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Aufgrund meiner eigenen Erfahrungen mit dieser Person, der Natur von sogenannten Wir-Räumen (Erklärung folgt), Zeugen, die erster Hand Erfahrungen mit der Organisations bekannt als Go&Change haben, und der überwältigend negativen und einleuchtenden Geschichten, welche ich über Go&Change im Internet gefunden habe, schlussfolgere ich, dass es sich bei Go&Change um einen gefährliche Sekte handelt.

Deswegen möchte ich nicht mit Go&Change oder seinen Mitgliedern in Verbindung gebracht werden. Ebenso möchte ich nicht mit dem ZEGG in Verbindung gebracht werden, wenn es weiterhin mit Go&Change in Verbindung bleibt. Ich will nicht den Eindruck vermitteln, dass ich Go&Change als Organisation oder seine Mitglieder gutheiße, durch meine Anwesenheit legitimiere oder sie im Einklang mit meinen Ideen sehe. Von daher, habe ich mich gegen eine Teilnahme an oben genannter Veranstaltung entschieden.

Ich möchte alle Mitglieder und Gäste des ZEGGs und die Öffentlichkeit vor dem manipulativen und missbräuchlichem Potential der dort stattfindenden Wir-Räume warnen. Diese sind keine neue Erfindung, sondern übliche Techniken von vielen Sekten, wo es zur Täuschung, Verunsicherung und Manipulation von Mitgliedern benutzt wird. (Ich habe Dr. Daniel Görtz, einen Soziologen mit erhöhtem Interesse an Sekten, kontaktiert und er konnte mir, meinen Beobachtungen entsprechend, in Detail die Mechanismen solcher Räume beschreiben ohne Go&Change oder die Erfahrungen von Menschen in diesen Räumen zu kennen).

Ich bin traurig zu sehen, dass ein führendes Mitglied von Go&Change zu einer Podiumsdiskussion am ZEGG Sommercamp eingeladen wurde. Ich glaube, dass das ein Fehler ist und das Ergebnis von schlechtem Urteilsvermögen, welches die Glaubwürdigkeit des ZEGG Sommer Camp Leitungsteams untergräbt. Was aber zum Glück nicht den Positionen des gesamten ZEGGs oder der ganzen ZEGG Gemeinschaft entspricht.

Schließlich möchte ich die vielen Überlebenden von Go&Change würdigen. Es ist meine Hoffnung, dass ihre traumatischen Erfahrungen anerkannt werden und dass sie Gerechtigkeit erleben. Ich entschuldige mich dafür nicht angemessen recherchiert zu haben mit wem ich durch das Camp in Verbindung gebracht werde und dass ich dadurch eine missbrauchende Organisation indirekter Weise legitimiert habe.

Emil Ejner Friis
Bad Belzig, 29. Juli 2021

Based on my own experiences with this leading member’s behaviour, the nature of the so-called “Wir-Raum” (explanation will follow later), witnesses who have had firsthand experiences with the organisation known as Go&Change and accounts they in turn have heard from other witnesses, and the overwhelmingly negative and appalling stories about the organisation I have found on the internet, I have come to the conclusion that Go&Change is a harmful cult.

I therefore do not want to be associated with Go&Change or any of its members, and I do not want to be associated with the ZEGG if it in turn remains closely associated with Go&Change or any of its members. I do not want to convey the impression that I approve of Go&Change as an organisation or in any way find that it is aligned with my work, and I do not want to legitimise the actions of Go&Change or any of its members with my presence. As such, I have chosen to refrain from participating in the above-mentioned public event.

I wish to warn all members and guests of the ZEGG, and the general public, about the manipulative and abusive potential of the so-called “Wir-Raum”. This is not a new invention, but rather a common technique found in many cults where it is used to gaslight and control its members. (I consulted Dr. Daniel Görtz, sociologist with a keen interest in cults, about the matter, and he could in detail describe the mechanisms of the “Wir-Raum” without knowing anything about neither Go&Change nor my own or others experiences with the “Wir-Raum”.)

I am saddened to see that a leading member of Go&Change has been chosen to participate in a panel discussion at the ZEGG Summer Camp. I believe this decision is an error and a result of poor judgement that severely compromises the credibility of the ZEGG Summer Camp Leitungsteam.

Finally I wish to honor the numerous survivors of Go&Change. It is my hope that their traumatic experiences will be recognised and that they one day will see justice for the wrongs that have been committed against them. I apologise for not having properly researched who I were to be associated with at the ZEGG Summer Camp and for indirectly legitimising an abusive organisation.

Emil Ejner Friis
Bad Belzig, 29th of July 2021

The following is a slightly edited extract from Hanzi Freinacht’s book ‘Nordic Ideology: A Metamodern Guide to Politics, Book Two’. This is the second book in a series on metamodern thought, a work of popular philosophy that investigates the nature of psychological development and its political implications. 

In today’s media-saturated society, jesters are indeed becoming kings. This is an aspect inherent to the postmodern condition, where the global village is imprinted upon us through a deluge of images from near and far, from across time and space—always told with someone’s perspective, some­one’s story, someone’s spin. The jesters, the tricksters, are the ones most proficient at catching people’s attention, and then quickly shift­ing bet­ween frames of understanding, between contexts.

That’s how comedy works: some frame or circumstance is suddenly shifted in communica­tion, and—whack!—things get funny. The simplest example is a pun or play-on-words: “Did you hear about the guy whose whole left side was cut off? He’s all right now.” The linguistics shift the meaning for us, creating a double meaning that catapults us, in this case, from the reassu­ring to the gruesome. A frame is shifted.

Add a refined sense of pacing, timing, rhythm—and nobody can stop the laughter from breaking out as clear water from a foun­tainhead.

Postmodern culture, the culture of perspective and surface, is a lot about mastering such framings of situations. One person can be framed as a hero, a president, a crook, a buffoon. Those who can most skillfully craft frames and shift between them with sleights-of-hand, in and across many different media are also likely to become the most powerful.

The late-night shows, the television hosts, the comedians—their power is growing. Jesters are becoming kings. The youth are getting their news filtered through comedy and entertainment. The jesters grab the attention of everyone, shaping and directing it—making us laugh together.

A large crowd laughing, united under one will. Oh, that’s so funny. That’s so edgy. They’re so smart, so admirable. Comedy is so liberating.

And then there is a subtle slide… If we all laughed along, then that must mean we all at least somewhat agreed, that what was said was at least partly true. And whoever was laughed at must have been, at least in part, at fault. We slide into assuming that the power to make us laugh is also the power to tell us the truth—or to suspend another truth, another story, another felt experience.

When we laugh we don’t only break taboos, relieve tensions and forge bonds. The laughter of the crowd also disciplines people into silence, and obedience—if anyone gets mad and says it isn’t funny, they just appear to be poor sportsmen with sticks up their asses. It stratifies us: the joker on top and the butt of the joke at the bottom. It unifies us, yes, but into “us and them”, with a rather clear who’s who.

Can you see it? The laughter of the crowd is a source of massive hidd­en obedience and submission to one will. Can you think of any other mom­ents when you can get hundreds, thousands, millions of people to sus­pend normal morality and to fall in line around the same point? Is there any better way to effectively steer a crowd?

The fascists of a hundred years ago hijacked the tech­niques of travel­ing socialist agitators. These knew how to display a sincere criticism of socie­ty, of how to fire up a crowd, how to point out glaring injustices. The fasc­ists caught on. Yet in today’ world, where educated and comfortable pop­u­l­ations are suspicious of such fiery speeches, of fanaticism and lack of iro­ny, the correspon­ding effect is achieved through jokes. Do you imagine that the fascists today might be paying attention and catching on?

It’s already happening. If you take a look at online movements of the far Right, such as the Alt-Right and the “meta-right”, these are packed with trans­gressive jokes and irony—often to the level of extreme absurdity so that it’s no longer distinguishable what is a joke, what is “post-truth” and what is sin­cere and what is not. The far Right jokes more than anyone else. They joke and joke and make memes until reality itself becomes transmogorified into a dream state where nothing is real and nothing needs to be taken seriously. If we have already joked a million times about being nazis and killing Jews, and waging war, and about a conspiracy that undermines our civilization, and about our own mega­lomania… then when the images of real crimes crop up, we keep jok­ing, keep laughing. “Relax, it’s just a joke. Don’t you get it, huh? All the smart people do. You’re one of the smart people, aren’t you? You’re not one of those with a stick up your ass who can’t even take watching children and animals being slit up alive—are you? I’m one of the crazy ones, the ones who know the subtle art of not giving a fuck. To me, there is nothing you can’t laugh about. Only people who are against free­dom would like to set taboos for what you may or may not joke and laugh about.”

During the Second World War, Charlie Chaplin famously made a par­ody of Hitler in his 1940 film, The Great Dictator. Chaplin used comedy to demask and demystify the power and allure of dictatorship and totalitar­ianism. And of course, this postmodern move, one of irony and parody, proved to be the hallmark of a superior society; one that ultima­tely beat the complete lack of self-distance that marked the fascists. When one side screams and rages on, and the other changes the frame and makes us all laugh—of course the latter is going to win. Of course the latter is going to be allied with a superior information processing system, which ultimately wins the war.

But now, nearing a century after the first emergence of fascism, the forces that want violence and bloodshed have learned a thing or two. This time, they won’t try to be Hitler—they’ll try to be Charlie Chaplin. The next dictator, the one who seduces crowds and leads the masses into trans­gressing common decency and morality, supporting nihilism in its destructive form and an abandonment of all empathy—will be a com­edian. Today, only comedians can claim the absolute and amoral obedi­ence of the crowd. Guess who also likes absolute and amoral obedience of the crowd? The totalitarian dictator.[i]

Michael Billig, a professor of social science, published a book in 2005 titled Laughter and Ridicule: Toward a Social Critique of Hu­mour. Boring­ly written as it is, this book seems almost prophetic: Billig was amongst the first to see that with laughter comes ridicule, and thus comes a reaffir­mation of power relations; sometimes liberating, but all too often discipli­ning and oppressive. Laughter often says: Shut the fuck up and obey.

Today’s inquisition, today’s Thought Police, thrives on the power of laughter. The most (pathologically) power hungry amongst us will be­come masters of mean and crafty jokes. And they will get away with it. And they will rule. And you will obey them with the rest of the mob.

What, then, beats laugher and ridicule? We may turn again to the early writings of Nietzsche. In his 1872 work, The Birth of Tragedy, he argues that tragedy is a higher and more refined art form than the “Apollonian” search for perfection in sculpture and “Dionysian” rapture and self-expression in the moment-to-moment flows of music. And indeed, in literature and theatre, comedy has never been able to become as highly esteemed as tragedy.

Tragedy is thus an expression of a higher synthesis; it resonates with more profound and vulnerable layers of the human soul. And tragedy is best expressed through poetry in its many different forms, poetry in a wide sense, what is sometimes called “poetics”.

In the times to come, then, dictatorship and oppression, sadistic power and maso­chistic submission, will come dis­guised in the form of comedy and laughter.

Resistance and emancipation, kindness and freedom, will come from that which brings a tear to our eye—from a subtle sense of tragedy, expre­ss­ed in different media, by poets of different shapes and sizes.

In these times, building upon the experiences of the last century, we have accustomed ourselves to thinking of the trickster as the hero. That used to be a good rule-of-thumb, and it still can be, in some cases. But this intuition will be increasingly treacherous in the times ahead.

We are beginn­ing to see the unfolding of a subtle battle-performed-as-play for the global hu­man soul—the near­est thing to what might be called a cos­mic struggle be­tween good and evil: the evil comedian, who speaks to the masses but sec­retly despises them as a herd that follows the crude me­chanics of humor understood only by a select elite, against the good poet, who sings to the few, but is in love with the many and their crea­tive spark of collective in­telligence. This is the struggle-reborn-as-play, stirring at midnight in the garden of good and evil.

David Foster Wallace, the early metamodernist novelist and cultural comm­entator who died by suicide in 2008, aged 46, author of the dense, thick and magisterial novel with the prophetic title Infinite Jest (1996), once said in 1990 “that the next real literary rebels in America would be artists with little interest in trying to shock or upset their peers but who were, rather, willing to become so credulous of everything in the world that their peers would laugh at them”.[ii] That’s what takes greater cour­age, and that’s where liberation is to be found—in a new sincerity.

The dictator-comedian, the jester-king, steers the laughter, pacing it with perfect timing as a dir­ector would an orchestra—often saying things that would have been completely unacceptable had they been voiced by an ordinary person. Remember Carl Schmitt’s definition of the sovereign as “he who decides on the excep­tion”? To a growing extent this seems to apply to the comedian: the elevated position of being excepted from the morality applying to everyone else. The consumtariat—the underclass of the inform­ational and attentionalist digital economy, per­petually starved for authen­tic meaning, participation, community and re­cognition—alwa­ys stuck in the role of onlookers, always consum­ers, always spectators; they laugh along greedily, hiding in the crowd, cheering. The consumta­riat are offered a false sense of participation and superiority: Chuckling along, they momentarily feel that they are part of what happens, and on the winning side, too. Indeed, laughter is the new heiling.

But the transmogorified dream-world of boundary-less jokes is not a productive outlet for the human soul. If, in the 20^th century the biggest joke was The Great Dictator; today’s biggest tragedy is The Great Spec­tator. The Great Dictator was an easier foe, because The Great Spectator turns out to be yourself.

The Great Spectator will mindlessly laugh along, from his own sense of inferiority, envy and Sklavenmoral—while the poet acts and is laughed at. What about you, will you laugh your way to obedience and meaningless murder, or will you side with the laughed-at? Will you sing with the infor­med naivety of the metamodern heart—one that can resist the cruel lau­ghter of a crowd reduced to groveling slaves?

—

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

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[i]. When I first wrote this, Europe had already seen the rise of standup comedian Beppe Grillo’s Five Star Movement in Italy. Now, rereading the text, the Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky has just been elected by a landslide of 73% (vs. 24% for the sitting president)—also a comedian, who even plays the part as president in a satirical television show. While these two can hardly be called new dictators, they do certainly attest to the new power of comedy—and the crossroads of fact and fiction. Stranger days are coming.

[ii]. Quoted from Seth Abramson “On Metamodernism”, published April 16^th 2018 on Medium, retrieved May 2018:

https://medium.com/@Seth_Abramson/on-metamodernism-926fdc55bd6a

The following is a slightly edited extract from Hanzi Freinacht’s book ‘Nordic Ideology: A Metamodern Guide to Politics, Book Two’. This is the second book in a series on metamodern thought, a work of popular philosophy that investigates the nature of psychological development and its political implications. 

For many readers, no doubt, “New Age” seems to be the odd one out in a series about the totalitarian ideologies of the 20^th century. Commun­ism, fascism, and… New Age? These phenomena aren’t usually discuss­ed in the same context. And yet, there is a clear and fundamental pattern conn­ecting the three; even a logical, historical progression (as well as more inter­connecting ties and overlaps than we could name or hope to trace).

The three ideologies appeared and gained prominence in sequence as modern society pro­gress­ed, each of them related to holistic visions, and each of them led to totalitarian, abusive and collapsed societies. Commun­ism rel­ates to a profound social equality and union between humans, to the abol­ition of the “shame-regime” as discussed in my book Nordic Ideology (since no one would have lower status in the communist utopia). Fascism builds upon the com­m­unist radical unity and the rise of certain strong wills and great figures in that unified society and a conscious refinement of huma­nity, corres­ponding to the abolition of the Sklavenmoral-regime. And the New Age move­ments aimed at creating a reign of universal love flowing from a genuinely unified and deeply emancipated hum­anity, uni­fying us not only with one another, but with the cosmos at large, with all life, and with our highest inner potentials—in Hanzi lan­guage, with our “highest subjective states” and “greatest inner depths”. Like commun­ism, New Age spirituality is utopian and egalitarian, like fascism it em­phasizes the dist­inctions between the genders as well as the value of authenti­city and full­ness of commitment and of total submission of the ego and disso­lution into a complete unity. This corresponds to the “higher reaches of free­dom” per­taining to the later stages of human development, to the deepest reaches of our imaginations and the most universalistic and holis­tic visi­ons of soc­iety and humanity.

Because of its developmental qualities, reaching higher and deeper than commun­ism and fascism, New Age holds the potential for a more hellish, oppressive and suffocating totalitarianism than anything hith­er­to seen in communist and fascist societies. Luckily for us, no utopian New Age mov­e­ments really gained power in the 20^th century—their social sust­ainability was simply too low to grow beyond small communities and inward-looking cults. The exception may be Scientology, which turned itself into a self-sustaining market mechanism using psychological coer­cion to get peop­le to aggressively pool money into real estate around the world, which in turn boasts the identities of members (“look at my big temple”) who then gain incentives to uphold the structure.

The close connection between fascism and say Adi Da’s cult, or that of Osho, or Scientology, may be difficult to spot on a surface level. After all, fascists are tough and manly, and New Agers soft and spiritual. But many scholars have shown that fascism—new and old—is full to the brim with esoteric and spiritual underpinnings. Karla Poewe, Pankaj Mishra and Göran Dahl are worth mentioning in this context.

Viewed with the goggles of my own theory, this is the develop­mental imbalance of “the magic residual” at work, as explained in The Listening Society; i.e. people who have greater depth and/or state than complexity and/or code tend to seek wholeness and be drawn to the non-rational in the search of the trans­rational. In other words, you have a pervasive sense there is som­ething more to the world and to reality than we can normally describe and grasp with our conscious conceptual minds, and that the direct expe­rience of reality always points towards something larger than any specific struc­ture of thought, but that something requires that we jump off a cliff into the unknown, that we stop thinking and allow ourselves to “fully be”.

This impulse, while true, opens the door inside of us for a holistic vis­ion that would unite all of society with primary, archetypal and spiritual forces: Martin Heidegger initially supported the Nazis and Carl Jung had early writings which spoke of collective Aryan and Jewish psyches, and count­less other “deep stuff” thinkers have fallen into similar traps. There is a very close connection between fascism and the New Age, most recent­ly revealed per­haps by the harrowing example of Andrew Cohen’s cult.

Why then would I claim that New Age has the potential to be even more hellish than Gulag or Holocaust? Think about it: These relations involve your innermost ontological belief structures. They can make you believe that if you don’t follow suit, if you even think the wrong thought, you will be punished for a literal eternity of unbearable suffering. And they can make you believe that in full and earnest. That’s much, much more radical than making you think you’re a bad comrade or not a part of the master race. And they can make you believe that the fate of the entire cosmos, literally speaking, depends on your work with this and that inner purifica­tion, enlightenment, etc. And they can make you believe this or that person is literally God speaking and that nothing else has any relevan­ce compared to what they may be saying. And they can make you inti­mately feel that with every cell of your body and soul. It’s the Michelin Star Club of totalitarianism. It’s totalitarianism magna cum laude, extra everything; ketchup and mustard. Because it reaches into the depths of your soul and controls parts of you neither Stalin nor Hitler could reach. In theory, then, what crimes could that sort of power make you commit? And if you were invested in it, what would you be prepared to do to defend it from perceived attackers?

If you consider the stories told by some escapees of North Korea, you notice this pattern. This is a nominally communist country, which all but in name has transitioned to a caste-like hyper-militarized fascist society, and where you increasingly see the use of supernatural narratives to legiti­mize pol­itical pow­er. Miracles are associated with the Supreme Leader, and it can take years for a young woman who escaped to get rid of the belief that he is reading her mind. That, if anything, is worse that Orwell’s 1984. And it’s pretty close to what has been reported by ex-Scientologists. If Sciento­logy would have managed to take over society as a whole, you might have seen similar patt­erns emerging in other countries or at a larger scale.

And then there’s always that distinct trait of totalitarianism: First you have a creative burst for a period in which the arts flower, then you con­verge around a massive repetition, a complete shut-down of all art. Scien­tology looks and feels exactly the same today as it did in the 1970s, except now in an ironic and more critically minded age, it all looks extremely kitschy and hysteri­cal. The same is true of North Korea: There are paint­ers, sure, but their skills are entirely tamed and employed on a producti­on-line basis, all in credit of the regime and its worldview. The same happened with nazism during its very short period of existence and with the “per­manent revolu­tion” in some commun­ist countries. If someone gets to you with the idea that they have a correct grasp of “the totality”, any divergence, even in your dreams, becomes a subject of great existen­tial terror. This adds another, and more terrifying, layer of mean­­ing to Orwell’s “boot stamping on a human face—for ever”. Personally, I would rather be gas­sed to death naked than to have someone convince me of an eternity of suffering for me and others if I don’t obey. Spiritual involve­ment opens the door to a whole new world of horrors.

And yet, it would be wrong to think that universal love and high­er inner states have no place in the future of humanity. Again, it’s a matter of developmental imbalances; the spiritual and existential insights that infor­m­ed and energized the New Age movement in its many forms, and the pro­found and authentic experiences that gave it life, are not in them­selves false. They’re simply too big and too difficult to manage to fit into what­ever human relationships, social roles and symbolic universes we con­struct, and so these relation­ships and roles always self-destruct pretty soon after we start engaging with the highest (spiritual) subjective states.

As society progresses and we reach deeper into ourselves in order to deal with the existential underpinnings of civilization as well as coordi­nating our streams-of-action on subtler and more complex levels, we are bound to come face to face again with these spiritual or cosmic peaks and abysses. Individually, many of us can ignore these issues and live “normal lives” and not be bothered, but transpersonally speaking, we as a global society and emerging posthumans cannot avoid it. We are going to have to deal with the terrifying depths and towering heights of existence, with the vast oceans of being, with the eternities of tragedy and suffering and the unbearable infinity of potential—sooner or later.

If the present world-system survives and development continues to accelerate, consciousness is very likely to self-organize into posthuman stages mirroring the great existential depths intuited by the mystics. The New Age movements have given us a brief taste of these farther land­scapes of the soul, of the peaks—and the great abyss.

The abyss. We then, collectively and transpersonally, encounter a more profound terror than has hitherto been experienced; a terror intuited only in madness and bad psychedelic trips. A terror beyond death: an experi­enced eternity of looped suffering. There is a towering challenge ahead of us; beyond anything yet experienced in the history of the known universe. The scale is of a whole other magnitude, the stakes of a cosmic kind. Sheer terror, pure emptiness—and a corres­ponding level of evil, always found, ultimately, within ourselves. The highest good—universal love and accep­tance—can only be attained by facing the greatest and purest of evils. Although this challenge lies outside the scope of the political metamoder­nism I have formulated, the latter can at least commence the needed pre­paratory work for this unavoidable challenge to our innermost being. Only an existentially mature civilization will be able to face the surmount­ing terror.

You cannot gaze into the abyss without being moved. You cannot taste the heavens without becoming, at least in some abstract sense, a believer. And that’s what political metamodernism shares with the New Age: an acceptance of the highest subjective states, their ultimate significance and transrational truth; that of universal love and acceptance, the dissol­ution of our separate identifications, and the non-attachment to ideas and beli­efs. In brief moments, these higher potentials can animate us, “As spring sweeps uninvited into barren gardens, as morning breezes reinvigorate dormant deserts”, as one of the most celebrated poets of the Urdu langu­age, Faiz Ahmed Faiz once wrote.[i]

These flowers of freshest hue must be met by an unequivocal commit­ment to deal with a corresponding level of existential terror. Unlike the New Ager, the metamodern mind is not a millenari­an one; we don’t bel­ieve that a wave of light will “come soon” and “wash over” all of us and this will make people “wake up” and that we are the carriers of that evan­gel (or some circumscription of the latter). We just recognize that there is such a thing as spirituality, yes, and we allow for faint glimmers of it to hint us about a potential future that is both incom­prehensively mag­nifi­cent and terrifying beyond imagination.

We do, however, share the idea that inner transformation is an import­ant and essential part of societal transformation, and ultimately of socie­ty’s sur­vival. And we share the idea that self-knowledge tends to lead to greater universalism and love, however tortuous and difficult the path. And we believe this path is not laid down, but that it must be conti­nually paved and rediscovered as we interact with the open systems of the world as these open systems inevitably also change us.

Here we return to the metamodern idea of proto-synthesis—we can­not just throw all maps of meaning and directionality overboard. We must see that spiritual insight and higher universal love are powerful futu­re attract­ors, but that they reside in the posthuman or transhuman realm of poten­tials, which means that we shouldn’t rush it. In this case, we must remain careful and conservative, as the sheer terror that can be unleashed under the auspices of a “metamodern totalitar­ianism” leaves a heavy ethical bur­den on us. Imagine a world where dictators control your soul and the con­struction of your social universe and have a thousand social, psycho­logical, chemical and technological tools to control the structure of your mind. That would be beyond nasty.

Where does this leave us? At the spot where political meta­modernism seeks to carefully work for the relative utopia of a listening society—a soc­iety that has resolved the modern problems of sustainabi­lity, inequality and alienation; but it must always stop before any direct, pass­ionate and non-ironic utopianism.

So fundamentally, whether political metamodernism becomes a force for good or evil in the world—or just another obscure cult-like group­ing—depends upon our shared ability to manage paradoxes and both-ands. And it depends upon our willingness and capacity to engage with the open systems of the world, and letting these systems change us, while still keeping some kind of shared map.

It is okay to let glimmers of New Age spirituality—and traditional paths in general—inform and inspire us. They must, however, never go­vern us, lest we will inherit all their pathologies, albeit in a magnified and yet more toxic version. These are dangerous dreams.

Political metamodernism is a bit like standing on the North Pole; if you go far enough north, so that you actually stand on the exact location of the North Pole, east and west and north all disappear; on that particular spot there is only south—in all directions. When you get really close to it, all directions become the opposite of what you want to achieve, and yet you have to keep trying to go “north of the North Pole”.

There’s a koan to stay with: What is north of the North Pole?

—

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

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[i]. From the poem Last Night, loose translation by Michael R. Burch.

The following is a slightly edited extract from Hanzi Freinacht’s book ‘Nordic Ideology: A Metamodern Guide to Politics, Book Two’. This is the second book in a series on metamodern thought, a work of popular philosophy that investigates the nature of psychological development and its political implications. 

Real communism, Marx and Engels agreed with Bakunin, would exist only when the state had dissolved. But to begin with, there would be need for an interim dictatorship of the proletariat.[i] This idea of using state power to trans­form society stuck with the revol­u­tion­ary com­munist move­ments and came to define communism and “real socialism” in the 20^th cen­tury.

That is why communism, unlike anarchism and Fourierism, became a serious political force, centered in the Soviet Union—the only coun­try of a non-ethnic and non-geographic denomination in the world, a society founded within the imaginary space of world-centric humanism.

Libertarian socialism nev­er materialized beyond small parliamentary representations here and there, and anarchism or lib­er­tarian Marxism hardly excised any political power anywhere: These have exist­ed almost entire­ly in the intellectual realm. As mentioned in Appendix A, the major wiel­ders of power have all been authori­tarian com­munists—follow­ing in the foot­steps of Lenin’s coup d’état in Russia.

The real leftwing political challenge to Marxism and Marxism-Leninism came from social democracy in the tradition of the philosopher Edu­ard Bern­stein (1850-1932) and perhaps the French socialist leader Jean Jaurès (1859-1914), who sought a peaceful transition to socialism by demo­cratic means and reforms. Whereas social democracy (and socialist parlia­ment­ary reformism) gained wide followership, it has in prac­tice gra­v­i­tated to­wards social liberalism—and in late modernity, towards green social lib­er­alism; i.e. towards the attractor point of modern society. In real­ity, then, social-democratic countries have largely developed along similar lines as other capitalist welfare democracies.

The underlying principle of communism is more radical: to act­ively and deliberately transform the fundamental structures of soc­iety by shoc­king them with planned strategic actions thought to be in line with the attractors that society’s inherent dynamics point towards. “Norm­al” soc­iety, “capitalist” society, “bourgeois” society—is simply viewed as eth­i­cally unacceptable. It’s just not good enough; it’s inhumane.

This—everything—everyday life with all its hierarchies, limitations and banality, is simply not enough. The communist demands more. The com­m­unist mind, its kernel of truth, grows from this solemn vengefulness aga­inst the injustices and insufficiencies of everyday life and from the deter­min­ation that comes with it: a moral determination to transform all of society; to act for the sake of the weak and the exploited; to act with the willingness to risk everything—one’s own life, one’s lifetime of commit­ment, and even perhaps being wrong—to make the decisive move that breaks the bound­aries of normal life and lets us come out on the other side. An honest sense of hope, a sincere and embodied sense of tragedy—and enough tempered righteous anger to remedy at least some of that tragedy.

That’s the dangerous dream of communism. It has little to do with drab concrete housing blocks, or polluting Trabant cars, or secret KGB agents, or nuclear warheads, or military marches, or mad dictators, or any of the things we usually associate with communism. We can even detach it from any specific vision about who owns the factories or how the eco­nomy is governed.

Real communism, then, in this deeper sense, simply connects to the det­er­mination to do what it takes to bring about a post-capitalist society. By definition, a communist society is that which dialectically flows from, and transcends, capitalist society and in which everyday life is governed and coordinated by another logic than economic capital. This logic must be less cruel and more rational, more in line with human needs and higher stages of inner development. It is a holistic, human­ized version of mod­ernity. Communism, in this deeper and generalized sense, is holis­tic post-­capi­tal­ism—plus the mor­ally driven determ­ination to achi­eve it.

The communists of the 19^th and 20^th centuries were wrong about a num­ber of issues concerning the dynamics and attractors of modern so­cieties and their economies. And this led to some terrible mis­takes, the worst of which was trying to force institutions into being with­out corr­es­­ponding develop­ments of psy­chology, behavior and culture (see this article on why communism failed); leading to jamm­ed information feedback processes, which in turn led to a fail­ing society, and ultimately to Gulag, surveill­ance, terror and coll­apse.

But some core aspects of communism were not in themselves false, only premature and out-of-context. Thereby I am not saying that bad con­sequen­c­es should be excused on account of good intentions. I am saying that par­tial truths should not be discarded on account of guilt-by-association.

What, then, are the communist truths shared by political metamod­ern­ism? One such aspect is the uncompromising moral determination to change the nat­ure of everyday life. Another is that there is in­deed some­thing that comes after capitalist relations, and that one can align one­self with such an emergence because it rhymes with discernable stages of techno­logical and societal development. A third aspect is that there should be a collect­ively intelligent form of governance based upon a more radical and deeper form of demo­cracy than representative party politics. A fourth one is that there should be a world-centric party (or meta-party) that takes on a transnation­al and even tran­scendental role of trans­forming soc­iety from a global perspec­tive, and that there should be some kind of van­guard who develops and spreads a shared theo­retical and organizational basis for such work. And a fifth, and last one, is that such a process-oriented party should rely upon the dialectics inhe­rent to society in order to guide its development and to gain power.

The Nordic ideology is, obviously, not communism. It may be revol­u­tion­ary, developmental and dialectical—but it is strictly non-violent. It works with other attractor points and it has other goals altogether. It sha­res the solemn vengefulness of communism, its tem­pered indignation: the grit, fire and guts to change a society that simply isn’t good enough, to achi­eve a higher stage of development, and to serve a deeper equ­ality.

—

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

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[i]. This is a posi­tion Marx at least partly revised after the 1871 Paris Commune, when “communard” workers revolted in Paris and held the city for two months before being beaten back.

The following is a slightly edited extract from Hanzi Freinacht’s book ‘Nordic Ideology: A Metamodern Guide to Politics, Book Two’. This is the second book in a series on metamodern thought, a work of popular philosophy that investigates the nature of psychological development and its political implications.

It is thus hardly a stretch to say that any kind of politics which does not maximize sustainability (again: of the present society or any imagined fut­ure one) is not the optimal Green politics, not in alignment with ecol­o­gism. Naturally, some forms of ecologism are of a reconciliatory bent (seek­ing to “reconcile” humanity with the environment), some are anth­ro­po­centric in their environmentalism, some are spiritual and focus upon att­ain­ing unity with “deep ecology”, some are unforgiving against the excesses of hum­anity while focusing on solidarity with ecosystems and the bio­sphere, some are transformational (seeking to transform the ecosys­tems of the world with human intelligence), some are futuristic and others primi­tiv­istic. You have pragmatists and hardliners, in the emble­matic exa­mple of Green par­ties, the German die Grüne, these are called the Fundis (fundamentalist environmentalists) and Realos (realist green politicians).

And then there are all the mixes with other ideologies and struggles: eco­socialism, green liberalism, techno-environmentalism, eco­fasc­ism, hu­man ecology of indige­nous minority rights, multiculturalism, and so on.

What they all share is a focus on sustainability in some form or other. Even if ecologist thinkers like Arne Næss, Murray Bookchin, Gary Snyder, Theo­d­ore Roszak and today’s Tim Morton and Roger Scruton all have diff­erent takes on this issue, it is not a stretch to say they are some­how committed to sus­tainability—although the word itself only became com­monplace after 1987 with the Brundt­land Report.[i]

What, then, can be learned from political metamodernism in terms of sustainability? A thing or two.

You cannot have a sustainable societal system (economy-layered-in-bio­sphere) without a corresponding and matching sustainability in all fields of development: system, culture, psychology and behavior (as dis­cussed here). In other words, you can’t have ecological sustaina­bility with­out social and economic sustainability. And how do you get there?

You need to get people to a point in their lives where they genuinely understand and care about issues larger than themselves. That’s Existen­tial Politics. You need to make sure people have good enough social rela­tions to not get stuck in prisoners’ dilemmas that hold back our devel­op­ment and potential to care and not get stuck in materialistic status gam­es. That’s Gemeinschaft Politics. You need to see to it that the systems of governance can nimbly and effectively redesign themselves so as to deal with new environmental challenges when they become known, in a way that gains support and legitimacy. That’s Democrati­zation Politics. You need to make certain that all of society is aligned with what is empirically shown to create circular economies and cradle-to-cradle processes, and you need to make sure that you spot and correctly understand environ­mental threats such as climate change and that the public is well informed and has the ability to respond reasonably. That’s Empirical Politics. And you need to make certain that ideas about ecology, sustainability and hu­manity’s place in a larger context of nature per­meate people’s conscious­ness and all of our ideas about life. That’s Politics of Theory. And un­less you’re an eco­fascist and just don’t care about the freedom of people, you need to make sure that all of these processes can play out without oppress­ing people, and that’s Emancipation Politics.

So tell me again how you were going to create a sustainable society with­out political metamodernism. Can you see how unrealistic any eco­logist ideology would be without these processes?

Any version of ecologism requires political metamodernism to be truly sust­ainable. Any environmentalism not underpinned by the Nordic ideo­logy is simply less sustainable, less resilient, less regenerative. That’s all, folks: the Nordic ideology is greener than Green.

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

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[i]. Named so after the Norwegian Prime Minister Gro Harlem Brundt­land who led the UN’s work on understanding and defining sustainability.

The following is a slightly edited extract from Hanzi Freinacht’s book ‘Nordic Ideology: A Metamodern Guide to Politics, Book Two’. This is the second book in a series on metamodern thought, a work of popular philosophy that investigates the nature of psychological development and its political implications. 

Conservatism reacts against the hubris of intellectuals. As soon as mo­d­ern society was showing its first glimmers and it became apparent that the human world was about to drastically change, “smart” but unwise people from privi­leged strata of soc­iety took upon themselves to use their intellects to try to shape the direction of this development. This was, and remains to this day, an act of vanity: you flatter yourself, you grow self-righteous, you put your­self above your place in the larger world, above your place in history, your place as a member of your peo­ple and their accumulated wisdoms—and this leads you to try to force your neatly arra­nged ideas and ideals upon the rich­ness and complexity of the world. And your mental con­struct never fits, and you always end up getting angry at the world. The stark raving revol­ution­aries take over and things get vio­lent. Crazy experiments abound. Decay follows.

The primordial and archetypal such dangerously utopian thinker is, again, Rousseau. While highly intelligent and idealistic, he was unbalan­ced as a person, an irres­pon­sible father and impossible friend—unable to live up to his own ideals of engaged parenting as out­lined in his 1762 work Émile—and he was hope­lessly roman­tically attach­ed to unachievable uto­pian goals. Rouss­eau, a perpetual child who would never grow up and died bitterly defending his ruined reputation with far-fetched justificati­ons, is the origin­ator of such dreamy and dangerous ideas as “Man is born free, and every­where he is in chains” and “We will force you to be free!”[i]

How telling, then, that Rousseau was the spiritual father of the hard­core Jacobins of the French Revolution—the ones who led the Reign of Terror and guillotined folks left and right as the Revolution began to eat its own child­ren. Maximilien Robespierre, the young Jacobin lawyer who rose to power and eventually had the king decapitated—and even coined the motto of the French Republic, “liberté, égalité, fraternité”—worship­ped Rousseau like a god:

“Rousseau is the one man who, through the loftiness of his soul and the grandeur of his character, showed himself worthy of the role of teacher of mankind.”[ii]

Fanaticism—just like Lenin would later declare himself to be “in love with Marx” and honor the memory of Robespierre with a monument in Saint Petersburg.

It was after the excesses and madness of the French Revol­ution that con­­servative thinking took hold in earnest. The pendulum swung and for a few generations the leading minds of France, Germany and England dev­eloped the foundations of modern conservatism. You have Burke’s re­pu­dia­tion of the French Revolution, the German Romanticism’s rejec­tion of the cold and ahistorical intellect of the French Enlightenment project, and Joseph de Maistre’s poignant retort to Rousseau’s ideal of men born free but being everywhere in chains: “To say that sheep are born carnivor­ous, but everywhere eat grass, would be just as reason­able”.[iii]

Conservative thinkers knew that modernity was encroaching upon society: They did not deny the power of science and technology and the profoundly new territory that humanity was entering. They held that modern society had to grow and evolve organically, and that the role of the intellect was not to force itself upon the world, but to refine the human spirit on an individual level by self-reflection and hard work—even beyond the intellectual re­alm: linking to the spiritual, the myst­ical and the aesthetic. People aren’t natur­ally be­nign, as Rousseau and Robes­pierre had postulated, and society does not always opp­ress them—it often protects, fosters and supports them. People are relatively brutish and simple, and they must refine their souls to be any good—and society’s role is more often to hold us in place so we don’t commit crimes or work against one another. And society can offer a source of cultural refinement—through history, art and Bildung.

To different extents, the conservative thinkers also defended God and the Christian faith against the onslaught of cold scientific rationality. Hum­ans need God to know their place in the larger scheme of things. So what could be worse than throwing all of that rich timbre of human expe­rience and culture overboard in exchange for a dreamt-up plan for a new society!

The point isn’t, then, to try to go back to the Middle Ages,[iv] but simply to defend traditions, sacred values, national ethnic bonds, hierarchical relations and institutions from unrealistic and irresponsible attempts to efface them. The funda­men­tal conservative prin­ciple is to be responsi­ble and prudent; it is to avoid what I have called “game denial”.

Conservatism and counter-revolution have surfaced as a political, aes­the­tic and intellectual force time and again since early modernity. During the period 1815–48, the Austrian statesman Prince Metternich, a major influence in Austria and in Europe generally, devoted his energies to erec­t­ing an antirevolutionary chain of international alliances throughout Eur­ope. After the turn of the 19^th century you had Oswald Spengler’s som­ber ruminations on the fall of Western civilization. In its latest incar­nation you have thinkers such as the Canadian psychologist Jordan B. Peterson and the US literary scholar Camille Paglia who call themselves classical liberal and libertarian respect­iv­ely, but who, structurally speak­ing, quite clearly repro­duce the conservative creed. They work to challenge leftwing academic postur­ing and to demask the exces­ses of univer­sity campus radicalism and the youth’s blind faith in neo-Marx­ism and inter­sectional femin­ism. Their message appeals mostly to white young men, just as ear­lier forms of conser­vatism. And just as before, the young men are encour­aged to cult­ivate their masculinities and inner lives. Peterson and Paglia seem to be lead­ing an ongoing counter-revolution in its own right—albeit in a cult­ural and not military sense.

The enemy is always simplistic and collectivist radicalism. As such, con­servative thinkers view themselves as opposed to “ideol­ogy”. The con­serva­tive mind holds that they stick to a sober view of reality, where­as radicals and progressives have sold out reason in hope of playing an into­xicatingly heroic role, or in covert hopes of advancing in the social hierar­chies. On a deep level, the conservative feels that ideologies provide an excuse for such behavior, a kind of simple filter through which the ideo­logue can view the world in black-and-white terms—thus avoid­ing to ever see his own limitations and the greed of his soul, because he is always on the “pure” and “good” side. The conservative tells us:

“Your ideology is a sickness, a big lie, an excuse for your in­ability and un­will­ing­ness to deal with your own inner weaknesses. And that is, ultimately, why the French Revolution turned sour, as did the Bolsh­evik one, as will all future ones. You say you are good, but you lie. If you really cared about what’s good, you would bother to first find out, without a priori, what is true—including truths that happen to hurt—and then you would do your hard inner home­work and deal with the less rosy and more terrifying reality of existence.”

This conservative trail of thought of course also poses a challenge to poli­tical metamodernism. And the challenge should be taken seriously, by all means. How can we justify the Nordic ideology? Is it just another attempt at a seductive, blinding ideology that would make Chairman Mao proud?

As with the other modern ideologies, you can either beat conservatism by dismantling its core suppositions, or by taking it to its own limits and turn it against itself. And again, we need to do the latter. But just to point out some ways to disprove conservatism “from the outside” we can men­tion that:

• conservatism cannot itself escape the charges of being an ideology,
• conservative thinkers have all been beaten down by history as they opp­o­sed abolition of slavery, universal suffrage, labor rights, the rule of sci­en­tific method over religion, the separa­tion of state and religion, the in­­­depen­dence of colonies, the equality between sexes, and so on, i.e. they have sided with the losing institutions, and all been proven terribly wrong in the long run, and
• you can always tear down their philosophical foundations, such as the belief in the individual, in free will, or in reason, all of which are manifestly false and provably so.

In short, it’s apparent that conservatives are usually right in the short run but wrong in the long run, and we can always point that out. But that would be cheating. It wouldn’t reach the conservatives on their own terms. Here’s the point of attack: The conservative wants to be pru­dent and to respect tradition and let society grow organically without effac­ing nat­ural hierarchies that have been est­ablished between com­petent and less competent members of society.

We can ask the conservative: Which scenario is most respectful of peo­ple’s relations and traditions—one in which you have an active and delib­erate Gemeinschaft Politics, or one in which such a thing is lacking? With a Ge­mein­schaft Politics you have the means to look at cultural, ethnic and national values and relations and to defend them or develop their inter­relations. Without it you don’t. So a good con­servative must accept that Gemein­schaft Politics can be useful—in fact, many unknowingly already advocate embry­onic forms of this kind of politics, as discussed in chapter 11.

How about Empirical Politics? Which society will be most prone to crazy dreamt-up and disembodied ideologies—one that continuously finds ways of optimizing checks against bullshit, or one that doesn’t? Em­pirical Polit­ics is perfectly in line with the conservative ideals of making well-informed decisions and demanding proof that something is likely to work before carrying it out.

And if you want to be prudent and respect the narratives and traditions that have grown through history, which alternative treats such folk narra­tives with the greatest care and respect; one that has a Politics of Theory to continuously see if culture has gone off the rails and become destructive, or one that has no such mechanism? Having a Politics of Theory is—toge­ther with Empirical Politics—like buying an insurance.

The classical conserva­tive wants to refuse to buy the insurance in an accelerating time that is changing very quickly and in which crazy ideo­l­ogies are popp­ing up again. The prudent thing to do—indeed, the resp­onsible and con­servative thing to do—is to buy the damned insurance and make sure you pay its premium. The same can be said about Demo­cra­ti­zation Politics: Again, it’s like buying an insurance.

And when it comes to the conservative concern for the soul, or the loss of connection to it in our fast-paced fast-food society, what could be more important than Existen­tial Politics? Would you like to go on not having inner development as a poli­tical topic, with good data to look at and dis­cuss? Not to mention Emanci­pation Politics—how will you defend indivi­dual rights without an institu­tional framework to do so? Wouldn’t it be reckless and irrespon­sible—which is what every conservative claims not to be—to reject such politics?

And then there’s the whole issue of the value of elites that have done hard inner work to earn their place and who lead with a gentle hand and a long-term perspective. Political metamodernism has a developmental psy­ch­ology to back it up and can help identify and gather such elites and make sure they can wield and maintain power. Can classical conservatism do that? Do the conservatives have any better strategies for how the edu­cated and com­petent elites of society should organize themselves to avoid an un­informed mob rule from taking over? Recent populist developments sugg­est they don’t.

And you want to not have a partial, ideological perspective, but to re­late to the slow and organic development of the whole? How exactly can you do that without seeing that the other ideological positions are also a part of that whole—without the metamodern principle of transpartisa­nism and the meta­­modern method of co-development? How can you lead and represent the whole when you always splice off about half of the population and their worldviews? You cannot let society grow organically without the holistic multi-perspectivalism of metamodernism. Or rather, you can, but you won’t be overviewing and leading that growth.

As you can see, good monsieur, your conservatism is only a cheap fanfare for political metamodernism. The modern form of conservatism is imm­ature, childish, irresponsible and imprudent compared to the Nor­­dic ideo­logy.

The Nordic ideology is, simply, more conservative than conservatism.

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

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[i]. Note that I’m paraphrasing here. What I am referring to is, more precisely, Book 1, Section 7 of the Social Contract. “This means nothing less than that he will be forced to be free; for this is the condition which, by giving each citizen to his coun­try, secures him against all personal dependence.”

[ii]. Robespierre quoted from chapter 4 in: Hicks, S. R. C., 2004/2011. Explaining Postmodernism: Skepticism and Socialism from Rousseau to Foucault. China: Ock­ham’s Razor Pub­lishing.

[iii]. Or actually, I’m playing along with a popular textbook simplification here. In reality this quote is from an 1899 book by Émile Faguet (Politiques et moralistes du dix-neuvième siècle), who creatively paraphrased the conservative philosopher de Maistre with the formulation: “Dire: les moutons sont nés carnivores, et partout ils mangent de l’herbe, serait aussi juste.” (p. 41).

[iv]. Even if some early conservatives, like the young Novalis, did indeed long for a united, Catholic, theocratic Europe.

The following is a slightly edited extract from Hanzi Freinacht’s book ‘Nordic Ideology: A Metamodern Guide to Politics, Book Two’. This is the second book in a series on metamodern thought, a work of popular philosophy that investigates the nature of psychological development and its political implications. 

So the fundamental goal of liberalism is to maximize the freedom of the individual. It is hard enough for each of us to figure out how we should lead our lives and what is good for us and our kids—let alone know what might be good for others. Hence, it is unwise to put too much of your life into my hands and vice versa. This means that the realm of the public and the political should not unnecessarily infringe upon the private sphere and the voluntary exchanges on the market. Rather, government should be stretched only so far that it guarantees our protection from one another and ensure that we don’t breach our freely entered agreements: As long as you don’t do anything that directly limits or harms me, you should be free to do it.

There is, to a considerable extent, a trade-off between how much should be decided upon politically and how much each of us can decide for our­selves. For instance, if you have high taxes, the political system controls a large share of human activity, and with lower taxes more of that decision power lands in the hands of individuals. Generally speaking, individuals will be more empowered in the latter case, and this fosters responsibility, innovation, hard work, independent thinking and econo­mic growth, which in turn increases individual freedom. Such freedom should also have as few legal restrictions as possible; you need very good arguments if you want to use the monopoly of violence to threaten people to comply with some rule.

What do you say, will that do as a general idea of liberalism? From John Locke and John Stuart Mill, to Hayek, to Ayn Rand, to Milton Fried­man, to Robert Nozick (before he changed his mind) and Reaganomics—the above posi­tion would be shared by all of them.

The easiest way to defeat liberalism is by attacking its core supposition: the individual. The moment we are shown that it is a surface phenome­non and that the real unit of analysis is the dividual or the transindividual, and that freedom must ultimately be defined in transpersonal terms, we can see that liberalism must be subjected to metamodernism: Ultimately, you can never be free unless the people around you develop well, because their development affects not only your choices in every moment of your life, but even the degrees of freedom by which you can think, feel, and be in the world. We co-emerge, and freedom is a social category that func­tions through different emotional regimes.

Libertarians gather around the hacker and startup comm­unities of Silicon Valley and the East Coast of the US—they don’t set up shop in Somalia or Afghanistan, where there is indeed no state power to limit “individual freedom”. It’s just you and the desert (and a few warlords). A dynamic market ultimately rests upon a strong monopoly of violence that provides enough stability for freedom to prosper. Security is a service, and the state is an efficient provider of just that. As Max Weber noted so long ago, states and markets develop together.

But that, of course, is cheating. Libertarians and classical liberals won’t give up their belief in the individual anytime soon, so in order to beat them on their own terms you must show them that the maximization of indivi­dual liberty cannot be done without political metamodernism. And that’s perfectly doable, too.

The weakest spot is, unsurprisingly perhaps, the role of the state. As much suspicion as liberalism harbors against the state, it ultimately always depends upon it. Not only must there be a state to guarantee the safety of individuals against the violence or oppression of one another, it must also warrant legally binding agreements and protect property rights. No capi­tal­ist market is possible without at least some minimum state action. And if such a state does exist it will always have to make priorities, which will always limit at least some freedoms of some individuals.

So there is a state, if only a minimal one. How to make sure it is truly liberal and non-oppress­ive? If the govern­ance of such a state does not in­clude an active and deliberate Emancipation Politics, there will be fewer ways for the oppressed and dis­favored parties to resist. This in turn would re­quire a Democrat­ization Poli­tics to make certain that the form of gover­nance is something that is entered into voluntarily in the first place. And from there on, you will require all the other four forms of politics because they all depend upon each other. Empirical Politics is necessary to ensure that the minimized governmental action actually does max­imize human freedom. That too, in part, is an empirical question.

What, then, about anarcho-capitalism, one might ask? In this extreme version of liberalism you want to get rid of the state altogether and even have a market solution for buying and selling security services such as policing and courts. Let’s take it from the anarcho-capitalist perspective then: no state, basta! Anarcho-capitalists are not un­comm­on around hac­k­er comm­unities, Sili­con Valley and the tech industries, so it is a rele­vant ques­tion. And with cryptocurrencies and blockchain techno­logies on the rise, we may be seeing increas­ingly serious attempts at anarcho-capitalist projects.

Here’s the thing. Even if you had no state and security was up for sale, the best security solutions would still be those that provide people with a “listening society” so that peo­ple feel heard, seen and represented. The best security is still preventive security. This would in turn require a dev­elop­ment of all the six forms of politics (Democrat­ization, Gemeinschaft, Existential, Emancipation, Empirical and Theory). In market terms, this service would be more competitive.

Imagine you’re a “client-citizen” of the kind envisioned by anarcho-capitalists: You have blockchain money and you shop around for the best state services. In one such state service, the metamodern one, you can affect the mode of govern­ance, people are nudged to treat you better and you get a framework that helps you find profound meaning in life, and the fellow citizens will be much more peaceful and socially intelligent, and it’s all empirically proven to work. The other providers lack such services and end up using your volun­tarily paid money much more ineffi­ciently. Which one are you going to pick? You go with the metamodern one. If there is such a thing as your “natural rights”, these will come to a fuller expression in a meta­modern soc­iety.

The only way to stop people from voluntarily choosing the meta­modern solutions would be to stop free competition by some kind of threat of viol­ence or monopoly. The only thing that can stop liberalism from being eaten alive by metamodernism is authoritarianism.

In the “market of ideas” (as proposed by the liberal thinker J. S. Mill), political metamodernism lands on top of liberalism in all of its forms. Just as the telephone and internet beat the telegraph. If you’re not a meta­moder­nist, you’re just a bad liberal, because metamodern­ism is more libe­ral than liberalism—even in the stringent forms of libertarianism and anarcho-cap­italism.

—

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

The following is a slightly edited extract from Hanzi Freinacht’s book ‘Nordic Ideology: A Metamodern Guide to Politics, Book Two’. This is the second book in a series on metamodern thought, a work of popular philosophy that investigates the nature of psychological development and its political implications. 

The idea of socialism took root in the wake of capitalist industriali­zation, although the word originated as a derogatory term already in the mid-1700s as Catholic theologians criticized the legal philosophies of Grotius and Puf­endorf who had the insolence to think that law should be based upon the relationships between people rather than divine revela­tion. Such “social­ists” wanted a societal order defined by human rela­tions.^[i] And modern socialism echoes some of that original meaning: Socialists want the econ­omy—and thus everyday life—not to be ruled by any blind, mechan­ical system, but by the relations between sensing and thinking human beings brought into benign relation with one another.

There are, naturally, more forms of socialist thought and practice than we could possibly deal with in this context—from Proudhon to Marx, to Bernstein’s democratic reformism, to Rosa Luxemburg, to Western hum­an­ist Marxism and Freudo-Marxism and their “New Left” and so on. But it is safe to say that anything falling outside of the above delineated bou­n­dary (in regard to the means of production and equality) is not “social­ism” in any meaningful sense of the word. By going to the root shared by all social­ists, we can compare socialism as a general category to the Nordic ideology.

The socialist goal is an equitable society, not merely in terms of opport­unity, but also of outcome. Because so much of society is always and for­ever bound up with the situated social relations between people, it is una­void­able to also seek to level out the outcomes in terms of income and wealth—other­wise the privileges tend to stack up over time: wealthy fami­ly dynas­ties, economic classes, cartels and monopolies, corporations that flee from social responsi­bility and taxation, and so on. So if you don’t care about out­come, you will end up reproducing inequality of opportunity as well. And only if people are reasonably equal can they resist exploitation, and only if they resist being exploited can they be free and fully human.

And right there is the killing point, my dear comrade. If you have the goal to create a fair and equal society, you must also support equalities of outcome to some extent.

Can you get equality of outcome without a developed Gemeinschaft Politics? No, because there will be so much social, emotional and phy­sio­logical in­equality left, and these will reproduce new forms of inequa­lity. The “classless” society in an economic sense is a very superficial utopia: Most of the inti­mate and hurtful inequality remains, and the stakes cannot be fair by any means. Inequality is economic, social, physio­logical, emo­tional, ecological and informational—and all of these are intercon­nec­ted. Only metamodern politics can address inequality at that level of com­plex­ity. Without it, you will never get a classless society.

And even if “everybody” would own the means of production together and manage them democratically, this process would always be limited by what­ever form democracy takes. If the mode of governance is not itself a process of incremental and self-critical development, you will always be stuck with the power relations inherent to that particular system. So with­out Democratization Politics, you cannot actually have soc­ialism in any real sense.

Both Gemeinschaft and Democratization Politics require the other four new forms of politics (Existential, Emancipation, Empirical and Theory) to function. Thus, you simply cannot call yourself a socialist unless you also accept political metamodernism. All said and done, the Nordic ideology is more egalitarian than socialism.

Where does this leave the Left in its existing modern and postmodern forms? If political metamodernism charges ahead and becomes the stan­dard bearer of a more embodied and deeper equality—connecting specifi­cally to the emerging postindustrial and digitized economy—what pur­pose does the residual old Left have to play?

To understand this we may look at the role of Christian­ity during the 19^th century. There can be little doubt that the fundamental “game chan­ge” shifts of this period were made possible by the emergence of a distinc­tly modern society: abolition of slavery, protests against rapacious exploi­tation in the colonies, the expan­sion of suffrage, the early forms of wel­fare. But—and this is a big but—radical born-again Christian­ity played a pivotal role in the mobilization of social move­ments and moral demands during this period. Hence, you can see how the morally driven “utopian” movements of the former metameme (postfaust­ianism) finally managed to reach the “low hanging fruit” that came into reach by the maturation of the next metameme—in this case modern soc­iety. The born-again Christ­ians and Pentecostals were hardly the “most enlightened” or “most mod­ern” citizens of their time; but they emphasized relatively simple and spe­cifically moral and collective demands that had now finally become rea­listic and achiev­able. They weren’t fans of Darwin, and still they had this progressive role to play in history.

That is the future role of socialism and the Left more generally in an increasingly metamodern world-system: being a source of popular moral mobil­ization within metamodern society. A lot of the things postmod­ern intellectuals and social movements may have wanted to achieve—animal rights, levelling-out international terms-of-trade, protecting the un­emplo­yed from marginali­zation and stigma—can become much more feasible in a society that is taking steps towards metamodern institu­tions, not least because it will make the average value meme and norm sys­tems develop more rapidly. We may perhaps not be looking at a “social­ism in the 21^st century” as many like to imagine (i.e. viewing the Left as the key force in organizing and governing society in the period ahead of us), because it will be outcompeted by political metamodernism. And it will be torn by the populist Right and new versions of conservatism from the other side, and it has no present-day real-world governments to point at as positive examples. But just as Christianity was dealt its fatal blows dur­ing the 19^th century and still managed to be morally transform­ative, so can the Left be a stepping stone for moral transformations in the 21^st cen­tury.

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

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[i]. You can read about this history in: Honneth, A., 2015/2017. The Idea of Social­ism: Towards a Renewal. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press.