Category: Uncategorized

We have access to a large number of conveniences that in the past would have been the envy of even kings and nobles: modern healthcare, com­fortable and speedy transportation, and safe, fresh food from all aro­und the world, even during winter.

Few of us would want to switch our pleasant modern lifestyle with that of Louis XIV 300 years ago. After all, not even the extravagant Sun King himself ever flew to the Canary Islands during his winter holiday and sat on a beach without catching malaria while enjoying his favorite show on Netflix. And we would presumably soon tire of court jesters and pheasant dinners in leaky castles anyway.

We have become accustomed to a standard of living so high not even Moses parting the Red Sea would impress us. Why wander to the land of milk and honey when we can cross the seas in comfortable jets to places with much more interesting cuisine? Jesus too would probably have need­ed to up his game if he were to make disciples out of us modern people. Turn­ing water into wine hardly competes with the marvel of a good 3D-printer.

Even in the social realm we have opportunities and privileges un­imag­inable in the past. A medieval farmer would not have believed it if he was told that his descendants would have voting rights, freedom of express­ion, property rights, police protection and the freedom to choose their reli­gion. And a 19^th century factory worker would have been dumbstruck by the life-conditions of common folks today: considerably shorter work hours, vaca­tions, pensions, unemployment benefits and an abundance of cheap con­sumer goods that used to be considered luxuries. Lenin’s gran­diose pro­mise of peace, bread and land that made a generation of workers start a revol­ution is so modest and unambitious in comparison to all the things we take for granted today.

There are of course still people who struggle to make ends meet: single unemployed parents, paperless immigrants, people with mental illnesses, substance addicts, and so on. But overall, we must admit we have come very far. We may not live in a true utopia, but in comparison to the past, modern society is at least a relative utopia; truly utopian relative to what used to be.

But the word “utopia” actually means “no­where”. It goes back to the proto-modern thinker Thomas More’s book Utopia from 1516. In this mean­ing of the word, we do actually live in yesterday’s Nowhereland, in a fairytale, a tech­no­logical Shan­gri-La that in the past only could have exis­ted as fiction. Yet, as things went on, the fictional became all the more fac­tual.

As such, there is little reason to believe the metamodern society we are headed towards won’t be a relative utopia; that what is currently only con­ceivable as a fictional account one day will materialize and acqu­ire osten­sibly utopian properties—relative to what we’re putting up with today and take for self-evident conditions of life.

The “Both-And” of Development

Even if the argument can be made that tradit­ional society was “better” than the modern one (as so-called “integral trad­itionalists” like Frithjof Schuon and Réné Guénon have argued: less poll­ution, more spirituality, a more enchanted sense of the world, less dest­ructive weapons, less mind­less con­sumerism and alienation, more in­dep­endence in having the skills to pro­duce what you need, more humility, etc.); this should not blind us to the circumstance that modernity largely solved all of the major prob­lems of pre-modern society. Yup, pretty much all of them.

For most of recorded history, child mortality was high, starvation com­m­on­place, slavery institutionalized, serf­dom ubiquitous, wars fre­qu­ent, violence a part of everyday life, mon­arch­ical oppression unqu­estion­ed, disease rampant, poverty the rule, literacy low, cruel norms limiting indiv­idual freedom prevailing—and so forth.

Yes, all of these miseries exist in the modern world too. In absolute num­bers, some of them are perhaps worse than ever as the world popu­lation is so much larger. On the other hand—and this is the point here—all of these problems have decreased drama­tically in relative terms. In­deed, if you look at the highly modernized, demo­cratic parts of the world, there is an appar­ent decrease in all of these problems at least by a power of ten. Look at Sweden today: How many peo­ple are starving for each one hundred who starved in the 1700s? One? Pro­bably not even that. When people are poor in the US today, they get food stamps and have to stand in line. In pre-modern times, they simply starved to death.

So modernity, with all its technological and social advances, has pract­ically solved all of the problems of all earlier societies: famine, disease, opp­re­ssion, war, poverty, lack of education, slow and dangerous trans­port­ation, superstition. Yes, even war; even if we count the world wars, the risk of being killed by another human being was statistically smaller during the 20^th century than at any time before. Steven Pinker wrote an often-cited book about it in 2011, The Better Angels of Our Nature, and then another one in 2018, Enlightenment Now. Since the millenn­ium, the number of people killed globally in violent con­flicts has been extre­mely low compared to any previous per­iod (in per capita terms).

Yet, of course, modern life is no walk in the park; it is still incredibly cruel and full of suff­ering—something that granny’s granny prob­ably would have had a hard time imagining if we went on for hours about all the awesome sauce (I imagine I’d pause for a long time to describe what I get to eat, where I have travelled and so forth).

Hence, it’s a relative utopia: It really is super-duper mega awe­some not to starve, to have modern medicine, to be able to speak and think freely, to have dominant sex with hot young men if you’re an old guy (I suppose granny might have had a problem with that part), to choose how to live your life and what to do for a living, to have internet and all kinds of abun­dance (even when un­employ­ed, you can eat well and have shelter and use many of the tech­no­logies). It really is nice.

At the same time that doesn’t mean life has become “perfect”. So to­day’s developed societies really are utopian, but only in a relative sense. This is the both-and of development. They are utopian as compared to what came before. But that doesn’t mean today’s society has no pro­blems. In fact, it has two very distinct kinds of problems:

• Residual problems
• New emergent properties problems

The residual problems are the percentages left here and there of the pre-modern stage of development: not all people are protected from cur­able dis­eases, some live in areas controlled by mobsters and are thereby still opp­­ressed, some slavery still goes on (30 million de facto slaves is a figure peo­ple often bring up), and some people still starve or other­wise suffer from pov­erty.

It’s true that the UN Development Goals were met in advance[i] and abject poverty is withering away as eco­nomic growth and ambi­tious, far-reaching aid programs take effect. But still, there are some resi­duals here and there, and they should cert­ainly be accou­nted for; they still define hundreds of millions of lives. They are, however, not quite the pro­ducts of modern society, as histor­ical develop­ments clear­ly indi­cate: Why else would they all be falling so sharply across the globe as the mo­dern world-system progresses? Nay, amigo, they are resid­uals, leftovers. The most modern countries have the least of these iss­ues.

The other category, which concerns us more in this context, are the pro­blems showing up as a direct result of modern society: the new emer­gent properties problems. At a bare minimum, there are three such prob­lems:

1. ecological unsus­tainability,
2. excess ineq­ual­ity, and
3. alienation and stress.

Notwithstanding that these are, on an individual scale, preferable to the wars, droughts and pestilences of yore, they are still quite serious. Sustain­ability issues like climate ch­ange, ecolo­gical collapse, mass extinction—not to mention the looming threat of nuc­lear holocaust and other increas­ingly tangible doomsday scenarios (haywire AI or nanotech, biological war­fare)—can potentially cause miseries worse and more irreparable than even the black plague.

The inequalities of the world may seem bearable compared to the pov­erty of pre-modern subsistence farming, but nowadays we all live in the proxi­mity of wealth and abundance, know­ing for instance the dis­ea­ses that kill our kids in fact are curable. Such knowledge can make our rela­tive poverty even more bitter and insufferable than the harshness of pre-mod­ern life. Indeed, it is one of the most robust findings of social science that income inequality correlates with violent crime, within coun­tries and even more so between countries.[ii]

And alien­ation—a pervading sense of estrangement and exis­t­ential angst—causes young people to suffer depression and com­mit suicide to an unpre­ce­­dented degree. It causes people to live mean­ingless and empty lives ami­dst what superficially looks like freedom and abundance; lives in which we become increasingly stressed out and often exper­ience burnout.

I rem­em­ber spending seven years fending off suicidal thoughts, as a per­vasive but unspecific anxiety haunted my young adult­hood. This is not un­comm­on in devel­op­ed, modern coun­tries where the trends generally point towards rising mental health pro­blems in adolescents and young adults. These are perhaps not as acute or severe as the chall­enges that people faced before mod­er­nity, but they still remain quite serious issues.

All three of these problems are caused, in one way or another, by the dramatic expansion of our industrial productivity: sustainability because we pro­duce and consume more than our ecosystems can endure, ineq­u­a­l­ity because this wealth is distributed in a series of “scale free net­works”, where the most cen­tral positions gain a larger proportion of the wealth, and alienation becau­se of the abstractness and distance that shows up be­tween our every­day activities and their benefits for ourselves and others: Many of us lose a sense of meaning, purpose and direction. (Of cour­se, there’s a lot more to the story on each one of these, but we’re just sket­ching here to get on to the point).

We have finally created a land that flows with milk and honey; literally, vast amounts of highly nutritional substances flow from the taps of indu­stry—yet it’s making us and the planet sick. The paradise of yesterday is great, but it carries with it a number of unexpected pathologies that need to be dealt with in tomorrow’s relative utopia.

Beauties Lost and New Heights Reached

Beyond the two categories—residual and new emergent properties pro­blems—we can add two more to the list of troubles of today’s society. The third cate­gory I’ve called “beau­ties lost”. It entails all the good things that were prevalent in pre-modern societies, but for different reasons dimini­shed as societies became modern.

A good example is “community”, or what the classical 19^th century soc­iologist Ferd­inand Tönnies called Ge­mein­schaft (modern life, at least in its later urban­ized stages, generally offers little cozy, genuine comm­unity in which you con­tinuously relate to a wider group of family and neighbors).

As an exam­ple of Gemeinschaft lost, compare the expansion of electro­n­ically available music—mill­ions of bands, artists and orchestras avail­able online to be played with marvelous sound systems—to the fact that most of us have stopp­ed singing. In all pre-modern societies, people got togeth­er and sang, pretty often too. The individualism and per­form­ance orien­ted attitu­des of mod­ern life somehow nudge us to shut up, un­less we’re alone in the shower or partake in a formally organized choir. Music gain­ed, but singing lost.

An­other example of a beauty lost is “sim­plicity”; that life had a kind of directness and straightforwardness which all­owed a certain modest satis­fac­tion. Other such beauties lost are the “conn­ection to the soil”, appre­ciation of the small things—perhaps a well-crafted tool—or the via con­templativa of monastic life; the calm, ascetic life in service of spiritual goals. You get the picture.

These “beauties lost” have been brought up by many reactionary move­ments and romantics of all kinds (I mentioned the inte­gral trad­itionalists, for instance). But the romantic and nostalgic longing lends itself to exagg­eration—to overvaluing an imagined past, a yesteryear that never quite happened. What we should do instead is simply to acknow­ledge that all societal progression into later and “more ad­vanced” stages en­tails some beauties lost, and that there may be good reasons to figure out how some of these can be regained and reincorp­or­ated without trying to turn the clock back.[iii]

The fourth category of problems is more important. We can call it “new heights rea­ch­ed”. There are problems that are perhaps not directly cau­sed by modern life, but whose solutions only now come within reach. Only when we acquire greater capabilities can we begin to see them and direct our atten­tion towards them. In the old days, we simply didn’t have the luxury to worry about these problems; now we can. We have reached new heights and hence we can begin to tackle higher issues. The soul always wants more; it is never contented. You never get to the end; there is al­ways a new hor­izon after this one, and another.

What are these new issues then, these “new heights”? I would like to men­tion four of them.

The first “new-heights issue” is tied to alienation, but still distinct from it: the lack of meaning and fulfillment. What happens in a society where you already have food, shelter and abundance? People begin to worry that they might be squan­dering their lives; that they may not be making the best of it; that some­thing is still lacking; that life has become boring and too pre­dictable.

The second new-heights issue has to do with struggle and heroism; how can we align our own petty lives with the overarching story about hu­m­­anity, the world and even the cosmos? How can we be something else, some­thing more, than just an average Jane or Joe consumer? Now that we have relative safety and autonomy, how can we make it worth­while? Once we have achieved a comfortable villa life, there is still, lin­gering in our hearts, a visceral longing for greatness within us. How can we tran­scend ourselves; how can we serve something greater so that our lives become imbued with crisp, clear moments of intense aliveness?

The third higher issue pertains to gender equality and freedom of iden­tity: Can we be sexually emancipated, not only in the sense that we can be women with equal rights as men, but that we can be truly sexually and emo­tionally fulfilled? Can we experience erotic fulfill­ment and intimacy both at once? Can we be gay, transgender, or otherwise experi­ment with and create our sexual and gender identities? Women’s liber­ation and the other gender/sexuality issues have come within our grasp in mod­ern soci­eties, but they are not conclusively solved by it.

The fourth and last higher issue is animal rights. Of course, a big part of the problem with the abuse of animals has to do with modern phen­omena such as industrial farming. Animal suff­ering is exacerbated by modernity, even with the increased legislations for “ani­mal welfare”. There have been some pre-mod­ern examples of prin­cipled con­cern for animals in the East­ern traditions (Buddhism and Jain­ism), but even these have not quite res­embled the modern-day animal rights move­ment. In Jainism, for inst­ance, concern with animals grew from a general non-violence prin­ciple, which is not quite the same as a modern phil­osophy of “rights”. In mod­ern life, we can now create an abundance of vegan and synthetic solutions that allow us to live without animal slavery and exploi­t­ation. Hence, vega­nism becom­es a new issue within our reach.

So, sorry for tricking you into thinking we had only two categories of pro­blems under modernity. We have four, these being:

• Residual problems (left-overs from before modernity).
• New emergent properties problems (caused by modernity).
• Beauties lost (qualities from earlier societies lost under modernity).
• New heights reached (problems that simply weren’t viable to try to solve before, but now have come within our reach).

Yep, that’s it. Modern society is truly utopian, truly glorious. Except it has these four categories of problems.[iv]

Now to the point we’ve been working our way towards. We live today in what to most earlier generations could only be described as sheer uto­pia. Yet, we hardly wake up every morning to what we feel is a utopian society. It is a utopia only in a relative sense: The problems of old have all but van­ished, just as new ones have appeared—as dark clouds on the hori­zon, growing cracks in the walls, and new subtle knots within our hearts and minds.

What about metamodern society; is it a utopian project? Yes. It is una­polog­etically utopian. A society can be described as metamodern if, and only if, all of the problems of modernity have been more or less resol­ved, meaning that they have been reduced by at least a power of ten.

In other words, metamodern society is defined as one in which the pro­blems that emerged in modernity—lack of sustainability, excess inequa­lity, alienation and stress—have been resolved. So that’s what we’re going for. Fucking utopia.

Fucking relative utopia, that is.

Gandhi saw the world was headed towards universal principles like democracy, human rights, racial equality and rule of law, which inevi­tably would render colonial rule ethically indefensible, even to the coloni­zers themselves. This enabled him to understand how India could be freed in a peaceful and democratic manner; he knew that history—the long-term att­ractors—was on his side. Similarly, because Jobs saw that digitiza­tion was the future, he realized before most others that everyone would want a personal computer.

To those who couldn’t see these attractors, home computers or the end of colonial rule appeared as distant dreams or science fiction. More­over, blindness to attractors makes it exceedingly difficult to know what exactly to do if you actually do indulge in such dreams. With a well-devel­oped sense of the attractors you get a much clearer picture of what is poss­ible in the near future and what remains a more distant prospect.

If you are able to discern different attractors from one another, under­standing their gravitational pull and intricate dynamics, you will be much more capable of successfully navigating the tides of historical chan­ge. The most astonishing and admirable achievements have rarely been made by those who set about to wrestle history and single­handedly ini­tiate a great change, and more often by those who knew the direction of the winds and adjusted their sails accordingly.

If you still don’t get it: Attractors make you smarter. Gandhi’s under­standing of the attractor of a democratic society and national sovereignty enabled him to “push the right buttons” at the right time so that colonial rule could be ended without firing a shot. He knew he did not have to force change to happen, but that it was more effective to gently steer the forces already in motion in a more preferable direction. By getting the attractor right, Gandhi grasped the golden opportunity that had dawned in his time: that freedom could be obtained, not by threat of physical force, but sim­ply by holding his colonial overlords to the same principles they themselves had sworn allegiance to. Brilliant. One person getting the att­ractor right may just have saved a million lives.

Jobs’ understanding of the attractor of a digitized society enabled him to see the computer as more than just a fast calculator to aid govern­ments and businesses, as most of his contemporaries did, but instead as a univer­sal tool to enable common people be more creative and empowered. He knew he didn’t have to know all the things people would use them for, just that he should make them more user-friendly—and a revolu­tion would follow. Getting it right made him filthy rich and turn­ed him into one of the most beloved public figures of our time.[ii] Quite extra­ordinary really.

The Spirit of the Laws Evolving

A good example of someone who identified an attractor is Montesquieu’s “separation of powers”, presented in his 1748 trea­tise The Spirit of Laws. Of course, earlier versions of this idea can be traced back to Athenian democracy, but Montesquieu gave it a more phil­oso­phically and logically coherent theory: that the legislative, execu­tive and judiciary powers (parliament, government and courts) must be sepa­rated from each other if we are to avoid tyranny and corruption. This tri­partite separation of powers still in­forms all democratic con­sti­tu­tions in the world today. Well done, my good Baron. You hit upon an attra­ctor.

But today we are dealing with a more abstract form of governance that concerns wider as well as more intimate spheres of human life. So the issue natur­ally becomes more complex: Instead of a three-part division of pow­ers, we need six dimensions; each new power being balanced by no less than five others.

Fiction—written words, sheets of paper—was all that Montesquieu’s idea of the separation of powers was to begin with; nothing really “real”. But his words came alive because, in some abstract sense, the Baron was right. His pre­vailing intuition was that power, whenever unchecked and unbalanced by other powers, is detrimental to freedom. He had no studies to show it, no empirical evidence by today’s standards. No “proof” he was correct. And yet many of us now live in societies gover­ned, at least partly, by Montesquieu’s principles. To this day his ideas draw the fine line be­tween democracy and dictator­ship—but we would probably have never known the former if we had demanded proof he was right before making his fiction reality.[iii]

Consequently, if you sense an attractor and seek to act upon it, but people around you demand proof whether it’s going to work, don’t mind these people, carry on; they won’t be the winners of history, whereas you might end up as the new Gandhi or Steve Jobs.

An Attractor Is…

So what is an attractor precisely? And how is it their knowabouts can make you so smart? Let’s get more precise.

Technically speaking,

an “attractor” is a patter­n or equil­ibrium that under certain conditions is very likely to emerge and stab­ilize within a dyna­mical system, such as a society.

We went from hunter-gatherer soci­e­­ties to agriculture—in Eurasia and the pre-Columbian Americas separat­ely—because agriculture was an attractor. We electrified the world, be­cause electricity was an attractor. We all started using interconnected com­puters, be­cause digitization was an attractor. These things did not happen random­ly.

The world is a chaotic place and the future is never predetermined; but on the general level, some things are just more likely to happen than others, and some are very likely to happen. How likely one development or another is to occur is determined by the “gravitational strength” of the att­ractors. Yes, they even talk about “great attractors” also in cosmology, hen­ce the analogy of gravity or pull.[iv]

The advantages of a digitized society, for instance, are simply so great that the gravitational pull of this attractor makes it very, very likely that we would all own a computer one day once it was invented. Today we see that solar and wind power, self-driving electric cars, crypto currencies and nano-technologies act as strong attractors in a similar vein as digit­iza­tion. These are all (potential) attractor points. Getting it right can make you a bitcoin bill­ionaire or turn you into a star entrepreneur like Elon Musk.

It’s hard to reject the idea of how technological attractors play a role in shaping historical developments. Few would claim the personal com­puter was a fluke or that it is just as likely we today would still light candles rather than light bulbs.

However, when it comes to how we think and how we organize society, people tend to be more dismissive of the notion that such delicate matters are under the influence of attract­ors. We like to think it’s all a big coinci­dence that things turned out the way they did, that the future has never been set in stone; that we can decide in which direction history should unfold. “We do have a choice, don’t we?”

Yes we do. But some choices are just much more likely to be made than others. We all make choices, and we take great pains to ensure we make the right ones in order to avoid our actions being completely hap­hazard. As such (given that certain choices have proven so abu­ndantly preferable to others), wouldn’t it be fair to claim that our choices, on a collective level, tend to form certain patterns that are more likely to emerge than others; that we are destined to decide between a limited range of societal models whenever they become poss­ible?

After all, there are a million ways to organize society. Yet human soci­eties tend to be remarkably similar at any stage of historical develop­ment. We could organize society in accordance with the teachings of the Jones­town suicide cult, or Robert Nozick’s minimal state, or set out to make reality of Orwell’s big brother society, or make children the only electable candidates for government, or have all decisions made by rolling dice—the possibilities are endless. But for some reason most of today’s coun­tries have chosen and tried to organize themselves along the lines of a modern state or polity[v] with a tripartite structure of govern­ance.

Even if the courts in some cases aren’t really free and independent from those who govern, and the actions of those who govern aren’t always held acc­ountable by the governed, most such despotic regimes still pretend to abide to the principles of the rule of law and the notion that the “people” is the sovereign. Coincidence? Or just a way to avoid pissing off the demo­cratic West? Probably not. Even the communist regimes of the past claim­ed to uphold the principle of rule of law and to represent the “people”—hence the frequent use of “the people’s republic” in the name of many of the most brutal dictatorships. Even Nazi Germany clai­med the German people to be the highest sovereign. And the brutal dic­tator Gaddafi also put great efforts into explaining how he had made a spe­cial deal with the Libyan people. So even if the de facto circumstances remain a far cry from the modern template of governance, rulers still try to make it appear as though the syst­em works in accordance with demo­cratic ideals.

The fact that Montesquieu’s system, in one form or another, spread to most of the world can hardly be coincidental. And the fact that the evol­u­tion of democracy, at least in terms of its constitutional struct­ure, more or less makes a full stop at this point—can hardly be a coin­ci­dence either. You reach a plat­eau; every­one reaches some version of the same system, and then we all stay there for deca­des, even cent­uries.

Beyond all the thou­sands of unique histo­r­ical events, personalities, ten­fold increa­ses of GDP output, and con­­flicts and cultures and mark­ets and ran­dom plot twists (like tsunamis and whatnot), the same syst­em emerges with a regul­arity reveal­ing itself with crushing clarity.

Coin­cid­­ence? No. The correct answer is: attractor. The modern demo­cratic state is not the only attractor, but it is certainly one of the most compet­itive ones.

So what is the next attractor?

—

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]. The word “attractor” is taken from the mathematical study of dynamical systems where it’s used to designate a set of numerical values towards which a system tends to evolve. We are here avoiding a more cumbersome discussion about what kinds of attractors there are. Since societies are very complex phenomena, we are talking of complex forms of attractors, called “strange attractors”, i.e. attractors that have a fractal structure. This term was coined by Ruelle and Takens. The most famous strange attractor is the Lorenz attractor, described already in 1963 by Edward Lorenz. These early models were made to describe meteorological phenomena.

See: Ruelle, D., Takens, F., 1971. On the nature of turbulence. Communications in Mathematical Physics. 20 (3): 167–192.

[ii]. Yes, we all know there was a dark side to Jobs, too. The point here is simply to point out the power of attractors.

[iii]. The point is not, of course, that our suggested “Montesquieu 2.0” should cancel the democratic principles of Montesquieu’s tripartite division, but to build another layer on top of them. The new insights regulate the old ones, but they don’t cancel them. Montesquieu’s division of powers still holds.

[iv]. “What Is The Great Attractor?” Universe Today. 2014-07-14.

[v]. I sometimes use the word “polity” instead of “state”.

Cited from The Penguin Book of Modern Speeches.
Held on May 4th, 2012. Greenwich, UK.

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So basically there is this vast mystery of existence that is always-already directly present, a horizon of direct experience, and stuff arises within it: objects appear, there are senses which seem to reflect some aspects of these objects from some angles, and there are feelings and thoughts and ideas and suppositions about these occurrences or events. There is a large flow of perceptions and they are not indifferent; they all feel like something, they all matter. This ever-present horizon of experience is truly vast; if I were to name everything present, from what is felt on the tip of my tongue, to the complexities of the background sounds to the enormity of visual experience, to things lingering in the outskirts of my mind, this would be a task worthy of Sisyphus.

But if the totality of experience must always elude me, as it is infinitely larger than my ability to delineate its parts and direct attention towards them, I can at least use very broad strokes to review its territory. Within this field of being, I can count at least three categories, three worlds at different remove. There is 1st person reality, 2nd person reality and 3rd person reality.

1st person reality

1st person reality is the pure being of reality itself. Nothing is ever outside of 1st person reality. All people I have ever known, all the words they have taught me, all the sensory perceptions, all the feelings, all the discoveries about what was hidden from my view (when I learn new insights about the world or even about my own unconscious motives); it all always comes up within the field of experience. Even if I may postulate that there is a world beyond this field of experience, I can, by definition, never travel beyond it. In this sense, I am the universe: I am all that arises. What I conventionally name “Hanzi” and refer to as “myself” is a loose and complexly interrelated set of categories within this field of experience, and the boundaries of these categories shift. Some things that appeared not to be Hanzi turn out to be—and vice versa. And even if I can see that the experiencing of the world seems to be tied to this—rather handsome—object called Hanzi, I must still admit that fundamentally, it is just a category (or complex set of categories) within the wider field of experience.

One of the objects that arise within this vast field (with no outer edges) is something that I have learned to call “will”. It is a powerful and elusive entity and it seems to steer some of the flows of events, but not others. It can lift a right hand, or tap keys on a keyboard, but it cannot change the weather. What I conventionally conceive of as an “I” or refer to as “Hanzi” seems to be structured around this elusive entity, the only “causal” phenomenon within the entire field of experience: the only phenomenon that seems to be able to cause other events to occur. The will seems to have the capacity to be expanded; I can sometimes volitionally soothe anger, sometimes not. The volition itself seems to be governed by other forces, some of which I can in turn affect and change. Hence, “I, Hanzi” seem to be structured around an awake participatory aspect of a larger process that is not in itself structured around Hanzi.

The existence of will means that all things that arise are non-indifferent. I don’t want pain and suffering; some things are unpleasant and some pleasant. I seem to want the pleasant sensations and things. But not only do I steer some movable aspects of the world (my body) towards pleasantness (drinking water, resting) and away from unpleasantness (quenching thirst, not being exhausted); the will participates in all-that-arises. It hardly leaves anything alone: I saw the blue skies today, and I saw that it was good; something stirred at a subtle but profoundly present level in other parts of my awareness, and these subtle sensations are somehow inherently good. I see a lily, and I like it. I cannot quite say why I like something, but sometimes I learn things about the mind, or the world, or things about myself, that seem to explain part of what may “cause” my perception of something to be “good”. My will is there; it participates by imbuing all of experience with at least some vague aspect of non-indifference.

2nd person reality

Within this vast field of experience there are some select few nexuses of objects, of categories of properties, that seem to have whole separate oceans of subjective experience. I cannot know for sure, and sometimes I can mistake something that seemed alive and awake—like a wax doll—for a person or a non-human animal.

But if I am correct, I am not alone in this world; there are other realities of non-indifferent emergence of vast horizons of phenomena. Some parts, some small subcategories of my entire world, look back at me and glimmer of other worlds. Consciousness is looking back at consciousness. I am become two. There is a second person.

I am speaking, of course, of you. You that I know, you that I don’t know, you without whom I would be entirely lost, you whom I love, you that I am afraid of, you who I wish to reach, you who I, ultimately, live for.

As far back as I remember, I have always known you; you are all that matters to me. You have always been there. Nothing is more imbued with my will than you. When I die, you will still be there. Some of you die, disappear. I miss you. Some of you live on after me. Some of you I left when you needed me because I couldn’t handle you and you made me unhappy. Some of you are bad to me. Some of you are unbelievably good to me. Some of you subtly betray me, some of you reach out through darkness and confusion. Some of you are my friends, and sometimes I feel you misunderstand me.

But I gather that I, the continuous flow-of-events that is Hanzi, must in embryonic, fetal and neonatal stages not have know of you. I must have glossed over making the differentiation within the greater field of experience, that another ocean of consciousness was looking back at me. But once I had made that discovery, I have been with you with every breath. I truly am nothing without you.

Not all of you have eyes. Some of you are words on screens, in letters, in books, in music, in architecture. Some of you are non-human animals. But, metaphorically speaking, your eyes looking back into me is all that ever has mattered and ever will.

You are somehow a higher reality than a world of “just me”. And yet, for all I know, you are just a hypothesis. In this sense, I must remain a religious creature; I must live by the faith in you. I must interact with you and learn more of these words from you, and I must shape you, and I must resist you and I must be with you.

3rd person reality

Some of the things that arise seem to be seen also by you; I can tell by your reactions. Hence, I have a subjective realm that, in the last instance, seems entirely inaccessible to you and you have an unfathomable world forever beyond my reach—the entirety of 1st person experience—and then there seem to be some categories of things that both you and I can see and respond to. The world of objects. Of things.

It’s true then, as Kant noted, that we cannot know the thing-in-itself, only a reflection within ourselves, based upon our senses and our perspective. But we can help one another to triangulate more and more things about reality and its objects.

When I met you—yes You—I learned that in your reflection is the source of truth about the nature of all things that are forever beyond my direct reach. Through you, and in my meeting with you—and the multiplicity of you, of (metaphorical) eyes looking back at me, of eyes also looking at the cosmos—a whole world is constructed beyond my senses. A world that I then inhabit and imagine before myself and after my death.

This world grows as you teach me about it and as I observe it and test my observations with you. I dive into it, and I dive deeper, and everything is torn apart and rebuilt a thousand times. And it grows and it expands beyond all fathomable boundaries—the sheer vastness of physical space, the counter-intuitive but elegant order of the physical universe, knowledge about the mind, knowledge about physiology, about myself being an object within the world, about systems and ecologies and histories and languages, about science, about metaphysics, about perspectives—and about fundamental categories of existence that allow me to write these words.

Thus, 3rd person reality is a creative and created category within my field of experience as I meet you. I sometimes dive so deeply into this constructed world of reflections, triangulation and ideas that I think that it is the most fundamental one: it does, undeniably, contain the Hanzi object from which I seem to be peering out, as it does contain You. It is even the case that I seem to be able to explain the properties of my own will by understanding things about objective reality. Objects explain me: “I probably said that because I was tired and angry” and so on.

And yet, I am not an object described in 3rd person; I am prior to any such object. And neither are You. You are something more transcendental, primary and holy than any other object that I can describe through the meeting with you. First there is “isness” or “suchness” or “being”—and then there is You, and when I meet you, “I” am also born and the journey of the self through self-understandings begins—and then there is “it”, the objective reality that we discover in the intersubjective realm. It is not harder than counting to three.

Some inescapable consequences

Hence, nowhere within 2nd or 3rd person reality do I find the will. I can infer that the will, non-indifference, should exist within your inner ocean of experience, imbuing everything that arises in your subjective universe. But such an inference of the existence of will is not the same as the direct participatory experience of will itself. Your will can be shaped by 3rd person explanations, same as mine, but I can never directly access it, never directly cause events to occur through it.

In other words, for all practical purposes, my will is the only causal participatory category in existence. I can will my hand to move, and I can walk over and lift your hand with mine, or use symbolic language to ask you to raise it, but I cannot ultimately will you to will anything. I can will to try to affect your will, or read a book about affecting you, or even to will you to affect me; but I cannot will anything into being beyond my own inner horizon.

In the last instance, this has the consequence that I alone have the full responsibility for all of reality, including you. It is tempting to elevate this into a general, universal rule that applies to “all of us”—“you have the responsibility for all of your reality and I have the responsibility for the entirety of mine”; but that would be missing the point. I really am alone here. Even if I postulate this or that rule that I have come up with, and you don’t get it or don’t buy it, it still boils down to my responsibility to communicate it to you and to make sure it makes sense in the first place. Fundamentally, I cannot blame you for not agreeing to what I think is correct. There is a logical, casual reason for why you don’t agree, and my job is to find out why, or at least to find a way of handling our difference.

There is really no escape from this complete responsibility and hence I am ultimately even responsible for all of your treatment of me. If you are good to me, if you despise me, if you would harm me, or harm anybody else, these are simply the facts of the matter. Only somewhere within my own field of experience is the will and thus the potential to affect reality. Even if there is a long chain of interactions through which we affect one another, the only the parts of this chain that appear to my inner experience are the ones that seem to have the true, direct causal quality. I have all of the responsibility, not by fairness or by duty—but by logic and definition. If you react to me, fairly or unfairly, I cannot call God to tell on you; I need to figure out how to respond productively so as to affect your future behaviors. I am responsible for what you think of me, for how you see me, for the emotions I awaken in you, and for how you act towards me.

If all blame of you is, in fact, a misunderstanding on my part, I am left with a message of universal love (for you) and corresponding universal acceptance (of the facts of reality, including those facts that pertain to the loose categories of “you” and “me”).

Because I exist only in the now and the will can be exercised only within the ever-present field of experience, the past “I” is also an object. Hence, I have no choice but to accept it. The conclusion is hence universal love, non-judgement and self-acceptance.

The following is a slightly edited extract from Hanzi Freinacht’s book ‘The Listening Society: A Metamodern Guide to Politics, Book One’. This is the first book in a series on metamodern thought, a work of popular philosophy that investigates the nature of psychological development and its political implications. What you will read below is from the chapter on wisdom called “Wisdom Troubles”; a chapter that discusses some of the fallacies related to the hyped and relatively overrated notion of wisdom and spiritual enlightenment.

Wisdom is always defined as something entirely beneficial and unprob­lem­atic. It is argued by more people than I could name, that “wisdom” is what humanity needs to solve its multifaceted crisis. Given all the em­phasis that I have put on discussing adult development (and the existential aspects thereof) in my book The Listening Society, I might be expected to enthusiast­ically supp­ort this trend. Yet, over the years, I have increasingly taken a skep­tical position.

The reason for this skepticism is rather simple: I have yet to see a cred­ible attempt to “operationalize” the concept; to make it workable. If wis­dom is such a serious matter, how come all its proponents only ever come up with vague and indirect ways of seeing it and measuring it? And what exactly is it that wisdom “does” – exactly how does it solve all manner of problems and “wicked issues”? People say that “higher consciousness” is necessary for humanity to solve the great problems we are facing. What exactly is it that people with all this wisdom and “higher consciousness” can do, that others cannot? These questions have been answered, but not quite convincingly.

The proponents of wisdom are certainly on to something. Surely, it makes sense to say that higher consciousness is what humanity needs. As I see it, what the wisdom people are scenting is the importance of seeing inner dimen­sions of people and society and the possibility of an active and deliberate dev­el­op­ment of these.

But the problem is that the wisdom people haven’t done their analytical homework. In other words, the researchers of this field – and other pro­po­nents – haven’t figured out exactly what they’re talking about. And the result is anything but productive. I should say, anything but “wise”.

Do you think I am exaggerating and being unfair? Andreas Fischer, a psychology professor at Heidelberg University, recently published a paper in The International Journal of Humanities and Social Science, titled “Wis­dom – The Answer to All the Questions Really Worth Asking.” As far as I can tell, the title is not ironically meant, and it’s not very different from others in the field. This is a scholar who has read through many of the different def­initions in ancient teachers and modern researchers alike; he is perfectly up-to-date. His paper is well-written and quite interesting – as are many others in the field – but does its very title not underscore that people take wisdom to be a magic bullet?

Fischer’s own suggestion is to see wisdom as fundamental and general insights about how to live a good life. But this definition more or less just says that wisdom is good, and lack of wisdom is bad. Fischer brings up some universally occurring insights in wisdom teach­ers, such as treating others well, going beyond materialism and selfish­ness, the importance of being good­hearted rather than successful, and so forth. He also shows that there is research supporting such claims (that following these guidelines tends to lead to happiness and mental health). Such advice can be useful, but it takes little account of people’s different developmental cap­abilities and personalities, let alone what society they live in and how this wisdom can ever evolve and change. How come so few of the classical wisdom teachers taught us about sustainability (with some North American excep­tions) or animal rights (with some Eastern exceptions)?

Making arguments for “wisdom” and “higher consciousness” without know­­­ing exactly what you are talking about can easily get out of hand. The researchers all try to be specific. But the problem persists – because it has to do with the concept of wisdom itself. It’s just not a very high-quality variable, simply because it is taken to be unambiguously good. My mentor Michael Commons (the creator of the Model of Hierarchical complexity, read this post if you want an introduction) would have said: “It’s a crap variable”.

Our search for the wise person easily becomes a search for the perfect person. Should it then surprise us that most people considered “wise” tend to be semi-mythic figures such as Jesus, the Buddha, Lao-Tze or Con­fuc­ius? The real people always run up against their equally real limitations.

Belief in “wisdom” is the belief that there is a variable that is always good, and the more of it, the better. Has there ever been such a variable? Not in the world I live in, at least. Where I come from, many variables always work together to create patterns and equilibriums. Too much of one single variable always has downsides.

So the proponents of wisdom are in fact defending a project that must by necess­ity be a fantasy. If they can’t say in which context this wisdom is good and when it is not, it’s just not a real variable. And if they can’t say how wisdom grows, through which mechanisms, and how it works, and what its limitations are, it is apparently an imagined magic bullet. It is fond hopes and dreams, not much more.

Of Wisdom and Wise-Guys

The proponents of wisdom fail to differentiate between pretty much all of the dimensions I’ve explored in The Listening Society: cognitive com­plexity, IQ, symbolic code, subjective state, existential depth (and the light­ness or dark­ness of that depth), mental health and having a well-integrated person­ality, Eriksonian life phases – the list goes on. Especially, people tend to have an irresistible urge for blending in those Eriksonian life pha­ses, which messes up their theories.

For certain, people who study wisdom generally have several com­ponents in their models (being both smart, patient, humble, emotionally stable, and so forth – see for instance Stephen Hall’s 2010 book Wisdom: From Philosophy to Neuroscience), but in turn all of these variables tend to be taken as unambiguously good and there is no serious con­sider­ation of what happens when people develop in one such variable but not another.

Without analytical distinctions it becomes quite difficult to know what you are talking about. Try this out:

• Is Nelly, a low-complexity (MHC stage 10 Abstract), great-depth, low-state, old and exper­ienced, psychologically stable person who has “inst­all­­ed” the symbol-stage E Modern, “wise” or not?
• Is Eckhart Tolle wise (a New Age wisdom teacher with high state and great depth) or is he plain stupid (believing that flowers are “enlight­­en­ed plants” and that a wave of New Age mindlessness will save humanity from im­pend­ing destruction and that he is leading the fray by giving often lousy therapeutic advice to people who actually need psychiatric care)? Does he have “high consciousness”?
• Or how about the great ruler of northern India in the 3^rd century BCE, Asho­ka? After times of conquest and war, he turned to Budd­hism and pacifism. In his great compassion he decided, among other things, to let all his prisoners out for fresh air once a year.

In these examples, the answer depends on how wisdom is defined. Which brings us to the third problem. With sloppy variables, no reliable measure­­ments and no stringent definitions (even if the researchers do attempt to be stringent), the field is wide open for people to have just about anything in mind when they talk about “wisdom”. And people always seem to assume that they themselves possess wisdom, and that people who they don’t like don’t. The wisdom movement goes: “Yeah man! You like wisdom too? Me too! Let’s do it, y’all!”

Think about it. The concept of wisdom becomes a projection screen, upon which we can project pretty, wishful images. We can paint anything that feels good onto this “super-duper-variable”. The problem is that it would break down into a giant slugfest of disappointment and conflict if operationalized in society: people would have to start arguing about who is wise, really, and why, and what that means. And a lot of people would force a lot of low quality “wisdom” down other people’s throats. Or sell it to them by means of expensive consulting and motivational speeches. Wisdom, after all, is most often just taken to mean: “you folks should be more like me”. This way, wisdom is simply the speaker’s received wisdom.

So here’s my take on a narrower, stricter, definition. Wisdom is great depth, plain and simple. Nothing more, nothing less. So, the way I use the term, wisdom has to do with things like spirituality and transcendence but not really with being smart or “proficient at living a good life”. With this defin­ition the answer is: yes, Eckhart Tolle is wise. To a highly com­plex but low-depth thinker like Richard Dawkins, Eckhart Tolle simply appears to be a fraud; to his enthused followership, he appears to be a sage. The truth is, quite simply, he has high state, great depth and relativ­ely low complexity.

The first example person, Nelly (great depth, low state, low complex­ity), is also wise, even if she lives in a darker subjective world than Eckhart Tolle. They are both wise, but perhaps not very clever. What can I say?

With this stricter definition, the rural Mongol shaman, for instance, can be viewed as wiser than an average modern person. The same goes for the Tibetan nun. With the definition I propose, they can be called “wiser” simply by virtue of having greater depth. We are being specific about what we mean. And a psych­ologically healthy, complex thinker, who is of old age and at peace with herself is not wise, unless she also has great depth – even if the clichés hold that she “should” be wise.

All this lets wisdom be specific, measurable, and just one piece in the puzzle (rather than being a universal fix-it-all). What we might lose by mak­ing the term more narrow, we regain manifold by clarifying what we are actually talking about.

We might try another definition if you like, a more inclusive one: wisdom is the combination of mental health, high complexity and great depth. This might let Ashoka qualify as wise (assuming that he, as a succ­essful ruler, was also a complex thinker). With this definition, people can be “wise” regardless of which symbolic code they have (so you can have a wise person in ancient India, even if he’s hardly progressive by modern standards). With this defin­ition it becomes more difficult to answer the question of who is wise, but strictly speaking neither Nelly nor Eckart Tolle would be categorized as such. Ashoka might.

The devil isn’t just in the details. He’s in the definitions. And, most of all, he’s in the analytical distinctions: in the ability to tell one thing apart from another. To not mix things up. So before you preach the gospel of wisdom, please consult the devil. It would be wise.

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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.

The following is a slightly edited extract from Hanzi Freinacht’s book ‘The Listening Society: A Metamodern Guide to Politics, Book One’. This is the first book in a series on metamodern thought, a work of popular philosophy that investigates the nature of psychological development and its political implications. What you will read below is from the chapter on higher subjective states called “Reaching Higher”; a chapter that discusses the nature of high psychological states of positive emotions.

In its pure form, however, I would claim that spiritual con­gregation is actually a modern phenomenon, showing up in the 19^th and 20^th cen­tur­ies – where people freely devote themselves to a guru, master or teacher who is believed to be enlightened. You may have come across one or more such spirit­ual commun­ities, often populated by hippies and New Age ideas (or New Thought, or variations of theosophy, or contemporary inter­­­­pretations of East­ern tradi­tions, or mysticism from any religion).

A striking pattern in these communities is the prevalence of abuses of power – financial or sexual exploitation, physical and emotional violence (some­­times even directed outside of the community), clear uses of brain­washing strategies, con-artist yogi miracle-makers, or at the very least false claims and endless intrigues and lawsuits. Looking at teachers like Sri Auro­bindo, Osho, Adi Da (Da Free John), Andrew Cohen, Amma (“the hugging mother”) and Chögyam Trungpa – even Jiddu Krishnamurti, who didn’t even found any organization – their comm­unities have all dev­olved into abusive or at least commercialized and dysfunctional rela­tion­ships. Whereas some of these nasty stories may perhaps be expl­ain­ed by deliberate manipulations on behalf of the teachers, the freq­ue­ncy with which these communities show cult-like and deeply oppress­ive tend­encies must have a more general, socio­logical and structural explanation.

My take on such an explanation is this. Whenever a community is built, there is a hier­archy. Hierarchies of some kind are necessary for peo­ple to successfully cooperate, evaluate the efforts of one another: who puts in the most effort, who is reliable, and so forth. Spiritual commun­ities like these are built primarily around a hierarchy of “subjective state”. The leader is taken to be one of higher subjective state than other mem­bers of the community, which is why people want to follow him or her. To advance within this hierarchy, one should also be able to rest for longer periods in higher subjective states.

The Fallacy of Turning Subjective States into Social Hirarchies

The main problem is that subjective state is not something that can easily be measured, and that it changes from moment to moment. Scien­tific results, athletic achievements, even a dollar bottom line – all these are things that can be intersubjectively confirmed or falsified, which means that you can relatively easily see who is a qualified scientist, athlete or business­woman. The spiritual commun­ities build a social hierarchy upon something that can only be personally experi­enced and imagined. Sure, for a brief mom­ent you can check some­one’s brainwaves with the right equipment, but then again, you never know if someone’s subjective state is quite what they say it is, and you can’t measure it all the time. You try to build an inter­subjective comm­unity upon a subjective thing. It’s a just a no-go. It’s an illogically con­structed social structure, and this poor const­ruction leads to some very bad social con­sequ­en­­ces.

It’s often not even easy to recognize what subjective state we are in our­selves; it often takes great effort just to notice. Ever heard a person shouting about how they’re “not angry”? This is just one example out of many of when we fail to recognize an obvious inner state or emotion within ourselves. If each person can hardly know her own state, how can we be expected to build a reliable community upon not only our own state, but the states of a whole group of people?

In spiritual communities, social pressure arises to present one­self as being in as high states as possible (both by personal prestige and because people want to hear that you are doing well in order to validate the spirit­ual enter­prise as a whole). So people begin to subtly lie to themselves and to one anoth­er about how lightly and profoundly they experience the world at any given moment. Ever noticed that strange hysterical happ­i­ness that sect people display? That’s what I’m talking about: they insist upon displaying behaviors that indicate high inner states; hence that stran­ge stare. This applies not least to the guru: if he or she is in a bad mood, the students will still interpret them as acting from a very high state.

So there is a social-psych­ological “spin” on the whole thing, making peo­­ple pretend to be something they’re not. This becomes a closely guard­ed, dirty secret for almost everyone and people are likely to react quite aggress­ively when­ever it risks surfacing. This is a central reason for why they turn so oppressive and aggressive when the image of harmony is challenged by all the conflicts and issues that necessarily show up in any community.

And all of this is aggravated by the fact that subjective states are deeply personal and emotional phenomena. If a community is built around achiev­ing higher subjective states, it must by necessity involve people sharing a lot of their inner lives. This leaves little or no personal sphere, no hiding away – which means that people get closely tied up to one another in situations that are full of smoke-screens, lies and self-deceit. It couldn’t get much more veno­mous.

High Spiritual States Doesn’t Necessarily Make You Smart

But the troubles don’t stop there. Traditional monasteries of earlier centur­ies were not purely spiritual communities; they were also, perhaps primarily, built around work, theo­logy, philosophy and so on. Thus hier­archies could be constructed around things that people could relate to and evaluate inter­subject­ively. Modern spiritual communes are different. If you build a comm­un­­ity around the idea that “this guy”, let’s say the US guru Adi Da, is “enligh­tened”, not only can you never get any proof of it, but you overlook all of the other devel­opmental dimensions.

In other words, even if your guru really does frequent high subjective states; he or she can still be low MHC stage (for an introduction to Hirarchical Complexity, read this post), work from defunct cultural codes, and have all manner of psychological issues and problems.

Just listen to a person like Eckhart Tolle, the author of the book The Power of Now, who has been featured on Oprah Winfrey and gained great traction. He obviously has high states. But his answers on any social or societal issues, and the theories propounded in his books, are of average complexity (MHC stage 11 Formal, more precisely). He just doesn’t have the answers. Which is okay. The only problem is that he makes all sorts of analyses of society, from politics to mental health to gender and sexual­ity – and many people listen. It should be made perfectly clear that this man, while being both kind and wise, is poorly educated and, truth be told, not very clever. Nothing wrong with it, but it should be recognized.

The same goes for pretty much all the gurus. They have high state perspec­tives – the ones that are authentic gurus, that is – but they mistake these exist­en­tial perspectives for authority on all sorts of other issues. As do their foll­ow­ers.

An issue that we haven’t really ventured to discuss here, but that should also briefly be mentioned, is high state pathologies. Low state path­ologies are pretty obvious – you feel like utter crap and this can make you dysfunct­ional, make you have destructive behaviors and want to lash out against the world. But higher states can also bring all sorts of complic­ations. If you, for instance, suddenly feel extremely enlarged and filled with cosmic love, this can easily translate to grandiose ideas about your­self and your place in the world. To megalomania and unsustainable opti­m­­ism. And in moments where you feel that everything is intimately inter­connect­ed and that all things are one, you are also likely to draw rather quest­ionable conclusions about how things are causally inter­related. It has even been shown that people who have just done mind­fulness are more like­ly to have imagined and false memories and that they are somewhat more gull­ible. For all the good things I have to say about high states, I can hardly overemphasize just how seductive and danger­ous they are. In my book The Listening Society I discuss the dang­ers of magic beliefs – as these show up in a lot of high state people.

Uncritical praise of people in high subjective states is a recipe for being ruled and fooled, for being abused and for very sudden and disappointing dis­sol­utions of form­erly very tightly knit communities. This is true even if some of the gurus turn out to be nice (which seems to be the case with only a min­or­ity of them, e.g. Eckhart Tolle, Rupert Spira, and perhaps the Jamaican guru Mooji) – indeed, even if they turn out to be intelligent as well (like Shinzen Young). But nice and intelligent teachers don’t make the struct­ur­al issues I brought up go away: you simply can’t build a good community with hierar­chies derived from subjective states. It doesn’t make sense. Bec­au­se, mon ami, commun­ities and their hierarchies are inter­subjective and relat­ive­ly dur­able structures; inner states are sub­jective and very transient.

Spirituality. Yes. But Let’s Make it More Well-informed and Democratic

This is not to say that all spiritual communities are a bad thing. Indeed, the places in which people make a common, concentrated and guided effort to develop higher states often have positive effects on people’s lives – and that may positively affect other aspects of society. It’s just that the endeavor comes with certain risks that have to do with the social-psychological territory; and these risks are pretty big, like all communities which elicit very deep commitment and fervor.

A possible antidote to this social-psychological malady might be to demo­cratize spirituality; to make it more participatory, transparent and based on measurable results. Such attempts are being made in and around the Burning Man festival culture, and notably in the Syntheist (“religious atheist”) move­ment which recently emerged in Stockholm – and some interesting pro­spects along these lines have been brought up by public intellectuals like Sam Harris (in his 2014 book Waking Up, Harris, a renowned critic of all things religious, makes his case for a scientifically supported exploration of spirit­uality). However, these are difficult matt­ers; thus far, almost all spiritual com­m­­unities have taken a long walk down Cult Avenue, so it is quite pro­bable that these movements will do likewise. We’ll see.

To conclude: Yes, the subjective state of organisms is the most impor­tant thing in the world, and yes, it should therefore be made a central goal of society. And yes, it has great significance for the overall development of people and societies. But no, having higher state does not give you all the answers. And no, we should not build a society that creates hierarchies based upon vague and unverifiable phenomena such as subjective state. And YES, more research is needed.

But we must try to optimize subjective states, as a society as well as single organisms. We are all always-already in some kind of subjective state. It is an inescapable, merciless fact that the universe has us eternally by the balls.

—

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.