Category: Uncategorized

This is why I have called solarpunk a “gateway drug” into metamodernism, i.e., into the kinds of society that go beyond modern life as we know it.

Solarpunk can do what merely intellectual arguments of better governance, of democracy, even of ecological collapse and the natural sciences, cannot: entice the average person, in particular, the established and new middle classes from across the world. If this potential is not tapped into in liberal and democratic societies, wide swathes of global populations will likely begin to look towards the paternalist and authoritarian powers that are already beginning to cast themselves as furnishers of solarpunk spaces and lifestyles (see previous article).

As authoritarianism will seem more appealing, democracy will continue to recede across the world and islands of “gated community” solarpunk-ish cities like Singapore and Dubai will win the hearts and minds of the world’s population.

But, if solarpunk is employed in tandem with processes of deepening democracy, more in line with its original ethos, it can scaffold and guide the steps of transformations that are not just aesthetically superficial, but ones that will reshape the social structure, human relations, and even our minds and emotions.

When solarpunk entices us within a democratic setting, it also draws us into a certain social logic that flows from attempts to manifest its visions: If we are to recreate public spaces through the participatory design of the many, we are compelled to find answers to how this is to be done, and issues that have hitherto appeared cumbersome and irrelevant can begin to engage citizens and lead to a development of governance that I have called democratization politics. And if we build more decentralized power grids, these become increasingly rooted in local communities, which highlights issues of what I have called Gemeinschaft politics. When people begin to reimagine their urban environments, this leads not only to Protopian ideas of what can be improved or be made more sustainable, but just as importantly to an ongoing renegotiations of social relations in society.

As I argued in the last article, there is a “good slippery slope” inherent in solarpunk that leads from more superficial concerns and aesthetic lure towards issues of civic engagement and social innovation—which aligns with what I call Protopian or metamodern design patterns of society. My hypothesis is that solarpunk is a gateway drug or trojan horse for metamodernism to take hold in mainstream society. And I don’t seem to be alone with this instinct. My friends, Dr Jason Fox and Joe Lightfoot have crafted a Metamodernist Solarpunk Manifesto that outlines an ethos for communities to gather around and start from.

Let us then trace some crucial aspects of how free and democratic societies can be “solarpunked”. (Yes, I’m doing the “it’s a verb” cliché. Sue me.)

Solarpunk cities—a space for reimagining that leads towards deeper questions that concern the social fabric of society, its economy, and governance.

The Four Levels of Solarpunk Co-Development

Let’s first get a sense of where solarpunk design can be located. Is it grassroots, city-level, or even a national project and beyond? I believe that there is a true both-and way to answer this question, and that all answers that focus on one level to the detriment of others are likely to either fail or backfire.

1. Transcendent design

In this first category, we have such solarpunk projects that almost certainly require national investments (large infrastructure projects, the founding or new cities and networks of eco-villages, stimulus packages, the creation of university level educations) and even transnational or supranational commitments (Green New Deal, European New Bauhaus). Without state level actors, flagships of solarpunk design that set the tone for the rest of society are hardly possibly, nor are major infrastructure investments in railways, hyperloops, secure power grids, and the like.

It is important not to fall too much in love with the “small is beautiful” ethos— a few very large projects corresponding to medieval cathedrals are also required for solarpunk to truly shine through to people’s hopes, aspirations, and sense of purpose. As such, at least some symbolic or transcendent “cathedrals” can capture the world’s public imagination, much like Singapore and Saudi Arabia’s The Line have been doing thus far. Democratic societies must link this transcendence to their values of freedom and inclusion.

2. Grand design

Likewise, city-level agents may need to muster resources at a municipal level and link them to specifically solarpunk design and urban ecology projects. This is also “solarpunk from above”, and while it cannot include such projects as key national airports, railways between cities, etc., it may include such things as:

• Art and event-filled parks
• Green roofs, collective planning for use of spaces for energy and other social, economic, or eco-services
• Solar and wind power grid-friendly planning and infrastructure
• Design guidelines for differently themed areas (night districts are more likely to follow the (bio-)luminescent lunarpunkthemes appropriate for after-dark activities, etc.)
• Stimulation of the establishment of post-automobile, post-carbon, and sharing economy frameworks and innovation hubs
• Use of feedback by mobiles etc. for quick reparations and adaptations of spaces and services

3. Inclusive design (also: design justice)

But beyond and below the municipal administration of urban planning there is always-already a living mycelium of communities, of real people with real roots and relationships. Without activating and establishing solarpunk movements and transitions to sustainability in these basic communities, and simultaneously stimulating these for greater social coherence and mutual trust, solarpunk cannot truly function. It loses its soul (again, think Singapore, the typical paternalist let’s-mind-our-own-business-leave-each-other-alone society).

This form of cultural “rooting” includes differentiating solarpunk into different civilizational and aesthetic forms as appropriate—it is unlikely that a future “China town” solarpunk project would have the exact same flavor as an Afrofuturist or Islamic one or as the downtown of Boston or reinventions of its New England suburbia. Such connections to ethnic and cultural communities needs to be cautiously balanced against the cosmopolitan and universalist strivings of an inclusive solarpunk design: on the one hand avoiding the dominance of slick, middleclass, dreamy—and “white”—solarpunk, on the other hand reducing (the unavoidable but undesirable) tendency of solarpunk design to activate ethnic tensions and become an arena for culture wars.

The involvement of communities must itself strive towards social justice (as such, reversing the trend towards privatized and commercialized public spaces, the cultural exclusion of minorities, and of deliberately designing spaces so as to be uninviting for loiterers, the moneyless, the homeless, etc.). This involves, of course, following principles such as those of design justice so that community-led design process itself is as fair and unbiased as possible.

4. Commoning design

There is, of course, a natural alignment between solarpunk urban design and the commons (collective goods and services) and thus the practice of commoning (i.e. reorganizing economies as commons). Solarpunk tries to remedy ecological issues which are always commons of some kind: air, water, power grids, forests, ecosystem services, climate self-regulation, and so on. It also concerns issues that are “commons” of a more abstract or cultural kind: mutual trust in society, the general mood of society, beauty of public spaces, security, the propensity to share, sense of autonomy, connection to nature, mental health, physical health, inventiveness in the face of problems, etc.

The fourth level of solarpunk co-development, even more refined and grassroots-based than the communities themselves, is thus a network of commons and “commoners” that spread solarpunk practices across contexts and help adapt them from city to city. Solarpunks need to be commoners, sharing in open source knowledge, direct action for reclaiming and redesigning spaces, while engaging not only middleclass citizens, but also a wide variety of movements—what Hardt and Negri have called “assemblage” of a “multitude”.

At the basis, solarpunk must empower people to solve their own problems and be genuinely incentivized to share in successes of such self-sovereignty with one another. This requires a strategic—I would say metamodernist—grassroots movement of solarpunks.

Solarpunk a la Metamodernism

Alright, keeping in mind that solarpunk cannot reside on one of these four levels alone if it is to fulfil its promise of a beautiful, ecologically viable, and socially just world, what traits should it have?

Let’s try to sketch it out. A solarpunk that could truly challenge the authoritarian bids to it of today is one that…

1. Builds around the decentralization of the power grid. Speaks for itself, doesn’t it? Its about solar power, after all, and that invites a decentralization of power production and thereby of power and resources across society (including a renewed self-reliancethat would make Emerson proud).
2. Explores decentralization of other systems, like waste, water, and of course, food production. Yes, there it is, the “good slippery slope” of solarpunk. If one thing is decentralized, why not more things? While we all like cheap food, we also like the idea that people close to us that we trust can produce it if need be. This ultimately spreads power in society, as reliance on a few powerful others creates unhealthy power relations. It also means that people can work in these services if they don’t have conventional (modern) jobs.
3. Uses metamodern aesthetics: implicated authenticity and craftsmanship, but avoids New Age hysteria and direct Fantasy elements.This one could merit its own article, but the idea is that metamodern solarpunk needs to be more implicated, subtle, and sophisticated in its design. It can’t be too “in your face” because it then too easily becomes phony and used to trick people. It needs to master the art of subtly inviting the trained observer, not trying to impress, or even press its own values and aesthetics upon everyone.
4. Coordinates with the sharing economy. Obviously, solarpunk societies can hardly co-exist with excessive commercialism/consumerism and private ownership. The existing numbers of cars and lawnmowers are wildly exaggerated as compared to the actual need in society—only the lacking logistics (and culture) of sharing hinder a drastic reduction, thereby putting consumption within ecologically reasonable bounds while maintaining a high standard of living. To create genuinely green public spaces, we must share more so that we can burden the space with fewer cars, fewer garages for lawnmowers and cars, and so on.
5. Builds around material-flow sovereignty. You and your community have very little say and control over how your materials flow around you (from production, to transportation, to waste management) and while we must all work to reduce wasteful and unsustainable flows of material, many different solutions to these issues are possible depending on the contexts of our living conditions. Hence, local community control over material flows coupled with commitments to achieve ecological goals would make sense.
6. Rewards positive externalities (and reduced/replaced negative ones). A favorite of my commoner friend, Michel Bauwens: today people only get paid for what other people can directly buy, not for e.g. reducing a negative externality of farming, etc. A solarpunk society would give vouchers to reward any innovation or initiative that reaches common goals, even if there is no “product” being sold. So people would be able to make a living by contributing to, for instance, cleaner water, reducing carbon footprints, and so on. This would incentivize innovation in these fields.

7. Requires a very strong civil sphere (high trust). As discussed above, solarpunk is fundamentally about civil society—even if it must be reflected at all of the four levels discussed above. As a first step to “solarpunking” society you must thereby always build a strong civil society (clubs, associations, communities, congregations, and so on) from which solarpunking can start. The Transition Townsmovement is a lot about gardening, when push comes to shove, but it offers a good civil society backbone for solarpunk.
8. Requires high average value meme. Controversial as this is (and discussed at length in my books), people must feel, think according to, and embody fairly “progressive” values for solarpunk movements to truly make sense. While there is certainly a role for, say, Christian solarpunk communities, it makes little sense to build a solarpunk movement on the basis of traditionalist fundamentalist evangelists who are against not only any notion of climate change, but even of Darwinian evolution and mainstream science. Nor can the average Wall Street banker be expected to embody values of punk, subtle aesthetics, reconnection to nature, and DIY innovation of postcapitalist solutions.
9. Connects to redefined metrics of growth/success (and post-growth economics). Solarpunk must be based on other measures than GDP and create a theory-and-practice feedback cycle with heterodox economics that emphasize the reduction of suffering and ecological values.
10. Connects to reconciliation ecologyand interspecies democracy. Basically, solarpunk societies should be cleverly thought-out to sustainably host non-human creatures—like forests, which don’t get invaded by a million rats, but there is still a rich and diverse ecology.
11. Connects to new municipalismand (digitally enhanced) local council democracy.Basically, solarpunk needs to be punk—building on citizens reclaiming control over their local economies and participating actively in decisions and planning. It’s hard to imagine a truly solarpunked city without a strong element of such renewed municipal autonomy. Solarpunk in a city like Berlin could for instance be introduced through a large fund that will invest in solarpunk projects, but only if the spending of solarpunk transition investments are subject to deep-democratic decision processes of the citizens involved.
12. Actively nudges towards higher subjective states. However we may view the paternalism of nudging, it cannot be denied that some environments and cues are more likely to make people feel safe, relaxed, and kind rather than aggressive. Whatever design features may nudge in such directions should be included—if, of course, it is an active choice of democratically empowered citizens.
13. Builds on oscillation between futurism and nature mysticism. Pretty interesting religious currents are likely to emerge in our time, not all of which may have much to do with solarpunk. But solarpunk spirituality would neither align with slick, metallic sci-fi, nor with pulsating, green, fantasy and a longing for the indigenous and animistic; it would try to stretch across this divide, marrying an intimate love of nature to the awe of tech and science.
14. Connects to digital and cosmolocal economies.The digital realm provides an important space for shared innovations and open source best practices. As such, it invites cosmolocalism: share much of the intellectual goods globally online (and sell some of them) and produce a greater proportion locally. This not only helps optimize for ecological footprints (what to produce where, at what scale, versus the costs of transportation… locally produced is not always better for the environment but it’s a case-to-case calculation), but equally builds resilience into the global system (otherwise, a few bottlenecks in the world’s transport system can paralyze the entire world, cause starvation, fuel poverty, etc.).
15. Is coordinated with urban crime prevention. Of course, issues of crime, gang violence, ethnic tensions, and so on, don’t magically go away because you “solarpunk” a city. But rather than viewing progressive and idealistic solarpunk visions as antithetical to crime prevention, it can be used for such purposes: dramatically upgrading shanty towns and ghettos, lighting up public spaces, creating greater self-reliance so that fewer people need to resort to criminality, defocusing on material prestige goods which drive inequalities and criminal behaviors, etc.
16. Builds on critical urban studies. An obvious point, perhaps, but real-world deep-democratic solarpunk should be less based on sci-fi writers and painters and more on urban sociology and urban ecology, understanding such issues as “who the living space is really for” and “how its spaces are used in unexpected ways by whom” and “who gets included/excluded from spaces, on what grounds”, etc.
17. Has eco-villages as its base (cottagepunk). Last but not least, solarpunk is not just about metropolises envisioned in green: it’s just as relevant in suburbia, in small town life, in villages, on the country side, even in wildlife restoration. A key element of solarpunk are eco-villages based around local communities where people can access things like a plot of own land, own electricity, and control over a local water supply—many such villages would be able to build up a new kind of economy where people can make decisions together, have at least some limited backup self-reliance if the economy goes badly, and have alternative identities and roles than just their jobs. Jobs would in turn often be digital distance jobs. This can allow for sustainable, attractive, close-to-nature living combined with participation in a global economy. This may include living concepts such as the ReGen villages. Thus far it hasn’t been successful, but imagine what such projects could do with the proper backing of state actors.

And that, my dear planners, leaders, philanthropists, investors, designers, innovators, activists, and fellow citizens, is how we should thoroughly solarpunk society. And turn a city like Berlin into a solarpunk Mecca.

—

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 Facebook, Twitter, and Medium, and you can speed up the process of new metamodern content reaching the world by making a donation to Hanzi here.

We also need an aesthetic longing that calls us: a sense of beauty, of good taste, of inspiration, of creativity.

The Nazis understood this very well. And so do the authoritarian regimes of today. Democratic nice guys, on the other hand, seem to struggle grasping this. As such, only authoritarian regimes have successfully managed to apply the aesthetics that speaks to the longings of 21st century humans: solarpunk.

I believe that the solarpunk movement and its aesthetics offer some of the most viable pathways for such an impulse—one that is capable of carrying forward transition (to sustainability) and transformation (of social reality). Solarpunk can be a vehicle of metamodernist visions, not as a set of abstract ideas and ideals, but as something that is viscerally experienced through the senses and thus easy to communicate and build momentum and movement around. Solarpunks (i.e. people committed to this design sensibility) can be purveyors of metamodern culture and thus ultimately of Protopian society, strengthening these attractor points.

So this is relevant stuff—let’s take a closer look at what may be at stake.

A Trojan Horse for Metamodernism

There is a certain logic behind solarpunk as a fulcrum for metamodernist cultural change. Metamodernism—the practice of taking modernity and its progress as an object to be related to and redirected—thrives at the crossroads of fact and fiction, with informed naivety, pragmatic romanticism, and so forth. The same can be said of solarpunk—it is science fiction about near futures where humanity lives closer to the environment but still with the perks of advanced technology, in closer connection to life and to one another. As solarpunk visions are fictional but strive to become increasingly tangible and to offer real solutions, they naturally strengthen the tendencies of pragmatic romanticism in culture. But there’s more to it than that: solarpunk projects bring with them a certain dynamic which subtly directs people towards metamodernist sensibilities:

• Let’s say you build a solarpunk movement around 12 visions: (cleanest streets, greenest streets, local expression, e-democracy and participation, responsive transculturalism, colorful and artsy streets, beautiful and living buildings, healthy environments, best choice architecture, New Municipalism, AI and IoT feedback for public goods, and of course sustainable energy).
• This means you’ll need to start investing much time, effort, money, materials, and energy into certain projects to improve buildings, streets, electric grids, transport, etc.
• This means that people will need to suggest such projects and gain traction for them by their peers.
• This will drive forward digital democratic frameworks and tools for presenting the ideas and deciding upon them.
• This will invest people—with real stakes—in deeper democratic participation.
• This will make people concerned with processes of democratization and thereby with the other processes that naturally follow from that starting point (the six new forms of politics that I discuss in my book Nordic Ideology). Otherwise, these issues simply don’t crop up as priorities in people’s lives.
• And that will get people into a space of superposition between the real here-and-now and the yet-to-be-even-imagined possible: the “new possible” as some people have termed it.
• And that’s basically the shift from modern to metamodern or Protopian culture.

Solarpunk can thus be a trojan horse for metamodernism. The expected, or desired, end result is not actually a shiny, green, techy, clean, happy, beautiful city. A metamodern society is, with its richer culture, superior governance, and “listening society” welfare is—i.e. a society profoundly happier and kinder than our current one. The solarpunk stuff is just the gateway drug to get people interested in things that sound too abstract.

Little wonder that metamodernism and solarpunk have already begun to overlap. My Aussie friends, Joe Lightfoot and Jason Fox, have already cobbled together a Metamodern Solarpunk Manifesto—which also incorporates neo-tribal elements, a theme earlier discussed in this article series.

The Grim Reality: Authoritarian Solarpunk

So, to strengthen the attractor points of metamodern society, we basically need to stimulate solarpunk movements, municipalities, urban planners, artists, writers, companies, and ecovillages, right?

Not so fast. The only solarpunk projects thus far—in terms of awe-inspiring aesthetics—have been led by agents decidedly un-metamodern: by authoritarian and paternalistic regimes. Singapore is, of course, the clearest example. But Chinese and Vietnamese projects are joining the fray. Saudi Arabia is designing a whole city, The Line, entirely based around a post-car world. These projects may look like solarpunk, the green and clean future cities we long for, but they are anything but alive and organic in the sense that they build on grassroots, on commons, and so on.

Solar-punks are idealistic libertarians, mainly within the West (sometimes elsewhere), often connected to some version of “nerd” counterculture (visionary/utopian sci-fi, regenerative gardening, tech, nature mysticism, paganism, hackathons, digital arts, role playing, and so on)—represented to a lesser extent also in developing countries. It builds on cyberpunk, on punk simply, on DIY, on energy sovereignty, on a romantic calling back to earth, soil, and nature. It’s about the love of freedom, the feeling that each of us can build small but beautiful lives, but still make a difference that makes a difference. It builds on a sense of the organic, the spontaneous, that streak of a fiercely independent “chaotic good” in each of us, to speak in roleplaying terms. Its intellectual icons are people like sci-fi writer Ursula K. Le Guin, the inventor Buckminister Fuller, and the architect-theorist Christopher Alexander.

But, ironically enough, the solarpunk aesthetics—the bank of imagery that comes up if you image-Google the term—seems to come in two distinctly different shades.

• The painted and animated images take the direction of the somewhat-too-fanciful-to-be-taken-seriously fantasy genre, sometimes overlapping with New Age-like themes.
• The other side, the photorealistic and architectural side, puts on display examples primarily from Singapore, but with some other examples from undeniably beautiful but dictatorial prestige projects, often catering to a rich, transnational class of professionals who are expected to come as tourists or residents but have no stake or say in a solarpunk reality themselves. Poor people, of course, would be locked out—or brought in only as migrant workers with little to no labor and civic rights. It’s a shiny, green, new version of the Dubai model, a city-state level version of the gated community.

Of the two, it is clear that the photorealistic solarpunk of Singapore is the one that captures the world’s imagination: it brings a taste of the future that feel concrete and credible. The more far-out images of fantasy-like solarpunk are just too childish and imagined to be taken seriously by the bulk of people (fantasy and sci-fi art, in turn, mimic the techniques of Romanticism period painting, i.e. heightening color, contrast, detail, perfection, on otherwise nearly realistic paintings, so as to give them that magical glow). Take a look at a few examples of two strands of solarpunk art/design below:

Solarpuink art: “fantasy/sci-fi” style:

Fantasy-style solarpunk—skies are always blue in these images.

Fantasy solarpunk—clearly a dream-world far removed from any urban planning.

Solarpunk “Singapore” style:

Singapore style solarpunk—notice how it works even on a cloudy day.

Arial view of Singapore’s famous “Garden by the Bay”.

Singapore-style solarpunk—notice how it works even with cars in sight.

To this second category you may also add the airport photo at the beginning of this article.

—

I spoke to a US citizen on a train about a year ago—he compared his native San Francisco to Singapore in which he was currently based. While he admitted that the latter was authoritarian, there was no doubt as to which one he preferred: his descriptions of the urban decay of San Francisco and his appreciation for the neat and the orderly spoke for themselves. Similar stories begin to crop up across the West: An old uncle of mine, a retired mailman from a liberal European country, awe-struck with Singapore’s order and beauty, called it “an ideal society” after a brief visit to his son who studied there. Hearing my old uncle’s tales of Singapore is, I imagine, the equivalent of what it must have been like to hear the visitors of early 20th century skyscraper America.

Meanwhile, liberal hubs like Berlin and San Francisco are not being properly solarpunked. Both cities have solarpunk communities and a few spots with solarpunk vibes going for them (like Salesforce Park in SF), but they’re just not leading stars like Singapore is.

Need I point out the risk we are running here? Solarpunk aesthetics are incredibly powerful, but they remain in the hands of those city planners that have enough centralized political power to make these visions come true. Such powers include: long-term capacity for large scale top-down planning, finances for no-expenses-saved projects, and of course border controls to attract only wealthy citizens while denying the unhealthy access or at least citizenship. Ideal society—ahem.

As fascist and neo-traditionalist theorists have long argued, it is often authority, inequality, and top-down power that concerns itself with the spiritual goals of embellishment (made possible, then, by the power differential itself, if you will by the surplus gained from exploitation itself): the super-rich create mansions and keep art galleries alive, the Catholic church raised cathedrals, and so forth, while communist or social democrat apartment blocks are generally functional and uninspiring—hence, the Louvre is not filled with 20th century stuff, but with stuff from more unequal and authoritarian days.

If the beauties and allure that capture the global public imagination and aesthetically define “the good life” are solarpunk-based, and if solarpunk is increasingly in the hands of authoritarian powers—what do you think will happen? There are already other attractor points that suggest we could end up in a period of global balkanization combined with some kind of eco-fascism or at the very least an extensive and deliberately exclusive eco-paternalism. If the citizens of the free world do not soon begin to offer viable alternatives to authoritarian solarpunk, the battle for human dreams and desires will very likely be won by authoritarian powers. People will gladly sell out their freedom and democracy for a chance to live in what looks like an ideal society. The lure of aesthetically superior expression and smoothly running social order will snuff out first the spirit of liberty and then of equality.

The Cold War against communist authoritarianism was not won by moral arguments. It was won, primarily, by consumer goods, by lifestyles that elicited genuine, visceral desires: As an example, it can be mentioned that leftwing Western students who visited communist East Germany were shocked to find that the citizens there were obsessed with empty cereal boxes from the West and would use them as decorations in their kitchens. And in 1959, in what was later named the Kitchen Debate, Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev visited the American National Exhibition in Moscow. Here he was shown a replica of an American household with all the newest home appliances and was shocked to see the level of affluence enjoyed by ordinary middleclass Americans.

The world’s imagination was captured by the lifestyle of the “1st world”. It is a daunting thought that washing machines, color TVs and middle class suburbias won the battle between liberal democracy and authoritarianism under a thin guise of socialism. Today, however, authoritarianism is winning the hearts of the global middle class through its capacity to guarantee order—and to solarpunk society “from above”.

You Could Show It to a Six-Year-Old—And, Crucially, to the Middle Class

If you are a metamodern activist or scholar and you want to reach others with your intentions and visions, you can tell a highly educated and philosophically gifted person: “We want to strengthen the metamodern tendencies in society so as to transcend the problems and tragedies of modernity…” And with much effort, and long discussions, you may have a fellow traveler on the paths to go beyond modern life.

But that only really works if your listener is a particularly abstract thinker, and it does take great effort. It’s a lot like taking a time machine to England 1224 AD and try to explain a few peasants, even intelligent ones, why they should strive towards “liberal democracy” Sure, some would be intrigued, but you would mostly be wasting your time. And theirs.

Yes, a metamodern or Protopian society is what really matters. But most people won’t give a damn (frankly my dear) about lofty ideals and visions.

Now, instead, imagine showing our medieval friends a video of a new home with running water and all the food available at the grocery store, and their interest might be peaked. Okay, that got me interested. How do we get there?

Correspondingly, if you show this following image of a reimagined, “solarpunked” Berlin, even to a six-year-old, there’s good reason to think they’ll intuitively understand what is to be achieved:

A “Solarpunk Berlin” by Alex Rommel

If you know Berlin, you here see it reimagined—with enough familiar buildings to recognize what it is, but also so much redefinition of it that its entirety feels more alive and inviting. (Blue skies, of course, in Berlin, but never mind).

Here, we are approaching a “show it don’t tell it” by means of beauty. Not rational argument, not moral awakening—just a sense of “ahhh, that’s nice, I’d like that.”

And here’s what’s crucial: You know who would like that? Not a few psychedelic artists and burners and punks and anarchists and deep ecologist. Middle class people would like it too. Even the underclass may prefer solarpunk’s more inviting landscape over cold, hard, concrete and garbage-filled alleys or trailer parks.

In short—this is an argument I have been implying from the beginning of the article, but which I feel must be made absolutely clear—solarpunk aesthetics is currently the world’s best ticket to getting normal people to change the world, thereby saving human civilization.

Solarpunk is, to speak the language of that great social reformist of fin-de-siècle London, Mary Poppins, the spoonful of sugar that makes the medicine go down. Again: I am not saying that the sugar is more wonderful than the medicine. All I am saying is Mary Poppins.

Solarpunk is an aesthetic that works, it’s a gateway drug to metamodernism and Protopia. If you want to be cynical about it, you could say that one can use it to fool people to want sensible things like the transition to an ecological, equitable, and effectively governed society. A Trojan horse, as discussed above.

Beauty in the Service of Truth

I don’t have many good things to say about the work and ideas of the New Age economist Charles Eisenstein, but I believe it is no coincidence that his dictum—and book title—The More Beautiful World Our Hearts Know Is Possible has stricken such a deep chord in so many readers. Dreams are not made of truth, nor of moral dignity, but of beauty, of aesthetic qualities. Eisenstein did not call us to a more rational world, nor to a morally dignified one: but specifically to a beautiful one. That’s the only calling we can, in all honesty, hear. That’s the ugly truth about truth, morality, and beauty.

To be clear, I certainly don’t believe that beauty, seen as a value, can ever be allowed to trump justice and truth—in fact, I have long argued that the essence of fascism and its brand of totalitarianism consists of that very misprioritization (“everything should look like THIS, and not otherwise, the truth and morality of the matter be damned!” …and from there on, a mad ride to copy the exact same pattern across the world ensues: same swastikas, same ideas, same people, same race, same clothes, same housing…). Truth and morality indeed must ultimately trump aesthetic qualities: There’s no sense to “this is a beautiful torture session”, or “what an aesthetically pleasing genocide”. But I am claiming that there is a “truth about the truth”, and a “truth about morality”—and it’s that humans are incapable on fully acting upon what’s true and what’s just unless these qualities are aesthetically mediated: the elegance of science, poetic justice, and so forth. We are not machines: if our world dries out, so do our spirits, and thus our motivation.

And if we stop to examine this point just a little further, I believe that a profound existential insight reveals itself:

• The evil of the world is recognizable particularly by its propensity to put beauty before morality and truth—to let subjective taste colonize the latter two. In Joseph Goebbels’ (who later became propaganda minister of Nazi Germany) novel Michael, “the people” is the marble in the hands of a sculptor, an artist. Society itself is not alive and sentience does not inherently merit ethical consideration—no, it’s just stuff you can reshape according to what looks nice. Again, this is exactly what the Nazis did: They manically pressed what the world should look like according to them onto everything, the truth be damned. A huge copy-paste regime plastered the Swastika on everything that moves and then some. Humans themselves were to look a certain way. Even their military tactics were aesthetically defined, refusing to rationally assess priorities (Let’s all get the coolest uniforms and most advanced equipment and the biggest cannon history has ever seen and never retreat on any fronts!).
• Conversely,if one follows what is both truthful and morally sound, there is always a beauty revealed at the end of the road. If you stand up for what’s good, there is beauty in that struggle and that in itself sparks the creative imagination. Follow where the search for truth takes you, with no regard for what your “taste” says, and the beauty that awaits is even greater than the one you left behind.

Compare these two images.

Nazi SS rally, Nuremberg 1936. Credit: Bettmann/Getty Images.

The neutrino detector Super-Kamiokande. Kamioka Observatory, ICRR (Institute for Cosmic Ray Research), The University of Tokyo

There is a certain similarity between the two, a beauty that both images seem to converge on—let us admit as much. The difference between them is that one was created for the sake of beauty alone, and from human flesh, on a might-makes-right basis, and with no honest appraisal of the truth claims of why all those men are standing there together in the first place. All those men are seduced (and in part coerced) into being part of one whole, but with no true guiding principle—only pretending to have one.

The science facility of second image was created for the sake of truth, emanating from physics itself. The beauty that we can see reflected in the Japanese neutrino detector chamber is more sublime, more lasting, more universal—because it follows from tracing the steps of deeper and deeper truths and mysteries of the universe.

There is no doubt in my mind that the awe felt by the SS soldiers is greater than the Japanese scientists who are just doing their jobs. But the awe felt doesn’t actually lead anywhere—just down a cliff and into immanent self-destruction. The awe of Nazism is real on an emotional level, but it is not real in the sense that the underlying assumptions it all builds on are entirely ludicrous (we’re a master race destined to conquer the world and our leader knows what he’s doing, guided by fate!). The fairly mundane task of maintenance work on the neutrino chamber is less awe-inspiring, but it points towards truths so mind-boggling it cannot but elude us and draw us into the beyond: the nature of matter, energy, and space—quantum realities, and so on.

Truth in the Service of Beauty

So similar things emerge from so diametrically opposed processes. And yet, the similarity is a superficial one, a false one. Even though the Nazi image is made of living men, by living men, its beauty is dead. While the neutrino chamber is made of inanimate glass and gold, its beauty is alive. Only one of the two is a sublime work of art, because it doesn’t force itself upon the world—it traces the very structure of reality and reveals itself as a surprise: beauty emanating from truth. The opposite of inauthenticity, of posturing, of hysterically impressing what we wish to be true upon reality.

Excuse this long detour. What I mean to say is this: The authoritarian solarpunk-from-above movement may look fancy. It may be as seductive and feel as alive as a Nuremburg rally. But it is a forced beauty, a Disney-land aesthetics. It does not follow function, nor morality, nor the truth of the people who live there, nor of the planet and its other creatures.

Emancipatory solarpunk—true solarpunk—must instead spring from an aesthetic that flows from real solutions to real problems, from real human concerns and relationships. It cannot be “designed” just for show, for the prestige and allure of a certain political-economic center of power.

True beauty brings freedom because it, well, follows where truth takes it. And so, interestingly, there is a truth about the truth: that truth needs beauty to prevail— while there is also a truth about beauty: beauty is a false promise if it does not emanate from truthfulness, including truthfully seeking to address moral concerns.

As such, we have a Ouroboros-like relationship between truth, aesthetics, and ethics. Truth needs beauty to be made manifest, it cannot live alone. Beauty needs to serve the truth in order not to be evil—and what is evil always turns ugly in the end. There are no pretty genocides, nor glorious ones.

Authoritarian solarpunk, solarpunk aesthetics used to seduce middle classes and to exclude people and to excuse the curtailing of freedom will also be ugly in the end.

A solarpunk that resolves real problems for and by real humans through truthful communication will result in the freedom and sustainability that solarpunk promises. This is a playful design-battle not only for justice, but for the future of the human soul.

We must thus save solarpunk by reclaiming its beauty for deep-democratic purposes: going beyond the limits of mainstream liberal and capitalist democracies, not undermining them and reverting to authoritarianism.

Doing so does not only save democracy on a planetary level; it also builds the environmental movement that Greta Thunberg has been calling for. But Greta’s call is a moral one. This will be an aesthetic one, one you literally cannot resist—designed, in turn, by tracing the real and practical solutions to problems of sustainability, inclusion, and justice.

More details on metamodern solarpunk in my next article.

—

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 Facebook, Twitter, and Medium, and you can speed up the process of new metamodern content reaching the world by making a donation to Hanzi here.

The Alternative was founded in 2013 by former Danish minister of culture Uffe Elbæk and entered parliament with almost 5% of the votes in 2015. Since then, however, things have only gone downhill: In 2019 The Alternative only got 3% of the votes, and in 2020 the party’s members elected a new leader, Josephine Fock—a controversial choice resulting in four out of their five members of parliament, Uffe Elbæk included, leaving the party. Today, The Alternative hovers around 1% in the polls, not enough to pass the 2% electoral threshold, while the break-out party Independent Greens (in Danish, Frie Grønne), founded by Uffe Elbæk and two other former MPs from The Alternative, barely registers in the polls.

What The Alternative Got Right

Let’s begin with what I initially found so promising about The Alternative, and what made it metamodern. In The Listening Society I wrote the following presentation of the party:

“Instead of being based on a readymade political program, the party was formed around a set of principles and values for how to conduct good politi­cal discourse and dialogue. The party also has political content, of course, a program with things they want to change, but this was subsequ­ently crowd sourced by its members after the party got founded. Most central to the party’s founding and organi­zation is still the how, rather than the what.

Starting with the what, the party has three main issues in focus.

• Transition to a sustainable society (drawing partly on the Transition Town movement, originally from the UK);
• supporting entrepreneurship and social entrepreneurship; and
• changing the culture of political dialogue (as well as supporting art and culture in general).”

[TLS pp. 109–110.]

Here are the things they got right:

• Process-oriented politics:First of all, The Alternative had a process-oriented way of conducting politics. The party was founded before it had a political program, for example, and instead of presenting a fixed program, the public was invited to participate in the drafting of the new party’s political agenda. This was done through a series of participatory workshops, or “political laboratories” as they were called. These events were facilitated by skilled people with years of experience in group processes. Many of these were educated at the renowned Kaospilot school in Århus (“chaos pilot” education), Denmark. High-tech stuff indeed. And a very metamodern approach to politics overall. The slogan of the political laboratories was “flere ved mere”, which directly translates into “more [people] know more”—indicating an awareness of, and a willingness to utilize, collective intelligence.
• Green social-liberal ideology:In The Listening Society I talk about the meta-ideology that conquered Scandinavian politics: Green social-liberalism. This is the idea that the good society is one that has a well-developed welfare system, an efficient market economy, and that the whole shebang is ecologically sustainable. This is the overarching societal ideology all liberal democracies are headed towards, given enough stability and development. And because Scandinavia has been particularly blessed with social stability and economic development, more or less all parties in the Nordic countries, left and right, are converging towards this meta-ideology, disregarding whether they nominally define themselves as socialists, conservatives, or libertarians. What makes The Alternative metamodern in this regard, is the fact that they more or less explicitly subscribed to this ideology: being green, social, and liberal, all at once, and, very importantly, in equal measures.
• Beyond left and right: Related to the above bullet point, The Alternative also sought to transcend the conventional left-right division and declared to be part of neither block, at least on paper. I write “on paper” since the vast majority of its members were and remain fairly left-leaning, and because, given the party’s progressive agenda, the only viable political allies were to be found in the social-democratic-lead block on the left. Still, of all the progressive parties, the Alternative had the best balance between government and market in my opinion—attempting to go beyond the classic political division, but without being a bland centrist compromise. Instead, The Alternative managed to be a radical and progressive alternative in regards to both market and state related issues.
• Trans­partisanism: Apart from declaring itself ideologically to go beyond the traditional left-right divide, the party also sought to collaborate beyond the actual party political divides in parliament. This was done most exemplarily by the opening speech following the 2015 election where Rasmus Norquistgave a speech about all the things he liked and admired about the other parties. Norquist’s speech was obviously an invitation to engage in a friendlier and more productive conversation across political divides. The Alternative had a culture of talking positive about others and were not shy about mentioning the things they had been inspired by from other political parties. This non-belligerent approach to working with your political opponents is a very productive way to change the political culture towards becoming more deliberative and intelligent. It’s also another example of process-oriented politics; not focusing on changing particular laws, but on changing the way we do politics.
• Catering to artists and the creative class:Initially, the Alternative reached out to artists and the creative class for support and vowed to prioritize culture and art. This explains a large part of the initial success. First of all, it’s a great advantage to have a lot of cultural capital on your side. Secondly, the creative class, along with all those broke artists belonging more to the new underclass of the precariat, represents two groups with progressive and post-materialist values who are not adequately represented in today’s politics. And, it is also here you find a great many metamodernists.
• Transnational: Finally, the Alternative also operated in a transnational manner, attempting to move beyond the traditional confines of national politics by connecting with ideological allies in other countries and by supporting new “Alternatives” and sister organizations.

Now, that The Alternative contained all these metamodern elements doesn’t mean that it should be labeled as a metamodern party as such. Most of its members were solidly gravitating toward the postmodern value meme, and even among its leadership, people tended to express postmodern values. What wasn’t postmodern, however, were many of their methods.

At the time, I actually saw it as an advantage that The Alternative was only kind of metamodern “light”, given that there still aren’t enough metamodern voters out there. To begin with, I thought, the pomos shouldn’t be turned off by too much metamodern content and with time the party could gradually become more and more metamodern. This was, however, very naive of me to consider.

It’s a telling sign that the Independent Greens, the party Uffe Elbæk founded after his departure from The Alternative, simply brands itself as “Denmark’s new Leftwing party” with their main program being about anti-racism and protection of the environment. As commendable as these causes are, it doesn’t get more postmodern than this and it seems that they have given up on the difficult idea of creating a new kind of party. Having been there myself, however, (trying to create a new kind of party) I can hardly blame them.

What Went Wrong?

On a superficial level, the main reason for the decline of The Alternative owes to one person in particular, namely Josephine Fock, one of the three initial leaders of the party alongside Uffe Elbæk. Apparently, Mrs. Fock had quite a temper and became infamous within the party for transgressive behavior, yelling at people and threatening them. As a result, many people with executive functions left the party. She was also accused of backstabbing her political peers within the party and using dirty tricks to get more power. So when she finally outmaneuvered Uffe Elbæk’s faction and managed to be elected chairman of The Alternative, Uffe Elbæk and three other MPs left the party, declaring that they simply couldn’t accept working under Fock’s leadership. I don’t want to dwell more on the details here. It’s a very sad story, and if you care, you can always google what happened.

In any case, despite all the things Josephine Fock has been accused of, it seems to have worked—for a while. She got elected leader of the party in 2020, but only remained in charge for a little less than a year until the whole thing came crashing down and she had to step down. It’s self-evident that internal chaos like this is very harmful to a newly established party. And as of today, the Alternative has never recovered.

Yet, if we were only to blame a single “bad” person for everything that happened and simply conclude that we should avoid such persons in the future, we wouldn’t have learned much. Instead, we should look at the structures, or lack of same, which gave rise to such a bad fit. From where I stand, the whole thing seems to have suffered from a pretty bad case of inclusion without proper integration. Let me explain:

Fock came from the worker’s movement and had been working for labor unions for most of her adult life. I take it that Uffe & Co. wanted to balance out their entourage of fluffy too-cool-for-school kaospilots with someone more grounded in down-to-earth mainstream politics. On paper, it seemed like a sound plan. On paper.

The Alternative came into this world as a revolt against the crude and antagonistic nature of modern politics and thus attracted a lot of idealistic hipsters and hippies with little to no political experience. Naivety, idealism, and a rejection of political power games were ingrained into the party’s DNA from the beginning.

That all sounds good, right? Everyone playing nice and refusing to turn politics into a brutal and cynical bloodsport. Well, without proper measures to counter that one person who doesn’t intend on renouncing the use of dirty tricks, the field becomes wide open for that very person to play everyone out of the game until he or she has reached their goals. And this is exactly what happened when Uffe Elbæk invited an experienced, largely modernist, power player from the worker’s union into a political setting consisting mostly of tender and idealistic postmodern hipsters and hippies. It really was like letting a fox into a henhouse.

Yet, from a traditional political perspective, I can’t blame Josephine Fock. Politics is about power, and if you can win without breaking the law, then you haven’t really done anything wrong. It’s not Josephine’s fault that everyone around her was so miserable at playing the game. All she did was play the game she had learned from her long career in the worker’s movement. And then she won.

She only made one grave mistake, and that was to expect that the kind of game accepted in mainstream society would be tolerated within a party like The Alternative.

Diversity is sometimes good, sometimes bad. And when it’s good, it’s because we have managed to successfully integrate different kinds of people into a greater whole.

Integration is essentially about setting boundaries—and in the case of Josephine Fock in The Alternative, there were no efficient countermeasures in place to put checks and balances on her and thus facilitate the proper integration of a staunch political bulldog into a whole consisting of well-mannered poodles. In short, inclusion without integration.

However, apart from this sad case of all-too-human political bickering, I believe there were three structural reasons for the decline of The Alternative:

1) Becoming just another Green Party:

I remember back in the early days that I was invited to a meeting with The Alternative in the Danish parliament. One of the things I wanted to discuss was the danger of the party becoming “just another green party”. I praised the methods they were using, but also had to raise my concern about the party becoming a conventional green party. At the time, there was no green party in the Danish parliament, which meant that any party choosing green as their party color and emphasizing environmental issues would be seen as the green option that was missing. Thus its voters would expect it to become just that.

To my relief, this was already something the leadership within The Alternative was very much aware of and wanted to avoid. At least that’s what I was being told. But if we look at what happened, The Alternative became more and more akin to a traditional green party. As time passed by, you would hear more and more about climate change and ecology and less and less about fourth sector enterprises, social entrepreneurship, process-oriented politics, and so on.

Today, The Alternative is known as Denmark’s green party, similar to that of Die Grüne in Germany and Miljöpartiet in Sweden. This wouldn’t have been a problem in itself if it weren’t for the fact that there was a reason why Denmark didn’t have a green party proper before The Alternative: The issue had been thoroughly absorbed by the other left-leaning parties, all competing about being the greenest of them all. As such, there wasn’t really any raison d’être for a young green party with a dysfunctional past.

2) Pomo-diluting:

One of the primary dangers of creating a metamodern party, and a reason why I believe it’s too early to do so, is the issue of postmodernly inclined people joining and out-numbering the metamodernists.

Since the ethics of metamodernism isn’t that different from postmodernism, pomos have a hard time telling postmodernism and metamodernism apart. What differs between the two are mainly the methods. Pomos will thus join metamodern projects, since they agree with their overall goals—but they will dismiss the methods and ways of reaching those goals, often succumbing to game denial, and thereby effectively blocking any real change from happening. Since the pomos outnumber metamodernist by a factor of at least 10 to 1, the metamodernists are doomed to be outnumbered if they don’t put mechanisms in place to counter this development.

Another problem is that people on the lower levels of complexity also outnumber people on higher levels of complexity (see my article about Michael Common’s Model of Hierarchical Complexity here). As such, in a structure that prides itself on being non-hierarchical, welcoming to everyone, and open to change, there is a risk of things getting “dumbed down” over time. Just as there is collective intelligence, there is also a thing we could call “collective stupidity”. This happens when the methods to utilize the collective intelligence fail and instead a race toward the lowest denominator takes over. In this case, the highest unifying principle had to do with shifting the nature of political communication across the board, thereby contributing to increased self-organizing capacities of society—while the lowest common denominators spells biodynamically grown carrots.

Obviously, I don’t have any scientific data to prove it, but my own strong impression is that over the years, many of the really smart and metamodern people left The Alternative, while the not-so-smart and not-so-metamodern became more numerous. As a result, The Alternative began to lack much of the political talent that is necessary to succeed.

3) Cultural Capital Leaving:

Back in 2015, I wrote an article in which I ascribed the success of The Alternative to the party’s access to high cultural capital. This was evident in the 2015 election campaign where The Alternative had by far the best videos, posters, and events going on despite having a vastly smaller budget than the big established parties. This was possible because The Alternative deliberately catered to artists and the creative class, and thus had access to highly motivated volunteers from the cultural sector and the advertising industry.

I deliberately wrote that piece to make the good folks at The Alternative aware of their good fortune, but also to warn them that they shouldn’t take their access to the finest and best from the cultural sector for granted. On multiple occasions, I voiced my concern that the cultural capital would leave if nothing was done to make it stay. Unfortunately, it doesn’t seem to have worked.

With time, and as the internal struggles within the party dragged on, The Alternative seems to have lost its cultural capital as the creatives left a party that became more and more of a traditional, “boring”, green party. On one side we had the faction that wanted to make the party more “respectable”, more “normal”, represented by Josephine Fock, and on the other the many people who just wanted the party to be about environmental issues and not all that artsy fartsy stuff.

I noticed how The Alternative’s website became more and more mainstream over the years. It started out as this avantgarde neon green (which became the party color) art project thing and ended up looking like just about any other dullsville party out there (with very little neon green). In their second election campaign in 2019 it was also clear that much of the edge the party had had in the previous election had been lost, and much of the campaign material was just old stuff from the last election. People were also asked to be less freaky, more respectable—which is a very efficient way of getting rid of creative people.

However, with this push to make the Alternative “normal”, the party lost the very thing that made it special and which offered a particular segment of the population something they couldn’t find anywhere else. This is what I wrote in The Listening Society:

“The old Left intellectuals of Denmark tend to stay with the socialist mov­e­­ments, whereas The Alternative steals away the triple-H and yoga bourgeoisie people, creating a platform for their interests and expressions. The party re­presents a merger of the artistic, digital and sustainability-concer­ned elem­ents of society. It is, in a way, the party of artists and their often eccentric, play­ful, post-materialist lifestyles.” [TLS p. 110.]

These are the people they lost. Some might have stuck around if it weren’t for the internal chaos later on, but the decline of The Alternative was already a fact prior to that. In the end, the triple-H (hackers, hipsters & hippies) and yoga bourgeoisie people went back to the traditional left-leaning and center-left parties they came from—at least those of them who didn’t give up the habit of voting which is sadly widespread among especially the triple-H folks.

In my upcoming book The 6 Hidden Patterns of History I make a great deal out of explaining that art is always first. With that I mean that the first elements of a new emerging metameme (societal stage of development) are always to be found within the arts. As such, since we live in a society that is just in the middle of becoming postmodern metamodernism barely exists—and where it exists, and where it can exist, is mainly within the realms of artistic and philosophical expression. If we are thus to create a metamodern party today, we will need to start with first things first, which are: art and culture.

The Alternative seemed to intuitively have sensed that aesthetic expression of the future was necessary in order to create a new kind of party, a political party beyond the postmodern, but that wisdom seems to have been lost along the way of the party’s short and turbulent existence.

So basically, if you want to quote me, what went wrong was that The Alternative sought to conduct politics in a kinder way, attracting people wanting to play nice, but without any mechanisms to fend off power players playing dirty and hard. And then it attracted a lot of pomos thinking that this is just another green party. And then it became just another green party. And as the party became dominated by a former union boss with anger issues and your typical manic-organic crowd dismissing all that artsy fartsy elitist stuff, the cultural capital left—and with that, one of the most important recourses for succeeding as a new kind of party.

—

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 Facebook, Twitter, and Medium, and you can speed up the process of new metamodern content reaching the world by making a donation to Hanzi here.

If you’re a visionary political thinker and agent, your eye may have been caught by one of the following theorists/activists of the future of democracy over the last decade or so:

• Integrative Governance(by Margaret Stout & Jeannine M. Love)
• Holistic Democracy(by Jan Inglis)
• Musical Democracy(by Nancy S. Love)
• Deep Democracy(by Arny Mindell)
• Liquid Democracy
• Sociocracy

One way or another, these suggest “Protopian” forms of governance, where it is assumed that there is some kind of development from monarchy etc. → liberal democracy etc. → deeper and more holistic forms of governance. Democracy isn’t a done deal. It’s not an either-or. It can evolve, and it will, given enough time and the right conditions.

I agree. There is a future of democracy, of governance, of the state and beyond. And it is some kind of more integrated form that transcends party politics and brings together diverse perspectives.

And, yes, democracy builds upon peaceful and respectful human relationships throughout society. If conflict rises above a certain level, the higher democratic ideals very quickly become difficult if not impossible to uphold. A simple example: A core democratic principle is the freedom to assemble and demonstrate, as well as counter-demonstrate. Let’s say—as happened in Sweden a couple of months ago—one (Danish) far-right activist asks to hold Koran burning demonstrations in cities across the country. Young Muslim men gathered and rioted nationwide, directly attacking and attempting to kill police officers with stones, burning busses (with people in them, but no one was harmed) and schools, and so on. To stoke these fires was, of course, was the whole point of the visiting Dane, who didn’t even need to show up in half the cities. He then went on to ask permission for further demonstrations (which were granted). But with costs in millions of dollars and severe dangers to the public, guess if the right to demonstrate with provocative messages will be maintained or curtailed in the long run? How many lifetimes of human work in expenses are the Swedes prepared to pay for one guy’s rights to burn Korans? How much human harm?

As I have argued in my book Nordic Ideology, the three qualities of freedom, equality, and order co-arise; they co-evolve. They depend upon one another. Democratic freedoms and political equality require a certain level of order, from which new struggles for freedom can begin to stoke new fires—albeit less directly violent ones—until a yet higher, more complex and sensitive, form of political order is established as a response to those very fires. Francesco Alberoni called this dynamic the oscillation between “movement” and “institution”. Moments where freedom and equality converge into a loving, ecstatic embrace of new values on new tablets are “movement”—but eventually they can and must stabilize into “institution”.

To be clear: The argument I wish to make in the following is not that civil wars and violent crime lead to higher political order. But, if violence in society is successfully contained, its energies channeled into discourse, it is the very differences of people’s interests, ideologies, and perspectives that push new forms of political reality into being.

So, what we have increasingly come to discuss as the “polarization” of society and its political landscape is not only a bad thing. Yes, it’s a bad thing when a zombie hoard of Proud Boys bloodthirstily shuffle through The Capitol bellowing Nancy Pelosi’s name.

But it’s not necessarily a bad thing that public opinion splinters into opposing camps.

Why am I saying this? Well, look at the other extreme: What if everyone had just about the exact same ideas about things? Do you imagine that society would evolve, adapt to new realities? The point of democracy is not that the majority is right and therefore decides—it’s that there is freedom of speech so that new minorities can rise to convince the rest of us that we were wrong, again and again. This is certainly what happened with climate change, feminism, and gay rights. These profound shifts of public consciousness and political reality have been products of rich and diverse ecosystems of opposing views.

Here’s the principle I would suggest:

• The farther away different positions are from one another, the higher and more complex truths can be triangulated from their dialectical interactions. Note that this has nothing to do with compromise and golden means! There was no compromise between fascism and democracy, but the defeat of fascism heralded the global victory of cosmopolitan humanitarian values and human rights.
• But the farther away from one another the different positions of political interest/reality come, the greater the risk of the discourse degrading along the axis of: co-development → deliberation → dialogue → debate → control over communication forums → insults and wit → sheer violence.
• The quality and resilience of democratic institutions determine how well these contain wider gaps between partisan perspectives. The different perspectives can slide so far apart that they snap the democratic institutions. The more resilient and flexible these institutions are, the more different perspectives they can contain, and thus the greater collective intelligence they can harness.

Basically, dictatorships are dictatorships because the institutions in place are frail. If someone as much as breathes a differing opinion, the whole thing will snap. Liberal democracies are just that because their institutions are resilient, so they can even “afford” to have dorks publicly burning the holy scriptures of other members of society without the whole falling apart.

It’s not polarization that is bad. It’s “more polarization than our institutions can handle” that is bad.

Chantal Mouffe’s Agonistic Democracy

Chantal Mouffe, drinking what I have good reasons to believe to be coffee. Source.

I’m not a huge fan of Chantal Mouffe—the Belgian left radical political philosopher. I view her as stuck in a dated paradigm, still “postmodern” in my sense of the term, and married to unhelpful concepts like “neoliberalism”.

But at the same time, I cannot help but like and respect her work: a far-left thinker bravely drawing on the only genius political philosopher that 20th century fascism ever produced: Carl Schmitt. It takes guts and a rare open-mindedness to learn from your political nemesis. Let me lift one aspect I particularly agree with.

One of the arguments that Mouffe is most famous for is the insistence that conflict is inherent to “the political” and thereby to liberal democracy (and then she herself learns from close dialogue with her political opposite, see what she did there?). The liberal element of democracy gains its energy and vitality precisely from the tendency of people to challenge the status quo, and that’s why the liberal element is so important: freedom of expression, assembly, and so forth. I have made a similar argument in The Listening Society, even if it is one that I today partly regret:

‘The divisions, not the unity, that made possible the party system we know as “liberal democracy”, are breaking down. So when democracy begins to fulfill its promise of a people ruling itself through deliberation—it ironically wrecks the whole game that we know as party politics, around which our democratic system is built, because the necessary party division interests break down. By its dialectic development, by the logic of its own productive contradictions, liberal democracy cancels itself.

In this strange new state of affairs we have every reason to engage in an open-ended, democratic dialogue and deliberation with one another—to do “real” democracy, more according to the classical and Habermasian ideals. But the system of governance is still running on the engine of a modern, industrial society. This is where the frustrations and disappointments with the ongoing political debate are coming from: People are recognizing that the boxing matches between Left and Right are increasingly devoid of substance. We begin to long for a real, honest talk about society and the future. But we find ourselves incapable of speaking and listening, these being a much more difficult tasks than we imagined.’ [Bold in original.]

There is much to commend my late-2015 observation of (mainly European) politics, if I may say so myself—but undeniably I underestimated how harshly the trend would turn towards a renewed polarization. In 2015, you had some corners taken by the far right but, by and large, a wide social-liberal consensus had been established across the continent. That has now crumbled and politics has become a lot more interesting again.

But even if I was wrong, I may have been correct at a deeper and more essential level of analysis: While it is true that the modern economic class divisions that I refer to in the above quote have indeed broken down, the cultural divisions that have surfaced instead have become so strong that they can now in themselves splinter the political realm into multiple antagonistic shards. In other words, my main point about divisions as the driving force of liberal democracy still seems to hold with today’s retrospection.

And it is this that Mouffe meant by Agonistic Democracy—that the politics we know as liberal democracy does indeed feed upon division, not unity. Her model of democracy is one that actively embraces the conflictual nature of politics and takes it into account when designing institutions.

In line with Mouffe, I believe that the mistake of pretty much all of the idealistic and holistic forms of democracy and governance suggested in the beginning of this article is that they tend to seek to transcend conflict, rather than to scaffold it, admit it, contain it, clarify it, and even to some extent even to stoke it and harness it. They all have lingering remnants of what I call “game denial”, denying that life is always also a game, even if it’s a transformable one. Among the visionaries of future democracy there is a lot of talk of “sitting with the difficulties” and so on, but there is an assumption that a higher synthesis will always be within reach.

I believe this to be true on a theoretical level: given that people can always learn to put their ideas and interests in perspective, there is bound to be some higher perspective within which the conflict would be resolved or simply rendered irrelevant. The potential is always there. But the field of potentiality is not the field of actuality—and in actual reality, the higher synthesis is more often out of reach than not. Instead, when you reach for consensus while it is not within genuine reach, what you get is some version of covert or implied power struggle—even if under the guise of cute understanding— where one side wins and another gives in.

The reason that progressive politics (of direct, participatory, or deliberative forms) so often becomes toxic is precisely that it tries to transcend conflicts prematurely. Because the conflict is still there de facto, but is not admitted to openly, you get manipulative power games coming in some very cute dresses.

Now, I think that the bridge between liberal democracy and these higher and visionary forms of governance goes directly through Agonistic Democracy. We need more conflict, not less, to transform democracy into its higher forms—not, as radicals and extremist true believers hold, because “we need to be ruthless to the other side if we are to win, and the stakes are so high!”, but precisely because we are all so limited in our perspectives that the only thing that can set us straight is a proper adversary that we meet in a fair fight. Our adversaries are, as wisdom teachers have been reminding us the last few millennia, our teachers.

So the idea is not to optimize for your side winning and crushing all ideological opponents. The only thing that happens then is that the divisions break down and you “win” by getting to force your truth down everyone’s throat—which is not only an intellectually boring prospect, but one that is bound to lead to totalitarianism which always sucks for everyone involved. Interestingly, all ideologies lead there—you can’t just pick the one you imagine to be “the most opposite of totalitarianism” (anarchism, liberalism, green decentralization, underdog nationalism against the globalist elites, etc.). Nor can you be “without an ideology”. They’re like accents—everyone’s got one but yourself. You can talk all day about how you are beyond -isms but that’s just your ism talking.

The idea is to optimize for you getting the best opponents possible. Not opponents with knuckle-irons. But ones armed to their teeth with facts, truths, wits, humor, perspective-taking, empathy, energy, enthusiasm.

We just need refined games of politics—ones that can contain the sheer power inherent in today’s polarization. It’s either that, or watching our world snap in slow motion and slide towards planetary decay.

The Production of Opinions

There’s another way of saying roughly the same thing as above:

• Technological development leads to fewer and fewer of us need to work producing stuff or moving physical things around.
• At the same time, our command of greater resources means that the actual effects of the actions of each one of us increase. We may not feel more powerful, but it is a fact that not only do we all have greater ecological footprints than any people ever before, each of us also affect more other people through chains of actions than we can imagine.
• As such, what opinions, beliefs, knowledge, attitudes, and sentiments we hold becomes increasingly consequential.
• Hence, changing people’s ideas about the world becomes an increasingly high-stakes game.
• Hence, more and more of us spend more and more time trying to affect other people (as well as absorbing more ideas and working to get the best opinions ourselves).
• Hence, a massive global arms-race of different ideologies and worldviews blooms, primarily in the digital sphere.

As things stand, this arms-race is tearing the world apart. Proud Boys are coming for Nancy Pelosi in The Capitol. Flat Earthers and allying with David Icke to fight NASA and the lizardmen that control the world. Far lefties hold their intra-group inquisitions of one-word-wrong Leftbook groups in an eternal anti-Darwinian race to the bottom of all relevance to anyone at all.

But at the same time, literally thousands of intellectually and socially interesting ideas are flowering across the Internet: Enactvism, Complexity, Ontological Design, Justice Design, Metamodernism, Inner Development Goal, Postgrowth Economies, The Commons and Commoning—the list is endless.

Somewhere among those thousand plateaus there is a place to land, to climb to, to rest, to call home. Now, however each of us individually invests oneself in one of those paths or projects, we will never be quite right. The best that we can hope for is that right syntheses will be achieved by the epistemic qualities of our societies: that our institutions embrace conflict well enough to empower a multiplicity of voices, to fight it out under the best possible circumstances.

In other words, we return here to the idea of Agonistic Democracy as the portal to higher and more integrated forms of governance: We must understand that violence is the resort of the epistemically powerless, not the powerful. Empower all parties with education, strategy, and channels of communication, and the ones who have the highest syntheses will win.

Or rather, all of us will feel like we lose more, but together, we will have won higher truths. There will be more “conflict”, yes, but ultimately less violence. Gandhi had a similar idea: The crime of killing someone is that you kill their side of the truth, and thereby you get a poorer picture of the whole. Their part of the story is a part of the story, however contradictory to yours it may be.

Fusion Power Politics

Simply put: The next step of liberal democracy is to deliberately create arenas that empower people to argue their case, to specify what they want and what they believe that their interests are, and what they’re mad at, and who they’re mad at, and who they perceive as their opponents. There are conflicts in society, so let us set up the common goal of clarifying them, articulating them, admitting them, understanding them, accepting them. This will not eliminate conflict, not at all. But it will guide conflicts away from violence and towards gentler forms.

The future forms of integrated democracy—and indeed, the opinion-making economy as a whole—are the ones that can first differentiate the different shards of conflicting groups and interests, create a free and fair fight between these, and then channel the profound transformations inherent in these dialectical forces.

The cuter forms of future democracy are, unsurprisingly, also connected to a more dramatic and tremendous sense of political action and engagement. This greatness reveals itself, however, through our failures, as we face the opponents we truly deserve.

Integrated democracy—protopian governance—engenders multiple powerful political actors. Like a fusion reactor, it contains the struggles of titans, harnessing deeper secrets of the universe than what can be fathomed by any singular mind or perspective.

But without political polarization, there’s no fusion power. You’ll get a political coal plant at best. So, yes, political polarization is good.

—

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 Facebook, Twitter, and Medium, and you can speed up the process of new metamodern content reaching the world by making a donation to Hanzi here.

Nowadays I’m in such a privileged position that a lot of young people, just starting out on journeys of their own, are coming to me for advice. I see that many are making the exact same mistakes I did back in the days. As such, in order not to keep repeating myself, I’d like to present the three greatest, but also most common, pitfalls of the trade.

So without further ado, let’s begin with numero uno:

1. The BS Trap of Empty Networking:

When you’re just starting out, one of the most important things is to expand your network and getting to know the right people. It doesn’t matter how brilliant your idea is, how well executed your product is, or how productive and smart you are—if no one knows who you are. As such, there are good reasons to spend a lot of time getting to know new people. And for many of us, this can be quite enjoyable.

But sometimes it can get a little bit too enjoyable, especially to those of us who’re extroverts. It can feel very meaningful and exciting to meet all these new people, but if it’s not leading to any concrete results, you just end up wasting your time chatting away in cafés and on endless zoom calls.

So, you need to ask yourself: am I meeting new people because it benefits my work, or am I mainly doing it because it just feels good? You need to bust your own bullshit. You need to face that little demon inside of you who’d rather drink a latte with an exciting stranger than sit at home toiling in front of the computer (or whichever inanimate object happens to be your primary work tool).

Now, I’m not saying you should tell Obama or Elon to take a hike if they wanted to hang out some day. It can, after all, be very wise to drop everything if the right person all of a sudden pops up in your life. But most of the time, in most people’s lives, the next potential coffee date is not an Obama, or an Elon, and does not turn out to be a pivotal moment for that important project of yours—which you presumably, unless you’re super human, are chronically behind schedule with anyway.

I know it can be flattering when people take an interest in your work and want to meet you, especially when you’re just starting out, but make a sober estimation of what the potential value of meeting this particular person could be. Don’t accept just any invitation for a meeting. After all, most out-of-the-blue-networking-dates-with-no-particular-agenda-apart-from-getting-to-know-each-other lead to: absolutely nothing.

Now, this is not to say that you should entirely dismiss the potential value of a new acquaintance. Some of the most valuable twists and turns of my own career have been the result of such random out-of-the-blue meetings. All I’m saying is that it’s wise to be aware about the trap of spending so much time on empty networking that you end up sacrificing crucial work time.

So, just to be clear: When I’m talking about “empty networking”, I’m not referring to meetings with someone who’s expressed an interest in maybe becoming a new client, partner, patron and so on, or that person who could create your new website, or become your new assistant etc. Empty networking refers to all those “getting-to-know-each-other” meetings that many of us inevitably end up spending time on when we’re working on abstract and experimental projects.

Initially, you’re just happy that anyone wants to meet with you, and I agree, if you have no network, just seeing what would happen can be a good strategy. But as times go by, and more people know about you and your work, it is advisable to get more picky and prioritize your actual work time wisely.

2. The BS Trap of Mutual Recruitment:

When people are networking, they’re often on the lookout for people to collaborate with—or, more specifically, they’re looking for people to recruit for this brilliant once-in-a-century project of theirs. The only problem: so is everyone else.

As a newcomer, you’ll quickly discover that everyone has a project—a project they for mysterious reasons think to be just as much the center of the universe as your own. As such, when people are networking, the polite thing is, of course, to hear the other person out and learn about their project and do a lot of nodding. Oftentimes though, the problem is that both parties are secretly trying to recruit the other for their own project. It’s kind of playing rock paper scissors, but without the paper and scissors.

Most people don’t have a lot of money and contacts when they’re just starting out. Initially, all you have is this amazing idea and a determination to convince others that your project is so exceptional and such a good opportunity for them that they should come work with you. For free. And that they should do most of the boring work, since you came up with the idea and thus are too special to do all the mundane things that are necessary to get the project off the ground. After all, you are more of a thinker and a strategist. Others would be more suitable for all the practical errands. In fact, it would be quite a waste of your unique talent if you were to spend your valuable time on such matters…

However, so is everyone else also thinking. And nothing ever gets done. Apart from words, all the best words, and lots of coffee dates and zoom meetings.

The thing is, many, if not most, end up in this gridlock situation because they expect people to follow, but without giving people any reason to do so. We delude ourselves into believing that we’re so special, and that our project is so brilliant, that others should just count themselves lucky that they get to work with us on this. But there’s nothing special about coming up with a good idea. What’s special is the ability to execute. Every successful entrepreneur knows this.

If you want people to join you, don’t be afraid of hard and dirty work. And certainly don’t fool yourself into believing you’re above doing humdrum tasks. In the real world, those who’ve become kings and queens are the ones who did a lot hard and boring work to begin with.

Boring work equals getting things started equals power equals money. And then you don’t have to beg people to join you, you can just pay them.

The way to avoid the Mutual Recruitment trap is to have already performed much of the work necessary for your idea to become a successfully executed project. When you’ve done that, when people can see your idea has materialized, they become much more inclined to join—not least if they don’t have to work for free or if revenue is just around the corner.

By the way, here’s a colorful example of true leadership, of how you get people to follow and create a movement. (Pssst, the secret point here is that maybe, just maybe, you should lead by following someone else, and through that create the change that matters.)

3. The BS Trap of “Out-platforming” each other:

Ever since the rise of Amazon, Facebook and all the other internet giants, it has become clear that if you control the platform everyone is using you’ll become extremely successful. This doesn’t only apply to the evil enterprise of selling stuff online and making people addicted to cute cat videos, but also to the business of saving the world: If you come up with the next big open source decentralized autonomous block chain web3 thing—that everyone is going to use to tear down capitalism, the patriarchy and racism, and in extension saving the whales and the rainforest—a great share of the fame and glory goes to you. The same is the case if you become the founder of the forum, community or umbrella organization everyone wants to be part of. (Just to be clear, before we move on, that when I talk about platforms I don’t refer to online applications only.)

The beauty of creating a successful platform is that the labor you put into building it will be amplified manifold by the people who’re using it. As such, if you’re the kind of person who wants to make as big an impact in the world as possible, it’s natural to be attracted to working on such projects. (Platform ideas are also particularly common among metamodernists since they tend to be highly complex thinkers, always thinking in terms of meta this and meta that. Hence, the world of metamodern hipsters, hippies and hackers is littered with people having brilliant ideas for new platforms.)

The only problem about this is that everyone else in these circles is also having an idea for a new platform. And those who don’t, often don’t understand what you’re talking about.

Often, the only people who understand your platform idea, are the people with a platform idea themselves. The mutual recruitment meetings thus gets spiked with a further gridlock dynamic of people trying to “out-platform” each other: “that’s a great idea, how about you make that part of my platform—that’s a great thanks, but how about your platform becomes part of my platform…”

I reckon I don’t need to explain why this leads to a lot of wasted time and energy.

One of the main problems with people’s platform ideas is that they want to create an “empty” platform. An empty platform is one devoid of already existing contents. It’s just the tool itself— with the addition of an idea about who’s going to use it and for what. (One of the problems about that is that it’s very hard to plan who’s going to use it and how they’re going to use. Remember, YouTube was initially a dating app until its userbase started using it for other things entirely.)

A particularly tempting part of platforming everyone else is how humble you can be about it. Or rather, how humble you can tell yourself that you are and try to convince others that you are: The good thing about me is that I don’t get off on power; I don’t even really have my own vision or project; I just hold space for everyone else and empower them; so I should get all the power because I’m by far the most deserving. Really, I don’t want to decide anything at all, so I have next to no vision or ideas or contents, and I’ll be sure to tell everyone with a vision that’s the case, so that they join my platform, given my thing is the bigger vehicle their thing fits within.

… And then there’s this annoying thing that other rude people try to out-humble you and getting you to be part of THEIR platforms. How dare they! Best make yours even more devoid of all meaning.

A typical empty platform idea is when you come up with the thought that it would be amazing if all these wonderful contents producers you know about, and who are somewhat related, came together into a greater weave where cross pollination and deeper collaboration could occur. You see this wonderful forum where all those busy people whose work you admire get connected in productive ways leading to change that otherwise wouldn’t be possible—all while you, the platform creator, sits on top pulling the strings and enjoy the powerful output of your creation. *Muhahaha (in a benign way)*

There are a few problems with this:

1. People are very well capable of connecting with others without a specific platform. You just need to google people, drop them a message and make a zoom appointment.
2. People end up wasting a lot of time; not only on fiddling around with just another platform, but also on being connected with people they might have things in common with, but do not have much use of just because of that. (It’s a common mistake to believe that just because people have things in common they’d automatically get a lot out of meeting each other).
3. People don’t like wasting time. So they don’t use your platform.
4. Your platform has no contents. So people don’t use your platform.

“Empty” platforms tend to fail. The platforms that succeed often have some contents, some idea beyond “wouldn’t it be great if all these people came together”. And many successful platforms do not even start out as platforms from the get go.

From my own network I can mention two platforms that have turned out to become fairly successful: Psychedelic Society and Rebel Wisdom. Psychedelic Society is a particular good example of a platform that didn’t even start out with the intention of being a platform. Or at least not the kind of platform it has become. Initially, Psychedelic Society was intended as an association to help decriminalizing psychedelics and to inform the public about responsible and therapeutic use thereof. Today, as you can see on their website, its mission extends far beyond that and the events hosted by the organization contains topics that are only vaguely related to Psychedelics. My friend and colleague Emil Ejner Friis from Metamoderna, for instance, has done courses about metamodernism on their online event platform — a platform that has become the go-to place for progressives interested in personal development and societal transformation.

The trick is to find that niche which isn’t already covered. Psychedelic Society did that with Psychedelics, Rebel Wisdom with men’s circles and Jordan Peterson stuff. Only from there did they became platforms for more broader issues. It’s also worth to mention that both of these platforms sprung out of already existing networks (meaning that they started out with contents).

Finding that niche, and succeeding, is difficult. Without it, it’s close to impossible.

Hence, if you want to create a platform, don’t. But if you still want to do it, it’s important you have something to offer people from the beginning. The wouldn’t-it-be-great-if-all-these-people-came-together idea—which I see people coming up with again and again—is for the most part doomed to failure.

—

Often, people fall into all three BS traps simultaneously: endless hours spent on empty networking, unsuccessfully trying to recruit others for this platform idea of theirs, which they expect others to build for them (now that they were so kind to come up with the idea)—all while the people they are meeting with are trying to do exactly the same. All the best intentions remain just that: intentions.

Well, and let’s be realistic: Even with good intentions, we can sometimes lie to ourselves. Maybe we’re not actually saving the world, but seducing ourselves into thinking that we are while in reality just talking to other people about talking to other people about talking to other people.

My advise is:

1. Try to be more selective and strategic when it comes to networking, especially when you’ve established yourself more firmly.
2. And if you’re an extrovert, meaning you’re a person who gets emotional energy from meeting new people, try to develop a higher self-awareness about whether you’re misleading yourself into believing that amazing things are happening from meeting all these people—but in reality, it just feels good to socialize and getting recognition.
3. Don’t delude yourself into believing you’re too special to do hard boring work. Just get to work and don’t waste time trying to make others work for you for free.
4. Pay people to do hard boring work. And show the respect for their efforts.
5. Don’t make an empty platform.
6. And if you do, don’t try to out-platform all your friends.

With these final words I wish you Godspeed on your journey. Deep down you know you’re a very special person with a great gift to the world.

Just don’t create another platform for empty networking. Please, don’t do it.

—

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 Facebook, Twitter, and Medium, and you can speed up the process of new metamodern content reaching the world by making a donation to Hanzi here.

133 Holocausts per Year

We all know that tormenting a cat or a dog is a pretty bad thing. Indeed, we regard it as criminal, highly immoral, and certainly as picking on someone weaker than ourselves. There’s little doubt for anybody who’s known an animals that they have real sensations, real discomfort, and—in a meaningful sense—feelings. Darwin studied this in considerable detail already in the 1860–70s.

Now, still, maybe it’s even worse to torment a little kid or an old lady than being cruel to a cat? Who knows at the end of the day? Let’s say then, to remain on the safe side of the argument (so we don’t make ourselves any kinder than we really have to!) that tormenting two little dogs and killing them is about as bad as whacking an old lady.

Nah, still don’t feel quite safe. Maybe we’re still giving the dogs too much slack. Make it three dogs.

Hmm. No. The suffering of one HUMAN BEING must surely be worth more than three pesky mongrels, no? Make it five.

Ten. Let’s say I torment and kill ten dogs, slowly, one by one. Is that about as bad as whacking that old lady?

Still doesn’t feel right. How about a hundred dogs? And a few cats crushed under car wheels for good measure.

No, no—let’s be serious about this. Let’s take one thousand dogs, each of which has a family of people and others who care about them, lock ’em up, starve them, make them work hard, humiliate them, and then gas them to death. Let’s make that count as the life of ONE human person.

Admittedly, this is a pretty speciesist and supremacist position. We cannot exactly account for why one of us humans should be worth literally a thousand dogs. But let’s just go with it, as we all have a strong feeling that a human life is something so much more than the life of a non-human animal. Maybe even a thousand ones. Most of all—let’s just remain really on the safe side that we shouldn’t be any kinder to animals than we absolutely have to by a bare minimum of decency and ethics. A bare minimum. We don’t want to overburden ourselves, do we? We need to be kind to ourselves, not too harsh, when it comes to how kind we should be to others, right?

So, a thousand it is. I, Hanzi Freinacht, hereby proclaim that I am literally worth one thousand (1,000) of those dirty mongrels. I am human. Let my supremacy be known.

Now, this leaves us with a multiplier of 1000 when it comes to comparing crimes against humanity to crimes against “non-humanity” of animals roughly comparable to dogs (we don’t know how sentient different animals are, but we can gauge their intelligence to be above that of human babies or toddlers).

Let us then consider how many land animals the global market “produces” per year—i.e., basically keeps in death camps—to the scale of the worst crime against humanity that we can think of: the Holocaust.

[Note before we go on: Far-right apologists and Nazis have long used the trick of comparing human suffering to animal suffering while granting greater rights to the latter as a way of relativizing the plights of targeted ethnicities, who in turn are then compared to animals. The gap is thereby narrowed from both sides and atrocities become less unthinkable. I will have no such accusations cast against me for the comparison below: I am doing the exact opposite, namely using the profound seriousness of human suffering as a starting point for expanding our circle of care to other beings. The crooks are whoever become the apologists for crimes, not the ones who seek to prevent crimes from being committed.]

Over the course of this event, the Nazis imprisoned, tormented, and killed about 6 million people over a period of five years (1941–45), so about 1.2 million per year on average (6/5 is 1.2). Or that is the relevant figure for what is usually referred to as Holocaust—the number of people killed under similar murder campaigns in Nazi Germany is around 12 million. But for the word “Holocaust” itself, 1.2 million per year is roughly correct.

Our global non-human animal industry subjects about 60 billion land animals to a comparable fate per year. Now, let us remember that these are “just animals” right? So let’s apply the 1000 multiplier. They’re just worth a thousandth of one of us!

That lands us, with this conservative estimate of the worth of non-human animal life, at 60 million. Per year. Not over five years.

Divide 60m by 1.2m to see how this compares to the Holocaust’s yearly effects— and you get a rather grim number: 50.

Our current global consumption of land animals causes: Fifty (50) ongoing Holocausts per year.

The animal industry is not, of course, 50 times worse than the Holocaust. That would be a great under-estimation of the severity of our crimes against non-humanity.

We must not forget that the Holocaust lasted only 5 years, whereas our animal megacide goes on year after year, decade after decade, and does not exhaust its killing fields.

Oh, and that’s just the land animals. Aquatic animals account for an estimated over 1 trillion kills yearly (many of which are cruel and slow deaths). Yes, that involves a lot of fish, so let’s give ourselves a yet higher ethical premium: 10,000 non-human aquatic animals for just me!

So, if you divide one trillion by 10,000 (including a few seal cubs and dolphins for good measure, death to them!) you get… 100 million.

100 million plus 60 million, divided by 1.2… produces…

133 Holocausts per year. Every year. And still growing.

This is if, and only if, I am worth one thousand dogs or cats or chickens or cows or pigs—or ten thousand sea and water animals of various sorts.

Phew, okay. Why am I saying this? It’s not really news to anyone, is it? It’s just to set the premise for what follows: This issue matters a lot. It’s well known that we all become less empathic, not more, when faced with large numbers. But as you may have noticed, I am not speaking to your feelings so much right now, but just to common sense, just to plain reason. It’s just weird to deny that this is a thing.

Even if you don’t care about animals and only have a shrugging “well, we shouldn’t be unnecessarily cruel…” then you can hardly write the issue off as insignificant. It still matters.

It’s not about your damned personal choice to eat what you feel like. It’s not about puritanism or scoring cheap moral shots. It’s not about crazy people on YouTube feeding their babies grass smoothies and sporting toothless smiles. It’s not about shame or guilt. It’s not about feeling hopeless or depressed.

It’s about, with a very conservative estimate, 133 Holocausts per year. Every year. Decades on end. And growing. So don’t make it about yourself.

133 Holocausts per year—and that’s when I also used excessively conservative estimates of the number of animals killed. On what planet, in what barbaric dark age, is this considered to be okay and entirely normal?

Answer: On planet Earth, right about this minute.

Breathe it in. The numbers don’t land in our minds, they cannot. But we can all understand the concept of a staggering moral mountain to climb: a heroic struggle against what is just not right.

And that’s just factory farming plus industrialized fishing. Neither are all of the other animal-oppressive things I didn’t bring up morally okay: lab torture, exploitative pet industries, entertainment slavery, destroyed habitats, noise and chemical pollution, plastics in bellies, pouring boiling water in the sewers to mass-murder squirrels (no, rats actually, but they’re quite alike)…

So we have to stop doing it. Because it is something we are actively doing. Thus we, ultimately, have the power to change it. It’s not easy, and not without its dilemmas, but no, all of that suffering is not necessary and justifiable. Maybe some of it is necessary for human dignity and survival—by all means, let’s go through things ethically one by one and let the apologists of murder make their cases. Maybe some torments and murders of animals are justifiable? No doubt. But all of it? At this scale? It seems unlikely, to put it mildly.

Given the above, it is no exaggeration to claim that ending this quiet massacre of creatures weaker than ourselves is a matter of a fundamental and civilizational quality—on par with such issues as preventing world wars, nuclear annihilation, and global ecological disaster.

The reasons that it has so little salience and support are manifold, but a large part of it spells speciesism: the unwarranted and unjustified belief in human moral supremacy. We’re worth more. Why, we’re not sure, exactly—but it has something to do with having individuality, personality, writing symphonies, and going to the moon. Somehow, our cute personality quirks and symphonies written by someone else 300 years ago and moon landings justify massacre after massacre of the helpless.

Any Utopia or Protopia or future worth striving for must be one that reverses this trend and begins to dramatically decrease the number of “Holocausts per year”. Perhaps it cannot become zero, but every damned Holocaust counts, and if we can prevent just one Holocaust per year, we will—in terms of heroic feats and ethical impact—have stopped Hitler. Reduce a few more and we will have prevented the equivalent of the Second World War. Or, if you actually consider other animals somewhat more equal to ourselves in terms of worth and suffering (and consider the fact that this is not just five years), you will have stopped hundreds of Hitlers “only” by reducing the number of Holocausts per year from 133 to 132.

[Note: Not calling non-vegans Hitler by the way; just saying that stopping Hitler equals stopping the Holocaust, so if we stop many Holocausts we will, in terms of ethical significance, have stopped many Hitlers.]

How about we just get our shit together and do that? I’m not asking much: not to save all animals for all eternity from all suffering, but just stop a few hundred Hitlers? Seems worthwhile, doesn’t it?

Or if this is not worthwhile—what have I missed? How is stopping a crime magnitudes greater than the Holocaust not relevant?

We all wish to save our civilization from ecological disasters and existential risks. But we also owe it to ourselves to make our global civilization into something we can be genuinely proud of, something that doesn’t have a dark underbelly we’re hiding from ourselves. Our civilization could be much more worth saving if it treated its weakest members better—for, yes, non-human animals are inescapably also parts of human societies.

Sometimes people say that concern for animals is underscored by a morbid fascination with the downfall of civilization and a hatred for humanity itself. I guess it can be. However, there is no necessity in it. To love something is also to wish it to be its best version; to respect it means to not look the other way when faced with its vices and mistakes. We should love our kids enough not to let them commit criminal or cruel acts. We should love ourselves and our planetary community of societies enough to not let them partake in new Holocausts.

Or to put it in pithier terms: Not all animals resemble children, but they share in that they are all in inferior positions of power and in that none of them wish to suffer. When the newly adopted homeless cat looks back at me with a gaze strikingly similar to that of my baby daughter, both pairs of eyes asking a being infinitely more powerful than themselves: Will you be kind to me? …there is only one answer that the heart can give: “To the best of my limited ability, yes, I will be kind.” If I looked at a being infinitely more powerful than myself to ask the same question, I know that’s the answer I’d be hoping for. How about you?

Okay, so with that intention set, what is an effective metamodernist version of Animal Rights or anti-speciesist thinking and strategy?

What to Bring from Postmodern Animal Rights

The Animal Rights movement will never achieve its goals unless it becomes metamodern—as long as it is stuck in postmodern moralizing, it cannot be truly effective. Like the environmentalist movement, the Animal Rights movement has largely been a failure, despite all the ethical and most of the practical argument going for it.

That being said, most of the Animal Rights insights and ethics are perfectly available to the postmodern mind, so let us first take stock of what to bring with us—and then turn to how we may restructure an update of this to a metamodernist version of Animal Rights advocacy and activism.

I say “Animal Rights” and not Animal Welfare because only one of the two is actually an emancipatory movement. The former seeks to end animal slavery and confer appropriate and sensible rights upon non-human animals, the latter seeks to lessen the harms and suffering of owned and bred-to-be-killed animals. It stands to reason that as long as people own non-human animals as slaves and kill them for profit, Animal Welfare reforms will always be countered by pressures for increased economic efficiency. We currently have more Animal Welfare laws than ever before, and these neatly co-exist with greater animal suffering, exploitation, and extinction than anything the world has ever seen. Capitalism is a bitch, at least if it includes slavery and killing for profit. You can’t change that by smoothening its edges: it’s still a hard rock to chew. Today, we remember the abolitionists of slavery, the people who said slavery isn’t okay, period. We don’t celebrate the slavery apologists who said that it’s okay to own people of certain races (or of little means), if you only whip them a little less—for the sake of their “welfare”. Not heroic, sorry.

Animal welfare is, then, largely a distraction—and possibly a harmful one. It provides all of the euphemisms and excuses for mass murder. The pigs LIKE being gassed to death. Or at least they really don’t mind. They had rich lives in their concrete prisons, and then one day they just quietly went to heaven—not entirely unlike the Nacht und Nebel policy, where creatures simply disappear very conveniently.

Animal Rights is the striving to confer reasonable and justifiable rights upon non-human animals. It says plainly what is obviously true: Owning and killing a fellow sentient being for profit is bad, so don’t do it.

That’s the main distinction that we bring from the postmodern Animal Rights movements: a wholesale rejection of Animal Welfare and an uncompromising embrace of Animal Rights—or anti-speciesism.

Other than that, we may bring the following along on our journey:

• The Abolitionist positionchampioned by philosopher Gary Francione which simply holds that animal slavery must, can, and shall be abolished without compromise. This position equally rejects “piecemeal protests” (being against certain furs, but having no problems with milk slavery, etc.). It also rejects the majority of mainstream animal advocacy organizations (like PETA), as these rely upon donations from the public, and most donors themselves benefit from animal slavery (not being vegan, etc.), and thus these organizations are always short of breath when it’s their turn to speak truth to power.
• The view of anti-speciesismas a vector of struggles for structural justice: anti-racism, anti-sexism, anti-ageism, and so forth. Feminist scholar Corey Lee Wrenn speaks to this, also emphasizing the overlap between capitalist economies (not that state communism proved better!) and the growth of animal slavery. These categories interact, of course, so you’ll find that people with lower status are implicitly (or not) thought to be closer to animals, while animals suffer from our ideas about gender and race (cows versus bulls, white dogs versus black dogs, and so on, there’s a lot of research on this). In the social sciences, critical animal studies has recently ballooned.
• The view that majority society isenthralled by the ideology of the dominant group, humans over animals, called speciesism or carnism, and that this distorts views of the oppression of animals—for instance, people have a hard time criticizing slaughterhouses while they’re still invested in feelings about wanting to eat animal products. Psychologist Melanie Joy has described this and shown it in studies.
• Friendly and pragmatic veganism—leading by example and opening pathways for living with less animal suffering, not being aggressive or an asshole, not being woo-woo, staying healthy, enjoying food and life generally. In cases when you fail to make the transition for various reasons (health, etc.), don’t try to pretend that veganism would not be better ethically speaking—hence still showing solidarity with people of a vegan lifestyle. Spreading information about such ways of life and addressing health concerns could unlock great potential when it comes to making people more open to supporting the end of animal slavery.
• Citizen journalism and research on animal mistreatment. Guess what? People will hide and lie about how animals in factory farms fare. Continuous documentation is important.
• Knowledge work on anthropocentrism—research on animal behaviors, intelligence, relations, sentience, and how people’s reasoning is convoluted around animal ethics topics. Even research on animals and their behavior is again and again shown to be steered by the assumptions of “man as the measure” and of human interests and supremacy. Eva Meijer’s overviews are great here. In popularizing such sentiments and common sense, documentaries about the lives and intelligent and emotionally complex behaviors of animals may arguably play a role.
• Differentiate Animal Rights from ecologism—being “green” does not in and of itself by any measure make you kinder to animals. By far the most ecologists hold as violent and oppressive views towards animals as mainstream society, if not more so, as it is romanticized as “part of the circle of life” and so on. Hence, support Animal Rights causes and work against all movements that would have us torment and exploit animals under more romantic and purportedly sustainable ways.
• Support peaceful and reasoned protests only. To protect life, one may put oneself above the law and enact civil disobedience, but this must be done in manners that do not cause violence or direct harm or danger to anyone. Otherwise, others will not be able to know if you are driven by compassion or by excuses for the pleasures of aggression. Letting out animals who then die in the near woods or as roadkill or become invasive species is not optimal.

The moral awakening to Animal Rights is perhaps the most powerful gateway into a truly postmodern consciousness. This is because it highlights the key postmodern insights in such salient relief: how power shapes knowledge and values, how norms shape personal morality, how utterly limited we all are in our perspectives, how extremely socially dependent we are to think even the slightest unique thoughts, how our minds are always fooling us with self-soothing and self-embellishing propaganda, how whole worlds can be built on top of the suffering of the voiceless and the invisible, how violence is structural and not personal, how a good person can be a part of an evil whole, how the world is always beyond good and evil in its sheer absurdity… and so on. People “woke” to postmodern consciousness will know what I mean when I trace these contours.

But again, my claim is that Animal Rights simply cannot succeed while emanating from this mode of consciousness. For victory over the institution of animal slavery, for ceasing the multiple Holocausts, a metamodern update on Animal Rights is necessary.

Meet The Metamodern Animals Rights Advocate

Now, with these insights, let us turn to the marriage of Animal Rights and the metamodernist mindset.

Unfortunately, very few metamodernists are Animal Rights defenders and very few Animal Rights defenders are metamodernists. The reason for this is fairly simple: metamodernism really doesn’t add or detract much to the morality of postmodern consciousness. Postmodernists emerge as a subsection of modern society, and metamodernists in turn emerge as a subsection of postmodern communities—metamodernists roughly have the same ethics as pomos; they just have different practices.

If we refresh our memories of the stages of cultural development (in my own version of them here and here), they follow a pattern where every other stage is more of a moral awakening, a critique of the former, and the rest are practical advances. Modernity was itself such a practical advance. As is metamodernism. Here’s the whole sequence:

• Animism (the role of which in contemporary society is discussed in an earlier post)
• Faustianism (involves a revolution of economic capacity, agricultural civilization, not morality)
• Postfaustianism (a moral revolution against Faustianism’s “might makes right” ethos, including the Perennial Age religions)
• Modernism (follows through on the promises made by Postfaustian critique—such as equality—but adds little moral content)
• Postmodernism (critiques all the dead-ends and inherent self-contradictions of Modernity)
• Metamodernism (delivers on the ethical awareness of Postmodernity, but adds little moral content).

Metamodern consciousness is not in and of itself that much of a moral awakening vis-à-vis postmodernism, but rather a practically oriented operationalization of the ethics of postmodernity. It emphasizes not new ends but new means: inner growth rather than economic growth, perspective-taking rather than moralism, reconstruction rather than deconstruction, and so on—but it does so as for the sake of achieving roughly the same ends as postmodernism: a more humane society, a more empathic civilization, the end of racism, greater equality, ecological resilience and a reconciliation with nature, cured alienation and improved mental health, less materialism and consumerism, greater gender freedom and equality… And, of course, the end of animal slavery.

As such, you might say that metamodernists are somewhat more cold-hearted and practically applied versions of postmodernists—just as the democratic reformers of modernity were more practical versions of Christian beliefs in the equality of all souls and the conviction that violence is wrong. Metamodernists emerge from internet society and thus see new pathways for action that were not open to the postmodern consciousness which largely came online with the counter culture movements of the 20th century. As such, metamodernists can often be somewhat less morally concerned than the postmodernists. Hence, ironically, they are less often truly faithful climate activists or vegans—just like mainstream modernists are less likely than religious postfaustians to give money to the poor or refuse military service.

Nevertheless, I hold, it is precisely the metamodernists who have the most potential to end animal slavery.

If you look at the psychologies and values of people, these will also tend to align according to one of the abovementioned six cultural stages. But on this personal or individual level, we call them “effective value memes” (as discussed in my book, The Listening Society). Even while living in societies that are “modern” like those of today, people can express and live by values that correspond to any of the six stages, although “modernists” will be the most common ones.

In terms of the effective value memes of vegans (not, then, Animal Rights advocates in the strict sense, just anyone who wishes to not harm animals and identifies with a vegan lifestyle), you will find that, although vegans exist across the board, they are overrepresented in two of the value memes: Animist and Postmodern. I don’t have the data to prove it, but I think a brief observation of vegan communities around the world will corroborate my claim:

• Animists: Vegans somewhat over-represented: “Animals are our friends, we can learn from them, etc.” Disney-ish and anthropomorphic reasons for animal care (i.e., seeing animals more as people, spirits, etc.). Keep in mind that I am here referring to non-indigenous animists (i.e. people living in modern societies who gravitate towards the animist value meme nonetheless), not indigenous populations who often need to sustain themselves from hunting and fishing.
• Faustianists: Almost no vegans (but a few Nazis may be vegans, see Wandervogel, etc.).
• Postfaustianism: Almost only Buddhist and Jain vegans, otherwise not really.
• Modernists (mainstream people in liberal democracies): Very few vegans, but still some extreme libertarians or posh lifestyle ones.
• Postmodernists: Lots of vegans, but of two distinct types: 1) “light” pomos are more likely to be of the new agey and puritan kind, sometimes collapsing back to Animist values, and 2) “dark” pomos, i.e. intellectual types who see structures, capitalism, power relations, language structures, etc. of animal oppression.
• Metamodernists: More vegans than among modernists, but somewhat fewer than among pomos (note, though, that metamodernists are by themselves rare, and thus there are very few metamodernist vegans).

Now, the first thing to note is that a “vegan” is not one thing. Critically minded dark pomo intellectual vegans have very little to do with the grass smoothie YouTuber cults who link veganism to magical powers and spiritual attainment while their health is deteriorating (but, of course, the defenders of animal slavery of mainstream society do love these own-goal videos!).

The metamodernist Animal Rights advocate is most often (but not always) a vegan, albeit of a non-judgmental kind—a kind of synthesis between the light pomos and the dark ones: aware of the importance of rationality and critical awareness and learning about animal suffering, factory farming, and so on, yes, while still seeing how inner transformations, the arduous practice of compassion, and meditating on the suffering of others can also fuel and guide animal advocacy.

And, as importantly, the metamodernist animal advocate sees that all of the above (vegans of all value memes) may be aligned for similar causes, but that they are indeed very different, and that different social logics pertain to each of them. It thus encourages veganism across the board (moderns for status, health, and lifestyle reasons, etc.) and defends veganism both against hostile attacks from the defenders of animal slavery and from the excesses and stupidities of magical thinking and puritanism. The metamodern mind weaves all of the former value memes together into one multi-dimensional vegan movement and steers it towards its goal: the shortest possible route to the abolition of animal slavery.

Metamodern animal advocacy cares somewhat less if John or Jane specifically becomes vegan, because the metamodern mind perceives a richer field of potentials: Yes, every consequential vegan matters (much more so than two or even ten 50%-less-often carnivores, as the vegan reshapes norms, discourses, expectations, consumer market demand, family networks, and so on to a much greater extent). But it is also the case that you can always contribute to the abolition of animal slavery across at least four different dimensions which I’m going to present in the following.

The Four Pillars of Metamodern Animal Rights

Okay, so I’ll simply use an old go-to for holistic thinking: the four quadrants of Ken Wilber’s integral theory—I just did something similar for environmentalism.

The “four quadrants” are: 1. inner experience, 2. concrete behavior, 3. culture, and 4. systems change.

The point here is that Animals Rights advocacy, with a metamodernist perspective, at a minimum should live up to this holistic view: working across and coordinating between all of the four quadrants. To date, no Animal Rights movement that I’m aware of fully lives up to this standard.

Pillar 1: Transform inner experience

This pillar involves the recognition that society will never end animal slavery unless more people develop—by themselves, spontaneously and from their own free will—postmodern and metamodern sensibilities and values. You can push for norms (so that exploiting animals would be shameful, illegal, etc.) but people will always become reactionaries against those norms unless their inner moral compasses align with them. Try to “force” political correctness on a population and a Donald Trump will explode in your face. Same here with Animal Rights.

Fundamentally, most of us really, genuinely just don’t feel it. Most animal advocates even don’t feel it deeply and in manners that are sanguinely compassionate rather than full of draining guilt and pity.

So, inner transformation entails:

• Compassion meditation (and the spread of it throughout society).
• The resolution of inner traumas and issues, so that we become less defensive and more open to challenging our own moral precepts.
• Perspective-taking in connecting to members of other species (and, to some degree, to nature), i.e. seeing the “faces” of animals, not just their anonymous snouts. Cultivate interspecies relationships and communication. Open up to new ways of seeing and understanding the world from the eyes of a seemingly foreign being: other colors, other lived and felt environments.
• Perspective-taking in terms of people of different backgrounds and effective value memes: maybe there’s a good reason your 98 years old granny doesn’t see the point with animal right? Or that indigenous pastoral cultures can’t see the vegan light? Or just that mainstream modern people “don’t quite feel it”?
• Training in self-forgiveness and acceptance, so that we have the fortitude to accept the moral responsibility of our civilization.
• The general enrichment of human life in manners that support inner growth into higher value memes.
• The dealing with feelings of hunger, fear of never being satiated, of feelings of imagined dissatisfaction or “thinness” associated with not consuming animal products.
• The improvement of cognitive processes, so that one can more easily make a decision (be vegan, or similar) and stick to it: busting our tendencies to fool ourselves (“I’ll just make a little exception, then it becomes much easier”—but of course being vegan is super easy to consequential vegans only, who just never have to make a decision about it, any more than deciding to sleep every night, brushing teeth, etc.).

As you can see, none of these points involve brainwashing anyone to becoming vegan or supporting the abolishment of animal slavery. It is just the case that moral growth comes from good conditions, and it begins from the inner depths of each of us.

In other words, gearing society for inner transformation, and working on our own inner qualities leads to a much more fertile soil for Animal Rights.

Pillar 2: Concrete behaviors

This one is fairly obvious: Some behaviors lead to little kittens being tormented and seals clubbed, others don’t.

• Vegan lifestyle (not just what you eat, also what you wear, such as leather, entertainment, such as circus animals, etc.)
• Take good care of yourself and stay on the side of reason and health, so you’re leading by example.
• Raise vegan families. 🙂
• Create vegan collectives, businesses, and restaurants.
• Work to create options at schools, restaurants, etc. and generally work for expanding societal acceptance and support.
• Invest in Animal Rights friendly companies and technologies.
• Give to Animal Rights causes.
• Learn manners to reply in social games when people question or mock the suffering of animals (“It’s a free choice.”—“Not of the pig, it isn’t.” etc.)
• Join and create Animal Rights advocacy movements and organizations.
• Help animal shelters.
• Guide intellectual and creative parts of your life towards integrating an Animal Rights perspective.
• Read the best theorists (Gary Francione, Melanie Joy, Corey Lee Wrenn, etc.)
• Announce your values when not inappropriate and in all other regards act normal and be a citizen and contributor that people have reasons to respect and like.
• Avoid all judgment and snobbishness: Just stand up for yourself as a person who will not stand for animal slavery.

Pillar 3: Cultural shifts

And then, of course, there can be no end to slavery unless cultures around the world change. Let’s take a look at what enacting such change can entail:

• The imaginative re-appropriation of food and consumption traditions linked to animal exploitation: Maybe the same essence or mood or quality can be achieved without animals being used? Christmas without meat? The Poles were already doing it: Their Catholic Christmas is almost vegetarian by tradition (not vegan!). My own Christmas is vegan, and it’s the season to be jolly.
• The linking of anti-speciesism to a wider network of social justice and intersectionality: to show and insist that even anti-racism and anti-sexism and postcolonialism are simply incomplete without anti-speciesism. In the same family of issues: to link the abolition of slavery as the natural heir to the abolition of human slavery in the 19th century.
• To challenge anthropocentrism in research, education, and media narratives—from research questions, to faults in thinking that arise from anthropocentric biases, to research methods and cruel experiments, to how animal suffering is spoken of and euphemized or routinely discarded, to creating philosophies that simply do not have anthropocentrism as a starting point (but rather center on things like the cosmos itself, existence, sentience, emergence, or interaction).
• Challenge infantilizing conceptions of animals. Non-human animals don’t have the exact same skills as humans, and they are in a less powerful position than humans in today’s world, but they are nonetheless competent and intelligent in ways that we are not: chimps have better working memory, hummingbirds can navigate the jungle better, and so on.
• To raise the sense of relevance, status, and “coolness” of going beyond anthropocentric worldviews and biases by creating or curating art with post-anthropocentric themes, or otherwise to develop vegan or Animal Rights conducive aesthetics that impress and shape public imagination in a manner that links Animal Rights to desirable and tasteful expressions of fashion, style, music, film, sports, and so on.
• To honor role models and public figures who stand up for Animal Rights.
• Work in all ways to normalize veganism and Animal Rights and facilitate the symbolic victories of their proponents whenever they are challenged, so that the norm systems sway in favor of veganism. Push the Overton window towards the normalcy and frequency of conversations about Animal Rights.
• Work to make visible and clear the ideology of carnism, how consuming animals is linked to conceptions of masculinity, and offer other role models for masculine identity formation.
• Challenge habitual derogative comments about “fanatic” and “extreme” Animal Rights activists and insist that animal advocacy is normal, reasonable, and respectable, so that it becomes more difficult for people to maintain a strawman version of what Animal Rights entails, hence making it easier for animal advocates everywhere to speak their minds.
• Make friends with other Animal Rights advocates and remain friends with others: be a good example to the latter.
• While “single issue” protests may not be beneficial, it is much easier to garner public support for the closing of slaughterhouses than for the banning of products of animals slavery—both things are similar, but one implicates more people (the consumers) and the other does not. The support for closing slaughterhouses is generally very widespread. So work on such gateway issues but balance them against getting stuck in the swamp of single issues (“don’t club seal cubs, but go ahead and choke piglets!”).
• Spread a rich vegan cuisine everywhere you go. Shoot at taste buds and invite changing habits.
• Cultivate positive identities for farmers and producers who make the transition from animal slavery (not blaming them!).
• Challenge and expose so-called meat nationalism: “Oh sure, those pesky French treat animals with no respect, but we Swedes… In fact, the more Swedish meat I buy, the better for the animals. The more I pay people to kill Swedish pigs and cows, the better a friend I am to animals…” The truth is, of course, that all industrial farming is an ethical abomination.
• Link animal liberation to the responsibilities of industrial civilization, not to the practices of tribal communities, fishers, and pastoral nomads—and do not let the existence of such communities be an excuse for the crimes of industrial civilization.

Basically, today’s culture is against human slavery but not against animal slavery. Tomorrow’s culture could, God willingly, be against the latter as well.

Pillar 4: Change the system

The last pillar has to do with changing the systems we live by—and these systems will have their own logics and incentives which shape our behaviors, values, and cultures. Today, factory farming and other expressions of animal slavery are part and parcel of our global economic systems. If one person goes vegan and thereby reduces demand for meat and dairy somewhat, the prices simply fall slightly and new consumer groups make up for the decrease. Even if consciousness of animal suffering increases, the system will still find ways to torment our fellow creatures for as long as it’s profitable.

But despite their tendency for inertia, systems do change from time to time. Human slavery was also ingrained into the global system and key to the economy (slaves from Africa, cotton from Dixieland, fabric from Manchester, and so the wheels of the world turned) but eventually the system shifted.

What systemic shifts are we talking of in this case?

• The abolition of subsidies for animal slavery (the US spends about $52bn on farm subsidies, where livestock and feed accounts for over 50% and fruit and vegetables only for 3%; the EU spends around €30bn on livestock farming—20% of its entire budget).
• Subsidize plant-based alternatives instead, making these available to all.
• Work to make visible and counter the systemic influence of animal slavery lobbyists.
• Create animal-friendly investment funds and grow startup hubs (alternatives to lab animals, lab-grown meat, vegan meat, veg tech, etc.)
• Shifting both the supply and demand-side: more numerous and attractive alternatives to the products of animal slavery and less demand for the latter.
• Providing health information and education from official and credible sources.
• Creating pathways for transitions to plant based models.
• Push for plant-based consumption in public institutions (schools, hospitals, and so forth).
• Link veganism to systemic issues of ecology, climate, health, food security, risks of pandemics (as viruses come from our animal industries, as do antibiotic resistant bacteria).
• Support effective altruist projects (which target helping as many sentient beings as possible).
• Push for progressive legislation of animal rights—notanimal welfare. Close down industries based on slavery, one by one.
• Create official certifications of different competencies (animal behavior and suffering and the ethics of these, wildlife suffering reduction, vegan nutrition, sociology of animal-human relations).
• Invest in research on bioethics, animal consciousness, and Animal Rights.
• Create official science-based standards of the life worlds of different species and their ethical concerns.
• Organize cross-party Animal Rights groups that can counter the interest group propaganda/lobbying of animal slavery industries.
• Envision and model “endgame equilibrium” scenarios—i.e., what would a realistic and humane process towards the end of animal slavery look like, and what would happen with animal slave populations?

The system of animal slavery has deep roots. It’s not “evil” in the sense it’s upheld by malicious intent, but a lot of self-interest does stand between us and animal liberation. Hence, you need to work this system on all the above fronts, transnationally. In the end, the arguments are on the side of Animal Rights.

Conclusion: Joke with the Hydra

Reason and common sense can and will prevail—but only if civilization is not under extreme pressure, possibly regressing to some kind of Mad Max society, under which circumstances we will likely see a drop in the prevailing “effective value memes” of populations and thereby no deepening moral enlightenment.

Metamodern Animal Rights advocates thus do not wish to see the collapse of our civilization. Instead they wish for society to grow peacefully and healthily into a higher awareness of the consequences of human action, and from there on, for animal slavery to be abolished once and for all.

But metamodernists would do well to take up some more of this care for the animals. Yes, the moral significance is unfathomable. But a great challenge, a mountain to surpass, a hydra with a 133 heads like Hitler, can also inspire us. It doesn’t have to leave us hopeless. When we look at this mountain of injustice, we also turn our eyes skyward—aspiring towards our highest potential.

And—as metamodernists are spiritually somewhat different from the righteous rebels of postmodernism—they can also adopt a sincerely ironic stance towards the sheer absurdity of it all. Okay, hydra with 133 heads like Hitler, show me what you’ve got. And like Churchill, we can call out:

We shall go on to the end, we shall fight on the seas and oceans, we shall fight with growing confidence and growing strength in the air, we shall defend our fellow animals, we shall fight in fucking Florida if we have to, whatever the cost may be. We shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender.

Maybe this is a world too dark to comprehend. And yet, here we are, somehow fairly happy much of the time, and somehow aware of the ethical direction we must take, and the route to get there. Somehow, that light at the end of the tunnel lights up the whole path towards a human civilization worth its name.

That moral journey is arguably a powerful fuel for metamodernists around the world—a playful struggle worthy of our blink of a lifetime. The hydra cannot be beaten with grit alone; it must also be met with grace, wit, imagination, and kindness.

Or, as they say, human civilization is a great idea. We should try it.

—

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 Facebook, Twitter, and Medium, and you can speed up the process of new metamodern content reaching the world by making a donation to Hanzi here.

After Deconstruction, Reconstruction Must Follow

Much of my writing focuses on “reconstructing” elements of modern society. For instance, I believe that instead of a welfare state, we should cultivate a so-called listening society—and what Marx and Engels critiqued as “the German ideology” (mainstream, modern, “bourgeois” life) I believe can and should be inverted into what I have only half-jokingly termed the Nordic ideology. This is, I hold, the kind of political thinking and activism that can break out of the ideological bankruptcies and dead-ends of modernity. In a corresponding manner, I have recently suggested that the nation state and the modern legal system can and should be reconstructed.

However, for the reconstruction of modern life to be fully functional and complete, elements of both pre-modern and post-modern thought must also be reconstructed in manners that harmonize with a profound shift of the modern world. That is to say, our deeply shared past must be revisited (pre-modern), and we must find new roles for the many critiques of modern life (post-modern).

• Among thepre-modern elements to be reconstructed, I have suggested an ironically-sincere stance towards religion, towards ethnic/tribal/national identities, and—in last week’s article—towards the animist or tribal elements of culture: our forgotten but ever-present psychological cradle.
• But among the post-modernelements of society to be reconstructed we find such things as: gender theory, critiques of inequality and capitalism, critical sociologies of knowledge (how power relations distort truth seeking and speaking in society) and—of course—ecological thinking and activism.

The metamodern dictum is that after (postmodern) deconstruction, reconstruction must follow. How then can an environmental awareness grow that is congruent with metamodernism, leading to Protopia? How can ecologism itself be reconstructed?

Metamodern Ecologism: The Bare Minimum

I have earlier claimed that political metamodernism, properly understood, is “more sustainable than ecologism” by which I mean to say that the defining “green” thinkers of the 20th century (Arne Næss, Gary Snyder), and the political parties that followed them lacked some key elements necessary to creating a genuinely sustainable society—but that metamodernism has them covered. It is political metamodernism that sees that sustainability (or resilience, or regenerativity) is not possible without huge investments into inner growth, the creation of scientifically driven public institutions, and so forth.

What I have not hitherto addressed is the future of “green” thinking and politics in and of itself. There can be little doubt that green thus far has been a massive failure and disappointment. As the ongoing UN summit in Stockholm reminds us (the 50th anniversary of the UN’s first summit on the topic), very little has changed and precious decades have been lost. All that organizing, all of that protesting, all of that science, all of that scholarship and personal investment, has not turned the tide.

The environmentalist efforts have surely not been for naught, but they have clearly been insufficient—or ineffective. In keeping with the principle of “triple-E” (ecological, equitable, and effective), let us thus ask what a truly effective ecologism might look like.

To begin with, we can simply map out some of the key ecological thinkers and schools of thought on Ken Wilber’s “four quadrants” from his “integral theory”(i.e., if something is subjective, objective, or cultural, or systemic—each gets its own“quadrant”):

Different forms of environmentalist or ecologist thinking/agency mapped onto Ken Wilber’s “four quadrants”.

There is more to such a map than can be discussed here, and the details of it certainly require refinements and revisions. But at the very minimum, it should be noted that a metamodern ecologism can and must be inclusive of the entirety of this map—as has been suggested in the magisterial book, Integral Ecology, by Sean Esbjörn-Hargens and Michael Zimmerman. That is to say, the ecologism of the future must span across:

• Inner transformation and sense of belonging with nature.
• Objective understanding and behavioral change accordingly.
• Cultural shifts away from consumer capitalism.
• Application of “systems perspectives” and redesigning of our flows and feedback cycles throughout the economy.

These four aspects must be viewed as co-emergent and mutually dependent: Changes of how we feel about and relate to the environment (as well as “who we are” in terms of personality and what we desire) naturally drives our willingness to find out about ecological limitations and adjust behaviors—those behaviors must in turn be part of larger systemic shifts, but these larger shifts make little sense to us unless corresponding shifts of our culture occur (norms about environmental care, the status of being “green”, access to deep ecology experiences, etc.). For instance, it has been shown by Christine Wamsler and others that more mindfulness (inner development) tends to lead to more climate change adaptive behaviors (objective change). From there on, it is not difficult to see that systems that guide those same behaviors might either strengthen or weaken them, which might in turn shape culture by changing people’s expectations upon one another…

That much has been stated by “integral ecologists” earlier (the folks who believe that one should include all four of Wilber’s quadrants and that most environmentalist settings do not). And, at a very minimum, I suppose a metamodernist or Protopian ecologism could stop here: If it is holistic and sensitive to exploring how inner transformation, shifting discourses, facts and behaviors, and the systems of economy and ecology arise together, it can and will find more numerous, inter-connected, and ultimately potent ways to become effective—not only in the face of climate change, but across all the major ecological crises and thresholds.

However, I would like to go further than that and sketch the philosophical foundations of an ecologism that could truly break through, that could truly create environmental sustainability.

Metamodern Ecologism: Deluxe Version

The deluxe version of metamodern ecologism needs to approach the question of degrowth—an issue popularized some years ago with Tim Jackson’s Prosperity without Growth. However much we make our ecological footprints more efficient and technologically smooth, it is not within the realm of possibility to sustain a still growing population at the levels of consumption of today. Unless the ecological thinking can realistically lead to degrowth (together with certain efficiency gains, of course), it cannot truly achieve its goals. And for that to happen we must imagine not a form of ecologism that would work if everyone adopted it—in such case we might as well imagine simply that everyone stops consuming over their carrying capacity—but one that will work in that it guides our steps towards degrowth even in a reality when people cannot be made to agree with its precepts.

As my friend the researcher Zack Walsh has often pointed out based on his extensive research into the area (multiple sources, long story), it is viable for the average person to roughly live at the same GDP level as people in the US during the 1960s (but with leaner use of those resources, of course).

Another comrade, the entrepreneur Nick Pinkston, has argued—in personal exchanges—that it makes little sense for the economy to develop “counter to the arrow of entropy”. In other words, we know that the world is always falling apart, “entropy”, but that this falling apart also releases energy which can then be used to create new and more complex structures (life feeds on other life it has broken down, etc.), and this is called negative entropy (so, complexity and level of self-organization increase, ironically as a result of everything falling apart). The terms have more specific and technical meanings depending on the contexts and sciences within which they’re used, but that’s what people generally mean when they’re used in conversations.

And this of course applies to the economy: It’s a system that arises from another, wider system (the ecology), and which creates an excess of disorder or chaos in that same system, sometimes to the point of destroying it. Now this is occurring on a global level.

Now, I believe that both my friends are right: We need degrowth, but degrowth would appear to “work against entropy”. When did humans ever decomplexify their economy, other than with their societies coming apart at the seams? If every person (or just the average person) seeks to make a living and command more resources, how on earth can we thereby create the collective emergent property of decreasing the flow of resources?

Suggestion 1: Exchange Economics for Ecology?

The most popular reply to this conundrum is: exchange economics for ecology! There are many versions of this vision. Satish Kumar, founder of the eco Mecca, Schumacher College, famously argued against the fact that the London School of Economics had no department of ecology. By introducing this wider perspective, we would get an understanding of ecological limits built-into our political economy, no?

Now, appealing as this sounds, it should be pointed out that ecology—as a science—is a considerably harsher one than economics. The word sounds nicer, but a quick comparison of textbooks of the subjects reveal that while, yes, economics focuses significantly on competition, ecology does so to a yet greater extent, and also callously studies bifurcation diagrams of populations (which is a nice way of saying, when most die off in a horrible collapse, before they grow back, and repeat), and it also features words like predators and parasites, which are hardly mentioned in economics.

I mention this to point out that ecology, as a science, seems to support the claim that entropy increases, complexity increases, until one day it breaks and crashes. It’s rather economics, not ecology, that imagines a state of sustainable exchanges and flows.

Ecology, as a science, sounds surprisingly little like ecologism or environmentalism, the “green” political ideology. We could blame this on the evils of detached, mechanistic, Cartesian, Western science, of course. Maybe a true science of ecology would be more generous? If other, softer and more spiritual, perspectives were applied, perhaps other visions of ecological community would come to the fore? It has become a popular trope to claim that Charles Darwin, whose theory of evolution shapes ecology to this day, never really spoke of competition and struggle. For the record, this is manifestly untrue (go ahead and look at Goodreads quotes, enjoy). To complicate things, Darwin was no crude or reductive theorist—he believed in the importance both of cooperation and competition, in interplay with one another. But even if this trope is wrong and based on wishful thinking, what does it matter? Maybe ecology could be a science based more on cooperation and harmony, and maybe this could then guide our steps towards harmonic relationships with nature? Again, maybe Darwin was also too steeped in Western reductionism?

There have indeed been some important theoretical advancements in this direction of seeing a more cooperative mechanism of evolution: The ornithologist Richard Plum’s Evolution of Beauty elegantly weaves in the feminist insight that females have selected aesthetically for males across species, and that this has led to a veritable explosion of color and beauty in birds that simply cannot be accounted for by “survival fitness” (which is entirely congruent with Darwin as well as with how chaos theory works).

But that does not take anything away from the fact that ecology studies populations and individuals locked in a struggle for survival, and that this spirit can and would pervade any perspective based on ecology—to a yet higher degree than today’s economics-based perspective. Fundamentally, economics is about competition and trade, ecology about competition and death. Life and death are locked in a dance—that’s what entropy is all about. Although Kate Raworth’s Donut Economics is an impressive and promising start for creating resilient economies, it still suffers from this division of the world into “bad” economics and “good” ecology—failing to account for the fact that ecology studies yet grimmer processes, where collapse is entirely normal.

So: If relying on ecology does not resolve the conundrum of how degrowth can be achieved, what can?

Suggestion 2: Emergence of Layers of Feedback Cycles

The second path, and the one I think is congruent with metamodernism, is to differentiate between different layers of emergence, and to seek to achieve a new and higher level of increasing complexity while it feeds upon and decreases the lower layer. As such:

• On the one hand, complexity keeps increasing, but shifts gear into new dynamics where new flows of exchanges account for the increasing complexity.
• On the other hand, activity is divested from the exchanges of lower level of complexity, and this economy thereby experiences degrowth.

Let me flesh that out a bit further.

We need, basically, to decrease the amount of things and energy that people exchange. However, that says very little about the amount of information, emotions, and meaning that people exchange.

Could then, the exchange of information—of cultural, social, and emotions capital, of inner growth, knowledge, and meaning—come to supplant our exchange of material goods and services to a degree such that these naturally begin to decline?

On the face of it, the prospect seems implausible, I’ll grant you that. Has such a thing ever occurred in the past?

Well, I believe that such a thing is already occurring at another level right now. Consider the two layers of emergence: the ecological systems and the economic systems that have emerged within them.

The economic systems have greater complexity and intensity than the ecological ones. They grow as parasites on the ecological ones. In fact, up until now, the ecological systems were continually increasing their complexity, until they gave rise to a new layer, which started to decrease their complexity by feeding off it. Up until now, ecology was a growth economy—now it is experiencing degrowth! Thus, the human economy is already a degrowth mechanism, just on the layer of emergence below it.

An ecologism that truly works towards achieving degrowth is thus one that brings about the form of emergence of flows that grow as a parasite on the material economy, de facto shrinking it.

There are both exhilarating and frightening prospects as to what this new and higher layer may entail—but to see what it is, we must answer the question:

• What is to the material economy as the material economy is to the ecological systemsupon which it feeds?

It would be something that so captures human attention and engagement that the exchange of material goods becomes less pertinent to us—some more direct path to eliciting qualia, emotions, or subjective states in us.

This horizon waits to be explored—it could include, of course, virtual worlds, electronic brain stimulations, new religious experiences, transcendent practices, purpose-giving life missions, ecstatic love or sex, local companionship in solarpunk communities, therapies that grant a profound sense of safety, and learning optimized for in a manner that makes it so consuming that we needn’t seek rewards in ever new things and travel destinations… Likely it is not one of these things, but a whole world of more abstracted goods and services that leave behind the “trade” logic of capitalism and enter into a more “cooperate” and “play” logic of pure emotional and intellectual exchange. We may be seeing early hints of such a dynamic in the rise of NFTs: right now, a fairly crude market but one that creates the potential to invent and exchange just about any token of perceived value.

Now—I am not claiming that this impulse towards “whatever is to the economy as the economy is to ecology” entirely supplants conventional environmentalism, bioregionalism, etc. Nor do I claim that back to nature idealism should stand back in favor or a pro-tech and pro-science thrust to invent our way out of our ecological troubles. I claim that such an impulse would be congruent with the “law” of increasing entropy and is thus a missing centerpiece of holistic and metamodern green movements.

Also, a metamodern ecologism would care about the lives of animals and seek to reduce animal suffering—and that means seeking to develop not only the dynamics of our economy, but of the ecological systems themselves.

Basically, it’s about looking deeper inside, and there entering into a creative dialogue with Gaia.

—

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 Facebook, Twitter, and Medium, and you can speed up the process of new metamodern content reaching the world by making a donation to Hanzi here.

This is in and of itself an understandable and honorable impulse. If modern life, or modernity, has disconnected us from nature, from our direct surroundings, from one another, from our bodies, from spiritual life, from the cathedral that is always present in earth and skies, the longing for and admiration of the remnants of tribal and animistic ways of life seems to offer a vital remedy. While we appreciate the freedoms and comforts of modern life, we all notice that we have piece by piece become creatures of the Internet, electronically mediated and photographically constructed cyborgs. No wonder we cannot save the environment from ourselves—and no wonder we feel alienated and lost in a world too artificial and confusing.

Our Problematic Longing for “the Indigenous”

Let us, before we go on, briefly reconstruct this newfound popular fascination with indigenous cultures. It entails:

• A shift in aesthetics, with expressions such as Afropunk (like the Afropunk festivalwhich attracts as many as 60k visitors.) On a wider scale yet, you have the increasing tendency to mimic (or co-opt or appropriate) native costumes and rituals in hippie/hipster festival occasions, not least as a part of the Ayahuasca tourist industries.
• An appreciation and honoring of indigenous lifestyles in the books of anthropologist David Graeberand aboriginal professor, Tyson Yunkaporta.
• The growth a vibrant scholarly counter-narrative to the economic “development” under the leadership of thinkers like anthropologist Arturo Escobar. Briefly stated, this position holds that it is a mistake to think of indigenous roots and cultures around the world as “under-developed” and that development itself cannot be thought of solely in terms of “extractive” economic growth. Rather, it is often the indigenous life forms that can and should inform the design of and solutions for humane, inclusive, and ecologically viable societies. Check out Pluriverse: A Post-Development Dictionary — it’s got something for everyone!
• In connection with the above note, the growing use of indigenous technologies and practices as sources of design for homes, communities, and even infrastructure.
• The growing awareness that the defense of indigenous rights to land and conservation of lifestyles goes hand in hand with protecting vulnerable and vital ecosystems—see for instance the Amazon Sacred Headwaters Initiative.
• The increased fascination with indigenous wisdom and spirituality, often with the impulse to try to include representatives of such qualities in conferences and summits.
• The increased coverage of indigenous struggles for native rights and alliances in the mainstream media.
• And other elements you could add, I am sure…

By and large, this must be viewed as a kind of public awakening and there is good reason to celebrate it as an increasing awareness of the importance not only of our shared past and rootedness in ways of life that went on for tens of thousands of years, but also of the key role that can be played by the tribal societies around the world in the cultivation of multifarious expressions of genuinely vital and desirable—protopian — ways of life for people around the world.

Yet, I cannot escape the feeling that there is also something rather unsavory going on in our shared way of “grasping for” the indigenous. It is as if we all, even if out of very reasonable longings, cannot quite leave “the indigenous” alone—and that we tend to mash up too many, too different, and too rich and contextually situated cultures into one and the same concept. To push this line of argument further, I almost feel that we have developed an underlying vampiric relationship to animist cultures: like the archetype of an old, stagnated person wishing to steal the elixir of youth and vitality from a younger and less privileged person.

Have we subtly become the Wicked Witch of the West?

I don’t believe that this “vampiric” tendency is necessarily rooted in exploitation and ill-will. Rather, I believe that it emanates from a shared naivety on “our” (Westerners and others part of late modernity) behalf: The indigenous ways of life have become so foreign to us that we cannot help but to view them through an exotified, hyper-essentializing lens—one that subtly carries our post-colonial and orientalist heritage forward in new guises. In our eagerness to “be more indigenous”, to be wiser, more embodied, more at home in the world, to become ecologically sane, we tend to forget that the indigenous cultures of the world are not ours to simply take. This creates a somewhat awkward dynamic through which we want something from the members of indigenous cultures around the world—not as unique expressions of themselves, but as expressions of our ideas and ideals of “the indigenous”.

And need I point out, that whatever we Westerners and other late moderns seek to cram into this one single concept of “the indigenous” (and its purported “wisdom”) there is just no way that the term can encapsulate these wildly varied ways of life? From the San of southern central Africa, to the Mursi of Ethiopia (title image is of Mursi man), to the “Zuni” of Central America (not their indigenous name, for one thing), to the Inuit of Greenland, to the Ainu of Japan, to the Lue of Thailand (who are, by the way, “indigenous” but not tribal or animist just to make matters more complicated), to the Aboriginal Australians, to the folks of the Andaman Islands? I suppose, from an anthropological perspective, one could abstract certain qualities that these have in common—even if these elements often mix with modern systems of economic exchange. But when we apply our term “indigenous” to these contexts, we are of course only seeing each of these cultures through a certain lens—one that has nothing to do with their cultures, and everything to do with modern, Western, culture. Even if we all get degrees in anthropology and spend a few years writing ethnographies about “indigenous” ways of life, this will still be the case: the very idea to view them as anthropological is a modern concept.

Let us then compare the picture of Mursi man above to this image of the Tsaatan reindeer herders of Mongolia:

Tsaatan reindeer herders (and riders!) of Mongolia.

The two—the Mursi and the Tsaatan—are arguably more widely different than the lifestyles of any modern country, from China, to Mexico, to New Zealand. (I theorize about why this is the case in a former article on the relationship between chaos theory and cultural development).

Both of these images express ostensibly magical cultures (a wording I borrowed from a friend, Chuck Pezeshki. And it’s natural for us to long for magic in our lives. But is it the same magic across different cultures, and can it truly be caught with one word, “indigenous”? Can we “add indigenous and stir” to our progressive and transformative practices, hanging another dream catcher on our porch? Or are we being creepy?

With these points in mind, consider the following critiques of our growing tendency to long for the indigenous:

• There is always a risk of “appropriating” the indigenous cultures, meaning that the unique identities and expressions of these become part of our larger, commercialized systems, which in turn can harm the self-distinction and dignity of minorities.
• If tribal cultures are fetishized, large swathes of majority populations will “want something” from them, and this something may not even be there to begin with. This can be excruciating and frustrating.
• Our longing for the indigenous can often be expressed as “token” representation, either through musical performances at festivals or with just a few people brought in to the summit. This kind of artificial interpretation turns people into a kind of living museum objects to be collected. Gotta catch ’em all, right?
• The grasping to reconnect to the indigenous subtly ignores what they want—while refocusing on how we want their qualities to save us.
• Our engagement with postcolonial values (through universities mostly) can make Westerners (or other moderns) into the spokespeople for indigenous causes, supplanting their own voices (the “sub-saltern”, to use Spivak’s term).
• And, again, the very notion of “the indigenous” arguably makes the Mursi and the Tsaatan and the Inuit invisible to us: we just see our own concepts that smash them together, not them.
• We infantilize our fellow human beings by projecting upon them an aura of innocence, purity, and authenticity. The lives and ways of life of the multiplicity of animist and tribal cultures contain all the struggle, strife, evil, manipulation, violence, tragedy, and brokenness of human existence along with those qualities we find enchanting. It’s not for kids.
• We disrespect whole cultures and ways of life when we “want the cake and eat it too” by wishing to keep the perceived (or imagined) coziness of and magic of animist life, but at the same time not wishing to dispense with the comforts and freedoms of modern life. How is this disrespectful? It fails to see that these cultures are responding to the real pressures and demands of life, and that their unique beauties and communities have grown from that. If you rip out the nice part but ignore the challenge, you disrespect the suffering and hard work that goes into creating and upholding the beauty of that particular culture.

Our admiration of “the indigenous” and the discourse it brings in progressive and countercultural circles is certainly preferable to our recent history of viewing our fellow human beings, often of the oldest and most refined cultures on earth, as savages, and “natives” to be “civilized”. Of course, this view still occurs among less progressive people: a young Christian missionary, John Allen Chau, was killed in 2018 as he came to convert the uncontacted Sentinelese (after traveling there illegally).

But even with this apparent step up, all of the above critiques still seem to hold.

The Ever-Present Origin Revisited

The irony of it all is that, psychologically speaking, we perhaps never left our indigenous, animistic, or tribal homestead. I have thus come to believe that our search for a home in the universe is actually not about an exotifying anthropology (itself being a modern and distancing and abstracting way of seeing, which of course in and of itself takes nothing away from its value as a kind of knowledge, but does highlight that anthropology is unlikely to lead to a reconstruction of the indigenous in our lives).

Instead, I have come to believe that making the universe our home is about a very subtle but brutally honest introspection: it’s about seeing how the tribal, the animist, the indigenous element lives within us. It’s about noticing what is already there. What was there all along: it was our home for tens of thousands of years, and for many of us, since about ten millennia, it faded into the background of our awareness.

If we trace the lines of Jean Gebser’s 1950s work, The Ever-Present Origin, (without necessarily buying his whole framework or its details) we can note that Gebser held that consciousness has restructured itself throughout history:

1. from the Archaic world where everything seems to be One (where we live in a cave, under a close and intimate sky, undifferentiated from much in the natural world)…
2. to the Magic world where the inner world is differentiated from nature, here in the guise of spirits, magic, ancestral union with nature, and ecstatic ritual practices—all of which is expressed, of course, through art, an art that is naturally genuine, expressive, and beautiful (for the cave paintings in France to today’s rich animist expressions)…
3. to the Mythic world of religions and more elaborate and systematized mythologies of chiefdoms and civilizations, where magic is at one further remove from everyday life—belonging to a celestial, distinctly other realm…
4. and from there on to what Gebser calls a Mental world and an Integral 

Let us disregard for a moment that this early theorist of the shifting modes of consciousness (in arts, science, philosophy, and so on) had a somewhat different model than later scholars. (For an excellent introduction, see Jeremy Johnson’s book on Jean Gebser.)

What is striking is that Gebser points out that there appear to be deep structures to human consciousness itself, expressed in and through the types of culture we are part of and live by. And these structures can only emerge in and through one another. Thus, any one structure is never truly left behind.

What if the Archaic, Magic (often corresponding to tribal/animist/indigenous), and Mythic structures are still present in us—right here, right now? What if they’re just repressed, downplayed, shamed, hidden in plain sight? What if we never left magic behind in the first place? What if God only appeared to die?

There is almost a mystical element to Gebser’s thought here: The “later” structures of consciousness are always-already embedded within the earlier ones, just as the earlier ones are always-still present within the later ones, without which they would not be possible. I say “mystical” because it thus follows that the omega point of where consciousness travels is already inherent in the earliest expression of consciousness (presumably also non-human consciousness) while the alpha point is never lost however far consciousness travels and shifts. (And, indeed, due to this mystical element of his social philosophy, Gebser’s oeuvre was never quite as respected and known as it might have been).

The source of our consciousness, the basic “universe as a home”, is an ever-present origin. The endpoint is a return. Forward is backwards.

Upwards is inwards.

Evolution is involution.

Better understanding of “you” is better knowledge of the great “it” of the universe, which is ultimately a better understanding of me. So science is introspection—just by a wide and necessarily detouring arc.

It all leads back to the ever-present origin. To the primordial home: That life is beautiful and this world is worth living in, and it is a home, despite all of its apparent harshness.

Maybe, then, looking for the magical within small and relatively foreign cultures is a fool’s errand. Maybe we need to find the pensée sauvage, the wild manners of thought, feeling, and being, within our own cultures, within ourselves?

No—indeed, I should like to go farther still in this argument: Could it be that our obsession with “the indigenous” is in and of itself a kind of denial?

Now, consider the work of those “gone native” anthropologists—some of whom explicitly say they’ve had sex with gnomes (when on spiritual journeys with indigenous rituals, etc.). My favorite is the somewhat hyper-sexual work of Hans-Peter Duerr. This guy—gotta love him—wrote five very thick books just to disprove one book by an influential sociologist, Norbert Elias. And he pretty much failed to disprove Elias’s brilliant theory (on “the civilizing process”) and, by the way, missed the point with it.

Anyway, Duerr describes in his books the radical and dramatic entrance into a world more beautiful and alive than anything modern life can offer. This is Dreamtime; it is access to altered states, and it is a kind of understanding of the world that animists may understand but modern people lack.

No wonder he never quite came back from wonderland. Would you have?

Now, again—there is something subtly hysterical and unsavory about Duerr’s story. But could we, hand in hand, reconstruct that journey he took? Could we retrace those steps?

I know I am not being entirely realistic here, but let me finish the thought for the sake of completeness:

• Could we reconstruct the Archaic in our lives by creating spaces in which we strip down everything but the most essential? When was the last day when you didn’t quantify anything, seek to achieve anything, seek to play a role? Probably it was before you were two years old.
• Could the Magic be reconstructed by time away in neo-tribal settings, where we live close to nature and only have a small group to cooperate with and find meaning with? Could we dance rather than think so much? Sing rather than discuss? Who knows—maybe we would find that the Magic, the animist, the indigenous, is not entirely lacking in us after all? Either way, whatever we find, it would be real and come from us, not from what we tried to extract from the last few tribal cultures on earth, destroying them in the process.
• Could the Mythic be reconstructed—monastic time spent searching for our own truths and an intimate relationship to something bigger than ourselves? How many of us even quite know we have this opportunity? Could many more be offered it?

And, of course, to integrate all of that with “modern” life is what Gebser called “Integral”. I would like to call it metamodern or protopian.

The indigenous we’re looking for is closer than we think. Protopia is closer than we think. Not as in “it’s in a nearer future”. It’s more intimately weaved into our lives.

The “pensée sauvage” (Wild Thought) was originally a play-on-words by the anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss: It referred to a flower, a wild pansy flower. The rare and wild flower, the thought that springs up out there in nature.

Well, as Henri Matisse once said: There are flowers everywhere, for those who deign to see them.

Stop looking for magic: It’s already here. Let’s just create space for it in our societies.

—

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 Facebook, Twitter, and Medium, and you can speed up the process of new metamodern content reaching the world by making a donation to Hanzi here.

Governance is, in many ways, the most important question of all. In societies that are well-governed, people do well (as far as that’s possible in a world full of challenges).

In this article, I skip the wider and more universal framework for analyzing and diagnosing governance, moving directly to “the vision itself”: the more desirable forms of governance that may become possible only under the best societal conditions.

Let us briefly note: I am not presenting a certain system of governance that I believe is the best for all societies, in all situations. Rather, I am presenting a certain future “attractor point” of governance that I believe is possible (and desirable) to achieve if and when other problems have been dealt with to a sufficient degree: inefficient bureaucracy, failing monopolies of violence, lacking legitimacy, fragmented collective identity, short-circuited informational feedback cycles, coerced distortions of public discourse, and so forth—all of the classical problems of governance. In my earlier attempt at a “general theory of governance” I outlined eight fundamental, but highly abstracted, social functions, and argued that the problems of governance that we see in the world, across the board, come down to imbalances between how these eight principles play out (and I am grateful to One Project for having made this work possible).

So, needless to say, the “protopian” form of governance is not to be “implemented” in Afghanistan on Tuesday. Protopian governance is to be cultivated by agents sensitive to the limitations inherent to any reform and the risks involved.

I shall thus summarize the future of governance in three design principles. By “design principle” I basically mean a feature of a governance system, but—again—not “implemented from above”; rather, a design principle is a recognizable pattern that grants a sense of direction to the larger process of cultivating new forms of governance. Basically, I hold that we are to ask ourselves for each change: “Is this particular development in line with our design principles?”

Oh, and by the way, let’s give a definition of “governance” before we proceed:

• Governance is the capacity of humans to weave their individual streams-of-action into coordinated wholes, so that actions form chains that are coordinated across time and space, in a manner increasing the likelihood of desirable results and decreasing the likelihood of undesirable results.

And if you wish to add another layer to it:

• Governance includes the coordination of human communicative actions that determine which results are desirable and undesirable.

My friend, the philosopher Magnus Vinding, suggests in his new book, Reasoned Politics, that “politics” has two layers: a values layer (establishing what we want and why) and an empirical layer (establishing what is true about getting where we want, so as to inform policy and action). I think that works well: governance, in a comprehensive sense, is about coordinating actions, including establishing the values from which we govern and agree to be being governed.

With that much established, let’s delve into the three design principles.

Design Principle 1:
Don’t ask how to make governance “more democratic”; ask how to increase collective intelligence

It is a common trap to focus on the question of how to make governance “more democratic”. The reasons for falling into this trap are fairly obvious: Across the world, and from a century of historical experience and data, we can see that more democratic societies generally fare better than less democratic ones—or at the very least that they abuse their citizens much less.

Given such strong correlations with greater democracy (of happiness, of health, of education, of human rights, of peace, and so forth) and given the extremely strong position of “democracy” as an ideology or discourse across the world, this is of no surprise. It simply seems logical, according to our stubborn habit to think linearly, that if democracy has been good so far, more democracy is even better.

And, in a sense, there is good reason to believe that this is the case. It’s alright to seek to deepen and increase the level of democracy in the world—not least as it has begun to decline across the world (globally speaking, it has decreased for 15 consecutive years). For certain, most of the world needs more and deeper democracy, not less.

But what happens when you get to the highest scores on the international rankings of democracy? Is your society thereby perfect? Is no further development of your forms of governance possible or desirable? Is the story of humanity fundamentally the one about, as some have said, “getting to Denmark?”

But once you do “get to Denmark” (having a stable liberal democracy, a functional market, and significant social welfare)—does further development of the systems of governance cease to be desirable, or even possible? And does further development entail “more democracy”?

If by “more democracy” we mean that “more people get a greater say in more issues”, there is indeed no reason to believe that we should seek to attain that goal. As argued in Democracy For Realists (see here for a summary), you often get worse result for everyone involved by simply expanding how many people are directly involved in decision-making.

In that sense, then, “more democracy” is often the last thing you want. What we usually mean by “more democracy in the world” is not to involve as many people as possible in as many decisions as possible, but rather the cultivation of a number of interrelated institutions that tend to remove power imbalances and the obvious misuse of power. This makes it appear as though getting more people involved in more decisions, because the less democratic societies are also the worse governed ones, but this is manifestly untrue—it’s a so-called “spurious relationship”.

The underlying principle is simply that fewer distortions of information and suppression of voices and interests tends to create more intelligent and tenable decisions.

Collective intelligence is the capacity of a group to solve shared problems. At this point, fairly little is known about it and researchers are still arguing about whether or not it’s really “one thing” or if there are indeed different dimensions of it. But on a trivial level, we can all understand that some groups (or collectives or organizations) will be better able to solve common problems than others, and that this must reasonably be the case also for societies at large—even for civilizations.

All I am saying with this design principle is that there is no reason to seek to “increase democracy” in and of itself, for its own sake. There is no “democracy god” that will punish us if we don’t. Democracy is good because it increases collective intelligence (and mitigates collective stupidity)—until it isn’t and doesn’t.

Hence, the four great strands of democratic decision making: direct democracy, representative democracy, participatory democracy, and deliberative democracy cannot be viewed as inherently practically or morally superior to one another. Rather, you need to see which types of decisions can reasonably be made by which forms of democratic governance.

To increase collective intelligence often means to move complex decisions into the realm of participatory and deliberative democracies—i.e. involving stakeholders and creating citizen councils selected by sortition (lottery) to discuss a matter before a policy is decided upon. In a way, this means that fewer people get a say which might seem “less democratic”—but at the same time, a richer and more nuanced picture can come to the fore, and this in turn means that people’s opinions on a matter can less easily be manipulated by smaller elites or interest groups.

With such developments, we move towards “less democracy”, and certainly fewer instances of voting, but hopefully towards greater collective intelligence.

Design Principle 2:
Create Meshwork Governance and Ignore the Principle of Subsidiarity

Another trap for creating the future of governance is to follow the principle of subsidiarity: that decisions should be made at the lowest possible level, thereby as closely as possible to the people affected by the decisions. For instance, there is little reason for the EU Commission to decide upon how my local municipality organizes its waste management. We’re here in this little township, and we presumably know better what works for us.

There are a number of paradoxes with this line of thinking. Let’s stay with the municipal waste management example for a moment.

• Firstly, it is still the case that the waste produced by my municipality can and will affect people and environments beyond it. Is it truly just our decision?
• Secondly, there may very well be a majority within my municipality who favor a cheaper and less environmentally friendly waste management system (just pile it up and burn it), and if the environmentally friendly minority cannot appeal to a higher instance, court, or national parliamentary legislation, they will simply be outnumbered. However, if the environmentally friendly people can ally across the nation and across the EU, they can exert enough influence to change many municipalities. This is just as an example—but would you say that they are wrong to push for good waste management “for the sake of subsidiarity”?
• Thirdly, there are always issues upon which we cannot agree as to where the boundary goes between “who is affected”. Let’s say one community decides to have a very experimental and religiously fundamentalist school system—and neighboring communities now begin to fear for their lives and for civil war or acts of religiously motivated terrorism. Maybe the fears are unfounded—we’ll know within a few decades. Who has the right to sovereignty, the experimental religious community, or the larger number of neighboring communities who fear for their safety?

To be clear, I am not “against” the principle of subsidiarity. Of course, there is no reason for the state government to decide upon where my local scout club should go trekking. It’s just that it cannot alone account for much of how the future of governance can and should function.

I instead hold that a sort of “meshwork governance” is the direction of protopian development. By this I mean to say that units of governance can and should exchange influence over one another, so as to create a lattice, network, or meshwork of lateral representation. Simple example: Naturally, Denmark and Sweden are sovereign states and cannot decide upon one another’s policies. But since Denmark is very much affected by Sweden and vice versa, it makes sense to not only make some bilateral deals from time to time, but to actually exchange a bit of influence over one another. Denmark’s perspective can and should be present in many more decisions in Sweden, and vice versa. Let us thus say that Denmark and Sweden find a way to exchange 1% of their power over one another. Now, Sweden automatically takes Denmark a little more into consideration in all of its decisions and vice versa. The two harmonize a little better.

(It’s not entirely unlike the idea of double-linking in sociocracy.)

Given the above design principle of collective intelligence, which often is increased by (deliberative) council rule, such meshwork governance would often mean exchanging seats within different deliberative councils on topics which have many stakeholders. Let’s say we have a citizen policy council on reducing criminal gang activity in South Sweden, close to Denmark—it would make perfect sense to have Danish representatives, not only because these may give valuable outsider perspectives, but also because their own gang violence scene overlaps and interacts with the Swedish one and they may thereby have both their own interests to defend and hold key pieces of the puzzle. Eventually, you may find that you have enough stakeholders for your organization to be run up to 50% by others—while your organization now in turn affects decisions of its environment. You have gone from separateness and “sovereignty” to a meshwork of governance.

The direction, then, is not necessarily towards greater and greater subsidiarity, but rather towards more and more meshwork governance, where different units of power sort of yin-yang their way into greater coherence. As such, we are not establishing coherence from above through harmonizing legal systems etc. (although such moves may sometimes be warranted, too); we are instead piece by piece revealing what physicist David Bohm called an “implicate order” (in his philosophical, not his scientific, work). Things fit together, yes, but in highly complex and inherently non-obvious ways, ways that must be revealed by searching for the truth together and sharing a multitude of differing perspectives.

I have thus come to believe that the principle of subsidiarity is a very partial description of the future of governance, and that meshwork governance is the stronger attractor point. It opens up the question of who is a stakeholder and where: Are hospitals stakeholders in schools—if so, to which degree?

Design Principle 3:
Allow for Deep Feedback Cycles—Limit Fast and Shallow Ones!

This point is a more abstract nature than the two above ones—please bear with me. At the same time, it can be stated yet more concisely: We tend to overemphasize short and shallow feedback cycles while ignoring the long and deep ones. Instead, we should increase our capacity to make fundamental and structural changes, while being less sensitive to short-term trends and pressures.

A few examples might be in order.

For instance, it is very difficult to change and update institutions of governance in most countries. An example is the United States, which has been in a cycle of institutional decay for the better part of a half-century, and unable to escape its rut. Small interest groups affect policy too much, which incapacitates governance, which undermines public trust, which creates a pressure for smaller government, which makes renewed governance structures even harder to fund and achieve. As a result, American society as a whole becomes less and less efficiently governed as the decades go by (and, as stated above, the quality of governance is the number one determining factor of its thriving). Because no agent can successfully update the system of governance, it continues to decay.

At the same time, consider the fact that businesses in the US and elsewhere report results four times a year, and that these quarterly reports have huge impacts on their funding, prestige, and future. Hence, they will break and bend to present fairly narrowly defined results in these reports. They are here stuck in very short feedback cycles, ones that in many ways affect society at large and thereby shape also how policies and public discourses are played out. Even within one 4-year presidential term, feedback cycles of public opinion, how the economy is going, and so on, can lead to swift changes of course and the interruption (or at least disruption) of numerous important long-term projects and investments.

Our governance systems react too fast to too shallow feedback, and too weakly to slow feedback cycles, like those of the environment.

Hence, the governance of the future can and should have more “reboot functions” built into them. These can look in many different ways, but the key principle is that there should be specific features that allow for the governance systems themselves to be fundamentally updated periodically—i.e. systems of governance should have special functions to make sure the “rules of the game” are updated in accordance with deep, structural changes. It is not wise and advisable to run a country in the internet age with a constitution drafted at the beginning of the industrial age. And so, constitutional reform should be made more accessible with periodic intervals. In practice, at the national level, this may mean that, once every 20 years, you can change the constitution with a simple majority vote. This would mobilize “deep reformist” to concentrate on how to use the next opportunity to change the fundamental game rules of their country. On other levels of governance, it could take different forms.

At the same time, the sensitivity to short feedback cycles may actually need to be reduced. We have become accustomed to thinking that more feedback information, more documentation, and quicker iteration is always a good thing. We tend to condemn, in harsh if superficially polite words, the rigidity of those who will not be open to criticism and feedback. However, for feedback to be truly valuable, it needs to be a) generalizable across multiple situations and settings, i.e. based on multiple data points, and b) properly processed as a piece of meaningful information, i.e. the best available interpretation must come to the fore for the right corrective steps to be taken.

It should also be noted that such data processing is a costly endeavor for all parties involved. The contemporary hysteria of consumer capitalism and services of public administration that spam us with emails and even intrusive survey phone calls “wanting your opinion!” is not a mark of humility or intelligent governance. Most of this information falls flat, is based upon the wrong questions being asked, is never fully followed up on, and so forth. They also drive an unsavory trend of hyper-quantification in society, the harms of which are too complex and numerous to be discussed here.

I suppose that a more listening society should also be better at leaving us the f* alone, while focusing on slowly building bases of carefully considered information for slower and more profound changes. This will increase stability and save considerable resources while still making society more flexible.

To summarize and coordinate this last point with the first two design principles:

• Greater collective intelligence will tend towards fewer people more deeply involved in more multi-perspectival and disinterested (because we select also neutral representatives) processes of deliberation in councils, with a greater emphasis on the quality of the communicative process. The development of new systems of governance are evaluated on the basis of collective intelligence, not “democracy” in and of itself.
• Such councils will in turn create an increasingly complex meshwork of cross-influence, hence converging on a deeper and deeper coherence, without there being one central authority that forces them in line.
• And such councils will be committed to serving long-term and deep transformations, while being designed to resist short-term pressures and trends. This is achieved by replacing the “collect feedback” trend with more long-term qualitative learning processes of the councils, and by creating the feature of periodic “reboot functions” through which the purposes and values of the councils can be redefined.

As such, the vision of Protopian governance is, very simply put:

• A large set of different units of governance that are tailored to maximize the collective intelligence with which different topics are managed, which are laterally connected into a meshwork of mutual influence, and which continuously evolve by periodically updating their constitutional forms and the stated purposes they serve.

There is, of course, more to the idea of Protopian governance—but this would be the bare basics. And that’s enough to reshape the world. Remember, though—don’t build this from scratch: cultivate it with a sensitivity to the initial conditions of the societies within which you act. Protopian is the next step after Liberal Democracy, and while there may be opportunities for developing countries to cultivate it, it always builds upon transcending and including the principles of democracy. The point is that development is never linear, and so even as Protopian governance grows from the soil of liberal democracy, it looks and feels quite different from it.

—

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 Facebook, Twitter, and Medium, and you can speed up the process of new metamodern content reaching the world by making a donation to Hanzi here.