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So let’s connect the dots. The Alt-Left only appears in history at a point where a critical mass of people begin to think, feel and breathe the digital age and have become intimately acquainted with the confusions and adversities of life in a postindustrial economy where the class interests of old make less sense.

It is also a matter of philosophical development: there need to be philosophers and social theorists who work out the ideas: Deleuze, Žižek, Wilber, Barad, Capra, Bard & Söderqvist, the postcapitalism of Mason, the metamodern understanding of art and culture by Vermeulen, van der Akker and others, complexity and chaos theory applied to social science and economics, the self-psychology of Siegel, theorists of the peer-to-peer economy, the sociocratic form of organizational management, and so forth.

Without going into detail with these diverse and partly contradictory strands of thought, let us just take stock of some simple points that can be garnered as an overall perspective from which an Alt-Left can flow:

The Old Left, from Marx to the humanist Marxists to the mainstream of Left and center-left politics, is ostensibly humanist. It is about humanity and her interests, her role in the world. The world, and politics, are seen through the lens of a taken-for-granted idea about “humanity”. Humanity and her interests are taken as an unquestioned point of departure.

The Alt-Left is based upon an anti-humanist perspective. This can mean several different things. Most importantly, it simply means that you break away from the anthropocentric worldview, i.e. that humanity is seen as the center of existence. Since Nietzsche, we have seen a line of progressive thinkers who argue that we cannot really make a rational argument that delineates humanity from the rest of existence. Foucault noted that any attempt to once and for all bolt down “a nature of man” can only be met with a philosophical laughter. In our days you have ideas such as Manuel DeLanda’s “flat ontology”, in which human realities are not seen as any “more real” than those of other living creatures or even physical objects. And you have a wider family of ideas such as “posthumanism”, in which humanity is itself viewed as a fleeting, malleable and political category – and transhumanism, in which humanity is seen as just a step on a wider range of the development of consciousness, one that will inevitably be biologically transformed by applications of technology, in effect merging with technology in various ways.

If we no longer take humanity’s primary importance for granted, it becomes impossible to argue that only human interests should be the aim of politics. This leads us to some of the developments of deep ecology, in which the biosphere is taken as the basic political unit. Perhaps more practically applicable is the thinking that involves the interests and rights of animals – from Peter Singer’s arguments in Animal Liberation, to Gary Francione’s abolitionism (seeking to “abolish” animal slavery) and developments of thinking in animal rights, such as in the critical leftwing sociologist Corey Lee Wrenn’s development of these thoughts and the psychologist Melanie Joy’s exploration of how people justify the exploitation of animals.

The next point is to view psychological development as key to reforming society. If humanity isn’t really a static category, this also means that humans can develop and change: we can become more complex thinkers, more far-sighted, begin relating to more subtle and existential aspects of life – and we can become healthier and happier. All of these things have been studied in adult development research (which reveals that people are at different stages of development), positive psychology and meditation research. The point is that the institutions of today are hardly geared towards supporting such growth; but they certainly can be. Creating the frameworks for such psychological development can be more productive than growing the economy and redistributing its spoils.

To see the inner dimensions of life and society leads us away from a materialistic worldview and towards a more holistic one. For instance, if someone becomes richer, how will they use their wealth? That depends on such things as personality, norms, emotions and relationships. Even the greatest material security and comfort can be insufficient if our ability to experience life in full is dulled. Even the fairest distribution of material goods might produce miserable lives if people’s relationships are not of sufficient quality. Cultural and psychological forces can topple governments and wreck economies. Subtle shifts in people’s values and emotional intelligence can save billions of dollars – and, in extension, millions of lives.

The idea here is to change the games of everyday life, so that everyday life itself becomes “richer”, more forgiving, kindlier. To do that you must first admit that there is a game of life and that competition is an inescapable part of existence. Hence, it is necessary to go beyond the “game denial” that often plagues the Old Left. For instance, you can’t have both very free immigration and high starting wages and safe jobs because the situation quickly becomes unsustainable. Rather, you can work towards a system in which global migration is as free as possible and jobs are fairly paid and relatively safe. This, in turn, becomes much easier if people’s needs and psychologies are more developed.

The ideal society, then, is not necessarily “socialism” in the classical sense – even if we strive towards a society that would qualitatively feel like socialism was imagined: free, fair and secure. But the society that has been emerging in the most progressive countries looks a lot more like a “Green Social Liberalism 2.0”. This means that society should be far to the Left and far to the (libertarian) Right, and be ecologically sustainable. We might imagine a balance where people have guaranteed basic income but where work in not taxed, and taxation is levied from consumption, ownership of land, taking rents and making profitable transactions.

This is not “utopianism” in the sense that our ideal society would actually be devoid of major problems and miseries. It is only a “relative utopia”, in which many of the problems of today (poor mental health, excessive inequalities, environmental degradation, animal slavery) are dramatically reduced. Of course, there will be new challenges.

A central issue is to loosen the fixation upon equality and start working for well-being or happiness. There are, of course, many complex relationships between the two. Often economic inequality can be detrimental to happiness. But is certainly not the only source of human and animal misery. The social games of everyday life contain many more mechanisms of violence and harm that must be addressed.

Last but not least, the Alt-Left is less vulnerable to the Alt-Right than the Old Left has been. This is because it actually supports a program that would incrementally increase people’s quality of life in the postindustrial, digitized and global age. The Alt-Right offers a path backwards, to nostalgia. The Alt-Left offers a path forward: towards a listening society.

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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.

The central issue here is that we are shifting from a “resistance stance” in which the Left is seen as reason and morality resisting the unjust structures of the world knowing that “another world is possible”, to a developmental stance, in which the mission is to improve upon the many faulty processes that constitute the world order. Basically, the Alt-Left doesn’t believe that you can tear down the existing order to find gold glittering underneath. Instead you must engineer better social, economic and political processes that – over time, and on average – lead to dramatically different results. This stance is no less rebellious than that of the traditional Left, because the transformations proposed are indeed very radical and difficult to achieve. But it does grant us a more concrete and direct program for change, something to do.

Let’s take a look at some of the distinctions:

Can you see how a developmental perspective is the common thread? For instance, following Chomsky’s anti-imperialism is good for pointing out some of the crimes committed by the US in its foreign policy, but it largely leaves us wondering what should come in its stead. Should the international community and democratic countries always refrain from the messy business of intervening in conflicts and humanitarian crises? The issue here is to develop the rationale, transparency, accountability and overall quality of international interventions. This would require the military forces to become much more civilian, much more anthropologically sensitive. You would require a system that curbs misuses of military power, but still allows for necessary humanitarian interventions to take place, and that works in tandem with local cultures, economies and languages. This is a more tenable and world-centric position, one that extends solidarity to all humans.

The same is the case with identity politics. The matter is less to protect minorities from appropriation and to make words taboo, and more to develop the overall psychological security, communication skills and quality of relations within the populations. An important reason that people are so racist and prejudiced in the first place is that they have feelings of frustrations and feel insecure. Likewise, a major reason that many of us are especially vulnerable to the discrimination of others is that they feel a lack of personal and cultural recognition. If people are generally better at giving, receiving and understanding such recognition – and feel that they can afford to lend their recognition more generously – this will make such issues less hurtful to many people. Research has shown that prejudice is closely tied with the level of personal development that people have attained: more psychologically developed people who have more of their inner needs met are less likely to be prejudiced. So the Alt-Left puts larger emphasis on these deeper issues. If you don’t feel the need to cling to a certain identity (national, ethnic or class) you are generally more open-minded. This is behavioral science. And people can develop.

All of this of course requires planned efforts resting on rigid science and continuous evaluation, which is why it cannot be primarily up to the grassroots communitarianism. It simply requires too much understanding of social science to spontaneously crop up by itself: how to devise schools that generate greater personal development, etc. Hence, the governmental level of governance must also be involved, together with the international community of scholars. This is why the Alt-Left generally works at that level, even while being sympathetic and sensitive towards the profound social value that can be generated at the community level involvement. But even so, there needs to be institutions and social environments that help such experimental zones to grow and multiply. This has been fruitfully discussed by the legal theorist Roberto Unger.

The same developmental perspective is applied to global migration. The (correct) moral intuition of the Left is that people should have the right to settle where they please, and that resistance to immigration in rich countries is often an expression of racism and defense of the interests of local people. The Alt-Left position is to view global migration in its current form as a broken system that hurts a lot of people and creates pockets of low social sustainability – the often disenfranchised children of refugees in rich countries. The Alt-Left position holds that this situation cannot be remedied only by curbing racism and discrimination within the rich countries, but that a truly transnational order of migration must be put into place. This system must respect the fears and misgivings that people have about migration in its current form and seek to establish sustainable levels of migration. Because the acceptance of refugees is often an expensive affair that pulls resources from foreign aid, it would make more sense for receiver countries to actively accept refugees close to their homes – and fly them to the host country. This would make possible a more rational prioritizing of the most vulnerable groups, curb the human smuggling industry, and make possible the pooling of greater resources to aid in the zones where people are most vulnerable. It would also be much easier to find public support and fewer fears would be there to be played upon by rightwing populists. Long story, this one. Let us return to it again in future posts.

Likewise, a developmental perspective is applied to the global system of prostitution and drugs. Amnesty International recently adopted a policy recommendation for decriminalization of prostitution. The Swedish model of criminalizing the Johns only is an interesting case study, but it still forces the prostitution to be part of the illegal economy and hence hinders organization of labor rights, protective legislation and so forth. Again, the overall suffering of these groups in society may be better served by an overall increase in gender equality, social security and transparency. Applied correctly, this may work against human trafficking. A corresponding approach to drugs and narcotics holds that the drugs aren’t going away, so that the best path ahead is to legalize, regulate and make transparent the market – which lowers global crime and increases the opportunities for damage reduction and help with addiction. Also, long story. All this feeds into the larger legal paradigms of restorative justice and therapeutic jurisprudence – i.e. that the legal system should be geared towards reducing suffering and repairing social relations according to best evidence based practices.

The issue, then, is not to fight the power structures, so much as to consciously and actively guide the overall development of human lives and relations. This perspective extends to gender equality, in which the Alt-Left leaves behind the antagonistic forms of feminism (“crush patriarchy!” etc.) in favor of a stance in which women’s, men’s and LGBT issues are all taken into account and taken seriously. The idea here is that you can improve upon the general quality of sexual, family and gender relations by addressing these issues in tandem with one another, rather than in opposition to one another. If we, for instance, leave out men’s issues, we leave out crucial parts of the behavioral equations that mess up people’s lives. Hence, an inclusive and progressive gender politics must see how these different perspectives of life – and their respective sufferings – can often overlap. A very important tool for this end is a widely expanded sexual education of the general population. Again, it’s a multiperspectival developmental issue. Touchy subject, this one. You can read more in this post.

That’s all for now. Stay tuned for more Alt-Left perspectives.

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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.

The main difference between the Old Left and the Alt-Left is that the latter focuses more on the cultural, behavioral and psychological sides of economic life. In a world where material resources are relatively abundant and information and information processing become dominant in economic life, money begins to matter less than e.g. cultural capital, good social relations and access to high quality information. What is lacking is not stuff, or money, but intelligent solutions for distribution, value creation and ideas about what to do with our lives in the first place. To create a fair and sustainable global order we must create better social settings for people to do worthwhile things.

We have already stated that this entails a “betrayal of the working class” (read previous post in this series). What do we mean by that? Basically it means that the Alt-Left loosens its ties to the worker movements and the interests of labor (higher wages, safer employment, benefits, consumption and so on). Simply put, the greatest problem of the world is no longer that working and middle class people make too little money. Many of the problems that come from poverty and economic precariousness are – upon closer inspection – in fact social and psychological problems. In the most developed countries people aren’t literally starving or freezing to death. But they are being stressed out, alienated, frustrated, treated poorly, manipulated by advertisement and getting stuck in destructive social relationships. Increasing people’s incomes and consumption can be a way of remedying these maladies, but it is far from the only way. And a too strong focus on material wealth does not only blind us to other means of improving people’s lives; it also perpetuates an overall system of production and consumption that is not ecologically sustainable.

So here are some distinctions between the economic perspectives of the Old Left and the Alt-Left, respectively:

Of course, there is more to unpack here than we can manage in one post, but let’s do a quick tour.

The first point is that the Alt-Left is generally critical of labor. Far from all work is good work. There is really no reason to romanticize people’s work. Often a person can do more good for the world by staying home from work, consuming less, staying healthy and nurturing her relationships than through her active participation in the labor market. A lot of the work, while providing an income, may in fact do more damage than good on a systemic level. Let’s say one person works in the meat industry and another is unemployed but is a socially engaged vegan. Which one creates most utility, seen in a systemic perspective? The meat industry of course tortures and exploits animals, but it also contributes to food resources being used inefficiently (you have to feed the animals with crops, you know), it is highly detrimental to the environment and contributes to a wide range of health problems. At a surface level, it looks as though the employed citizen is doing good for the economy and the unemployed vegan bum is not. But if you look at the overall value added, the relation is in fact the opposite. Or what about a politician who works really hard, but generally defends regressive and unproductive ideas? Or a slick advertisement professional who plays on people’s insecurities and desires? Or just a telephone salesman? All of these arguably do greater harm than the beggar on the corner. Even if these may all be good people who, at an individual level, live okay lives, they may all be doing more harm than good at a systemic level.

So we may have to shed our loyalty to “labor”, and start looking at how labor – and all human activity, economic or otherwise – can be developed: in terms of consumption, production, transport and distribution.

This leads us to a more behavioral, cultural and psychological view of humans and our participation in the economy. Can we have greater psychological comfort and thereby have less urge to splurge on clothes and cars? Can we buy more services and less goods? Can we be brought to think more critically about what our businesses do in the world? What our public services do? These are issues of cultural and psychological development. For instance, meditation may seem like a waste of time and good GDP; but if it contributes to fulfilling human needs in a more efficient manner, is it not a net gain? This is where the concept of the “Economy of Happiness” comes in; what may seem like a loss to the material economy may well turn out to be a net gain in the “Economy of Happiness”, i.e. that the distribution of people’s life experience is improved.

The “Economy of Happiness” creates the greatest justification for “The Listening Society”. Whereas the Old Left successfully created the welfare state it has not produced a new, corresponding, project for the increase of security and wellbeing in the general population in a postindustrial, digitalized and global setting. The Listening Society, which you can read about in my upcoming book with the same title, is a more complex form of welfare which deliberately seeks to improve the mental health and inner wellbeing of all citizens. This may include such services as psychological support, training in emotional intelligence at schools, paid sabbaticals for the 40-year crisis, active development of organizations and leadership, curbing of excessive advertisement and so forth. Say what you will, these are not “centrist” positions; they are Alt-Left positions.

We should strive for an economy in which rational, long-term human activities are promoted and generated. And this may well require people to divide their time and attention in manners that don’t fit very well into the categories of the conventional labor market and economy. This is one reason that we should, in the long run, seek to lower – or even remove – taxes on labor and move them to consumption, ownership, rents, transactions and use of natural resources. People should pay not for working but for using finite resources and for having privileged positions of power in the economy.

All of this goes against the vested interests not only of powerful agents in the world economy, such as large corporations, but also – and more controversially – against the generally perceived interests of the middle class itself. So it’s not only the working class that is betrayed, but also the middle class. The Alt-Left is the enemy of the middle class.

Finally the Alt-Left must be based upon world-centric values. The Old Left has unfortunately been bogged down by the confines of the nation state, and often explicitly puts the interests of the local working class over the equally real interest of the world’s bottom billion (people living in abject poverty). From a world-centric perspective this can only be seen as unethical. Hence, the Alt-Left must sometimes go against the interests of the large groups in rich countries in order to create a more equitable global economy. This means, for instance, that consumer goods may become less cheap in Walmart, but be produced under less appalling circumstances; that we may have to pay for recycling our own computers rather than leaving it to children in Ghana, and so forth.

Because it has this transformative view of economy, culture and society the Alt-Left is the most radical of the current political positions; more radical, I would argue, than anarcho-communism.

The next post in this series will investigate the Alt-Left’s stance on culture and politics. Stay tuned!

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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.

This is the first in a series of blog posts were I’ll attempt to provide a rough outline of the positions of this emerging Alt-Left. Of course, all of the items are up for discussion and most points are likely to be derided by traditional left-wingers as “centrism” or “liberalism”. But the Alt-Left is not centrist, and even, to some extent, it is anti-liberal. It should not be confounded with the Democrats in the US or Social Democrats in Europe. As you’ll see, the positions I outline in the following few posts can hardly be found in the mainstream center-left.

You will find, over the years, that these positions will become increasingly common. This is because they reflect the attractors of how society is evolving: we are entering a new age, with an entirely new form of global economy and society. This means that many of the Old Left positions become unsustainable, irrelevant or downright counterproductive.

If the Old Left paradigm could transform the world, it already would have. If the labor movement could take over production and turn it into cooperatives, it already would have. Has this movement produced ecological awareness, animal rights, global solidarity, even solidarity within the borders of the affluent countries? Did it even create a genuinely progressive politics of gender, sexuality and identity? The answer is no. Progressives need a new movement, and a new paradigm; an Alt-Left.

Let’s begin with the basics:

The Old Left still thinks and functions according to the logic and classes of industrial society. In this analysis, capitalism stratifies society into different classes and it is this stratification that must be curbed and eventually brought to an end. The Alt-Left reacts to the class divisions of a postindustrial, digitalized society.

In this kind of society the political game changes dramatically. People have much more complex class divisions, ideologies, interests and identities. Hence it becomes increasingly difficult to “represent” a segment of society.

Instead, you need to target these many complex relationships and try to develop them in a manner that reproduces less inequality and less alienation. One way of doing this is by deliberately supporting the elements of the economy that are less governed by the logic of capital. In the old days, you needed a lot of capital to start a business. Today you need skills, contacts, mutual trust, cultural capital – and a laptop with an internet connection. These are the primary goods and resources that must become more evenly distributed if people are to be empowered.

Because people to a lesser degree are divided into discernible classes and identities, traditional party politics also becomes more difficult to pursue in a meaningful manner – at least if you’re the progressive. This doesn’t affect the populist anti-immigration movements; they can build upon etnhic identities and single issues. The progressives, then, must adopt more complex stances and rely upon avant-garde groups and networks in order to affect the overall political climate and debate. They must work more across and beyond the traditional political parties. An important part of this is to try to improve the quality and inclusiveness of deliberation and political culture. In the end, this should lead to a greater enfranchisement of citizens through innovations within the fruitful field of internet democracy. Delib in the UK is a promising example and the Finnish think-tank Demos have also done impressive work towards this end.

In a better democratic climate the more universal and progressive ideas can win out against the lowest common denominators, the simplistic solutions of populist movements. This, in turn, requires that we relax some of the narratives of “struggle” and “resistance” and the impulse to “fight the power”. We must lead by example, creating more intelligent political processes, a starting point for which is to treat our political adversaries with kindness and respect.

This is the principle of co-development: that we develop the political landscape as a whole. We can’t change people and tell them what to think or who they should be. There are going to be political strands of all kinds. The point is, rather, to make the Left more efficient by arming it with better social technologies, to make the Right pick up and steal some of its ideas and to make the populists less polemic and aggressive.

By means of better deliberation and processes that harness collective intelligence (as described by the MIT Institute of Collective Intelligence), you subtly implant progressive ideas and ideals across the board. This is done in a deliberate and, in a sense, manipulative manner. But it is a very open and transparent form of manipulation – the avant garde groups don’t have anything to hide.

What policies should such a progressive avant-garde pursue? What is the “metamodern virus” that should be spread? Stay tuned for more on the Alt-Left, the next post will address its position on economy.

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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.

A common and widely proclaimed notion is that the reasons for the Left’s decline is that it isn’t left enough and that it has given up on its core values. The idea here is that going further left, stressing even more state control, combating conservative values even more zealously, would all of a sudden fix the economy and convince more conservatively inclined voters to choose the Left rather than the Right. But lack of ideological purity is not the culprit; the failure to address current issues in an adequate manner is.

Often it’s also heard by the representatives of Left parties and other groups that they have failed at communicating their message more efficiently. But seriously, is it just that we have a communication problem here? Is it really true that in the time of social media and a rapidly growing army of media savvy communication experts, that the biggest problem of the Left is its lacking communication skills? Is it entirely impossible that the politics being communicated just aren’t good enough? That the age old doctrines of the Left just don’t seem to cut it any longer in today’s post-industrial world?

Another commonly heard conviction in later years, with perhaps a little more merit, is that the Left has become increasingly out of tune with its core voters of the working classes. But what’s often omitted from such analyses is the inquiry into what constitutes the working class today, or more specifically, if this term makes much sense today in the increasingly de-industrialized societies of the developed world.

And no, it’s not because the world is evil that the Left doesn’t succeed; it’s because it suffers from a lacking analysis of how the world actually works.

Industrial Era Thinking

In the past, the Left has accomplished a lot of things: it improved the working conditions of wage laborers, built the welfare state and won an intellectual victory with the decades long success story of Keynesian economics, just to mention a few of its greatest accomplishments. But a lot of water has flowed under the bridge since that. All of these things belong to the industrial era, and hitting the same strings in today’s hyper capitalist global information economy doesn’t seem to generate the same results; in fact, attempting to do the very same things that proved successful in the past often tends to be rather inefficient and sometimes outright counterproductive today. The world has changed too much, and the Left, unfortunately, has not.

The prevalent industrial era thinking of the Left is perhaps one of its greatest handicaps. Notions such as “the working class” and thinking along the lines of large groups of organized labor in the industrial centers of the nation state are so exceedingly out of tune with the present developments of the global world economy – especially in the richest and most advanced countries – that the transformative power of the Left has become a far cry from that of yesteryear. It doesn’t have adequate answers to address the issue of transnational capital flows; it doesn’t know how to handle new emergent technologies such as AI, robotics and transhumanist bio-technologies; it’s paralyzed in regard to immigration and refugees; and what to do with the growing precariat, i.e. the people who are at the fringes of the labor market and have generally low levels of social and economic enfranchisement? Does it even have any proposals to how the growing psychological distress, alienation and feelings of marginalization in modern society could be addressed? Or the acute destruction of the environment? Globalization? No it doesn’t.

With the status quo of the nation based welfare state and the regulation of the labor markets in the most developed countries, the old established Left seems to have reached the limits of its analytical power. The end of history. Its history. Since the great visions of the welfare state and the organization of the labor force, no new utopian ideals worth mentioning have been proposed. A grand vision of how to raise the level of well-being and life satisfaction further is all but entirely lacking. Its raison d’etre is simply to keep the boat from rocking. Sadly, this is diminishing the importance of the Left.

The old vision of creating a feasible alternative to the capitalist world order is, in terms of real political movements, a forgotten dream of the past. Rather than challenging capitalism with new means of coordinating people’s productive actions in the new information economy, it tends to play along the pre-given rules of capital. And instead of conquering new territories, its fiercest battles are fought over keeping what it has previously won. But when you’re always on the defense, you know that you have already lost.

But who can blame them? If the labor movement could have taken over production and turned it into cooperatives, it already would have. If a greater solidarity between all workers of the world, in the spirit of the International, could have been achieved, we would have seen it by now. And if the intellectuals of the old Left could have developed a workable and convincing alternative to capitalism, it would already have been implemented. After all, the Left has had more than 100 years to achieve these things.

There are challengers to the old established Left, but none have put forward workable and convincing alternatives to the fundamental economic thinking first envisioned in the industrial era. Instead of focusing on novel economic systems in tune with the information era and addressing the issue of equality on a systemic level in our increasingly globalized world, parts of the Left have moved on to minority and identity issues.

Identity Projects

The recent surge in various minority and identity projects has accomplished a lot of good things (however, often independently and sometimes in opposition to the worker’s movements), but they have not, will never, change society in any fundamental, groundbreaking fashion. Often that’s not the ambition either. Most of these movements settle for equal rights and equal access to the very same privileges as the majority population (which is, admittedly, not such a bad thing). But those who believe these ideas will somehow miraculously change society in any fundamental fashion, crush capitalism or save the environment, are severely deluding themselves. Changing the capitalistic world system is far beyond any of these movements’ analytical reach. They simply don’t know what they are up against and often reduce capitalism to a club of rich white guys that can somehow be purged.

For all the good things to have come out of these movements, their lacking transformative power on the bigger scale remains a severe handicap. They don’t offer feasible paths forward on the systemic level, but seem to be content with merely serving the special interests of certain marginalized groups. But that’s not only unambitious; it’s also rather counter-productive as recent political developments have showed. Just think about it; if the identity Left would have a complete victory, everything would still be pretty much the same, but with more women and ethnic minorities in the top. Is it strange that white disenfranchised males don’t get overly enthusiastic about these ideas: a world that pretty much works like now, just with more women and blacks to boss them around, instead of just white guys in suits. Great, huh? No wonder that the traditional working classes aren’t as closely allied with the Left as they used to be. And if it’s all a big zero-sum game, why give up on that white-privilege if that’s the best card you have on your hand? Did anyone really believe that people would just give up on that without an alternative proposal to how their lives could become better too?

Neglecting the class aspect in favor of ethnic and gender identities and not offering any new solutions to how common white workers could empower themselves, or even make their lives better, has had grave consequences. It’s quite silly when you think about it, leaving one of the largest demographics out of the equation is bound to come back and bite you in the ass.

And it’s not just that common white workers don’t seem to be included in these new identity Leftist movements, they have even been deprived of their old narrative in which they were the heroes. Prior to the decline of democratic socialism and the proud ethos of the working class, common working men could obtain pride, identity and self-empowerment from traditional Leftist ideology and often saw their representatives in parliament as some of their “own”. Now where should they turn when the old labor parties seem to have sold them out? Queer-feminism?

Many people aren’t really working class any longer but have plunged into the growing ranks of the precariat, with new interests not covered by the traditional worker’s movements. Is it so strange that a new brand of postmodern fascism appears as a valid option to these people?

Anti-Everything

While the old Left, devoid of any real transformative agendas, has become part of the establishment and increasingly more bourgeois, radical activist groups on the fringes have taken its place as the standard bearer of progressive change. Unfortunately you don’t find a whole lot of new ideas here either. These movements tend to be characterized more by what they are against than what they are really for. It is a telling sign that many such groups tend to be explicitly identified by what they are against and often even use the prefix “anti-” in their names. It seems as though opposition in and of itself is considered the highest virtue, that being against a whole lot of things takes primacy from actually developing workable solutions and investigating realistic methods and plans to implement these in the political game. Of course there are many things out there worthy of opposition, but if the primary endeavor is just to be against stuff, hence being on the defense all the time, then it’s a sign that you’re already losing.

The far Left is still capable of mobilizing large numbers of people in demonstrations, happenings and so on, but such gatherings are mostly based on feelings of dissent and almost never on any constructive ideas of how to reorganize society. They rarely achieve much. Despite the spectacle, they are quite harmless really. Burning a few dumpsters and blocking the roads is barely a threat to capitalism or whatever they are opposing.

But that’s probably not a major issue to those involved. Often the political fight itself is romanticized and what’s going to happen if they actually win the fight is of secondary importance. Rarely is an actual plan envisioned, but who can blame them as the odds of success are as close to zero as possible. All that remain are vague notions of the “people” winning over the “bad guys” by smashing , as if their rallies and simple taglines would somehow exorcise this evil essence, whether that’s capitalism, racism, the patriarchy or some other menace out there. But to the revolutionary romantic it’s often enough to just fight the fight so as to pat oneself on the shoulder and be considered a proud, and cool, radical – thus entering the trap of righteousness where moral superiority takes primacy from actual political results, usually as part of some personal identity project. We’ll return to that in a minute.

It’s not that the far Left is entirely without its merits, but the excessive focus on opposition, civil disobedience and activist manifestations, not just as means, but as goals in themselves, is severely reducing the actual political impact and transformative power of these movements. If you are only capable of setting the agenda for opposition, and even if you might be successful from time to time, it’s others who will be the ones to set the actual course. It’s a shame really, all that wonderful engagement largely becomes a wasted potential for greater things.

The sad state of affairs is that we rarely see any Leftists today with any grand plans for society that could actually be achieved, hasn’t been tried before, or with any groundbreaking new ideas to transform society. And if we do, they mostly tend to fall into the trap of game denial.

Game Denial

The Left tends to be exceedingly prone to game denial (for a more thorough presentation, read this post): the idea that it’s somehow possible to make away with all the games that governs our social and political relations; that everybody, always, can be a winner; that you can omit losing from people’s lives entirely; that life could be completely fair. The farther Left you go, the more prone people tend to be game deniers, ultimately succumbing to “give everything to everyone” arguments and equally silly notions.

Avoiding game denial is not so much a matter of just being “realistic” (which mostly tends to throw one into the opposite camp of “game acceptance”), but more about being able to decipher the rules, find out how the current relations of power play out, and accordingly develop new means of changing the game in a feasible manner.

The sad consequence of game denial is that your opponents repeatedly will have you by the balls (excuse the male-centric expression) in face of practical reality; they will have the means of exposing that your solutions won’t be feasible, and your lacking ability to understand the rules of the game will ultimately make you incapable of changing them for the better. Game denial will put you on the side line. And if you actually succeed in implementing policies that suffer from a poor analysis of how the game plays out, how human relations actually work, they will fail and thus make way for your opponents to take over. Solutions based upon game denial are bad because they aren’t socially sustainable – something you can see examples of in everything from socialist states to hippie communities.

But a lot of leftists don’t care about the game. They are just too good for that, which leads us to the next and final point.

The Trap of Righteousness

A lot of Leftists end up in the trap of righteousness: a paralyzing condition where personal moral superiority takes primacy over actual political results. Too preoccupied with being perceived as the “good guy”, and feeling “empowered” by telling everyone else that they are wrong or outright “evil”, it often results in people sitting in their ivory towers just being “right” about everything but not accomplishing anything. As any social theorist knows, there is nothing wrong with ivory towers per se; you just have to build them in the right historical spots. Unfortunately, moralism often hinders such placement and they are built at safe distance from political and economic reality.

You might think that it doesn’t matter what everybody else thinks if you just “know” that you’re “right”; that it’s perfectly acceptable to disregard the lacking results of your political ideology, and that it doesn’t mean that there’s anything wrong with you if your take on politics don’t seem to be catching wind; that it simply suffices to have the “correct” opinions. False. I don’t talk about giving up on your ideals, but if your methods of action and applied theories don’t seem to generate any positive changes, then they just aren’t good enough. The world needs your help and we’re running out of time.

You might moralize about all the evils that come out of participating in the political game; that it’s better to avoid dirty politics altogether and instead take on a more “activist” role; that it’s morally more pure to form local grass root movements, gather in protest marches and sign petitions in order to influence politicians than entering the floor of politics yourself. But I suspect these are often bad excuses; that another issue is at hand, namely our own vanity. We are too afraid of losing our moral superiority. We don’t want to risk being the bad guy. We simply don’t want to get our hands dirty.

Taking responsibility always means that you can’t make everybody happy, and, perhaps more importantly, that you will be accountable if something goes wrong. But seriously, the world doesn’t have time for that, the fate of humanity is at stake and your personal moral purity puts that in jeopardy. Forming pious priesthoods whose mission it is to discipline and correct those unfortunate enough not to have the correct opinions does not suffice. The world needs your engagement in a practical and effective manner, not another person to merely call himself a good guy.

Idealism shouldn’t be a matter of moral purity, but of finding the ideal practical solutions to make reality of your ideals. If your political ideals don’t hold up to practical reality, the ideals have already disqualified themselves as worth striving towards.

You don’t need to change your core values, but evaluating your line of action and methods of application is a moral imperative if they don’t seem to be generating any meaningful results.

So maybe it’s not just the evil spirit of capitalism, racism or the patriarchy that is to blame. Maybe it’s you?

—

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.

As mentioned in my previous post we seem to be in the middle of a major transition in history, just like the one the world was going through between the two world wars. Back then it was the transition to a fully modern industrial society, which resulted in major political, economic as well as existential crises. Today we are in the middle of a transition to a global information society, an increasingly postmodern society, which is likewise certain to bring about dramatic changes.

What’s so Postmodern about our Times?

Postmodernity is not only a philosophical and artistic current, it’s also a stage of societal development. One of the most crucial postmodern developments in recent years is that we seem to have reached a critical tipping point towards an information society. In the developed world we live in a society where symbols, not manufactured goods, have moved to the center of the economy. The growing emphasis on information, signs and symbols is a very postmodern feature of our times to say the least.

The most powerful industries today are not the steel mills and automobile manufacturers, but those preoccupied with developing the latest in bits and bytes and those who control the billions of virtual dollars that make the world economy go round. This doesn’t mean that the physical products themselves are without importance, but physical reality has been subordinated to the logic of the symbolic. In the hierarchies of value the contents of products are mostly below that of the brands themselves, and the ones who most skillfully master the art of advertising will win the most profitable shares of the market. Again, symbols, rather than physical reality, matter the most in our postmodern world.

Another contemporary development is how electronic mass media is shaping the world, or more specifically, our perceptions of it – which according to a postmodern logic is what really counts at the end of the day. How we see the world ultimately decides how we shape it; and the ones who master the symbols most competently and manage to gain the attention of people, accordingly get to choose how it’s seen and what’s to be done with it. A wise person once noticed that something dramatic had happened to society as more people recognize the face of Nelson Mandela than that of their neighbors. Just think about it; most of us have our minds filled with famous people we have only been acquainted with through mass media but never met personally, while most of the people in our closest physical proximity remain unknown to us. The world has truly changed.

The most powerful people in our postmodern times are not the ones who control the largest armies; in the long run the winners are the ones with the largest amounts of cultural capital (for more on cultural capital read this post). The perhaps most critical feature that distinguishes the world’s most powerful economies, the one thing that most decidedly sets apart developed nations from developing ones, is not just their relatively larger military might, or their industrial output, but the level of cultural capital. “Soft power” with another term.

On one hand we have the level of scientific developments and on the other culture proper in the form of entertainment products such as movies, music and video games. Such commodities are sold on the global market at very favorable exchange rates and give the nations who possess these productive capabilities a most advantageous position on the global stage. A Korean politician once noticed that the value of the movie Jurassic Park was equal to about 1½ million Hyundai cars. And with significantly fewer working hours associated with the former, the production of high-end entertainment commodities accordingly constitutes a valuable asset to the nations that produce them. But that’s not all. Coal and steel don’t generate dreams. Factories do not appeal to people as much as centers of knowledge and culture. With the accumulation of cultural capital in select areas of the most developed countries, these regions enthrall the imagination of people all over the world; they effectively promote the values and ways of life of their nations of origin and have the capacity to attract the best and the brightest from all corners of the planet. A very powerful asset.

It doesn’t really matter how many nuclear warheads Putin has at his disposal, he’s unlikely to use them anyway (knock wood). As long as the global appeal of Russian artists don’t come close to the mesmerizing power of Beyoncé’s booty or the seductive smile of George Clooney, the approval rate of Russian values and way of life will continue to lag behind in the global competition.

During the Cold War Russian was part of school curriculums all across the Eastern Block; wide dissemination has always occurred with the language of a powerful empire. But today’s digital kids are learning Japanese, voluntarily, in their past time as part of their fascination with Manga culture. And that’s power. Japan is winning the hearts of people and is increasingly seen as a model society. This facilitates the continued growth of its cultural exports, and despite the country’s declining economic power vis-à-vis its neighbors, its position as a cultural great power in East Asia will prove to be a most favorable one. Admiration on the global scene is a powerful asset, both in order to sell one’s products, but also to gain diplomatic leeway.

Lastly it should be mentioned that we live in an ideological, postmodern, vacuum. The death of all grand narratives, as proposed by Jean-François Lyotard (who later, by the way, disowned his theory), is one of the primary features of postmodernism. Whereas the Cold War was a conflict between competing grand narratives such as communism and capitalism, the postmodern era has accordingly made way with such notions. Instead ideological conflicts between many small narratives have taken its place, sometimes dubbed identity wars, involving national narratives, religious ones or ideologies such as feminism among others. These seem to have taken primacy after capitalism won the Cold War and make for some very peculiar conflicts.

Postmodern War?

Postmodern war, what is it good for? My postmodern fellow scholars would be quick to point out that what war is “good” for is a matter of perspective, something inherent not to war, but to the eye of the beholder. That said, postmodern war fills the gap after modern large-scale wars have become less efficient and relevant: Putin’s war against Ukraine is almost not a war, yet it is ostensibly so. That’s what the postmodern war is good for; for waging wars that somehow aren’t. And then you win the battle by letting your troll factories spam online media with reports about there being no war. Goebbels asked the Germans if they wanted “total war”. The Goebbels’ of today coyly ask us if we’d like just a little war, just something for the coffee.

So let’s bring this point home – what are the postmodern wars? Tensions seem to have risen to a level not seen since the end of the Cold War. Military balances are shifting as American hegemony is challenged by new emerging powers around the world. This is perhaps one of the main issues that have impelled people into comparing the present state of affairs with the 1930s. Yet, we should be careful not to make to literal interpreted allegories. Obviously we are not going to see tanks equipped with Blitzkrieg tactics roll across the plains of Poland, or Mexico for that matter (seriously, that would be ridiculous). It’s highly unlikely that countries will engage in carpet bombing of industrial centers. We will not see another Marlene Dietrich entertaining the troops on the shores of Normandy (a bit less ridiculous, though). And no, anything bearing resemblance with the industrial mass killings known as the Holocaust is very unlikely to occur in the coming period despite the many injustices and cruelties that without doubt will happen in the near future.

We are becoming acquainted with another kind of warfare than the what we’ve been accustomed to from the world wars of the last century; a postmodern kind of warfare. So what would that entail? The term “new wars” as proposed by Mary Kaldor seems to describe many of the features we can expect in the future. Kaldor specifically notices that many of today’s wars tend to be “low intensity conflicts”. A typical example is – again – the current war between Russia and Ukraine. The countries are officially not at war, and neither of the combatants is putting all of their military strength into defeating the other. It’s noticeable that such wars, while being of a rather low intensity on the battlefield, instead tend to be high intensity media wars. Propaganda seems to be an equally, or perhaps even more, important measure of such wars than physical fighting, and manipulating public opinion is often a more critical war goal than the acquisition of strategic points on a battle map. Winning the hearts and minds of people seems to be of greater importance than winning the battles themselves, and in our highly globalized world that includes people all over the world with no personal stakes in the conflict itself. The war, in turn, offers a rich projection screen for personal identity projects that people pursue in the social media, vilifying or glorifying Russia, “disclosing” conspiracies, sharing citizen journalism, criticizing the wretched “mainstream media”, and so forth.

There have been frequent talks about a new emerging cold war between NATO and Russia. But instead of the proxy wars known from the 20th century and the secret operations of 007, the primary battlefront today seems to be located on the wild frontiers of the internet where battles are fought with information, disinformation and propaganda. Electronic mass media is truly shaping our postmodern world. The control over people’s minds is conducted with bits and bytes and competing narratives, while the very same bit and bytes are fighting to control our physical reality in the new emergent phenomenon known as cyber warfare. If the meaning of the term “war” is to be taken literally, then we’re already at it. Hackers have taken the role of good ole’ Mr. Bond, and his Russian, Chinese and North Korean equivalents are increasingly testing the capabilities of the world’s most developed nations in cyber space.

Terrorism proves another point in case. It is a very postmodern phenomenon because it’s not the physical damage that matters, but the psychological one. The word even implies it, terror, terror is an emotion, and the objective of terrorists is to inflict as much of this mental damage as possible. The damage is conducted through information, and the transmission of that information relies on mass media. In our postmodern world of mass media terrorism can be a very effective weapon, in fact, without mass media it probably wouldn’t have any effect. Just think about: what would the effect of a terror attack be in medieval times? How would you inflict terror on a nation of illiterate peasants, without any TV-set, internet or any other means of acquiring news than the slow measure of word of mouth? It simply wouldn’t work.

The most successful terrorist organizations such as Al-Qaeda and ISIS are, despite their extreme reactionary ambitions, some very postmodern phenomena. They are children of the internet age as pointed out by the philosopher Alexander Bard. Without the internet they wouldn’t have managed to recruit as many combatants and they wouldn’t have had the means to spread their ideology as widely as they have. Accordingly a skilled media professional has been estimated to be worth more than a 100 warriors. Without these people the organization would never have taken off, it would not have had the power to recruit as many people and it would not have had the ability to promote its ideology and gain the support of disenfranchised people around the world. The postmodern logic of signs and symbols doesn’t escape even the most reactionary and backward-looking in today’s world.

Postmodern Fascism

When making comparisons with the 1930s one hardly escapes the most notorious aspect of the era: fascism. There is no lack of analyses drawing parallels between the rise of fascism and Nazism in Europe and the present developments in the Western World. However, fascists are not what they used to be, and I’m not just talking about their loss of good taste in clothing.

It’s not the neo-Nazis with their fondness of short haircuts and shiny boots that make up the most prominent feature of today’s fascism. These guys have been around for a while and haven’t achieved much. As mentioned in my earlier post, by “…merely copying the Nazis they ironically disqualify themselves from being the fascism of the present, postmodern era.” They do so by simply not having the same transformative power as their predecessors.

Today’s fascists usually don’t run around beating up people in the streets, but instead tend to sit comfortably at home in front of their computers, developing the delicate craft of trolling the internet. Many of them also seem to have quite different views on the world than the old-school Nazis – more postmodern views that is. Following the last many decades’ surge in minority identity projects, the fascism of today can be seen as a counter reaction that ironically has taken the form of a white identity project rather that a quest for white supremacy and the abolishment of democracy. In fact, these guys are exceedingly more democratically inclined than their predecessors, even to a degree that they lean more towards popular opinion and direct democratic notions than the progressives of today, who seem to be in a state of panic regarding the fascist tendencies of the masses. How postmodern can it get? Democratic Nazis with identity issues, poor marginalized white men with a desire to be heard, focusing on cultural issues, trying to defeat the specter of “cultural Marxism”.

Speaking of which, a certain newly elected someone has made Hitler comparisons increasingly fashionable. As I asked in my previous post: “if a contemporary Hitler showed up today, would we be able to recognize him as such?” Well, a lot of people have. Even though it’s not nice to make comparisons with the aforementioned historical figure, and even if efforts should be done not to compare this new dude with Hitler, the circumstances are just too damn similar. However, calling Trump a Nazi is a rather unproductive endeavor, and no matter the analytic stringency of such comparisons it’s likely to collapse into immature name-calling. We don’t need to label him as such; his actions are enough to disqualify him as a competent and benevolent leader.

Given the transformative power of fascism in its heyday, a corresponding contemporary movement should also be energizing, populist, reactionary, masculine and profoundly felt by its adherents. So copying the programs of the aforementioned movement doesn’t suffice to make a postmodern version of fascism happen. What then are the features that make Trump a worthy postmodern equivalent of the fascism of the 1930s?

The idea of wanting to become great again is so similar to the situation in Germany after the First World War and the economic crisis of the 1930s that it’s hardly worth mentioning. Russia followed a similar pattern after losing the Cold War after which they too suffered from a deep economic crisis, which then was followed by the yearnings for a strong leader to restore the country’s former glory. Same old story.

But what makes the newly emerged American urge for greatness exceedingly postmodern is that it’s more a matter of perceived loss of greatness than an actual one. The country is still the only remaining super power, it didn’t lose a great war. It did experience an economic crisis however, along with the rest of the world, but recovered relatively fast and is now experiencing healthy growth. The US has never been “greater”, only in relative terms has the country lost ground, but it has done so since the end of the Second World War as other countries have modernized. The thing is that loss of greatness is a very subjective one. Crime in American hasn’t been lower for decades, employment is going up and terrorism is rare. But the perception of these things is different. It’s not the facts themselves that shape most people’s understanding of reality, but how the world is presented to them through the media.

This is where Trump enters the picture. Not only has he succeeded in using the common perception about a society in disarray to further his cause of making “America great again”, now he’s even attempting to denounce the media as a valid source of information by calling anything that goes against him “fake news”. This is a very postmodern, and in our days a more efficient, way of delegitimizing oppositional ideas and ideologies than burning books. Just think about it, the most powerful individual in the country proclaims that the media doesn’t provide the truth. If people stopped believing that CNN provided the truth he could just as well have burned the CNN Center down to the ground. And when his administration talks about “alternative facts” it’s an attempt to use postmodernity’s perspectivism and relativism – often against itself (as the very same postmodern ideologies, such as queer-feminism, multiculturalism and so on, are the ones getting targeted by these measures). According to the logic of postmodernity every perspective is worth of equal consideration, so why couldn’t the narratives of the Trump administration be just as true as anything else? And if anyone’s opinion is as good as another’s, why put your faith in the self-proclaimed authorities. Postmodernity is zealously anti-hierarchical and despises all authorities. But if no authorities exist on a topic, why bother listening to the experts, the elite, their analyses are just opinions, right? And anyone’s opinion is as valuable as any other.

It’s interesting to see how the reactionary Right is using this “post-truth” line of argument on a number of issues. Take evolution or global warming for example, “the scientific community is divided on the issue!” is a commonly proclaimed statement. Well, it’s not entirely true, the vast majority of scientists believe in these things, but that doesn’t matter because there’s always someone with another opinion out there, so who knows what’s right, you decide! It’s not as if Trump is likely to succeed in defining the truth, and he knows it. But that’s not the point. The Russian government is applying a similar strategy, and the goal is not to win the information war, but more to cause confusion, distractions from the truth and mobilize support from different opposition groups. It’s the postmodern equivalent of a guerrilla war, a type of warfare where a weaker opponent manages to withhold the enemy and inflict attrition.

Carelessness with the truth is a common fascist tendency as widespread today as it was back in the 1930s. The perpetual anti-intellectualism that follows from that is likewise a universal feature of fascism which draws its power from popular dissent. When the “elite” is perceived as not “delivering the goods” it is accordingly brought into question, with good reasons, but this is also dangerous. It’s a telling sign that fascist movements have always used popular dissent to fuel their agendas by alleviating gut feelings, anger and pandering the lowest common denominator. Populism has always been one of the crucial tools of fascism, in fact, that’s what makes the whole endeavor possible. It’s the everlasting danger in all true democracies, the Achilles heel of democracy, because in democracies power can be peacefully transferred from one agent to the other by popular opinion – and thus democracy can potentially obliterate itself in the process. It’s a danger that existed in modernity, as well as in today’s postmodern world.

Postmodern Genocide

The most disastrous consequence of the developments in the 1930s was the well-documented genocides that followed. For good reasons these events have served as a grave reminder of how bad things can go in industrialized societies. But even if large scale massacres may occur from time to time, as we’ve sadly seen in Rwanda and Bosnia, atrocities of the magnitude seen during the era of Stalin and Hitler are probably as unlikely to reappear as full-blown warfare between industrialized nations. Or let’s hope that is the case.

However, the vast majority of postmodern fascists are not really out to exterminate entire groups of people. After all, this sort of reasoning is limited to the utmost periphery. Instead of physically killing people, the goal of postmodern fascists is to silence them, to make them invisible – which according to a postmodern logic is almost the equivalent of death. And to many, it’s worse than death; being heard and seen is a cause worth dying for.

One of the primary ambitions of contemporary fascists is the silencing of minority and other oppositional voices, and the strategy to conduct this massacre is by disqualifying them as legitimate individuals. Fascists often portray themselves as “the real people”, the original inhabitants of the land, followers of the true faith and similar notions. By doing so they imply that the “others” are “false” people, with no valid rights to the land or of a false religion. Accordingly this line of reasoning entails that their voices are without legitimacy, that they shouldn’t be heard and that it’s acceptable to ignore them; often to an extent that it’s even a virtue to marginalize, oppress and humiliate them.

Now, freedom of speech is such a well-established right in democratic countries that very few postmodern fascist are actually proposing that anyone should be denied that right. In fact, they are probably some of the most enthusiastic and outspoken defenders of “freedom of expression” at the moment. So contrary the fascist regimes of the past, actual censorship is not on the agenda here. It’s too crude a tool, as inefficient as burning books in the streets and obviously not a viable measure in the age of the internet anyway. But censorship is not necessary. Much can be accomplished if you make the voices that oppose you illegitimate, if you drown them in disinformation and succeed in carving out your own group of followers by reaffirming their prejudices and vindicating their anger. And such an endeavor has become much easier to accomplish for a challenger to the establishment in the age of the internet. With the increasingly shorter attention span of a media saturated population, simpler and more spectacular narratives that resonate with people’s feelings can easily overshadow complicated facts and inconvenient truths. And with the growing tribalization into highly separated media bubbles, larger groups of people can more easily be insulated from alternative views than before.

But this is only step one. Just as they can use their purported “outsider position” to ultimately acquire the very same political power they despise the so-called establishment for having, the ultimate goal of postmodern fascism is also to seize control of the very same media institutions they criticize for not being “open-minded” enough towards their ideas. And if that happens, the postmodern genocide can begin. If you can remove certain groups of people from being visible in the virtual world of the media outlets, then they essentially don’t exist in a world that has become more and more distant from physical reality. The mission of postmodern fascists is thus to fight all attempts at a more diverse representation in the media landscape, to exclude the voices of minorities and to insulate majority cultures from outside influences. It also vigorously seeks to silence and delegitimize the intellectual voices that oppose them, often labeling them as “elites”, and thus according to a postmodern logic to be considered “evil” – even if they themselves obviously want to become the elite.

They know that they can’t just make away with all these people as dictatorships in the industrial era has done before; democracy is, after all, too well-established to allow for something like that to happen. But if people can be made invisible, under the moral pretention of democracy, the goal will have been achieved.

Now, it may sound a little exaggerated when using terms like “genocide” or even suggesting that silencing the many voices of marginalized groups out there constitutes an imminent danger in modern democracies. Contemporary fascists are, after all, not entirely insulated from the many rhetorical victories of progressive thought and do indeed have a hard time to conceptually oppose the freedom of speech they themselves seem so keen on defending. But still, it’s common to hear arguments from conservatives and reactionaries such as: “You can be gay, sure that’s no problem, but I don’t like how they keep talking about how proud they are about it, that gay agenda and all their propaganda, couldn’t they just keep it in the private domain? Shouldn’t we do something to protect our children from hearing these things?” Meaning, “shouldn’t we do something to revoke the right of free expression from this particular group of people?” In Russia, where homosexuality is legal, this line of thought has even made it into law, as so-called “homosexual propaganda” has been made illegal. You see, according to a postmodern logic it’s not important whether a phenomenon exists or not; if we don’t hear about it, it’s just as good as non-existent.

There are admittedly many sound arguments against the use of the term “genocide” when people aren’t actually getting killed, but if anyone succeeds in controlling the institutions that have the greatest attention of the majority of the population; if popular discourse has it that certain groups and individuals are considered illegitimate – made invisible – if diversity and the representation of minorities is sacrificed in favor of complete majority dominance – liberal, pluralistic democracy as we know it would have been replaced by a fascist form of democracy; a postmodern kind of fascism.

If nothing else, it hinders much preemptive progressive action to prevent suffering around the world – like the fact that a major famine is ongoing in Yemen, largely caused by Saudi bombings, but without hitting the top news. Half a million starving children somehow aren’t that interesting in the midst of Trump’s media fireworks about what went on in Sweden last Friday night.

Call it what you like, to me that qualifies as genocide.

There it is: postmodern war, fascism and genocide. Welcome to the postmodern 1930s. How about we try to beat our old record and handle this crisis a bit better than last time?

—

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.

But haven’t we seen this before, some might ask? In recent years many have compared our times with earlier epochs. Are we approaching a new 1914? Or is it perhaps more accurate to make comparisons with the 1930s? After all, the stable and predictable world order that followed the Second World War seems to be nearing its end. Another chaotic period to decide the future order of the planet appears to be what we can expect to live in for the foreseeable future. That does sound like an echo of the turbulent first half of the 20th century.

The growing protectionism in some countries, the emergence of a new, but still uncertain, global world order and the rampant social unrest and political instability – all of this does show similarities with the volatile situation of the early 20th century; a time that followed a rather stable period of established power balances between the great empires of the time, increased international trade and a hitherto unseen level of globalization and interdependency (only to be surpassed in the latter third of the 20th century). So the question arises, are we now approaching the inevitable setback? Will history repeat itself?

Of course, history never literally repeats itself; every epoch and event is the result of unique conditions in time that once over will never occur again. We should therefore be careful not to make anachronistic errors. Drawing parallels between different eras has often led to grave mistakes when interpreting the allegories too literally.

However, history does seem to generate stubborn patterns that show up again and again when certain conditions are present. So could we learn something important from studying these patterns? Could we, after all, as commonly claimed, learn something from history?

That Guy…

Yup, let’s just put him up here, I know you’re already thinking about him. Hitler. Now, from all the events of history the rise of Nazism and the subsequent world war and genocides is perhaps the single most addressed event regarding lessons thought to be learned. And for good reasons too.

It is a shame, really, that people have used the Nazi allegory so often that few politicians, movements and what not haven’t been awarded the Nazi-label at one time or another. Just a dab of conservatism and you’re Hitler, the slightest injustice and we have a new Holocaust. Any lessons taught from this unfortunate turn in history thus gets reduced to cheap rhetoric tricks and name-calling. It has now reached a level, well, already noticed as early as 1951 by Leo Strauss, that whenever someone pulls the “Hitler-card”, the discussion is officially in the gutter—collapsed into the argumentation fallacy of guilt by association, or reductio ad Hitlerum as humorously coined by Strauss. We have learned nothing, and if insightful comparisons could be made, the constant wolf-cries over the years have made any such discussions incapable of making a lasting impact. Nazi allegories are rarely taken seriously these days.

This urges another question: if a contemporary Hitler showed up today, would we be able to recognize him as such? I mean, the world is full Nazis, marching and waving flags as they do, but this is hardly where you’d find the next Hitler. Movements with identical programs to the fascists of the 1930s, of which some are outright identifying as true national-socialists, are not where one would find the contemporary equivalents to the movements of the 1930s. By merely copying the Nazis they ironically disqualify themselves from being the fascism of the present, postmodern era. They simply don’t do what these movements did back in the days; they fail where their predecessors succeeded and remain peripheral shadows with none of the transformative power that defined fascism in its heydays.

The self-proclaimed Führers of today are nothing but minuscule copy-cats out of tune with the times they are living in. They might as well have proclaimed to be Caesar or Napoleon. And as such they are as anachronistic as the ones who repeatedly call their opponents Nazis.

Hitler was a man of his time and an expertly endowed exploiter of the unique conditions of the period, so anyone deserving of comparison with this figure of history should likewise be capable of that. Flag waving and marches in snappy uniforms was a prominent and powerful feature of his time, not of ours. And the ideology that brought him to power was especially designed for those times; applying the exact same line of thought to ours is doomed to fail politically, which it repeatedly has. Nazism seemed new, shiny and – in a sense – progressive in the 1930s. The seductions and dead-ends of our present era are likely to have a corresponding glow.

In order to make useful comparisons with the catastrophic mistakes of the past we need to interpret them in the context of the present. Surface phenomena don’t suffice. We need to look at the underlying mechanisms and adequately interpret them in light of a sound analysis of our current times. So what could be the best point of departure for such an analysis?

Transitional Crisis

The reason that our time bears so much resemblance with the turbulent years of the first half of the 20th century is that we are in the midst of a major transition. The period between the two world wars was characterized by the final transition from an agrarian to a fully industrialized and mechanized economy. The time of the First World War was a period where technological progress reached a critical breaking point; leaving many people unemployed, confused and without purpose. The economic crisis of the 1930s was directly associated with the demise of the agricultural economy and the many unemployed of the era were freshly recruited from the countryside to serve in an industrial economy in which they lacked many of the critical skills to navigate successfully. We seem to be in the middle of such a transition once again. Now, however, we are leaving the modern industrial society behind in favor of a global information society, a more postmodern society, which inevitably is going to generate proud winners and sore losers to wreak havoc upon the social fabric of society.

So, given that the world is very different from what it was in the 1930s, what would a transitional crisis as that of the early 20th century look like? We are living in a time that is increasingly becoming more postmodern, where signs and symbols take primacy over physical reality, where the production of information has shoved the production of industrial goods to the margins of the economy and a global world where many different cultures, identities and interpretations of reality are interacting in a myriad of ways accompanied by new competing ideologies fighting to determine the shape of the 21st century and the coming new world order. So what would learning a few lessons from history, without being too anachronistic about it, teach us about the place we can expect to be going in the near future? What would a postmodern transitional crisis look like? And what would be the solutions? It’s a good question right? But no matter what, it’s likely to be one hell of a ride.

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

If you on a general level agree with the old established Left and happily vote for any of the socialist or social democratic parties or their liberal equivalents in the US (yes, that includes Bernie Sanders) then you’re probably not Alt-Left. If you instead see the political identity based movements in all their diverse glory, whether that’s feminism, multiculturalism and what not as the only way forward, then you’re probably not Alt-Left either. If you self-identify as Alt-Left but merely repackage the same old thoughts that have been available for the past 30 years or more, then you’re per definition not Alt-Left. But if you find that the following describes your opinions and way of thought, then you’re probably Alt-Left. Here goes:

1) The market

You have a critical stance towards the forces of the market, yet knowing that it’s extremely unwise to play against them or refraining from taking the hard logic of capital into serious consideration in our highly globalized market economy. You have no illusions about planned economies and are acutely aware of the dangers of ending up as a new Venezuela. However, you likewise have no illusions about the idea of a so called free market; you know it’s just a construct made up of rules that humans have devised themselves, rules that can be changed to produce different outcomes. You know that no such thing as a “free” market could exist even in theory as the rules themselves are what constitute a market. You have never committed the fallacy of seeing the market as a natural God-given constant that therefore only generates good results (you are a leftie after all). But still you acknowledge that the chaos and widely disruptive effects of capitalism somehow, in midst of all the calamity, in some strange fashion also bring about the progress of the world – which is, after all, necessary for humanity to survive and prosper.

You are as appalled with the old established Left’s sell-out attitude and resignation towards the forces of capitalism as you are dismissive of the naive “game denial” of the more rebellious postmodern challengers in regard to the hard undeniable logic of capital. You understand that capitalism can’t be abolished, and if someone tries it always has more negative consequences than positive ones. Your solution is thus not to abolish, but to outcompete, capitalism – with superior means of coordinating people’s combined economic actions while reducing the importance of monetary exchanges in society. Exchange of money capital is by definition capitalist. Only by strengthening other means of coordinating human labor and activity, can we go beyond capitalism.

And no, your solution is not just more state to balance out the market. You know that state and capital are merely two sides of the same coin; and no, no, no, fighting the patriarchy and racism won’t make away with capitalism either. A new way of thinking about economics that in a competitive manner goes beyond monetary exchanges is the only way to counter the dominance of capitalism.

2) Immigration, refugees and multiculturalism

Your solidarity naturally extends to all people on the planet, but you understand that open borders and unregulated immigration currently are a socially unsustainable endeavor in our highly unequal world. Abolishing all travel restrictions may be a long term goal, but it’s not feasible to sustain such policies in the near future as it causes unnecessary social and political instability, such as integration problems, cultural alienation and pressures to the wages of the working class which all in all may lead to fascist, populist and other reactionary uprisings.

It’s not so much a moral question, a matter of priding yourself with the correct opinions, but more a practical one that concerns you: whether immigration may inhibit or foster progressive global developments altogether. You are against the national based socialism of protecting the privileged status of workers in rich countries, but at the same time you understand that such concerns cannot be neglected completely. Immigration policies that are perceived as win-win situations should be favored over zero-sum ones.

You have a critical stance towards how the issue of refugees is handled today, but you consider both the restrictive hardliners of the Right and the open-for-all position of the Left too irresponsible and lacking in adequate understandings of the problem. Yet you don’t see the middle ground as the best position either; in fact, the current compromise on the issue is itself the greatest problem.

The idealism of granting everyone the right to seek asylum – and the cynicism of making sure that, in practice, they don’t – is causing a great deal of suffering and don’t help the ones who need it the most (because the weakest don’t have the means to travel). As we have seen lately, it has become obvious that the self-interest of nations works against the idealism of the international laws regarding asylum, which has resulted in much suffering. In short, the current system, which can be summed up as: telling people in poor and war-torn countries that they might have a chance at gaining a secure and well-off western lifestyle (because that’s just how morally good we are) – if – they have the money for a human smuggler (because we have effectively stopped all legal travel to the rich countries), survive the dangerous trip across the ocean and are deemed eligible for asylum by a slow incomprehensible bureaucratic system while living in miserable camps (where the hosts are hoping that they go back). This is, needless to say, an altogether unsustainable and morally irresponsible way of tackling the issue. Instead an alternative, more utilitarian, system that goes beyond the cynicism and unachievable idealism should be devised to maximize the positive effects with the currently available resources while minimizing overall suffering.

Likewise you don’t have any illusions about the blessings of multiculturalism. You understand that diversity, despite its merits, is not just universally good but also causes conflicts, misunderstandings and challenges the social coherence of society. And that the moral superiority of subscribing to multiculturalism on a personal level doesn’t seem to tackle those negative effects adequately.

The multicultural tendency towards seeing cultures as rigid constants and given categories is also something you reject. Instead of multiculturalism you are more inclined towards transculturalism, the idea that cultures are ever-evolving non-static entities that reach the most beneficial outcomes when they are challenged, opened up for outside influences, transgressed and fused with other cultural elements. You understand 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. You find the multiculturalist way of only emphasizing the communication part, attempting to bridge differences and conflicts across cultures by intercultural dialog alone, as highly inadequate. Of equal importance are deliberate, but sensitive, attempts to change and shape cultures so as to foster more optimal conditions for peaceful co-existence and productive collaboration. It goes without saying that that includes majority as well as minority cultures.

3) Psychological development

You know that focusing on economic and legal structures alone doesn’t suffice to change society in a more just, sustainable and equal direction, and that the various identity policies and cultural critics don’t address the most crucial aspects of society either. Instead you stress the importance of psychological development and understand the greater societal consequences of supporting policies that foster greater psychological well-being, acceptance and emotional intelligence.

You clearly see how many of the so called wicked problem such as crime, psychological distress and integration could be solved if policies addressed the inner workings of human psychology in a more deliberate and effective manner. The most urgent problem of our time is not that people in the developed world have too low incomes, but that lacking psychological well-being and dysfunctional social relations, often in combination, greatly lower the quality of life and cause all kinds of problems in society at large. Implementing policies that adequately address these issues would, in the long run, be more effective for solving people’s problems than is economic redistribution.

You see equality as being about more than just money. It’s just as important to ensure that psychological well-being, feelings of acceptance and self-esteem are more equally distributed in the population. All in all you are more concerned about life satisfaction, or “happiness”, than where exactly people are positioned in the hierarchies of power or how much money they have vis-à-vis others. Even though it’s just as utopian to achieve a situation where everybody is equal in terms of well-being, self-esteem and social acceptance as it is to create one where everybody are economically equal, you do believe that a society that strives towards psychological equality is inherently better than one that only strives towards economic equality.

4) Idealism and Machiavellianism

You see yourself as a staunch idealist while simultaneously acting like a fierce Machiavellian – without making any compromises between the two. Being a realist does not mean accepting things as they are. And your idealism is not a matter of moral purity, but of finding the ideal practical solutions to make reality of your ideals. If political ideals don’t hold up to practical reality, the ideals have already disqualified themselves as worth striving towards.

You are not afraid of getting your hands dirty. You know you can’t make everybody happy; you can’t give everything to everybody. And if you tried, you would betray your own ideals since trying to please everybody would hinder you from achieving your goals. You somewhat disdain those progressives who embrace moral purity while sacrificing practical results. Your ideals are not an identity project, it’s not important that you’re perceived as the “good guy” in other people’s eyes. All that matters to you are getting results – because the state of the planet is at stake and we’re running out of time.

However, this doesn’t mean that you don’t have any moral integrity in the things you do. You will avoid hurting people, even it requires additional efforts. In fact, causing pain and harm to the world, even if it helps achieving some goals, often defeats the very purpose of your actions in the long run. You always seek the optimal synthesis between idealism and Machiavellianism and avoid any compromises between the two.

5) The Avant-garde

And finally. You don’t have time to wait for everybody else. You understand the strengths of popular movements, but also their inherent weaknesses. Accordingly you emphasize the importance of supplementing progressive movements with a more elitist approach. As an Alt-Left person you’re thinking more metamodern than your surroundings and hence seek to create the necessary leeway for yourself to move ahead of others so as not to let them hinder your progress. You understand that small groups of far-sighted individuals with the right means can accomplish great things by hacking the fabric of society and recoding parts of its DNA – without needing to ask everyone’s permission first. You therefore abide to avant-garde tendencies by forming smaller networks with other likeminded persons.

You know that the working class is not going to bring about a revolution, otherwise they would have done it a long time ago, and that they are too preoccupied with their own narrow interests to bring about substantial progressive changes to society. In fact, it is usually too conservative and often stands in the way for the changes you find the most urgent. You have noticed that the workers’ movement hasn’t really come up with any new thoughts for the past 100 years, and that many of the progressive developments that have occurred, for example the women’s and gay movements, did so independently of the workers.

Instead you’re more focused on the interests of the creative class, who are often the driving force behind the most progressive developments, because they have the means to develop many of the needed solutions for a more sustainable society. These interests are often shared by the growing precariat, who are sometimes in direct opposition to the working class. There are a growing number of people who lead insecure lives between the creative class and the precariat itself.

If you’re Alt-Left you’re probably more inclined towards organizing smaller networks together with other “hackers, hipsters and hippies” than trying to organizing mass movements with simple taglines.

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If you’re Alt-Left you may have pondered that if the old established Left could have transformed the world in a more progressive direction, it already would have. If the labor movement could have taken over production and turned it into democratic cooperatives, it already would have. If it could have abolished capitalism, it would have. After all, it has had 100 years to do so.

You may also have noticed that, despite its early internationalist proclamations, the old established Left hasn’t fostered any greater international solidarity. You understand that it has failed at these tasks because it didn’t have feasible solutions or sound analyses of how the world actually works and therefore never will succeed in its current form ever. It seems as if the old established Left has reached the end of the road, the limits of its analytical power, and currently only seems to be preoccupied with keeping the boat from rocking too much.

And in the current transition to a globalized information society, to which it lacks answers, you see how hopelessly outdated the old Marxism of the Left appears and that many of its positions have become unsustainable, irrelevant or downright counterproductive.

If the above seems to describe you, then you might be Alt-Left, and if that is the case, then you might also be metamodern. Here are five things that make you metamodern.

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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.

Introduction: Expanding the realm of the economic

In social science a perpetual question of legitimacy is the definition and delimitation of the economic. What is ‘economic’ fundamentally defines with what we, collectively as well as individually, can economize, within which frames we can meaningfully make trade-offs. In an acclaimed economics text-book trade-offs are said to be made concerning: 1. which goods/services to produce, 2. how to produce, and 3. who receives goods/services (Perloff, 2004: p 2). Some domains of our existence are however generally considered to be beyond economic inquiry, and therefore meaningful trade-offs cannot be made between that which we generally consider as ‘economic’ and that which we do not. Critical theorists have lately been working towards opening greater domains of human existence to be compared with economic analysis: how does the redistribution of wealth relate to the redistribution of recognition? Which of these two should come first in political discourse? etc. (Fraser & Honneth, 2003). At the other end of the spectrum of social theory, models from economics are spreading into other social sciences, as indicated by the growth of rational choice theory and public choice theory as well as by popular books such as Lewitt & Dubner’s Freakonomics from 2005, where almost everything sub-lunar is brought under ‘economic’ scrutiny.

This paper defends the legitimacy of an economic approach to society as a chief matter of social science, but an attempt is also made to criticize the dominant conception of ‘goods’ and ‘utility’ in the rational choice and public choice paradigms. The Socratic principle of some ends being more rational than others is defended against Hume’s notion of all preferences being beyond the rational (Rawling, 2003: p 115). Hume famously wrote that there is nothing ‘irrational’ about preferring the end of the world to the scratching of one’s finger. The Weberian paradigm of defining modernity by separating goal-oriented rationality from means-oriented rationality can be viewed as a continuation of this Humean tradition (Udehn, 2003: p 148). Although such differentiation is crucial for modern civilization to evolve, the task today is arguably to integrate normativity with rationality in a functional manner. The aim of this paper is to contribute, with a small step, to the working out of an effective theoretical framework for making normative distinctions and trade-offs that are today neglected by the dominant economic models used in political and economic thought. A framework of this kind is needed because of the relative retreat that economic thinking has made: from being based on progressive liberal theory in the 19th century, to becoming a chief legitimator of the status quo (MacPherson, 1977). Neo-classic economic theory seeks to increase growth, trade and utility, but does not in and of itself explain why this is good, nor does it take into account the distribution of utility. Notable economists of the last two decades like Amartya Sen have worked to introduce an ethical aspect into economic theory proper, but this has stirred controversy and not made its way into the economics textbooks (Morris, 2010). In the public sphere, notions of ‘green growth’, ‘pro-poor growth’ (Angelsen & Wunder, 2008: p. 96) and ‘gross national happiness’ have been suggested. These concepts still require further operationalization in order to be taken into account within a clear ‘economic’ paradigm. They are not clearly defined and usable in for instance financial departments around the world. Indeed, economic thought no longer plays the role of expanding our horizons, but appears to be locked down into the paradigmatic utilitarian concepts of 19th century liberal thought. To evolve beyond its current confines, economic thought must go back to its philosophical roots and redefine its core concepts, while keeping its practicality and usefulness, and incorporating a refined sociological sensitivity.

The concern is not to suppress economic thought as we know it, but to expand it. The ability to – without flinching – hold, control and accept the consequences of hard-lined, cynical theories is very important in any economic inquiry. Tough realities don’t become less tough just because we don’t like them. In life in general, and in social science in particular, it is advisable to expand our ability to, when necessary, accept and take into account even the grimmest insights about social reality. This permits our responses to have more predictable outcomes. Hard truths are often sugar-coated in academic literature and text-books to avoid the stigmatizing of the author as ‘cynical’ or ‘cruel’, because the study of self-interested, rational individuals or institutions can appear to be a heartless enterprise. There is of course nothing heartless in stating the consequences of a relevant fact or interpretation that can be scientifically supported, however unappealing or even appalling it may be. But hard-line theories can also be fetishized, being seen as a sign of that well-needed masculine pride. Cynicism has a certain lure that can cripple our understanding of reality. Theories can be influenced by our personalities, or worse, come to influence our whole world-views and make us blind to great potentials and opportunities because ‘we see past all that’. They can become identities and political defences for unjust social realities. Cynical thought is a powerful tool, but it is ultimately a very poor basis for relating to a universe that literally speaking evolved from dust to Shakespeare, from survival of the fittest to solidarity.

What we need today is not primarily more hard-line understanding of the functions of power relations and enlightened self-interest. Certainly, these aspect of social-theoretical understanding must be cherished and protected from politically correct moosh-moosh that attempts to repress and deny basic truths about human agency: for instance, that all relations are created and upheld through use of power and violence (Foucault, Laing); that there is a very strong statistical correlation between enlightened self-interest and empirical agency (Buchanan, von Mises), etc. But keeping these aspects in mind, what I feel is urgently needed in social science today is an encompassing softer theoretical framework. By ‘softer’ I mean a theoretical framework that allows us to both study society as feeling, compassionate, contemplative human beings and to make tough collective decisions about the employment of resources and dispatching of state violence (i.e. legislation). A paradigm is needed that without apology takes both an uncompromisingly cynical view of society and a deeply idealistic one. Our outlook should be philosophically satisfying and socially functional. Why should we ask anything less of ourselves?

Economic thought must deepen its grounding social theory. It is hence too limited a task to understand what the Club of Rome called the ‘Limits to Growth’. That entire problematic is only a function of a deeper concern that is directly social-philosophical: namely that of the limits of economic inquiry. To expand these limits is the purpose of laying out the following five articles.

Article I. Utility is a means

What is the utility of the Pyramids? This thought experiment is proposed in all seriousness. If one looks past the myths presented by nationalistically inclined Egyptian tourist guides, it is apparent that the Pyramids must have been built with the help of coercion, by forced labour. Thousands of human beings must have suffered under the burning sun for the sake of raising a pile of rocks of little use to themselves, that served only to artificially enhance the grandiosity of their exploiters. And yet, the building of the Pyramids is rightfully considered to be one of the greatest achievements of humanity as a whole. Was it worth it? To whom? The human labor put into building the Pyramids could doubtlessly have been much better allocated to serve the well-being of the inhabitants of ancient Egypt. But the Pyramids stand today as an inspirational monument to human creativity and will likely continue to do so for ages to come. They draw our attention to the cradle of civilization and confront us with the material reality of history, with the ebb and flow of whole cultures, of centres of political power and nexuses of economic interaction and accumulation. The Pyramids served as a wondrous adventure at their discovery and uncovering in modern times. And they are today a major tourist attraction, offering a lot of rich people ‘an experience’ and a lot of poor people a living. These effects were certainly not intended by the architects of the Pyramids, but it cannot be denied that they add to their utility.

The above considerations put into focus certain paradoxical aspects about the classical notion of ‘utility’. There are three tensions that underlie the confusion around evaluating the utility of something originating from another epoch:

1. The tension between utilitarian awareness or reasoning, and non-utilitarian awareness or reasoning.
2. The tension between the immediate pleasure principle of living subjects, and the long-term effects in all future times.
3. The tension between the understanding and interpretation of the acting subjects, and evaluation through the retroactive re-interpretation of historical hindsight.

Does the occurrence of these tensions discredit the idea of utility as a goal of human activity? Not at all. Rather, what should be underlined is that these tensions require of the observer a certain social-philosophical sensitivity for the term ‘utility’ to be meaningfully employed as a guiding concept for human activity. The three tensions should not be settled through a direct either/or logic: for instance, that ‘real’ utility would be that of utilitarian consciousness, working with a perspective of all future times and with the apprehension of historical hindsight. Such a position is of little use, because the tension de facto remains. No, the lesson to be learned is that both extremes of each paradoxical aspect must be held simultaneously, and the tensions must be resolved through the acceptance of their insolubility. Counter-intuitive as such as position may appear, it is the only way to avoid that one or another crucial aspect of the term ‘utility’ is repressed and denied.
The intellectual sensitivity towards these tensions is lacking in social science today, as in the cultural discourse at large. With this lack in mind it is hardly surprising to find that observers bound from different paradigms (e.g. neo-classic economists of libertarian bent, deep-ecologists and utilitarian animal rights defenders) are unable to meaningfully compare their conclusions in a cross-disciplinary manner and quantify the interests they are expressing in a way that can be understood extra-disciplinarily. Instead of fruitfully comparing perspectives, the different perspectives compete to frame reality and define the discourse. In academia, this represents the creation of tropes in which social scientists can rest assured that they have the ‘real’ perspective and that the perspectives of ‘those other academics’ are inferior, because otherwise they’d come to the same sound conclusions, wouldn’t they? Simple empirical observations can reaffirm this state of affairs: how large percentage of Masters students of sociology take seriously the neo-classic growth models? Very few, which is surprising given the tantamount importance that these models have in today’s political reality around the world. And how many economics students take seriously the account of animal rights in a utilitarian perspective, upon which their own theoretical grounding ultimately rests? Again, very few.

Let us look closer at the three tensions mentioned above. A sufficient social-philosophical grounding is lacking in contemporary social science, as the concept of ‘utility’, whether used explicitly or implicitly, is taken for granted – despite the persistence of the three tensions. This ‘taken for granted’ is a fallacy that consists of two parts. The first part of the fallacy is simply that utility is understood as a given, something which has material reality, which it does not. Utility arises in a context where what is useful is somehow defined in reference to material reality and to a given interpretation of the same. Like in Marx’s quote at the beginning of this paper, what is useful to a dog is not the same as what is useful to a human being. And what is useful to human beings also changes along the lines of economic, cultural and personal development as has been shown by numerous scholars, from Maslow to Jean Gebser to Carol Gilligan to Robert Kegan. The second and crucial part of the fallacy is that utility is taken to be a goal, which it is not. Utility is a means for something else. As such utility is an empty slot. It is a void, nothing. Nobody dreams of a life full of utility. We dream of lives full of wonder, love, joy, excitement, pleasure, validation, harmony, bliss. We don’t wish one another ‘useful holidays’ and so on. Nevertheless utility is taken to be the chief de facto aim of our political and economic life. (It could even be argued that in our time, we have a ruling ideology that turns utility into a ‘sublime object’, charges it with an air of sacredness. God is dead. Utility is God. Long live utility!)

Why is it important to point out that utility is a means, rather than an end? Simply because ends in and of themselves cannot be rationally discussed and quantified. That some courses of action generate more ‘marginal utility’ than others is a useful guidance, but only if this utility serves a good end. What if the end is the destruction of a minority segment of the population? The goodness of that end cannot be quantified by existing economic theory! I don’t pretend to give a satisfying answer to the ultimate end of human activity, but as working hypothesis I suggest that the end towards we strive is ‘bliss’. Today economic inquiry halts at utility without being concerned with its relationship to bliss. As Stanley Jevons in 1871 famously argued that ‘to maximize pleasure, is the problem of economics’ (Udehn, 2003: p 145), it may appear that economics is already the science of bliss. But this is far from the case. Jevons’ definition serves only to underline the role of rationality as a means for maximizing utility, without inquiring into the relationship between utility and bliss. Utility is taken as directly conductive to pleasure. It is not understood critically, with awareness of its own radical contingency. The contingency of this link between utility and bliss, as outlined above, exposes the philosophical weakness of the grounding of our economic thought, hence of our modern political enterprise as a whole. The development of Jevons’ thought by Menger and other Austrians (into a science of the economizing of scarce resources to satisfy needs) has made economic thought grow in practical usefulness, although it has not freed economic inquiry from its very limited scope. Indeed, the impressive technical development of economic science within econometrics, macroeconomics and financial economics is largely built on the same philosophically weak grounding.

A parallel discussion is possible on the notion of ‘goods’. Are goods good in and of themselves, or are they good only in a certain context? Does it make a difference in what mind-set and for what purpose a good is consumed? Is the act of producing a good more important than interpreting it? Are some goods only perceived as good, but are really bad? Goods are empty. They only become good in relation to bliss.

So if utility is a means for and end, and this end is bliss – what is then bliss? We cannot pretend to give bliss a positive meaning, at least not in this paper. Rather bliss must be understood as a subjectively lived quality in existence that is always implicit, unreachable, unknowable. Even if we empirically study the anatomy of bliss as a series of bio-chemical reactions in the nervous system of a given living creature, this does not grant us subjective first-person, lived knowledge of bliss. Much like Adorno and Horkheimer warned us, when we attempt to positively define reality, we do so at risk of violating reality, the object. Bliss is to wake up a careless morning and have coffee; to look at the clear, awe-inspiring midday skies; to become aware of a deep silence around us; to anticipate the arrival of a loved one; to fight for a good cause; to work hard and feel good about it. Nowhere in these examples can one find the exact address of ‘bliss’. It is subtle, implicit. Bliss is always already in all living experience, as is suffering. Sentient beings cannot live completely indifferently, we are always somewhere on the scale between suffering and bliss.

If life is a book, a text-line, bliss is in the understood context in which it is read. Cut an exciting novel into pieces and try to locate the exact letter, or combination of letters that makes it exciting and you are bound to fail. However, it is possible to see how the author of the book has used different techniques to create fertile ground for an exciting reading experience. The same can be said of bliss. Although bliss in and of itself must remain unknowable, and although it would be a violation to define it (beautiful home, faith in God, love relationship, meaningful work, good habits, altruism …), what can be known is utility, and our relationship to it. With today’s quite limited understanding of utility, you cannot make trade-offs between different forms of utility: there is just utility – and the more of it, the better.

At the same time, paradoxically, the prevailing understanding of utility is a case of what Marxists call reification, as something insubstantial is given the status of a positively knowable substance, even to the extent that it becomes the object of idolatry. By expanding our idea of what economics is to maximize, trade-offs can become possible between things that have hitherto been beyond economic inquiry. It should hence be possible to expand our possibilities for bliss by changing our conceptions of economic inquiry. As starting-point for such a critical enterprise I suggest the notion of utility as a means, an empty slot. This empty slot is to be filled with bliss: an unknowable quality of existence. It should be easier than it sounds.

Article II. Utility is the result of stream-of-action

Microeconomics is really a microsociology explaining macro-scale realities. It theorizes about the individual (household) and draws conclusions about prices on markets on basis of the expected choices and actions of this individual (household). The argument of this paper is to unfold against a similar understanding: a microsociological basis explaining macrosociological realities.

In Maurice Godelier’s search for a cross-cultural, comparative economic science, he outlined three major parts of the work (Godelier, 1978: p 25):

1. A philosophical part (interpreted here as ‘defining utility’)
2. An economic part (interpreted here as ‘quantifying utility’)
3. An anthropological part (interpreted here as ‘qualifying subjects for utility’)

We are now to take the transitioning step from the philosophical work of Article I, to the economic work in Article III. Article II is here to provide a bridge between the two. By holding that utility is a means for bliss, we have opened the door to making a shift in the micro¬sociological basis upon which microeconomic thought (being the heart of economics) is based. If utility is defined differently, surely its quantifications must rest upon different theoretical assumptions. This understanding of utility is in and of itself not very substantial and practically meaningful and must hence be linked to realities that are empirically observable, quantifiable: namely actions.

Newton taught us that every action is met by an equal reaction. Indeed, no action in the universe is ever isolated, outside a causal chain of more or less distinguishable events. The same is true of all intentional actions undertaken by sentient beings. All actions have consequences, and this has implications for economic inquiry, as we shall soon see. We are now to zoom in on a few completely uncontroversial truisms about objective reality and draw the consequences for economic inquiry (which is of course a somewhat more controversial enterprise!):

• First truism: from birth until death, all sentient beings are involved in a constant stream of agency. This agency can be more or less conscious, more or less controlled, more or less overt (uttered words versus inner monolog etc.). No sentient being ever ceases to act.
• Second truism: each moment of each action has consequences that spread in a causal chain, by the laws of physics connected with the whole of the universe, without exception. The ongoing consequences of each moment never stop – they keep working their way through world history until the universe ceases to exist.
• Third truism: each moment of each action has consequences conductive to both bliss and suffering. No action ever has entirely blissful consequences, and no action ever brings only suffering, which means that no action, no matter how vile can ever bring eternal suffering to all living things.

Many discussions could be held with these truisms as starting points. They put into focus certain existential predicaments that we all face; they form a basis for ethical awareness; they disprove the idea of ‘purity from sin’; they push morality beyond an anthropocentric view; and they guarantee a minimum of hope in the future (as was held by the Stoics). But for the purpose of this discussion, it is relevant to look at these truisms as foundational for a micro-sociology as basis for economic inquiry. Here a term should be borrowed from symbolic interactionism – stream-of-action. This term denotes the stream of constant agency that all (not sentient in this case, but human) beings produce. The term also implies that all actions emerge in a symbolic order and must be interpreted to be rendered meaningful, for their purpose and effect to be understood. Furthermore it implies that such an interpretation is largely implicit, and that the interpretation can change or evolve, for instance by becoming more conscious and critical (Charon, 2001).

The point for economic inquiry is then that all utility must ultimately originate from this stream-of-action. Not from choices made, from things produced, from games played (game theory) or from trade-offs – all these are merely descriptions of instances within the stream-of-action of certain agents.

All action has motive. The motive may be more or less clear, more or less explicit, more or less conscious, but it is always there, even in an insect. It is in the word ‘motive’ – the mover – that which propels action, grants to the stream its direction. Motive always emerges from a lack, or emptiness, something that is not there, not yet achieved, fulfilled. The motive of the author to write this paper is to write something he has not already written (and to receive academic credits, not already received), and so on. This links to the Hegelian notion of a dialectic based around a constitutive emptiness: in Adorno this is a ‘negative dialectic’, in Lacan it is ‘lack in the self’.

The motive of action is always to affect the effect of future action: we eat and drink so that we can live to learn philosophy, learn philosophy so that we can live better, and so on. Here we must step away from individual atomism to grasp the full scope of agency and motive. Individual atomism is a limited perspective upon which current microeconomics is based. Symbolic interactionism is also a relatively weak perspective in regard to its critical potential because it still adheres to a kind of atomism. Although agency emerges from individuals with some kind of what American philosopher Ken Wilber calls a ‘dominant monad’ that controls the whole of the organism, and never from social entities like states or firms (that consist of many individual agents), the effect of agency is always social, affecting the effects of future actions of the individual agent as well as the future actions of other individual agents. No man is an island. To further deepen this understanding, one must take into account that the ‘self’ is by no means a sealed entity that can uncritically be linked to the individual agent. ‘Selves’ are in themselves structures that are built in social surroundings (no-self of infant agency, undifferentiated tribal self, modern individualist self, deconstructed post-modern self, and so on). Hence we are left with a lattice or network of interconnected nexuses of different quality, identification, motive and awareness: from these nexuses stream-of-action emerges affecting the sum of suffering and bliss of the network as a whole. This warrants further discussion, but suffice at this point to underline the non-atomic nature of agency.

Hence we are left with the conclusion that utility is the sum of the effect of all current stream-of-action on the sum of all future stream-of-action, where bliss is the indefinable negative that drives the motivation but is never caught directly in observable stream-of-action, the point that is always referred to but never met. See figure 1. below.

The figure should be understood as a theoretical model of the sum of a definable network’s sum of stream-of-action. As we have observed, all action has consequences, and all sentient beings are in states of non-indifference (suffering or bliss). From here it can be observed that actions that bring about more extreme suffering or bliss are less frequent (or less likely to occur) than actions that bring about moderate amounts of suffering or bliss or actions that bring about a more balanced amount of both suffering and bliss (for instance, by benefiting one and depriving another). On a trivial level: It is more frequent to buy milk and spill some on the table than to start a world war or invent a cure for cancer. It should be an uncontroversial claim that the effects of streams-of-action follow a normal distribution as indicated in fig. 1.

It should further be noted that this model says nothing of which actions lead to what consequences or anything about what the ‘normal’ or ‘median’ utility of actions in a given network might be. The white middle is never ‘ethically neutral’. Ethical neutrality is a nonsensical concept. The ethics of given actions are questions that must be resolved separately with a social-philosophical sensitivity towards the notion of utility as discussed above. Given that we are here theoretically discussing the ‘eternal consequences for all sentient beings’ it is important to see that the model itself cannot give guidance, only point out the deep and inescapable ethical importance of our collective stream-of-action.

From here it should become clear that an encompassing economic paradigm used with normative sensitivity should economize not primarily scarce resources, but stream-of-action – that is, the whole scope of human agency. An economic science that looks solely upon what is today loosely termed ‘economic activity’ will miss out on the most relevant trade-offs to be made. This would not be a problem if economic thought did not so thoroughly influence our understanding of the political. However, since this influence is abound it is fair to hold that economics (as in ‘political economy’) should become a critical tool-kit for the distribution and redistribution of human stream-of-action, overt as well as covert.

Article III. Utility can be studied at different levels of depth

Article III attempts to establish the transition from philosophical inquiry to economic thought in which trade-offs can be made. As we have seen, the effect of an action (upon the effect of future actions) depends upon the causal chain through which the action is spread or transmitted. The causal chain can affect wider parts of the network, or affect a target point in the network more strongly if it is transmitted through a stronger medium. Hence the medium through which our action is transmitted is a crucial component of the real effect of the action. All practical tools or technologies can be understood as such action-transmitting media: doctors who use modern medical equipment with scientific expertise can be expected to have greater effect upon the future action of their patients (by saving their lives etc.) than ancient practitioners. Industrial society has greater impact on the environment than do hunter-gathered societies. To denote this significance of effect-transmitting media I have borrowed Kevin Kelly’s term ‘the technium’. The technium is technology studied as an evolutionary phenomenon inherent in the structure of the universe. See figure 2. below.

Kevin Kelly is a scientific journalist, former editor of Wired Magazine and speaker at many leading scientific and futurist conferences. The merit of his concept of the technium is that it emphasizes the non-anthropocentric dimension of technological progress. When the first eukaryote cells ‘realized’ that they could use that poisonous piss of theirs in which they were drowning in countless billions (i.e. oxygen) to destroy other living matter and from that retrieve energy for their own growth, evolution took a giant leap as the first animal life appeared on our planet. This was an ‘innovation’ of sorts, and the technium was at that time something external, new – it was oxygen. I’m simplifying to a violent extent, of course, but you get the picture. Thus the technium is a broader term than technology as it denotes anything that transmits the effect of the stream-of-action of a given sentient being.

Figure 2 should be understood in the following way: the suffering or bliss ultimately resulting from any given action or ongoing activity is multiplied by the technium that transmits it. The darker the gray areas beneath each point on the suffering-bliss continuum, the greater the effect of the action. An act of aggression matters more when transmitted by an atomic bomb and insults hurt more on TV than at the local pub.

From this figure one can begin to see that utility has different layers, as it were: different levels of depth. Again, all stream-of-action targets future stream-of-action, more or less consciously, but without exception. Hence the conclusion can be drawn that different actions will affect the future sum of stream-of-action in different ways. More conscious action can change future streams of action more thoroughly. Conversely damage, or negative utility, can also occur on different levels of depth. Was the great catastrophe that extinguished the dinosaurs more barbaric than the Holocaust? Most would argue that it was not: no bad intentions were there when the meteor struck (which cannot itself be considered as an act, but rather as a circumstance), no human lives were lost, and no thinking person lost his or her dignity and faith in life. Utility depends on the awareness of the stream-of-action, upon the medium through which it is transmitted, and upon the depth of the awareness of the network of sentient beings whose future streams-of-action are affected. With so many living, feeling and thinking human beings and other highly developed animals present in the world today, the actions of whom are transmitted through such tremendous technium (itself growing with accelerating pace), the ethical significance of our actions has grown to a truly unprecedented magnitude.

Although this initial mapping of utility must necessarily be crude, five levels of utility can be identified from what has been said so far. These levels are of increasing depth, but not of increasing significance. They will be discussed one by one and examples will be given. The levels of utility have always existed, although they have become consciously supported means for bliss along the lines of progress in history. I have argued elsewhere in alignment with Norbert Elias, Mihály Csíkszentmihályi (a leading ‘positive psychologist’ and author of the concept of ‘flow’) as well as the classic evolutionary sociologists like Durkheim and Spencer that historical progress is defined by greater interacting integration and individuation. As individuals become more aware of their uniqueness and simultaneously become more integrated into increasingly complex networks of greater depth-of-self-awareness, the nature of the effect of their stream-of-action makes qualitative shifts into deeper, more subtle levels. The levels are the following:

1. Instrumental utility
2. Systemic utility
3. Meta-systemic utility
4. Paradigmatic utility
5. Cross-paradigmatic or Existential utility

The ‘title prefixes’ of utility levels 2, 3, 4 and 5 are borrowed from the ‘Model of Hierarchical Complexity’ of complex systems theorist and Harvard psychiatrist Michael Commons. Although there are admittedly still unresolved problems with the definitions of these utilities, they are presented here in their raw hypothetical form, open to either theoretic refinement or fundamental critique and revision. See figure 3 below.

The point of the model is to summarize the different possible effects upon stream-of-action that actions can have. These effects are what define the different levels of utility. They also form a basis for functionally analysing the division of labour in society.

Instrumental utility (U1) results from actions that serve a practical end of maintenance of one kind or another: to eat, to build, to grow food, to buy grocery, to distribute grocery, to kill in order to survive. All of our routine, concrete activity and work falls under this category, ranging from health-care to security to transport to retailing to teaching at public schools. The maintenance of an equilibrium of stream-of-action increases the frequency of the mean effect of the sum of a network’s stream-of-action. Instrumental utility has always existed but it came into awareness only with the invention of the first simple tools: ‘Hey, I can have more of this maintaining effect if I use this instrument’. This awareness of U1 can be found in chimpanzees and other intelligent primates. In human history the U1 evolved greatly with the introduction of horticultural livelihood, as human beings could then relatively easily sustain themselves and their offspring, greatly increasing the population and hence the frequency of their mean effect of sum of stream-of-action. This is why U1 is marked in figure 3 as an arrow raising the peak of the normal distribution (thus also increasing the total area underneath the normal distribution curve). Note that awareness of U1 is not the awareness of innovation: chimpanzees don’t consciously think about expanding their tool-kit, indeed they consistently toss away their tool after each usage. Members of horticultural societies were obviously not aware of technological development – how could they have been? They just saw instrumental use in things around them, which lead to a major shift in their concrete stream-of-action.

Systemic utility (U2) results from actions that expand the utility of the existing technium. In neo-classic growth theory this is called ‘allocation of resources’, not increasing the derivative of the growth function over time, but simply raising the level of utility by increasing the constant of the linear function (y = b*x +c, where c is the constant). In the division of labour U2 is in all planning and administration: economists, pragmatic politicians, bureaucrats, managers, human resource people and so on. U2 has always existed but came into conscious awareness with the first political formations, where the function was generally fulfilled by or in collaboration with priesthood. U2 is marked by an arrow that pushes the constant of the technium downwards, hence increasing the effect of the full scale of stream-of-action, from the most blissful, to the most dastardly. If we find a smart way of putting into practice something really bad on large scale, like a war, we get more suffering. Systemic damage is some kind of waste of allocation of resources through bad planning, mismanagement etc, which would mean that the good and bad effects of the sum of stream-of-action decreases.

Meta-systemic utility (U3) results from actions that change the theoretical possibility for innovation, for expansion of the technium. When U3 is consciously pursued new insights about the nature of the universe are sought for their explicit potential to bring about innovation, changing the whole setting within which the system can be built. Research in medical science has brought wondrous cures, put into systemic use by states, instrumentally administered by physicians, resulting in the virtual eradication of formerly pandemic diseases. U3 became acknowledged in the wake of the scientific revolution of the seventeenth century, with the laying out of Francis Bacon’s Novum Organum (1620) and the founding of the Royal Society in London. At this point people saw the direct utility of actively supporting scientific inquiry. U3 changes the curve of the technium, increasing exponentially, not linearly, the effect of the whole sum of stream-of-action: suffering as well as bliss. Hence the greatest tragedies in history and the greatest triumphs appear to converge chronologically as the technium has expanded. U3 is meta-systemic because it pushes the reaches of what systems can be built. Examples of U3 labour are the natural scientist, the engineer, the philosopher of scientific method.

Paradigmatic utility (U4) results from actions that change the existing ethical understanding through which stream-of-action is organized. When paradigms change, new thought structures (interpretations of reality) emerge, affecting the conceived purpose of action, including the conceived purpose of all former/grosser levels of utility. Although paradigms have shifted since the cradle of human culture, the more deep-going shifts that affect not only contingent types (names of deities, architectural detail, ceremonial procedures, etc.) but more qualitatively absolute or ontological levels (Aristotelian teleological cosmology to Newtonian physics, traditional society to modernity, etc.) have increased in frequency over time. Unless this trend has somehow been reversed we are likely to experience qualitative cosmological shifts yet more often in the future – a mind-bogging thought considering the impact of recent qualitative shifts like Darwinianism and the general theory of relativity! U4 is when a shift occurs not only in knowledge about the universe but in thought-relation to society and/or the universe: new cosmologies, ideologies, moral philosophies. U4 became acknowledged somewhere during or after the Enlightenment. Voltaire’s catch-phrase ‘I hate your opinion, but I am ready to die for your right to speak it’ is an early sign-post. The founding of the Humbolt university in Germany can be seen as another stepping stone. J.S. Mill’s liberal notions of a ‘market of ideas’ and of ‘experimental life-forms’ were later fully institutionalized and made into democratic norms. States actively support a lively cultural debate and some cultural critics are even highly esteemed. The realization that society’s norms evolve in qualitative shifts was a foundational principle behind Marxist thought, behind the institutionalization of critical social science, psycho-analysis and moral philosophy. In the division of labour one can identify ideologues, critical social scientists and moral philosophers. In figure 3. U4 is marked as an arrow pushing the whole of the normal distribution to the right, towards bliss: for instance by granting society new norms on sexuality and aesthetics or emancipating oppressed minorities. If damage is done at the U4 level, the whole scale is pushed leftwards, towards suffering. The rise of 20th century fascism is perhaps in retrospect the clearest example: with the technium and systemic utility present at that time, the effects were catastrophic.

Cross-paradigmatic or Existential utility (U5) results from actions that deepen the cognitive awareness of the network and the sentient beings within it, making them more sentient. Such change occurs not in thought, but in the pre-conceptual space of awareness in which thought and other cognitive structures (sensory experiences, emotions, etc.) emerge. U5 is meta-paradigmatic because it sets the limits for what paradigms can emerge at all: Christianity or socialism could never have been brought about by cats. That U5 has always existed is clear: the mechanisms of evolution brought about elevated awareness in for instance human beings from what was originally just a hot cloud of hydrogen gas. U5 is existential because it is not located within thought-structure (the subject matter of structuralism as in Lévi-Strauss etc.), but rather in the awareness within which thought-structure arises. Religious mysticism and contemplative practice as developed by the founders of many religions and esoteric traditions serve U5 as they explicitly change the pre-conceptual relationship of human beings to their lived universe (and according to a growing host of neurological research, evolve the cognitive capacities of the brain by thickening the neo-cortex and increasing neural connectivity). Mysticism can range from shamanism to the so-called ‘non-dual mysticism’ discovered more or less simultaneously during the fourteenth century in Tibet and by Christian mystics like Meister Eckhart. Although such traditions serve U5, it was not recognized as a specific form of utility: the spiritual practice discovered was always taken as an absolute, and not as an evolutionary step to bringing about even greater depth in future stream-of-action. Institutional religion in turn has almost exclusively served U1 and U2, by supporting political power and by spreading certain U5 structures. Although critical thinkers of existential insight have defended existential utility for at least half a century (Erich Fromm, Roy Bhaskar, Sri Aurobindo, Jiddu Krishnamurti, etc.) it has yet to be recognized in the dominant discourse of any existing culture, and hence U5 cannot really be identified in any existent division of labor. U5 is more dangerous than any other form of utility, as it brings about the capacity for suffering. Hydrogen atoms don’t suffer; insects do. Human beings suffer immensely. And human beings with greater awareness of their individuality suffer even more (which is why the Holocaust is more tragic than the extinction of the dinosaurs). What is suffering if not an elevated awareness unable to manifest itself, unable to relate to the universe in a manner corresponding to the altitude of its consciousness? An insect does not suffer from the inability to distinguish itself from its surroundings. A human being not able to distinguish her own thoughts from the outside world is psychotic, subject to unimaginable suffering (which is why mysticism, which eradicates the sense of separate self, is closely related to psychosis). Consider the fate of Satan: an angel that falls from the heavens, and is left in hell. Conversely, when a human being with great poetic depth gazes upon the sky or manifests her sexuality, the bliss is likely far beyond that of any insect performing the corresponding actions. U5 increases the scale of the suffering-bliss continuum logarithmically. Future technium is likely to bring about greater possibilities for boosting U5. If this is not done with sufficient U4 development, the suffering could be greater than anything experienced yet in history.

A few notes should be made concerning these five levels of utility. The first is that there is a certain tension between the different forms of utility, from the concretion of the lower levels to the subtleness of the higher ones. It can appear as though concrete levels are ‘more real’ than subtle ones: a nurse or doctor (U1) does more ‘real work’ than a bureaucrat (U2) who sits in the office and organizes the hospital or a medial lab-rat (U3) or the nosy arm-chair philosopher who formulated the principles from which the regulations stem that the bureaucrat follows (U4). Such crude understanding of utility must be seen as a grave misunderstanding. Conversely it may appear as though the philosopher is ‘more refined’ than the carpenter who made his chair. The levels of subtlety must not be used to devalue the different kinds of labor or activity.

A second note is that, in practice, the different levels of utility are always entangled in one another. For instance, an expert at research organization serves U2 but does so in expanding U3 or U4. Also, an astounding part of all U1 in late modern society serves the purpose of maintaining U2, U3 and U4. Furthermore, U5 adjustments can be argued for in U2 terms, for instance by viewing the organizational impact of meditative practices in governmental agencies (Parihar, 2004).

Finally, we must remind ourselves that utility is and remains an empty slot driven by a ‘negative dialectic’ of the indefinable lack or emptiness. Hence what is considered to be U1 is by no means an absolute reality, but only a relational Euclidean point, much like the mathematical concept of the number 1 is only meaningful when put into relation to other numbers. To be very clear: it does not make sense to transcendentally define carpentry as U1!

With these levels of utility in place it is possible to make more encompassing functional analysis than that of ‘conservative’ Parsonian sociology, while retaining a critical gaze and making trade-offs between areas of human activity that were hitherto beyond economic analysis. Such an analysis leaves the ethnocentric understanding of currently prevailing economic thought (the political economy of the nation state that defines utility only in reference to a contingently constructed nationality and what is really a fascistic understanding of whose reality counts – not the reality of animals and foreigners!). The analysis enters a ‘kosmocentric’ utilitarianism that takes into account the suffering or bliss of the universe as a whole – although the political unit of the state can of course still studied for functional reasons, such as its ability to monopolize the creative force of violence (i.e. effectively distribute norms through legislation etc.) and greater interconnectivity of the networks of sentient beings that converge with its territorial borders.

Article IV. Rationality is normative

The subsequent recognition of different levels of utility over time results in an understanding of economic rationality as an evolving entity, not eternally bound by the principles of a certain utilitarian recognition. To account for the construction of the Pyramids by reference to the classical ‘economic man’ is really to overstretch the argument made by main-stream economic historians!

The rationality through which trade-offs between different distributions of human activity are made is normative, inescapably so. According to the rationality of Pharaohs, it made perfect sense to raise giant graves. According to today’s prevailing rationality it makes little sense to redistribute a much greater part of our collective human activity to philosophical work, contemplation and meditative practice. In the ideological landscape of today rationality presents itself as ‘beyond norms’, just as universal reason. It must be understood that such a ‘pure rationality’ is not viable and that it is very limiting to the scope of our economic inquiry. It is true, that this paper too appeals to the faculty of reason of the reader. But it doesn’t claim to draw conclusions other than those grounded in a normative understanding, a rationality related to a certain set of ideas about what is good and what is not. The normative economic rationality of this paper would by many contemporary and perhaps future readers be rightly viewed as normatively questionable. However, at least the argument admits its own rationality as based upon an ideological view that is connected to an ontological understanding. The ruthless tearing down of every piece of argument in this paper can be celebrated as progress through paradigmatic utility.

Article V. Economics can only be used normatively

It should be clear from what has been said thus far that economic rationality can only be used normatively. This lands us in the economic-anthropological part of the theoretical work, as the economic history of humanity can no longer be written by accounting only of the ‘economic man’ as the author of institutions in the tradition of Douglass North and Mancur Olson (Udehn, 2003). In the light of the understanding presented under Article III and IV, it appears relevant to expand the analysis of economic institutions and their ‘rationality’ to an anthropological work involving at least five ‘economic men’ (aware of U1, aware of U1+U2, and so forth). The anthropological requisites or qualifications for different kinds of normative rationality constitute a matter of great importance if one is to make intelligible trade-offs between the five kinds of utility. Here an important point is that economic analysis itself tracks the five kinds of utility and trade-offs between them, while the economic-anthropological work tracks the awareness and interpretation through which utility arises in stream-of-action. Such a distinction greatly increases the scope of economic inquiry.

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

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