Education for Protopia: Why Play Is Vital to our Survival

“Culture arises and unfolds in and as play”.

— Johan Huizinga, Dutch historian 1872–1945

A Time Between Worlds

Zak Stein (philosopher of education) has famously noted that our educational system is stuck in “a time between worlds”. It’s a time that has begun to shed the Modern educational frameworks, but no Protopian or Metamodern framework has emerged to fill the void.

(“Metamodern” can mean either the society beyond modernity, or the time between modernity or what comes after, depending on who you ask. I discuss this here.)

There is today the opportunity to shape the development of Global Education for the next decade—right at the nexus in world history when:

  • the Global Southmatches the Global North in a large variety of ways;
  • the East and Westtruly meet and integrate as a Global society with several centers; and
  • the world transitions into the Internet Age; a society dominated by information technology, robotics, AI, with a corresponding series of global risk factors ranging from technological disruptions to climate change to pandemics and large flows of displaced refugees and other
    threats to human rights.

It takes no leap of the imagination to see that the education of the world’s diverse populations can and will decide the fate of nations, the global community, and humanity at large. The responsibility—and creative potential—to get education right even extends beyond our current humanity, as effects
of our choices today inevitably cascade into future generations and the biosphere.

This series of nine articles is based upon extensive research into the farther reaches of the landscapes of global education. What is on the horizon? What are prominent, brave and creative thinkers and practitioners thinking, saying and doing? And what can be done?

This Article Series: A Map of a Paradigm

How do we tip the scales of educational realities for a Protopian outcome at a planetary scale?

We are leaving the old world behind—industrial and dominated by Western powers—for a world that is postindustrial, digitized, and truly global. This means that we are also leaving one view of education in the past and welcoming another; a new paradigm of education.

What, then, is a useful map of education’s frontiers, anno 2022? My answer: A paradigm map.

A paradigm is not the same as an “idea”, or even as “values”. A paradigm is a large pattern of interconnected and mutually reinforcing ideas, presuppositions, and values—and the pattern is partly invisible to all who think according to that paradigm.

The reason that we focus on creating a map of the paradigm, is that we, through our research and experience, have come to believe that in order to substantially transform and develop education, one has to understand and address the paradigm itself.

Here is how our argument goes:

  • There are several different fields of education, each with their own key thinkers, agents, and innovators.
  • If you create a major reform or innovation within any one field, the underlying assumptions and practices of all the remaining fields will work against the change you wish to achieve because they still function according to the old paradigm.
  • Only through concerted efforts that are meaningfully coordinated across the different fields can the overall spell of the old paradigm be broken; throwing the systems and culture of education into a new orbit—as it were, “escaping the gravity” of the old paradigm.

The map presented here consists of eight pathways, each within a separate field, through which education can—and, we have reason to argue, as you will see—should be transformed at all levels of society.

But the eight pathways are not arbitrary. They make up, we argue, a larger, interconnected whole. I have come to believe that these eight pathways must be successfully understood, developed and coordinated by key agents in the world. I hope that you are such an agent and that these ideas may be of service in your work.

A Planetary Definition of “Education”

Before we go on to the eight pathways, let us begin with the basics: What, if anything, is education?

My contention is that education, in the strictest and primordial sense, is play.

Within the animal realm, cubs, kittens, chicks, and little monkeys, all play. Children of homo sapiens, left to their own devices, play. The behavioral explanation for this may be the inherent joy of playing, the intrinsic motivation of performing a task for its own reward. The evolutionary purpose of this same reward (the reason nature has selected for it), however, is that something is learned, and that something increases the chances of survival.

At least two of my interviewees (interviews done as preparation for this article series as a part of former but unpublished work), Peter Gärdenfors (cognitive scientist) and Alexander Bard (cyber philosopher), have both emphasized that play, in many ways, is a kind of imitation, whereby learning is achieved. Species that depend on more learning for their survival have longer periods of childhood, growth and learning. Play is also a way to form bonds, upon which collaboration and relationships can be built.

Non-adulthood—i.e. childhood and youth—is defined by growth; the growth of faculties to feed, procreate and protect. This growth is both of the physical body and of skills that ultimately always depend upon the use of that same body. Play gives way to work, work being different from play in that it serves the purpose of acquiring resources, such as food and shelter.

In humans, culture constitutes patterns of knowledge that are inherited over generations. This includes such cultural technologies as spoken language, writing, and arithmetic. These technologies, in turn, cannot be learned only by spontaneous imitation and play. The play must somehow be organized and systematized, so that its outcomes of learning will resonate with culture.

Education, then, is the naturally occurring tendency to play, albeit extended into a more systematized realm of culture; it is play connected to a larger whole. Education guides play—sometimes at the expense of oppressing its spontaneous expressions, sometimes by successfully harnessing the will to play and bewondered curiosity we all harbor—and shapes it into culture.

Primary education introduces the playing child into the culture of a civilization. Secondary education bridges the child into adult participation within a larger cultural context. Higher education and research ideally marry the curios child within the adult—still learning—to the farther reaches of civilization’s knowledge; within a few years, after the Masters level, the adult can do their own ground research, producing knowledge hitherto unknown by anyone; expanding upon the realm of culture.

So, the child grows into culture and adulthood, the adult grows as a person and in knowledge and experience, and culture itself grows as a result of the creative spark—the inner child—of adults. But education, all of our studies and experts unanimously agree, risks extinguishing the inner spark, suffocating the natural playfulness of the child. And yet, our economies and our very civilization can only adapt if there are minds and hearts at play, if people and their cultures truly grow. How, then, can education be redefined to better harness play, and thus serve creativity and growth?

In starkly changing environments, growth is a necessary condition not only for thriving and flourishing; it is necessary for survival. Humanity, then, is presented with a seemingly strange conundrum: Play, or perish!

I invite you to consider a near future time when “the survival of the playful” is the order of the day. Which nations will stimulate their children into the best learning practices, using which ideas and technologies? Which first movers will spark childlike curiosity in their growing adult populations? Where—and how—will a multifaceted continued adult development flourish throughout the lifespan, so that populations may best handle the complex issues of our time? Which cultures and regions will spur growth and thus shape global civilization, contributing to its survival? Only by rescuing playfulness can we survive and thrive;

education is play;
play is growth;
growth is survival.

From the Old to the New Paradigm of Education

The old paradigm” of education builds upon a lot of ideas that were creative and progressive a century ago, and ebbs and flows of different understandings of learning and education have come and gone over the decades. Some have emphasized the growth of children through stages of learning, others have emphasized that knowledge is relational and contextual, and that learners are shaped by their environments. Some have emphasized empowering weak and marginalized populations, others have emphasized the creative spark of the few and especially talented.

Yet, none of these were truly invented to tackle a society that is global, transnational, multicultural, post-industrial, and thoroughly digitized—these being changes that have arrived with such speed and force that they have left educational institutions in a state of future shock, i.e., they have not been able to adapt accordingly.

A simple analogy for seeing how education has been resistant to change and development is offered by Justin Van Fleet (Director of the Global Business Coalition for Education): Compare a hospital of today to a hospital a century ago; it is quite different. Compare a school of today to that of a century ago, and they are quite alike.

Schools, and education at large, have proven more difficult to develop than our systems of medical care—despite the earnest efforts to experiment with forms of education around the world.

Thus, there is still to be invented “a new paradigm of education” to suit these new life conditions. The many interrelated and underlying suppositions of “the old paradigm” are still to be unearthed and properly challenged at scale.

Indeed, the efforts to do so have been many—and not always futile—but the old paradigm persists. In this series of articles, I attempt to offer yet another, hopefully not futile, attempt. One that could establish and stabilize what I call a Metamodern and/or Protopian society (which are terms that I and others use to describe desirable potential futures).

The Eight Pathways to Protopian Planetary Education

The aim thus presents itself to the global community: To find a pathway from the old to the new paradigm of education. Unsurprisingly, we find, this path is a complex one, and it thus includes eight different pathways, each of which can and should be successfully coordinated with the others. The eight pathways are:

  1. Ecological Relatedness. Since so many of the shared global challenges are of an ecological nature, climate change being only one such aspect, the education of the future must somehow reconnect human beings to the biosphere, both through new knowledge and through new forms of experience of ourselves as part of nature.
  2. Technological Disruption. Since technology and information change the life-conditions so dramatically, the educational systems must take into account how technology not only brings new potential, but also new sources of harm and disruption, and it must seek to counter and work around these challenges.
  3. Technological Potential. But technology does, naturally, not only offer challenges; it also offers untapped potentials. Thinkers and innovators around the world are working to leverage the potential of information technology—and algorithms—to reinvent the tools of education, which in turn makes possible new forms of schooling and learning.
  4. Human-to-Human Relations.In our interviews we have put a lot of emphasis on sensitive, holistic, and subtle experts on personal growth and relationships; these emphasize learnings from the human potential movement, from intimate experience with relational work, from indigenous cultures, and even from spiritual and emotional healing practices. How can trust and teacherly authority be cultivated and leveraged to support play, education, and personal growth?
  5. Human-to-System Relations.But human educational relations always arise in the context of how education is organized. We have found few defenders of the classical pulpit teaching styles, and many engaging and promising examples of different ways in which schooling and education can be organized—more in line, perhaps, with the emergent life conditions of the Internet age. This involves, not least, to foster closer interconnections between education and the worlds of healthcare, governance, and business.
  6. Meta-Skills.There are also challenges to the curriculum; what should children learn, and how can people be best prepared for life-long learning, adaptation and growth through adulthood? In a global environment that is more complex, and in which disruptions and potentials occur with increasing frequency, it is more difficult to predict the exact skills and bodies of knowledge that people will need and benefit from. Hence, an emphasis on “meta-skills” becomes more important; i.e., identifying and prioritizing the cultivation of those traits that provide the greatest dividends to individuals and societies.
  7. The Rise of the Global South. The old paradigm of education has been, to a significant degree, shaped by the dominant powers of the 20th century. From a postcolonial perspective, this can be viewed as distorting the view of the world, focusing too much on Western culture and history, depriving many populations of their due recognition as contributors global society. Those who can see a more multipolar world, relate to it, and apply a more global perspective, will undoubtedly be at an advantage. There is also reason to believe that countries of the Global South may be, in many ways, better placed to redefine education and reap the benefits of being first movers.
  8. Education on the Move.Large populations are displaced in waves of migration, meaning that citizens fall between the cracks of state structures, and that many children are left without proper education while growing up in refugee camps or on the move. It is a global challenge for all countries to fill these gaps and to use the best of technology to reach these populations with educational resources, so that they can more easily join and be integrated into communities and economies around the world.

No single country, organization or group can by themselves master all of these pathways; different networks will need to take the lead on each of them. And they do, arguably, depend on each other.

In an afterword to this series, I labor to present interconnections between the eight pathways. I offer my own best attempt at a synthesis: a holistic vision of the field of education, an early map of the new paradigm of education—one that is infused with Metamodern sensibilities and conducive to Protopian societies.

I invite you to critically assess this map, and then use it as a backdrop for your own strategy in building alliances and communities of knowledge that will reinvent global education.

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.

[Digital] Madness and [Pornographic] Civilization

Why digital society brings forth cynicism and anxiety—and what we can do about it. [A very French piece of theory: READERS BE WARNED.]

Would you say that life has become more or less “civilized” as societies have evolved? Let us consider only the last few decades of cultural shifts to get a handle on this question. Michel Foucault famously wrote Madness and CivilizationNorbert Elias identified the Civilizing Process. Where do we stand on how civilization and madness evolve today? I would claim that we need an updated version of these theories, one in tune with the advent of Internet Society:

  • Digital Madness, that drives forth a…
  • Pornographic Civilization.

Let us get into the weeds of this updated diagnosis of our time and let us begin to consider what can be done about it.

Civilization Found—Innocence Lost

“as society ‘advances’, people and their values become less barbaric, more universal and abstract, but also more XXX-rated, more pornographic in every (sexual an non-sexual) sense of the word.”

On the one hand, we can observe obvious signs of what the older generations can only recognize as a kind of cultural decay: pop culture has become cynical and crude with popstars like Billie Eilish glorifying suicide for young people or Lana Del Rey romanticizing infidelity and daddy issues; children increasingly exposed to, misinformed by, and traumatized by online (sexual) pornography which itself draws wider and wider swathes of the population into some kind of prostitution (which also spreads to more and more young people); sexual debuts creeping to lower ages and especially young girls increasingly being pressured to partake in harmful sexual activities; hard drugs being the stuff of casual conversations of middleclass 13-year-olds, and that’s when they’re not talking about sex and carrying knives (real story, that one, overheard on a local bus in a “nice” neighborhood); the average kid spending 8+ hours by a screen each day and the activities there becoming increasingly based on addictive dopamine hits with apps like TikTok and Snapchat; more and more of us trying psychedelics and other drugs, bought from criminal gangs; celebrities and Netflix shows casually showing and joking about hard drug use and death by drugs; realistic, violent computer games; de facto decreases of people’s real competence and skills, including a reversal of the average IQ scores in developed countries; attention spans, even among adults, dropping like lead balloons; weaker and less motorically developed bodies in the average population; the spread of online conspiracy theories of savage and sadistically imaginative detail…

Cultural decay, right? There’s no other word for it.

Well, on the other hand, consider all of the following: the all but absolute collapse of norms that held it to be normal and healthy to beat children; the reduction of brawls and fistfights as part of growing up and being a young man or out in the nightclubs; the shift from an exceedingly homophobic society to the almost unanimous unacceptance of homophobia; the shift from extreme racism and white supremacy towards firmly established anti-racist norms and serious taboos against racist jargon; the establishment of feminism and gender equality as normal and justified; the extreme increase of environmental awareness; the rise of concern with animal welfare, animal rights, and veganism or at least vegetarianism; the collapse of ideals of authoritarian leaders in organizations and the embracing of egalitarian organizational cultures; the increased resistance to war and the view of it as inherently barbaric and outdated; the vastly increased tendency to learn from religions and spiritual traditions other than one’s own; the rise of liberal, open-ended pedagogy where each person is expected to find their own path and learn critical thinking rather than parrot a fixed curriculum; the de-stigmatization of going to the therapist or otherwise having mental health issues; the shift away from indoor smoking and beer drinking during work hours; the much more solid traffic safety regulations that literally save thousands of lives; teen pregnancies down sharply; alcohol consumption down sharply; on it goes…

Well—so there is another word for it, after all: Cultural progress. Right?

So, which one is it, then? Are we evolving into a more refined and civilized culture, or is there widespread cultural decay?

Consider the following examples:

  • In the 1950s, the most action-packed scenes were to be found in black and white western films. The violence was not particularly graphic and consisted of little more than the occasional fistfight and someone raising their hand to the chest and falling over pretending to have been shot. Not much blood. Today there is no end to the gory details with massive amount of splattered blood, guts and brains and carefully choreographed gun- and martial arts fights. Torture and rape are no infrequent occurrences either.
    The people of the 50s would probably have been shocked and felt sick to their stomach were they to watch an action or horror movie from today. The people of the 21st century, on the other hand, tend to be appalled by the way Native Americans are portrayed as brutal savages and merely cannon fodder for the white male hero and the way in which women merely serve the role as someone for the hero to save in a in a typical western movie from the 50s.
  • Two generations ago, it didn’t get much wilder than Tarzan and Batman (in color, if you were lucky) comics if you were a 12-year old boy. Today, boys that age typically play ultra violent videogames about killing soldiers or zombies (or zombie soldiers!) with super photorealistic graphics. (The games of today look so realistic that they are often mistaken for real-life footage. Whether by mistake or design, images from video games are shown in TV-news again, and again).
    Yet, safety measures for children have increased extensively since the 1950s. Back in the day, children could buy fire works, cigarettes and Lawn Darts™ (which were practically small, potentially lethal throwing spears!). Today, few parents allow their children to ride a bike without a helmet—and that’s only if they live in a quiet rural area or a suburb without too much traffic.
  • If you were a young man coming of age in the 1950s, it’s likely that the most arousing images you could get your hand on was lingerie commercials or similar. Today, by the age of 14, most boys, and many girls too, have already been through Pornhub’s vast archives and acquainted themselves with everything from vanilla sex, to gang bangs, BDSM, and gagging.
    At the same time, contraception is widely available and today’s teens tend to be well informed when it comes to preventing STDs and unwanted pregnancies. Two generations ago, girls were much more likely to become pregnant out of ignorance and people were less likely to seek treatment for STDs out of shame.

And we can go on. You can even hear drug addicts talking nostalgically about the good old days before Fentanyl, how innocent the world felt when it was just pure heroin out there on the market. At the same time, drug addiction has never been less stigmatized, and designated areas for drug consumption have even been made available in many cities around the world with clean needles, nurses and other necessities.

On the one hand, things that were taken as self-evident just a brief few decades ago are today viewed as nothing short of medieval. On the other hand, things that were entirely unthinkable and viewed as excessively vulgar just a brief moment ago are today being touted as edgy and cool to very young audiences and participants.

Decay or progress? The answer to this conundrum is perhaps simpler than it seems.

But let us first put aside the two “dumb” answers to the question. One is the conservative (or reactionary) one: “It’s not progress at all! If it weren’t for all those anti-racists, feminists, and vegans, our culture would still maintain its moral fiber and common decency”. It’s a popular answer, of course, but it has very little merit. It’s well known, for instance, that the Bible Belt has the highest consumption of pornography in the Unites States, that the Catholic Church is a cesspool of debauchery, that gender inequality is linked to lower marital satisfaction, that higher empathy is linked to caring more about social justice and the environment, etc. So, no, it’s not that if we simply stopped all of those “progressive” developments from occurring, we would also have a more decent and respectable society.

The other dumb answer is to simply deny just how vulgar, cynical, weird, confusing, and out-rightly pornographic our society is indeed becoming. Despite the measures of quantitative progress (higher global GDP and so on), it is undeniably true that we are, globally, on a sharp downwards spiral in terms of mental health and that young people are hurting: The Mental State of the World Survey, spanning across 20 countries, recently revealed that in the age group 18–24, as much as 44% of the population are in the “clinical/at risk” category in terms of mental health—as compared to 6% for those 65 and older. Between these extremes, there is a steady downwards staircase: the younger the cohort, the more compromised their mental health. It’s the opposite of a stairway to heaven.

It’s not just me; when I was a 13-year-old in a middle class suburb, talk of knives and hard drugs were just not part of the mix. A cultural pornographization really has occurred, and it all but indisputably affects the mental health of the young.

What, then, is the better explanation? It’s that cultural evolution simultaneously drives forth two interrelated processes of transformation:

  • More civilized, universal, and non-violent values.
  • Innocence lost, a more penetrating and revealing gaze and imagination, including a more disenchanting and critical viewpoint.

Simply put, as society “advances”, people and their values become less barbaric, more universal and abstract, but also more XXX-rated, more pornographic in every (sexual an non-sexual) sense of the word. As such, even if society escapes the ecological dead-ends of modernity, we are headed both towards a cute and idyllic future of softer and more inclusive values (take the bike-path to the vegan café run by a now fully respected minority!), and towards a rawer and more cynical culture (sit down in the same café and discuss psychedelic deconstructions of reality, the inescapable unfairness of life, the profound meaninglessness of most jobs, and the rarity of relief of sexual ecstacy).

The social logic behind this is that the two cultural properties—universal values and a penetrating, revealing, critical gaze—are both generated by the same variable: the degree of mediation of society.

Exploding prevalence of solarpunk visions on the left; rising mainstreaming of BDSM on the right—two sides of the same coin?

By “the degree of mediation of society” I mean the sheer amount and variety of thoughts, messages, images, symbols, and other information that are being sent and received throughout society (in our case, planetary civilization).

Digital society produces more information in a few days than all of human history prior to the advent of the Internet. This means that there is always an immense abundance of information vying for attention—and to gain more attention, a meme must recombine what has hitherto been communicated in a manner that carries forth an element of surprise. You get simulacra of simulacra of simulacra, to speak with the terms of French philosopher Jean Baudrillard. If people have already said A, B, and C, you can make a whole career out of saying D. And so, everyone scrambles to figure out how to say what follows from A, B, and C. That propels a rapid and powerful cultural evolution towards universality (if you’ve said “free all slaves”, and the Dalai Lama says “all sentient beings”, I’ll add “free all non-human animal slaves”, and so forth)…

… and it produces pornographization (if ABBA was racy in the 1970s by wearing wide, colorful pants, popstars in the 1980s started showing more skin, until Rihanna, the idol of every little schoolgirl, starts singing about how BDSM excites her, and Billy Eilish finally declares that she, the musical and cultural child genius, is the bad guy, not those older creepy guys out there, Lana Del Rey singing nostalgic farewell hymns to an America who’s innocence is lost… all of which is of course matched with, well, unimaginable amounts of literal porn—i.e. more and more extreme images of all kinds, anything that stands out by being more explicit, more real, more raw, more revealing, from weird and degrading sex to social realist reality soaps). You even have a combination of the two tendencies in the kind of critical theory popularized by intellectuals like Slavoj Žižek, which penetrates the perversion and all-too-human patheticness of us all, manifested as capitalist society. And, of course, Žižek makes his own movies, all about revealing other movies. Increasingly revealingly detailed news and journalism do a similar thing to our people in power and positions of prestige. Behavioral science and the social sciences make short notice of the rest of us: we’re revealed in our all-but-dignified gore and grime.

The emperor is not only naked. He’s downright see-through. You can watch the emperor’s skeleton, his whole wardrobe, when he’s taking a dump, and so forth. It’s the meta-naked, X-rayed emperor, and everyone competes to be the pointing kid in H.C. Andersen’s iconic tale. Or that’s the point we’re heading towards. Surveillance capitalism or China’s social credit system are just extensions of this same tendency.

To remake the point as simply as possible: Our grand-grandmother was fairly barbaric, but also quite endearingly innocent, as compared to people today. She was all for beating children with a belt (or a slipper if in a good mood or she couldn’t find the belt), she warned us of the child-abducting gypsies, she thought everything in life was about getting more food, including the pet rabbit that she viewed as a piece of potential pâté and did everything in her power to fatten for the same reason. But her “sins” amounted to reading romance novels and fawning over a game show host in a nice suit. Her entertainment was the circus, literally.

And she was, despite having lived a tougher life, relatively mentally stable and emotionally healthier than most of us. She could be relied upon.

As society complexifies and shifts in “effective value meme” (we go from traditional values, to modern ones, to postmodern ones, and perhaps on to metamodern ones), we become more civilized, less violent, less bigoted, but also less innocent. Where does this leave the minds of younger generations?

The Best of Potentials—in the Worst of Worlds

“Not only are you always stuck as an observer to other people pushing the (pornographic) boundaries; you are at a far distance from all that truly matters, from all “real relevance”.”

I have long maintained that the “metamodern mind” is one that marries irony to sincerity, in so-called “sincere irony”. Hence, the metamodern mind is one that labors to straddle the paradox of 1) wide-eyed and uncompromising belief in idealism, and 2) “innocence lost”, coexisting in one culture, in one social network, in one person, in one situation.

This splitting-of-the-mind-into-two-increasingly-mutually-distant-realities could, in a perfect world, offer the ultimate dialectic for human growth. I say “dialectic” because one side would drive the other: the progress of civilized and ethically considerate behavior would allow for greater playfulness of the carnal and “Freudian” sides of existence (while sanitizing our shared everyday life to the extent that people would long increasingly for transgression and the raw); the play with further spiraling revelations, critiques, and perversions would allow for a solid psychological basis of a hyper-civilized society by means of deep embodiment and catharsis as well as increased transparency, inescapably radical honesty, and the mutually applicable self-knowledge that grows from recognizing the vulnerabilities of our naked and darker selves.

Hence, if considered under ideal bio-socio-psychological conditions, there could hardly be a better dynamic (or dialectic) for spurring the growth, maturity, and even reliability of the human spirit and thus of harmonious human relations. Think about it: From one side, our minds are always pushed to critique our current assumptions, always towards more encompassing and complex perspectives on life—towards “higher”, more universally valid values. From the other side, we are ever exposed to something that challenges and pushes us; pushes our buttons, calls forth our fascination or disgust, and lets us get in touch with our ever-present carnal, politically incorrect, and “Freudian” psychological undergrounds. Again, this can lead to sex positivity (or some more sophisticated life-affirming form of eroticism), to the release of tensions and taboos, to the breaking of prejudice, to emotional catharsis or healing, to self-knowledge, to embodiment of emotions, to spiritual exploration. Together the twain are braided into a way of life that is neither cruel nor lackluster.

Now, that’s in an ideal case scenario. The world we know, last I checked, is not perfect.

What happens instead is that children, and youths, and young adults, and even future-shocked older generations, all land into the brave new digital world like a face on concrete. The sight is not a pretty one.

People, often those with little or no education, fall into so-called online “rabbit holes” and end up believing the Earth is flat, that the American Democratic Party is run by pedophile, child-sacrificing Satanists and other absurd conspiracy theories. Young disillusioned Muslim men from Western Europe become radicalized on online fora and end up joining ISIS—and their white and equally disillusioned counterparts end up joining various far-right terrorist organizations, or at the very least gloat at harm to women in incel clubs. And older people end up obsessing about immigrants, reading article after article about how awful the world has become, spending countless hours arguing with strangers on Facebook instead of doing something nice with their grandchildren. And we have loads of young women obsessing about all the perfect images on Instagram and starving themselves to live up to the ultrathin ideals of the supermodel. And then there are the boys, lost to online porn and video game addictions, stunting their physical and emotional development. There are even the so-called “iPad babies” who get withdrawal symptoms when screens are taken away. And so on, and so on.

It’s much like with the Industrial Revolution. When Britain as the first country in the world industrialized, it didn’t have any countermeasures to combat the many ills of industrialization such as hazardous work conditions, social exploitation, child labor, unhygienic living conditions etc. The result was a significant drop in average life span and severe social unrest for the first quarter century of the Industrial Revolution. When France, Germany and the rest of Europe were to industrialize, following the British example, they wisely put measures in place to counter many of the unforeseen negative consequences that had been observed in Britain. The difference with the Digital Revolution today, however, is that it’s a global phenomenon hitting all parts of the world with the same impact at once. We don’t know which countermeasures to put in place before it’s already to late.

The mechanism that drives the ubiquitous decay of mental health as society “progresses” is thus fairly easy to explain, or at least to offer a strong hypothesis for. On the one hand, young and immature minds are simply scandalized and over-heated by stark, revealing imagery and language. Young people are misinformed, hyper-stimulated, addicted, obsessed, self-disgusted by “too much too soon”—and yet, very understandably, they cannot keep themselves away. Indeed, to impress their teenage peers, they need to appear to be casually familiar with stark and weird images and ideas. This, of course, distorts the view of adulthood and sexual relations, among other things. But most of all, it simply overloads the still-developing psychology of the young minds of our age. It’s traumatizing for eleven-year-olds to watch a woman being drugged and sexually abused in a pornographic movie. It does not bring about “growth”; it simply interrupts the innocent gaze of the child, landing him/her in a kind of “adult mind” but one which still lacks all of the emotional, intellectual, and practical capacities of adulthood. The child is stuck in a limbo, in a time between worlds; a place of utter loneliness and helplessness. And from there on, it becomes easy for digital predators—commercial, sexual, or cult-like ones—to target them.

We needn’t consider the other age categories; suffice to say that ours is a planetary society with the hitherto greatest potentials for inner growth, and yet with perhaps the worst conditions for it.

And then add the other factor: the universalization of values—the increasing abstraction of what is ethically considered, included, coordinated within human action. If the child is stunted in her inner growth due to the traumas of an over-explicit, over-revealing, hyper-pornographic, media-saturated hyperreality, how can she then muster the genuine emotional capacities to match such lofty ideals as acceptance of peoples of all creeds and cultures, the caring for the wretched in distant lands, the caring for weird people and the mentally disabled, for non-human animals, for environmental and ecological entities, future generations, and for inner development of love and compassion?

Just as she/he is over-exposed to downright debauchery, the child of today is equally exposed to an ethics too high-minded, abstract, and confusing for her/his developmental psychology to fathom and genuinely embody. At least this will be the tragic case for the vast majority of children growing up today: They will oscillate between trying to identify with these higher values and force themselves to feel and to think what is beyond their cognitive scope and emotional capacity, often pretending to feel, or posturing to seem good enough—and rebelling against these same values in a reactionary rage that will appear to strike as lightning from clear-blue heavens. Trouble in paradise is always double the trouble.

This dynamic feeds the very same sense of helplessness. Not only are you always stuck as an observer to other people pushing the (pornographic) boundaries; you are at a far distance from all that truly matters, from all “real relevance”. You feel insignificant. As I said, this is the opposite of a stairway to heaven.

Squeezed from both sides, from darkness and light alike, the young mind deteriorates on a planetary and civilizational scale—as we have seen in the statistics, and as we see in the lives around us. If we deign to look, we can see it within ourselves, too.

To Counteract Madness, Don’t Fight It—Follow It!

“The farther we slide into a “hyperreal” and mediated society, the greater our need to grow the capacities for introspection, self-awareness, and connection to our genuine emotions.”

The answer, then, is to help people—across generations, but especially among the young—to develop a more “metamodern” mind. This is a psychology that is differently structured than the modern “individual self”.

Ladies and gents, esteemed non-binaries; heroes and anti-heroes—if it is true that we have cornered ourselves into a cultural spiral where innocence is lost, I call upon you to save the innocence of the world! Before it is too late. Because only that innocence can, in turn, save the world.

We are right to lose the childlike political “innocence” that marks the liberal mainstream mind: “As long as I didn’t make a bad political decision, I’m not to blame, I’m not responsible”. If you have read my book The Listening Society, you may remember my death sentence to the so-called liberal innocent. We must all grow up to feel responsible for society-as-a-whole, yes. But the innocence of the child, and of the child within each of us, must be kept out of harm’s way: The capacity to feel, to care, to learn, to grow, to play, to love.

How, then, can the metamodern mind—and its accompanying embodiment and emotional development—be cultivated within the population? How can innocence be saved so that it can dance through the dialectic between the darkness and light of life that was outlined above?

The first answer is that clarifying this diagnosis of our time is crucial, so that we may together invent a thousand answers. We need to rethink the role of digital media, of digital identity and nudging, of incentive structures, of informational architectures, of democratized algorithms, of user interfaces, of market regulations, of education and schooling, of an expansion of individual rights to “dividual rights” and so forth. And, of course, we need to cultivate institutions of governance and self-organization that are at all capable of grasping such issues—which today, alas, do no exist.

The second answer, and perhaps the more profound one, is that we must invest in what I have termed “the listening society”. We must have a society that matches the psychological pressures of hyperreality and the equal inner pressure that results from the extension of universal ethics with structures that support our capacity to reach inwards, to self-observe, to connect to the child within, and to listen to that child in the midst of the noise of so many, so seductive distractions.

In brief, we must cultivate our shared capacity for mental health, for emotional nourishment, and for spiritual attainment. This often means selecting a wide range of very simple practices of self-development and making certain that the opportunities and cues to practice them are as ubiquitous as the distractions.

Said otherwise, I suggest that we update the dialect between:

  • Civilizational Progress and
  • Innocence Lost,

with…

  • Support of Inner Growth.

The farther we slide into a “hyperreal” and mediated society, the greater our need to grow the capacities for introspection, self-awareness, and connection to our genuine emotions. If and when we connect to our primordial innocence, the better we can manage the onslaught of stark images and messages, and the better we can find an embodied grounding for our increasingly abstract, universal, and complex values and ideals. This inner nourishment is, I have come to believe, the missing piece of this puzzle. Thus, it is also the way to reverse the trend towards rising levels of anxiety experienced around the world.

Our civilization is driving towards madness—and it’s a fair guess that, soon enough, madness will be driving civilization. That drive will be nasty, brutish, and short.

To avoid this trajectory, we must follow where madness takes us—into the depths of our interconnected psyches. We must cultivate the institutions capable of supporting us so that we neither fall into denial of our darker realities, nor into blindness of our higher ethical potentials—institutions that pace that development in lockstep with our development as human beings.

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.

Advanced Course on Metamodernism Starting April 10

There are still four tickets left for the advanced course on metamodernism starting April 10. The course is an intense deep-dive reserved for just 12 participants interested in a more intimate experience with Emil Ejner Friis as your teacher. This will be the last time Emil does this course this year. Here’s what he has to offer:

This course is limited to 12 participants ready for a deep-dive into metamodernism, the latest emerging grand narrative of our time. It’s designed for those who’re already somewhat familiar with metamodernism, including the work of Hanzi Freinacht. References will be made to Hanzi’s books, so it’s good to already have them available. This is no requirement, however.

Everyone will have two private 45-minute sessions with Emil, one before the first group session so as to figure out where you are and what you’re interested in, and one after the last group session to wrap up. Additionally, there will be abundant opportunities to ask Emil questions during the sessions. Although the specifics of this course will be tailored to the individual participants and where the discussions take us during the six-week process, it’s guaranteed to go into depth with the following topics:

Hanzi Freinacht’s The Listening Society & Nordic Ideology

  • Too long didn’t read? No problem, Emil got you covered.
  • What people usually get wrong after having read Hanzi’s books.
  • Why Nordic Ideology is a far more important and original book than The Listening Society.

What the Metamodern Stage of Consciousness Entails

  • Who’s metamodern and who isn’t?
  • What the metamodern mind can do that the postmodern cannot.
  • What are metamodern values?
  • The common error of not integrating postmodernism and the problems with regressive metamodernism.

What the Metamodern Stage of Cultural and Societal Development Entails

  • Game Change, how to avoid the traps of Game Acceptance and Game Denial.
  • How to predict the future(s): Attractors Points and how they determine the winners and losers of history.
  • Who will rule the future: The metamodern aristocracy and the role of hackers, hipsters and hippies (and hermetics, the “fourth H”, not mentioned in any of Hanzi’s books).
  • The emerging emotional regime of our times, The Sklavenmoral-regime, and how it will try to hold us back.
  • The increasing intimacy of control: Why we must embrace “creepy politics” to save the world (and how to avoid it actually getting creepy).

Hanzi Freinacht’s Upcoming Book 6 Hidden Patterns of History

  • What is a metameme? And how it differs from effective value-meme.
  • The difference between “hard” and “soft” metamemes. What Faustianism and Modernism have in common, and what Postfaustianism and Postmodernism have in common.
  • Art is always first! How art is always the first place to look in order to spot a new emerging metameme.
  • Why ethics is always last.
  • Development is tilted! The reason why most people can’t see historical development clearly.

Hanzi Freinacht’s Upcoming Book Outcompeting Capitalism

  • Why you cannot abolish capitalism (and why it’s stupid to try).
  • What capitalism really is (most people do not properly understand what capitalism is).
  • The forces that eventually (unless humanity kills itself beforehand) will outcompete and submit capitalism to a new logic.
  • The new emerging class society.
  • Why metamodernism must be postcapitalist.

Where is it all heading? What is the future of humanity?

  • At the end of this course we will wrap up what we have learned and discuss the current trajectory of the world.
  • Your hypothesis for future trajectories will be discussed and analyzed, if you wish.

This is a unique chance to get access to unpublished material and theory that will only be made widely accessible to the public once the next Hanzi books are released.

Emil will adapt the course and its contents to the individual participants. In order to figure out what the individual participants are interested in learning and what they already know, the course will begin with a personal one-on-one conversation with each participant of the duration of 45 minutes. Similarly, every participant will be offered a private 45 minute one-on-one with Emil at the end of the course to wrap up and answer questions.

The course thus contains:

  • 6 x 2½ hour long online session in a group of twelve participants
  • 2 x 45 minutes private session with Emil
  • Access to unpublished theory not found anywhere else (please don’t redistribute)

The main sessions will be held in English, personal conversations will be available in English, German, Danish or Swedish.

About your Facilitator

 

Emil Ejner Friis (b. 1981) is a theory artist and a teacher of metamodernism, he is a co-founder of Metamoderna and one of the writers behind Hanzi Freinacht. He has spent the last ten years trying to figure out how to create a listening society, a kinder and more developed society that deeply cares for the happiness and emotional needs of every citizen.

He has tried and failed at creating a metamodern political party, he has tried and failed at creating a metamodern IT-company, and he has just plainly failed at ever finishing his not so metamodern university studies by being drawn to all kinds of adventures to try and save the world instead.

When he’s not writing and theorizing from his safehouse in Berlin, he’s conspiring with other metamodernly inclined hackers, hipsters and hippies to outcompete modern society. To pay the rent he sells words, all the best words.

Emil is a skilled and experienced speaker and has a reputation of being quite entertaining and good at making complex ideas easier to digest.

You can follow Emil on his facebook profile here.

Here’s a link to the tickets: https://dandelion.earth/events/6160255e02cacc000c8e5fa4

Is Protopia a Classless Society?

In times of war, issues of ethnic and national identity overshadow all considerations of class. We are thereby forgetting a crucial question: Which class relations should we aspire towards?

[Note: As the war in Ukraine broke out, I was in the process of writing a series of weekly articles that explore visions of societal development beyond the liberal capitalist democracies. I am now continuing that thread, no disrespect meant to the realities of the war and its victims.]

Protopia and the Metamodern View of Class

Can class society and its inequalities, its mechanisms of “stratification”, truly be transcended — or is the vision of the classless society a distraction that puts us at odds with social reality, ultimately always leading to oppression?

If “Protopia”, as previously discussed, is “the conceptual device that gathers the multiplicity of utopian dreams into coherent and actionable frameworks for increasing the self-proving cycles of society” — where does the Protopian mind reasonably stand on the issue of class? Is the classless society more than a utopian dream, more than a potentially dangerous distraction to be discarded? Is Protopia “a classless society”? Or does it, with liberalism, tolerate class distinctions that arise over time?

Maybe the last few questions contain too much baggage of the Modern world and its structures of political thought. Perhaps the question is not one of “class against class”, nor “class or nationality”, nor even “are class differences justified” — but, rather:

  • How can class relations be optimized for human thriving?

The question sounds heretical, even to their own writer. It sounds callous, even cruel, and yet strangely naïve at the same time.

To the Modern mind, class was either the fundamental source of ills in society (socialism), a necessary evil (liberalism), or even a strange boon as differences of wealth and power seem necessary for the flowering of arts, palaces, cathedrals, and other aesthetic wonders of civilization (conservatism: we go to the Louvre and Versailles for beauty, not to a grey social-democratic Scandinavian suburb, right?). In more recent and extreme versions, class has been viewed as the sole, fundamental identity of any group (communism), as a dangerous and illusory distraction from our “true” belonging to nations/race/caste (fascism), or, with intersectionality, as one dimension within a larger matrix of unjustifiable inequalities, thus often a category oppressing and silencing demands for social justice between genders, ethnicities, and so forth.

Still, let us linger on this seemingly heretical question for the duration of this article. I have increasingly come to view it as the properly updated question of class — the “metamodern” version of the question of class.

In brief, I should like to first pick apart the very concept of “class” as we habitually approach it, and then reexamine how it can be put back together in a way that brings a new, wider meaning to the term; one that allows for greater agency in the face of inequalities, offering aspirational venues for desirable future societies.

Going Beyond the Current Left

“Protopian societies should actively and deliberately cultivate institutions (“collective habits”) that cut through all forms of inequality and mitigate them at the level of their root causes.”

Since the days of real communist experiments, the ideal of the classless society has smacked of hypocrisy and oppressive top-down social engineering. But it is a dream that ever beckons the Left, that always highlights the absurdities and ethical failures of everyday life, that helps us to ask the simple, naïve questions of why. Why do some people clean the toilets of others for small fractions of their incomes? Why are there beggars and homeless people? Why are there billionaires with unreasonable levels of influence and status? Why are glamorous restaurants and hotels catering to the few while so many others suffer on their very doorsteps? It firmly guides our gaze towards recognizing the injustice of the imbalance between Global North and Global South, between the 10% and the 90%, the 1% and the 99%, not to mention the 99.9 vs. 0.1, and onwards to yet more ghastly revealing fractions of wealth distribution decimals.

At the same time, this dream has arguably (almost certainly) led people to try to force social dynamics upon societies that in practice have arguably hurt more people than they have helped. Communist societies achieved relative levels of socio-economic equality, but only by curtailing freedoms and trampling human rights — often with significant murder rates and death tolls.

The most common response on the Left to this history (and the “black book of communism”) is to challenge the narrative that classlessness has truly been tried but failed. Communism was an oppressive deviation, we are told, of the correct vision of a democratic socialism, where the people together can decide what to produce, how to work, and how to distribute the spoils. “Socialism has never been tried” is a lead theme here. And, it is claimed, the viable socialist experiments have all been thwarted and sabotaged by malicious capitalist powers. True socialism, the argument goes, remains a real potential, and it is yet to be disproven as credible. Beautiful little sparks of true socialist society have flickered past but quickly been extinguished by all those who were scared to death by the prospect of lost privilege and power.

For many reasons that fall outside of the scope of this article, I do not find this Left narrative to be a plausible one. I believe that the Left is indeed still enthralled by a Modernist Utopia, as I defined the term here. I count myself among the people who feel that socialism, as it was conceived by 19th and 20th-century intellectuals, has inherent analytical flaws and suffers from what I call “game denial”. But there are, of course, fruitful currents of socialist thought and practice — some of which still merit further experimentation. The most compelling reincarnation of socialist thought today arguably revolves around “the commons” and “commoning” — issues that deserve their own article to be understood in the context of metamodernism and Protopia, but which I refrain from discussing here.

The fact that I view socialist romantics as misguided does not mean that I do not share their general concern with what sociologist Richard Sennett called “the hidden injuries of class”. Human relations, when mediated through and structured by excessive socio-economic class differences, are degrading to the human spirit and harmful to our psychological development. The research here is rather unanimous. Class relations foster more narrowly self-serving motives, distracting us from truly “wise” endeavors, while distorting our understanding of one another in manners that perpetuate the unjust treatment of so many. Income inequality is the greatest predictor of violence within societies. Simply put, class inequality is one of the great tragedies of life. As such, it deserves our attention and ethical engagement. Nothing about the rejection of socialist dreams and infatuations take anything away from that realization.

What, then, can be a way to approach the issue of class differences in a more sober, multiplistic, incremental, and “Protopian” view of society? How can this tragedy be addressed, its wounds healed, and more dignified human relationships be established?

I’d like to suggest three shifts of perspective in relation to how the category of “class” is understood. The purpose of this is to increase our shared capacity for cultivating greater equality, equivalence, and (as I shall discuss) equanimity in society — targeting the very roots of class society in an ever changing environment.

Hence, I hold that Protopian societies should actively and deliberately cultivate institutions (“collective habits”) that cut through all forms of inequality and mitigate them at the level of their root causes.

Let’s go through the three shifts of perspective.

Shift 1: View Class as Multidimensional (but beyond Intersectionality)

“So, intersectionality does begin to coordinate class relation with other vectors of inequality, yes, but it does not sufficiently get at the heart of how class inequalities reproduce and play out.”

Over the last few decades, many observers and critics have veered towards an “intersectional” view of inequality: class is one out of several orders of structural inequality (or “stratification”, a term that denotes society’s tendency to become layered into higher and lower strata). Thus a fuller analysis, the intersectional analysts argue, should include race/ethnicity, gender/sexuality, functionality, discrimination against the neuro-atypical (ADHD and so on), postcolonialist distortions of social reality, even age group differences, perhaps adding other dimensions as needed. While each of these structures of inequality follow their own respective social logic (racism, sexism, and so on) and cannot be reduced to one another (you cannot “explain away” all racism with class differences, etc.) — they all interact. They “cut through” or intersect one another, creating a meshwork of inequality, hence the term, intersectionality. The biases present in language use, in popular culture, in norms of everyday life, in the labor market, in the judicial systems, all contribute to skewing the games of life in unfair and ethically unjustifiable manners — reproducing the stigma of underprivileged groups along with the privileges of the powerful. Related concepts are the Marxist movement philosophers Hardt and Negri’s “multitude” and “assemblage”: justice movements around the world are different but have significant overlaps — and their vast multitude needs to form a self-organizing assemblage, i.e. a complex meshwork where the many movements cooperate to achieve their goals, despite their differences.

While I do share this viewpoint to a significant degree, and I do concede that further work — both from activists and scholars— is always needed to push the envelope on social justice across its many dimensions, I also feel that the intersectionality framework is ultimately insufficient to fully capture the mechanisms at work in the reproduction of inequality. More specifically, even with greater racial, gender, and other forms of justice, life would still be dismally unfair: There is always another dimension along which some are empowered and others humiliated and undermined. The sources of inequality are legion.

It is also the case, as liberal and conservative critics of the radical tradition (that intersectionality stems from) have never been late to point out, that these frameworks always rely upon making the differences between categories of people (women and men, white and black, and so on) the focus of attention and contention. This can inadvertently charge such boundaries with yet greater antagonism and even lead to counter-reactions and misunderstandings. After all, if a person — or group of people — are accused of being racist or of misusing their positions of power, there is always the risk of this accusation being practically unactionable, diffuse, or even downright false. The accusations can be hard to understand or respond to, and thus breed frustration and resentment. In my earlier ethnographic work with police officers, I could quite clearly see that police officers — both of majority and minority ethnicities and genders — simply had no idea what to do with the sociological revelations of the discrimination that they indisputably all partook in, structurally speaking. The police officers thus shielded themselves by the enactment of an ironic or humorous distancing from what they felt was the “political correctness” of a general public they felt could not understand their unique position in society.

I don’t find this liberal/conservative response to intersectionality to be conclusive. For one, it fails to account for the very real grievances social justice theories and movements seek to address (while also failing to account for the epistemological grounds for why universities generally gravitate towards critical theory of different brands in the first place). Most importantly, the liberal/conservative mainstream criticism fails to offer a reasonable alternative for mitigating the many injustices that so many people keep experiencing in their own lives. It’s almost as if the liberal and conservative simply ask, politely or not, all of those uppity social justice proponents to shut up and sit down. Naturally, this also breeds antagonism, as the very real experiences and grievances of vast swathes of the population are not validated. If intersectionality sometimes fails in its sociological perspective-taking (it’s dismally poor at accounting for the life-worlds of designated “powerful” groups), its critics are certainly guilty of a corresponding mistake: They don’t see how their resistance to intersectionality invalidates the starkly felt grievances of many activists of social justice and it appears to shut the door shut to a more dignified and fair treatment. The proponents of intersectionality feel they are being deprived of their one chance of reasserting their dignity.

Naturally, this response further radicalizes social justice activists and scholars, which further antagonizes their detractors, and — voilà, culture wars spiral to the point of rioters barging through the front doors of the Capitol Building.

So, intersectionality does begin to coordinate class relation with other vectors of inequality, yes, but it does not sufficiently get at the heart of how class inequalities reproduce and play out. In crude sociological terms, one could say that intersectionality, through its focus on exceedingly wide and complex variables like race and sexual identity, offers a fairly limited understanding of the actual mechanisms of inequality — class included. For certain, Black people make less money than White people—but what does that mean? What is the chain of events or mechanisms that reproduce that inequality? Here, seeing how wealth or poverty (indeed, “class” in a wider sense) has many meanings, each with their own dynamics, is crucial. It is insufficient to study categories of people — we must also study the categories of wealth and poverty.

Rather than dismissing the intersectionalist perspective, I’d like to expand upon it by offering a complementary framework (as, in parallel, I have attempted to do on multiculturalism in another article).

I have previously suggested that inequality should be viewed across the distribution of at least six forms of capital that cut across all of the dimensions of intersectionality, but which still refocus on a widely and holistically defined notion of “class” as a kind of nexus for inequalities:

  1. Economic inequality
  2. Social inequality
  3. Physiological inequality
  4. Emotional inequality
  5. Ecological inequality, and
  6. Informational inequality

All of these vectors of inequality naturally have repercussions across the categories studied through intersectionality (health follows socio-economic class, physiological scars mark even the DNA of the downtrodden over generations, inhaled pollution is unequally distributed between White and Black US citizens, exposure to low-quality digital screen time is higher among Black and Latino children, and so forth).

Yet, just as importantly: If you consider all of these six dimensions, you gain a more holistic view of the reproduction of class relations in society. Think about it: If you could redistribute wealth to address economic inequality, but social inequalities (like status, networks, trust, and number of reliable friends) persist along with physiological, emotional, ecological, and informational ones — will not very real power and status differentials resurface again and again with all the tenacity of a whack-a-mole game? Will not the healthier, better connected, emotionally more nourished people with access to better environments and exposure to higher-quality information very easily reassert their dominance? Will not class reassert itself, also economically— along with structures of gender, race, and so forth?

Hence, a holistic view of class — indeed, an effective view of class — must work across these six vectors (or some corresponding multi-vector model). A Protopian society must cultivate institutions that carry forth strategies that counteract the mechanisms that perpetuate each of these forms of inequality. That would, to a significant extent, lead to a lessened emphasis on the categories of intersectionality, the “categories of people”. Rather, we would get one composite variable that we might term “deep class” — the class relation that matters the most in terms of how your life plays out.

Simply put, rather than focusing primarily on the “categories of people” in intersectionality, my suggestion is that Protopian societies should focus on the active mitigation of “deep class”-inequalities.

Shift 2: Know that Class Configurations Evolve with the Economic System

“Class exists. Class is real. Class is hard, material social reality. But it is just more mosaic than we have been accustomed to think of it.”

Many observers, Left and Right, have lamented the collapse of socio-economic class as the focal point of party politics in liberal (capitalist) democracies over the last few decades. Instead, issues of identity (across the categories studied under intersectionality) have increasingly taken a front seat. Nothing is more common than this complaint — while still being viewed a unique and incisive “back to basics” insight.

But none of the lamenters seem very keen on explaining why this major shift has occurred.

The explanation should be rather simple: Class relations of industrial capitalist society (working class, and so on), around which parties were formed, have come to less accurately describe the real life experience of people. And so, taking Sweden as an example, you have a higher percentage of low-income voters among the conservative Christian Democrats than among the socialist Left Party voters. Starker contrasts instead become visible between male and female, immigrant and non-immigrant voters, age groups, and so forth. Parties are formed around these categories more than around income levels. Cultural categories — or simply categories other than socio-economic class — have become the strongest axes of political organization.

This new state of affairs, in turn, can only be explained by a corresponding shift in class structure itself. Yes, income distributions certainly still exist. But they have become more complexly layered and intermixed. A person such as myself — a rogue scholar — oscillates between rags and riches, status and insignificance, precarious life conditions and advising people in big international institutions. So class, in an information society, becomes redistributed within a person’s life, over time, across multiple arenas. The monolith of class becomes fractured (paralleling, to a great extent, Andy Warhol’s proverbial 15 minutes of fame — he just forgot to add the equally ubiquitous “15 minutes of shame”).

And that’s just on the individual level: You have increasing difficulties to pin down the “class” of a family network, too. One family can include one teacher, two medical doctors, one nurse, one mailman, one in the upper echelons of international finance, one on disability pension, and one unemployed but highly intellectual type. Is it a middle class family? Will they have middle class values and vote middle class? Will they be having middle class conversations with one another about comparable metrics of success? Add to the mix that the same family can have different nationalities and that they have moved to different parts of the world where they compare differently to others in their environment. While there may be socio-economically discernable patterns to this family, it’s not a far stretch to guess that they won’t be voting in unison, as a certain “class”. it will even be difficult for them to gauge how to vote in the interest of their whole family network.

To complicate things, in societies of wide middle classes, people will even start to compete for the title of “working class” to appear more underdog, unique, and self-made — more deserving. This a funny reversal of sociologist Pierre Bourdieu’s observation in 1960’s France, that people use taste in consumption as a mode of “distinction” in class terms: people start performing realness, authenticity, simplicity in relief to the background of an imagined, large, colorless, and privileged middle class. People start vying for attractive class identities that aren’t always “upwards”.

I can partake in such self-definitions myself: Most people would probably view me as middle class, white, male, academic—but I’ve hardly ever had a job, I was born in a rough crime-ridden neighborhood with many immigrants, my family consists of people with different ethnic identities, many of which are working typical working class jobs, while many of my friends and much of my network belongs to “the creative class” and upper classes… I could go on. The point is: I will often feel more inclined to find ways of defining myself as something other than middle class.

Class exists. Class is real. Class is hard, material social reality. But it is just more mosaic than we have been accustomed to think of it. Like a piece of glass, it was shattered into a thousand shards which are then reassembled in a kaleidoscopic manner. This observation takes nothing away from the factual reality of increasing concentrations of wealth under information capitalism. Sharpened inequalities of wealth does not translate to clearer and more relevant distinctions and identities of class. These two realities easily coexist.

Rather than complaining that people have become inexplicably enthralled by “identity politics”, the productive response to this new reality would arguably be to understand it and to analyze which struggles and fault lines are now appearing in society. With the more holistic view of class outlined above, we can fairly easily resolve some of the conundrums that have haunted the public debate over recent years. For instance, are Trump voters “privileged” or not? In strictly economic terms, they are comparatively well-to-do on average, but in terms of “total capital” across the different vectors, they are falling behind other groups — which they experience as a loss of dignity in society. That’s arguably where much of their collective frustrations are coming from.

In other words, as Protopian societies will not be like the Modern mainstream, industrial, capitalist ones; they will not have the same configuration of meaningful class categories. I have formerly suggested the following table of evolving class relations:

We will refrain from discussing this table in detail, but let us note some of the features it suggests.

Societies have evolved through different forms of class logics. There’s not one logic that rules them all, because the main ways in which people trade, cooperate, and compete have evolved with technology and thus with the fabric of the economy. Hence the games of life have changed — but these games have never been eradicated.

Today we are barely finding our feet in the image- and sound saturated society of mass media — and thus, the mass-mediated image: think of Marilyn Monroe and we all see her before our inner eye; think of Charlemagne and the image is much vaguer. This is because we have all seen recorded and curated images of the construction “Marilyn Monroe”. After only a few generations of acclimatization to this new (Postmodern) world — we are now crash-landing into the internet society. Here, a new class structure begins to emerge, coexisting with earlier ones, but rapidly growing in significance. In this digital economy, one’s position within the flows of information and technologically mediated attention, of access to cultural capital, and of inequalities of emotional energy, begin to structure who is privileged and who isn’t.

As such, you begin to see what Kevin Kelly termed the rise of “netocrats” — the class of those who are made most powerful by advent of the internet. As such, you see a new axis of class relations, which in turn begins to structure other class relations. The underprivileged “consumtariat” are those who get stuck in “onlooker roles”, whose attention is guided and exploited by others, not least through what Shosana Zuboff termed “surveillance capitalism”. The new masters guide the attentions, the desires, the wills, even the inner worlds of the exploited. The exploited have their autonomy hijacked by attention-grabbing manipulation, by online addictions, by non-productive gaming, by political manipulation, and online pornography of sexualized or consumerized kinds. As such, the consumtariat are victimized by their very own participation in conspiracy theories and pseudo-scientific trends. One could hold that this constitutes a novel form of the Marxist notion of “false consciousness”: different kinds of pseudo-participation, of clicktivism, of depleted creative energy. They are stuck with low-quality information and low levels of attention control. (The political sociologist Brent Cooper’s Meta-Marxism seeks to answer to some of this viscous dynamic).

There is yet to emerge a good term for the “middle class” position in this new digital game of life. But we can see fairly clearly what the features of such an “informational middle class” might be: a level of knowledge about issues of integrity and privacy, of resistance to attention manipulation, and the resources to act to establish greater control of the technologically mediated interfaces to the world. This requires, most often, a certain level of education, better informed networks, and a capacity to create content that would entice and interest others. Much like the former systems of class, its stability largely relies on the size and strength of this middle class.

This is a different game — one that is thus far only very partially and provisionally represented in political self-organization. Under emergent metamodernity, the netocrats have had the first-mover initiative for a significant period of time, and have thus strongly established their position as masters not only of attention and information, but also of financial wealth. A structure of class struggle that stretches across the co-existing modern, postmodern, and metamodern economic realities is yet to be meaningfully established. As such, our political systems of representation falter and produce wide swathes of discontent demographics — fueling reaction, culture wars, and downright paranoia.

A Protopian society would have democratic institutions in place that do not conclusively remove these class differentials, but offers frameworks within which fruitful political organization becomes actionable while the awareness of the relevant class relations becomes established. Because these class relations are of another and more complex nature than those of industrial society, they will require more deliberative forms of democracy and networked governance.

The issue, then, is not to efface these class structures, but to create the frameworks of governance that would give the emergent classes sufficient self-awareness and capacity to self-organize for them to have a fighting chance of defending their interests. In the current state of the world, sadly, the netocrats have more or less free rain as their class-categorical counterparts are unable to defend themselves.

Shift 3: Evolve the Inner Dimensions of Class (along with Material Inequalities)

“A Protopian society should thus include mechanisms that soften the blows of inequality-as-it-is-felt-and-experienced, or even inequality-as-it-is-socially-constructed.”

To date, the only truly classless societies appear to be the ones that lack a significant accumulation of wealth and resources over time. Many (but not all!) hunter-gatherer societies tend to be fiercely egalitarian, with norms of resource sharing deeply engrained. Interestingly, experiments have shown, members of such societies tend to actually share less of their resources if they are finally granted the chance to eat a whole cake by themselves: it’s just that there is such a strong social pressure to share that they rarely get the chance to. As such, they keep the tendency to accumulate wealth in check — and thus benefit from having very low levels of inequality.

David Wengrow and David Graeber have shown in their recent book, The Dawn of Everything, that societies across history and the world have had many exceptions to the class structures and inequalities we today have come to take for granted. This echoes Frederic Jameson’s saying that “It is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism” (or, Ursula Le Guin’s famous quote to similar effect). The two Davids hold that much of the class inequalities of our day and age ultimately come down to a lack of sociological imagination: that we become too enthralled by our own narratives, ways of life, and excuses for society’s injustices to fruitfully challenge the status quo.

While I share in the Davids’ sentiment at a general level, I believe there is more to the dynamics behind class structures than a lack of sociological imagination. The question is, much as the Marxists held in their time, to understand the dynamics of stratification and class, and then to empower people to counteract the ills of these dynamics as effectively as possible.

The crucial aspect of this is to understand that class relations do not only play out economically and materially, but also psychologically, socially, and culturally. For instance: What does it mean to be “unemployed”? How will people conceive of this status; how will they rate themselves and one another according to the category of un/employment?

By widening the viable identities through which people can project a desirable “presentation of self in everyday life” (a term from sociologist Erving Goffman), the “social damage” of being defined as “unemployed” can be reduced. Simply put, if we have less disdain of the unemployed, we may end up enriching society immensely — empowering wide swathes of the population in the process. A citizenship and identity that include not only our role as an economic contributor could be established with a shift of norms in society: You are not just your job, “a banker”, but equally a responsible consumer, a participant in public discourse, a resource to your local civil society, and a reliable family member or romantic partner. Professional identity can be put in its proper place, dethroned from its identity-hegemony.

Here, we are moving towards deeper forms of “equity”. We are looking at equality not only “from the outside” (as a “social fact”) but also “from the inside out” (as an experience, as a psychological reality, phenomenologically). Whereas this “inner perspective” cannot replace the external, material one, it can and should certainly complement it.

A Protopian society should thus include mechanisms that soften the blows of inequality-as-it-is-felt-and-experienced, or even inequality-as-it-is-socially-constructed. The metamodern view of class holds that our previous notions of class have suffered from an “inner dimensions blindness”, which has limited our shared capacity to mitigate its harms as well as its mechanisms of reproduction.

This view holds that there is a progression of how deeply we analyze and respond to inequalities, previously discussed here:

  • from equality, which is the struggle to reduce material inequalities across multiple vectors,
  • to equivalence, which fosters a sense of felt and embodied sense of being a dignified member of society and viewing others with the same respect,
  • to equanimity, which mirrors the quality of inner acceptance of ourselves, one another, and our inevitable differences of capacities, in effect reducing our very propensity to identify with arbitrary dominator hierarchies.

Simply stated, from the metamodernist perspective, it is insufficient to focus solely on material inequalities, as these result from deep dynamics that are to a certain extent beyond our collective control — and because people will still be hurt by negative comparison and judgment across more vectors than we can possibly account for or anticipate. Rather, to reduce the true harms of inequality and class relations, we can and must always work to create better psychological and social conditions for a lived and felt equality.

Institutions that function in this manner can include the spread of meditative practices that foster compassion, training in perspective-taking and empathy, and support structures for the cultivation of genuine self-esteem (which needs to rely much less on negative comparisons). The ultimate enemy, at this deepest layer of “equanimity”, are not the inequalities in and of themselves, but our psychological tendencies to compare with one another, to clamor for glamor, to disdain the grief-stricken and downtrodden. If we seek to counteract the injuries of “deep class” as discussed above, it stands to reason that the struggle for equality should also delve into the depth of the human soul.

Ultimately, one of the main reproducers of inequality is our tendency to view ourselves and one another through the goggles of arbitrary dominator hierarchies — or even to compare our strengths and weaknesses in the first place. One of the major feedback cycles of structures of inequality is arguably the stigmas that come with being underprivileged. To view ourselves and one another with a universalized sense of respect is thus a key tool to weakening the power of such downward spirals.

Protopian societies should thus include active and deliberate institutionalized strategies to increase not only material equality (e.g. across the six vectors outlined above), but also, and just as crucially, to increase the capacities of equivalence and equanimity within the population. In so doing, Protopia will arguably be better equipped to create also material equality, as people will view inequalities as less justifiable (or even desirable) in the first place.

Summary (and Considerations of Ukraine)

“While class cannot conclusively be done away with, transcended once and for all, people can always be empowered in a thousand ways to establish their dignity and defend their equal worth.”

I have thus suggested that Protopian society is not a “classless society” in the image of communist and socialist utopias. Rather, Protopia would be a society in which structures of class, and class relations, are managed and mitigated in a much richer and more multi-dimensional manner than what has been the case in any society to date. To approach this goal, I have suggested three perspective shifts:

  1. that class is viewed across six dimensions rather than one,
  2. that class is viewed as an evolving entity that requires new forms of governance to mitigate as its dynamics shift with techno-economic realities, and
  3. that the inner dimensions of inequality are directly targeted as a key reinforcer of class stratification.

Protopia is a class-smart society: a society capable of reducing and mitigating the injuries of class with a wide and intricate battery of inter-connected institutional practices that are also sensitive to the categories studied by intersectionality.

As such, I still believe that Protopia has greater de facto capacities to reduce the suffering caused by inequality than was the case in communist countries. While class cannot conclusively be done away with, transcended once and for all, people can always be empowered in a thousand ways to establish their dignity and defend their equal worth. And that’s what we should aim for. The very category of “class” remains a moving target, and to respond to it productively means to cultivate frameworks that are themselves flexible and complexly adaptable to changing realities. Echoing how I put it crudely in the beginning: Protopia is a society that optimizes class relations.

To say something about how this interfaces with the current war in Ukraine, we could note that Russia’s invasion appears to be a conflict between nations and geopolitical interests (and that’s also true), but that the frustrations within Russia and Ukraine that have led up to the war certainly have a multi-dimensional “deep class” dimension. The informational poverty of vast swathes of the Russian population play a part, as does the lack of opportunities and self-respect that has driven many young men on both sides into the far-right groups that have been fueling the violence in the Donbass region. This is just to point out that, while international wars tend to make questions of class invisible, class relations are always present and part even of the grandest geopolitical happenings. Lest we forget.

The suggested view of class is, I believe, more in line with Protopia as being not a static vision of “the good society” (like Utopia), but rather a society with a dramatically increased capacity for self-assessment and self-improvement. It is a “relative utopia”, a vision not of a perfect society, but of a much better one; one that is Triple-E (Ecological, Equitable, and Effectively governed) — one that merits our hopes, dreams, and playful struggles even more than the static modern Utopia of a classless society.

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.

10 Action Points on Russia-Ukraine

What can we, as citizens of the world, do to avoid the worst consequences of the war in Ukraine and to make “the best” out of a grim situation?

This is the second of two 10-pointers on the invasion of Ukraine. The first one sets the stage in terms of understanding the situation. This one goes on to consider what can and should be done by the West and the international community.

After these two 10-pointers, I am sharing a more in-depth analysis of the situation.

To the left, Paddington the Bear, voiced in Ukrainian by Volodymyr Zelenskyy before he became president of Ukraine. To the right, another kind of bear.

1. Russia must be beaten back — so crowdsource support for Ukraine without compromise!

Although balanced views of the situation are crucial, and frenzied tunnel-visioned warmongering against Russia may be lethal for all of us, there is very little reason to not take a strong stand for Ukraine in this conflict.

The Ukrainian President Zelenskyy asks of the peoples of Europe (and elsewhere) to push our governments in the direction of military, logistical, economic, and humanitarian support, while encouraging more direct citizen action as well. In some strategic countries, like Sweden and Finland, pushing for swift NATO membership may be in order. Pushing for powerful sanctions is crucial — and Switzerland’s support here may be especially important due to its central role in the global financial system. Of course, and unfortunately, European countries need to increase their defense budgets.

For companies, civil society organizations, and sports and culture, penalizing Russia — even if it might hurt some innocent people — can be crucial. The Russian government should not be able to spread the narrative that the war serves Russia’s economic interests or its prestige and honor on the world stage. This ranges from ice hockey, to figure skating, to soccer, to the Eurovision Song Contest, to film festivals, to World Taekwondo stripping Putin of his black belt in Judo. Last I heard, the cat breeders’ association joined the fray: Russian cats are being sanctioned! If we disregard for a moment that cat breeding is an unethical and exploitative endeavor, we can hear the meows for peace all the way from frosty Moscow.

If the Russian population feels that the war is disgracing their country and harming the economy, they are less likely to side with their government and begin to look for other positive national identities that can still honor their past, culture, and traditions. And there’s no lack of material to build on — Russia is one of the culturally most impressive societies on Earth! The motherland of Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy, Tchaikovsky, and so on, Russia is home to some of the best classical musicians on Earth; Russian ballet is world-famous, Russia is the world’s leading chess nation and it is one of the most victorious Olympic nations in the world. Russians have a strong presence in the natural sciences and have a long and proud tradition of space exploration. In short, there’s a lot to pick from; a lot of alternatives to military conquest and dreams of imperial expansion.

All of us foreigners can do something. From building domestic opinion in Ukraine’s favor to honoring and encouraging our suffering and frightened Ukrainian brothers and sisters, to helping and receiving refugees, to hacking Russian systems, to sharing useful information and perspectives in the information war, to challenging misinformation and showing little tolerance against the expression of apologist narratives (“but Ukraine has a Nazi problem!” and so on), to financially supporting Ukrainian war efforts, to creative little hacks that further pressure Russia (like uploading pictures of the war in Google maps in Russia, sending anti-war messages through Tinder with a VPN set in Russia, and so on), there is something for many more of us to do than we might think.

The aim remains to beat Russia back. The losses of a prolonged and lost war are immense (as discussed in the following points). The gains of a quicker and victorious defense of Ukraine are potentially enormous. So support the Ukrainian war effort and undermine the attacker on all fronts!

2. China is on the fence — so act now!

Given that China is biding its time and watching how events unfold, an immediate and firm response to the Ukraine situation is vital. It will decide how China acts in the near future, and thus possibly how the direction of the world system at large develops. From a Western perspective, the Russian situation is the pebble that can tip the world system in two very different directions.

Not only would a failure to defend Ukraine lead to Russia becoming a desirable and viable ally with whom an anti-Western and authoritarian alternative future can be built — but it would also embolden aggression against Taiwan and stoke Chinese unwillingness to compromise with democratic countries. It would, moreover, make it less appealing to its population to support a democratic route of the country’s development.

Even other powers, notably India, seem to be balancing between taking a stand and relativizing the war of aggression, which only adds to the same argument. Given that India is likely to become one of the superpowers of the 21st century, having it siding with the West could be decisive for the fate of our century.

Stalling or weak responses can and will be damned by history. As Lessig (as in Lawrence Lessig, a legal scholar whose work I truly respect) writes on the matter in a Medium post titled Crowdsourced War, if the sanctions are not sufficiently potent, the risk of spiraling into war with Russia actually increases, as “wannabe Churchills” will be able to argue for direct military interventions. Better to be tough and clear now, so that we don’t need to be shirky and hysterical in even more dramatic responses later on.

So, although the response to Russian aggression can and should be “crowdsourced” so that we cannot as easily be targeted by retaliatory measures and thus avoid escalation, that takes nothing away from the importance of acting immediately. That really goes for all of us.

3. Avoid a split into a new Cold War — by winning the war and causing regime change in Russia!

It is highly unlikely that the Russian regime will survive in its current form if it loses the war.

Think about the consequences if Russia would successfully capture and control Ukraine, and from there on secure its geopolitical and economic goals. When would the West be able to lift its sanctions? Not for ages. The world would effectively be split into two Cold War spheres of influence, where Russia and China would approach one another, which would further isolate them from the West and prop up their respective autocratic regimes. We would have a new Cold War, one that would in all likelihood last for decades.

In terms of climate change and other transnational “wicked issues” that require deepened planetary solidarity and mutual trust between cultures and countries, this would be nothing short of catastrophic. Tensions, militarism, fears, and short-sighted survivalist values around the world would be stoked for decades on end, and cosmopolitanism and cooperation would suffer. This would further inflame wicked issues that lie at the foundations of our global civilization and thus eventually increase the risk of rising conflict (a new World War, or just a hundred cruel proxy wars in Africa and elsewhere). Eventually, the risk of a collapse of the world system would increase from “significant” to “overwhelming”.

Here I am, just writing a Medium article about it, and it all somehow feels awfully petty in regard to the stakes at hand. But I really wish to stress this: the price of a new Cold War at this point in history is one that we simply cannot afford to pay. It must be avoided.

So “we” (feel free to exclude yourself from my use of “we” if you disagree with me) have to win the war — and fast. If we do, Russia will likely experience a regime change within some years (don’t forget that Russia is to hold a presidential election in 2024, or at least pretend to), and that could open the entire spectrum of possibilities to co-construct a more equitable, ecological, and effectively governed world order. A Moscow we could talk to, trust, and mutually demilitarize the world with — what a dream!

As Russia and international security expert Keir Giles argued in The Guardian already on February the 25th, Russia may now finally be in a position similar to Western empires (France, Britain) when they lost their status as colonial overlords — fairly late in the 20th century. They didn’t go down without a fight. It took harsh and humiliating defeats at the hands of colonial rebels reasserting their autonomy and dignity. But eventually, they (more or less) accepted their roles as “just another country” with no special right to dictate the fates of other nations. That needs to happen for Russia as well.

Another historical parallel: When did the two Russian Revolutions occur? In 1917 — at the hour of World War I, when the war had lost popular support and the economy was faltering. The German emperor sent Vladimir Lenin and stuffed his pockets full of money to go back home and revolt. The whole operation was a bit more successful than the German Emperor had anticipated (and his own government was toppled shortly after, in the German Revolution).

Now, this time, unfortunately, the Germans sent back the contemporary “Lenin” (opposition leader Alexei Navalny) a little too early, and he’s already in a Russian prison. Still, though, we may be seeing new turns of events here. Watch this development closely!

4. Avoid escalation into World War III — by supporting as discretely as possible!

To complicate things, direct military involvement in Ukraine by NATO and others to shorten the war might instead trigger a spiral of escalation, very possibly triggering a chain reaction that could only be described as World War III — expanding the war zone and prolonging and deepening the military conflict.

In a sense, given that the struggle playing out in Ukraine is already likely to affect the entire world, World War III could be thought of as already having begun. If the conflict escalates further, people will likely view the invasion of Ukraine as the beginning date of World War III. But there’s a great difference between a potential and theoretical world war with stakes as large or possibly greater than the two former ones (due to climate change and existential threats), and an actual, global, military conflict between the world powers. Many more countries would be invaded. The consequences would be devastating beyond comprehension.

I must admit that my initial impulse over the first few days of the invasion was to argue for NATO and allies to at least try to secure a “no-fly zone” in Ukraine’s skies, or to otherwise match Russian forces with an international peacekeeper presence. This was also what Keir Giles argued in his opinion piece: We have a duty to act, even militarily!

But I changed my mind, partly because it turns out that Russia is relying more on ground artillery than on bomber aircraft, partly because the escalation would arguably be much more dramatic if troops or aircraft were to enter Ukraine. Besides, the military support by means of lending aircraft and handing out weapons to the Ukrainians has thus far been effective (at least as things appear in Western media). This sanctions-based approach also seems to be the position of Barack Obama, with whom I now find myself agreeing.

So, yes, support vigorously. But do so as discreetly as possible, in a truly crowdsourced manner, to avoid escalation.

5. Avoid a nuclear war — by helping Russia to save face!

In the end, it is true that:

  • Russia has a ten times stronger military than Ukraine (at least on paper).
  • The Russian government (and the apparatus it relies upon and shares interests with) will be very desperate to not back down.
  • Other countries are unlikely to directly intervene.
  • Putin is threatening us with the world’s largest nuclear arsenal.

Thus, a complete military victory by Ukraine is, after all, unlikely. Even with crowdsourced support around the world, even with a morale boost of the Ukrainians unparalleled in contemporary history (they know the whole world is watching them, and that they’re rocking our socks off; can you think of a better genesis of national cohesion and patriotic identity?), even with Russian logistical fiascos, even with collapsing public support for the government in Russia, it is a David’s fight against Goliath. In fairy tales, David always wins. In reality, this is less often the case.

It is probably true, as Yuval Noah Harari argues (also in The Guardian) that Putin has already lost the war in the larger scheme of things — politically speaking. But there is little comfort in that realization alone. It still means military defeat for Ukraine, a prolonged conflict, possibly bloody guerilla warfare, and an increasingly desperate Russian government — increasingly likely to “lose it” and start a nuclear war. When a house of cards collapses, when lies are exposed, when the posers accidentally reveal their underlying fear and weakness, it’s just never a pretty sight.

Where does this leave us? Well, we might, again, learn from history. When the Soviet Union attacked Finland in 1939–40, in the so-called Winter War, the USSR suffered massive and humiliating losses because of the sheer logistical catastrophe of the operation. Finnish soldiers, camouflaged, shot the Russians as they tumbled slowly through the thick snow in the dense Finnish forests. In my family, we remember Eifel, a Finnish neighbor in the 1980s who fought in that war. More than four decades later, he literally cried at the thought of how many men he had mowed down. David versus Goliath was not pretty, even when David won.

What happened with the Winter War then? In fact, the Russians signed a peace treaty and were handed some new territories. On paper, in theory, in their own narrative, “they had won”. They had conquered new territory.

It’s the basic thing that sociologists of everyday interaction teach us: We all need to save face. My take on this is, thus, to try to help Putin and his administration save face by conceding some territories to Russia. It’s not like Donetsk and Luhansk or Crimea will be nice places for Russians and Ukrainians to live together after all of this is over either way. So, make a compromise: Hand Crimea and perhaps Donbas (Donetsk, Luhansk) to Russia. And open the canal down to Crimea, so that Russia can keep Crimea under tolerable circumstances, rather than having a perpetually drought-stricken peninsula on their hands.

Even with such concessions, the Russian government will still have lost so much in power and position that their days will likely be numbered. We just have to prevent the “wounded beast” from lashing out — nuclearly or otherwise.

Ending the war as soon as possible with a compromise that could give Putin a chance to save face and proclaim at least a superficial victory would not only lead away from the prospect of nuclear war. It would also shorten the conflict itself, which reduces the risk of further fires in the nuclear power facilities of the war zone (as was reported a few days ago in Europe’s largest facility).

I know compromise is hard. And not necessarily just. But, in the long run, the free world will win this either way. What needs to be prevented is for the tragic-comical implosion of the Russian Imperium to cause a corresponding nuclear explosion that consumes all the rest of us.

Patience and pragmatism will lead to the victory of justice.

6. There is no alternative to speaking to Putin!

In the light of what I have discussed in former points, it should be apparent that there really is no alternative to speaking to Putin (even if you cannot trust what he says).

Yes, by all means, the goal can and should be to remove his corrupt and criminal regime from the helm of Russia. And yes, Putin himself has pretty much served that up for us. And yes, speaking to Putin really is akin to bargaining with terrorists.

But there is no other way. The “World War III” scenario would perhaps end only when “Allied” tanks roll into Moscow and Putin is arrested. And, true, NATO and allies would win in the end. But that’s a terrible and terrifying scenario that involves unfathomable suffering and possibly a nuclear holocaust.

In the real reality that we are in, Putin is the guy to talk to. But the more we beat him back in Ukraine, the better “face-saving compromise” he is offered, and the quicker the war is brought to an end — the better the terms of that talk can be.

7. Mobilize the many small creeks!

A CNN poll shows that 87% of US citizens support sanctions, and 79% follow the conflict closely. Do that many Americans even know where Ukraine is on the map? A level of transnational engagement that is unprecedented in its strength shows that “the agency of millions” can make life very difficult for Russia and ultimately for its regime.

And here is the hopeful side of this: We can actually make a difference. Because every bit counts. Every little action — even going online and criticizing the war in 5-star reviews of Russian elite restaurants — matters. Make it entirely clear to Russia’s 144 million people that the rest of the world is finding this war unacceptable and disgraceful, and that their everyday lives will be made more complicated for as long as the war persists.

Individually, each Russian bears quite little responsibility for what their government does in their name. Collectively, however, the Russian people arguably do bear a great responsibility for accepting and condoning a crooked government. It is not wrong to make that responsibility felt, all the while assuring Russians that there can and will be a brighter future for them if they get rid of their government.

It is also important to make as many Russians as possible understand how profoundly their own country will be harmed if Putin’s war continues. The consequences for ordinary Russians are likely to become extremely severe if the war goes on for long. In a co-dependent world economy, you just can’t live as an economic, informational, and cultural pariah while keeping a large, costly war going. It’s one thing to have the living standard of an already impoverished peasant population decrease over time, but it’s a whole other matter when a comfortable modern lifestyle is taken away from people overnight. It’s going to be a tragic shitshow for millions of people.

Now, the key for all of us is to mobilize the small creeks of resistance and solidarity until there can be no misunderstanding: a bet on Putin’s war is not worth it. The longer you persist in the war, the greater the costs.

This coordination of the swarm, the many small creeks of a transnational public and civil society, could possibly spur the creation of a more self-conscious planetary “public consciousness” — and conscience — mediated through information technology. As many have noted, we didn’t react correspondingly to the horrors of the “more remote” and less black-and-white war in Yemen. Imagine if we would have. Imagine if the planetary public becomes skilled at mobilizing support and resistance to war, oppression, and suffering everywhere. The value of such a planetary civil society would be immeasurable— even in the face of issues like climate change. Mary Kaldor, the eminent peace worker and political scientist, wrote on the eve of the war (the 22nd of February) that a human rights perspective should be applied to the situation. I would respond that, for that to be a realistic prospect, the planetary public must first be successfully mobilized. And that’s where you, the reader, make all the difference.

If you are a Russian citizen somehow reading this despite all the information blockages set up by the government (as Putin’s sworn intellectual nemesis, Masha Gessen, describes in The New Yorker) please know that you are not alone. Millions stand with you. And remember these words from the Koran:

A man asked the Messenger of Allah, peace and blessings be upon him, “What is the highest form of jihad?” The Prophet said:

“A word of truth in the face of an unjust ruler.”

8. Counteract the global reactionary movement!

The Russian government has long been fanning the flames of European and other nationalist and reactionary movements and parties. As a response to the alienation felt towards social, cultural, and economic transformations, such worldviews have grown roots deep within the populations of most liberal democracies.

This has led to a number of undesirable dynamics in many democracies over the last decade: from culture wars and riots, to the loss of momentum for transformational solutions to climate change, to the loss of the public’s ability to organize around class interests, to grid-locked parliamentary situations, to Donald Trump’s train of maddening adventures in public life, to the rise of Nazi and violent insurgency groups (yes, also in Ukraine, but no, that’s not an excuse to invade the country), to harassment of public figures, to the cultivation of online conspiracy theories, to certain governments curtailing civic rights, to increased xenophobia…

These currents of European and American sentiment are, unsurprisingly enough, generally positive towards Russia’s government — and many reactionaries even view Russia as a beacon of traditionalism and decency. The “decadent liberal West” is an old trope, common pretty much to all autocracies (in the Stasi museum in Berlin, for instance, you can see DDR propaganda showing the ghastly Iron Maiden posters that Western kids worshipped in the 1980s). But the assertiveness of such autocracies on the international scene certainly encourages the growing nationalist movements within liberal democracies, while tilting developing countries in authoritarian directions. As is often noted, the “freedom in the world” index has now been in decline for 15 consecutive years.

Now is our chance to turn this trend. If Russia is defeated in Ukraine and the whole “Russia-is-so-realistic-and-rational-Real-politically-cool-and-it-stands-up-for-masculinity-and-truly-feminine-women” is curtailed and exposed for the incoherent bullshit it, in all honesty, is (with some partial truths, sure, but still, it’s bullshit) — then the lure and legitimacy of neo-reactionary movements around the world will take a serious blow. They’ll lose their shine. And the hearts of young men (and old, embittered ones) can slowly begin to take up more worthwhile causes. Maybe even Poland and Hungary would notice that alignment with democratic values isn’t such a bad thing. Turkey — who knows?

As things stand today, Russia props up corrupt governments in Africa: guns for mining rights and resources, the Wagner Group mercenaries doing the dirty work, no questions asked. If Russia’s current government loses its grip, we can turn the long tide of authoritarian development across the world, including inside the bastions of liberal democracy.

For the future of a non-authoritarian, post-Putin Russia, there can be few things as valuable as an independent Ukraine — a kind of cultural hybrid “West Russia”. A Russian bear, perhaps, but more Paddington-like (as I alluded to in the image above). It would serve as a bridge and melting-pot for the Russian-Orthodox and Western civilizations, while allowing the flexibility of multiple positive Russian identities. What the metamodern sociologist Brent Cooper discusses as “metanoia” (or “in-betweenness”) is increased in such liminal spaces, places “between worlds” — charged with greater emergent potentials. This is what network science calls the power of bridging nodes. This could be the future of Ukraine, spurring on a fascinating new role for Russia herself.

9. Use the momentum for deep energy transformation!

Just like the swift response to the covid pandemic, the Ukraine war shows that we can basically change the world overnight. This shouldn’t be forgotten in relation to climate change and energy transition to sustainable and renewable solutions.

Now that core world economies like Germany (and the EU at large) are prodded to start taking dramatic steps to sever at least some of their fossil dependencies, there is significant momentum to be used — and coordinated with the green strategies linked to covid stimulus packages.

This momentum becomes larger still if you consider that 1) countries and populations are now entering into “wartime economies” where the state plays a strong and active role as investor and leader of structural transformations, that 2) populations at large are mobilized and become prepared to make sacrifices for the common good, and that 3) a flood of transnational unity and sense of coherence has emerged in response to the war.

As argued in my last article, remember that this is also a war of survival of the Russian petrostate military-industrial complex — and that its decline would herald a strong advancement of the positions of the renewable energy economy and decentralized structures.

Russia, through its historical development, has veered strongly in the direction of centralized power (just look at the map of cities and roads centered like a spider web around Moscow!). The country has a strong state, a strong church, and strong families, but comparatively little in the way of “civil society” as it is understood in the social sciences. Hence, the road to a more democratic and decentralized Russia may be a longer and more painful one than for other countries. But the widespread resistance to the war within Russia itself, and the growth of political opposition and free press offer some seeds for a livelier Russian civil society upon which democratic institutions can be cultivated.

In a sense, the world would do Russia a favor by helping it decouple from its path dependency on the one-trick-pony fossil economy and the petrostate’s tendency to play geopolitical games (as, after all, oil and gas are geographical phenomena, more so than renewables).

10. Use the opportunity to establish transnational governance!

Ultimately, the world will continue to suffer from confusion and mayhem until a more coherent and solitary order of transnational governance is achieved. This is a topic I have researched and theorized over some years but I cannot give the topic justice here. Suffice to say that the post-WW2 institutions of the UN are increasingly dated and that the current forms of transnational coordination are insufficient.

If the larger community of nations manages to take a joint and coordinated stand against this war and defend democratic sovereignty, while spreading better governance and freedom to Russia, this could indeed serve as the seed for a new, multi-polar world order and thus for a deepening and redefinition of how societies around the world cooperate.

Part of this argument flows from a crass change in the balance of power: if authoritarianism loses its bastion on the northern hemisphere and one of its greatest worldwide agents, the world will likely become a more democratic and cooperative place. Maybe this time, the West would be wiser than to step on Russian pride and economy (which is what occurred after the Cold War), and truly include Russia and all of Eastern Europe as equals and friends. Western cultural arrogance has cost us dearly and I can only hope we’ve learned a lesson.

But another part of the argument, I believe, flows from a deeper and more universal place. Institutions change on rare occasions when momentous movements occur; movements that stir the souls of millions of people at the same time. If so many of us around the world feel that we took a stand against war, and felt empowered to act against it, and felt solidarity with new people that we hardly considered before, that may be such a rare moment — comparable to the days after the Second World War, when today’s world order was forged.

My hope is, ultimately, that we can avoid the Third World War, but still reap the benefits of moral growth that come from having dodged it together — while having stood up to tyranny.

And then, hopefully, we can begin to apply that new-won public conscience to the forgotten corners of the world where injustice and suffering have been allowed and disregarded for far too long. Ukraine is crying. But so is Yemen and many other places just as real and relevant.

Then again, I’m the hopeful sort. I believe that a sincerely-ironic geopolitics is both possible and necessary.

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.

10 Key Insights Into Russia-Ukraine

What is a sober and clear way of understanding the Russian war of aggression in Ukraine as a whole?

This is the first of two 10-pointers on the invasion of Ukraine. This one sets the stage in terms of understanding the situation. The second one goes on to what can and should be done by the West and the international community.

After these two 10-pointers, I am sharing a more in-depth analysis of the situation.

1. Don’t mistake the West’s sociological failures for geopolitical weakness

NATO and the West has appeared weaker than they really are, geopolitically and economically speaking: with the failures in Iraq, Afghanistan (couldn’t even beat the Taliban, despite magnitudes greater military and economic might), unsuccessful interventions into Syria, a losing grip on influence over Africa, an internally quarreling EU, and internal culture wars leading up to the storming of Capitol Hill last year.

However, these failures are largely sociological failures, i.e. failures to understand and manage social and cultural forces, not signs of lacking economic and military prowess per se. Lack of sociological understanding has severely limited the capacity for the West, NATO, and the international community under Global North leadership to successfully intervene in different parts of the world, but it is still true that the collective powers of this larger network are much greater than those of Russia. And unlike targets like the Taliban hiding in vast mountainous terrain or goals like the creation of a new Iraqi state, Russia is a large target that can more easily and straightforwardly be resisted with conventional means.

Just for perspective, Russia roughly has a ten times larger defense budget than Ukraine, while the US defense budget in turn is about ten times larger than Russia’s, making up two-thirds of NATOs total. The NATO populations are larger, richer, better educated, and have better access to useful information (in a more “free information” system) than Russia, which means that they can find a myriad of ways of resisting even without engaging in a full-blown military conflict. So where ordinary citizens in the West are sending money and supplies, help to spread pro-Ukrainian information, hack Russian information infrastructure, boycott Russian commodities and some even join the Ukrainian army—ordinary Russians aren’t even told that there’s a war going on.

Russia is dwarfed in comparison with NATO and its partners: Russia has a population of roughly 144 million, 153 if you add its ally Belarus; NATO has 951 million, and if you add its European partners such as Finland and Sweden, and non European ones such as Australia, Japan and South Korea, it’s well over a billion — and then there’s the 40 million Ukrainians armed to their teeth ready to fight all incoming Russian invaders.

In economic terms, Russia’s economy is comparable to that of Australia (a country of 26 million), and highly dependent on the export of gas and oil, mostly sold to Europe — accounting for 30% of GDP and 50% of the government’s income. In comparison, the NATO countries make up more than half the world’s economy measured in GDP — and that’s without Japan, South Korea and Australia, the world’s 3rd, 10th and 13th biggest economies. Russia is number 11, just ahead of Brazil. Or was; after the Ruble hit the rubble last week, and with the continuation of the economic sanctions, it’s likely to be out of the top 20 this year.

In other words, the West looked weaker than it really is, which may have emboldened Russian aggression. As militaries are propped up around Europe in much larger economies and larger collective populations (with Germany taking a lead with major investments in its military that will give it the third largest military budget in the world, way ahead of Russia), the military advantage and initiative of an increasingly poorer and more isolated Russia quickly wane.

2. Russia looked stronger than it truly is

We have been accustomed to thinking of Russia as the heir to the USSR and leader of the Warsaw Pact, and thus as a dormant superpower. But since Poland, the Baltics, and other countries have switched sides, and the economic gap has widened, the new power relation between East and West has shifted far away from Russia’s interests.

In the late eighties, the countries of the Warsaw Pact had a population of roughly 400 million, versus NATO’s 600 million at the time. Its troops were based deep into Germany and Central Europe. As of such, the Cold War of the 20th century was a more equal confrontation than the one today between the 30 NATO countries (+ 20 or so strategic partners) and Russia and its Belarusian satellite.

Russia has impressed an image upon the world as an effective military force with its former successful operations in Georgia, Chechnya, Crimea, and Syria. But the scale and nature of the current operation are different: Ukraine is geographically the second biggest country in Europe, with a population a little less than one third of Russia’s, and it appears that Russia intends to conquer the entire country — something it never even tried with the invasion of the small country of Georgia back in 2008.

The Russian system has a vast intelligence deficiency. Basically, there are poor feedback loops of information, as information flows are curtailed in a KGB style. Lower-ranking Russian officers work on a strong need-to-know basis and their narrative is dependent on the Russian propaganda apparatus, which makes it more difficult for them to self-organize in the context of complex operations and the situations that face them. Apparently, Russian soldiers haven’t been told where they’re going and what they’re going to do. Secrecy like that may be a virtue in the KGB, but having clueless soldiers on a battlefield is a big weakness in any army — especially if they are going into combat. From what I see, it wouldn’t be surprising if the average Westerner watching the news has a better understanding of what’s going on than low level officers in the Russian army.

There are also significant problems with the effectiveness of the Russian military apparatus. Here, the devil is in the detail: Yes, Russia has many tanks, artillery pieces, and aircrafts, but how effectively these can be used all depends on how well-oiled the entire apparatus is. And serious cracks are showing in the facade of how well this military operates in practice: Analysts have reportedly been “shocked” at what they observe. Russia has a lot of fighter jets, for example, but their efficiency is severely hampered by inexperienced pilots and lacking munitions. The same can be said about tanks running out of fuel. And if we are to believe the content of this article, Russian troops in Ukraine have even been overheard complaining about lacking logistical support and even been talking back emotionally against orders given. There are even reports of Russians sabotaging their vehicles to avoid going into battle.

Given that resistance to the war is strong even within Russia, the position of the Russian government is currently not a very strong one and is likely to grow as sanctions take their toll, possibly breaking the country’s economy— at least not in the long run.

3. Russia is to blame — but understanding it is crucial

Western media, and international media at large, do a fairly poor job at bringing nuance and understanding to the Russian side of this cruel equation. For instance, we are continuously informed about Ukrainian civilian losses, as well as Russian losses of military personnel, but the media is vague, silent, or unrealistic about Ukrainian military losses. We should have no illusions about the impartiality of reporting.

It stands to reason — and viscerally feel — that Russia is an unlawful aggressor in this situation. But to seek to understand Russia (and, in the longer run, even to accept and forgive) is not to condone the actions of its government. For citizens around the world, both of these traps must be avoided: A. relativizing and condoning a criminal war of aggression, and B. falling into a clichéd, black-and-white narrative that hinders productive measures and responses because there is no real understanding.

The better analysts, leaders, and the public understand the Russian side of the matter (not, note, its state-sanctioned propaganda, but the dilemmas faced by its people and leadership), the more hope there is for a shorter war and viable future relationship.

4. Putin is acting more “rationally” than it appears (but he is just about to lose it)

Much ink has been spilled to gauge the sanity or insanity of the autocratic Russian President. If you listen to some of the more astute analyses out there, it becomes clear that the Russian leadership are in a long-term decline and may feel that their hand is forced in the matter:

  • If Ukraine joins NATO and the EU, with more than 40 million people switching sides, Russia will no longer be a geopolitical powerhouse. If Russia could add the former Soviet republics, Russia could double its population. And if they could submit the biggest of these, namely Ukraine, to Russian rule, the likelihood of the remaining ones following suit would be that much greater.
  • If Ukraine joins NATO, and there is already an ongoing conflict in Donetsk and Luhansk, the country could risk being attacked by NATO forces as “an attack on one is an attack on all”, and that would be from a very wide front of 2700 kilometers in Ukraine.
  • Geopolitically, because of the large steppe that stretches from northern Europe and widens towards the Ural Mountains, Russia becomes harder to defend from Western attacks the farther its zone of military control is pushed eastwards. Ukraine joining NATO would more or less leave Russia at the West’s mercy.
  • As long as Ukraine is not under Russian control, Russia loses income as it has to pay tariffs on gas pipes passing through the country.
  • Ukraine has found its own gas deposits and could soon be a real competitor to Russia’s main income. And if all of a sudden there would be a democratic alternative to Russia’s gas, the West would be likely to trade with the former.
  • Ukraine controls the water flow through a canal that goes down to Russian-controlled Crimea, and this region is so dry that its 2½ million inhabitants are currently a big economic drain on Russia, as Ukraine has refused to open the canal.

Taken together, the Russian leadership’s days are numbered if they do not seize control over Ukraine.

Of course, the truly rational course of action would be to peacefully dismantle the current rule, democratize the country, diversify the economy, and become a trusted member of the international community. But as the leadership is invested in the current imperial project and could suffer grim consequences if they lost power (due to corruption, crimes, and so forth), it is “rational” from their perspective to take the gamble and try to seize Ukraine.

However, as the situation becomes increasingly dire for Putin and his allies, we are seeing that emotional over-reactions and acts of desperation may increase, as telling signs of mounting romanticism and paranoia suggest.

5. Putin is acting more ideologically than we think

That there is a certain “rationality” in Putin’s actions does not preclude that these are also ordered according to certain earnestly held ideological sentiments.

One such source of ideological reasoning is the kinship and shared historical roots of Russia and Ukraine (Russia was in effect founded in Kyiv, and before the Soviet era, Ukrainians were even referred to as “little Russians”). This closeness and sense of shared belonging may cause Putin and many others to feel a sense of betrayal if Ukraine chooses a path that leads away from the Russian Imperium.

The second major ideological position is simply to view the Imperium (and its zone of influence) as inherent to the Russian national identity. Thus, upholding an order where this Imperium is maintained and strengthened is viewed as a natural duty of the leadership of Russia — and a sense of humiliation before one’s own people would be felt if the Imperium is weakened during one’s rule. For instance, Russian citizens largely supported the annexation of Crimea and reported feeling renewed pride as a result of it.

6. Putin has difficulties understanding democracy

One of the miscalculations of Putin’s decision to attack may have to do with the workings of democracy. The Ukrainian President, Zelenskyy, had dismally bad poll ratings just before the attack, and people were also expressing low trust in their country’s institutions — which may have given the impression that Ukrainians would accept or even support a toppling of its government: “a war against the administration, not against the people”.

Autocratic leaders generally have difficulties understanding the game boards of more democratic countries (just as people in democracies have trouble understanding the mechanisms of autocratic systems). While Ukraine is by no means a perfect democracy, it still leans strongly in that direction, and as such, it is quite natural for its people to dislike and distrust its current leader. In fact, that’s the whole point: in a democracy you’re free, if not even obliged, to complain about your leaders and swap them out at the next election. Democracies are imperfect and built on compromise and constant slight dissatisfaction. That does not mean that their peoples wish to topple the state and system as a whole! Apparently, Ukrainians turned out to be willing to sacrifice their lives to save their current freedoms and democratic rights.

In fact, one is reminded of Voltaire’s old saying: “I hate your opinion, but I am willing to die for your right to express it.”

7. Ukraine is not Iraq

While direct intervention into Ukraine by NATO and allies may risk too dramatic escalations of the conflict (see the next 10 points list I publish), the Western experience of failures in Iraq and Afghanistan does not translate well to the current situation.

Simply put: Our possibilities of doing good in this situation are considerably larger. In Iraq and Afghanistan, there were no functional systems and countries to “revert to” once their respective tyrannical leaderships were ousted. This led to the “sociological failures” I mentioned above. In this case, the situation is more comparable to that of Germany or Japan after the Second World War — there is a real country that can coalesce and thrive. Or, at least, the conditions for such a post-war revival appear to be much better.

Hence, supporting Ukraine, even militarily (if done prudently) is likely to be a productive and sustainable path for the country and the world around it.

8. The conflict is partly a climate- and water conflict

Interestingly, as is the case in so many matters these days, and as is so often overlooked, the Russia-Ukraine situation is partly aggravated by climate change.

Not only has climate change affected Russian crops and thus further destabilized the country’s exports of wheat to the Middle East, which contributed to spiking food costs in that region, and thus helped spark the Arab Spring and, thereby, the Russian intervention into Syria some years later — which built up momentum for a more confident and aggressive Russian leadership.

It is also the case that the perpetual drought on the Crimean Peninsula has arguably been caused by climate change, which has made Russia yet more eager to seize control over the canal that the Ukrainians have blocked since the annexation of Crimea.

This point is perhaps auxiliary, but important nonetheless as it helps to underscore that a world without climate security is more likely to spiral into a world of geopolitical insecurity.

9. The war stands between petrostate military-industrial complexes and renewable energy

Despite the above-mentioned damages to Russia by the hands of climate change, it is also true that Russia is the only major country that would actually benefit from climate change in the long term. Or, rather, the same may be true of Canada.

A warmer planet is one where the temperate zone on the northern hemisphere would climb further northwards, which would unlock untold areas of agriculturally viable lands within Russia, while making other countries more dependent on its exports. Considering that Russia has fewer large coastal cities, and that it is also too far away from the North Atlantic Gulf stream to feel the effects were it to stop (as one theory on climate change predicts), its position in the world would likely be strengthened by further climate change.

Given that Russia is more or less currently a petrol-state, and that there is a close connection between the fossil-fuel incomes and the military and a limited number of oligarchs, we can see that Russia is passionately unmotivated to seeing a transformation into a decentralized and renewable energy system around the globe.

If Russia loses some of its initiative on the fossil-fuel market, and other countries become less dependent on its exports, the current centralized power structure (a patrol-state military-industrial complex) would risk falling apart.

Thus, I don’t feel that it’s too far a stretch to claim that the current conflict is, more than incidentally, a struggle between the maintenance of petrol-state interests and energy transformation.

Interestingly, centralized power jives well with centralized political power, just as decentralized power grids open pathways for greater dispersion of decision-making. A post-petrol world is a freer world, which is worth striving towards, even if the end is not yet in sight.

10. No Liberal order — no Post-Liberal order, either

Lastly, let us simply note — all of us who believe in and work for developments of society that go beyond the Modern capitalist-liberal mainstream — that our dreams of an ecological, equitable, and effectively governed future cannot materialize if basic human rights and international law are curtailed. If big countries with big sticks can coerce smaller neighbors, if media is controlled and weaponized, if gangster-like oligarchies threaten security, poison opponents and put dissidents in jail, there will not be possibilities, freedom, and will enough to experiment boldly with what comes next in the evolution of human societies.

If we cannot sustain the liberal world order, we should not expect to be able to create new, post-liberal (post-capitalist, protopian, metamodern) world orders either. The current attack on freedom is decidedly non-liberal, but it has nothing to do with post-liberal potentials of desirable future societies.

Hence, even for die-hard critics of the Western mainstream and its institutions, it makes sense to stand with Ukraine, with the suffering of its people, and against unlawful state aggression.

The potential to find pathways ahead from the dead-end of our civilization dramatically decreases if Putin gets his way and gets to violently perpetuate a non-democratic petrol-state.

Hence, I suggest that we stand with Ukraine — not only for the sake of our brothers and sisters in that country, but also for the future of the world.

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 Failure of Multiculturalism and Its Resolution: Transculturalism

Across the world, Multiculturalism has been failing over the recent decades: conflicts, racism, discrimination, antagonism, distrust, ghetto despair, the rise of rightwing populism, riots, crime, and even ISIS as an emergent transnational vortex of discontent and violent regression. These realities are grasped differently across the political spectrum, damning or defending Multiculturalism. But none of the established positions seem to embrace a proper update of the Multiculturalist stance: Transculturalism.

In my book, Nordic Ideology, I outline six new forms of politics that I feel must become institutionalized parts of societies across the world for the core challenges of late modern life to be properly managed. One of these I call Gemeinschaft Politics — “Gemeinschaft” being a German word that sociologists use to denote the aspects of society that are not formalized into rules, regulations, and bureaucracies. It’s the informal weave of relationships in society: friendships, family and courting practices, inter-citizen trust and solidarity, religious, cultural, and ethnic or racial relations. It’s the politics of “fellowship” — the active and deliberate work to heal, develop, and improve upon such informal but crucial aspects of society.

In the book, I go on to outline a few positions on gender/sexuality as well as ethnic/racial relations in society. In the latter case, I suggest the following positions that I hold can be observed in societies across the world:

  • Nationalism — the (purported) defense of the majority culture, race, and ethnicity at the expense of minorities and foreigners. To the extent that nationalism has more cosmopolitan aspects, it’s in the defense of the right to nationalist assertion across countries and cultures.
  • Non-Nationalism — the emphasis on market solutions and integration between ethnicities through a liberal order that empowers people to get a job and achieve social mobility and new contacts across different groups in society. In its left-wing version, this position holds that inequalities of culture, race, and ethnicity are surface phenomena and are fundamentally distractions to differences of class, and that class should be re-focused as the real basis of social relations. To the extent that people are treated differently because of e.g. skin color, this can be explained by socio-economic differentials at a group level.
  • Multiculturalism — (or, as I rebrand it in the book, Inter-Culturalism) which is the standard “progressive” position that takes up anti-racism, inclusion, the defense of minority rights, and the higher valuation of multiple ethnic groups and their contribution in terms of unique ways of life and perspectives. As championed by Canadian sociologist and philosopher Charles Taylor, this position holds that people don’t only have individual “liberal” rights, but also collective or social rights that pertain to their needs to live in and express their culture, not only at the level of token attires or exotified “ethnic” festival color explosions, but as a real and felt part of everyday life. This position tends to hold that diversity is in and of itself a good: the more of it, the better.
  • Transculturalism — the view we shall be exploring here, and which I hold can and should be a part of an effective Gemeinschaft Politics. The transculturalist position holds that it is both true that diversity is good, that racism, inequality, and discrimination are real issues with their own respective (often postcolonial) historical roots, and that there are real problems of integration and inter-cultural relations, as well as real limitations to and problems inherent in the cultures of different ethnic groups and cultures in society. As such, it takes a transformational view on ethnic groups (whether these happen to be constructed along the lines of race, nationality, ethnic denominations, or religious practices) and holds them responsible vis-à-vis one another as parts of “the whole” of society that results from their interactions. This sometimes involves making a value judgment of or comparison between the ethical desirability of cultures.

It should be noted that these four positions largely line up around four different “value-memes” prevalent in late modern societies (value-memes being the overall structures of people’s values and ways of making sense of the world): Traditionalists tend towards Nationalism, Moderns (“mainstream people”) towards Non-Nationalism, Postmodernists towards Multiculturalism, and Metamodernists towards Transculturalism.

(My own version of understanding these “value-memes” are discussed in detail in my book, The Listening Society.)

I thus hold that societies need to increasingly cultivate and establish institutional practices informed by Transculturalism. This is in keeping with the idea that societies around the world would do well to develop more “metamodern” institutions in order to thrive and survive in the face of mounting disruptions that come with systemic shifts. Transculturalism is a social process (or set of social processes) that manages and develops the quality of ethnic and racial relations. If we seek to resolve the culture wars of today, Transculturalism is our best bet. If we seek to create harmonious relations between groups in society, Transculturalism, the same holds true.

In brief, it can be argued that Nationalism exacerbates ethnic division while only momentarily soothing the grievances of the in-group, Non-Nationalism fails to address ethnic realities and treats the issue with a naïve belief in the progress of society through economic transactions, while Multiculturalism leads to some inescapable paradoxes: More cultures are added and strengthened besides one another, but they fail to interact productively across their cultural divides, and the relativism of “you cannot judge one culture on the premises of another” leads to impasses when it comes to challenging and transforming cultures into better versions of themselves, with better interactions across cultures.

The Paradoxes of Multiculturalism

“Rather than reaping the richness of multiple perspectives, the political realm becomes increasingly charged with ethnic tensions, and ethnic divisions begin to infuse the party politics of formerly reasonably functional democracies.”

I should stay a little longer on this last point, the paradoxes of Multiculturalism.

One such paradox is the incompatibility of its two core positions: 1. More diversity is good, so adding more cultures is good, and 2. Cultures should be allowed to preserve themselves in their current form. On the face of it, both of these positions appear reasonable and honorable. But the moment that it is part of a certain culture to be intolerant of other cultures (which is arguably an aspect of all cultures to some degree), the two positions collide. The same thing occurs the moment one cultural practice somehow bothers and disturbs another one (and this also happens as soon as cultures coexist in the same spaces). A simple example: let’s say that one culture has another view on the role of women in society, and this leads to what is perceived as street harassments of women by gangs of young men from that culture.

Multiculturalism seems to be unable to resolve these paradoxes. If members of one culture begin to judge the practices of another culture, that is perceived as racism and condemned. When the first culture responds by defending and preserving its practices, that is perceived as chauvinism and nationalism (and perhaps, correctly so). What you get is an increase of quiet grievances and taboo topics, which results in the suppressed frustrations that play out in all arenas of society: the street, the workplace, the labor market, the housing market, in education. Segregation mounts and ethnic divisions are deepened. Rather than reaping the richness of multiple perspectives, the political realm becomes increasingly charged with ethnic tensions, and ethnic divisions begin to infuse the party politics of formerly reasonably functional democracies.

Ironically, there seems to be a “sociological wormhole” that leads right from the underbelly of Multiculturalism back to the dynamics of Nationalism — albeit in a situation when a larger and growing number of groups contend for power and recognition. Multiculturalism, and its many expressions, is a well-meaning but ultimately self-defeating way to approach the problem. In its admittedly commendable struggle against racism and structural inequality, it inadvertently breeds the very divisions and resentments it seeks to transcend.

Then again, perhaps the very most damning paradox of the Multiculturalist view becomes apparent if we situate it within a wider Postmodern project. This project includes such things as challenging the hegemony of white men, challenging toxic masculinity, of unearthing biases buried in our language — all of which are directly about transforming culture. Yet, if all cultures are to be treated equally and have the right to preserve themselves and define themselves as they wish, all such projects of critique and transformation would reasonably be off-limits.

The Multiculturalist “solution” to this problem is generally to hold the hegemonic culture (usually, Western, white, male, etc.) to a different and higher standard than other cultures (minority, indigenous, counter-culture, etc.) But this solution falls on its own rope: Implicitly, it’s treating one culture as superior, adult, and responsible, and another as inferior, child-like, and exempt from responsibility. In other words, Multiculturalism itself ends up being racist. And so, it’s not that surprising there’s a wormhole right back to Nationalism and Balkanization at the core of the Multiculturalist project.

Shifting Gear to Transculturalism

“Without each other, we are culturally blind. With the right processes — arduous as they must be—we can see our own cultures from the outside, and work to honor our respective cultural heritages by cultivating cultures that we are proud of and command the liking and respect of others.”

It is these paradoxes that must be addressed for the current societal impasse to be surmounted. The fundamental shift of perspective from Multiculturalism to Transculturalism is the following one:

  • If cultures are to have the right to exist and gain recognition in an environment of other cultures that they interact with, they must also be charged with the obligation to develop and transform into versions of themselves that are — not subjected to, but — compatible with the other cultures.

In terms of majority cultures, this very often comes down to increased tolerance, inclusion, and acceptance. It comes down to curiosity towards “the other” and strong norms against discrimination, as well as increased self-awareness of how privileges can shape biases and prejudice. This is not to say, in the case of for instance Western majority populations, that self-defeatism and shame should become the norm, or that the cultures should cease to express themselves through traditions, customs, and values. It simply means that, in order for these cultures to live up to their own values, racism should be viewed as entirely unacceptable — and that histories of oppression (colonial, genocidal, or other) are owned up to. You have the right to express pride in your own culture, but also the obligation to embody the best version of that culture in a manner that respects other cultures. In other words, nationalist and chauvinist reactions must be questioned and condemned. On a day-to-day level, it’s not okay to refuse to rent your summer house family to another family-based only on their Arabic family name, for instance. Hence, real work with transforming dominant cultures and owning up to the postcolonial heritage must be worked with until the norms are conclusively shifted towards tolerance and inclusion. As argued in last week’s article, cultivating the psychological capacity for Acceptance among the population may be an effective lever to pull in this regard.

This struggle with postcolonial ghosts of Christmas’ past undeniably even has geopolitical consequences. If Western cultures retreat into Nationalism or default to Non-Nationalism (largely ignoring issues of race, still the majority position in Western cultures), this will only feed the revanchist tendencies of new global powers, from China, to India’s Hindu nationalism, to the public Russian support for Vladimir Putin’s warmongering. The Global South, in Africa in particular, is increasingly turning away from the West’s attempt to uphold a liberal world order, and often questionable regimes are colluding increasingly with the powers of Russia and China in what seems to be amounting to a new Cold War.

Simply said, Western cultures, in their failure to take up the obligations that come with their own values, are fanning the flames of hurt pride around the world, of peoples trampled over decades and centuries. Whereas the dark clouds on the geopolitical horizon cannot simply be reduced to this one issue, it is very likely a strong contributor to the situation. “We” Westerners need to evolve our cultures, swallow some pride (which is often disowned shame and guilt), and be humble towards the rich contributions of others. But the hurt pride of other cultures lives on even within our own societies — from the experience of being Black or Latino in the United States to being Arab or African in Europe, people are feeling downtrodden, and understandably so. When riots arise in our banlieues or ghettos, or when ISIS emerges as a specter of our cultural dynamics, we shouldn’t be so surprised.

For other cultures, the demands upon their evolution naturally vary from case to case. Indian culture has a grim heritage of the caste system, which is viewed as largely unacceptable in other parts of the world. Honor killings, antagonistic isolationism, and limitations on the freedom of women are unacceptable aspects of many Muslim communities in the West. In each of these cases, the answers do not lie in denial of one’s own heritage, but in creative redefinitions of the culture.

A similar position has been explored by the sociologists Michael O. Emerson and George Yancey in their 2010 book, Transcending Racial Barriers: Toward a Mutual Obligations Approach. While I don’t support everything in the book, and while the study they base their reasoning on is much too small and limited, I do feel that they capture something essential in their “mutual obligations approach”. Groups have a right to be mutually respected, yes, but they also have obligations towards one another. And those obligations can only reasonably be negotiated mutually. There need to be institutional practices that facilitate such mutual expectations of obligations to develop, to evolve, to transform. That is marital counseling functions, and cultures of the world are, in an interconnected world, stuck with one another. We’re collectively married, whether we like it or not.

Today, such institutional practices and skillsets of facilitation hardly exist. But it could certainly motivate people to change their own cultures and positions — in keeping with their own traditions and customs — if people see corresponding work to change on the other side. Again, just as the two individuals of a marriage are reasonably obliged to help both parties become the best versions of themselves, so cultures can and should be charged with the task to help one another improve, to live up to our own ideals, to become cultures more worthy of respect and recognition.

And that’s the real wealth of multiple cultures co-existing. It’s that each culture is a parallel perspective, a weird mirror through which we can see new aspects of ourselves. The promise is not perfect harmony or the resolution of all ethnic tensions. The promise is increased collective intelligence. As a global community, we’re ultimately lucky to have each other, even if it hurts, even if there are clashes and misunderstandings.

Without each other, we are culturally blind. With the right processes — arduous as they must be—we can see our own cultures from the outside, and work to honor our respective cultural heritages by cultivating cultures that we are proud of and command the liking and respect of others.

The Transcultural Arbiter: Three Concepts

“In summary, the idea is to treat cultures more like we treat people: not as monolithic and essentially fixed, but as responsible, responsive, and highly malleable.”

All of this leaves us with the question: On what grounds should different co-existing cultures reasonably negotiate their mutual obligations? Through what methods of discourse and facilitation? After all, if people’s very identities and psychologies are always layered within their own cultures, how then can a member of one culture ever pass judgment on the practices of another culture? Is slavery wrong — who’s to say? Is it wrong to burn the wife of a deceased husband alive at his funeral pyre — who knows, right? Female genital mutilation? Destroying the natural environment? Sacred child temple prostitution? It’s all being tried and tested under the sun, as we speak.

There are other questions to be answered, for sure, but this one seems first in line.

As a very first step, let us simply state that, on a trivial level, it appears fairly obvious that not all cultures in all times are equally good for human thriving, if that is taken as a universal goal of humans to live dignified lives. You have, for instance, in terms of indigenous cultures a wide range from peaceful and friendly ones to highly violent, aggressive, and “toxic” ones. Nor is every aspect of a certain culture equally good for the thriving of its members (or those of other cultures). Admittedly, the cultural relativism of classical anthropologists like Ruth Benedict and Franz Boas served as a vital counterweight to the horrors of European colonialism and paternalism — but in the context of today’s diverse cultural context of globalized societies, the cultural relativist stance leads to all of the impasses discussed above. Most notably, it precludes the capacity to critique cultures and thus to develop them. Such critique and development, in turn, need to rely upon the productive meeting and merging of cultures.

As such, the rights of a certain culture to preserve its way of life must be balanced against its corresponding obligation to interface reasonably well with its neighboring communities, as well as against the collective will of its members to be subjected to critiques of (what others view as) toxic dynamics that result in the oppression of its own members. In turn, the right to make reasonable demands on other cultures is won. The aim, then, is not to efface the crucial aspect of critique from cultures in the name of diversity and respect of inter-cultural boundaries, but to make use of the interactions between cultures in order to co-critique — empowering critical and silenced voices on both sides. Within every culture, the downtrodden, the “subaltern”, can find valuable allies outside of their own culture, to make their case. This holds true of women subjected to honor culture in Arab families, to Black communities in the US who can reveal that the white Western mainstream treats them and Native Americans with similar disregard, and for Dalits in India who can make use of international critiques of the caste system.

In summary, the idea is to treat cultures more like we treat people: not as monolithic and essentially fixed, but as responsible, responsive, and highly malleable. If cultures have deep historical roots that cannot simply be disregarded (and, as such, always have a resistance to change), they are also ever re-interpreted and re-enacted by their members — always in the process of being invoked and socially constructed by real people with real and often conflicting interests.

Especially if we hold that cultural transformations are necessary for the Modern world-system to transform to a sustainable and more humane Metamodern or Protopian system (or meta-system), we simply cannot afford a stance that precludes the possibility of cultures around the world to transform. Such transformations must find ways to honor traditions and ways of life, while still helping cultures to become parts of a greater whole — a whole that is not monocultural, but deeply diverse and still relatively integrated in a manner that allows resonance across diversity.

This, the “rules of engagement of cross-cultural development”, is a too complex issue to be done justice in a single article. But let me introduce three concepts to get us started: The Parallax View, The Cultural Hybrid, and Ethnic Inter-Creativity. Both of these hold within them great potential to unlock a more self-aware and co-creative relationship with cultures around the world.

  • The Parallax View is the critical view of one’s own culture that comes from deeply immersing oneself in the perspective of “the other”. It is a form of “triangulation”, and so often requires not only the two meeting cultures to have facilitated meetings of negotiation, but also the presence of representatives of one or more other cultures who can comment upon the positions, critiques, and demands made by either side. As such, the self-critique within each culture is empowered and corroborated by the views of outsider observers. This affords stronger vectors of critique and cultural evolution on both sides — while balancing the demands in manners that attempt to counteract the power relations between the two cultures. The aim here is a kind of cross-cultural fairness or justice: that cultures are treated as equals, and thus that their members feel more respected and dignified, which allows for lesser defensiveness and greater openness to challenge own practices and biases.
  • The Cultural Hybrid is the person who is deeply immersed in more than one (usually two) cultures and can thus serve as a bridge and interpreter during Transcultural negotiations. Often, they may have one parent from each of the cultures in question, or at the very least have lived in and identified with both of them. They thus feel responsible for and loyal towards both sides. Tyson Yunkaporta, the author of Sand Talk: How Indigenous Thinking Can Save the World, can serve as an emblematic example, here in the case of the intersection between Aboriginal and Australian (Anglo-Saxon) cultures. The Cultural Hybrid is thus an invaluable resource in cross-cultural development — in Transcultural processes. They are better situated than others to adopt The Parallax View of the interactions of cultures. Again, this underscored the profound value of deep inter-cultural interactions: without close relationships, fewer such hybrids are born and socialized.
  • Ethnic Inter-Creativity is a concept I explored (albeit under different names) in my own earlier work with the role of race and ethnicity in police work. The idea is that members of one culture (usually the majority culture) should become as aware as possible of their own role of co-creating the ethnic identities of members of other communities, by virtue of how they interact with and treat them. People define their own ethnic and racial identities to a large extent by how they are met by members of other cultures. For instance, the treatment a minority group member receives by law enforcers that represent the hegemonic culture will lead to identifications with the own culture in more or less antagonistic terms. By extension, the same argument holds across all such interactions: Part by part, we shape how the culture of “the other” is expressed, which parts of it are emphasized, embodied, and enacted. This leads to greater self-reflection and to a greater sense of empowerment in regard to how “other cultures” play out in society. You come to realize that you have more power to shape how other cultures evolve than you might think, and you begin to take greater responsibility for how your own actions mold them.

Taken together, these are steps towards creating institutional practices that serve as a Transcultural Arbiter. One culture can never fully grasp and judge another culture. But this very paradox can be turned on its head and be made to work in favor of mutually desirable developments across cultures. Of course, the ideal should be to work towards cross-culturally universal values. But these “universal values” cannot simply be West-centric and Global North-centric “liberal” (Modern) values of human rights and individual expression. Rather the universality must be viewed as ever-open-ended, to be mutually explored precisely through the fault lines that cause tensions between cultures. Like in marital counselling, the tensions are hidden depositories of mutual insight and potential transformation.

An Example of Transculturalism: Mechelen

“Cultures are not static. They flow. They evolve. And if they have a right to exist as organic, living entities, it stands to reason that must also be held responsible as such.”

Mechelen is a Belgian town of some 80,000 inhabitants. In the early 2000s, the city had high unemployment, a large immigrant (mostly Muslim) minority, and high crime rates, with ethnic tensions as a result. This development was turned around with a comprehensive plan to adjust ethnic relations, which arguably serves as a case of Gemeinschaft Politics and Transculturalism. When ISIS exploded across Europe, Belgium had the highest per capita prevalence of people joining the organization — but Mechelen impressively had no recorded instances.

Under the leadership of Mayor Bart Somers, a program was introduced that took the following steps, in sequence:

  • Restoring order through increased police presence in key areas, increasing the sense of safety.
  • A wide public information campaign that set up a sort of “mutual obligations” social contract: Ethnic Flemish Belgians were asked to show tolerance to minorities but have zero tolerance of the discrimination of minorities, while minorities were asked to take steps to make their families conform with law and order.
  • Middle-class families of ethnic Belgians were reached out to, one by one, in the hundreds, to get them to accept having their own children in the same schools as immigrant children, tackling each of their concerns with safety and quality of education on a case-by-case basis. This broke up the segregation and re-zoning of school districts that had accumulated, increasing the number of positive interactions between ethnic groups.
  • Most controversially, perhaps, the Muslim youths of the municipality were all offered trips to Cordoba in Spain, where the Cordoban Caliphate of the 10th century has been a Muslim center of learning, science, pluralism, and tolerance of Europe in the Middle Ages. This thus tilts the expression of Muslim minority identities — towards pride, and also towards a real historical heritage of progressiveness and cosmopolitanism. Arguably, this was key to creating an alternative local Muslim identity, one that proved resistant to the lure of ISIS propaganda and chauvinism.

Simply stated, a rather advanced version of a “mutual obligations approach” was adopted over a number of years. And indeed, ethnic tensions were reduced, while still honoring the cultures and heritages involved. Mayor Somers was awarded the World Mayor Prize in 2016.

This is just one simple example of the potential inherent in the Transcultural stance. It’s not perfect and can certainly be critiqued. Much still needs to be invented by movement leaders, grassroots, and public officials on a case-to-case basis.

It stands to reason that Protopian and Metamodern societies would have advanced Transcultural practices as part and parcel of their institutional frameworks — combining these with facilitated processes of deliberative democracy (i.e. councils that discuss to reach mutual understanding of complex issues) with stakeholders from across sectors of society.

Simply put: Cultures are not static. They flow. They evolve. And if they have a right to exist as organic, living entities, it stands to reason that must also be held responsible as such. And they evolve together — depending upon the invaluable outsider perspectives of one another. Let us thus weave the best possible conditions for cultures to co-evolve into more ethical and universal versions of themselves, while still honoring their respective historical roots. That brings us beyond the impasses of Multiculturalism, and lands us in a co-creative space of Transculturalism.

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.

Acceptance, not Tolerance, Is the Elixir of a Good Society

Growing the inner capacity to accept things-as-they-are may be the best investment ever for society—and no, cultivating acceptance doesn’t lead to complacency in the face of injustice.
“Things die, which is to say that the feedback processes that flowed through them cease. And when things grow really fast—like our world system has—they often collapse more spectacularly, as well.”

Amidst the apparent turmoil of ongoing pandemics, climate disasters, and geo-political slides into what amounts to nothing less than a new Cold War, the world has slowly and quietly been warming up to a new political idea—an idea that I feel brings some light and hope to an otherwise daunting picture.

It’s that statistically speaking poverty and violence has decreased, globally, and faster than ever. Steven Pinker and Hans Rosling

Nah, kidding. Got you, didn’t I? Not more of that awfully unidimensional thinking, thank you.

Yes, the global economic human system has grown according to its own logic, and that has brought boons and blessings to many. But the systemic problems we are facing are no figment of Facebook paranoia. The system cannot continue along its current trajectory and dynamics: It will increasingly fall apart.

And there really isn’t anything very strange about that: things grow, they blossom, cracks show eventually, the cracks grow until things decay, and at some point in space-time it all falls apart. Things die, which is to say that the feedback processes that flowed through them cease. And when things grow really fast—like our world system has—they often collapse more spectacularly, as well. Or at least the risk of doing so increases drastically. When I say “spectacularly” I don’t mean the Hollywood version thereof, just that we’ll be stuck in spectacularly dreary and complicated situations for a very long time and that the quantity of people who can live happily will decrease substantially.

But at the same time, living systems can “survive” in the sense that they can give birth to something new. They can transform. All life depends on change, on flow—societies and civilizations, too. On most occasions, survival means “just keep the flow going”—sometimes it means: mutate, shape-shift, burn the bridge behind you! We’re likely at such a point, as more indicators than I can list here show.

Inner Development Goals

“The transformation at hand is not merely technological, political, psychological, or spiritual—it’s all of these. But the spiritual and existential sides of it cannot be ignored.”

The view that many observers are coming to, often largely independently of one another, is that some kind of “phase shift” is required in terms of the ways our systems function. That is to say, we need to simultaneously shift how economies, cultures, polities, and also civil societies, media, and even information architecture function—so that the world at large (or the human systems interacting with the biosphere) begins to function in a manner that is capable of sustaining itself at least for an acceptable amount of time. And a very important part of that is to shift the psychology of each of us, our personalities or our “personal development” if you will—as well as the social psychology that plays out between us and shapes our lives.

The global shape-shift will involve new technologies, new ways of making decisions, new ways of creating and distributing goods and services, no doubt. But there needs to be a corresponding “mind-shift”. The transformation at hand is not merely technological, political, psychological, or spiritual—it’s all of these. But the spiritual and existential sides of it cannot be ignored.

Which brings us back to the “political idea” I was talking about:

  • Could institutions be created to actively and deliberately support people’s inner development—so that each of us, on our own, becomes more likely to take up values, behaviors, and sentiments that are conducive to a thriving and sustainable world?

And that can only happen if everyone accepts Jesus Christ as their personal savior and submits fully.

Okay, kidding again. I’ll stop. Promise.

It can only happen if we start a serious and scientifically informed (but not scientifically reductionist!) public discourse on how such inner growth can be spurred in society, and about what such inner development may be taken to mean in the first place.

I have called this idea “the listening society”, because it would need to entail institutional and cultural frameworks that are much more attentive to the subtleties of human needs, desires, and ways of functioning and thriving (or suffering) than today’s modern societies.

With a somewhat different take you might call it Protopia (not Utopia) as I discussed in an earlier article, because it’s not “one idea of how a good society would work” but rather the cultivation of a tendency to manage the many complex issues of life, thus increasing the chances for thriving lives to emerge. If people function better in their own lives and relationships, it’s highly likely to have effects on how society functions and how well it can move through difficult transformations. Makes sense, doesn’t it, that societal resilience (to stagnation and collapse) should at least partly depend on the resilience of each of us as human beings? One million people over-reacting at the same time, or managing a conflict unproductively, or not taking responsibility for their emotions—of course it’s going to have aggregate effects! Justin Rosenstein’s One Project currently uses the word Protopia to weave together a greater whole from the many social innovators and problems solvers they can identify and support.

And you might call it, with yet another angle, Inner Development Goals (IDGs). That is, goals of “development that matters”—not the development of new and cooler furniture and gadgets (even if such things can also matter) but of things like the personal qualities, lived experiences, and relationships of real human beings. Those things also need investments in terms of time and resources. The IDG framework is still young and being developed and encompasses 23 “skills” divided into five categories: Being, Thinking, Relating, Collaborating, and Acting. The “Being” category, for instance, would include such traits as Authenticity/Integrity, Presence (being able to be in the moment), and Self-Awareness. It’s all work-in-progress and needs to be funded, expanded, fleshed out, and experimented with—the IDG team are already working with Costa Rica at a government level to create an IDG strategy, and seem to be starting up in more countries.

IDG Framework Overview. Source: www.innerdevelopmentgoals.org

As you might have caught, the IDGs constitute a direct response to the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals, SDGs. To simplify the argument here, it would be that attainment of SDGs would require a corresponding focus on the hitherto under-emphasized IDGs. And that requires some research and practice to get a handle on what good IDG projects might look like.

I’ve been thrilled with both the One Project and IDGs as they, in ways different from but related to what I myself imagined, have been pointing out and concretizing some of what I feel is the most hopeful and promising idea of our time. Both are young and experimental projects (and, full transparency, I have to various degrees been involved with both of them professionally), but they both share the basic impulse to work towards transition and transformation into sustainability not only by changing the external life conditions of people, but also by developing the inner landscapes of human experience itself.

The Master Variable: Wisdom or Acceptance?

“Wisdom tells us what we could’ve-should’ve, Acceptance tells us, with great precision what to do: first, accept the truth of the matter, regardless of what that truth may be.”

In this context, I’d like to make a suggestion about one particular quality of Inner Development that I believe is particularly important to achieve resilience, sustainability, and thriving in the world: Acceptance.

There are strong reasons to believe, I hold, that Acceptance may be the most efficient handle to cultivate in the population for driving meaningful inner growth in a cost-effective manner that still makes a difference in people’s lives.

We might compare it to another popular candidate in this context: the focus on Wisdom. I’ve always been skeptical of it, because it only truly functions “after-the-fact”, so to speak. Wisdom is a composite variable with several components that somehow together create a sum greater than its parts where you’re more likely to take good actions and feel okay yourself. The dictionary definition reads: “The ability to discern or judge what is true, right, or lasting; insight.” Now, the problem is that the jury’s still out on what’s true, right, or lasting in any one situation. So it basically comes down to wisdom = doing the right thing, whatever that might be.

You only know that in retrospect, if at all. Confronted with a tough real-life dilemma, you’re compelled to do something “wise”. So is it wise to show your righteous anger here, or to breathe and count to ten? Is it wise to suggest splicing a baby in two (as the symbol of wisdom, King Solomon, did when faced with two women who both claimed to be the baby’s mother, so as to see which one would decline it, and thus be the real mother)? What happens if both mothers are happy with the proposal to slice it in two—do you then change your mind, thereby undermining the weight of your future royal verdicts? We only know that Solomon is “wise” because the a posteriori (after-the-fact) story says he is. He might as well have been “idiotic evil” (to paraphrase Dungeons and Dragons). Splitting babies sounds a lot more like Caligula to me; saying crude shit you can’t back up sounds like Donald Trump.

Another example of how Wisdom is a posteriori: All those stories about how the Buddha turned nasty and unreasonable people around. The other person always stands corrected. What would have happened if one of the Buddha’s interventions or responses just didn’t work, if he didn’t “win” the confrontation? Would there then have been a story of Wisdom that included the Buddha being humiliated but then learning from his mistake and showing regret? In all of these stories, Wisdom seems to imply ending up on top somehow, if in a benign manner. It whispers of a “hail victory!”. The German phrase for which is Sieg Heil, by the way.

Now, compare that to Acceptance. Let’s conjure up a number of real-life dilemmas we’ve all been through and compare how Wisdom and Acceptance stack up in terms of their usefulness as an entry point into each situation.

  • Your boss is abusive. Wisdom says “handle it well”; Acceptance says “accept the reality of the situation and make sure you soberly see your options in terms of what actions you can take, including accepting the level of difficulty, conflict, and risk of what you must do to change the situation.”
  • You’re confronted with new ideas that challenge your worldview. Wisdom says “stick with the best worldview”; Acceptance says “accept the difficult emotions of confusion and ambiguity and accept the fact that it may take some time before your mind and emotions stabilize on a new set of assumptions in life”.
  • You work towards some goal of social justice. Wisdom says “Do it in a manner that really works and that is good for others as well as yourself”; Acceptance says “accept that the world is not as you would like it to be, accept the reality of your emotions about that, accept that you cannot control very much, and then accept the responsibility of the task you’ve taken upon yourself.”
  • You suffer from some mental illness. Wisdom: “Handle it well… But then again, a wise person kind of per definition isn’t mentally ill, so stop being mentally ill, and handle it well that you are…” [AKA syntax error!]; Acceptance says: “Hey, it’s okay to be mentally ill, either way, that’s now the reality of this moment and the cards you’ve been dealt, and if you don’t accept the truth of that, how will you be able to improve upon it?”
  • We did something we really shouldn’t have. Wisdom: “Handle it well.”; Acceptance: “Accept that you did it, and accept yourself despite having made a mistake. Accept responsibility for it”.
  • There are groups in society you find abhorrent and are in doubt whether or not to “tolerate” them. Wisdom says: “Be as tolerant as possible, but not more”; Acceptance says: “Accept that not everyone is going to be to your liking, and then accept the responsibility you have for protecting others from them.”
  • You’re in great physical pain. Wisdom says: “Be wise about it.” Acceptance says: “Accept the sensations in your body, and then accept which level of acceptance you can muster, and this will actually reduce not only how much you suffer from the pain, but even the level of pain itself” (true story).
  • Grief stuck in you that blocks your heart from feeling truly alive. Wisdom: “Be a wise person about your suffering.”; Acceptance: “Accept the numbness, and pain will emerge, accept that pain, and grief will emerge, accept the grief and rage will emerge, repeat through a looping roller-coaster, and one day you’ll start feeling something again, for good or bad. But at least you’ll be fucking alive. Then accept that.”
  • Wisdom: “Be wise about it.” Acceptance: “Another one bites the dust. Pretty fly for a dead guy. Find your peace with the inevitable.”

I guess we could go on. The point is that, in pretty much any case I can think of, Wisdom adds nothing (and sometimes even detracts a bit) while Acceptance guides your steps and helps you figure out how to act in a productive manner. Simply stated, it appears to me that Acceptance is, as a guiding principle, wiser than Wisdom. It seems to actually work a priori, before the fact, which is to say that it seems to have predictive power on human thriving—causal power, which is the only power worth its salt. Wisdom tells us what we could’ve-should’ve, Acceptance tells us, with great precision what to do: first, accept the truth of the matter, regardless of what that truth may be. Reality as it is, not as we would like it to be.

The River that Connects the Creeks

“Acceptance, then, is simply the capacity of a mind/psyche/body to take in and process feedback data from the world without corrupting it along the way.”

And yes, Acceptance does seem to be correlated to human happiness, too. Likely, this has to do with putting our whole nervous system in a more relaxed and receptive mode to the experience of life, and to our own agency within. We accept the reality of something we cannot control but we don’t need to condone it. As such, Acceptance goes beyond tolerance. It is both deeper and more compassionate than tolerance—and it can help us discern when to tolerate and what to tolerate.

Tolerance, a highly celebrated virtue in liberal democracies, is overrated. Just consider what you’d prefer: a society where we just tolerate one another despite our flaws, or a society where we accept each other—including our less admirable sides. What would Jesus do?

  • So basically, Acceptance in this sense is just our capacity to take in the truth of the matter in a given moment, to the best of our cognitive ability, while resisting the unconscious temptation to bargain with reality. It is what it is. It’s our relationship to the truth, however well we may approach. Or, as Gandhi said: Truth is God. That’s the core principle of Acceptance.

Think about it—Acceptance appears to be a fairly universal streak across psychology and self-knowledge:

  • In a “Western setting”, we can see the Acceptance principle as central to Stoicism (but still overlapping, strangely enough, Epicureanism), in Existentialism (and thus in logo therapy), in Freudian psychoanalysis (the “catharsis” is fundamentally a quality of Acceptance), and from Stoicism to its modern version in CBT (Cognitive Behavioral Therapy—the most practiced and widely proven cost-effective treatment there is), and particularly the mindfulness-based versions thereof, leading up to DBT (Dialectical Behavioral Therapy, which is the multi-modal heavy-weight cousin of CBT, more specialized on severe personality disorders and depressions), and popular tools in today’s landscape of social work and counseling, like ACT (Acceptance Commitment Therapy) and Solution-Based Therapy (where you, first of all, use tools such as sliding scales to better accept the current reality of your situation without getting hopeless about it)… For all the drastic differences in Western traditions, Acceptance seems to run right through them all like more than a thread, more like a central river to connect all the creeks of human effort to cope with the world.
  • In an Eastern setting, we have, perhaps most visibly and notably in the West today, the practice of equanimity in mediation such as Theravadan (Buddhist) Vipassana, which explicitly teaches that the other dimensions of practice (concentration/absorption and subtlety of awareness) are only fundamentally valuable as auxiliaries to equanimity. And equanimity is just another word for Acceptance, if you think about it. Theravada Buddhists will also meditate on rotting corpses to accept death and transience. If you venture into more far-out stuff, like Tibetan tantric traditions, etc., you must face inner monsters with Acceptance for these to transform into pure light, as is depicted in Tibetan artwork of weird demon faces. You have the fakir traditions of the depths of Indian history. Why do you think they’re lying on spikes, if not to foster Acceptance? Or what about Daoism, where everything is about letting go, and letting things flow—is that not fundamentally a teaching almost entirely devoted to Acceptance?

If you’ll allow me a few more archetypal excursions. Truth is God, and the submission to God just means accepting the truth of the matter, resisting the temptation to unconsciously fight reality itself by entering into some magical deal with the devil. The devil, like Goethe’s Faust, will offer you power over reality, but violate reality itself—which casts you into illusion, ultimately isolating you from shared reality, from others, and that ultimately leaves us burning in hell.

You have the same scheme among psychonauts—i.e., psychedelic explorers: You are faced with frightening visions and the Abyss, but if you go through it and accept it, you reach therapeutic or cathartic results. Forgiveness and redemption come within reach, leading to increased peace of mind.

Acceptance, then, is simply the capacity of a mind/psyche/body to take in and process feedback data from the world without corrupting it along the way. It’s opening the doors of perception (echoing The Doors, who echo Aldous Huxley, who echoes William Blake).

In a world where things only interact causally, by touch within any of the fundamental “fields” that the standard model of physics holds to correspond to the four forces of the universe (although a fifth one has recently been suggested) perceiving means interacting with. And so, the spiritual quality of Acceptance will likely affect every aspect of a person’s interactions with the world, all subtle phenomena arising within the experience of their own mind and body included.

And thus, if we carry that argument to its conclusion, it is likely almost always in our own interest that others we interact with are as accepting as possible. And it’s most often in our own interest that we ourselves manage to accept the reality of what is.

The argument could be expanded substantially from here on (going into the nature of “reality” in the empirical, logical, ethical, and social sense and how Acceptance plays out differently but still works across all of them).

Facing the tough stuff—let it be said once and for all, that staring into the abyss with Acceptance is the very opposite of complacency. The whole “selling your soul to the devil” looks like a cool rebellion on the face of it—but it’s actually the opposite. It’s just synonymous with not accepting what is and going with it. That’s complacency, because it leaves reality to be participated in and shaped by others than yourself.

Take MASSIVE ACTION!

“I’m not saying that Acceptance is one ring to rule them all. That would be too strong an assumption. I’m saying that, as a start for cultivating a more listening society, Acceptance is a good bet at this point.”

If I had to choose between Acceptance and NFTs or the best of the cryptocurrencies, I’d have to go with Acceptance. It’s just a better investment. Cryptos won’t help me that much on my deathbed. Acceptance will.

Now, the really good news is that Acceptance can be practiced. That’s basically what you do in Vipassana 10-day retreats (but then you also have to put up with Goenka’s rather offensively dumb brainwashing on video while you’re spending the whole days making yourself suggestible; it’s a package deal, but you can go for free). It’s what you do in all of those therapies I mentioned, one way or another. Many of them work, to a large degree, because of Acceptance. My favorite is probably DBT, Dialectical Behavioral Therapy, and it has a whole modality on increasing your “distress tolerance”—one of the most important parts of the therapy. And the most important part of increasing “distress tolerance”? You guessed it.

Look down the list of the 23 skills listed in the IDGs (Inner Development Goals) in its early attempt to gather what should be emphasized by such programs—humility, perseverance, trust, and so forth. If I’m not mistaken, pretty much all of them seem to be closely connected to Acceptance—and, notably, by far the most of them seem like they would be explained by Acceptance rather than be a factor in explaining it. But may the truth on this be researched and cleared up, so we’ll know better. And may we all accept whatever that truth might be.

I’m not saying that Acceptance is one ring to rule them all. That would be too strong an assumption. I’m saying that, as a start for cultivating a more listening society, Acceptance is a good bet at this point. It appears to be a viable pressure point in the psycho-social weave of society.

Let us try to cultivate Acceptance and evaluate the results. I don’t mean in a half-assed manner—I mean, let’s take massive action. Let’s invest millions of “man-hours” and clever minds and good hearts to figure out how Acceptance can grow in the general population, in the hearts of each of us. Let’s see if it really is the elixir of a good society.

There are, namely, things coming our way we’ll have to try to accept. Getting good at accepting seems like a good idea to create resilience—i.e. the capacity to bounce back when life hits us up with new surprises.

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.

Is Metamodernism the Last Stage of Development? Chaos Theory Might Hold the Answer

Chaos Is Not A Ladder—But the Ladder Leads to Chaos.

Yes, Human History Has Developed Through Discernable Stages—But That May Be Changing—If So, Future (Protopian) Society Must Be “Designed for Chaos”

“With a sweet twist of irony, Graeber and Wengrow may have failed to rewrite human history, but inadvertently offered an understanding of our own time—and the future landscapes of cultural evolution.”

How utterly and awfully wrong they are, David Graeber and David Wengrow, in their recent book, The Dawn of Everything—which is widely (and wildly) hailed as nothing less than a rewriting of all-of-human-history-as-we-know-it. It’s somewhat disconcerting how easily and eagerly the intellectual public swallows a book’s conclusions if they are only served with a spoonful of enticing story weaving, numerous examples, and some rebel edge.

Yes, the book is a genuine masterpiece in more manners than can be listed here. But its undeniable merits do not detract anything from how dismally mistaken its core premises are: that society and culture have not developed in discernable stages and that social reality has been freely invented and randomly experimented with throughout history. If only we dared dream—the authors maintain—if only the powers-that-be did not shackle our sociological imagination, we could create the world in a new multiplicity of beautiful social realities.

As nice as all of that sounds, it’s just not how social reality has functioned throughout history. For all the exceptions that the two Davids find to the rule of the large, over-arching, developmental patterns of world history, they forget something very basic: that the cases-in-point are far more numerous, and do not require the turning of every stone of archaeological details to spot. No hunter-gatherer society ever invented an alphabet and started writing books on metaphysics and law, none of the great civilizations of the ancient world ever started something akin to the Scientific Revolution, and never did anyone before the 20th century come up with anything resembling contemporary queer feminism.

Cultural history has in fact developed through discernable stages, through six different meta-memesThese do leave a lot of leeway for human inventiveness—but that ingenuity is always structured along a certain generator function at the core of culture. That’s why, for instance, Egyptian art and architecture looked roughly the same for more than a millennium, or why Precolumbian Mesoamerican artifacts are fairly easily recognizable as such. That’s why each tribal, indigenous society develops its own aesthetic forms and costumes, but they still remain distinct from one another. “Cultural forms”—to use Michel Foucault’s old expression—emerge in discernible patterns.

I return to Graeber and Wengrow in detail in my upcoming book, The 6 Hidden Patterns of History— we shan’t stay on the topic now. Here, I just want to point out the following:

  • In equal measure as with which the Davids are mistaken about the past(yes, cultural history really did develop in discernable stages), so they may very well have hit upon an understanding of social reality that correctly describes the future. We may be nearing an inflection point in history where stage theories actually lose their relevance—and in which the sociological imagination truly can design reality; indeed, a situation in which society itself must be “designed for chaos” if it is to survive and thrive.

And yet, paradoxically, this very fact (i.e., that we may, as an emerging planetary system of interconnected cultures, now be stepping off the ladder of stages of cultural development that until now has meaningfully described how history functions) makes the understanding of the developmental stages of society yet more crucial. They help us understand the “order within the chaos”—like in chaos mathematics, the study of how apparent “chaos” emerges from a deterministic order.

With a sweet twist of irony, Graeber and Wengrow may have failed to rewrite human history, but inadvertently offered an understanding of our own time—and the future landscapes of cultural evolution.

My suggestion is that we view the cultural history of humanity as a form of “chaotic system”—as understood by chaos mathematicians. From that vantage point, it can be stated that we are, with yet another ironic twist of fate, determined to develop towards unpredictability—towards “chaos”: i.e., towards a cultural state of affairs sensitive to “initial conditions”. This, incidentally, brings forth the conditions of freedom to shape our culture that Graeber and Wengrow so astutely intuited in their reading of world history. Freedom grows from the barrel of what chaos theorists call “sensitivity to initial conditions”.

The strange fact is that there are incredibly profound and mysteriously detailed similarities between:

  1. on one hand chaos theory, and
  2. on the other hand, the theory of the stages of cultural development (the so-called meta-memes, i.e. the overarching patterns-of-patterns within which human cultures have developed.)

To introduce this idea, let me take a proper detour into the basics of chaos theory and one of its key innovators: the physicist Mitchell Feigenbaum. It takes a bit of cognitive weight-lifting, this next part of the article, but I assure you it’s worth the lift.

Feigenbaum’s Constant in Chaos Theory

“Feigenbaum found that, across all different equations of such feedback systems, the ratio between when one bifurcation occurs, and the next one, is constant: it’s 4.669 201 609…”

The Feigenbaum Constant is roughly 4.67. It’s one of those numbers that go on and on into more decimals, like π (Pi) or e—so-called “transcendental numbers”. With a few more decimals, it looks like this:

  • 4.669 201 609…

Roughly 4.67, then. What does this number describe?

In 1975, Feigenbaum (and two French scientists, Coullet and Tresser, who made the same discovery pretty much simultaneously) noticed, that there is a pattern to how feedback loop systems shift between phases.

Such systems are based on a feedback mechanism. They all work “fractally”, in that they repeat the same function again and again, on the result of the former iteration. In the 1970s, it was already well known that such systems, mathematically speaking, go from stabilizing on one single number, to stabilizing around an oscillation between two numbers, to an oscillation between four numbers, eight ones, and so on.

If you increase how high the “input variable” is (for example, as in the most classical example, how quickly rabbits breed minus how often they die), “the system” (of numbers of rabbits from year to year) starts behaving differently; it shifts between different “phases”:

  • With a low “input variable” (relatively slow breeding), the rabbit population will stabilize as a constant number from year to year, regardless of how many rabbits were there initially. If there were many, they will die off and stabilize; if there were few, they will breed until the same number is reached. The system has a stable attractor point. It’s like a rubber band: after we’ve stretched it (or even tried to compress it), it goes back to one size, one “equilibrium state”. See image below.

Screenshot from Veritasium YouTube channel. The system stabilizes on one and the same value (on the right). The left side plots the different points at which the system stabilizes.

  • With a higher input variable, the rabbit population will start oscillating from year to year. When the rabbits become too many, some will die, and when they are few, there will be more opportunities to multiply, becoming many again. But regardless of how many rabbits there were initially, the system will settle on a certain oscillation between two specific values. This is an oscillating attractor point. See image below.

Screenshot from Veritasium YouTube channel. Oscillation on the right, bifurcation on the left. The left side plots the different points at which the system can stabilize, either into a stable attractor point or into an oscillation between two values.

  • From there on, if you increase the input variable again (reminder: how quickly the rabbits breed minus how often they die); i.e. if you “supercharge” the system further, the system goes through new phase shifts: settling on oscillating attractor points with 4 values, then 8 values, then 16, onwards. You have “period doubling”. With every phase shift, it doubles, it branches off. That’s why you call each such shift a bifurcation. You need to increase the input variable by less and less for each new bifurcation to emerge. (Bifurcation is not the same as “oscilliation”; a bifurcation is a shift of how the system oscillates once it has hit its attractor point.) See image below.

Screenshot from Veritasium YouTube channel.

  • After about seven bifurcations (as you “supercharge” the system more and more), the system’s properties change more fundamentally: It stops settling around an oscillation at all, and enters a state of chaos. Here, the number of rabbits (or whatever else the system describes) begins to vary seemingly erratically from year to year (or other time period described). It appears random (indeed, equations like these are used to simulate randomness when a computer is told to generate a random number). Now, even if, theoretically speaking, this chaos is determined (that is, for a certain value of the input variable, you can calculate the erratic leaps of future rabbit population values for all years to come), in practice it is not determined: Because, even if you change the 100th decimal of the input variable, the system will soon produce radically different values. This is what is meant by “sensitive initial conditions”. This is the whole “butterfly effect” thing we’ve all heard of: the change of one little, itsy, bitsy thing can have dramatic effects on how the system as a whole behaves later down the line. See image below.

Screenshot from Veritasium YouTube channel. As you can see, if you supercharge the system enough, it explodes into chaos.

The example here was about rabbit populations, where you “supercharge the system” by increasing how quickly they breed minus how often they die, but this pattern (one stable attractor, then two, four… until boom, chaos!) has been observed to emerge in fluid dynamics as the temperature increases (that being the “input variable” in this case), in the light sensitivity of eyes in humans and salamanders, in heartbeat fibrillation (where you can then use chaos theory to know how to bring the heart back to a steadier rhythm), the rhythm of dripping faucets has period-doubling with increasing flow rate, until it reaches chaos (yep, try it at home, folks!)…

Like the Golden Ratio, this is one of those seemingly magical patterns of nature. It’s a universal. It’s the stuff of minds blown to cosmic smithereens. It’s a source of that sense of awe that science alone can bring, and which, in its own way, arguably matches the rapture of religious experience.

Now, then, what in this pattern does the Feigenbaum Constant—4.67—describe? Feigenbaum found that, across all different equations of such feedback systems, the ratio between when one bifurcation occurs, and the next one, is constant: it’s 4.669 201 609…

Let me restate that:

  • Every new bifurcation comes faster than the last one. How much faster? 4.67 times faster.

That is to say, you only need to increase the “input variable” (rate of rabbit breeding/death, water flow rate, temperature, or whatever) one 4.67th of the amount to reach the next bifurcation. The bifurcations come faster and faster—as you can see in this diagram. That’s what Feigenbaum discovered, making his constant worthier of a tattoo than most symbols.

To the left, Mitchell Feigenbaum, to the right, awesome tattoo suggestion.

But wait a minute—wouldn’t that mean that the period-doubling gets ridiculously rapid after a few doublings?

Yes, exactly.

So, after about seven period-doublings, this dynamic peters off, and the system reaches a new state: chaos!

You climb a ladder of predictable intervals (although the distance between the steps gets shorter each time, the shift that occurs is the same: a doubling of branches), in a predictable universe; one of determined numbers that simply follow from what you have already defined and stated—but the ladder collapses around a certain point, its predictable steps disappearing into infinity.

And you step off the ladder—into chaos.

(If my way of explaining didn’t do it for you—some of which is with my own words and simplifications—you can try this explanation on the Veritasium YouTube channel. It’s wonderful. My own introduction to the topic was via Santa Fe Institute professor Melanie Mitchell’s brilliant book, Complexity.)

Okay—fair enough. There is a universal, tattoo-worthy, pattern out there in the natural sciences that describes the behavior of chaotic systems. What on earth does that have to do with any theory of evolution through stages of cultural history—the so-called meta-memes? And does it suggest anything about the times we live in, anything about what visions of the future we should reasonably be striving towards? And how does it comment upon Geaber and Wengrow’s point of view?

Ladies and gents, esteemed non-binaries—I give you The Three Striking Resemblances Between Chaos Theory and Cultural Evolution.

Are these striking resemblances merely coincidental? You take a look and be the judge.

First Resemblance:

The Meta-Memes Follow Feigenbaum’s Constant

 

“It has been noted by many observers that each metameme emerges about five times faster than the last one.”

The seven meta-memes (i.e., the stages of cultural logics or “generator functions” of societies) are, as I discuss in my upcoming book, The 6 Hidden Patterns of History:

  1. Archaic (I usually don’t count this one, hence speaking of “six patterns”.)
  2. Animistic
  3. Faustian
  4. Post-Faustian
  5. Modern
  6. Post-Modern
  7. Meta-Modern

(Hereafter, hyphens are ditched, so I’ll be writing “metamemes”, “postmodern”, etc. That’s how you normally write them; it’s just for a bit extra clarity that they’re first introduced with hyphens.)

Understanding each of these metamemes is a whole discipline of scholarly study in and of itself—or, rather, a trans-disciplinary field. But they can be intuitively understood as a major correction of the old and outdated division of history into Stone Age, Bronze Age, Iron Age, and so on. They are, more along the lines of media theorist Marshall McLuhan, based around information technology, and how each such form of communication has properties that crystallize as particular societies and civilizations throughout history and geography.

Roughly, it can be stated that each of the metamemes corresponds to a revolution of the communicative technology of society.

  1. Archaic—Simple spoken language.
  2. Animist—Abstract spoken language, and images and sculptures that represent what they look like.
  3. Faustian—Images that represent something else than what they look like: symbols for simple written messages and basic accounting.
  4. Postfaustian—Writing in abstracted texts, such as literature and algebra.
  5. Modern—Printed texts (printing press, standardized alphabet and spelling, “codex” books, newspapers, mass distribution).
  6. Postmodern—Transferred images and sounds (printed images and photographs in magazines, books and newspapers, gramophone records, radio, cinema, television, “simulacra”).
  7. Metamodern—the Internet, Web 2.0, Web 3.0, and onwards.

The emergence of the Archaic metameme presumably coincides with the appearance of what scholars call “anatomically modern human beings”. (Here “modern” simply refers to “anatomically similar to today”, not in the Modern-with-capital-M in the metamemetic sense “linked to Modern society and its specific way of functioning”.) If these people were like us physiologically, more or less, it means they also had a genetic predisposition for language. Human babies, for instance, begin to “speak” or try to converse long before they’ve learned their first word. Hence, something we could recognize as a spoken language in the specifically human sense likely coincides with the emergence of Homo Sapiens (there are, naturally, many meaningful ways to describe and study non-human animal languages, see e.g. When Animals Speak: Towards an Interspecies Democracy by Eva Meijer).

The date for that emergence keeps getting pushed back with new paleontological or archeological findings. We’ve gone from habitually claiming that it’s 200 000 years ago towards somewhere closer to 250 000, or even 300 000 years ago. The Archaic metameme is thus around 200–300 k old.

The emergence of Animist cultures (in all of their variation and complexity, which indeed seem to have increased over the millennia, today’s tribal hunter-gatherer societies being more distinct and unique than those of, say, the Ice Age) seems to be linked to the so-called “cognitive revolution” of circa 70k to 30k years ago. This coincides with the most significant “recent” wave out of Africa 70k–50k years ago and the emergence of art around 50k years ago. In the archeological records, the appearance of artworks of various kinds, be it carved figurines, cave paintings, or whatnot, is quite sudden and explosive after 50 000 BCE, indicating that some revolutionary cultural and cognitive development had taken place. Within a comparatively short period, a few thousand years that is, the world was teeming with artistic human expression. Hence, I would claim that it’s relatively safe to say that from about 50k years ago you have something that could meaningfully be described as the Animist metameme; a distinct departure from the way humans had lived before.

The following metameme, Faustianism, is linked to settled agricultural civilizations—but not reducible to it. In one form or another, such polytheistic warrior societies cropped up without necessarily being based on agriculture and/or pastoralism. The ruins of Göbekli Tepe in Southeastern Anatolia are a good example of monolithic architecture, a typical Faustian feature, built by hunter-gatherers. The earliest facets of Faustianism thus emerged prior to the agricultural revolution and this metameme is thus about 10k to 12k years old.

Postfaustianism, linked to the emergence of the traditional world religions and major world civilizations of the so-called “axial age”, is about 2.5k–3k years old. This is what is usually referred to as “traditional” or sometimes “premodern” society as we generally imagine the conditions of life in Europe, the Middle East, and China before the industrial revolution.

The Modern metameme emerges, if you dig to its roots, around the mid-1400s in the Italian Renaissance, i.e. between five and six centuries ago.

The Postmodern metameme emerges in the late 19th century (but, of course, comes to dominate society only much later), with a culture saturated with photographic images, and sounds which begin to form a shared layer of the social imagination (think of Marilyn Monroe—poof, we all get similar images, although none of us ever met her, and those images have little to do with the actual person).

The Metamodern metameme seems to be emerging as we speak. It’s the culture of digital society, where new social imaginaries are weaved by the imaginations of the many, for good or bad.

It has been noted by many observers that each metameme emerges about five times faster than the last one. In a very weird way, time (here being the input variable, or at least the one we’re noticing: there may be other some variable that simply increases with the passing of time in human culture), seems to become compressed as it progresses through the universe of cultural evolution.

About five times”, aye?

Hmm, does it appear to be on the higher end of that (slightly above 5), or on the lower end (somewhat below)? Well, actually it seems to be somewhat below five times faster with each metameme.

But still more than 4.5 times faster…

Could it be… about 4.669 201 609 times faster? About 4.67 times faster?

Seems about right, actually.

But we’ll never know. Defining the metamemes and establishing precisely when fundamental cultural shifts emerged throughout history will never be an exact science and always remain open to different interpretations.

Still, it’s a strong hypothesis that the ratio between the emergence of each of the metamemes somewhat follows Feigenbaum’s constant.

Or to put it yet more briefly: Cultural development seems to follow Feigenbaum’s Constant, thus behaving like the bifurcation diagram I described above.

Second Resemblance:

Like “Period Doublings”, Metamemes Can Be Meaningfully Repeated About 7 Times

 

“Both the bifurcation diagram and the metamemes seem to meaningfully iterate 7 times, or just a little beyond, before “chaos” ensues.”

In chaos theory, the difference of the “input value” with which you increase the charge of the function so that the phase shifts is thus circa 4.67 times smaller for each step. The period doublings thus occur faster and faster.

In the most famous equation where this is true, the so-called “logistic map” (the model that tracks how many rabbits there are expected to be from year to year), you get the following sequence:

(Remember: the value we’re putting into this equation is how fast the rabbits breed minus how often they die.)

  • If you put in a value higher than 1.0, the rabbits don’t just die off, but eventually reach some kind of equilibrium population other than zero.
  • The 1st bifurcation happens at the value of 3.0. Once you put in a value equal to or greater than that, the population starts to oscillate between two numbers from year to year.
  • 2nd bifurcation (to oscillating between 4 points) happens (this is what Feigenbaum calculated) at 3.44949.
  • 3rd bifurcation happens 4.7 times closer to the last one, so around 3.54409.
  • 4th one even closer, at 3.564407.
  • 5th one, at 3.568759.
  • 6th one: 3.569629
  • 7th one: 3.569891
  • 8th one: 3.569934
  • “Infinitieth” one (the omega point): 3.569934…

So, if you increase the input variable in this equation (“the logistic map”) beyond 3.569934…, you hit chaos. This is the breaking point, where this system’s mathematical properties change. Sure, in theory, you can add more decimals in infinity around this point, always doubling the period but never hitting chaos. But that doesn’t seem to be what real-world systems behave like.

Notice the following: Because the distance is about 4.67 times closer to each next bifurcation, the distance between the later bifurcations becomes very small—eventually infinitesimally small, of course.

Beyond the seventh bifurcation, we’re talking small changes of the fourth decimal, and after the 8th bifurcation, you have to go beyond the sixth decimal to even notice the change.

The whole thing seems to collapse before it quite lands on the 8th bifurcation—or just after it.

Now, keep that in mind and think about the following progression of metamemes…

  1. Archaic: a bit less than 250 000 years ago.
  2. Animistic: about 50 000 years ago.
  3. Faustian about 10–12 000 years ago.
  4. Postfaustian: about 2500–3000 years ago.
  5. Modern: about 600 years ago.
  6. Postmodern: about 120–150 years ago.
  7. Metamodern: emerges within a period of 30+ years, currently ongoing.
  8. Whatever comes after Metamodern (the suggestions are many out there!)— emerges in about 6–7 years? Begins to sound more than a bit too weird, no?
  9. A ninth metameme, whatever that might be called, emerges in less than two years (now we’ve entered the realm of the patently absurd).
  10. A tenth metameme: a few months?
  11. A few weeks!?
  12. Days!?
  13. Hours!??
  14. You get the picture… Soon down to fractions of seconds. Huh?

There is just too much weirdness going down for that pattern to meaningfully hold up—up until the 7th, possibly the 8th, metameme.

Notice that I’m not applying the above model of chaos mathematics to the theory of metamemes: I’m just following the pattern discernable within the shifts of metamemes, historically speaking, to its own respective conclusion. And it seems to meaningfully hold only to the 7th iteration—possibly just a tiny little bit beyond.

It’s not that one logic is pressed upon the other: it’s that both phenomena behave in the same manner— feedback systems that reach a point of chaos on the one hand, and the cultural evolution of human history on the other.

As a brief side note, we may underscore that the metamemes seem to iterate 7 times also when it comes to what I call the layers of social emergence (a theory developed together with Johan Ranefors using his metatheory framework). These are: 1. individual agency, 2. group agency, 3. incorporated group agency (like companies and organizations), 4. systems and platforms, 5. Modern state institutions, 6. transnational cooperation, and 7. planetary coordination of all former layers. This is a longer discussion—suffice to say, at this point, that Metamodernity corresponds to the point where planetary coordination becomes both possible and necessary for all former layers to survive and thrive. I shall write another article on this topic—here it’s just to point out the seeming convergence around 7 metamemes in yet another way. Not more, nor fewer.

Both the bifurcation diagram and the metamemes seem to meaningfully iterate 7 times, or just a little beyond, before “chaos” ensues.

Chaos, in this sense, is anything but a ladder. But cultural development throughout history has followed what looks like a ladder—and that ladder ends mid-air; the ladder leads to chaos.

From this point of view, it appears that Metamodernity is emerging as we speak. Metamodernism is the last of the stages of cultural development (perhaps with a minuscule extra stage added at the very end of it). After that point, in the next few decades, we will need entirely different modes of thinking to properly describe the landscapes of cultural development. Stage theories were true, but they are running obsolete. They describe the past (and Graeber and Wengrow are simply incorrect in their refutation of them); they even describe the present and bring us to this very moment: but they do not meaningfully describe the future.

Please note that metamemes are not time periods: they are deep-seated patterns of information that structure the generation of culture. And so, several different metamemes always co-exist at any one time in history; they always overlap. Today, we still live in a largely Modern world-system, albeit with an influential fringe of Postmodernity. And within the Postmodern strata of societies, Metamodern fringes are cropping up—the fringe of the fringe, which still connects to the most central nodes and thus exerts great influence on the whole. And at the same time, billions of people still gravitate towards the traditional, Postfaustian metameme.

I hold, then, that while metamemes may soon be an obsoleted way of understanding development, it is absolutely crucial to understand the sensibilities, social logic, philosophies, spiritualities, and psychologies of Metamodernism—because this constitutes the starting range of humanity’s taking off into from “cultural history”, into chaos. And given that “sensitive initial conditions” matter when a system hits chaos, small differences can make all the difference.

Be the butterfly at the end of history—the difference that makes a difference.

The fact that we are at the very last stage of cultural development would suggest that cultural history is indeed nearing its “end”—but the opposite kind of end as Francis Fukuyama’s “end of history”: not a static state of a predictable institutional order, but an end to all “staticness”, an explosion into unprecedented and unimaginable dynamism, more along the lines of the term the social singularity as intuited by my fellow interpreter of today’s world, Max Borders (who used this term in his book title, The Social Singularity, but filled it with a somewhat different meaning than the one I am proposing here). This state of chaos is unlikely to be meaningfully caught in any one historical narrative—and, in that sense, “history” will be over.

Or—more along the lines of what I have called, in my book The Listening Society, “the boom equation”. If so many things change so rapidly, affecting one another in a gazillion ways, what you get is simply: BOOM!

You just don’t know if it’s fireworks, atom bombs, or both.

At any rate—if this pattern holds, we should be reaching a point in history where “sensitive initial condition” become the rule: and thus Graeber and Wengrow’s anarchist intuition about our great degrees of freedom to invent and create social realities seems to become true. The emergence of virtual reality suggests that this could be the case—along with so many other new ways of technologically recreating lived reality and even biological life itself.

This leaves the question open—how do we wish to use the terms Metamodern/Metamodernity/Metamodernism? Are they simply the last stage of cultural evolution before it is no longer meaningful to speak of such things (and, as Wittgenstein quipped, we thereafter should remain silent on the topic)? Or should we use these terms to denote The Time Between Worlds (as one recent anthology on Metamodernism was titled), a window in which cultural evolution itself shifts gear and direction, and then as a word for the chaotic state-of-affairs that presumably follows? For my part, I think it’s more meaningful to do the latter. Metamodernism is the term for what happens when we jump off the ladder of cultural development, so to speak.

In any case, I hope that we can hereby bury all of these highly understandable but ultimately unfruitful attempts to define metamemes or stages of culture beyond the Metamodern. At most, you can add one stage, and it presumably emerges in the window of a few years, and presumably looks and feels a lot like Metamodernism (see next section, on the third resemblance, to see why).

In parallel to this discussion, it should be noted that many theories on adult development psychology have also described stages of development that correspond to the seven metamemes. With a few exceptions, however, these all tend to start getting eerily weird (and empirically very poorly supported) after whichever stage corresponds to Metamodernism in those models. As such, we can suspect that stage theories are less suited for studying the development of human personalities as well, after a certain point.

It seems as though, after this point, both in cultural and psychological development, the landscape of properties that follows is “out of reach” for a developmental perspective—much like the basic theories of physics only seem to apply to phenomena at certain scales. Some other perspective is needed to understand these fields of potential reality.

Let it be known that Hanzi Freinacht has hereby encouraged all to stop stacking stages on top of Metamodernism and corresponding stages in psychological development. Stage theories break down around this point. Stage-stackers be warned.

All said, cultural history itself appears to be at an end-point, and perhaps something else is beginning. Metamodernity is the phase shift into that new state of affairs.

The question is, of course, if there will be enough stability in the world for us to experiment—or, again, if that BOOM will just blow us off the map.

Still. It’s a thought that is as thrilling as it is terrifying. My suggestion is that we hold hands. And be careful about millenarian cults who prophesize an end of days and salvation for the few faithful (as these are having good days).

Let’s be honest, we can read some signs here, suggest some contours—but we don’t know what it means in practice. We are determined to move towards unpredictability.

Third Resemblance:

Although More Possibilities Arise, the Difference Becomes Smaller and Smaller Between Each Bifurcation/Metameme

 

“The difference between jungle-roaming hunters and gatherers and the Indus Valley urban civilization is huge. The latter looks, feels, sounds, and smells so differently that birds notice it from miles away. The shift from Postmodernism to Metamodernism requires a master’s degree in the humanities to even detect.”

The third point is a smaller one, but it’s a resemblance nonetheless. As you can see in the bifurcation diagram, every time there is a new bifurcation, you can notice two things:

  • The number of possible values within the attractor point doubles (a wider range of possibilities emerges).
  • The branching off is smaller with each step, i.e., its values oscillate comparatively closely to wherever the former oscillation broke up. Very simply put: Notice how the first arc you see is big, the next one is smaller, next one smaller yet, and so on.

The same holds true, to a large extent, for how metamemes emerge, evolve, and develop throughout history. Think about it—Animism has been going on for tens of thousands of years and has produced an absolutely stupefying array of cultural forms from all around the world; their masks, rituals, adornments, and crafts looking so vastly different from one another that it mirrors the creativity of nature’s own beauty. As argued in detail in ornithologist Richard O. Prum’s book, Evolution of Beauty, nature itself spirals off into chaotic emergence whenever feedback cycles of sexual/aesthetic selection come online. These selection feedback processes cannot be reduced to mere “fitness” or “strength”—they sometimes work directly counter to the logic of the survival of the fittest (shiny blue, sexy feathers can get you detected and eaten by predators, etc.). Likewise, Animist cultures developed aesthetic variations and uniqueness beyond any later metamemes.

With Animism, you have long stretches of divergence between its different cultural forms (awe-inspiring tribal expressions of human creativity)—but of course, also a fairly limited range of possible memetic combinations that can be created within each of these cultures (no theory of relativity and poststructuralist literary theory, etc.), as compared to later metamemes. (To be more precise: the possible combinations within Animism across the world are indeed infinite, but it’s an infinity that does not include many of the “sets of cultural phenomena” that are possible in later metamemes.)

Compare the great colorful difference between different Animist tribes to Postmodernism and its subsequent shift into Metamodernism. Postmodernism looks about the same across world cultures: its forms are more predictable, even if each individual Postmodernist commands greater freedom of creativity (a seeming paradox, isn’t it?). Then consider the short memetic distance between Postmodernity and Metamodernity: At Metamodernity, with the advent of the Internet, memetic creativity goes into some kind of wild hyperdrive—every person in the world becomes a creator as it were, and here I am, reading and ordering books on the web, creating bridges between culture, history, art, psychology, technology, information and chaos mathematics while speeding to New Retro Waves post-ironic 80’s-style electronica tunes in a flow of sheer digital-magic weirdness—all hooked up to one behemoth of planetary, digital, monoculture (Medium, Facebook, Google, Amazon, Wiki…). But even as the creative potentials are supercharged, every inch of this unhinged Metamodern creativity remains so utterly close to Postmodernism, that the expressions of the two metamemes are in fact indistinguishable from one another to all observers but the specialist experts. And so, Metamodern cultural theorists can tell you that South Park is Postmodern in its cultural DNA, but BoJack Horseman is Metamodern. They’re perfectly right, of course. But nobody else notices—or even cares.

Simply put, just as the shifts between bifurcation points become smaller and smaller in chaos math, so do the shifts between metamemes become subtler and subtler. The difference between jungle-roaming hunters and gatherers and the Indus Valley urban civilization is huge. The latter looks, feels, sounds, and smells so differently that birds notice it from miles away. The shift from Postmodernism to Metamodernism requires a master’s degree in the humanities to even detect.

This third and last resemblance between chaos theory and metamemes is a less central point, but I feel it’s still important. As you can see, it helps us to elucidate the contours of what I am beginning to believe (but it’s still just at the “strong hunch” level) is the path through the rabbit hole at the end of history, leading us into creative chaos.

It’s a strong hypothesis I hold, so to speak, with sincere irony—or with informed naivety.

Some Implications: Protopia Must Surf the Waves of Chaos

If the above line of reasoning, and the similarities observed, are more than a coincidental freak of the digital hive-mind, it follows that we may indeed be approaching some kind of “chaos” as a cultural planetary system.

We must thus collectively become better at managing complexity. We must cultivate institutions, the building blocks of our societies, which can react to the chaotic emergence that we can expect at this mysterious “end of history” we seem to be approaching—likely with hitherto unimaginably wild combinations of wonder and suffering as a result.

In last week’s article, I argued that “Protopia” may be to the Metamodern mind what Utopia has been to the Modern mind. If we take that concept at face value, it would follow that a society is “Protopian” to the degree that its institutions can manage to thrive in conditions of chaos.

This is a larger horizon to explore, naturally. But just to sound the starting gun on this one: What would politics look like, if it were sensitive to chaotic emergence, to sensitive conditions? What would the legal system look like? What would the economy look like?

Here, Graeber and Wengrow’s anarchist optimism seems sharply on point: Not only is “another world possible”. The continuation of the world as we know it—indeed, all of history as we know it—is impossible.

Famous Last Words

“If this “ladder to chaos” hypothesis holds some truth, “the dawn of everything” is not in the distant past, but on the brink of the future, starting right about now.”

As you have seen, I have needed to work by analogy to bring home this argument (that chaos and metamemes are lookalikes)—after all, the models of chaos mathematics describe oscillations between simple numbers (the so-called attractor points), and cultures can hardly be reduced to simple numbers.

But the analogy, I hold (and as readers will hopefully agree), is simply too compelling, and its implications too significant, to be ignored or cast off as a mere curiosity.

Indeed, sociology and social science have always drawn upon analogies from the natural sciences (from the mechanics of early sociology, to the statistics of chemistry, to information-, network-, and complexity- and chaos theory of our days). What I am doing here is no different—but do keep in mind that an analogy is and remains an analogy. The question is not if the analogy is perfect (it is not); the question is only if the analogy helps us to grasp society better than other, alternative modes of thinking. Not, then, if it’s “absolutely correct”, but if it’s “less wrong”.

If any entity such as “culture” is at all connected to the mathematical regularities of the universe, it would make sense that this connection looks more like chaos and fractals, and less than billiard balls or statistical mechanics and chemical reactions. Culture is more likely like something alive, creative, and unpredictable. If nothing else, it’s certainly based on iterations of behaviors, and should thus be a feedback system of sorts—which is what chaos theory describes.

We can thus view society as determined-but-chaotic. It’s not “mechanical” but it still is not entirely arbitrary, detached from the natural world and its laws. I feel, in a manner, that this view strikes a balance between Platonic theorizing (everything follows mathematical forms) and a social, embodied being-in-the-world (the world emerges and exists beyond any static patterns that happen to be described by mathematics). It’s a synthesis, in a way, between flow and stasis.

Even if the resemblances that the analogy highlights would be coincidental, the observations I have made on the side of metamemes still seem to hold up. Think about it—if the metamemes have accelerated through history, will there really continue to be new stages indefinitely, or are we nearing what is some kind of singularity coupled with “the limits to growth”, an inherent ceiling to the dynamic (as environmental scientist Vaclav Smil has claimed all systems are subject to in his book, Growth). Everything in the universe stops growing eventually—because it has to. Here, we thus have a view that seems to synthesize Smil’s sober view of the world with that of the prophets of The Singularity (from Ray Kurzweil’s tech version to Max Borders’ “social” version thereof) who believe in the wonders of exponentially.

We also thereby have a suggested synthesis between “developmentalists” (or stage theorists) on the one hand, and all of those observers who, on the other hand, strongly intuit that we must leave stage theories of cultural development behind to understand our time. Both are right in the light of what has been discussed—just perhaps in ways they themselves didn’t consider. Stage theory does hold up—until it doesn’t.

If this “ladder to chaos” hypothesis holds some truth, “the dawn of everything” (which is the title of Graeber and Wengrow’s new book) is not in the distant past, but on the brink of the future, starting right about now.

I thus invite Metamodernists and Protopians to jump off the cliff, into the unknown, hand in hand. Where the “strong men” of the world promise law and order, the Metamodern ironic prophets make no promises at all. But they extend an invitation—an invitation to step off the ladder of history and to live lives of chaos, as participants and co-creators of culture in the moment it happens.

Beyond history, there is an existential or spiritual calling—into the creativity of the eternal now—as time slows down and new event horizons open.

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.