The following is a slightly edited extract from Hanzi Freinacht’s book ‘The Listening Society: A Metamodern Guide to Politics, Book One’. This is the first book in a series on metamodern thought, a work of popular philosophy that investigates the nature of psychological development and its political implications. What you will read below is from the chapter about “How Politics Changed”, the rise of post-materialist values and how a new meta-ideology has already been victorious across the entire political spectrum in the Nordic countries.

In the Nordic countries we are beginning to see clear patt­erns of metamodern politics at play. The metamodern political revolution goes under the radar of global media – and academia – because it happens so inconspicuously, so grad­ually. And, moreover, the Scandinavians themselves lack any conception of the profound global changes that are beginning to take place in their own back­yards. Still, people in and beyond Scandinavia haven’t failed to notice that he Nordic countries may very well be the most progressive societies on Earth.

But political “progressivity” is a rather strange notion. The idea pre­supposes that there can be a certain form of “historical progression”, a goal or at least direct­ion towards which humanity can and should evolve. It pre­supposes, further­more, that there is a “background space” with preset mea­­s­­­ures and mark­­ings in it, denoting both directionality and distance of social develop­ment.

Some different possible meanings of “progressive” should thereby be men­tioned before we go on. When people use the word in different con­texts, pro­g­ress­ivity can mean:

• That one favors values that have appeared recently over values that have existed a longer time.
• That one is invested in the ideas and political opinions that happ­en to become ratified by people in the future – thereby the future “shows that you were right”.
• That one is eager to see change in society and thereby is willing to take risks and experiment with new social forms.
• That one is simply leftwing – and the more leftwing, the more prog­ress­ive.
• That one is simply good, instead of bad (conservative) or evil (regress­ive, reactionary).

None of these meanings quite capture the idea of the Nordic countries being “progressive”. We are not really speaking of progression through hist­orical time – and certainly not a determined progression.

What Makes Sweden Progressive?

So, what do we mean? Let’s take a few examples. In Sweden, all parties dis­­cuss sustainability issues much more than almost anywhere in the world. This country also accepts more refugees than other European coun­­t­ries (at least until it reached an administrative limit in 2015), shows lower levels of explicit xenophobia in the surveys, gives more money to foreign aid develop­ment, is more digitalized, has lower crime rates and corruption, lower income inequality (at least until recently), higher stand­ards of living, higher levels of reported happiness, and greater gender equality (Sweden has the only signi­ficant feminist party in the world and an explicitly feminist foreign policy). The country generally supports free trade and manages to have relatively little red tape on enterprise despite its high taxes and strong labor rights. People live longer, at better health, with better teeth, with greater trust for other people and the authorities. People are more secularized than in almost any other country. Kids who grow up there now­adays often start working ser­iously only at around 30, after having travelled the world, studied (paid for by government), played computer games and gone to music festivals. Gender equality is much better, with liberal, permissive expressions of sexuality as a result. When the girls select guys, they go less after the hyper-masculine and socio-economic­ally dominant ones than is the case in other countries.

Sweden is by no means, and never has been, the socialist semi-utopia it was sometimes portrayed as. There is unemployment, social tensions of all sorts and plenty of human and animal misery. Issues of racism, exclu­sion and poverty are at every corner. Police, nurses and teachers feel undervalued and protest at waning real wages, sometimes to the point of leaving their jobs. But overall, the country has some qualities that make it a good example for under­standing what general cultural progression might look like.

Sweden is a tiny part of the economic system of some seven billion people that today spans the globe, constituting circa 1/700^th of the world’s popul­ation. It has a favorable position within that system, where it has been able to combine relative wealth with relative equality and stability for a considerable period of time. There is nothing within the “Swedish soul”, nothing inherent to their “Swedish model” Folkhemmet (“The People’s Home”, a welfare system which in fact resembles other European count­ries much more than people generally realize), or about the country’s natu­ral resour­ces, that exp­lains this progression. When Mary Wollstone­craft, the English mother of first wave feminism, travelled Sweden in 1796, she wrote in her famous Letters Written in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark about the appallingly low status of women in these societies, how barbaric it all seem­ed. Until the early 1700s, the Swe­des were arguably the most blood-thirsty, warmongering people in Europe. Only in 1865 did the country transition from an estate system with nobility, church, bourge­oisie and peas­antry to a bicameral parliamentary syst­em (which has since been repla­ced by a single cham­ber).

Sweden had relatively few industries and a poor population, with major migrations to America in the 19^th century and widespread poverty well into the early 20^th century. The comparatively small bourgeois class could not gain the same political influence as in France and Germany, and worker parties established social democracy – an alliance between poor, relatively conser­vative workers and progressive intellectuals (supported by the peasant party). In exchange for representing their economic interests, the intellectuals im­posed their more cosmopolitan values upon the workers by use of the insti­tutions of the industrial nation state: schooling, mass media and the bureau­cracy. This system was supplemented with a few “popular movements” (Swe­dish: folkrörelse), where wide participation was mustered – Pentecostal reli­gion, labor movements, anti-alcohol and later anti-nuclear energy. The ac­counts of these popular movements tend to be rather romanticized, but they did play a part in popularizing “mod­ern” and “progressive” values.

As the country did not partake in the world wars, its relative economic position was strength­ened and it could sport an impressive growth during the “golden age” of the dec­ades after the Second World War.

The only thing special about Sweden is that it has had a relatively stable development in a relatively favorable part of the world economic system of trade, growth and exploitation – while being at a relatively short geo­graphic, cultural and linguistic distance from the center. That’s it.

Progressive Values

Most often, in most parts of the world, society tends to be much more tumul­tuous, especially dur­ing periods of rapid change and technological expansion. But for a host of different reasons, this particular part of the world, not only Sweden but also the rest of Scandi­navia, managed to dev­elop a full-blown postindustrial econ­omy with more or less the whole of the population on board, under relatively stable circumstances. This caused the cultural values of the popul­ation to cha­nge during the last part of the 20^th century, and the political land­scape shifted accordingly, subtly but radically.

You are perhaps familiar with the Inglehart-Welzel Cultural Map of the Wor­ld (see figure below). It is based on the world’s by far most encom­pa­ss­ing soc­iolog­ical investigation, asking people in most countries of the world a host of survey questions, a total of over a thousand variables (alth­ough far from all parti­cipants are asked all of the questions). Over the decades it has accum­ulated millions of entries, studying cultural differ­ences and trends over time. In the scientific literature there is almost a whole genre of papers directed towards criticizing different aspects of its methodology. But even if criti­cism can be raised against different aspects of the World Values Survey, one of its main results seems rather solid: the overall picture of The Cultural Map of the World. As you can see in the figure, Protestant Europe (and especially the Nordic countries) holds the upper right corner of the two-dimensional cultural map of the world. This means that people here, on average, lean much more towards rational-secular values (vs. traditional values) and self-express­ion val­ues (vs. sur­vival values) than anywhere in the world. This is where people believe in abortion and gay rights rather than God’s reign, and where they are more likely to go to India to “find themselves” on a spiritual journey rather than finish their degree on time.

Source: Inglehart–Welzel cultural map of the world, 2015.

It can be no coincidence that the most stable parts of the world, the parts that have had a wealthy and equitable economy for a long time, also have the “most modern” worldview among their populations. In fact, the Nordic coun­tries have sped up in this direction during the last two dec­ades, in the same period as they have become countries of immi­gration, accepting large num­bers of people from more traditional societ­ies. In a way, the figures there­by conceal a yet stronger and clearer trend: the values of late modernity are winning over the traditional values at an astoun­ding pace. Even immigrants in Sweden tend to be “more modern” than e.g. the average resident of Poland. If you zoom out to a couple of hundred years ago, and look globally, the trend becomes clear. The Swed­es and Danes would have been conserv­ative peas­ants back then, com­par­able perhaps with today’s Afghans. Even if the values of countries do jerk back and forth over time, the overall progress­ion is clear: we are headed towards a world with more cosmopolitan values; values which accord­ing to Inglehardt and Welzel’s own analysis work better in modern society.

Think about it. The most secular people in say Pakistan are the richest and most educated ones – and these are the ranks that most other Pakistanis aspire to join. The wealthy Pakistanis, in turn, like to go to the US and adopt large parts of the American lifestyle and values. In the US, the liberal press has a constant upper hand on the conservative press, with TV-hosts ridiculing the rural, conservative population – and the people with the highest status are liberal New Yorkers rather than “hillbillies” and Christian fundamentalists. And among the liberal US population, Swed­en and other Nordic countries have a very strong lure, being viewed as “pure” and “fresh” – or just prog­ressive. If you are a liberal lawyer in Boston, you tend to love watching the Danish TV-series Borgen, (where a divorced woman and mother of two is prime minister of Denmark, dealing with a fictional Green Party to out­maneuver the crude, conserv­ative populists). And you are likely to listen to Nordic pop artists such as Robyn, Elliphant, MØ, Röyksopp or Björk, because these subtly embody more prog­ress­ive values in their artwork.

The Direction of Societal Progression

So the rapidly globalizing economic world-system has produced some pockets where the values and worldviews of a more global, digitalized civili­zation seem to have taken stronger hold, and they just happen to be in the Nordic countries. And these pockets have high symbolic value in the status chain of world cultures, which is evident in the growing cultural exports of these countries and the strong “Nordic brand” in proportion to the small size of the region.

None of this should be controversial. Some parts of the world seem to “develop” values ahead of others and thereby acquire “progressive” values, which in turn grant different advantages on the global market. After all, why should we expect all seven billion of us to alter our values in perfect unison with one another? And why should we expect all value systems to be of equal status on the global scene of cultural prestige?

I am not saying that the rest of the world is “destined” to become like the Nordic countries – technology and culture are evolving much too quickly for such silly recaps to occur. There will never be another 1960 or another 1990. Each historical moment is unique. Neither am I saying, of course, that the world is becoming irrevocably “westernized” and “secul­ar­ized” – there is cert­ainly more going on under the sun than that. But signi­ficant sociological develop­ments have undeniably taken place here during the last century; chan­ges that can help us understand future developments in other countries.

We are likely to see new and unexpected forms of societies emerge, for better or worse. It is in this regard that the Nordic countries offer an inter­est­ing case. If we truly want to understand the development of the global econ­omy and the emergence of its political, cultural and socio-psych­olo­gical land­scapes, we should not confine our analytical gaze to the after­maths of the Arab Spring or the struggling Kurdish state. In this coherent world-syst­em, we should look for the locations where people have the preconditions to write new values on new tablets.

Societal progression is when lasting conditions of stability and abun­dance allow for changes in the games of everyday life to occur: in the workplace, in dating, in friends’ groups, at home (you stop beating the kids, for one thing), in neighborhoods, at school, in the political arena, in the market – and the labor market. The games of every­day life become milder, more sensitive, fair and forgiving as a result.

In this perspective it becomes apparent that the Nordic countries are by far the most progressive societies that the world has ever seen. It is here that we are most likely to find the values and worldviews that best corres­p­ond, in functional terms, to a complex, digitalized, global, trans­national, post-industr­ial society. (Now don’t get cocky and patriotic on me, you stupid Swedes, it’s not about you being better than anyone else.)

—

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.

AA: Hanzi Freinacht is the main author in the website metamoderna.org. As a disclaimer, this is not an attack on Freinacht as a person, nor is the point to put in doubt his qualifications as a philosopher. This is an attack on his ideology.

HF: Muchly appreciated. I wish the internet was a little more like this – respectful, kind, content focused. Cudos to AA.

AA: Freinacht claims to have discovered Ariadne’s thread, the resolution to the puzzle of overcoming postmodern capitalism, which he tells us consists of “out-competing capitalism”. Capitalism, he tells us, is not to be abolished nor combated, but outperformed. I am unsure if Freinacht is even aware of the irony here: for many years this was the line followed by the USSR during the leadership of Nikita Khrushchev, who used it as the ideological justification for reconciliation with the capitalist West and the abandoning of class struggle.

HF: Yes, I am aware of it. That this idea has surfaced before in – quite superficially – similar forms, does not mean that it is today a well-established idea. I challenge AA and any other reader to Google search the phrase “outcompeting capitalism”. What you will find is not only surprisingly few search hits, but that my article on the topic, posted five weeks ago, is the top hit. The internet (and, by extension humanity) is not having this discussion. The idea is not mainstream, in other words.

AA: The idea was that Soviet socialism was then (in the years following de-Stalinization) more efficient than western capitalism, so it would be a mere matter of time for countries (and specially countries just liberating themselves from colonial subordination) to see the superiority of the Soviet system and adopt it. This way, the sphere of influence of the Soviet Union would exponentially increase over time and come to deprive the centers of western capitalism of the resources needed to run their economy, and thus the Soviet Union would win the Cold War without firing a single shot. We know this did not come to pass. This brief history lesson serves to indicate that Freinacht likely did not do his homework. If he is going to make the naive claim of having discovered the way world capitalism will be overcome, he should be prepared to endure the ideological attacks this claim will provoke, both from the left and from the right.

HF: AA’s line of reasoning seems to be that if Soviet socialism failed to outcompete global capitalism, all attempts to do so must inevitably fail. This is of course not a tenable argument. My argument looks very little like that of Khrushchev era doctrines, and the mechanisms proposed are very different. Even the manner and scale of Darwinian competition is different.

AA: Which leads me to my second point: central to Freinacht’s ideology is the creative class being the radical subject that will lead to the overcoming of post-modernity. In Freinacht’s account the creative class is now the main contender fighting for prestige and power against the big bourgeoisie and petite bourgeoisie, and this creative class does so by possessing something that the other ruling classes allegedly don’t have: creative capital. To give a succinct definition we would say that creative capital is -again as understood by Freinacht- the capacity of certain subjects, either because of their charisma, skill or histrionism, to draw the attention of their contemporaries. In Freinacht’s idealist philosophy the mere fact that I take the time to read his blog already makes him the possessor of creative capital. Freinacht however, doesn’t take into consideration that I may take the time to read his blog, understand his philosophy and assimilate his ideas, in order to defeat said ideas. Louis Althusser already gave an account, back in the day, of how philosophy is highly partisan. Philosophy can only be for or against the status quo, there is no middle way. And the same could be said of this “creative capital”, creativity too is partisan.

HF: Good point about attention. In these articles I haven’t presented a more comprehensive theory about the attentionalist economy and its distinctions – so that is well observed. If it were any attention that could be understood as power or capital in any context, this would of course be a silly theory. In that case, the world would probably be ruled by YouPorn and PornHub (which, by the way is not so far from certain antisemitic conspiracy theories on the far Right). We need, of course, a more granular theory of attention, cultural capital, symbols, information and value. Just to mention one feature of such a theory, displayed attention would be more worth than hidden attention. For instance, people will brag about watching Lars von Trier’s very sexually explicit Nympohomaniac, but conceal their porn surfing. So von Trier’s work naturally holds a much higher position in the attentionalist economy. To create things that will stick and define the discourse generally requires a special kind of savvy. As I have argued, this is concentrated around the creative class, but similar skills and social technologies can be found on e.g. the Alt-Right. The central issue here is that cultural capital begins to dominate economic capital and thus shifts the games for power over the construction of social reality.

AA: To conceive that the creative class, will unite as a whole to overthrow the bourgeoisie is idealist. It is more conceivable to see this creative class as embedded in the same old main antagonism in society and as such, can only take the side of either the wretched of the Earth or the oppressors.

HF: I am not quite idealist. I have a “holistic” approach, in that I see material factors, ideas and feelings, cultures, systems and institutions as partly interacting with one another, partly as co-emergent, i.e. that they are different aspects of reality. It is difficult to conceive of a world in which any of these factors can be entirely removed. Speaking of idealism, however, AA him- or herself makes an “idealist” move when he or she assumes that a vague structural collective such as the “creative class” can make a moral “choice”. We of course have to analyze the real economic, cultural and psychological mechanisms of how hippies, hackers and hipsters can become progressive agents in the world.

AA: The quintessential example here would perhaps be no other than Jon Jafari, a.k.a Jontron. As a YouTube celebrity he’s the possessor of this mystical ethereal substance called creative capital, he draws the attention of millions. If Jon Jafari is a part of the vanguard of the creative class that will in time overthrow the bourgeoisie, we’re doomed. When it comes to ideology, Jon Jafari appears, like many YouTube celebrities, to be ambivalently undecided between a Ron Paulian Libertarianism and a confused white nationalism. In other words, Jon Jafari is alt-right. And this matters a lot when talking about the creative class as subject: this creative class can in fact play the role of ideologues of capital, and not even just capital, but the most reactionary, chauvinist elements of the global bourgeoisie, perhaps it is no coincidence that, if we were to run a census on this internet based creative class we will find most of them to be white, urban, and from the global north.

HF: Not really a quintessential example. The best example might perhaps be how the Danish party The Alternative has successfully barged into the center of Danish politics by use of cultural capital. See my earlier post.

AA: Without delving into identity politics we can venture the claim that this global creative class is part of the stratum of the global division of labor that extracts surplus value from the world proletariat. Consider everything that has to be in place for someone to become a member of this creative class: one must be educated, urbanite, presumably having had all their material needs already met (Freinacht concedes as much when he calls this class “postmaterialist”) and “networked”, that is, already in contact with potential sponsors and patrons. Here we see, firmly in place, not just all the obstacles preventing the most radical elements of society even making into this privileged stratum of global society, but the reason why the creative class can never really be a true antagonist to the ruling class, they will always depend on their patronage. This alone should dilapidate the idea of this “creative capital” as ever existing independently from finance capital.

HF: There is of course a developmental dynamics at play here. A postcapitalist society can only flow from postcapitalist values. And postcapitalist values are postmaterialist values. Any socialist or communist project that is ruled by the striving of people to get rich will, at its heart, still be capitalist. It will still be ruled by money capital and its logic. And postmaterialist values show up only the richest, most stable and most progressive parts of the world, like Scandinavia. Denial of this dynamic would lead you back to Khrushchev – trying to build postcapitalist societies on non-postmaterialist values, within capitalist structures. It’s not feasible.

AA: Nor is the creative class, due to its simple lack of know-how, capable of overtaking production and running the factories independently from the bourgeoisie and thus making the bourgeoisie superfluous, as the proletariat in the standard Marxist narrative, in other words the creative class has nothing but its creativity. This makes it incapable of ever becoming a class-for-itself, a radical subject.

HF: The factories are taken over by robots. This creates huge surpluses of financial capital. Global financial capital doesn’t know what to do with itself or where to go. Meaning and social sustainability become the scarcities, rather than material resources. Cultural capital thus begins to rule over financial capital. Those whose interests lie in cultural capital – the creative class and the precariat – begin to organize to defend its interests.

AA: The creative class has two and only two paths ahead for itself, to continue seeking patronage from the moneyed sectors of society, hence continuing to be inherently parasitic, or becoming what in Gramscian accounts is called “organic intellectuals” and siding with the workers and the oppressed, that being the moment in which the creative class is subsumed into the world proletariat at large, this I think, is the only progressive way forward for this so-called class.

HF: Here AA reverts again to the idealism he or she shuns. Any belief that a “class” can make a “choice” is pure idealism in the anti-Marxist sense.

—

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.

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 named “Crisis-Revolution” which investigates the newly dug trenches in contemporary politics, the new classes and polarization to emerge and the rise of “trumpism” in the US and populist nationalism in Europe.

Today we are experiencing an era in which several extremely far-reaching revolutions of technology, thinking and behavior are occurring simultaneously. For better and/or worse, profound changes are very likely to take place in the coming decades.

The first such change is simply the maturing of information and com­m­­­­u­nication technology itself. We live in an information age and this affects all parts of our lives. We think differently, we act differently, we socialize differently. Our worldviews begin to evolve much faster, as we begin sifting through more and more information. New challenges appear  – from Facebook time wasted and gaming addictions to grooming pedophiles entering the bedrooms of children via computer screens, to new ways of distinguishing ourselves that tempt us to create emotionally inauthentic virtual identities, to the selectivity in our reading of news articles – the list goes on. As I write this, the so-called “dark net” is booming: anonymity at last, married of course to a stupefying quantity of criminality and all manner of online depravities.

Computers saturate every aspect of everyone’s life, changing governance, production, distribution, transportation, travelling and science. Education is being made available through MOOCs (massive open online courses), Khan Academy and Cours­era, and soon it will be transformed in a massive surge of gamification.

Given the dramatic changes of the last twenty years, and that these have been accelerating and becoming all the more radical, we are looking at an entirely new form of society. The amount of information is growing at what appears to be an exponential rate – and yes, here “expon­ential” is the correct term. The same goes for the total of computational power available, with the possibility of quantum computing becoming increas­ingly tangible. From the bankers of Wall Street to the Mumbai rickshaw taxi driver’s dau­ghter, the basic conditions of life are shifting. And we haven’t even entered step two of this revolution: virtual reality, now appearing as gadgets, but soon as a strong opium for the people in the form of games, porno­graphy, travel, work interfaces or online meetings in realistic 3D environments.

And peace be with us, this is only one out of several technological rev­ol­utions that seem to be at our doorstep. Another, related one, is Artificial Intelligence (AI) and robotics – and self-learning machines, “deep learn­ing” through “stacked neural networks”. We will increasingly be able to exchange complex human work with machine labor. This may or may not “cause unemployment” (a question that is likely to look sillier by the year), but it can and will cause profound shifts in the way that we live our lives, as the robots become better at learning new tasks that go far beyond running a production plant and beyond self-driving cars. The employ­ments of doctors, teachers, programmers, musicians and research assist­ants can all, in principle, be chall­enged by the AI. The more dramatic forecasts of futurists, like those of Ray Kurzweil, suggest that we are appr­oa­ching “the singularity”, when computers begin to take control of their own development. Even with­out accepting such fanciful specul­a­tions, we can safely assume that AI will be a major force of change.

Another budding revolution is the nanotechnological one. Nanotech is lik­ely to solve fundamental problems of scarcity and has the potential to create abundance of a whole new magnitude. The growing ability to man­i­­­pulate structures at the atomic level – and the tremendous drive in scien­tists to succ­ess­fully do so – can create all manner of useful substances with incred­ible properties from virtually no raw material. Nanotech also faces us with per­haps the greatest environmental risks to date; much, much worse than plast­ics. Not to mention the implications of its medical uses and the closing gap between organic and non-organic applied chemistry.

And then there is the even stronger and more well-funded drive to mani­pulate life itself. We have an ongoing genetics revolution, nearing the possib­ility to manipulate and shape the human genetic code – which just took a giant leap with the CRISPR technology (Clustered Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats) – allowing anybody with a lab to alter gen­etic code. To this category we should add not only epigenetics, the study of gene activation and deactiv­ation in living organisms, but also the broader field of “human enhancement”, i.e. the use of various techno­logies to change or improve upon the human body itself – not least by merging our bodies with machine parts. The so-called transhuman­ist movement is gaining traction with its radical ideas about the how tech­nology can and should be applied to change humanity itself. And trans­hum­anist phil­oso­phers draw a following consisting largely of tech-savvy scientists, doctors and engineers who show an almost frightening zeal in their quest to remake humanity. Bio-hacking is growing in peer-to-peer comm­unities, a form of applied do-it-yourself bio­logy. Even within the humanities, start­ing with Donna Haraway (a biologist gone human­ities professor), peo­ple are talking about “the cyborg”, the merg­ing of human­ity and the machine, and how it relates to gender iss­ues and whatnot.

Beyond that, we have a host of ongoing developments that by them­selves are revolutionary. Look at energy prices – how solar panel energy is becom­ing cheaper and how many innovations are beginning to show up in this area, including new forms of nuclear power. Take a look at housing, where we are beginning to construct homes that are largely self-supporting – and cheaper, and designed by the customer with modules. Look at the 3D-printers and drones, demo­cratizing customized produc­tion and distribution (as well as the distribution of bombs, in the case of drones). Look at the Internet of Things – connecting all of our everyday objects to the same coop­erating net­work.

Look at the peer-to-peer prod­uc­tion movements, in which people have begun to be able to produce cars at only a small percentage of the previous costs.

Look at cradle-to-cradle production and the sharing economy and what in Germany is called Ind­ustrie 4.0 (when the customer orders a full tailor-made indust­rial prod­uction from scratch).

Look at the mobile revolu­tion, today driving the on­going migration (the waves of immigrants are harder to stop because they share information with one another).

Look at Big Data and data mining – the explosively useful and dangerous analysis of vast quan­tities of real-life infor­mation gathered by registering user behavior.

Look at the Quantified Self movement and the increasing ability to measure your­self in a myriad of ways and create your own data, including inform­ation on your own genetics.

Look at the Effective Altru­ists and their increasingly evidence-based forms of charity showing up in so many areas.

Look at the staggering number and diversity of hi-tech companies being born, bought and sold. Not to mention the growing number of world-altering inno­vations brought about by talented children.

Look at the block chain tech­nologies, Bitcoin and other crypto-currencies, and the increasingly vocal and serious critique of the monetary system, banking and rents.

Phew.

And then turn your gaze to the seismic shifts of perspective that are taking place across our conceptual maps of the world. The physicists are giving us an entirely new view of reality, called string theory, where poten­tiality is real and multiple universes may be possible. Fundamental notions such as caus­ality are being attacked as illusions of the senses and our living, partici­patory perspectives are proving to be ingrained into – entangled with – the very fabric of space, time and matter. The cosmo­logists are bending reality farther and farther beyond what we can recog­nize or may even compre­hend. The philosophers and myst­ics are tearing down the idea of a sepa­rate self, an ego at the center of existence, from all sides – leaving only a longing, empty space that needs to be filled with relations and partici­pation. Neuroscience is exploding, with its philoso­phical cousin cognitive science following suit and the strange next cousin computational neuro­science still being born. So-called posthumanist think­ers are radically challenging humanity’s biased view of herself in rela­tion to the other ani­mals and the rest of reality, taking us beyond the anthro­pocentric (human-biased) perspect­ives we have hitherto lived by. The mathe­matic­ians are teaching us that most things in reality emerge through chaos and com­plexity and that so many of our modes of thought are outdated and dangerous, since we are oblivious of the non-linear patterns and relation­ships that matter the most. Systems science and syst­ems perspectives are breaking through, from their home bases in com­puter science, informat­ion science, chemistry and ecology – to all aspects of life, includ­ing the interactions bet­ween physio­logy and psych­ology. The social scientists are tearing down the found­ations of the state, of the market, of money and of science itself as we have known them. Econom­ists are telling us that the economy we took so seriously was really a myth all along, just a story. Radically new spiritual movements are cropp­ing up, notably the “atheist” practice of Syntheism. And music­ians are creating stranger and stranger electrical sounds and rhythms, mixing them with strained voices, as if to underscore just how mysterious, yet pecul­iarly fam­iliar, it all seems. And fashionable, tattooed young female DJs play that music on the dance floor, and we dance under flashing lights into the darkness and get high and drunk and make out, as the reality we thought we knew is being torn down and we plunge into the sublime and the unknown. And far out into the desert, under the clear skies of that luminous, open black­ness lit by perfect stars, we find each other in an intimate, loving embrace. Without the slightest effort we converse for hours and all of reality melts away as we let go of our inner shields and become one. In that timeless moment of for­giving embrace we lose our­selves and find ourselves, both at once.

The next morning we wake up in new outlandish company. Or are we still dreaming? Are we alone, or are we together? Can we ever be alone or to­gether? We’ll have to discuss these questions later. This is also a time of deep, multifarious crisis. However myst­eriously terrifying and sublime our age may be, we must remain sober, clear sighted, responsible.

The Multidimensional Crisis-Revolution

Now look at the demographics, especially the ongoing popula­tion booms in countries like the unstable Nigeria, the quickly aging demo­graphics of Japan and Europe (and increasingly other parts of the world, with birthrates below replacement rates from China to southern India to the Caribbean and Latin America). This brings us to the colossal growth of the world economy at large, with an even more radical growth in trade, and a yet sharper growth in FDI (Foreign Direct Investment). Look at all the new finan­cial instruments, growing in size, speed and influ­­ence as the quants (mathe­maticians and theoretical physicists work­ing for investment banks) use some of the sharpest minds on the planet to continuou­sly make automated stock trading more competitive. Look at the unprece­den­ted volume of know­ledge in the hands of the equally unprecedented masses of highly educ­ated people that are more intimately and effectively connected than ever before. Look at the sheer volume of PhDs – within more areas than I could dream of naming or even imagine.

Look at the global political power structure of the world shifting with China, India and Brazil blazing into world prominence, their vast populations rising above poverty (whereas the middle classes of Western societies are shrinking and new poverty growing), and the order of international security changing (with Russia still dangerously stagnating, economically, politically and cultur­ally). Look at the budding global inst­itutions of trade, development and secur­ity, from the IMF and WTO to OECD to NATO and IPCC and the many heads of the UN hydra, not to mention the floundering EU – taking us closer, step by step to a proto- form of global polity (a World State), whether we like it or not. In a similar vein, the number of international non-govern­mental organiz­a­tions (NGOs) has kept exploding during the last few decades.

We face no less than nine simultaneous major global ecological crises, according to the Stockholm Resilience Centre (or at least three very acute ones). We are living in an age of mass extinction of species, comparable to the one that ended the age of dino­saurs some 60 million years ago. Almost all animal biomass on land (discounting insects and the like) con­sists of humans and our enslaved, tortured ani­mals under global industrial farm­ing. Even if wildlife fauna isn’t necess­arily happier than domesticated animal life, the exploitative behavior towards non-human animals must be seen not only as unsustainable but also, and prim­arily, as ethically inex­cus­­able.

Most of the oceans have collapsing ecosystems and most fish are dead or dying (a truly explosive development since 1950: over a trillion aquatic ani­mals are killed per year). The soil is eroding and climate change is striking at the heart of the frail meteor­ological equilib­rium that const­itutes our rather young current meteorological epoch. The scientists tell us­­ that we have entered a new geological epoch, the anthropocene, in which humanity shapes the envir­o­nment more than volcano eruptions and erosion.

To the defi­nite risks we must add the uncertain but even more dram­atic ones. There is the threat of nuclear war – and a host of other dooms­day scenarios are sur­facing as we begin to comprehend the sheer power unleashed by our own gazing into the secrets of the universe – and the universe winks right back at us with a vengeance. Haywire AI, erratic nanotech and global epidem­ics are the major ones. Senior scientists like Oxford philosopher Nick Bos­trom and physicist Max Tegmark (both of whom founded the Future of Life Inst­itute) warn our leaders at special UN conferences.

And the global capitalist system is based upon perpetual growth. But we have yet to see economic growth without increased exploitation of natural resources – resources that are already overused by a wide margin. Something will have to change for this system to compute and be sustain­able. The finan­cial system seems to generate both growth and crisis – and it increas­ingly concentrates wealth at the top, which in turn seems to hijack our politics by way of lobbying and other artful machin­ations. Each financial crisis reveals that our political systems are inept to deal with the dramatic changes at hand. And the political system itself is – as outlined above – in a more subtle kind of crisis, losing its grip of a runaway, global­ized world.

At the micro-sociological level, most humans are doing better than ever. Yet there is so much confusion, suffering and bitter resentment. How many beautiful, privileged people have I not heard whisper to me, late at night, that if it were up to them, they would never have been born; that they are angry with the world; that they were let down; that they live with guilt and self-doubt; that their friends and families are hypocrites? These are signs of the alienation suffered by modern human beings.

–

If you don’t already know about the things I have mentioned, you should go back up the list and look them up. You may have serious holes in your education and worldview. To consider yourself up-to-date with the current state of the world you should at least know the basic outline of our day and age.

This is all just to point out a simple fact: the times are changing. And how could they not be? After all – just compare today to a hundred years ago, or two hundred years ago. How can we expect immobility from a universe that literally evolved from dust to Shakespeare, as one author wrote? Whatever will come, it is not likely to be business as usual. We need to bet on a good future. And the stakes are very high.

Just consider that right now, this moment, there are a million people out there, working eagerly on something that the rest of us don’t yet quite under­stand – knowing, knowing that “this will change everything”. If even one percent of them are not mistaken, we will literally have thousands of discoveries, inventions and insights that, each one by itself, changes soc­iety in pro­found and unexpected ways.

Even if some of the things I have mentioned turn out to be exaggerated or based on misconceptions, the totality will certainly be something dramatically new and different as the world-system evolves over the coming decades. What I have not ventured to discuss is that every one of these mentioned pheno­mena interact with the others at an accelerating pace. We live in a time of “peer-to-peer digitalized nano-bio-tech employ­ed by means of virtual 3D to solve energy problems to address climate change” – and so forth. All of this is happening simultaneously, day by day, in one great web of interacting, evolv­ing nodes.

Do the math – an increasing number of accelerating revolutions and crises, all cross-pollinating at an accelerating pace (the solution to the equation is “boom!” – we just don’t know if it’s fireworks or atom bombs).

When a multiplicity of things explode all at once, in a multidimensional crisis-revolution, our linear models of the world rarely work out – they cannot take on so many different variables (and variables with qualitatively different properties) and their mutual interactions. But that does not mean we should refrain from attempting to understand the times we live in; au con­trai­re, we have even greater reason to analyze society and to try to see the deeper patterns that connect in the chaos.

We need directions, but these directions must necessarily be of an abstract, open-ended nature. We don’t need cookbooks; we need general ideas on how to create good cookbooks, so to speak. We need stories about stories. Meta-narratives.

In circumstances such as these, it is only seemly to anticipate corresponding changes of the political system and how society functions in daily life. Indeed, to ignore the necessary adaptations of political, cultural and psychological development in the face of a multidimensional crisis-revolution would be highly irresponsible. In order to take responsibility we must use an intricate understanding of psychology – the science of the human soul and the behavior of the human organism – to develop social technologies that address the deeper issues at hand.

Politics has changed for all time. This change is part of a wide and profound shift of the world at large. We’ve just got our trembling hands on the boom-stick. Where do we go from here?

—

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 about new and important agents on the political playing field such as process based parties, metamodern activists, transnationalism and the emergence of the metamodern aristocracy.

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

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

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

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

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

Who are these Metamodern Aristocrats?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What does the Metamodern Aristocracy do?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So What about You?

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

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

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

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

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

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

—

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 describing the new political demographics in postindustrial societies, its newly dug trenches and the multidimensional crisis-revolution we are facing.

Hipsters, hackers & hippies: for short I refer to these people as the “triple-H population”. Their cultural and economic DNA is going to play a crucial role in bringing about a metamodern soc­iety. They have world­views, interests and skills that are notably different from any of the classes of industrial society. So let’s go through each of the subgroups, see what they produce, and why they are in fact becoming a new basis of power in society.

Hackers

A hacker is not just a person who illegally gains access to computer systems; the hackers I refer to, self-identified (like that of Facebook’s founder Mark Zuckerberg) or not (like many of those who nonetheless participate in programing events known as “hackathons”), produce digital solutions and software that reduce the complexity of society and make it manageable. Of course, not all IT-workers, computer engineers and programmers can be considered to be hackers in this sense. Only the ones who combine their IT and pro­g­ramming skills with an intimate, embodied knowledge of digital culture (and other sensitivities towards our day and age) can be considered as such. They combine software development with cultural capital and social cap­ital, i.e. with a sensitive knowledge of the culture and age we live in, with a rich understanding of its symbols. You’ll find many of these people in creative industries ranging from smaller app startups to some of the more visionary departments at Google and other major actors, the independent, “indie-”, game development scene and social innovation projects. They invent solutions that bypass many of the old, capitalist ways of distributing services and infor­mation: digitalizing and gamifying education (and making it more module based), finding novel applications of technologies to solve social problems (like making software for social movements to organize, or to improve the democratic deliberation in larger organizations) and demo­crat­izing medical equipment by creating mobile applications that measure every­thing from brain waves and heart rates to the environmental impact of our purchases, or working to create more transparent and shared data bases available to governments and publics, or working to create mobile solu­tions that help payments and pricing in developing economies or help sharing videos of abuses or facilitating other forms of whistleblowing. Data­mining and AI play increasingly important parts in this develop­ment. The increasing saturation of computer games of everyday life offer many plat­forms for such endeavors. So this group is growing in import­ance because it offers us the software solutions that can only come from great creativity combined with cultural capital and digital know-how.

Hipsters

Hipsters are not just people with a particular style of fashion, or the pretentious college kids who show off their supposedly good taste in music and art. The hipsters I refer to produce the many symbols that help us to orientate our­selves in, make sense of, and find meaning in the global, digital age. Here you find a wide array of artists, designers, thinkers, social entre­preneurs, writers and bloggers. They develop the ideas of post­hum­anism, trans­hum­anism, complexity and network researchers, partici­patory forms of pol­itics and social move­ments, critique of wage labor (and the often irrat­ional nature of work in the economy), ecological and social resilience, personal develop­ment, organizational develop­ment, the new gender and sex­ual relations, our forms of family and com­m­unity life, the interactions of different cultures – and much more. They also, notably, embody these new thou­ghts by creating music, fashion, movies, books and games that em­body these new values and ideas – and by their own taste in fashion, art and lifestyle. Whereas the hackers rely upon a com­bination of digital skills and cultural capital, the hipsters rely upon a greater amount of cultural capital only – combined with their personal networks, i.e. on social cap­ital. People who adopt and success­fully wield and display these sym­bols gain different kinds of competitive advantages: companies turn great­er revenues, individual persons appear more sens­itive and sophisticated, and cit­ies or municipalities can brand them­selves as attractive, dynamic and creative hubs. The hipsters are becoming more powerful because it is be­com­ing increasingly difficult for most of us to grasp and navigate the society of the present age – and they offer us the tools for doing so.

Hippies

The hippies, then. I concede that this is a silly use of terms, as the word “hippie” was originally derived from the word “hipster”. But since the 1950s and 60s, the two words have taken on quite different connotations, so I think we can safely separate them. The hippies are the people who produce new lifestyles, habits and practices that make life in postindustrial society happier, healthier and, perhaps, more enchanted. The hippies here are not quite the same as the hippies of old: the starry-eyed New Agers who looked to astro­logy, crystals, transpersonal psychologies and gurus, but rather people with highly developed skills in meditation, con­tem­plation, bodily practices, psychedelics, diets and physical training, pro­­found forms of intimate communication and sexuality and simple life wis­doms that apply to our day and age. You will find more rational and re­search based approaches to psychedelics, communities for self-develop­ment and eco-village living, science-driven meditation and stress release pract­ices, coaches of all kinds, and elaborate forms of practices for achie­ving higher mental states and spiritual experiences. An important hub for all this is the Burning Man festival community of “burners” that are spring­ing up around the world – originally held in the Nevada desert, but now with numerous offshoots. At this festival you will find a large host of MDMA-induced (a.k.a. ecstasy) art projects; large, impressive and “mean­ingless” structures that are built as temporary art projects for no other reason than that it is fun and interest­ing. So the hippies are becom­ing a force to reckon with because they provide social and personal technologies for maintaining health, happ­iness, community and a sense of enchant­ment to an increasingly strange and alienating world. Sometimes, this takes the form of vegan diets, sustainable lifestyles, organic farming for self-sufficiency, and relative with­drawals from mod­ern life. But the activ­ism always reinserts itself into the mainstream; it always comes back with a will to engage with others – not least via social media. The sort of hippies we are talk­ing about here are gener­ally highly educated and rely upon know­ledge of medicine, physiology and psych­ology. This, too, can be seen as a form of cultural capital. Hippies without such cultural sens­itivity fall behind and remain the old kind of hippies.

What Unites the triple-H

Somewhat strange bed-fellows, these three. What, then, unites the triple-H population? One thing is that all three groups share an alternative relationship to work and the market: they are all driven by what psychologists of work call intrinsic motivation and self-realization, rather than extrinsic motivation, such as monetary rew­ards, consumption and security. This means that they work by another social and economic logic than any of the old groups in industrial society. Of cour­se, this is an outflow of post­materialist and highly individualized societies, in which significant parts of the population have the luxury to think much less about how to pay the bills and more about how they can change the world. Bangladesh is not full of triple-H; California is. Because of the idiosyncratic nature of their many end­ea­vors, the triple-H folks find it hard to “fit in” within the classical, hierarchical and meritocratic organizations. Many of them will have rebelled against such structures and try to find ways to work outside and beyond them – out­side academia, out­side major corporations and even medium-sized com­panies and beside public bureaucracies. No doubt, organizations that find ways to attract and keep these agents and harness their talents will gain great competitive advantages in the future.

The second – and most significant – thing that unites them is the fact that they all rely more upon cultural capital (and to some extent social cap­ital) and less upon economic capital. As such, they form a complex but united front against the capitalist society in which they take part, a subtle revolution of cultural capital. What you see is that, near the centers of the world economy, you find more and more people whose lives are no longer governed by the logic of economic capital. And some of these people can still be rich. Rich hipsters? How does that work? Because cultural capital is becoming more power­ful than economic (as a means of organizing and coordinating people’s actions and behaviors), the cultural capital can be traded for money or other valuable resources at a favorable rate. Hence, bit by bit, cultural capital is beginning to dominate economic capital in the new dig­ital, postindustrial age. You can read about that here.

Which brings us to the third thing that unites the triple-H: their common vested inte­rest as a postindustrial class. In this sense, these peo­ple are the real “creative class”. When the American sociologist Rich­ard Florida tried to describe the creative class he relied upon classical occ­upational statistics, but that is, needless to say, a very clumsy tool. If you want to spot this new class and their interests, you must first under­stand them qualitatively, and then analyze their socio-economic DNA, like we are doing now.

The Precariat and the Creative Class

For these people, the wage labor tread­mill (and conventional work life) hinders the lives that they want to live, rather than being a source of sec­urity and empowerment. Each aspiring triple-H person of course has rela­ti­vely low chances of achieving financial success. She must win the trust and attention of other people in order to be able to perform her “real” work, her labor of love, fulltime. So she must make many attempts, which often leaves her back at square one, where she must again tweak her ideas and modes of work.

Hence, there is a revolving door between “the creative class”, which the triple-H population largely constitutes, and the pre­cariat – people in eco­nomically and socially precarious situations, at the fringes or outside of the conventional labor market. Often­times, it is up to the family or the state to support this growing reserve army of “failed” triple-H folks. And once these people must give up their intrinsic motivation to stand in line for menial work, reporting in to the rigid control structures for the unem­ployed, or adapt to the demands of not-so-postmater­ialist suppor­ting fa­m­ily members, they become miserable and often dysfunc­tional. For them, there is no clear line between fun and work. Even reading a novel or wat­ch­ing a TV series or playing a computer game is part and parcel of their work to change the world. If their higher aspirations fail, life seems to offer them very little and they are prone to falling into escapism and depression – which decreases their chances of holding on to a job on the conventional labor marker and thus increases the risk of entering the growing ranks of the precariat.

For this reason, the triple-H popul­ation generally supports ideas of basic income: this would insulate them against falling into precarious situations and eman­cipate them in the face of demeaning bureaucratic control. This is why the triple-H population and the precariat are both classes produced by postindustrial, digital soc­iety and as such, they form an entirely diff­erent form of class interest, a line drawn between them and the classes of old: worker, middle class and the rich. What the triple-H people often don’t understand, however, is that most people do not function like them and do indeed still find mean­ing and security in the conventional work life – even the ones who don’t like their jobs find structure and context to their lives and earn a much valued paycheck. The demands for basic income are hence often premature and naive, not least because they over­look the developmental psychology of the population. The triple-H people are children of a new society, and their needs and their solutions are, in the last instance, at odds with the modern, capitalist system. But the group is growing and so is their relative power within the global capitalist economy.

The Maladies of the Triple-H Pop­ulation

The triple-H pop­ulations suffer from a number of things that aren’t an issue to most people. These are:

• Uncertainty of levels of ex­pect­ations,
• bullshit,
• empty networking.

“Uncertainty of expect­a­tions” has to do with the extreme differences of responses that can be pro­duced by their work. If you work hard and put your stuff out there almost anything can happen: you can become a star, get a solid inter­national upper middle class career, or you can be completely ignored for whatever reason. There can be fame and glory and a major breakthrough around any next corner, or there can be a lifetime of frustrations and precarious and embarrassing situations. Will your app help save a million lives or will you have wasted ten years of your life? Will people scorn you or adore you, or both? Should you continue, follow your dreams, change plans and pivot, or maybe go back to the security and humility of a con­ventional life and career? This is the revolving door between the creative class and the pre­cariat; there can be great distance between expectations, strivings, hop­es and realities in these non-conventional lifestyles. At least since the class­ical sociologist Émile Durkheim’s work at the turn of the last century, it has been known that expectations minus realities is how you calculate a major factor of ill mental health and human misery (what Durkheim fam­ously called anomie).

“Bullshit” means that there needs to be a lot of big talk when you deal with bigger and more abstract issues and matters. A new organizational paradigm? A revolution in how we apply datamining to new problems? A major innovation or a technical detail? A profound global movement or a club for self-admiration? Because there is so much understanding and context needed to all these projects, they may be difficult to explain, and sometimes you may need to find ways to package and sell them. In plain English, you need to wrestle the doubts and accusations that it’s all just bullshit. And, needless to say, the majority of the work of the triple-H population is undeniably so. The reason that it’s so valuable to society is just that some of it isn’t bullshit and even a small percentage of genuine innovations of software, culture or lifestyle can have a huge impact. Still, you never quite know if you are the bullshitter or the hero, or if you are being sold utter bullshit.

“Empty networking” is a wasteful activity that most triple-H people know all too well: those many coffees and lunches had, Skype conferences held and evenings attended that never really led anywhere. Because the triple-H people all rely upon large networks of people to collaborate with in different projects, they must always be open to new contacts. This means curiously inviting new people, surveying the skills and assets and building personal report, exploring new ways to work with new people. The people they meet are friendly, like-minded and always interesting. But the prod­uctive relationships that are mutually reinforcing and become stronger over time are rare: because it’s so complex; so many expectations and assumptions and so much shared knowledge that must be in place.

So these are some of the sufferings of the triple-H population, some of their weaknesses. The parts of the world economy that are most sensitive towards these weaknesses will also become the most competitive ones as they can successfully harness the creative powers of the triple-H. Advan­ced science is also a key ingredient to postindustrial growth, but it doesn’t necessarily create local growth without a vibrant community of creatives and people who can invent applications of ground research – the research results can be picked up by any agents around the world, at least in theory.

Why is it important to Know about the Triple-H Population?

Because they are going to play a dominant role in society, outcompete the traditional bourgeoisie and eventually invent most of the solutions to save the world, that’s why!

In our new society of digital culture and software, being in touch with the symbols and tempo of contemporary society – having large amounts of “cult­ural capital” that is – puts one at a much greater advantage than before. Whereas money, in most developed countries, is scattered relatively evenly across the represent­atives of the old classes of industrial society and the new creative ones, cultural capital is certainly not. The triple-H folks are usually more artsy, creative, well connected, socially intelligent, emo­tionally dev­el­op­ed, idealistic, digitalized, diversified and educated – and thus more likely to become rising stars of the new society.

But it’s also important to know about the triple-H people because the societies that most effectively adapt to the needs of this group will come out on top in the global economy.

There is no denying the advantages of having a thriving triple-H population. For instance, Malmö, a city in southern Sweden, recently reinvented itself, going from an industrial economy where jobs disappeared, to being a “progressive” and “hip” city attracting young creative souls from all over the country and abroad. It’s the fastest growing major city in Sweden (not only from overseas immigration, but also from internal immigration as well) and many of the country’s new IT-startups, social innovators and artists have made the city their home. Malmö has become a center of Sweden’s burgeoning video game industry and it has become known for its vibrant and edgy cultural scene and even managed to successfully compete with its big brother Stockholm. Sweden’s traditional industrial center Gothenburg now seems to be lagging behind Malmö in terms of innovation, culture and attracting young people. If we look at the global scene we’ll find an identical picture: San Francisco has become the center of innovation and growth in postindustrial USA, not Detroit, Berlin is the new hip place to attract young creatives in Germany, not the old industrial heartland of the Ruhr and previously periphery cities on the global stage, like Krakow, Dublin, Vancouver and Reykjavik, have successfully reinvented themselves as cultural and innovative hotspots, while former industrial centers like Bradford, Cleveland and Lille haven’t been as fortunate – yet. It has now become evident that a successful transition to, not just a well-developed service economy, but a hi-tech one based on creativity, culture and innovation determines whether a society will prosper in the global, digitalized economy or not. But what many still fail to realize is that it’s critical to attract the triple-H people.

Nurturing the demands of hackers, hipsters and hippies seems to be a recipe for financial success in the global economy. And Silicon Valley has showed us that the world’s most successful businesses tend to include all three. Would the success of Apple, Facebook, Google and many of the other major tech companies have been possible without the rebel hackers who quit their day jobs and rejected bourgeois values in favor of sunny California and its liberal hippie culture? Or the many artistically gifted hipsters who’ve flocked around the existing creative industries in the region? Not very likely. Why didn’t Detroit or Cleveland become the center of the world’s new hi-tech industries? These places were the home of Americas leading technological industries after all, supposedly well-suited for the next industrial revolution, so why didn’t it appear here? Or why didn’t they at least catch up with the developments elsewhere? Well, the industrial setting and associated values, traditions and established ways of conducting business simply didn’t resonate with the progressive creatives.

Now, favoring the interests of the new creative classes is never an easy issue, or an ethically and socially unproblematic one. There is a con­siderable, and to some extent justified, resistance from other, more conventional segments of society. Malmö’s success of attracting many new IT startups and invigorating its art scene has caused bitter resentment among some of the city’s original inhabitants. This has grown to a level where an actual “anti-hipster movement” has emerged, visible by the many stickers in downtown Malmö telling “hipster pigs” to leave or “go home to Småland” (a rural province in Sweden from where many young people have emigrated). A similar tendency can be found in Berlin, targeting Swabians, who have become synonymous with the recent influx of people from Germany’s wealthy southern provinces.

It’s no wonder that the gentrification of old working-class neighborhoods causes a great deal of indignation as rents and prices go up and gradually replace the original residents who cannot afford to live in the homes they’ve lived in their entire lives. But to a considerable degree it’s not just about money, many of these hip creatives are just as poor as those who already live there after all, it’s also that many feel confused about the changes happening to their old neighborhoods, and, perhaps more importantly, a vague sense of inferiority and cultural alienation towards these newcomers. Their old favorite pubs and grocery stores suddenly change to accommodate the tastes of the new residents; new people with strange looks start to appear in the streets and cultural events to which they feel alienated, and often not welcome, start to take up a larger proportion of the city’s nightlife. Values, customs and products many of the original, and often more traditional-minded, inhabitants feel estranged from and even resentful towards begins to dominate city life as the triple-H people move in. The thing is that it’s not just resentment towards a life-style the original inhabitants can’t afford, as is often the case when a neighborhood is gentrified by wealthier newcomers, it’s not only economic capital that causes feelings of inferiority, no, the animosity that can be felt in cities such as Malmö and Berlin stems from the circumstance that the new people have higher amounts of cultural capital. It’s a vague and often unconscious feeling of inadequacy, rarely articulated as cultural inferiority, but rather as annoyance with the newcomers’ perceived pretentiousness, self-importance and showing off, that causes what I would claim constitutes a new kind of class hate.

So there it is again: the struggle between the old society and the new. Despite all the cuddliness, “correct” political opinions and good intentions of the often very sensitive and socially aware hackers, hipsters and hippies they don’t avoid causing bitter felt class conflicts. And even if class struggle is not what it used to be there is still a political game. Development of societies has always produced winners and losers. It has always been a grim business. A new political reality is emerging at the heart of the most progressive countries in the world, a silent revolution pertaining to the information age. So in a sense, what we are seeing today is not really a wave of national­ism rising across Europe and North America, or a socialist utopia lost to neo­liberalism. We are witnessing the rise of the digitalized, globalized, trans­national, postind­us­t­rial soc­iety – and its discontents. The nationalist resurgence is only that: the outdated, the out­­gunned, the outman­euv­ered. That does not make the con­fu­sion and suffer­ing of the losing side any less real.

Still, favoring the triple-H is of paramount importance, and not only in terms of economic growth. These people are on average more progressive, more socially concerned and more aware of the dire environmental crises of the world. So if they are provided with the infrastructure and opportunities to prosper they can become a valuable asset for the overall level of societal progress. And even if they often come off as arrogant and awfully politically correct to the traditional workers they live among, they are generally more engaged in their local community and willing to show greater amounts of sensitiveness and understanding towards their co-citizens than the bourgeois middle class people who have followed them into the old working-class neighborhoods. They also tend to have a global mindset (which makes the co-existence with ethnic minorities from traditional cultures surprisingly friction-free despite the considerable differences in values and levels of cultural capital) and have more transnational perspectives on things. As such they work to transform their countries (or cities or regions) into nodes within a larger network where information is free, production of cultural goods is central, and creativity is paramount. They seek to live in progressive and cultural vibrant pockets of transnational networks where they can partake in innovative IT-companies, public-private partnerships and different forms of social entrepreneurship and research programs, often working professionally with things such as open information, climate change and organizational democratization. And the locations with the highest concentrations of these things thus achieve greater centrality in the new emerging transnational networks – with considerable advantages on the global stage as a result.

In short, the progressive and postmaterialist values of the triple-H people generally make them more concerned with the transition to an ecologically and socially sustainable society than making a buck to buy nice things. It’s not that they are better than normal folks, but they are the ones to invent all the things to save the world. Because of that we should see to it that they get the optimal conditions to do so.

—

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.

Attempting to describe the Alt-Right in terms of concrete political ideology entirely misses the mark. Rigidly insisting on equating it with the political proposals of some self-identified Alt-Right advocate or another is as inadequate an approach as equating the term “fascism” with the political program of the Italian Fascist Party of the Interbellum Period. Not only does such an approach omit the many individuals who don’t identify with either of the abovementioned movements, but nonetheless are considered part of these currents. Neither does it reveal the underlying psychology and social mechanisms that have come to signify the broader semantic meaning of these terms.

Speaking of which, there seems to be a lot of similarities between the Alt-Right and traditional fascism. However, the former is to be seen in light of the unique societal circumstances of the present and we should therefore, as stated in a previous post, be careful not to draw too literally inferred parallels with fascism. The Alt-Right should be interpreted in a contemporary context that, albeit exhibiting rather similar political conditions and almost identical social mechanisms as those of the Interbellum Period, indeed is very different.

The Alt-Right is a child of our time, a memetic mutation born from dissent, anger and resentment towards a perceived ruling elite thought to be out of tune with popular opinion, not least in cultural terms. As such it has emerged from similar conditions to those of fascism almost a century ago. But being a phenomenon of the current, postmodern, era also means that it has appeared at a time in history when all the old ideologies have died out. We live in a time where all notions about grand narratives have lost their legitimacy and the only trustworthy response to any great prophet is a quick and preferably witty dismissal, one that with a smug ironic attitude effortlessly rejects such pompous claims and effectively reveals them as nothing but highly inadequate fairytales based on naive assumptions – often while refraining from mentioning if such claims, despite their shortcomings, have any merits worth mentioning after all, and usually without making any suggestions to how they could be improved or presenting any counter proposals to how the issue at hand could be more adequately addressed. In the postmodern era we usually settle for the anti-thesis, a proposal dismissed is a job well done.

Postmodernity has in later years come to dominate a substantial part of intellectual and cultural life in the West, and its unrelenting aspirations to make the anti-thesis the only acceptable outcome of any intellectual discussion has largely succeeded in elevating the status of the critique to stand above all other concerns. Its associated schools of thought, such as queer-feminism, discourse analysis, post-colonialism and critical theory, are highly antithetical and expertly master the delicate craft of deconstructing oppressive discourses; they rigorously reveal all the faults and errors of our assumptions and audaciously scrutinize the legitimacy of those in power – all with a confident and ironic smile on their lips when executed most skillfully. But postmodernity hasn’t had the same success in creating new narratives to replace those it has artfully dismantled. Although such attempts have been made, it hasn’t managed to narrate any tales with the same inclusive power and popular recognition as those of the modernity yesteryear.

This is the point of departure of the Alt-Right. Postmodernity has fostered an intellectual climate that has alienated a large part of the population and created an ideological vacuum from which the Alt-Right draws its power. In addition, the inability of postmodern thought to efficiently tackle many of the new issues to have appeared in our digital postindustrial societies and to properly address the felt societal concerns of all citizens, to which mainstream society remains just as clueless, has thus opened the door for the Alt-Right to dictate public discourse for years to come.

But even if the Alt-Right above everything else should be seen as a counter-reaction against postmodern ideology and discourse, it’s just as much a postmodern phenomenon itself. It differs from previous currents to oppose postmodernism in the way it has adopted certain postmodern methods and insights to conduct the resistance. So even if the Alt-Right in many respects entails the absolute opposite to postmodern values, as a societal development it’s inherently postmodern.

1) The Alt-Right is an Antithetical Movement:

The Alt-Right is as antithetical as many of its postmodern adversaries, perhaps even more antithetical since the only thing that seems to unite its many different adherents is opposition itself. The Alt-Right identity is one of opposition.

You see, the Alt-Right doesn’t generally make claims to a brand new overarching ideology, it’s too postmodern for that; instead it attacks those very same postmodern schools of thought (feminism, multiculturalism etc.) that it perceives as being too idealistic and thus in violation of the postmodern discourse that prevails today. The Alt-Right people feel that the idealistic struggles for social justice are based on too much faith in progress, not too little.

The Alt-Right criticizes postmodern thought of having become an ideology in itself, often termed “cultural Marxism” or something similar, based on the postmodern assumption that all ideologies are inherently bad. And it complies with its postmodern roots by refraining from offering any coherent ideologies in its stead. The Alt-Right doesn’t present a new great narrative, invalidating its opponents is enough. It simply settles for the anti-thesis – so very postmodern of it.

The thing is that the Alt-Right is a non-ideology. It’s not even a proper movement, which is why I use the term “current” instead. It’s more or less defined by its opposition against postmodern ideologies alone, such as feminism, multiculturalism and so on, and the new ways in which the resistance is conducted (we’ll return to those in point three and four).

Now, you might object by pointing out the fact that most of these Alt-Right dudes actually tend to adhere to some ideology or the other – usually some form of conservatism or fascism. This is often correct. But we all tend to subscribe to one ideology or the other, even when we don’t want to acknowledge it. After all, when the joy of landing every discussion in an antithesis and the fun of tearing apart the ideology of one’s opponents’ is over, even the most postmodernly inclined and anti-ideological of us usually find comfort in an ideology when the pitch black abyss of nihilism threatens our prospects of a good night’s sleep. In that regard, the Alt-Right people aren’t different.

So just like postmoderns, proclaiming to be the antithesis of all ideological constructs, at the end of the day tend to settle for some ideology or the other, usually some kind of Marxism, the proponents of the Alt-Right likewise tend to find recourse in some traditional rightwing ideology, neo-nazism, libertarianism, conservatism, pro-Russian neo-traditionalism or Putinism, and so on, after having rejected all ideologies as pure evil.

But these ideologies in themselves are not what the Alt-Right is about. For all, the abovementioned schools of thought are not very compatible, and if you listen carefully, you’ll discover that these people, all things considered, have very little ideological common ground. So what is the Alt-Right about then?

Well, as mentioned, opposition seems to be the one thing that unites this group. Among the myriad of incompatible views, their resentment of “social justice warriors”, “political correctness” and perceived associated ideologies such as feminism, multiculturalism and so on, tends to be the only common denominator of the Alt-Right. As such it would be a mistake to just consider it a white nationalistic movement.

But I admit it’s a tricky one. Even if the Alt-Right isn’t exclusive to neo-Nazis and white supremacists, as it evidently gathers support from people who don’t hold such views, many proponents of the Alt-Right still tend to be racists, misogynists and homophobes. But as a political current the Alt-Right is neither in favor of such views, nor is it against them, it’s more that it really doesn’t care. Whether one of its adherents is racist or not is actually not a concern, it’s simply preoccupied with other issues – and since it’s not an ideology, it doesn’t demand any ideological purity either.

The non-ideological stance of the Alt-Right thus has the perplexing consequence that we’re talking about a political current where people who differ on as seemingly critical issues, like whether they’re nazis or not(!), still seem to find common ground and use the very same political label, in the most surprisingly carefree manner.

Now the only way to explain this paradox is that it isn’t about the above issues. In fact, when we label people as Alt-Right who don’t even identify with the movement (as we do), and who obviously have very opposing views on a number of topics, we do so because this broad term seems to be the best way to describe them and because their attitudes and actions appear to be in accordance with the overall societal current and sentiments that now has become known as the Alt-Right.

So what is that sentiment about? Well, if we dwell into the matter we’ll find another very postmodern feature.

2) The Alt-Right is an Identity Project:

The Alt-Right guys are predominantly white, and that’s not a coincidence. The Alt-Right has emerged as a result of the last few decades’ attention to racial matters such as white privilege, the subordinated status of minorities in white majority countries and the many atrocities performed by whites in the past and the present. The Alt-Right perceives this debate as one-sided and unfair criticism of white people. It claims that whites are constantly accused of being the bad guys and that it’s simply an excuse for bashing white people since it doesn’t sufficiently include atrocities performed by other ethnicities. As such the Alt-Right is largely a group of people who have grown tired with all the criticism tied to whiteness that they perceive as unjust attacks on themselves.

The Alt-Right is also a reaction against, or even a continuation of, the various “identity projects” that have appeared in later years. In a way, the Alt-Right can be seen as a white identity project itself. I’d admit that its obsession with identity issues to a large extent stems from feelings of annoyance with such identity movement, that it’s simply based on frustration with the attention these groups have managed to get – a common inclination of humans when things don’t revolve around ourselves.

But I believe there’s more to it. A lot of minority groups have emphasized their right to be proud of who they are; made it an explicit goal to reclaim the pride they feel majority culture has deprived them of. Consequently a lot of whites have questioned why they shouldn’t have the same right, why it’s perceived as racist to feel proud of being white, arguing that it’s unfair that they are the only group in society who aren’t allowed to declare pride in their racial identity.

Now, it’s a sound objection to stress the silliness of finding pride in ones’ whiteness, or nationality for that matter; after all it’s not a personal accomplishment, it’s just something you’re born with and a superficial feature that doesn’t entail anything worth of recognition. However, that also applies if you’re black, or gay for that matter. I’d agree that the context differs, the purpose of emphasizing pride of belonging to a minority is a measure to counter the opposite, namely shame. The gay pride movement, for instance, is the result of having been told to feel ashamed about one’s sexuality. But the white people who want to assert their racial pride don’t care about that; they probably don’t understand it either. Most of them simply don’t like that blacks and gays want to feel proud, don’t feel they deserve the recognition they desire and some even find that things like blackness or homosexuality are things to consider inferior or even shameful.

Still, some of these inclinations towards white pride may actually stem from sincere and justified emotional needs of feeling proud about who they are; a desire among white marginalized people to get recognition and to be listened to. It’s a telling sign that we rarely see successful people enjoying a large amount of recognition who claim to be proud of being white. Those who most vigorously emphasize their racial identity or nationality, or take excessive pride in the historical accomplishments of those they perceive to be their peers, are usually people who are marginalized in one regard or the other. Feelings of marginalization are a feature of all postmodern identity projects. So in that regard the Alt-Right is actually no different from the other identity projects out there and thus a postmodern phenomenon too.

You may have noticed that I’ve used the word “guys” a lot, that’s not a coincident. Even if the Alt-Right isn’t restricted to males, the vast majority still happens to be men. There’s a reason for that too. Its fixation and resentment of feminism is part of the explanation. Many men are simply fed up with the critique of gender relations they claim to constantly accuse them of being villains – an inclination similar to that of the abovementioned perceived racial vilifying of whites. But such sentiments can be found among many other groups, and aren’t even restricted to males either. No, the thing about the Alt-Right that makes it such a male-dominated current is that it criticizes the changes to the gender roles of men in late modern society and the new normative perceptions of masculinity. When we look at the things the Alt-Right puts forth it’s not only a critique of feminism, it also seeks to foil a perceived loss of masculinity, resist what’s perceived as an agenda to “feminize” men and defend traditional gender roles – simply declaring that it’s okay to be a macho man. As such it can be seen as a branch of the men’s movement, though I’d admit a largely pathological one that often resorts to misogyny and advocacy of male dominance.

But still, beneath the frequent misogyny and silly hyper-masculine compensations we’ll find a sincerely felt hurtful loss of esteem, entitled yearnings to reassert one’s masculinity and regain the pride of being a man and an honest – though perhaps poorly executed – attempt at establishing a male identity project. It’s an inevitable result of the current confusion and insecurity many men experience in face of a rapidly changing gender discourse; developments they fear will marginalize them, and thus an identity project as postmodern as the other ones preceding it.

It’s an identity project. Hence the heroes of the Alt-Right become the ones who most successfully are able to pull off narcissistic displays: the brash and vulgarly rich Trump, the posh, arrogant Milo, the beautiful Tomi Lahren, the buffed and self-grooming “Golden One”, a nationalist weightlifter youtuber from Sweden – see pictures below. These are sexually potent resistors of political correctness, inviting their followers to mirror themselves in their public images. And there’s the hairdo of Dutch politician Geert Wilders. Blondness seems to be the rule. Smile to the camera.

3) The Alt-Right has adopted postmodern methods:

The Alt-Right differs from most contemporary conservatives and other rightwing movements in the past in the way it has learned to competently master the valuable methods of its postmodern adversaries, and thus acquired the means to win the battles its predecessors lost.

The Alt-Right has a modern and/or traditional point of departure for its content, but its methods are derived from an ostensibly postmodern cultural logic. This entails that the Alt-Right, obviously, hasn’t adopted the values associated with the postmodern schools of thought, such as gender and racial equality, tolerance or inclusiveness, but it has acquired some of its analytical tools like discourse analysis and deconstruction, and learned the valuable craft of critiquing normativity. Equipped with these powerful measures the brightest and savviest exponents of the Alt-Right can thus effectively reveal the unfounded assumptions of their opponents and critically expose the underlying and often unstated values that sometimes are hard to defend. Even when such attacks occasionally turn out to be highly unreasonable and analytically sketchy, the most seasoned and analytically well-founded postmodernist doesn’t avoid the risk of being caught off foot when suddenly confronted with the sophisticated and convincing rhetoric of a right-winger well trained in postmodern semantic word games.

Some Alt-Righters are also capable of accurately deducting the universal principles from where the arguments of their opponents are derived, and with analytical validity determine when they happen to violate their own principles. You may object that although that’s what they are trying to accomplish, they usually fail to do so in a legitimate manner; that I’m simply overestimating their analytical abilities and what I’m referring to are nothing but flawed, manipulative techniques that the Right has used for decades to only make it appear as if the argument has been won. This is, admittedly, often the case. But some of today’s right-wingers are actually not just attacking the Left with intentionally misrepresented straw man arguments falsely asserted to be evidence of double standards, they are not just exposing ideological contradictions that only appear as such on the surface, no, some of them actually manage to expose contradictions that, under closer scrutiny, in fact are contradictory. This includes valid objections to some of the double-standards and ideological contradictions of feminists and multiculturalists, such as gender and racial antagonization, free-speech infringements and assumptions based on lacking sociological and biological evidence.

Now, these right-wingers obviously don’t offer any resolutions to these inconsistencies and they don’t even address the many ethical discrepancies of not at least acknowledging the intentions and utility of the principles they have scrutinized. But they don’t have to. They simply settle for the anti-thesis, and when their critique doesn’t imply any opinions of their own to be subjected to the same treatment they can leave the debate untainted. Without any opinions to defend, they’re able to secure the higher ground.

However, I’m not claiming that the people of the Alt-Right aren’t proposing any ideas at all, far from it, the Alt-Right scene is evidently full of obscure and incoherent opinions that can easily be ripped apart and deemed not only analytically inconsistent, but also ethically flawed. Neither am I saying that everything originating from the Alt-Right are solely anti-theses and mere analytical objections to the inconsistencies of Leftist ideology and lines of argument. I’m not even claiming that they always have the correct analyses or that this political current is overwhelmingly dominated by sharp-witted thinking. On the contrary, it’s difficult to find a place with more stupidity, analytical inconsistency and unfounded opinions than an Alt-Right internet forum. But the vast majority who isn’t capable of coming up with any sound arguments themselves are still able to acquire those of the competent few, which doesn’t invalidate the arguments as such. This makes them a threat to the Left.

So what I’m saying is that the abovementioned intellectual accomplishments of the Right are a novel development that happens to have appeared in these Alt-Right circles. And because it’s not really a unified movement with baggage of its own to defend, some of these more intelligent thoughts are capable of posing a severe threat to the Left on an analytical level.

This is a rather new development. In the past it has usually been the Right who’s suffered bitter defeats when they’ve slipped and fell on their own unsubstantiated assumptions, ideological inconsistencies and blatant double standards. The analytically weaker right-wingers of the past have on an intellectual level generally been defeated in engagements with their often much more consistent and well-founded leftist adversaries. But that seems to have changed somewhat in later years. A new generation of rightwing intellectuals has cropped up who actually have rather solid arguments and thus increasingly manages to challenge the Left, not only in terms of winning popular opinion, but now also analytically. It doesn’t mean they are generally more right about things, or that their underlying ideology is capable of providing better solutions, but on single issues they are sometimes correct, and the overall criticism of Leftist ideology has merits that demand further deliberation.

The thing about the Alt-Right is that it has grown out of an age where notions about gender and racial issues have been on the political and intellectual agenda for quite some time. We have to do with young right leaning persons who have grown up in a time and age where postmodern ideas such as feminism and multiculturalism have become commonly known, but the knowledge about how to analyze societal discourses and deconstruct social norms have likewise become widely available. This means that whereas the older generations of conservatives barely knew how to spell the word feminism, some of these younger fellows know it by heart and can more easily oppose it. And the feminists and other postmoderns have accordingly taught them how to deconstruct ideologies, how to challenge the social norms that surrounds them and how one effectively changes public discourse. They have also learned the secret trade of constructing narratives of victimization and how they can be used to counter what one perceives as unjust oppression.

But that’s not all.

4) The Alt-Right is a Media Phenomenon of the Internet Age:

The Alt-Right also differs from other rightwing movements in the past in the ways it more competently makes use of the media and successfully navigates the postmodern hyper-reality it has brought about. When we look at television clips of older conservatives they often appear frightfully apologetic when confronted with their apparent ethical shortcomings, always excusing themselves and embarrassingly wanting to appear more moderate than they actually are. Over and over again they have mismanaged their media appearance, failed to understand the disastrous consequences of always appearing to be on the defense and overestimated the importance of looking respectable at any price. The Alt-Right, self-identified or not, knows how the mass media works and how its intricate, and ludicrous, social mechanisms subordinate our physical reality to its own peculiar and counterintuitive logic. Or at least they seem to have an intuitive understanding of it.

It looks as if this new movement from the Right is one to have finally grasped what every noteworthy postmodern philosopher has warned us about, namely that since mass media not only reports what goes on in the world, but increasingly constructs our perceptions of it, those who most skillfully master the use of the media will be the ones to decide how we see the world, and thus what’s to be done with it. The Alt-Right seems to understand that this new reality is a fierce Darwinian battle for attention, and that the ever shorter attention-span of contemporary media-saturated consumers favors the simple over the complex and the spectacular over the well-thought-out. They have also discovered that it’s actually not so bad to be considered offensive. On the contrary, as long as you stand your ground and don’t appear weak a well-executed media firework can be used to your advantage – and you don’t even need to tell the truth. It’s not the facts themselves that shape most people’s understanding of reality anyway, but the way in which the world is presented to them through the media.

In addition, the Alt-Right has learned a valuable insight about human psychology that most postmoderns don’t seem to have realized, or don’t want to acknowledge or take advantage of, namely that appearing morally superior is less important than appearing strong. As such the Alt-Right has calculatedly and accurately estimated that the loss of moral points by asserting aggression and dominance will be richly compensated in the end. This makes the Alt-Right appear to be on the offence, it overshadows its weaknesses and makes their adversaries who prefer to take the moral high-ground look frail and powerless in comparison.

As a media-savvy phenomenon in contemporary society the Alt-Right relies heavily on postmodern irony. It has to, because of the peculiar feature of our postmodern age dictates that anyone without a well-developed sense of irony and a witty rejection of too much sincerity automatically is to be deemed untrustworthy. This is something that’s perfectly compatible with the new media logic of the internet. Accordingly the Alt-Right has learned to master the delicate craft of trolling, how to manufacture contagious internet memes, upon which it heavily relies, and how to refine their sense of irony and esthetic expressions to accommodate the language and tastes the internet generation has grown accustomed to. Here’s a few examples:

One of Yiannopoulos’ memes illustrating the perceived ridiculousness of feminist males in contemporary Sweden, with undertones of lost masculinity and yearnings for the greatness of the past.

A meme from Anti-FemComics satirizing the perceived overreaction of feminists towards harmless everyday life-situations.

A meme, that with a slight addition to a Nike advertisement for a sports-hijab humorously seeks to call attention to the perceived contradiction of female empowerment through sports, which the ad suggests, and that of female subordination in Islam. It’s an attempt to ridicule the celebration of diversity, which it symbolizes, and expose the naivety of multiculturalism. Another adaptation of the meme even includes a photoshopped black eye and a bruised lip on the depicted woman, showing how memes can take on a life of their own and mutate over time.

The Alt-Right deliberately seeks to be offensive; its goal is to cause provocations for the sake of provocation alone as it thrives from heated debates and highly emotional disputes. And it works as long as it’s done in an entertaining manner – which is perfectly attuned with the nature of our internet driven media reality. Being outrageous is far more likely to get people’s attention. So even if the essence of the Alt-Right probably is a matter of style rather than substance and its sincerity often seems rather questionable, its challenge to social norms and speech taboos conducted in a fun and entertaining manner may very well be a mere door-opener for a more sincerely felt reactionary and traditional rightwing agenda to which the Alt-Right is just a tool.

This is something the internet richly satisfies. In fact, the Alt-Right wouldn’t even be possible without it. It’s the political incarnation of the angry comments field from the online tabloid newspapers, a group of people who largely conduct their political activism from behind their computer screens who would never have joined forces and established a movement in real, physical life. The Alt-Right would never have had a chance without the internet since it otherwise would have been censored or simply ignored by traditional media outlets. As such it’s the far-right non-ideology of the internet age. A truly postmodern phenomenon.

As postmodernism has taught us, since its first appearance in the arts, the world consists of surfaces, images and the points of view from which these are perceived. Smile to the camera.

–

Wanting to renounce the Alt-Right as nothing but plain neo-nazis – and accordingly with no legitimacy to exist since they are just evil – would be a grave mistake. First of all this simplified interpretation is simply incorrect. Secondly it’s inhibiting your ability to conduct an accurate analysis of one the most influential political currents today, which consequently will make you incapable of countering it in an effective manner.

Still, and even if the Alt-Right is predominantly an antithetical endeavor: anti-feminism, anti-multiculturalism, anti-political correctness and so on – it is not – anti-sexism, anti-racism or anti-nationalism. Its whole raison d’être is that it opposes the former – but all while excusing the latter. As such it would be equally unwise to trivialize its significance and write it off as merely a harmless trifle. It’s a telling sign that you rarely hear an advocate of the Alt-Right who finds it worthwhile to condemn the oppression or any of the humanitarian atrocities carried out by white (non-socialist) males they mostly agree to be terrible things, but only acknowledge in a digression when confronted with the obvious ethical difficulties of excusing them.

So even if the Alt-Right doesn’t necessarily entail a fascist agenda, it’s not really dismissive of it either, and that alone makes it a challenge we need to address.

But we have to rise to the postmodern challenge, to beat them at their own game. How about going beyond the postmodern altogether and present new metamodern visions of society? In the marriage of sincerity and irony we have the means to turn this regressive tide.

Alt-Left, anyone?

—

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.

Conversely, many of the rejections towards treating this political current as a novel phenomenon probably stems from the fact that the Alt-Right doesn’t propose any new ideas, and whenever political contents is sought it tends to be the same old rubbish we’ve heard a million times from right-wingers in the past. Yet this shouldn’t distract us from a further inquiry into what the Alt-Right is. The thing is that the Alt-Right, as a political and social development, is not about political contents as such. It’s not a coherent ideology and it doesn’t have a political program, it’s a very different creature indeed.

Origins of the Term

The term itself was originally coined by Richard Spencer back in 2010 (a white-supremacist most famous for being punched in the head) to define a far-right ideology centered on white nationalism. However, the connotation of the term has somewhat changed in later years and is no longer exclusively used to refer to the specific ideology of this fella. Instead it has become a much broader catch-all category to define a new oppositional trend, a kind of rightwing counterculture.

The term rose to prominence during the presidential campaign of Donald Trump as a result of the widespread enthusiasm his candidacy invoked among the original Alt-Right community. But the extent to which the Trump-friendly internet-memes originating from the Alt-Right scene gathered wide circulation in the mainstream, and the way in which the movement’s advocacy of Trump began to appeal to a large group of Trump’s followers – which all drew considerable media attention and controversy – ultimately reached a point where the Alt-Right became indistinguishable from the overall Trump movement. Trump later disavowed and condemned the Alt-Right, but the term stuck around since it had come to describe the new political stance of the Trump voter (or at least a sub-section of them). It didn’t become any less relevant when Trump made Steve Bannon his White House Chief Strategist and Senior Counselor; a former executive of the online media Breitbart News who had declared it to be “the platform for the Alt-Right”.

Today, however, the term is broadly associated with the general rejection of mainstream conservatism that Trump has come to represent and is no longer exclusively used to refer to the views of Breitbart News or the radical rightwing-bloggers who pioneered the term. While many of those who identify as Alt-Right tend to be somewhat aligned with the original visions proposed by Spencer, others have explicitly distanced themselves from such views and some even have political convictions in direct opposition to these.

For instance, and evident to how far the meaning of the term has drifted from its origins, the most prominent spokesperson of the Alt-Right currently appears to be the media phenomenon known as Milo Yiannopoulos, a gay man claiming Jewish ancestry who somewhat humorously seems to have accepted the media’s “coronation” of him as the “queen of the Alt-Right”. Politically he’s merely a moderate conservative, a far cry from the white-supremacists like Spencer, but he mainly focuses on attacking the things they hate the most, such as feminism, multiculturalism and political correctness – and in a rhetorically convincing and often surprisingly well-founded manner that clearly reveals why he has become a poster-boy of the Alt-Right. Consequently the criticism of Leftist ideology has now become one of the only common denominators of an otherwise politically diverse movement.

The prominence of Yiannopoulos has compelled a lot of commentators to labeling a number of similar media-savvy internet sensations as Alt-Right, many of whom don’t even identify as such. This includes a young woman named Tomi Lahren, who hasn’t embraced the media’s recent coronation of her as the “queen” of the Alt-Right as passionately as Yiannopoulos, but simply defines herself as a moderate conservative with liberal views on abortion and gay rights. However, that hasn’t stopped her from causing controversy. Her negative comments about African Americans, the Black Lives Matter movement and her self-declared stance as an anti-feminist have made her notorious. She generally criticizes the same things as Yiannopoulos, though arguably without the level of rhetorical sophistication and analytical rigor of the latter. Without denying her obvious charisma and oratory skills one still suspects that her rise to fame has more to do with being a young, vocal and undeniably stunning looking female than the content of her comments itself.

The truth of the matter is that most of the things put forth by these young and chic Alt-Right commentators repeatedly have been said by older, conservative males in the past. But despite the younger generation’s sometimes superior arguments, the novelty that has made observers use a new term to describe them is probably more the circumstance that it comes from a generation of millennials who expertly master the internet’s possibilities for self-promotion and effectively use their age, good looks and gender or sexual orientation as an means to get attention – and thereby challenging the typical image of conservatives as old, straight guys.

The Alt-Right in a Nutshell

Now, what has come to be known as the Alt-Right is not just a bunch of rhetorically gifted youngsters who gain internet prominence from defying our expectations of which gender and sexual orientation moderately conservative provocateurs usually have. Some are actually old, most are straight and the vast majority of them are indeed guys. Actual talent is few and far between, as well as prominence, and many are not very moderate either. In fact, a considerable proportion of the Alt-Right to supposedly enter the mainstream hasn’t really diverged that far from its racist roots despite their rhetorical efforts to do so. But still we shouldn’t equate the entirety of the Alt-Right with mere far-right white supremacism. Such views belong to a minority after all.

When we investigate the people who label themselves as Alt-Right we find all kinds of political positions, from the center right to the far right. Many are admittedly nothing but old-school nazis who’ve just learned how to make ironic internet-memes, but that hasn’t stopped a few right leaning Jews from using the same label. We find fundamentalist Christians who care more about the one true faith than race, while others are advocates of atheism. We’ll find plenty of homophobia, but also a lot who don’t care about homosexuality at all and some who might in fact be gay themselves. Some are libertarians on economic policy, others are merely moderate conservatives.

Yet it appears as though all of the above are only secondary issues, even supposedly important ones like whether one wants to be associated with nazis or not. So what on Earth is the reason these people have chosen to unite themselves under that same banner and bothered to use their precious online time to advocate an Alt-Right agenda? They don’t seem to agree on much politically, so what’s the deal?

But that’s exactly the thing about the Alt-Right, it’s not really about a political program. What unites these people are not their political ideologies, but rather an opposition against Leftist thought, or more specifically, postmodern ideologies, such as feminism and multiculturalism and the political correctness they feel oppresses their political opinions and threatens their freedom of speech.

It’s not really a question whether the Alt-Right is about nazism or not. Not said that it doesn’t matter at all – the Alt-Right advocates themselves do occasionally address the question – but the truth of the matter is that the movement as such doesn’t really care about this. It’s simply not concerned with issues such as racial discrimination of minorities, women’s subordinated status in Western societies or the lacking legal rights of LGBTQ persons. What it cares about are about people who care about these things. As a movement the Alt-Right is neither in favor nor against any of these things; some Alt-Righters excuse these issues while others admit them to be ills, but that really hasn’t anything to do with the Alt-Right agenda per se.

Now, you might argue that not being anti-racist effectively makes you racist. Perhaps so, but that still misses the point entirely regarding the nature of the Alt-Right. The movement is not anti-racist, it’s simply anti-anti-racist, which isn’t really pro-racist but doesn’t exclude racism either. Being racist or not is thus not part of the equation at all.

The reason that it doesn’t enter the equation is because the whole point of the Alt-Right as the current it has become only is to be against things – against Leftist things that to some appear as excessive emphasis on equality, unreasonably high standards of tolerance and an overly suffocating sensitiveness. Above all, perhaps, the Alt-Right is a reaction against the nauseating moral high horses the Left has ridden for far too long. It simply suffices to point out the fact that such notions are the only things all those Alt-Righters seem to agree upon, it’s actually their primary preoccupation. If you don’t believe me, take a look at a random Alt-Right forum on the internet: 90% of everything consists of outcries against people considered unreasonably demanding regarding political rights, inappropriately vocal about social injustices and overly critical of oppression. That’s the Alt-Right in a nutshell – basically, a movement about being offended about others being offended.

So instead of labeling the Alt-Right as single minded bigots and Nazis, it may in fact be more appropriate to see them as something more similar to what rather humorously has been called “South Park Republicans”: a new generation of people with center-right beliefs, tired with the moral righteousness and political correctness of traditional liberals.

The Creators of South Park, Trey Parker and Matt Stone, once replied to the question in an online forum whether they considered themselves liberal or conservative:

Parker: We avoid extremes but we hate liberals more than conservatives and we hate them [conservatives].

Stone: I hate conservatives but I really fucking hate liberals.

You see, the deliberate provocations of the Alt-Right, which often qualify for an episode on South Park, are perhaps more an indication of resentment towards the liberal Left than an advocacy of deeply reactionary policies.

Talking of which, I forgot to mention the remaining 10% that admittedly consists of actual political contents, but they never seem to agree on much. However, that really doesn’t matter. The dislike of “social justice warriors”, “political correctness” and years of accumulated anger with the constant accusations of being the perpetrators of everything evil appears to be more than enough to build a movement around. Uniting around bigotry is just of secondary importance, a privilege to be enjoyed among one’s understanding peers in the internet forum – an Alt-Right equivalent of the safe-space, one that guarantees safety from condemnation.

Although such things can be difficult to understand for the outsider, I would still claim that the overall mainstream current of the Alt-Right is not really about hating blacks, women and gays – that much. No, it’s more about hating feminists and multiculturalist and being fed up with their political correctness and constant language policing. In fact, I believe a large proposition of the Alt-Right’s bigoted rhetoric is more a matter of a political Tourette’s syndrome: an offendedness over offendedness that has turned into offensiveness for the sake of offensiveness.

Now, even if the Alt-Right can be said to be largely an anti-movement, there is perhaps one thing it’s actually in favor of. Despite my earlier emphasis on the diversity of the movement, one would be a fool not to notice that it’s primarily made up of young, white males. This is no coincident. You rarely see any Alt-Right advocates mentioning it, but it has arguably become a kind of branch of the men’s movement and a white identity project. A rather pathological one I admit, but still a forum and an advocacy group for marginalized men to address the concerns and emotional issues experienced by many white males in the face of radically changing gender roles and increased global competition on the labor market. It’s the result of the seemingly impossible request of coming to terms with one’s white privilege and patriarchal power when all you feel is inferiority and marginalization. I consider the frequent racist and sexist slurs originating from the Alt-Right a sad consequence of this circumstance.

So to sum it all up, the Alt-Right can be boiled down to a bunch of white guys who simply don’t like feminism, multiculturalism – and perhaps foremost – being told what to think all the time. It’s a politically diverse group who simply has the one thing in common, namely that they are tired up being told that they are sexists, racists and homophobes by their “politically correct” adversaries. It’s the guys who happen to have antiquated notions about gender and race, who are unfortunate not to emotionally resonate with contemporary notions of what is considered correct behaviors and the ones who always get ridiculed and scolded for using the wrong words and for being insensitive.

You know who I’m talking about, you probably know one yourself.

—

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.

Mind if I have a go at it? Alright, here’s my take on capital, it is:

Something that creates a positive feedback loop,
which changes social relations,
so that power is accumulated,
for the person or organization to which the feedback loop is linked.

So anything that makes you more powerful vis-à-vis others, and that can grow and expand itself by proper management, is capital. The positive feedback loop means that you tend to get more of it once you have a certain amount; it creates an advantage from which you can get more of the same or more of something similar.

It’s possible to add another dimension: Capital must have some kind of psychological lure or desirability. There must be something we can fetishize, something we can crave, possess, call our own, and/or be possessed by. Otherwise it won’t do anything and thus it cannot be capital.

That means this isn’t the only form of capital:

Money is a kind of capital yes, but not the definition of capital in itself.

Another form of capital is this:

Sexual attractiveness and even good health is a form of capital. Remember, capital has the quality that one form of it can be exchanged for another. Being fit and beautiful can potentially give you a movie career and the social capital gained from that can sometimes even be exchanged for political capital – and, not least, a lot of money capital as well. It can also get you laid; in fact, pretty much all kinds of capital can get you laid. And erotic capital itself can likewise be exchanged for almost all other kinds of capital.

That means even this is a form of capital:

Having good friends and loving family relations is also a form of capital, so called social capital. The number of friends and contacts, and the quality of those relations, can give you many advantages; in fact, it’s almost impossible to accumulate other forms of capital without it. With social capital you can ask someone favors you otherwise would have paid for, for example make a good friend help you move; and if you have many friends and contacts other people are more inclined to want to know you simply because you know “everyone”. It also makes it more likely for you to get a good job; in fact, if you’re not capable of establishing that initial social capital at the job interview you probably won’t get it.

So just like having lots of money helps you get even more money (that’s the positive feedback loop), so does having a lot of friends help you get even more, and, these things can be exchanged for each other. Can’t buy friend you say? Well, why do rich people usually have a lot of people they call their friends, while bums on the street tend to be all alone? Capital attracts other capital, and if you have a lot of one kind it’s easier to get the other kinds you need.

So what other kinds are there? Historically, this has been the most important form of capital:

Organized violence, to be specific. Prior to the modern era the ones who controlled an army were usually also the ones who controlled the economy. By having a big army rulers and warlords could simply accumulate all other forms of capital by the sheer use of force, and often by the mere threat of it. Controlling a piece of land with an army could grant one additional land by conquest and thus further increase the size of one’s army by gaining even more soldiers and resources and so on (until they met someone else with an army to counter their force). This is the positive feedback loop. Organized violence could be exchanged for other forms of capital such as food, money, social status etc. – and who doesn’t want to be friends with the warrior chief himself!

History is not shy of telling us that organized violence has been the most fundamental form of capital throughout history – and with a modern phrasing, one with a very favorable exchange rate. So that’s what the past has looked like, before money capital ruled the world (as it does today). But, in the future, this form of capital will be king:

These people might look cute and harmless, but they are increasingly a force to be reckoned with. This is because they have large amounts of cultural capital. In the future this form of capital, not money capital, will be at the center of the economy. The ones who have large amount of cultural capital are able to exchange it at ever more favorable exchange rates; that means getting other forms of capital in large quantities for a smaller quantity of their precious cultural capital. But not only are such people getting well paid for their services; in virtue of their larger amounts of cultural capital they are better at getting and keeping the precious attention of others, more likely to be listened to. And their ability to gain the attention of others will make them increasingly more powerful in the future, to an extent that they will finally dominate the economy. But more on that later. This leads us to the next question.

What is Economy?

What is “economy”? Not just the economy. What does the term “economy” actually mean? And no, economy is not just about flows of money and material goods. What is economy essentially about? What is its most fundamental mechanism?

Work! you might reply, is what economy is all about. Well, it’s also about work, but since our present definition of the word tends to only cover those services exchanged for money it doesn’t quite cut it. For instance, just think about “house work”, put forth by many feminist scholars. This activity usually doesn’t involve the exchange of money and is mostly not considered economically relevant, but the domestic duties performed by women throughout history have been absolutely crucial for the functioning of society. Taking care of your children is usually not considered work, but if someone does it for money it suddenly becomes “real” work. However, it’s still the same activity; still the same economic task being performed.

Or think about sex. Not considered work right? Unless you prostitute yourself! Although the activity, per se, is still the same, but the exchange of money suddenly turns it into work. Is it work if I clean your house for free? Just because I like you? Or fuck you? Economically the same task has still been performed whether you pay me or not. The real output is the same, but it doesn’t get measured in monetary value and thus usually isn’t seen as an economical matter. You won’t find the work I put into helping my friend move in the GNP, but still a valuable task has been performed.

So if “economy” can’t merely be boiled down to money or work, what is it then?

Let’s look at the root of the word itself:

Economy (noun):
Borrowed from Latin oeconomia, from ancient Greek οἰκονομία meaning:
“management of a household, administration”
(οἶκος ‎(oîkos, “house”) + νόμος ‎(nómos, “law”) (surface analysis eco– +‎ –nomy).

In the Scandinavian languages there is actually a common word that roughly translates into “management of a household” or “to economize”: “hushålla”/”husholde”, literally “to hold house”.  It’s a verb, meaning that it’s something you do. But what is it, most fundamentally, that you do, when you are “holding house” or “economizing”?

Yes, it includes the management of limited assets, manufactured goods and natural resources and the work included in producing and distributing these things. But you’re managing something more fundamental than that, something that goes beyond the concrete work tasks and physical resources: namely, our most limited resource – time and attention.

Economy is about the management of our time and attention. Money and work are just abstractions and surface phenomena of these two much more fundamental aspects. Money is merely a crude measure of evaluating the worth of someone’s actions in relation to someone else, and what we see as “actual” work is merely a social construct, a convention and definition of what is considered to be actions creating economic value for others – in our day and age usually the kind of actions by which a monetary exchange takes place.

Our time and attention is more fundamental than money and work. It’s what is at the very core of the economy. For example, you reading this text and giving me your attention is an economic action. You could have done something else, but you chose to, you economized, those scarce resource (that is, your valuable time and attention) to read. In that regard all our actions are economic priorities. All of them. Taking a hike in the forest, talking to your neighbor or doing activism are all economic actions. You could have done something else.

Hence “economy”, or to “economize”, is all about behaviors and relations. It’s about the behaviors we spend our time doing and towards which relations we direct our attention.

So, this ain’t it:

You won’t find the essence of economy from studying the wizardry of stock exchange brokers, bankers and other financial occupations that we’re so accustomed to. The economy runs much deeper than the numerical values presented by statistics on monetary exchanges.

A Crash Course in Economic History

With this short introduction I welcome you to a crash course in economic history: A tale of how different forms of capital have shaped our behaviors and how technological advances have turned the dynamics and mechanisms of the economy upside down.

If you already feel familiar with the history of the world, you can skip past it and go straight to the final point “What to do with Capitalism?” [Link]

The Agrarian Revolution

Let’s begin with the emergence of the “agrarian regime” which can be divided into two overarching steps of development.

Step one, the agricultural revolution per se: This initial step revolves around the management, investment and timing of the surplus energy of the natural world.

The novel invention of the agricultural revolution was the way in which humans began to deliberately extract, manage and alter naturally occurring resources by investing surplus resources in expectation of a greater yield the coming harvest. And people developed methods to time those measures so as to maximize its output or, with another word, to profit. In short, by refraining from consuming resources immediately and determining the optimal conduct for future yields, humans had developed a new way of production. Sounds familiar? Just wait.

But then a new problem arose. The denser societies and closer proximity to other, often competing, societies meant that conflicts became inevitable. Anthropological as well as archaeological investigations show that war seems to be endemic among horticultural (early agrarian) societies. Security, rather than mere survival, thus became the most critical concern. This circumstance paved the way for the next step of development.

Step two, the emergence of state-like structures or “civilizations”: Economically the second step revolves around the exploitation of a new energy source: that of human bodies.

The way in which human bodies can be seen as an exploitable energy source is obviously not that this measure of production had not been available prior to this turn in history (of course people had used their bodies to extract resources from the environment before). But because of the new circumstances that arose in large sedentary farming communities with steep social hierarchies other humans suddenly became “exploitable” for other purposes than their own – however, this was true only for particular agents who had the appropriate means to do so. That “means” was organized violence. And as the large agrarian societies managed to produce sufficient surplus resources to support full-time warriors, rulers secured their grip on power and acquired the measures to make people do what they wanted.

Slaves and other dependents were treated as human stores of energy, “living batteries” so to speak. And because humans are more efficient converters of food into energy than many animals (and can perform many tasks that the animals can’t) they were often more valuable. Human beings as an effective source of energy explains why slavery was so universally prevailing in the pre-modern world, just as the use of fossil fuels is in the modern; which further explains why fossil fuels eventually made slavery unfashionable.

Aided by organized violence, and since agriculture generated a considerable amount of surplus labor not preoccupied with food-production, rulers could use their authority to allocate the energy of other human beings to tasks that had been difficult, if not outright impossible, in the “foraging regime” – such as erecting large monumental buildings and the mass production of crafted goods. This surplus also made possible the growth of administrative, intellectual and religious endeavors. All these activities accumulated to an extent never seen before. In short, agriculture and organized violence fostered what has been termed “civilization”.

Then everything changed again.

The “Capitalist” Revolution

Whereas organized violence was the primary capital to organize society in the agrarian regime, modernity has money capital as its primary means to manage the collective actions of humans. With the what we usually call the “capitalist” revolution, controlling a big army was no longer the most crucial measure of power.  When the descendants of the medieval merchants started to control huge amounts of money they could muster larger armies and weapons than the old landed elite – not least by entering alliances with the kings. The logic of organized violence became subordinated to the logic of money capital. The masters of the world were no longer the aristocratic knights in shining armor, but the accountants and savvy merchants in humble suits. By managing the surplus energy of human labor and carefully investing and re-investing human labor for productive uses, they could accumulate larger amounts of resources and power than any warrior by means of plunder alone. And when this was coupled with newly discovered methods to exploit the energy of millions of years of stored sun power in the form of underground fossil fuels: Boom! A new age dawned, and we saw the beginnings of the society we have today. With modernity the hard logic of one regime was finally supplemented by another.

The “agrarian regime” had supplemented the “foraging regime”. Now the agrarian regime was supplemented by the capitalist-industrial regime. And Britannia ruled the waves, as the first truly emerging capitalist power. Those who commanded the greatest capital also commanded the greatest military power. Eventually, nations began to compete less by means of warfare and more by means of economic growth.

So let’s return to the initial question. What is capitalism?

Well, capitalism is simply the management of human surplus by means of money capital.

(Note that the terms used here: what we usually think of as “capital” is money capital and that has, by tradition, given us the name conventional name for “capitalism” – which is when money capital govern our lives. But our everyday lives can be governed by other forces as well, by “other capitals”, and under such circumstances, we wouldn’t call it “capitalism”.)

Like the agrarian regime, the modern (money) capitalist industrial one also developed in two steps.

Step one, the emergence of capitalism: This initial step revolves around the management, investment and timing of the surplus energy of the human world.

Investing the surplus of human labor in new productive measures is basically the core of capitalism; and that goes whether it is the state or a private entrepreneur who does it. (This means that Soviet communism wasn’t less “capitalist” than its counterpart in the West, hence it has often been termed “state capitalism”.)

We need to note that this was something entirely new. The agrarian regime did not manage to invest the surplus of human labor in productive measures, but merely exploited what was currently available through plunder or taxation (which is often more or less the same). If anyone (usually kings) had money they did not use (that is, essentially, surplus labor), it got locked away in treasure chests. And when it got used, it usually was not invested in new productive measures, but spent on luxury items or to build big castles or pyramids; it basically went to waste­ – according to the capitalist logic. But when the Dutch during the 17^th century managed to pool their resources, and the risk, into companies (the first of their kind), they created social machines with delicate mechanisms to generate increased economic growth by careful management and investment of surplus capital into productive measures. Money in a mattress doesn’t do anything, but money in a company does tremendous things.

So what made this development possible?

Well, because organized violence became so abundant, so total through the early modern state’s monopoly on violence, focus shifted from violence to money – from one hard logic to another (somewhat less hard) logic. Because when you have enough security (to a certain extent), and the state’s monopoly on violence secures one’s property, the game changes completely and the exchange of property by means of money moves to the center of the economy (which used to be more or less moneyless).

Remember that, before the modern state, rulers could just confiscate your property, and there were no police to defend you from robbers either. If you did not have a warrior to protect you it was “game over” – and warriors are usually not very concerned with respecting other people’s property. That makes security the main concern, and organized violence the primary capital to acquire it. But when violence is abundant, exactly because there is so much of it – or to be more exact the amount of organized violence is so total – then it ceases to be an issue to the people living under the state’s monopoly on violence, and then property becomes the main concern instead of security (which is obtained through that monopoly). And the means to get property, is money.

So to sum up: The dominant logic in the agrarian age was a quest for security where the effective management of organized violence was the crucial ingredient. The logic of the capitalistic regime is one that is born from the abundant amount of organized violence, the state’s monopoly on violence, which reshapes the main quest into one of property instead. And the effective management of money capital thus becomes the crucial ingredient in this endeavor.

The Rulers who merely invested their surplus into great building projects, such as pyramids and cathedrals, with no apparent utility (according to a capitalist logic) – or spend it on bling-bling – would eventually lose out to the capitalists. But those rulers who most efficiently allied themselves with the champions of capital became the most powerful persons in the world, in effect out-competing those who failed to do so.

Money capital began to dominate the earlier “capital” of organized violence.

And then, a new discovery made further developments possible.

Step two, the industrial revolution: The second step largely revolves around the exploitation of a new energy source, that of fossil fuels.

While following a similar development of first finding new ways of managing surplus energy, and then discovering a new energy source, modernity reversed the two-step developmental sequence of the agrarian regime by addressing human aspects first and natural ones second. The agrarian age revolutionized, as mentioned, productive measures by: 1) the management, investment and timing of the natural world and its surplus energy; and 2) by exploiting a new energy source, that of human bodies. Modernity, however, revolutionized the economy by: 1) managing the surplus energy of the human world, and 2) by exploiting a new natural energy source, that of fossil fuels.

Capitalism and industrialism generated progress and material growth to an extent never seen before. Prior to this turn growth was too slow and sluggish for people to even notice it, but now it became obvious that things were changing rapidly during one’s own lifetime. This made thinkers speculate about the notion of development, further fueling the idea that the future could be very different from the past, perhaps even better. The idea of progress was a mental and cultural revolution. Pre-modern peoples are usually not aware of the possibility of technological and scientific progress, and only barely of economic growth for that matter. This constitutes a huge difference between the modern and the pre-modern mind, and one to widen the gap between those still stuck in the old mindset and those who embraced the brave new world of modernity.

This way of thinking also had great political consequences. If the economic and technological base of society could change, maybe even society itself could be different; and not only in the distant future, but soon, and not only in the next life, but this one. And off went the king’s head.

Just like the agricultural revolution was not just about putting seeds in the ground and breeding livestock, the industrial revolution was not just about steam engines and fossil fuels, but about the way in which the whole thing was organized; how the entirety of society was to be reorganized around these new modes of production and how power relations accordingly were to be changed. As the capitalists seized the economic power they also demanded political power, and if the people were to work in factories and learn how to read and write they likewise demanded representation to secure their interests.

Let’s take a brief look at the two, two-step models again:

THE AGRARIAN REGIME

• Step one: Management of the natural world and its surplus energy, investment and timing of it (Agrarian revolution).
• Step two: Exploitation of a new energy source, human bodies (The emergence of civilization).

THE INDUSTRIAL CAPITALIST REGIME

• Step one: Management of the human world, investment, coordination and timing of its surplus energy (The emergence of capitalism).
• Step two: Exploitation of a new energy source, fossil fuels (Industrial revolution).

We see that the structure and sequential logic of these two developmental models resemble each other and are rather symmetrical. First humans learn to manage the surplus energy of an existing resource, then they discover how to exploit a new energy source. Yet, there is also a qualitative progression: In the agrarian regime the main concern is security and the primary “capital” to achieve that is organized violence, but when the early modern state finally acquires a firm monopoly on violence, the main concern moves towards property and the primary capital to acquire that becomes money.

However, that’s not all. Capitalism relies on delicate measures of handling information. And with the invention of the printing press information got much cheaper and abundant. With widely available printed accounts of trading opportunities, commodity prices and exotic tales from faraway lands, merchants could more effectively estimate the profitability of their activities and thus increase the economic growth in their home countries. The printing press also gave rise to the scientific revolution, and with time thus even further economic growth – but that’s a whole other story.

The industrial economy also created an entirely new class structure. The managers of money capital, the so called capitalists, moved to the top of the new social hierarchy, pushing the old landed elite aside, and at the bottom a new class of industrial workers emerged, the proletariat, those without property. A bourgeois middle class also emerged, striving towards becoming capitalists themselves while fervently avoiding to become proletarians. Even though the initial emergence of capitalism caused slavery to increase, industrialism eventually abolished this practice. Slaves were no longer needed as it turned out people on the brink of starvation made less loyal workers (remember, you need to feed your slaves), and the possibility of becoming a capitalist yourself made the growing petty bourgeoisie industrious and loyal to the new regime.

Let’s compare the two in a bit more detail.

Note that I have called the era preceding modernity the “faustian” era, or metameme; derived from the story of Goethe’s Faust who exchanged his soul for power – which was exactly what humanity did at the advent of civilization. You can read more about this in my books.

Transitional Eras

But something is missing. The transition between the two was not a sudden event, but a more gradual with long transition periods.

The Axial Age

Before the emergence of capitalism the agrarian regime was profoundly changed by the intellectual developments that began in the so called “Axial Age” c. 500 BCE, which introduced ethics and spiritual traditions – all conveyed through literary masterpieces. The philosophy of the Greeks, Confucius’ writings in China, Buddhism and the Judaic tradition, which later evolved into Christianity and Islam, changed how we thought about the world, life and how we should organize society. And it all became possible with the invention of a new information technology, something more than just writing, namely literature.

Combined with the state’s ever firmer monopoly on violence, growing wealth and increased literacy in a wider proportion of the populace, new dangerous ideas started to emerge as both political and intellectual challengers from the periphery began to erode the existing base of power – rebels like Jesus of Nazareth and the Buddha emerged. The old myths and the political legitimacy of the established political order were scrutinized from a more critical point of view, while novel ways were sought to address the dire needs of all the forgotten souls of the empire and the hardships of life in agrarian civilization. The old myths didn’t satisfy the emotional and spiritual needs of people any more, the divine sun king didn’t appear as morally legitimate any longer and new radical solutions were needed to meet the growing social unrest and discontentment with the political elite’s oppression and mistreatment of people. For all the progress we had made life shouldn’t be this hard and unjust, but what could be the remedy? Sounds familiar? Just wait.

But, what started as a revolt against the establishment was eventually adopted by the empires themselves to provide them with the necessary moral legitimacy, and the rebels themselves gradually became part of the new established order (seen that before). A new bargain was made, replacing the “faustian” one, as rulers ultimately agreed to subject themselves to a new moral order in exchange of staying in charge. They relinquished their claim to divine exclusiveness and accepted the role of merely being the divine’s mediators and foremost representatives on Earth (Evident in for example the Chinese idea of the Mandate of Heaven.) With the invention of divine law rulers had to govern in accordance with higher moral principles not even they stood above, and they only upheld their political legitimacy as long as they did so. And with the invention of the idea of “the soul” not only the elites were considered to have heavenly qualities; now everybody had a piece of inviolable divinity within them. An agreement was reached that rulers retained their higher status within the realms of the earthly mundane, but in heaven everybody was on a more equal footing.

This development also created a new class structure. The clergy became a political force to be reckoned with, unlike the simple scribes and ceremonial leaders (who were often the rulers themselves), of the previous era. And since rulers couldn’t rule without the blessings of God (or other divine principles), they had to act like noble Kings and uphold certain principles. Being a tyrant or despot wasn’t good enough anymore. Likewise, artisans and merchants, growing in numbers, became a group with distinct interests and ideas of their own. And to some extent even slavery was dismantled – but only to the extent that you couldn’t enslave people of your own faith (and later, among Europeans, your own skin color, but that’s another story).

But demands for social justice and the moral legitimacy of those in power were not the only issues; the way in which people were to treat one another was a great concern too. The brutish and nasty ways in which people often treated each other in agrarian society needed to change. The cruelty had to stop. Moral teachings of pro-social behavior were developed and preachers encouraged people to let go of their immediate self-interest in furtherance of the greater good, often with the promise of eternal bliss in the afterlife if they complied.

However, as we know, the critics of the faustian agrarian regime only partly succeeded in creating a fair society. They rarely – or never – achieved the divine state they preached about. But many brutal customs were abandoned and behaviors that previously had been commonly accepted as part of everyday life were now frowned upon. Pious attitudes and behaviors were rewarded and rulers could not behave as arbitrarily as before. Society became a little bit more humane, and many people acquired higher things to believe in and higher principles to strive towards.

But the productive “engine” of society wasn’t replaced by these social and moral developments. The economic engine of society still relied upon agriculture and the only way to govern an agrarian society was with a firm monopoly on violence in the hands of a small privileged elite. So even if the new spiritual and ethical traditions tried to change the prevailing power relations, they only managed to a limited extent. So on one hand society was equipped with a new cultural and moral superstructure on top of its agrarian engine – permeating more or less every aspect of society. But on the other hand, given the still relatively brutal and oppressive circumstances of the agrarian era, its ethical properties may appear as nothing but a superficial veneer. It does sound familiar, doesn’t it? Well here goes:

Postmodernity

Now, let’s move to the postmodern era. That is today! Mass media and a literate public have changed modern, capitalist society just like literature changed agrarian society. It has increased awareness and critical thinking, new ideologies to have “faith” in have appeared, but it hasn’t replaced the productive engine of capitalism.

Postmodernity is a cultural, transitional, phase – just like the one that began with the Axial Age that I have given the name “postfaustian” (with the addition of the “post”-prefix it has been my intention to stress the similarity). Such phases tend to revolve around new standards of ethics and notions of equality to counter the elitist and exploitive tendencies of the established regime. And in that regard postfaustianism did succeed, to some extent, by providing marginalized groups certain rights and powers they did not have within the faustian regime. The great project of these “post-”stages can be said to be one of equalizing power relations and redistributing authority in accordance with new moral guidelines. They also tend to make societies a little “smarter” by emphasizing intellectual developments, and socially more efficient and robust by cultivating more benign social relations and encouraging spiritual growth.

Postmodernity emerged, just like its postfaustian predecessor, from the ethical shortcomings of the established regime. As soon as modern capitalist society matured into its early industrial form, the critics followed. At first, these were a few individuals – intellectuals, artists and even mystics. But in time, the many springs gathered and grew into a flood: the young Marx’s romantic death sentence to capitalism, major philosophical schools – like existentialism and phenomenology – that sought to emphasize the spiritual and existential sides of life, and finally full-blown student revolts in Paris and on US campuses in 1968. And lately, mainstream culture has itself become critical of modern society, not least thanks to electronic mass media.

Postmodernity is a reaction against the perceived superficial and soulless rationality of modernity and the many injustices modern capitalism entails despite its promises. Initially the modern worldview was criticized, by the movement known as Romanticism, for not sufficiently capturing the manifold beauties of human life and for not providing meaningful spiritual experiences. With time the criticism advanced to a point where modernity’s pursuit of knowledge and progress was claimed to be illusory and shallow, and the prevalence of illegitimate totalitarian principles embedded in its ideas of “progress” and “rationality”. The postmodern thinkers and intellectuals labor to expose these hidden power structures and to challenge them. According to these critics the modern approach had been one-dimensional and failed in its task of enlightenment and emancipation. And as an alternative a wide range of new equally valid perspectives have been offered along new approaches to science, art and philosophy.

So as with its postfaustian predecessor, postmodernity also has its righteous rebels and affiliated “churches” such as queer-feminism, post-colonialism and environmental protectionism. These rebels can be said to constitute a new “priesthood”, also known as the inherently postmodern invention of the “intellectual”, who’s mission it is to discipline and correct those unfortunate enough to subscribe to the dated ethics of the past. Despite being a minority, “pomos”, in virtue of often higher levels of education, but also since their arguments conceptually beat modern (and traditional postfaustian) arguments at their own game, have managed to change public discourse in favor of postmodern values to a considerable degree.

The result of this is that modernists and postfaustians often pretend to conform to the postmodern ideology. Postmodern arguments on ethics are conceptually simply superior, and most people at least want to pretend that they subscribe to it. No one wants to be a racist, or a sexist, and who can argue against the fact that the environment is important. But in reality, many in late modern society are merely paying lip service to the ethical code of postmodernity. This phenomenon does deserve comparison with the pious pretentiousness associated with the traditional, postfaustian religions.

But despite the priestly characteristics of its disciples postmodernity is actually more secular than modernity. Jean-François Lyotard wrote in 1979 that “[s]implifying to the extreme, I define postmodern as incredulity towards metanarratives”, by which he meant all teleological narratives that guide or structure explanations of social reality. This has had the effect that many of our beliefs have been brought into question, critically deconstructed as nothing but beliefs, “mythologies” relying on faith, including all of the grand ideologies such as liberalism, communism and socialism. Democracy and capitalism have likewise been critically examined and deemed to be little more than naive beliefs. Even an idea such as scientific objectivity has been proclaimed to be just another myth, and our notions about gender as a biological constant have been exposed to be culturally and socially derived conventions. In light of the rampant ecological destruction and the unequal distribution of its spoils, the modern idea of progress has also been harshly criticized and exposed as a harmful myth. But the foremost mythologies to have been brought to the slaughter are perhaps those from which power and authority are derived. Postmodernity is inherently hostile towards all authorities and social hierarchies and has as its central objective to reveal all the injustice and oppression and the arbitrary narratives on which it all relies.

The above mentioned postmodern philosopher Lyotard also once wrote that postmodernism is “…the consequence of capital and informational flows that have moved beyond political or instrumental control.” Citizens of late modern societies are often wealthy enough, have the sufficient educational level and adequate access to information technologies, so as to defy the center of political and economic control. Again we see the equalizing tendency of a transitional stage of development in action. And just like the societal developments in late faustian societies allowed for challengers to arise from the peripheries of the center of power, so does the technological complexity and level of wealth in late modern society generate opponents from the margins to counter the accumulation of power and wealth by the elites today. And just like their postfaustian predecessors, these pomos likewise seek to redistribute wealth and power in accordance with new moral standards. By criticizing modern capitalism their goal is to alter the rules by which power relations play out.

But just like postfaustianism, postmodernity does not have any groundbreaking suggestions for how the logic of the productive regime can be fundamentally changed. Although this is a contested claim, I would argue that postmodernity does not really have any means to replace the logic of capitalism – nothing to replace the regime of hard, cold cash, that is.

So even if postmodern thinkers have suggestions to democratize power over capital, it is still money, and as such still the engine of money capitalism that runs society and the economy as a whole. And as long as money is the logic by which the economy runs (paying people to work and so on), it is, by definition, still capitalism – and as such, a logic inherently alien to the many social and emotional aspects postmodernity seeks to address.

Postmodernity wants to change the principles on which money and property are distributed in society, but still runs on the very same logic of – you guessed it – money and property. A hard logic is still lacking for generating a new engine of production. And as this fact has become increasingly more obvious since the end of the Cold War and the fall of socialism, postmodernity has consequently become more prone to sarcasm and cynicism, merely mocking its modern opponents and using its cultural and ethical superiority to position itself favorably within the current system. It appears as if postmodernity, now in its mature form, has moved to a point which equals its postfaustian predecessors at the later stage following the initial revolutionary era of the Axial Age: a condition where worldly matters are largely left to the ruling structures of the productive regime while settling for influence over the moral and cultural sphere.

Postmodernism is currently – and rapidly – constructing an entirely new cultural superstructure on top of the modern, capitalistic engine of production. Still, this superstructure is one that can be said to be merely a veneer around the capitalist engine, just like that of its postfaustian predecessor.

Postmodernity has made life a little more humane. Tolerance of ethnic and sexual minorities has improved, gender relations are not as rigid and oppressive as before and measures have been taken to save the environment. And where modernity – inhibited by the logic of its national ethnocentrism – failed in creating a larger circle of solidarity encompassing all people, in all nations, postmodernity is currently succeeding in producing “world-citizens” with multiculturalist values and global perspectives. So just like the postfaustian traditions managed to create great civilizational world-religions, incorporating people of many different creeds and cultures within the same mythological imagined community, postmodernity is currently narrating the tale of one world and one humanity.

Here is a presentation including the transition eras.

As you see, we are right in the middle of a transition period. The engine of our economy is still industrial capitalism, and the main concern of society, which pretty much all of our institutions are designed for, revolves around property – which is acquired with the means of money capital.

However, some elements are different from the capitalist society described by Marx in the 19^th century, most notably the class structure. Instead of the traditional division into proletarians and bourgeoisie (which I have divided into capitalists and middle class), the new class structure in late modern or postmodern society has been accompanied by the precariat and the creative class. The precariat is currently a growing demographic, consisting of people in a variety of “precarious” situations – who find it difficult to gain a foothold on the labor market. The precariat should not be confused with the working class and they don’t identify with the traditional organized working class, with its ties to the unions and labor parties. Often they have very different interests than the working class, not only because they don’t have the same ties to the labor market, but also because they often don’t have the same values and aspirations in life.

The creative class, the ones preoccupied with the manufacturing of new symbols and information, not merely the reproduction hereof, is also a growing group of people. Despite their sometimes relatively high incomes and on the surface white-collar occupation, they don’t fall into the same category as the traditional, bourgeois middle class because their values are usually much more progressive. They tend to be exceedingly post-material and their interests are more aligned with emotional needs such as self-realization than with the typical property rights of the bourgeoisie.

So what do I want to say with all of this?

Well, the capitalist society we live in today is very different from the one described by Marx in the 19^th century. It still runs on the productive engine of industrial capitalism – but there are differences. Postmodern philosophies, inherently hostile towards the capitalist regime, have succeeded in changing public discourse and they have empowered oppositional groups. Electronic mass media have expanded and saturated our lives to a degree where they have come to play the defining role in how we perceive the world, also making way for marginalized and previously invisible groups to make their voices heard. Information technologies, AI and robotics have progressed to a level where more and more jobs are getting automated. Symbols, not manufactured goods, have moved to the center of the economy; whereby the growing emphasis on innovation and new signs and symbols has given rise to an emerging creative class and made those who master the symbols most competently the new masters of the world. And globalization has pushed the production of industrial goods to the margins of the world economy, leaving a growing precariat behind in the old industrial heartlands of the West. All of this has led to a version of modernity, a postmodern kind, where physical reality has become increasingly subordinated to the logic of the symbolic.

However, for all these changes, despite the huge differences between a modern and a postmodern society, and even if the economy on the surface level has moved far beyond its old industrial form of the steel and coal era, it’s still capitalism. The postmodern society, of which we have only seen the beginning, is going to change the way in which we think about reality, how we relate to others and even our level ethical conduct. It will change our culture in its image. But it won’t fundamentally change how capitalism works. It will never abolish capitalism despite the many passionate attempts. It would like to, but it simply cannot because it lacks the analytical means to do so. It can only develop a cultural, or ethical, superstructure on top of the existing capitalistic engine of production. This is what qualifies postmodernity as a transitional phase.

Luckily, postmodernity is not the end of history. In what almost appears as a “law” of history, every cultural and intellectual transition phase, such as postfaustianism and postmodernism is followed by a new productive logic (which couldn’t be provided by the “post-” paradigm due to its core ideology), that has the capacity to outcompete the productive logic of the preceding regime, which then renders the transitional paradigm largely irrelevant, only to be challenged by a new emergent transitional phase, and so on – until, who knows, the logic breaks down and gets replaced by a new law yet to be discovered.

What to do with Capitalism?

Postmodernism can’t abolish or replace capitalism because it doesn’t provide any means to compete with the logic of money capital. Even if we find ways to democratize power over capital, even if the use of capital is heavily regulated and even if we distribute capital more evenly, yes, even if we abolish the free market altogether and implement fixed prices and planned economics; it is still a form of capitalism since money remains the primary means of exchange and property (the question about who gets what); money is still the all-embracing issue the whole shebang revolves around.

It is a telling sign that all non-authoritarian socialists and anarchists have been intellectuals without political power. Their ideas have simply not been realizable. And this is also why all communist societies were state capitalist. As long as money remains the primary and dominant means of economic exchange and organization and as long as it is the one measure to which the value of most products and services are measured, l money be the logic by which the economy runs and we’ll continue to be subjects of capitalism. Unless you have another logic that beats money capital at its own game you cannot go beyond it.

So how can we abolish capitalism then? …you might ask. But that’s the pomo talking! The simple answer is that you can’t. You cannot remove capitalism altogether, just like you cannot remove the state’s monopoly on violence (without getting into trouble – and then you’ll return to status quo). Remember the history lesson above. The postfaustians tried to abolish all the wicked evil-doings of violent men, they tried to build a peaceful kingdom on Earth in the image of God by moralizing and turning the other cheek, and they all utterly failed! They didn’t have a competitive logic to replace the dominant capital of organized violence. But money capitalism never made way with the state’s organized violence, it didn’t even try. It did something else. In fact, it used the state’s monopoly on organized violence, abundant violence, to finally create a situation where security became such a minor issue that the quest for property with the means of money capital, rather than violence, came to dominate the economy. In the end, money capital outcompeted violence as the most effective means of coordinating people’s productive actions. It beat it at its own game by subordinating it to the logic of money.

Now, money is the logic and means by which people that don’t have personal relations of a loving kind exchange products and services – and that’s going to be with us for a long time. We’re not going to see a real communist society where everyone shares everything with each other as in a family any time soon. But, the exchange of product and services doesn’t need to be the most fundamental aspect of the economy. The acquisition of property doesn’t need to be the primary concern in people’s lives. In fact, for some lucky individuals it isn’t. And for many of us, a great deal of our everyday activities is not concerned with property.

This brings us to the next question.

How Can we Outcompete Capitalism?

So, how can we do that? Think about it! Are there things out there we could do to outcompete capitalism? What about these things, for example?

• Local grass root movements?
• Protest marches?
• Off grid communities?
• Petitions?
• NGO’s?
• Community kitchens?

Hmm, you sure about this? I mean, these are all good things indeed, but they don’t exactly go beyond capitalism. Some of these things (like NGOs) even depend on the capitalist engine of production to provide them with the necessary resources to function. But it’s not just the dependency on money that is a problem. The main issue is that none of the above is capable of supplementing the logic of money with a higher, more competitive logic; hence they are all, ultimately, subordinated to the iron law of capital in the end. A crucial ingredient is missing.

Capitalism out-competed the old agrarian regime because it managed to make money capital more effective than violence capital, and in effect subordinated organized violence to the logic of hard, cold cash. So, what could be the means to outcompete the logic of money capital? Only if you can reliably organize and coordinate the behaviors of millions of people by another logic than money, then will you have created a relation between humans that is non-capitalist. But for that you’ll actually need another form of capital, and remember, there are many forms of capital out there so what could it be?

Now, it’s not so simple that some forms of capital are just superior to others. You can’t just pick the highest card in the stack and run with. It all depends on the context, and current situation. Remember, for money capital to become the dominant mechanism for managing people’s behaviors and relations, society first had to evolve to a very high level of development. So we need to look into the current developments and try to foresee the future.

The Attention Economy

Postmodernity still runs on money and property, but the emergence of mass media has changed the game to some extent. People are better informed than ever and information has become extremely cheap. But recently a new media phenomenon appeared you might have heard of, the internet. Now, the internet is not just a further development of the electronic mass media of the 20^th century, it is to the postmodern phenomenon of mass media what the printing press was to literature. I don’t want to sound like a cliché, but yes, it has revolutionized everything. But if you think it has truly changed our society now you haven’t seen anything yet. We’re just at the beginning.

The internet has substantially increased the amount of information, made it available to virtually everyone and lowered the price to almost zero. Together with AI, robotics and 3D printing it will soon dramatically reduce the price of material goods as well.

Now, before we move on I just need to add that just like agricultural products are just as crucial today as during the agrarian era (we all need to eat), manufactured products will remain just as important in the future. Without food, housing and all the products we surround us with our way of living obviously wouldn’t be possible. However, just like farmers lost their key economic role with the emergence of industrialism, so will industrial manufacturers lose their primacy in the future – and to some extent they already have. It is the ones who control, manage and create new symbols, the lords of information – not of property – who will become the most powerful ones in the future, simply because industrial goods will become so abundant and easy to manufacture and new symbols, information and ideas so much harder to produce and manage.

Will this mean a classless society where everybody can have their material needs met? Yes and no. Material gains will be much cheaper to acquire, and in such an economy political measures will more likely than not be sought to provide people with most of the things they need. We will see a political alliance between the growing creative class and the equally rapid growing precariat to make sure that happens. These groups are also characterized by their predominant “post materialist values”, not meaning that they are non-materialists, but that they strive towards something more than just material gains. For example, emotional needs such as self-esteem, peace of mind and self-realization become central – in short a meaningful, and happy, life beyond material acquisitions.

It will lead to a society where the old property-based upper-class will lose out to the creative class, first economically and later politically, and the old Left won’t be able to rely on the working class which will decrease in size on behalf of a precariat – a group whose interests are not equal to those of the working class.

However. The end result will not be a classless society. One class structure will just replace another. At the top of this new social hierarchy we’ll find the so called “netocrats” (a notion put forth by the philosopher Alexander Bard), the masters of the symbols and information, and at the bottom a class of people who merely consume what the netocrats produce, the consumtariat. Those who direct attention – and those who are left in the audience.

In this new economy the concern with physical property will decrease because of the abundance, and the means to acquire it, money, will thus decrease in importance, especially among the ruling netocrat elite more preoccupied with all the things money can’t buy. Money will thus lose some its power over people; it won’t motivate them as much since other concerns than property are perceived more desirable, and money capital won’t be able to manage people behaviors to the same extent as before, that is, make them do what money used to make them do.

When people’s material needs are met it’s not more money they are after, but emotional needs such as good relations, self-esteem and self-realization. And for that you need attention, you want people’s recognition – and when working with information or symbols, as more people are doing, one’s work is essentially worthless without other people paying attention to you.

This will be a fierce battle with proud winners and sore losers. Since symbols can be reproduced infinitely, only the best will have an audience.

And remember, by creating the symbols everyone desires, you can exchange that for money – if that’s what you want after all. One form of dominant capital can always be exchanged for another, subordinated, form of capital at a very favorable exchange rate.

Emotional Energy

So what is the main concern in the attention economy? What is the prime quest, the stuff everybody is after in an economy where property has become of secondary importance?

Emotional energy! It’s the stuff everyone basically wants, all the time. Positive feelings, right? And, of course, avoiding negative ones.

Both violence and money produce emotional responses; in fact, that’s actually the most fundamental feature of these measures: point a gun at someone’s face and you produce an emotional response that alters that person’s behavior. The mechanism of the stick. The same goes for money, wave a stack of money bills in front of someone and you might produce an emotional response that make that person do what you want. The mechanism of the carrot that beats the power of the stick.

But emotional energy is essentially what we have been seeking the entire time. Not the money or the gun itself. With the proper use of symbols one can actually make someone do what you want them to do with a will and desire that guns and money can’t compete with. People might alter their behaviors because they are scared of your gun, or because they need money to pay their bills, but getting them excited and wanting to do the best they can requires more delicate measures. And if they aren’t scared or have enough money to pay their bills, being able to master such symbols is much more powerful. And who cares about someone offering you a carrot if you just ate.

You think I’m kidding? Well, just look at the feverish eager of young activists who decide on joining some cause or the other instead of earning more money. Or people paying good money to stand and scream at someone performing a music piece. The church has actually known about this mechanism for a while, but has recently lost some of its competitive edge in generating high level of emotional energy. And by the way, why are you still reading this piece, it’s pretty long, and you are not getting paid? Some exciting symbols made you keep reading this text because it causes some amount of emotional energy.

But wait, if emotional energy is the main concern in the attention economy, what would then be the new dominant means of capital to acquire it? The form of capital destined to outcompete money capital?

Cultural Capital

Cultural capital is the stuff that’s going to outcompete money capital. So what is it then? Well, it’s the form of capital that makes me capable of writing – and reading – this post; it’s the capacity to create a song everyone wants to listen to; the game everyone wants to play; it’s knowing the stuff everyone wants to know; and it’s the capacity to come up with the new facebook or twitter, inventing a flying car and all the ideas in the heads of scientists that make them capable of doing their jobs. Cultural capital is basically the mastery of symbols. And if you have high enough cultural capital you might even create new high-value symbols.

In the new emerging economy that makes the ones with high cultural capital increasingly powerful over the ones who only have money capital because the exchange rate of money will decrease while that of cultural capital goes up. And in the era of the internet the ones with high cultural capital don’t really need anything else but a cheap laptop with an internet connection to do their work. They don’t need a lot of money to get started, buying land or building a factory. And what you do with that laptop if you have high cultural capital can be exchanged for money capital, often at a generous exchange rate – if that’s what you desire.

And just as importantly, cultural capital can also be exchanged for political, social and other kinds of capital. And it can get you laid. By having access to large amounts of cultural capital you can win against those who only have only have money, and eventually someday become even richer than them.

To sum up: In the agrarian regime the main concern was security and the most effective form of capital to achieve that was organized violence. But as the amount of organized violence became so abundant with the early modern state’s monopoly on violence, the main concern instead moved towards property and the capital to acquire it thus became money. Now, when property becomes so abundant that it ceases to be the main concern, emotional energy moves to the center of the stage and the means to acquire it, and to create it, thus becomes cultural capital.

But what’s not abundant in the new economy is attention. Emotional energy is difficult to quantify, but attention is actually a more quantifiable asset that can be economized if we think about it: the time and intensity with which direct our attention can be measured. As all scarce resources in the past, attention is actually likely to hit the political agenda in the future. Some might even talk about creating a more “listening society”, for instance (wink, wink).

Attention is often needed to generate emotional energy; people need to be seen, they want to be heard, they want someone to care about them. But in order to get attention beyond a smaller circle, one needs to have some amount of cultural capital, you need something of interest to other people, a reason for them to listen to you – otherwise they don’t get any emotional energy from you, it’ll be uneconomical to pay attention to you.

Material wealth is actually not the greatest concern in the most developed nations today. It seems as though, as pointed out by the philosopher and sociologist Jürgen Habermas, that in late modern society, the main concern is actually lack of “motivation” – that is, of emotional energy. To make people do all the good things we want and need them to do, if money doesn’t motivate them, we need something else to foster the needed emotional energy. In this situation the ones who’ll be able to create that emotional energy will be the next rulers, they’ll acquire the political as well as the economic power.

Here is the final table with all of the above developments included:

What the Hell are You Talking About?

…you might think. I know. You might say that “it’s not very concrete, is it? After all, money makes the world go round, and the material economic hard facts of life are essentially what counts in the end.” Well, the capitalistic economy with money was actually a very subtle and delicate matter in the minds of most people 250 years ago. Back then you might have replied that “it’s not very concrete what the accountants and merchants are doing, is it?  No way these abstract numbers and arbitrary values far from concrete reality could become the dominant forces of society. What really matters is the concrete sword of the king, yes?  After all, security counts more than anything else, and a good sword makes that more likely to happen than a stack of papers in your hand. Right? How could these wimpy figures who wouldn’t last one day in battle become the new kings?”

Well they did.

Simply because they were better at affecting the behaviors and relations of human beings. And in a future society where material gains, property, is so abundant that it ceases being the main concern, the ones who most effectively generate emotional energy by managing the cultural capital that make the new world go round, they, will be the new kings. God have mercy on their souls.

This won’t create a utopian society, one without struggle and competition. There will still be winners and losers. But it will be qualitatively different from a capitalist society, and it will be able to mend some of its greatest maladies. After all, being consumtariat and lacking the cherished positive attention of others is not fun – but it is a better place to start for creating a fair society, than is material poverty and being tied to wage labor.

In the internet age, the revolution of cultural capital can topple money capitalism and create a more free, fair and equal society – more than any of the socialist ideas ever could. But the promised utopia is still only a relative utopia. I say it’s still worth going for; because it will dramatically improve people’s lives. It will still be more fair and equal than what our friends the socialists have managed to offer.

The only thing that can replace capitalism is something that beats it at its own game, given the specific economic and technological circumstances. We cannot moralize it away or purify it away with the piety of our critical minds and the goodness of our hearts. That will only ever be veneer on the slick capitalist engine, still running society.

The way to outcompete capitalism is to politically strengthen the currents that draw us beyond it – towards a world ruled by cultural capital. And then we take it from there. We must the opportunities that these new forms of non-capitalist human life can offer to create a free and equal society.

Because these developments are underway whether we like it or not, we are wiser to shape them in the direction of equality and fairness than to play along with the regime of money capitalism. The risks are great – but so are, undeniably, the possibilities for radical social change.

Let’s not waste the opportunity.

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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.

First of all, it should be obvious that it doesn’t suffice to merely advocate the same ideas that have been floating around for the past 30 years or more when claiming a supposedly new political position (such as post -68 humanist Marxism or critical theory). In order to be an “alternative” a new position is required that drastically differs from any former stances. This means that those who self-describe as Alt-Left but only seem to disown the prevailing Left without anchoring this criticism in a greater framework of thought, and without an elaborated analysis of what exactly it is that constitutes this new political position, eventually won’t have the necessary means to back up their claims of representing a new ideology worth its name.

Now, it’s no secret that the Alt-Left has emerged as a response to the current surge in nationalist and regressive tendencies in Western politics, in that sense being the namesake of the Alt-Right. It’s also a reaction against the many postmodern tendencies that have permeated the Left for the last many decades – and, to some extent, have paved the way for the recent success of the reactionary Right. However, the Alt-Left is not just an anti-movement; it’s not just a counter reaction to other phenomena out there, but just as much a political program in its own right. The Alt-Left is a child of our time, one that seeks to address current societal developments in a proactive manner by proposing new ideas about how the world could be made better.

No, it’s not about Misogyny and Bigotry

So with this said we can might as well begin with the first grave misunderstanding you’re probably thinking about right now: “the Alt-Left as just another excuse for bigotry and misogyny, merely a copy-paste of the Alt-Right in leftist disguise.” – This, is very far off the mark.

Now, it’s true that many who identify as Alt-Left use it as just another excuse for misogyny and bigotry. However, such nonsense doesn’t qualify for a new political position, and, since it’s not aligned with the core values of progressive leftist thought it should not be considered as such. A critical stance towards feminism and multiculturalism, which is part of the Alt-Left, does not mean one should endorse bigotry. On the contrary. The criticism only has merit as long as it stresses the lacking capabilities of the aforementioned schools of thought to actually generate greater sexual and ethnic equality.

So even if many proponents of the Alt-Left have a critical stance towards today’s feminism, it should not be mistaken for anti-feminism. To be considered progressive one has to acknowledge and include many of the advances of the women’s movement, strive towards gender equality and stress the equal value of all sexual identities. The Alt-Left actually endorses feminism; it seeks to support all forms of sexual and gender-based equality, including even the men’s movement (in its non-misogynic forms). Accordingly, the Alt-Left should not be misinterpreted as simple anti-feminism when it criticizes current views on the matter, but instead, when done in an appropriate manner, be seen as a further development of feminism that includes and gives equal value to all genders, all sexual orientations and all lifestyles – even the issues of males, heterosexuals and traditional gender roles.

The Alt-Left’s critical stance towards multiculturalism should likewise not be mistaken for plain bigotry. Any progressive movement needs to emphasize ethnic and religious equality, protect the rights of minorities and endorse cultural expression in all its diversity. However, celebrating diversity in itself does not suffice for societal harmony, peace and coherency. The multiculturalist emphasis on the communication part, attempting to bridge differences and conflicts across cultural barriers by intercultural dialog alone, is simply seen as a highly inadequate measure to reduce tensions and conflicts that often arise in multicultural societies. So instead of multiculturalism, the Alt-Left goes one step further towards transculturalism.

Transculturalism is the idea that cultures are ever-evolving non-static entities that – often, but not always – reach the most beneficial outcomes when they are challenged, opened up for outside influences, transgressed and fused with other cultural elements. It’s the view that cultures and other identities are merely sliding semantic categories, changing over time, overlapping and interacting with other sociological variables in a myriad of ways and that the best way to go about this is to refrain from seeing cultures as sacred entities that should be respected and preserved no matter what. Cultural expressions, just as religious ones, shouldn’t stand above criticism. Some tendencies may in fact be harmful. So of equal importance to the multicultural emphasis on intercultural understanding and dialogue are thus the deliberate, but sensitive, attempts to change and shape cultures so as to foster more optimal conditions for peaceful co-existence and productive collaboration. This includes majority as well as minority cultures, but obviously does not endorse the hegemony of one specific culture above others. Transculturalist intentions should never be used as an excuse to oppress minorities and it does not remove tolerance, sensitiveness and inclusion from the equation.

It’s not against Immigration

This brings us to the next major misunderstanding: that the Alt-Left is an anti-immigration movement. The Alt-Left does not oppose immigration as such, in fact, it sees the freedom of individuals to settle where they wish as a long term goal and something worth fighting for when it’s practically and politically possible. However, the Alt-Left has emerged in a time and age where the Left’s liberal position on immigration has proved rather socially unsustainable and caused severe disorder in the social fabric in rich countries (as well as many poor countries, albeit in other ways). This circumstance is one of the primary contributors to the rise of populist and nationalist sentiments in recent years. The Alt-Left accordingly seeks to take the necessary measures in order to address the anxieties and alienation experienced by a large part of the population, especially those who feel marginalized in the new global economy.

But, it is not a matter of endorsing nationalist sentiments or making a virtue out of “protecting the borders” of the nation. The Alt-Left acknowledges that immigration is often a valuable contribution to society, so minimizing the influx of immigrants is not a goal in itself. It’s more a matter of adjusting the number of immigrants and refugees to a more socially sustainable level that doesn’t foster resentment, while simultaneously encouraging the forms of immigration that seem to cause less friction. It’s therefore a simplification and a misinterpretation that the Alt-Left is just against immigration.

The Alt-Left often criticizes the way in which the asylum system works (or more specifically, doesn’t work) and how it doesn’t really create morally justifiable outcomes. A similar line of rhetoric is often used by the Right, however, unfortunately mostly as an excuse to relieve the rich world from its international responsibilities. The Alt-Left position is quite the opposite. It’s a sober, utilitarian assessment that in deeply altruistic terms emphasizes a more efficient use of the rich countries’ resources. For instance, by encouraging further investments into foreign aid, increased transnational collaboration and humanitarian interventions conducted in a more anthropologically sensitive manner you can simple relieve much more human suffering than by using the same resources for helping refugees. The Alt-Left is not opposed to receiving asylum seekers as such; it may very well be the only ethically justified solution in many instances, but it does stress the fact that it is a very expensive and inefficient measure that can never solve an acute humanitarian crisis. Asylum in rich countries is poised to remain an option to the privileged few who have the means to travel abroad, only capable of giving relief to a very small fraction of the world’s refugees. Accordingly other, more efficient, measures should be sought to address these dire international issues.

So when the Alt-Left challenges many of the liberal positions of the established Left regarding immigration, refugees and the role of the nation state, it’s simply a misunderstanding, derived from ignorance about the underlining values and reasoning from which the Alt-Left reaches its conclusions, that impels the defenders of the above position into deeming the Alt-Left as nationalistic, anti-immigration and no better than the regressive Right.

The Alt-Left is not nationalistic, it doesn’t harbor any romantic ideas about the nation state. Quite the contrary, it’s actually less nationally inclined than the old established Left as it has a more elaborated and well-founded program, one that is in tune with the current state of the globalized information economy and that explicitly seeks to go beyond the narrow confines of the nation state. By virtue of its emphasis on transnational solutions to the many problems that can’t sufficiently be addressed on the level of the nation state, and not even between states (viz. the “inter-”national aspirations of the old Left), it’s therefore less national. And ironically the Alt-Left is more faithful to the ethos of the old socialist International than is the old established Left. which still considers the nation state the primary political unit and the predominant arena for political change.

It’s not Atheistic

The third common place misunderstanding regards religion, namely: that the Alt-Left is anti-religious, zealously atheistic or even, especially in regards to one specific religion, outright islamophobic. This couldn’t be further from the truth.

The Left has always been critical of religion and religious authorities. But this has changed somewhat in later years as the number of religious minorities has increased and the postmodern, identity-based Left has risen to the task of protecting the right of religious freedom (for good reasons, too). But in doing so some of the criticism may have been thrown out with the bathwater. Many, of which some identify as Alt-Left, have accordingly reacted against this tendency and attempted to reclaim the Left’s critical stance towards religion, especially that of Islam, which many consider to have dodged the criticisms that usually apply to the majority religion. However, some of the views out there, claimed to be derived from an Alt-Left position, can be rejected as nothing but outright islamophobia when they cross the delicate line between criticism of religion and discrimination. The general stance of the Alt-Left should not be misinterpreted as an attack on religious freedoms or tolerance. Islamophobic tendencies and attempts at revoking the religious rights of any group are never aligned with anything worthy of the Alt-Left label. Such notions have no justifications in a progressive movement.

The Alt-Left is not anti-religious. Quite the contrary, it actually encourages and wishes to support spiritual growth and personal development as these phenomena bring value to people’s life, and, even have the capacity to further the emotional and ethical development of society as a whole. This is one of the aspects that make the Alt-Left radically different from many of its leftist predecessors. The old Left often considered spiritual practice inappropriate and counter-productive as a means for societal development. In many historical cases the Left has even attempted to eliminate religious sentiments in favor of atheism.

However, even if the Alt-Left deems spiritual practice valuable, it does retain the Left’s critical stance towards religious authorities. It’s observant and wary of religious oppression, sectarian tendencies and harmful mythologically founded assumptions that hinder scientific thought and political progress. Instead, it seeks to encourage spiritual growth and personal development in ways that are scientifically supported and thoroughly documented to generate positive results. So in a way, the Alt-Left’s stance on religion should be seen as a form of secular spirituality rather than an advocacy of atheism.

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In short, if it isn’t clear by now, being a misogynic, racist and islamophobic old-school liberal or social democrat does not make you Alt-Left even if you identify as such – this position doesn’t need a new term and therefore shouldn’t qualify as Alt-Left.

It’s not Reactionary Leftism

The fourth misunderstanding is that the Alt-Left is merely a return to the old liberal or social democratic virtues of yesteryear. As mentioned, the yearning to go back to a time before Leftist politics became too postmodern doesn’t justify the usage of a new political label. So simply stressing the interests of the working class in favor of the many minority issues that have permeated the Left in recent years is not an adequate response to the current crisis of the Left. Even if the interests of the common working class may have been neglected and do deserve our attention, it’s a reactionary stance to merely turn the clock back and reassert old-school policies in accordance with an industrial proletariat that doesn’t really exist anymore in the developed world. Neglecting minority issues is not the way forward.

The Alt-Left has emerged as a response to the outdated programs of the old established Left, as an answer to how the Left ought to reform many of its traditional views and adjust to the new social and economic circumstances in the global information society of today. So simply relying on older notions about how labor and production worked in the industrial age, while rejecting all the new ideas about gender, race and identity, is an extremely insufficient approach to tackle current issues that never should be mistaken as Alt-Left.

However, that doesn’t mean that an Alt-Left position necessarily rejects everything associated with the established Left. That would be silly. So even if the endorsement of a big welfare state in itself is not an Alt-Left position, it can still be perfectly aligned with the Alt-Left to advocate expansive and widely available welfare programs (as those in Scandinavia), and in some instances (especially in the US) it can even be a top priority as such measures are likely to be a prerequisite for successfully implementing any Alt-Left policies at all. This means that even if the Alt-Left is critical towards the single minded practice of simply pouring ever more money into established welfare programs and relentlessly expanding the public sector, as usually proposed as the solution to everything by traditional social democrats, it doesn’t mean that it opposes the stance on universal welfare. In fact, it actually seeks to further develop and expand the scope of welfare measures to include many of the emotional needs of humans that aren’t sufficiently covered by the current systems, such as psychological well-being, self-esteem and self-realization.

The Alt-Left shouldn’t be rejected as just another leftist movement out to abolish capitalism either, or a defeatist leftist stance lacking in determination and means to challenge the capitalist world order. Instead, it seeks to outcompete capitalism. This rather unconventional approach towards capitalism has led to quite a bit of confusion, from the Left as well as the Right, both falsely accusing the Alt-Left of being regressive or reactionary – but for very different reasons. Since the Alt-Left isn’t outspoken anti-capitalist it’s often seen by the old Left as reactionary as this is the only critical stance towards capitalism imaginable by many traditional leftists. Right-wingers, however, often sees anyone who talks about capitalism as a problematic way of organizing society as a regression to Soviet styled communism.

But outcompeting capitalism is neither.

Painfully aware about the many failed attempts to abolish capitalism in the past, and seeing that the forces of the market can’t really be removed even in planned economies, the Alt-Left seeks to develop alternative means of coordinating people’s economic actions that are superior to capitalism while reducing the dominance of monetary exchanges in society, making the economy less dependent on money capital, which essentially is what makes societies capitalist. (This isn’t how most people define capitalism, but I will explain and defend this definition in a near-future post and in coming books. Stay tuned.)

Not being explicitly anti-capitalist doesn’t mean the Alt-Left is pro-capitalist. It shouldn’t in any way be seen as an apologetic stance towards the many injustices, exploitations and unfortunate effects of modern capitalism. It’s simply a crucial understanding, acquired from bitterly learned lessons from the past, that only by strengthening other means of coordinating human labor and activities (than monetary exchange) is it possible to go beyond capitalism. This is not a resignation. And it’s not a centrist position either – which leads us to the last misunderstanding I wish to address here.

It’s not Centrism

Finally, the Alt-Left should not be seen as just another centrist position. It’s not a new disguise for traditional social liberalism, socialism “with a human face”, or a mere rebranding of the “Third Way” and so forth. The Alt-Left is an attempt to couple pragmatism with radicalism. But it’s very far from just a middle ground between socialism and capitalism, and neither is it just another pragmatic application of leftist values devoid of any aspirations for radical change in face of current realities. In fact, it’s probably more radical than any other leftist movements, present or in the past, because it actually seeks to alter and further develop the most intimate and innermost aspects of human psychology and how they play out in society.

The Alt-Left doesn’t settle for any static notions of “human nature” but seeks to deliberately alter how we function as emotional and social beings. It doesn’t settle for mere regulations of the current economy to become more socially sustainable either, but actually goes one step further to deliberately alter and transform the supply and demand of the economy through inner transformations of the cultural and psychological roots that determine our behavioral patterns and participation in the economy. It does so by stressing some of the aspects that usually aren’t considered in our conventional views on the labor market and the economy. Most importantly, it scrutinizes the most basic properties of our lives, namely time and attention, and seeks to develop ways of economizing with these scarce resources to generate optimal utility in terms of well-being and human happiness. (You can read more about this in my upcoming book titled Outcompeting Capitalism: a metamodern guide to the economy).

Accordingly, the above mentioned notion of not being anti-capitalist should neither be considered a form of reactionary leftism, nor a centrist position. Wanting to “abolish” capitalism is not very radical, really, it’s just silly. Outcompeting capitalism is actually much more radical (and feasible). It is a more radical stance because it has a transformative view of the economy, our culture and society which it actively and deliberately wants to change – not just wish away.

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The Alt-Left is a necessary, new and creative adaptation of progressive action. That’s what it is.

It’ll take a while for this to sink in. People will keep claiming that is nothing new, or try to pin it onto any of the above. Okay. So let’s do a little challenge. Point me to one source, more than a few years old, that takes this general political position. Links please.

You cannot. Nobody can.

Because the Alt-Left is a new position on the political spectrum.

Or you can take these ideas and start using them politically. Whoever does it first will trash the Alt-Right and play an important role in shaping society in the coming age.

It’s called first mover advantage.

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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.