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At each order, or level, distinctions are made, opinions formed. But the different kinds of distinctions are made for different reasons. Here is the general outline of the five orders:

1st order: Opinion as identity cost-benefit calculation

2nd order: Opinion as (perceived) interest

3rd order: Opinion as perspective from a social position

4th order: Opinion as ideology (ontological horizon)

5th order: Opinion as cognitive ability (stage of development)

Let’s go through them one by one. The fifth order is the hardest one to understand, but also the most important one. It takes a basic understanding of adult development research to be graspable. This piece of theory can be read with just the first four or even three levels. Enjoy!

The 1st Order: Opinion as Identity Cost-Benefit Calculation

The first order is perhaps the simplest one to understand. The individual is likely to choose opinions that positively reinforce his or her identity in a given social setting. What opinions will make me appear cool, interesting, sophisticated, humane, of good character? It’s so banal that we often miss it. Nevertheless there is good reason to believe that the first order is quite powerful, one of the main explanatory factors in opinion formation. Quite simply: from what opinion will people gain the most in terms of their social identity? Adopting what political opinion will best serve my image, fit my style, help my career, get me laid, and get me into fewer awkward situations? This is perhaps the dominant causation of opinion formation in adolescents, and also the dominant order of causation in the spin-doctor games of everyday politics. This is basic behaviorism: what behaviors are reinforced and what behaviors are punished? This extends to formation of political opinions as well. Once a behavior has been adopted it tends to stick (because of habit and investment) until it becomes uncomfortable due to some changed circumstances.

The individual makes a cost-benefit calculation in terms of identity. An example might be the sociologist becoming politically left-leaning simply because it’s beneficial in his or her work environment. Becoming left-leaning might also work for musical artists who seek to reflect their positions of cultural capital. Or how about businessmen who adopt right-wing political opinions based on what will serve them best in their everyday lives? Political parties no less: how can we be the “good” party, the party that gets the votes? What opinions should we display if we want to be popular?

The cost-benefit calculation is dependent on social position (if you are long-term unemployed you are more likely to become an anarchist, simply because it has cosmetic value in that context) and on dominant social discourse (today, overtly racist opinions can only be beneficial in very specific groups, whereas they used to be widely embraced). The cost-benefit calculation is thus always being revised for different social positions and for changes of the cultural discourse in a given social system as a whole. The first order emphasizes only the identity-cost benefit aspect of opinion formation. It looks purely at what people gain through displaying an opinion, on what can be gained in terms of Goffman’s “presentation of everyday self”. It should not be confounded with the second or third levels of causation.

This level of causation is the one most densely allied with the powers that be. There is very little true subversiveness in it, because by definition we generally have less to gain by making distinctions that are not rewarded. The first order is the one that is most mechanistic, most reproductive of current power relations in society. The existence of this order largely explains how whole populations can shift opinion in short periods of time – e.g. shifting back and forth from being political radicals (fascism, the late sixties) to being conservatives (the fifties, the eighties).

The 2nd Order: Opinion as (Perceived) Interest

Whereas the first order is entirely symbolic, focusing on form and image alone, the second order is qualitatively different. It focuses on the content of the political opinion, on the short and long-term gains for the individual and his or her in-group in the struggle for material and symbolic scarce resources and capital. It focuses on the perceived effects of policy making.

Which policies will benefit my family? Will I gain more from higher taxes and more welfare, or from lower taxes and a less welfare? Will I gain more from a flexible labor market or from a more secure regulation of employment? Will I gain more from international competition for labor or would stricter immigration policies benefit me? Will prohibiting prostitution or narcotics make the urban landscape safer for me or will it hinder me in my everyday life? Will banning death penalty put my loved ones at greater risk of serious crimes? Will taxes on real-estate harm my house-hold economy or benefit it?

This order of causation is course what Marxism ascribes primary importance in understanding political struggle and development. By forming clearer perceptions of their individual and common good people are assumed to converge around broad class interests. Paul Krugman, the famous liberal economist and columnist, recently wrote that it’s a mystery to him how so many Americans can vote republican when “in fact” only a fraction of a percent of the population gain from republican policies. Regardless of the accuracy of his assessment (which is in my own opinion quite doubtful), the mystery wanes in this perspective on political opinion formation. The answer here is not simply a binary one of “false consciousness” pitched against “real, material class interest” as was the Marxist interpretation. Rather, it has to do with the fact that people can only go after their perceived interest. People perceive interests in accordance to their ability to understand society and their mental models of society. If people don’t share the Marxist or liberal analysis of the economy, they are unlikely to perceive themselves as gaining from these policies. There is nothing “false” about perceiving a certain kind of interest – for instance, an interest in lower taxes. But that’s not the whole answer: People perceive interests not only in material terms, but also in moral terms. If the perceived in-group is seen as threatened by terrorism or moral decay, people are likely to vote to defend this in-group, perhaps even at the expense of some “material” gains, and so forth.

We tend to form political opinions based on what we honestly believe will benefit us. This depends then on who we identify with (which “us” we seek to benefit), what values we want to achieve (what essence we ascribe to this benefit), how we think that benefit can be achieved (what policies/practices we think are efficient) and of course on our personal time frames (shorter against longer term interests).

The 3rd Order: Opinion as Perspective from a Social Position

Whereas the first two orders taken together might have a great deal of explanatory power (given we know the basic structures and discourses of the polity in question) there is still a large residual of unexplained dimensions to political opinion making. People hold social positions in society based on their access to different capitals: economic, social, cultural. We know this from Bourdieu, the great master of interpreting habitus: the subtle skills and perspectives adopted and embodied by people in relation to our position in society, our complex relationship to capital. These different social positions do not only determine interests in terms of the first and second orders of causation: they also help explaining the world-view of the individual.

Because, after all, opinion making is not all about personal or in-group interests. People actually believe that some things are better for society as a whole. Depending on our position in society, we will perceive different things as more beneficial or harmful to society. To an entrepreneurial businessman, regulations of the economy will likely look hindering to positive growth and innovation. He or she will be more likely to, in all honesty, perceive the downsides of regulations: all the paper-work, the reluctance to hire, the frustration of having a good business running but being bogged down by “red tape” or internationally uneven trade regulations and tariffs. He or she is likely to become convinced, in all honesty, that is would simply be better for everyone involved if the market was deregulated. The same goes for the union worker: he or she is likely to have so many experiences supporting the idea that extended labor rights are beneficial for society as a whole. Not to mention the religious fundamentalist nationalist: if only Western influence could be curbed and ousted and people could unite under the word of God! Then things would run harmoniously, smoothly. And there would be peace and justice for all.

This third order of causation can very well work against the first and second orders. People can say: of course, I personally would gain more from reducing the tax rate, but I know that it would not be beneficial for society. This order of causation does seem to have a certain degree of autonomy in relation to the first two orders. It is explained by the social position, the habitus, of the subject. And habitus sticks over time, which means that social mobility can explain that people make distinctions that are not in line with the interest perceived by others approximately in our own currently held social position. Speaking with Aristotle we can unequivocally agree that man is a social and political animal, although we must put a question mark on the idea that man is a rational animal. Our political rationality is in part dependent on a rationalization process, where we rationalize or “excuse” our own perceived interests in terms of “what’s best for all of us”. So man is in part a rational animal, and in part a rationalizing animal. The relative autonomy of this order of causation vis-à-vis the first two orders in turn depends on the two higher orders: the fourth and the fifth.

This also means that the number of social positions available in a given society limits the number of possible political stances. More complex societies (with greater connectivity or what Durkheim called greater “organic solidarity”) obviously have more complex stances, more differentiated stances.

The 4th order: Opinion as Ideology (Ontological Horizon)

To determine the relative autonomy of the third order, we need to turn to an idea developed by Theodor Adorno and the Frankfurt school’s development of Marx’s idea of “false consciousness”: ideology. Adorno of course, was a socialist intellectual through and through, and analyzed ideology because he wanted to know how people possibly could not want a fair, authentic socialist society. “Ideology” somehow prevented people from reacting against an unjust society and from toppling capitalism. He blamed the TV.

In our days, Slavoj Žižek has reversed the Marxist idea of false consciousness, that “they’re doing it, but they don’t know it”, to his famous slogan “they know it, and they’re still doing it!” He thinks people are eagerly complicit in upholding an unjust society, because it has some kind of pay-off, and that we use strategies of irony and sarcasm to distance ourselves from the unethical effects of our own actions. Žižek speaks of a “sublime object of ideology”, that is, something in our way of representing reality that does not quite make sense, that we need to cover up in order for everyday reality not to fall apart, lose its meaning. And we cover it up by wanting that sublime object, by wanting it real bad. So ideology is upheld by our struggle to reach that unreachable sublime object, that pleasure we want but in practice cannot get. It’s a very strange paradox, a painful paradox, at the heart of our common social reality.

These short accounts of course do little justice to the elaborate works of such original thinkers. But the idea here is simply to point out the fundamental importance of the social limits to our collective thinking. Any given society has some kind of ideological range, some limit to what can meaningfully be discussed as a “real” and realistic alternative in political opinion. We need to have ideas that are thought of and even felt as real.

History from the agricultural revolution to the French revolution is a long, bloody trail of peasant revolts against their masters. The masters would win most of the time, but even when toppled, the peasants would not achieve “freedom” in any modern sense of the word, simply because the ideas and institutions were not in place. Masters would be followed by new masters – their relations to peasants largely determined by the access to land and labor. People simply did not have a wide enough ideological range to be able to imagine a society or a utopia until Rousseau started whining at the French upper class salons: why does it have to be this way? Why can’t be have a just society? With the Enlightenment, the ideological range took a great leap, it expanded manifold and has kept expanding. But our sense of common reality, of what is possible to achieve as a society, is still bound up and controlled. By necessity we have a limited ideological range of political alternatives.

We can only have opinions that are accepted as real if we want the opinions to be effective in social reality. Somebody with the opinion that “cats should rule the finance sector” would of course not be taken seriously. Likewise, there are many possible opinions that simply cannot be taken seriously at any given time. The ideological frame is a kind of “ontological horizon”, the range of accepted reality, what people think and feel is real. The “denser” this reality, the closer its connection to power (in the foucauldian sense of the word). We can all agree that the existing power relations are felt as very real: if you don’t get a job, a respectable position, money, connection to the distributive systems – you are severely punished. And the reverse: any connection to power, to what is defined as real, is rewarding in terms of distribution of different forms of capital.

So in a more ideological state of affairs, there is less serious talk about political alternatives. People will need to avoid seriously challenging the existent power structures. The ideological range thus sets the limit of positions we can take in the first three orders: we cannot openly hold opinions that will alienate us in social life (1st order); we cannot pursue interests which we do not know of and cannot believe in as real (2nd order); and we cannot choose from many different political positions, achieving relative autonomy in our thinking about society as a whole, independent from simply rationalizing the first and second orders (3rd order). The most fundamental side of the fourth order is that it sets the limit for what political positions can be held, what distinctions can be made. As such ideology is the fundamental glue of the social order, but also a fundamental block to social progress.

The denseness of the thought and felt realness of reality, the power of ideology, is determined by so many factors that it cannot easily be grasped and theorized. A general rule can however be observed: that ideology is connected the complexity of a given society, its system and culture – and to the balance between distinction and connectivity. When there is more distinction than connectivity and society starts falling apart, when there is failure to integrate the many distinctions into a meaningful whole, the pressure to contract the ideological range of possible positions increases. 20th century totalitarianism is a testimony to this general rule of thumb. The successful integration of many distinctions into a meaningful whole increases the ideological range. And both the making of distinctions and their integration have cognitive prerequisites: that is to say, it can be difficult and thus requires more complex modes of thinking.

The 5th Order: Opinion as Cognitive Ability (Stage of Development)

Even when a distinction is discursively open to be held by people in certain positions in a given society, each distinction comes with certain cognitive requirements. The most basic way of illustrating this is a single sentence: Cats could not have come up with Christianity or socialism. But it doesn’t stop here, with comparing cats to people. As we know, there are empirically grounded levels of cognitive development and of ego development that constitute the body of adult development research. These levels go far beyond Piaget’s tracking up to “formal logic”. I rely chiefly on Michael Commons’s model of hierarchical complexity. The fourth order ideological “software” thus depends on the fifth order cognitive “hardware”.

We know that more complex societies tend to allow higher levels of individuation, thereby facilitating higher levels of complex thinking in individuals, more complex ways of making distinctions. The different positions available as political alternatives can thus be held in qualitatively very different ways. At lower levels, distinctions are made by grosser forms of logic, siding with more contingent and partial shards of social reality and consciousness. The fifth order is at once the most abstract order (the qualitative principles by which distinctions are made) and the most concrete one (the complexity de facto in place in the nervous system of the individual and the people around him or her).

At the lower levels of complexity, distinctions between what is good and bad are made in terms of more contingent, superficial categories: me and not you; us and not them; normal people and not strange people; white people and not black people; humans and not animals; Swedes and not Arabs; Christians and not Muslims; communists and not capitalists. This logic of course cuts through all the four previous orders, with a strong gravity towards the determinism of the lower orders. The relative autonomy of the third level cannot reach any heights worth mentioning, simply because the person in question makes distinctions that are not abstract enough to embrace society in the abstract. The lower levels of complexity can of course take any position conjured within society, given that the position has been elaborated clearly enough to be adopted by “downwards assimilation”.

Around formal logic, and perhaps systemic, the quality of distinction shifts. Here distinctions are made less around contingent, concrete categories, and more around principles – the most obvious being around agency (right wing, libertarianism) and communion (left wing, social conservatism). The general principle is what distinguishes good from bad. The relative autonomy of the third order thus increases.

To the formal thinker these general principles can be cast in linear relationships: lower taxes means more business and more employment; freedom is better than control; too much immigration creates conflicts in society; the poorest should be helped first; that tolerance leads to a more stable, peaceful society; or that the corporate world exploits people and must be stopped.

To the systematic thinker the followed principles take on another, more complex, quality. They are still the distinction between good and bad, where breaching these complex principles is bad, although it is not necessarily the “fault” of any of the agents involved. Here we have ideas such as John Rawls’s “the only just inequality is one that leads to the betterment of the least privileged”; or “gender is socially constructed and can thus be reconstructed so that it no longer creates inequalities”; or why not “our way of thinking about the economy must shift so that we can better live in accordance with our ecological limitations”.

Whereas the formal thinker sees clear-cut principles that can be breached or followed, the systematic thinker sees more general principles that must be applied to a wide range of political settings in order to solve deep-rooted problems. They both side with one set of principles, however, and believe that by defeating the opposite of their principles, they can change society for the better. Anybody who adheres to this principle is on the good side, and anyone who does not is part of the problem. If only other people would understand this or that principle, the world would be better off. Thus the formation of political opinion-making in systemic thinking is still likely to side with others that have similar thoughts and ideas, but display lower levels of complexity in their distinction-making. The typical example is a systematic public intellectual, writing blog entries and books from a say libertarianism set of principles, but whose followers use the same material as a way of strengthening their investment in rather cemented and gross political positions.

It is only at late systematic or perhaps at meta-systemic levels of thinking that the fundamental rule of adherence to general principles shifts again into something different. Here, it is instead an assessment of the quality of the distinction-making that constitutes the distinctions made. That is, distinction itself becomes the distinguishing principle. People at these post-formal stages are hence less likely to take positions based on allegiance to a nationality or an ideology, but more likely to look for ways to evolve the political discourse itself – both on the side of agency (liberalism) and communion (socialism or conservatism). Post-formal thinkers find more in common with thinkers of different or even opposite ideological views to their own – as long as these also display post-formal thinking – than they do with people of their own second and third order positions in the ideological landscape. For instance, the founder of a radically libertarian party in Sweden has Slavoj Žižek as his greatest inspirational source – a staunch communist. Left and right can still be important to the post-formal thinker, but they are seen as much less rigid thought structures, much more in a dialectical relationship to one another.

The political commitment of post-formal thinkers thus works to make more subtle distinctions while at the same time working to facilitate the integration of seemingly irreconcilable opposites made at the lower orders of causation. In terms of political opinion formation, the post-formal thinkers can very well take positions within existent frame works, while keeping a network of other post-formal thinkers across the ideological scale. If they form their own political institutions, they do so around post-formally informed political processes rather than around specific principles. The Swiss Integrale Politik can be understood as a manifestation of this tendency, as can the Habermasian project of achieving a rational discourse through deliberation.

The fifth order is thus the most fundamental one when it comes to determining the real outcome of political opinion formation. The distribution of different levels of thinking is determined of course by the complexity of a given political system, in all four of Wilber’s quadrants. Only a society with great levels of integration and individuation can sport significant proportions of post-formal thinkers in the population. The fifth order appears to be the one most determinant of the four lower orders, because the distribution of complexity in thinking determines which order of causation will gain the most “gravitational pull”. The occurrence of many pre-formal thinkers pushes the political system to follow a logic determined by the lower orders, whereas the occurrence of many post-formal thinkers pushes the gravitational pull towards relative autonomy of the higher orders vis-à-vis the lower ones. But post-formal thinking doesn’t make lower order distinctions go away. They still exist, but with lesser gravitational pull.

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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.

Ah, freedom.

Freedom, yeah.

The research, monitoring and lobbying undertaken by this kind of NGO:s are exceedingly important. No doubt about it. Democracy is better than dictatorship. Upholding human rights is better than violating human rights. Freedom of speech is really, really important for the individuation and integration processes that constitute the flowering of life and the release from suffering and degradation.

Looks Like We’ve Hit a Plateau!

But of course, human rights aren’t ontologically grounded realties like laws of nature. They are social constructs, deals if you like, struck between human beings in their exercise of power over themselves and one another. Power is the producer of reality. Nothing can be alive or created or sustained without the use of power. A human body consists of organic matter under violent control: killed, chewed, swallowed, digested, broken down and reorganized. All states consist at a minimum of a monopoly of violence, its subjects controlled, digested, broken down and reorganized – or killed, in the last instance. It is a political-philosophical question, an ethical question, which exercise of power should be used to create what.

Power, Love and Freedom

But power is not the ground of reality. Love is. Beyond the crude reality of power, is that sublime quality of Existence, that wordless relationship called love. Power, for all its grim, carnal materiality, is only that: a shadow reflection of the beauty of it all. It works to create, to sustain, to protect, to evolve, to give birth, to expand, to include, to understand, to love.

Human rights too, are created by productive violence, by the exercise of power. And by power’s intricate ways of refining itself, finding new balances, new equilibria, it creates states of being. Mental states of being in a sentient being (a biological creature), or political or cultural states of being in societies. A state or equilibrium is a relatively stable plateau – scientifically you can find this idea pretty much across the scale: Nash equilibrium, Alberoni’s “Movement and Institution”, all over economics, ecological balance, Kegan’s stages of personal development and so on. But states can shift. They can collapse into lower states, or they can evolve to new ones that can arguably be called higher, deeper or just more complex ones.

One such equilibrium achieved is the 1/1 score on the Freedom House rating. Things reinforce one another and a kind of stable, free democracy emerges. Yep, you can go about your day anyway you like, write pretentious blogs and tell your boss to **** off, score political good-guy points off your wretched government in the paper, cast votes, form parties, desecrate holy symbols and still get a job, a nice house and get laid. Bingo. But really, what to do with all that freedom? Just keep it and put it on a shelf next to your DVD collection (hopefully not including Buffy The Vampire Slayer – full series)? Nah, I want more.

Have we reached ultimate freedom?

I don’t know about you, but the idea that emancipation in any real, political sense is over, finito, by the time a society becomes like a current Western country seems … boring. And highly unlikely. If I don’t like reality because I think it’s boring I need just deal with it. But that’s not what this post is about. It’s about showing that the idea that Sweden, US and similar countries are “free”, is a crappy analysis that does little justice to the struggle for political freedom. We are free, but only in a relative sense. We can have more negative freedoms (from oppression, from constraints) and more positive freedoms (security, fulfillment, meaning making).

Nevertheless, this is where we are. Nowhere to go. Looks like we’ve hit a plateau.

The Transpersonal Perspective

There are many possible explanations for the persistence of this rather absurd plateau (electoral democracy with market economy and social welfare, Freedom House rating 1). One possible explanation is that our conception of freedom is based on a limited unit of analysis: the individual human being and his or her rights. The individual human being is considered to have free will, to have a sacred individuality, to be autonomous and thus as being the fundamental addressee of all human rights. Individual is Latin. The word atomis Greek for the same thing. Atom, a fundamental building block. In the very idea of individual human rights is the idea that the individual is a the unit of analysis, that it fundamentally constitutes social reality. But the problem is of course, that at the subatomic level, we can study phenomena that go way beyond the constrains of individual atoms. But the individual, phenomenologically speaking, is just an idea, a habit pattern of thought. At the subindividual level, that is if we pick this mystical, sacred entity apart, we find: guess what, guess what – units of analysis that go way beyond the individual. When freedom is attributed to these refined units instead of to the primitive intellectual idea of the individual (and his or her ‘personality’, which is social-psychologically speaking just a mask), the nature of conceivable freedom changes. Radically.

We might speak with the French philosopher Gilles Deleuze, who described the dividual contrasted to the individual. But let’s take a somewhat more systematized approach: integral theory.

Following the integral model proposed by Ken Wilber, we can exchange this mystified “sacred” individual human being with the notion of all sentient beingsexpressing themselves as consciousness, behavior, culture and system. Another way of saying this is, we look at the freedom of consciousness itself to express itself in the manifest world. Any restraint to this expression, and any power exercised to the oppression of this same expression, is in fact a lack of political freedom.

Ouch. But that would mean that…

Yep, you got it sister. That would mean that we live in a horribly oppressed state of being from birth until death! Good news, in fact, because it means that the game for political emancipation is on!

So here’s the new deal: instead of defending a half-measure intellectual excuse for Existence, the individual, we defend the rights of Spirit or consciousness manifesting its highest potential for love and bliss.

A four-dimensional freedom

Let us speak about another kind of freedom; one that begins in chains, slavery and fear, in the wailing tears the billion years’ history of life – and ends as a democratic, inclusive dance of spontaneous becoming.

* In consciousness itself: by removing constraints to relate sanely and freely to phenomenal reality. By making unconscious processes conscious, by removing constraints for evolving into harmonious states of bliss and being-in-the-world. Anyone not being completely smitten by orgasmic love of Existence is oppressed, because that is the only sane way of relating to reality.

* Behavior: by removing de facto constraints to agency: opportunity, inability, pressure, insecurity, habit, fear. Any behavior steered at least partly by a lacking-need, lacking-want or fear is unfree, oppressed. Only an act that is propelled by creative, loving joy is actually free. Make education so generic and boosting of individual choice and autonomy that the maximal possible choice of behavior becomes open. This does not mean primitive libertarianism (‘No state shall tell us how much to smoke! etc.), but acting politically by a double move of creating contexts where fear, lacking-wants and lacking-needs do not arise, and qualifying individuals and groups to being able to act on their highest possible impulse – which for some strange reason always seems to involve affirmation of Self in service of the Other. The vision of a so-called Listening Society is to create a psycho-social environment that is so secure that virtue spontaneously arises, without indoctrination. The vision of a so-called Economy of Happiness is the transferring of as much activity as possible to the realm of being-driven needs, where lack and fear are not in control, not the propelling force.

* Culture: by consciously redesigning language, customs and relationships to become an open, reflexive field of expression. Any context not continuously openly and calmly reinterpreting reality and the symbols used to relate to it – is oppressed. Consciousness always expresses itself through some kind of cultural context. When culture is locked down, unquestioned, taken for granted, it is oppressed. Culture is alive, essentially. Not as an individual person or sentient being, but as a living expression of consciousness. Are norms created through conscious, open, deliberate and deliberative processes? If not, culture is oppressed.

* System: by eliminating the restraints of the system to manifest itself through its inherent dialectic. When equality of opportunity is systematically unjustly distributed in a system that explicitly strives to establish universal rights, the system is oppressed. When the individual does not feel in control of his or her political reality and the system runs by blind processes and logics other than the highest aims of the system (political and economic), the system is oppressed. This one is especially hard to get one’s head around if one is stuck in the atomistic paradigm of individual rights, as we are used to think of the system as the potential oppressor of the poor, innocent individual.

This perspective is based on a transpersonal paradigm, where no trouble, virtue or vice is reified and explained away as it being a mere function of this or that specific individual. Nor is it a collectivist perspective, a label that would fit traditionalist or Marxist interpretations.

Why would we ask anything less of ourselves? Why would we limit our own horizons? We should demand of life and Existence what is offered and no less: Another kind of freedom. And we should consciously and deliberately work towards that end.

….

Summa summarum: we have more degrees of freedom available. Looks like there’s a long road to go to freedom from this plateau we happen to be standing on. Freedom House is OK, but at rating 1/1 is where the real emancipatory fun starts – not where it ends! There’s no such thing as freedom rating 1.

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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’. You can follow Hanzi on his facebook profile here, and you can speed up the process of new metamodern content reaching the world by making a donation to Hanzi here.

The Philosophical Goal of Metamodernism: Proto-Synthesis

The major overarching intellectual goal of metamodernism is the attempt to construct a unified overview of all knowledge in a cosmological context, a grand narrative of everything – while knowing full and well that the synthesis produced can never be final or absolute.

Reconstruction

The mantra of Metamodernism is: Reconstruction must follow deconstruction. This is to be seen as a reaction against the postmodern aim of deconstructing everything. But Metamodernism is not the same as modernity. The grand project of modernity was based on the belief that given enough time, rational thought and careful objective analysis, science would reveal the secrets of existence. Metamodernists are aware that creating a new grand narrative of the world is a never ending endeavor and only Proto-Synthesis is achievable.

The grand narrative of Metamodernism can be described as a meta-narrative, a modern mythos of creation. Metamodernists are aware of the postmodern insight that knowledge can only be transferred through narratives. Metamodernism is concerned with creating a meaningful creation myth for our time. The message is stated in mythic form; it is not to be taken as absolute truth. Metamodernists strive towards the most comprehensive narrative presently available, but do so through the study of both large and miniscule phenomena combining the modernist grande histoire with the anti-narrative and petite histoire of postmodernism.

Where modernism was concerned with design, postmodernism emphasized chance. Metamodernism includes both of these perspectives and perceives the world as emergent phenomena and patterns of self-organization. It studies how remarkably unlikely events and processes happen despite the odds. How many factors come together and self-organize into new, more complex orders. Instead of only looking at what’s present (like the modernists), or the absent (like the postmodernists), metamodernists emphazise the process and have a keen eye for emergence.

The grand intellectual aim of Metamodernism is to order reality into coherent and hierarchically organized, interdependent patterns, thus creating a new map of reality, but without mistaking the map for reality. The postmodern insight, that we are just dealing with models or representations of reality, but not reality itself, should be kept intact. What is not postmodern about it is the lack of irony and complete sincerity in this apparently impossible endeavor.

Transcending postmodernism

Metamodernists agree with postmodernists that there is no possibility of a creation myth to be neutral, since all knowledge arises from a relationship between a knower and an object of knowledge. But the metamodernist does not agree that we should just relax and give up on metanarratives after realizing that all of our ideas about the world were merely constructions of the mind reflected by the discourse of our surroundings.

Metamodernism includes many of the substantial wisdoms of postmodernity, but at the same time transcends this paradigm without being reactionary. With ‘reactionary’ I mean turning against postmodernity, refusing its insights by going back to the perspectives preceding it.

Since our knowledge about the world can only consist of narratives, structures of the mind, I say: Let us construct the best available narrative of our age! It is not enough to continue making new differentiations, to notice differences and contrasts and contradictions. We must pick up the pieces of our fragmented world and build a new narrative – but not by going back and do what was done before everything got deconstructed.

A holarchical view of autopoesis

As metamodernists we see the value in at least trying to see the world as a whole, as an interconnected place. The holistic perspective of metamodernism, that the whole is more than the sum of its parts, points towards a new synthesis: Where modernism was intrinsically hierarchical in its ontology, postmodernism reacted against this by being unreservedly anarchical. Metamodernism’s approach could be classified as holarchical, showing that there is a structure out there in what seemingly appears to be chaotic. But the chaotic is structured along the lines of complexity. We see structures wherein all parts retain their autonomy while at the same time remaining parts of a greater whole.

Metamodernism has a ‘non-oops’ explanation of creation – shit doesn’t ‘just’ happen. This goes beyond both postmodernity’s view of randomness, but also modernity’s mechanic and non-teleological view on things. Metamodernism’s explanation model can be described as ‘autopoesis’, or with a simpler word ‘self-organization’. Things happen because of immanent features, i.e. not due to some kind of transcendental dualism (present in modernity as well as Western pre-modernity). But this immanence is both random and structured. Development of nature, of human society, of psychology, has directions; it has directionality. Metamodernists sense and explore the directionalities of an evolving hypercomplex, self-conscious, self-organizing, interconnected reality. We thereby explore ourselves, because we know that we are expressions of this same reality.

At the hypercomplex heart of existence lie patterns. These patters manifest themselves through human beings, through their agency, development and culture.

Modern science was partly successful by a continuing process of differentiation. By this we mean reducing the world to its smallest, most easy comprehensible parts. This was developed further with postmodernism, where language, science and logic themselves increasingly became subjects of critical analysis and inquiry. Differentiation became even more pronounced in postmodernism. Postmodernism sought to chop reality down to even finer pieces by ripping the formerly assumed, coherent neutral observer apart. But as a society, culture and a philosophical community, we have come to the end of the road here. If we wish to go beyond this impasse, if we truly want to develop a new paradigm, we have to work with developing a new meta-narrative.

Such a narrative that can only be a Proto-Synthesis. We connect all that we know and create a story. But we know that it’s just a story. However, we prefer it to no story at all. And we will both love it and fight for it and try to challenge it, evolve it and tear it down.

The first quality of a metamodern mind is its ability to productively handle paradox. Proto-Synthesis is the first and foremost paradox to handle.

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

The Political Goal of Metamodernism: Game Change

The major objective of the metamodern political project is to change the rules of the game. Our simple message is that life as we know it can and must evolve. The Game Change position is:

• • • Life is a plus-sum game with possible win-wins.
    • Life is also often a zero-sum game with lose-win.
    • Life is often even a tragic dilemma of lose-lose.
    • But the rules of the game can change, evolving into more win-win, less lose-win and less lose-lose.
    • Nobody actually ever “deserves” to lose games and suffer defeat or humiliation. Seriously – would you tell a kid that she “deserves” to be crappy at school? To be ugly and smelly and lonely or poor? To starve? To have low self-esteem? To have a fragmented, anxious mind? To be part of the losing side of globalization? That baby turkeys in factories got what they deserved?
    • All injustices in the world are caused by the playing of games.
    • People and other beings have no choice but to partake in games.
    • No injustice or suffering is ever excusable or tolerable.
    • It is our ethical imperative, without compromise, to change the rules of the game.
    • Successful changing of the game is that which produces more winners in life, and fewer losers. It is also that which softens the fall of the losers, increases the rewards of the winners, and makes people act more kindly and fairly while playing the game.

What do we mean by “the game”? The game is the fundamental, interactive process by which human beings and other living creatures either become happy or suffer. Going to work is a game, because you can win or lose. Asking for a date is a game. Hey, even texting a friend is a game. Or having lunch. You eat the salmon. If the salmon would have won, things would have been different. It is not in the optimal interest of the salmon to be part of your sandwich.

Games produce dynamics of interaction. They dub losers and winners. Just like you and me. We all know both sides, in different contexts, to different extent. The bad news is that any interaction produces relative losers, that suffering and loss are here to stay for eternity. That goes for all your hopes and dreams, all your life time, in all ages, and everyone you will ever love and care about – and everyone they will ever love and care about: your kids, your mama, your favorite gold fish. If you become an idealist NGO-hero or Nobel prize medalist, it means somebody else didn’t get that same satisfaction, attention and appreciation. Some win, some lose.

The good news is that we can change the rules of the game, making it fairer and more forgiving for everyone.

Game Change is the most deeply idealistic political strife conceivable. It is the love impulse of politics and progress. It is the measure of real positive development. Communism, socialism, Marxism, feminism, critical thinking, genders studies, animal rights and ecologism – these are all utterly and unforgivably primitive and oppressive crap compared to Game Change. Or rather, without being subdued to the clear, analytic power of Game Change, these concepts lose their meaning and become oppressors. As they have all been, and will very likely continue to be.

Game Change is what gives a political, social or intellectual movement its meaning. If the movement happens, and the subtle and not-so-subtle rules of the game of people’s interactions stay the same – then it will have achieved nothing. If partaking in everyday life has not become kinder, less manipulative, less harsh, the movement has failed. Game Change is the essence of real solidarity. Failure to understand Game Change is the essence of human evil in this world.

Most movements fail. You fail because you deny the existence of the very game you are trying to change. Or because, like with fascism, capitalism or conservatism, you actually accept the game and reinforce its injustice.

Game Denial

Game Denial is the inability to perceive, or a complete negligence of, the rules that regulate all human relations. It is when you ignore or “wish away” certain uncomfortable truths regarding human relations and how reality works. The simplest form of this is make-believe and wishful thinking.

Game Denial is to expect everyone to become vegan tomorrow, that people would accept lower wages and increased work hours to mend the poverty of the world, or to think that you can drastically increase corporate taxes without losing business to markets abroad. It’s Game Denial to expect that all social hierarchies would disappear, just by pretending that they are not there and we’re all equal; to believe that we can remove all power games between humans and ensure that everyone always gets what they want. We live in a world with limited resources and people will always strive towards things that others have. We can’t all get married to the same person, or get the same job; few can become rock stars, there’ll always be someone who wins and someone who loses. Everyone can’t get everything; everyone doesn’t even want be friends with everybody.

The most striking and tragic example of Game Denial was communism. An economic system based on the assumption that everyone was solidary and equal, and pretended that human relations weren’t characterized by competition and power games. Evidently it was very difficult to plan economize and enforce a political correctness upon society about everyone being solidary, and then believe they actually were. For all their apparent analysis of human relations and cruel economic power, the communists attempted to deny and repress real, existing power games instead of actively and consciously evolving them. The result, as we know, was catastrophic – people that didn’t fit the idealized mold were deemed an enemy or monstrosity, somebody that had to be removed. Killed. Murdered.

Game Denial is a fully and thoroughly unconscious process. That’s why it’s important to check yourself if your analysis is based on a realistic, sober observation on how the world really is, or if it’s characterized by one’s wishes about how it ought to be. You need to know the rules of the game, even if you think they’re wrong, and to some extent play along – in order to change them. If you don’t, you will lose and thus fail at changing the game.

What if I Win?

But then again, you can accept the game and learn to play it. Be successful and happy. Ah, the American dream! How beautiful. I mean, what if I win? What if I become this awesome movie star, this saintly good-guy, this cool musician, this loving mother of children, this clever pundit…?

To do that I will have to play by the rules handed to me by the environment. Want to be a doctor saving poor children in Africa? If you work hard and play the game by its rules, you know the rules and optimize your game, you can become this or that person. Every president and CEO and famous professor and artist and movie star in the world knows this. They all want to tell you that they just did their thing and by spontaneity and the goodness of their heart ended up where they are. They truth is they played the game. They maneuvered. They learned good and bad stances and strategies. They went after power. They let go of that which couldn’t help them. This includes Mother Teresa. She didn’t become a saint without playing the saint game. This goes especially for idealistic left wing writers who must maneuver to become that symbol of critical thinking and idealism.

Sure, we can knock ourselves out and play to our heart’s content. But the point is, winning in life is never enough. What if you become that successful? What if you get those chicks? What if you save that many lives? What if you really save the world from climate crisis?

Then you’ll still have a kid, or somebody else you care about, who is crushed and humiliated by the same game you played and happened to win. The game is still there. Still grinding. For every winner, there is a loser. You were that awesome idealistic writer who pointed out injustice? You were a hero? The very fact of your moral victory means that you just trashed, humiliated and out-competed somebody else. That somebody else could have been you. It could have been your own kid.

And more fundamentally – it is you. Winning in life is fun. But it is just not enough. Liberalism, conservatism and capitalism and fascism, are all based on accepting the game and “may the best player win”. They are all defenders and upholders of an injustice and cruelty and suffering that just cannot be ethically justified.

So what if I win? In deeper sense, you have still lost. You must change the game of life. That is the only result that counts. That is the only victory worth keeping, because it includes everybody.

Game Change and Human Freedom

To accept that life is unjust and merely play along, leads to Game Acceptance which is just as bad as Game Denial. Realism and idealism should go hand in hand – the greater the level of realism, the greater the potential for idealism. To include realism is to have a good analysis. At the very core of Metamodernism lies an ambition to change the rules of the game. This is what we call Game Change.

The rules of the social game can be changed so as to be fairer and have less harsh consequences when people lose. But there will always be a game and rules that manage it. Game Denial, to ignore the rules and repress the game, will always have negative consequences.

But there is something real here. Something worth striving for. We can develop the conditions for solidarity to blossom. Such Game Change is only possible, in practicality, if we admit the all-pervading existence of the game. To deny the game is to repress and deny the fundamental tragedy of the world. If you argue against me on this point, you are already proving my point. You are trying to win the argument, and making me and my point lose.

Again, the game cannot dissolve, disappear. But it can evolve. It can change.

Throughout history the rules of the game have been continuously changed for the better. Human freedom has developed through definite stages. During the days of the Roman Empire losing the game meant losing your head, thus “game over” at the slightest mistake. Christianity meant the near abolishment of slavery in Europe and changed the rules of conduct between people to be less severe. Democracy changed the rules so that the poorest in society also had a voice. Social democracy meant that losing your job or getting sick didn’t mean complete marginalization. Over and over the game has been changed to give people more chances. This can be developed further – with the help of behavioral science. By for instance nursing for poor mothers and cooperation games for children, and mindfulness in schools, and sexual education, and increased social security – we can change what life is felt and lived like for everyone.

What are the harsh realities of the game in late modernity? How can the rules be made more fair and just? How can we see to it that people will be given more chances when they lose? And how can we make the rules that conduct our relations to one another less brutal and more humane? These are the ultimate questions of the metamodern politician and activist. The principle of solidarity with all sentient beings is the ethical premise; game change is the way of conduct towards reaching that goal.

One thing is to determine that things are unfair and society is rotten to its core. This was the postmodern anti-thesis. It’s a completely different ball game to understand why it’s so and how it can be changed.

Don’t hate the player.
Don’t hate the game.
Know the game.
And play to change it.
Because you love the players.

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Part 2 on proto-synthesis can be found here!

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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.

Three Dimensions

Let’s start with the arithmetics. The gender-political complex has at least three dimensions, possibly more. If you can’t count to three, you’re out. And if you can’t keep one, two, three apart – you’re out. Whatever gender politics you conceive of that does not at least include these three dimensions is inherently oppressive. The dimensions are:

• • Identity freedom
  • Game evolution
  • Reproductive functionality

No political system or ideology in the world today looks at more than one of these three dimensions. Radicalism and critical studies in all of its forms, the political left, look at identity freedom. Conservatism and the political right look at reproductive functionality. No-one, except perhaps the creme of the emerging men’s movement, looks at what I call game evolution. What are these dimensions and why are they being overlooked? And why is it oppressive to overlook them? Let’s zoom in on them one by one.

Identity freedom

Identity freedom is our freedom to express and develop sexual and gendered identities without formal or informal stigma. To be homosexual, to be asexual, trans-sexual, trans-gender, boy-girl, girl-boy, superfeminine, androgynous, hermaphroditic, being plain normal, supermasculine, pedophile, being attracted to pets, being into S&M, being a prostitute, bad-boy, nerd, being a 40-year old virgin, being attracted to inanimate objects, necrophilia, having incestuous emotions, being polygamous, polyamorous, being traditional heterosexual core-family – well, you get the picture.

The point of identity freedom is not that all sexual acts are equal. All sensible people would agree that anything abusive or harmful should be illegal (as, by definition is the case with rape and sex between adults and children. As we know, the pedophile movement marched alongside the gay movement in the seventies but was left behind, for good reason too as their demands were unreasonable, but unfortunately we never got a rational and open discussion about what to do about all the people who had these strong sexual urges they never asked for). And we all know that sometimes sexual acts mean more to us than at other times and sometimes they are more wholesome than at other times. Some sexual acts are more ethically OK and more valuable than others. And some sexual acts are indeed deeply unethical.

The point is to accept – really and fully accept – all people, regardless of their sexuality and gender identity! The point is that identity freedom is a dimension of the gender-political complex that seeks to expand the non-stigmatized realm. It seeks to make open what was locked in, to let out what was suffocated, to cross out the taboos, the rid of the shame, to emancipate human beings in all of our gory, messy, beautiful, vulnerable purity. It shouldn’t cost me anything to be a woman. Or a man. Or anything else.

Game Evolution

Game evolution or Game Change is about how much and how deeply people really get to enjoy, develop and productively express their genders and sexualities. As we know, not everyone can get punani or whatever it is we’re after, all of the time. Some people are seen as attractive, interesting, stimulating, status-inducing and whatnot – whereas others end up on the short end of the stick – being viewed as lacking of vitality, beauty, being ugly, boring, plain, sexually uninteresting. But how many get to be losers, and how many get to be relative winners? How many people get psychologically thrashed by unhappy love-lives and sexual frustration and the tragedy of rejection? How many people get the opportunity to get properly laid, to be positively appreciated and confirmed in their sexual identities? How many people get to have lots of fun in the subtle complexities of meeting lovers, a partner? How many people get to have positive body-images and honestly enjoy their bodies? And how many people get to really open their hearts and feel truly in love during their lives? And in how cruel and cynical ways do we have to compete to achieve this? Do we have to slander one another and break down the self-confidence of our friends? Or are we granted the opportunity to co-operate for mutual benefit?

The many subtle games of everyday life can be developed to produce more winners, to increase how much there is to gain for the winners, to produce fewer losers, to soften the fall for losers, to increase the number of chances you get, and to make the whole game more transparent and fair – make competition more fruitful and less cruel. To evolve the sexual and gendered games of everyday life we need to both increase people’s awareness of these games, their ability to play them successfully (to express vitality and attract one another and be better sexual partners) and to expand the reach of our acceptance and taste.

No-one can force anyone to like somebody. If I am a nerdish guy or a trans-sexual I can’t call the “gender equality court” to raise charges against a woman who I fancy but who does not find me exciting enough. I have no right to demand that people like me. But there is room for development: people’s tastes can develop, and people can – through their own personal development – learn to appreciate wider ranges of human attributes. This holds true also of sexuality. So game evolution happens in two ways: by development of our skills, and by development of our personality.

Reproductive functionality

Reproductive functionality is the third dimension of the gender-political complex. It is the ability within our society to self-organize into stable, loving families. These families can of course look in many different ways, the most common one still being the hetero-sexual core family unit. The family remains the main institution of primary socialization (that is, socialization into the basics of cultural and social life) and is the chief determinant of people’s mental health and happiness. Close long-term relationships taken together with sex-life explain more than all other social factors put together when it comes to subjective happiness and the psychological productivity of a human being. This core unit is also determinant of the occurrence of deviance and criminality, of violence and mental illness. It is within this realm that our psycho-sexual personality structures emerge and develop in the first place. The stability and love within family settings are based on the ability to uphold long-term productive relationships where a certain degree of polarity and complementarity exists. This can of course be the polarity between masculine and feminine, but it can take many forms.

I’ll go with some classical examples from hetero-sexual relationships because that is all I would know much about: That a husband can retain the deep respect, attraction and admiration of his wife and vice versa, that there is openness and a deep sense of trust, that you deeply feel that you will always be together, that you feel that everyday life works out smoothly, that each of the partners feel strong and independent unto themselves, that an interplay can be upheld between psychologically and socially independent partners, that the burdens of work are fairly and somewhat equally shared, that there is sexual variation with both deep emotion and animal instincts, that children have a deep and unique connection to both (or all) parental figures.

This dimension of the gender-political complex suggests the development of quite different skills and qualities than does game evolution. It also suggests that we must actively support the practical, cultural forms of family formation in all of its guises. Above all the development of clear expectations, supportive structures and social intelligence reinforce this dimension.

How It All Connects – The Tragedy

The point so far is that all of these three dimensions are immensely important. But here’s where the tragedy comes in, the reason we have to deal with so much suffering when it comes to gender and sexuality: the three dimensions are partly in opposition to one another!

* We can’t be 100 % free to choose our sexual and gender identity because there’s a game out there where people have real preferences and if we don’t take them into account we will end up being losers and our hearts will break. So we end up forming identities based on the preferences of others. And we can’t be 100 % free to form gender and sexual identities because we need to fit them into functional reproductive frames if we want to have a meaningful long-lasting relationships upon which we can build family life (which is why traditional society has always been opposed to sexual freedom and gender equality – it threatened the reproductive unit upon which society was built). Darn.

* We can’t play the games of love and seduction to make everyone a winner because people have different sexual identities and interests in building families, so we have to exclude people who don’t match up or fit in.

* We can’t have stable, loving families always and forever all of us, because we have desires and gendered freedoms and because there’s a game out there where any partner can be out-competed by someone else.

NOTE. This is not so say that alternative sexual relations outside of the hetero norm are in themselves in the way of family creation. Rather, it is to say that freedom can be pitched against stability, that free expression and exciting transgression can be pitched against reliability and sustainability.

Whoa, that really is a mess. No wonder things look the way they do.

What Then? – Utopia

It is only when you can see tragedy staring you in the face that you can see Utopia. Seeing the tragedy we are facing – that so many people are condemned to be judged and stigmatized, to be sexual losers and to have miserable family lives – that we can begin to recognize what political development is necessary. Tomorrow’s society must be one that has an active and conscious development of all of these three dimensions. Nothing else will do. We must create a society and culture that sees the oppositions of these three dimensions and attempts to find the best possible solutions for improving all three dimensions.

Because not only are they in opposition to one another – they also create one another. Greater sexual freedom can allow a saner game of love, a saner game of love can create more stable and honest family formations, and this can in turn form a basis for greater gender-sexual freedom.

Seen in this uncompromising light we must also recognize the deeply oppressive nature of the gender equality discourse of our day and the politics that follow: it defends only identity freedom, and only for certain groups (usually homosexuals and women). Doing so it casts us into denying the dynamics of the game, leaving so many men and women rejected and lonely, and threatening the dynamics of the family – eroding it quickly. Besides, the identity freedom gained is little more than lip service, because it is still limited by the undeveloped love games of our culture and age.

For at-least-three-dimensional gender freedom and equality!
We must have much more sex in politics, and much more politics in sex.

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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.

First of all, any true metamodernist must also be a postmodernist. If you do not understand and depart from the postmodern critique of knowledge, science, philosophy, art and consciousness, you cannot really claim to be metamodern. If you have a general disliking of all things postmodern, guess what, you cannot be metamodern.

This being said, metamodernists are quite different from postmodernists. Here’s a list of five key insights that make you metamodern – given that you are also/already postmodern.

1) An awareness of allergies

An allergy is an uncontrolled negative emotional response towards some idea or person. It’s the gut-wrenching feeling that a person you dislike provokes in you, or the feeling of anger and discontent certain ideas or concepts can spawn.

We all have these emotions, but the metamodernist has developed its mind (what researchers call metacognition) to keep these allergies in check, so as not to let them pollute the capability to make objective judgments and fair analysis. The wisdom is, just because something makes you feel bad, doesn’t mean it’s wrong.

It’s not your feeling towards something that makes it right or wrong, no, determining the truth and value of something must be based on careful analysis. The trick is to know when your brain is bullshitting you, often one’s emotions will seduce reason to construct truths that correspond with that intuitive feeling. That’s ok if it’ll lead you towards good arguments, but you need to be aware that, that’s what’s going on – that your brain is biased and your emotions don’t tell the whole truth.

To be aware of your emotion’s impact on the way you’re thinking is a personal development stage towards a metamodern mindset. Don’t bullshit yourself; become aware of your emotions. For example, if you react negatively towards certain words, you have an allergy. Let’s try a few out:

Feminism,
Capitalism,
Marxism,
Liberalism,
Postmodernism,
Profit,
Religion,
Efficiency,
White males,
Spirituality,
Money,
Conservative,
Activism,
Power,
Justin Bieber.

If you suddenly get the impulse to explain why any of these words refer to something inherently bad, then you have an allergy. If you understand this point, that you are being subjected to an automatic allergic response, the allergy loses some its power over your thought structures. You can reclaim responsibility for your own mind, your own thoughts, and your own truth. Because all of these examples are neutral terms referring to a great host of phenomena that can be considered both good and bad, then you’ve made the first step towards metamodern thinking.

2) A belief in development and progress

The metamodern mind believes in progress and sees the concept of ‘development’ as a way of enriching an otherwise one-dimensional analysis of change.

The metamodern way of thinking is a reaction to the postmodern relativistic dogma that progress was an illusion and that all you can say is that things change, not that any kind of development takes place. It is not a return to modernistic uncritical praise of technological progress and belief that all development is good, but an attempt at redefining what appropriate progress entails, based on the postmodern critique, but without throwing out the hope that we can develop things for the better.

If you’re allergic to the concepts of development and progress, and you honestly believe everything keeps getting worse, then you’re probably postmodern. If you get irritated every time someone points out the drawbacks and potential harms of new technological developments, then you’re probably a good ole’ modernist. However, if you understand that all development has pros and cons, but that progress is inevitable and in the long run ultimately is a good thing, that cultural progress goes along technological change, and that it is your own personal responsibility to see to it that we as humanity get the most out of it, then you’re well on your way to become metamodern.

3) An understanding of hierarchies

The notion of development is a good model to perceive the past and form the future. Hierarchy is the needed framework to order entities into coherent systems and meaningful narratives. If you think all hierarchies are bad, then you’re probably postmodern, if you think we should just make away with them all, then you’re guilty of something we call game denial. If you think you can justify your own privileged status in the social hierarchy, then you’re a guilty of what we call game acceptance which is just as bad.

Hierarchies are all around us. People are more complex than frogs; animals are more complex than rocks. Industrial societies more advanced than hunter gatherers, modern physics is more enlightened than dogmatic religion. And feminism is more in tune with current societal needs than Nazism.

There are hierarchies according to complexity, which is not to say that more complexity necessarily is better. But there are also things that can be ordered according to their ethical validity. Love is better than hate. Parental leave is better than child murder. If you’re a relativist and believe no such thing can be determined, then you’re probably postmodern, but then you cannot even justify that, that claim of yours should be more valid than another.

Metamodernism reintroduces hierarchies as a unit of analysis as a reaction against the postmodern relativistic attitude that all hierarchies are bad. But it is not a return to the old arbitrary dominator hierarchies (race, class, privilege, gender) that postmodernism acted against. The metamodern mind however, attempts to reorder reality according to non-arbitrary and well-founded hierarchies according to complexity and ethical value, by including the higher ethics discovered within postmodernism and beyond.

Why are hierarchies a sound unit of analysis? Well, not only can they tell us what’s better and what’s worse. They can also answer many of our current puzzles that the flatland perspective of postmodernism cannot solve. Many conflicts are between different stages of development: Religion vs. science. Autocracy vs. Democracy. Conservative vs. liberals. Postmodernism vs. everyone else. If we understand that people of opposing beliefs aren’t just wrong, but think according to certain stages of development, with different validity claims than our own; if we understand these stages – then we can more easily understand why we don’t agree and thus become more capable at solving conflicts.

4) Aiming at reconstruction

A mantra of Metamodernism is that: Reconstruction must follow deconstruction. Where the postmodern mind restlessly aims at deconstructing the world of signs, the metamodern has grown tired of this endeavor and takes on the task of reconstructing our symbolic universe and reconnecting it to other aspects of reality.

The metamodernist stands in the smoking ruins of modernity’s once almighty grand narrative of rational thought, demolished by the superior forces of postmodernity, left to be rebuilt by posterior generations. This is the great objective of Metamodernism, to erect a new grand narrative by combining all known knowledge and wisdom, well aware that it is a never ending endeavor and that the only achievable synthesis is a proto-synthesis, forever subjected to critique and never without flaws.

The metamodern mind is never content with mere anti-thesis. The metamodernist gets no satisfaction from only describing the world, when actual explanations are just beyond the horizon. What is, is just as interesting as what isn’t. To the metamodern mind, saying what you actually believe to be the truth is of greater importance. This is different from the postmodern cowardice of explaining why others are wrong. The metamodern mind has the courage to be vulnerable by making mistakes and reach faulty conclusions.

5) Thinking ‘both-and’

The crucial tool to erect a new grand narrative is the ‘both-and’ thinking. It is not just taking the best from modernity and postmodernity, or finding a middle ground between these two poles, nor is it the ability to reach a compromise. No, it is the ability to synthesize apparent opposites and from theses and anti-theses construct new syntheses.

This is a way of transcending the apparent paradoxes not yet to reach satisfying answers by modernists and postmodernists. Objective science or subjective hermeneutics? Both-and. Heritage or environment? Both-and. Biological determinism or cultural adaptation? Both-and. Matter or spirit? Both-and, baby-doll. Wholes or parts, wholeparts!

If you feel certain that things are mostly determined by physical laws and biological genetic conditions, then you’re a science obsessed modernist; if you on the other hand consider everything to be just social constructs, then you’re a blazing postmodern. Both positions bear seeds of truth, but only the metamodern mind knows how to construct feasible syntheses and understands the intimate relationship between both exterior and interior conditions, physical and social variables. That we are 100% biological animals and 100% culturally adapted beings, not 50/50.

If you shake your head and think “it’s both-and dammit!”, whenever discussions come to a full stop due to opposing opinions lack of reaching common ground, then you’re probably metamodern. And to that I congratulate you; you’re a rare breed and you’ll probably enjoy this blog.

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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.

250 fake bloggers in St Petersburg

Internet trolls. Meaning people who show up in comments and social media and write provocative or dissident views. Hired by the Russian government. Working in a building, four full floors, in St Petersburg. This is a reality in today’s absurd world. This is one out of many examples of a 19th century national geopolitics paradigm taking on an increasingly global, transnational polity based increasingly on shared cosmopolitan values and trade.

Of course these 250 trolls, with salaries and all, are a small, small drop in the ocean we call the Internet and the Western media. In these, Putin’s Russia is of course being scrutinized and to a certain extent ridiculed. And these forces are working for free, leaving Russia’s opponents free to hire 250 people to do something else.

Another suspicious thing to be noticed is that, for an online pirate, you always seem to be getting the best downloads and rips from Russia, always neatly packaged and with careful instructions in correct English. Might we suspect that there is also a supported Russian pirate group somewhere, with the mission to undermine profit from Silicon Valley etc? I wouldn’t be so surprised.

But all this really doesn’t work. All the mechanisms are playing against the Russian bid for power in these days. There will be no Euroasian Union (notice its flag). Let’s take a closer look. But first, look at this Russian boy band. They’re kind of cute – but not very awe inspiring for young men and women:

Where are people moving?

Of course, the cultural sector to a large extent follows the economic development. Where there is large and diverse economic development, you tend to have a richer surplus of artistry.

Both these developments (cultural and economic) work in tandem with migration. People move towards the centers of the economic and cultural world system. What should be emphasized, however, is that the mass distribution of cultural influence through media and information technology makes this part of the equation increasingly powerful. And while Russia and the Soviet Union for a while competed in this arena – just consider the intellects of Lenin and Trotsky, versed in Russian and French literature and German philosophy – today’s Russia really does not stand a chance. Read this Wikipedia article on Russian music. While Russia of course still sports impressive skill and craftsmanship in classical music, its pop scene is a desolate zone by global standards.

If you look at the pattern of where people are moving, the whole issue becomes clear: More people moved to Ukraine from Russia than vice versa. And Ukraine has a dwindling population, because people are moving westwards (and there is low child birth and poorer health development).

And if you compare the migration from and to the US, Russians are migrating to the US and not the other way around. The people who are moving are less likely to be the poorest and least educated, and more likely to be the richer and more educated. The people who support Putin are likely to be poorer and less educated.

The Mechanisms at Play

I suggest that pop culture simply makes the Western lifestyle more appealing. But not to everyone. It becomes most appealing to the people who already amass a certain amount of economic, social and cultural capital.

This means that there is a veritable vortex at the very economic, social and cultural core of Russian society. What happens then is that central power of Russia allies itself with the peripheries of its own society. But unlike when the Roman liberals allied themselves with the plebs and threatened the aristocracy and its republic, we see a non-liberal development that is not based on deepening enfranchisement of the citizens.

This does just not compute. You can’t build a new geopolitical center while the hopes and dreams of the young generation are elsewhere, inspired by Western art increasingly accessible through the Internet. The higher status, competence and connectivity of a person in Russia, the greater the probability that they just moved to the US.

The project of building a cultural narrative around a “strong Russia” simply cannot compete with the more refined pop culture of Western countries, with more diverse and well-funded research grants, with the opportunities of IT-industries. The symbolic economy is already outpacing the industrial one in terms of growth and profit. The battle cannot be won.

A Sober Assessment

The total population and economic output of the NATO and associated countries are vastly larger than those of Russia. A military confrontation would also lead to defeat, even if such a confrontation might offer a powerful narrative for the Russian government and parts of its population. Such a narrative is only exciting for a while, however. It gets old and tiresome after a while.

But pop culture continues to renew itself and grant social status to the individuals who learn to appreciate it. In this brave new world, soft power is the hardest power. It is bringing a powerful army to its knees.

Let us hope for a peaceful end to this Russian bid for power. Let us hope that Russia can be brought into a global project within the next few decades. It would have to be a project that grants a positive and admirable position to the Russian population.

With the current trends this seems unlikely, tragically enough. We are likely to see a Russian government acting from the old paradigms of power politics, with increasingly counterproductive results. In desperation, it might turn violent and chauvinist, but it cannot win the war.

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Kyla la Grange (a British talent with a degree in philosophy): ‘Cut Your Teeth’ – remix by Kygo

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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 societal effects of the Charlie Hebdo attacks

First and foremost the effects of the Charlie Hebdo attacks are the individual tragedies, bereavement, trauma, chock and long lasting sorrow. This should be recognized before we move on.

However, I want to discuss the matter less emotionally and personally. What then are the societal effects of attacks such as these? Here are five effects that we may deduce and rather safely expect:

• • • That journalists become more afraid of doing their job, that they feel threatened
    • That right wing populists gain leverage
    • That state surveillance and social control gain political legitimacy
    • That (Muslim) minorities are further marginalized
    • That racist violence against Muslim minorities, border police brutality etc. increase

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There you go. The big five.

I assume that the reader can fill in the mechanisms that would be at play in each of these effects: the journalist may think twice about his or her article, right wing populists gain support when public fear and distrust increases, governments can implement greater surveillance with political impunity and so forth.

Hyper hyper (reality)

We live in a time where the media image has become a form of hyperreality, more real in a way, than what goes on in our everyday lives. Somehow, things become more real because they are on TV, in the papers or just viral on Twitter. There are many examples of how media images strangely make things more real than everyday reality. Celebrities seem to have a somewhat godlike glow, they appear more colorful, more powerful, physically bigger and phenomenologically just more salient when they walk into a room. They strike you as MORE.

And of course, we experience ourselves as part of this hyperreality. But to be honest, let’s look at these things concretely. Most of us have nothing to do with all that politics stuff, with that big world out there, in Davos, in Syria, Ukraine, Lebanon or even the passing storm over New York. I’m looking out the window, a calm street is there, The Black Keys are bringing home another brilliant guitar riff on Spotify. Things are quiet, calm. The skies are grey. This is my reality.

Yet I feel myself living in a world full of people I have never met and never will. I partake in crisis, in the ups and downs of the economy. In the raging scientific revolutions that seem to be popping up in every corner at an increasing rate. I know thousands of scholars, artists, politicians and celebrities. But wait a minute. I never actually noticed much of that stuff, let alone really understood them myself. I just have them by word of mouth. Not even that. By word of print and word of screen.

What a strange thing. And the word of print and word of screen seem to come alive, to burst out into the living room like a slimy alien or a pale Japanese girl in a scary movie. They become so real. The things I did yesterday, the party I was at, the snowman I made, the bus ride I took, all these things are not shared, not seen by many.

But those things going on in the papers are seen by everyone. And our social brains make that which is seen, recognized and remembered by the many, that which is touched by gazes of judgement and awe, come out as more real.

What I am saying is, in a way, that Charlie Hebdo became so much more real because of its media exposure. And the response of the media becomes social reality. The response of the media is more real, a much greater event in society and in our lives, than machine guns and murders.

The God of Irony

I am not going to bore you with a long list of editorials from last month to prove the point I am now going to make. You can find as many examples as you like, and I bet you can find them in all languages, more or less. What was the resounding, more or less unified, response of media, paper editorials, social media users? It was a condemnation of terrorism and a defense of free speech and humor. We all have to stand up against the bad guys who threaten our free speech.

There are also many notable exceptions, yes. Never mind that for now. But by and large, this was the response. There was no analysis or explanation. There was a sense that that which is holy and sacred in modern society, free speech, had been desecrated. As pointed out already in les formes élémentaires de la vie religieuse (and even earlier, also by Émile Durkheim), we can see the rage that is awakened when that which is sacred is profaned. And we can see the soaring aura of sacredness rise to the heavens as we, with shared moral indignation, create an us-and-them. And this us-and-them, is what makes something sacred in the first place. The greater the sacrifice, the more warm blood that flows, the more innocent that blood is, the greater the sacredness of the institution becomes.

And holier yet, yet more sacred in our postmodern times, is humor, or satire. The Simpsons and South Park mocked society, now being followed by a vast army of stand-up comedians. But who DARES mock the comedian! Who DARES challenge irony! How DARE you! You M****F***ER! That is NOT funny anymore.

[caption id="attachment_778" align="aligncenter" width="450"] Isn’t there something hideously banal about these young boys? Should we really mystify them and make it a war between our God and theirs?[/caption]

Yes, the postmodern God, the God of irony, has been attacked. And the insolence, God has been attacked in the name of a lesser deity they call Allah and some stupido they call his prophet.

The liberal media are whispering, in unified choir with conservative, populist and racist media: “Since you have profaned our God, we will no longer try to understand you. We will exclude you from our ironic distancing and deconstruction. We will mystify you. We will make you the enemy. We will forget that you are just a confused kid, that your evil is banal, that we are part of the cause as well as the solution.”

Postmodernism has been attacked. Irony has been attacked. Oh, the sacredness of sarcasm has been insulted! The joke by which we purify ourselves, to which we submit the light of our non-essential, contextual souls! (errhm, and distance ourselves from passionate commitment to society and avoid admitting our own passionate complicity in its injustices).

The effects of liberal media response

So, this “defense” of free speech, rooted deeply in a sense of moral indignation, mystifies and exotifies the terrorists. Freedom is not under attack by a lesser deity and its followers. The tragic truth is that our own society structurally produces deep injustice and alienation in a sometimes explosive mixture.

I leave you with the list of the big five societal effects of the terrorists’ actions. Think about it, would an uncritical condemnation – without analysis, explanation and understanding – not result in these same five effects?

• • • • That journalists become more afraid of doing their job, that they feel threatened.
      • That right wing populists gain leverage.
      • That state surveillance and social control gain political legitimacy.
      • That (Muslim) minorities are further marginalized
      • That racist violence against Muslim minorities, border police brutality etc. increase

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There you go. Five things that terrorists and liberal media have in common.

Who is Charlie, really? If I can profane even the postmodern God, in all His Holy Sarcasm, I bet I am more Charlie than you.

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Flynt feat. Orelsan ‘Mon pote’

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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.

What Syriza gets right

There are some things that the Syriza movement gets absolutely right. First and foremost it is the ethical and pragmatic question of the Greek debt. There is no reason to treat national economies as individual people with their own debts and individual budgets. Because they are just not. They are part of a transnational economic, globalized system – a system that produces winners and losers, accumulation of capital and labor and vast swathes of desolate zones. Greece is not a person who “owes” this or that to Germany or France. It is a node in a system that has crashed the Greek economy and subdued it to a fiscal form of domination.

The Greek population is not “responsible” for all those abstract flows and dynamics. All that talk is the product of a reified idea of the collective we call “nation state” and of a basic misunderstanding about how the economy works. Syriza and related movements on the Left and Right are completely justified in their resistance against the debt. It is unjust and counterproductive to all the parties involved, because insisting on this debt has few gains for Germany, great losses for Greece and it fundamentally undermines the European project and its legitimacy (which also means that Germany loses out in the long run).

The second thing that Syriza gets right is its general suspicion towards austerity measures. Now, this is said with a very big caveat, namely that austerity is anything but a binary question of yes-no. The right kind of austerity is the best thing in the world. Another word for “good” austerity is “economic sustainability”. But the wrong kind of austerity is extremely harmful. The question was never to spend or not to spend. The question is to understand the fundamental structures of the economy and act upon them in a deliberate, non-linear fashion. This means that you may need an economically active government in order to tackle crisis by creating a wide range of opportunities for the economy to gain more complexity, finding more pathways to activate people in genuinely productive ways.

What Syriza gets wrong

The first thing to understand about a movement like Syriza is from what general perspective or narrative (analytic and emotional) it is coming: both its leadership and its political mandate in the electorate.

More than anything, Syriza is a movement against the austerity measures and the power balance in the European Union. Its chief narrative goes something like this:

The evil international capital has attacked and robbed the Greek people in order to make a few people rich, ruining the lives of so many innocent, honest folks. Now a few a heroes are arising, with the courage and clarity to call a spade a spade, and to do the right thing, which was really obvious all along: go left! Just say no to the rich and powerful and start giving it all back to the people.

This is a core narrative. Because it is analytically so faulty, its ability to produce desired effects in the real world is very limited.

The first thing to note about this narrative is that it draws its main legitimacy from a resistance against the “neo-liberal” European Union. But if you look at the mandate from the electorate, the legitimacy of Syriza is simply the combination of being the Left alternative (like to social democrats) that is EU-aversive (not like the social democrats).

So the faulty narrative set aside, the reason that Syriza is getting all the action and the moderate center-left almost none, is simply that they represent a popular combination of being Left, and having a narrow, nationalist view on how to fix the economy. The Syriza movement is a displaced center left. Its legitimacy among its supporters is largely the same as the other popular movements against the EU. It is parallel to Podemos in Spain (although Podemos is a somewhat more progressive version). But, more relevantly, it is the parallel of right wing movements such as Alternative für Deutchland in Germany, UKIP in the UK – and the Independent Greeks in Greece. And yes, the first move of Syriza was to gang up with none other than the Independent Greeks (a more conservative version of UKIP).

The parallel to these right wing movements is the simplistic and populist resistance to the EU within the frames of a national mindset. What we need to understand is that both Syriza and Alternative für Deutchland are the same popular impulse: “No man! We’re not gonna let some greedy bureaucrats and big business run off with our gold and share it with those nasty Greeks/Germans! We’ll stand up for the common people and stick together with our own national economy and its interests!”

Alternative für Deutchland and Syriza are fundamentally the same movement! They have the same drives, the same logic, the same simplicity and bad-guy theory! Just so happens one is Left and South of the fence, the other is Right and North of the fence. What these movements don’t see is that neither has the solution for the fundamental transnational problems of the economy and that they are both likely to antagonize and vilify each other to the detriment of everyone involved.

And what is worse, perhaps, is that both movements are built on quicksand. Neither actually has an ideology more efficient and superior to the prevailing green social liberalism of European politics. They have an electoral mandate to defy the European Union, and “save the common man” (with opposite measures) and they mistake this for a mandate to radically transform society. They have no such ability or mandate, and they will fail at any such attempt. They will also fail at saving the economy.

What Syriza gets really wrong

The thing about Syriza and similar movements is that they haven’t updated their view of culture, democracy, the economy, international politics or technological development.

They do not understand that you can’t just stimulate away with a new wave of spending, unless you have a very specific and intelligent plan for how that would create long-term, lasting value. If you start fighting capital within the borders of little Greece, capital just flees. If start spending without having the fundamentals of your economy right so that you actually gain a strong position on the international market, you get inflation and a patron state with passive client citizens – which is where this mess started in the first place. And if you let Germany and the US get all the high quality growth, you are outcompeted again and you will be back in a worse crisis than when you started.

Getting off the Euro so that Greece can use inflation might be a short term remedy for this, but really this is a solution that is bound to backfire.

What needs to be done is to write off the debt and to gather international, long term support for cultivating a Greek economy that offers sustainable, genuine value to the European and global markets. Such value can be:

• • • A cultural development towards higher value memes, so that the art, ideas and services of the country become symbolically valuable on the global market.
    • An increase in the collective intelligence by deepening or refining democratic self-organization and participation.
    • A refinement of the complexity of the economy so that the relative position of the economy is improved and people are activated in ways where they create genuine, long-term value for themselves and others.
    • That the country gains more favorable relations with the surrounding world, not on a governmental level but in the real world, by offering things and services that are highly valued by other populations. Green energy, progressive health care, social entrepreneurship – these things may be good candidates.
    • That the country takes decisive steps to entering the Bio-Info-Nano-Cogntive (BINC) age, which includes stimulating the founding of companies within these areas and making sure there is an abundance of research going on.

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All of these are long term goals. They are not in opposition to anything like the EU. They require not angry resistance, but a cool head, an open heart, imagination, analysis – and the friendship of neighboring countries and populations. The achievement of such goals is not helped by an antagonistic, downright stupid, black-white narrative about the evils of global capital.

What needs to be achieved is a fundamental remake of the Greek economy, its position on the world market, and the functionality and intelligence of the Greek democracy. From such a position, the more radical currents of Syriza may actually find a home: shorter workdays, better social security, perhaps even basic income. These things are achieved by the common effort of many countries and economies. They cannot be achieved by denying the economic relations and realties of today and fantasizing about the magic powers of socialism in one country. We have heard that before.

The radicalism of Syriza today is understandable, but quite misplaced and misrepresented. The movement has very little real possibility of changing Greece, let alone Europe. We must, unfortunately, see it for what it is: another populist movement with a shaky popular support, a weak analysis of our times, and a poor plan for its country.

Calling a spade a spade. Sorry.

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‘Mathematics’ by Mos Def:

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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.