden et al. 2014. How Was Life? OECD.

The following is a slightly edited extract from Hanzi Freinacht’s book ‘Nordic Ideology: A Metamodern Guide to Politics, Book Two’. This is the second book in a series on metamodern thought, a work of popular philosophy that investigates the nature of psychological development and its political implications.

Furthermore, we have noted a second paradox of freedom: while free­dom is cast in terms of our emancipation from commonly held negative emo­tions which we all avoid during our everyday lives, it is also apparent that said negative emotions regulate our behaviors in ways making society possible in the first place. Without emotions of guilt and shame, it is diff­icult to see how we could make societal life function at all. And only highly functional societies can be expected to develop greater freedom. So freedom within a society always has to build upon un-freedom, upon an increasingly intimate form of self-organizing control. It is as though we were climbing a ladder with the goal of reaching above the ladder itself. But then what would we hold on to?

We have to wrestle with freedom as a common good, as something em­anating from our everyday inter­actions with one another, with our envir­on­ment and our “selves”. Freedom flows not only from institutions, but also from intimate and personal relationships.

Your freedom does not begin where my freedom ends; that’s an illu­sion based upon the under­lying assum­ption that human beings are sealed containers, that we are indivi­duals, in­divisible atoms. But in a behavioral-sci­entific sense, it is clear we are more than individuals, that we are “div­iduals” or “transindividuals”, as des­cribed in The Listening Society. Hence, your free­dom begins not at my imagined outward border, but at the center of my heart.

Once you understand this, you can also see that equality is part and par­cel of freedom’s development as equality determines the nature and quality of our relations. So let’s talk about the paradoxes of equality, and then march quickly to resolve them. I am offer­ing an anatomy of equality and its evolution.

The Four Paradoxes of Equality

Let me go through four fundamental paradoxes of “equality” that make the issue an eternally insolvable problem.

1. WE AREN’T ACTUALLY EQUAL

The first paradox of equality is that humans are not equals. As I labored to describe in The Listening Society, there are great developmental differ­ences between us, with some people advancing to higher stages of adult psy­chological dev­elopment than others: some have more complex think­ing, more uni­ver­sal values, more refined relationships to life and exist­ence.

The same holds true in terms of other characteristics: some are health­ier and strong­er, some have more balanced personalities, some are more ind­ust­rious and have greater endurance and tolerance of stress, some have higher IQ, some are more sociable, some are better looking—and some have the opposite traits. At a superficial level, this could have us think that equality in a deeper sense is not possible as our differences and variations of endow­ments will always manifest in our lives and our rela­tionships. But such a defeatist stance will not serve us well; it is, after all, quite appa­rent that different societies have different levels of equality, and hence that equa­lity can develop. Rather, we must venture deeper into an understand­ing of equality to resolve this paradox.

2. THE CRUELTY OF PERFECT MERITOCRACY

A limited version of the value of equality is the idea of “meritocracy”, or the “equality of opportunity”. According to this ideal, the aim of pur­suing equality is one of removing all obstacles for people to achieve what the traits of their character would “naturally” let them “deserve”. You may re­member Martin Luther King’s echoing voice: “I look to a day when people will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character.” That may be a good starting point for equal­ity, but it is cer­tainly not the endpoint. The Martin Luther Kings of today and of the fut­ure must ask for much more. They must be much more analytically strin­gent and radical.

Let’s say for a moment that we really achieved a society in which people are truly “judged by the content of their character”. This would mean that people with more competitive traits would gain more recognition, power, resources—and ultimately happiness—than their more miserably endow­ed fellow citizens. 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. And everybody else blames you as well. You are not judged by distinctions of class, gender or race, but you are still judged. And the en­titled feel even more exalted, yet more deserving. Drawn to its logical con­clusion, King’s vision—so often held almost as a religious tenet of mod­ernity—reveals an inescapably cruel and cynical side.

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

To a large extent, equality is about recognition, and you are recognized not only des­pite your race/gender/class, but also because of your abilities to pro­duce things other people want (products, services, elicited emoti­ons). And people will only give you recognition if they are unable to take it from you, i.e. if there is a power balance in place. Cows “give” us milk but receive no recognition because they are powerless in our bovine-opp­ressive soci­ety.

The meritocratic vision of equality still builds upon out­dated, religious (I am tempted to say Protestant) ideas: that you have a soul, and that “God” doles out rewards depending on how pretty you are on the inside. With King, we have—perhaps unsurprisingly—smuggled in a good dose of Luth­er and Calvin.

In reality, of course, no such God exists. And there is no fate that re­wards good character according to a universal measure; no law of Kar­ma, at least not in the traditional sense. People don’t “deserve” anything in any deeper, cosmic sense.

As the ladder of life is strung—as society is “stratified” into higher and lower strata—people simply end up in different social positions as the result of cold, mechanical pro­cesses, some of which orig­inate within each of us and from our own choices and actions, and some of which orig­inate from structures lying far beyond our control. There is really no solid bor­der between the inequality that comes from beyond ourselves, and the one that comes from within (from our psyches, personal traits and behav­iors).

Naturally, not all inequality is always a bad thing, but up to a certain point—a rather high threshold—inequality is painful to people and detri­mental to soc­ieties, whether it originates from people’s inner traits or from unfair collective structures.

We are called, then, to look for an intimately lived and felt equality; one that in turn shapes our relationships in the direction of mutual respect and sol­idarity, caring, even love. Such equality must ultimately be based upon social recognition, that people’s value and quality are genuinely app­rec­iated and honored by others. This and similar arguments have been made by many sociologists in recent years, most notably perhaps by the social theo­rist Axel Honn­eth.[i] This line of thought goes back as far as Hegel (in The Phenomenology of Spirit), who viewed the struggle for re­cognition as a primary driver in history, and it has been theorized not only on the Left, and not only by sociologists—in 2018 none other than Francis Fukuyama published a book titled Identity, which also looks close­ly at the primacy of recognition in society.

But this striving for a de facto equality of recognition, espoused by Hon­neth and others, lands us in yet another paradox, largely missed by the theo­rists of recog­nition. It is, if possible, an even more caustic one.

All humans desire recognition—civic, soc­ial, economic, emotional and sexual. We want to be recognized as worthy citizens, as real people, as com­petent contributors, as good friends and fam­ily members, and as gendered and sexual beings.

But—and this is the paradox that defenders of recognition tend to miss —we only want recog­nition from those who we ourselves value, from those who we our­selves “recognize” as equals or superiors, from the ones we res­pect, admire or desire.

We don’t want to be admired by the ones we look down upon, but by the ones we look up to. We don’t want to be members of a community we don’t respect. We don’t want to have our taste and lifestyle venerated by those we deem to have poor taste and ignoble lifestyles. We don’t want to be validated as beautiful and desirable by those we deem ugly and rep­ulsive. In short, we desire recognition from the recog­nized. And it goes farther than that—we even want only the recognition of those who in turn are recognized by others we in turn recognize. Recognition is a networked tagging game; a game of performances and displays. Recogni­tion repro­duces recognition. Disdain reproduces disdain.

And the eliciting of respect and recognition is not a volitional act on behalf of the beholder. Admiration, attra­c­tion and respect are things that occur automat­ically, as a result of our emotional, social and cultural wir­ing. We can’t help our­selves but to admire the gifted, to desire the beauti­ful, to clamor for the glamorous, to respect the powerful, to be dazzled by the smooth and the cool. And conversely, alas, we cannot help but feel disdain for those we perceive as stupid, ugly, delinquent, weird or imm­oral—dis­dain for the peo­ple who don’t elicit positive emotional responses in us or otherwise don’t provide things we value.

Sure, on a theoretical and impersonal level, we can extend our solidar­ity to the wretched, with citizenship and the vote and human rights. But we won’t choose them as friends; we won’t enter long-lasting and prod­uctive profess­ional partner­ships with them; we won’t invite them to our parties; we won’t miss them; we won’t marry them; we won’t truly love them.

That innocent wish we so often hail as uni­versally human: “I just want to be respected, loved and desired”, has an inescapable dark side, whisp­er­ing under its breath: “I merely want to be respected, loved and de­sired… by the ones I respect, love and desire”. And we often respect, love and de­sire someone simply because other people seem to.

Ours is a tragic universe, where universal love cannot be the simple an­swer. Any attempt to be genuinely loving of the unloved will prove unsus­tain­able. Even if you let one alcoholic beggar live at your house, you will pay a significant price for doing so, and you will have to exclude the next beggar who comes knocking. And the exchange between you and the begg­­ar will be an act of charity rather than a genuine and mutual offering of res­pect. The whole thing is set up to create large groups of the unwant­ed, the disrespected, the untouchable.

This cruel mechanism of social reality lays its verdict on all of us; as not­ed earlier, we are all winners and losers, in different contexts and to differ­ent extents. We all know both sides, and we all know the intense pain of rejection, of withheld recognition and cold indifference. And we all know, perhaps apart from the uncond­itional love of mothers for their children, that all that matters in life, at the most sensitive and intimate level, can be taken away from us. Hence, we cannot give our care and recognition freely.

If we play our cards wrong, if we convene with the lonely, the failures, the nerds, with those who cannot offer us new and productive outlets for life, this will not only create limited rewards for us; it will spill over and affect how others judge our status and standing in society.

Hence, we stay clear of those who have little recognition, in turn offer­ing them no re­cogni­tion so that we can gain the recognition we so desire. The wounds of the lonely and the despised are as frightening and con­tagious as lepro­sy.

4. WE ENVY ONE ANOTHER

Last, but not least, there is the disturbing tendency of humans to envy those who gain the kinds of recognition we our­selves long for. This creates another paradox of equality.

We withhold our recognition for reasons of envy. Such envy can show up for different reasons: that we feel competition for the scarce resource of atten­tion and recognition, that we are invested in another story about real­ity (why should the footballer be recognized when great poets like “my­self” are ignored; why should brilliant Marxists be admir­ed when in truth lib­ertarian economics are the best; why should great intell­ectuals be hon­ored when “I” am so much kinder and more spiritual?)—or that we feel some­one’s recognition was acquired through undue priv­ileges, that “the fight was fixed”. Or simply that we find someone morally un­deser­ving: why should such a wretched person be so lucky?

The strange and ubiquitous hunger of the human soul, the hunger for recognition, makes the fair and even distribution of recog­nition yet more acrimonious. Envy is an often under­estimated force of hum­an soc­ieties and interactions, and as discussed earlier, it generally goes unnoti­ced by the envier him­self. It leads us to give unhelpful and unsol­ic­ited advice, to slander and diminish the gifts and bea­u­ties of one another. It works as a subtle but per­vasive counterforce to human dignity and equ­al­­ity. It gets in the way of any struggle for deeper equality.

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I have thus offered four paradoxical natures of equality: first, that we are not de facto equal; second, that even a perfect meritocracy with no struct­ural dis­crim­ination reproduces an exacer­bated felt inequality; third, that all equal­ity is based upon viscerally felt and embodied recognition, but that we will only seek the recognition of the recognized, and thus only offer true recog­nition to limited segments of our social surroundings—and last, the strange and subtle presence of envy.

This might all look rather hopeless. Yet, equality varies over societies and epochs. 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 to be given, nor can it be redistributed like material wealth, nor can it be force-fed to the starving. But, again, the fact that equality is paradoxical, and perhaps cannot be “achieved” in any absol­ute sense, doesn’t mean it cannot develop and grow.

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 issue is not, then, to “achieve” equality, but to tackle its paradoxes more intelligently; to work around them with wide and deep-reaching mea­s­ures.

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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.

 

[i]. Honneth, A., 1992/1996. Struggle for Recognition: The Moral Grammar of Social Conflicts. Oxford: Polity Press.