HANZI FREINACHT
Nordic Ideology: A Guide to Metamodern Politics, Book Two
Copyright © Metamoderna ApS, 2019
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First Edition, 2019
ISBN 978-87-999739-3-4
Metamoderna ApS | www.metamoderna.org
Here’s one for Jonas,
And one for Jimmy
And for all the kind, intelligent
And sensitive people
Who bow down
And break down
Under the existential pressures
Of modern life
And one for Tom,
This mischievous man
Who was the first reader of this book
And passed away shortly after
Contents
Introduction: BLAZING NEW PATHS
Breaking the Limits
The Last Book and This One
The Map, The Plan and The Proof
Hanzi: Your Suspicious Friend
Make an Effort
Fanfare to Part One: ATTRACTORS
A Winner’s History
The Spirit of the Laws Evolving
An Attractor Is…
Society and Evolution
Set the Lodestone Right
Navigators of History
Chapter 1: RELATIVE UTOPIA
The “Both-And” of Development
Beauties Lost and New Heights Reached
New Miseries Worth Fighting For
Chapter 2: GAME CHANGE
Game Denial
Conservative Satisfaction
Game Acceptance
Don’t Hate the Game
Multi-Dimensional Game Change
Chapter 3: HISTORY’S DIRECTION
A Developmental View of Order
1. The Early Modern State
2. The Nation State
3. The Welfare State
4. The Listening Society
The Pattern: (In)dividuation and Differentiation
Chapter 4: ANOTHER KIND OF FREEDOM
Freedom as Emotions
Sociology of Emotions to the Rescue
Emotional Regimes: Hidden in Plain Sight
The Spectrum of Judgment
The Hierarchy of Negative Social Emotions
Freedom as Societal Development
Chapter 5: FREEDOM’S BEYOND
In-formalization and Nordic Envy
Narcissism Decoded
Envy and Jealousy
Escape from Freedom
Three Voices Whisper
A Simple Scale of (In-)Dividual Freedom
The Highest Reaches of Freedom
Chapter 6: DIMENSIONS OF EQUALITY
Equality as Paradox
Six Dimensions of Inequality
Chapter 7: DEEPER EQUALITY
Deeper Resonances
Equality, Equivalence, Equanimity
Spirituality as a Class Magnifier
Chapter 8: THE EVOLUTION OF NORMS
Cultural Penalties and Rewards
The Norm System as Cultural Struggle
The Map of Cultural Game Change
Interlude to Part Two, The Plan: THE SIX NEW FORMS
Very, Very Quick Recap
Processes for Deeper Societal Coherence
Three Caveats
Chapter 9: DEMOCRATIZATION POLITICS
Updating Democracy Itself
The True North: Collective Intelligence
False Defenders of Democracy
The Four Democratic Forms
Interconnecting the Four
Chapter 10: EVOLVING DEMOCRACY
Voting Systems and Internet Democracy
Bottom-Up and Top-Down
Institutional Experiments
Final Countdown for Democracy
Chapter 11: GEMEINSCHAFT POLITICS
A Call to Fellowship
Developing the Demos
From Public to Domestic to Private
Enter Creepy Politics
An Orwellian “Ministry of Love”?
Doing Gemeinschaft Politics
Four Examples of Gemeinschaft Politics
Chapter 12: TRANSFORMATIONS OF EVERYDAY LIFE
Reducing Ethnic Tensions
Post-Feminism and Gender Antagonism
Empty Rituals and Unritualized Emotions
Golden Keys
Chapter 13: EXISTENTIAL POLITICS
Existential Issues Determine the Goals of Politics
Is and Is Not
Supporting Inner Growth
Existential Statistics and a Ministry of Existential Affairs
Via Contemplativa
Life Crisis and Development
Chapter 14: THE AWAKENED PUBLIC
Secular Monasteries
Meditation and Society
Transpersonal Integrity
Death, Truth and Discourse
Madness and Civilization
Chapter 15: EMANCIPATION POLITICS
New Sources of Oppression
Rights Reloaded
La Résistance, Direct and Indirect
Four Dimensions of Oppression
Chapter 16: EMPIRICAL POLITICS
Not Obvious, Not Naive
Higher Levels of Truth?
An Appalling State of Affairs
The Ten-Fold Path to Enlightenment (2.0)
Chapter 17: POLITICS OF THEORY
Culture into Our Own Hands
A Serpent Biting Its Own Tail
Theory in Practice
Example: Big History in Schools
Methods for Worldviewing
Chapter 18: THE MASTER PATTERN
Resonanz, Bitte!
Montesquieu 2.0
Inherent Semiotic Structure
What Must Be Done
More Sinister Plots
Simmering Micro Movements
Trouble Shooting / FAQ
Chapter 19: REQUIEMS FOR MODERN IDEOLOGIES
Subtle Memetic Revolution
More Egalitarian than Socialism
More Liberal than Liberalism
More Sustainable than Ecologism
More Prudent than Conservatism
More Radically Rebellious than Anarchism
Strategic Considerations
Chapter 20: DANGEROUS DREAMS
Forbidden Phantoms™
The Solemn Vengefulness of Communism ☭
The (Partial) Glory of Fascism
Excursion: Obedience as Laughter
Glimmers of New Age Spirituality
EPILOGUE
Appendix A: WHY COMMUNISM FAILED
Don’t Blame Comrade Napoleon
The Mainstream/Libertarian Account
A Jammed Information Feedback System
Marx Had the Wrong Meta-Ideology
Communism Is “Game Denial”
Appendix B: THE FOUR FIELDS
Value Memes in Populations
The Four Fields of Societal Development
Marxian Blindness
The Psychological Prerequisites of Socialism
Too Dumb for Complex Societies?
Murder She Wrote
A Diagnosis of Our Time
Appendix C: EFFECTING GAME CHANGE
Evolving Markets, Polities and Civil Spheres
Notes
Introduction:
BLAZING NEW PATHS
Let it first of all be said that the previous book, The Listening Society , wasn’t all that good or important.
The previous book basically hammers home one point: that devel
opment is real and that it matters. It stays mostly within the realm of psychology. There are a few innovations, true, but they aren’t that big.
The present volume is different. Fewer people will like it, no doubt, as it’s not as light-weight. This is a much heavier, more original and, in my opinion, a more significant piece of work. Essentially, the first book was only the introduction to this one, which contains about three times more in terms of theoretical content and innovation. It presents you with an actual to-do plan to save the world. Without this plan, we’re still just playing around.
This is where it gets real. Welcome.
—
Ah, back in the Alps. It’s a sunny winter’s day. Clear skies. Open horizons. Majestic mountains. Swathes of pine trees burdened with a thick layer of slowly melting snow, naked cliffs in glistening black and white, rising above misty valleys. It’s quiet here.
Only the buzzing flies keep me company in this chalet of sixteen beds, five bathrooms, and one jacuzzi. I’ve just spent half an hour chasing a veritable army of them out the windows. Many more remain. They want to see the sun, but the moment they make their way out, they freeze to death. I watched a few of them land in the soft snow; it takes about ten seconds before their last spasm.
I don’t know if it’s preferable to a forty-eight-hour life of beating against a window until you dry up and roll over—and eventually have your body swallowed by the vacuum cleaner. I just sentenced a good fifty of them to death. I can’t say I regret it.
Still, I wonder what it would be like to be one of them. They have about 10,000 neurons each. Apparently, this wooden house has parts where maggots thrive and eggs can be safely laid. But once the flies have won their wings and confidently lift off to explore the world, they find a barren landscape of wood and glass, with no scrap to eat, no water to quench their thirst, no cow dung to relish in. During the summer, there are cows grazing about, their bells chiming and echoing until sunset, fields of dung aplenty. But now there is only a hopeless struggle against the window, an invisible barrier granting no solace.
From a human perspective, the relentless efforts of these creatures appear futile. Their way of understanding the world—“just go for the light”—seems much too simpleminded. Quite clearly, their intuition betrays them.
But are we so different from our distant house fly kin? Evolutionarily, we parted ways about half a billion years ago. For certain, we have taken divergent paths. Vertebrates like ourselves develop a “second mouth” during early embryonic stages, whereas the “first mouth” becomes our anus. These little bastards, banging their heads against the window, still eat through their anuses. They live short lives and multiply quickly, dying en masse to let some lucky few pass on their genes—lots of genes. We, on the contrary, live long lives and invest huge energy into our rather few offspring for many years. Some of us even love them.
But like the flies, we are born into a world of greater circumstances beyond our control. Some of us are born on hot, humid summer days, with plenty of space to buzz around and cows to bother; to live the lives we were, in some sense, meant to live. Others are born to a merciless struggle spent beating our heads against invisible barriers.
Had I been born elsewhere, I could have been a drug-addicted child soldier in Sierra Leone, a sweatshop worker in Bangladesh, or brainwashed in a North Korean labor camp on the Russian taiga. Talk about barren landscapes for human growth and flourishing.
Breaking the Limits
Nature is a cruel mistress. On one hand she graciously endows us all—mice and men, and yes, even flies—with unlimited potential to flourish; on the other, she sooner or later throws us against an impenetrable glass barrier. We always hit limits such as lacking resources, harsh climatic conditions, hostile life forms, or diseases, to either stump our growth or kill us off.
No one ever reaches their full potential. But nature isn’t being unfair; on the contrary, it’s life that is utterly unreasonable in its aspirations. To life, to the primordial impulse of the will, the world is simply not enough; the moment it wins the world, it seeks to conquer another.
Take a pair of flies, for instance; without any natural barriers, one mating couple could grow into a swarm exceeding the mass of the Earth in less than a year. [1] A simple house fly may appear a humble creature; but don’t be fooled: If given the chance, it’ll consume the world and everyone in it. Lord of the flies.
Humans are no less unreasonable; just closer to conquering the world. Human crops now account for more than a third of the Earth’s non-marine biomass, 83% of the terrestrial biosphere is under direct human control, and we and our domesticated animals now make up 97% of all land mammals. Insects may be more numerous, but the biomass of all humans has been estimated to be slightly larger than the combined biomass of all 12,649 species of ants. Quite impressive when you think about it. I couldn’t find any estimates for how we compare to flies, but a recent investigation has shown that in certain parts of the world we have killed off around 75% of all winged insects in the last 30 years. [2] At this rate we’ll beat the flies pretty soon.
Victory at last. If perhaps a lonely one.
However, the explosive growth from a few million to soon-to-be eight billion humans in the course of a mere 10,000 years is not the most extraordinary fact about our species. What’s even more extraordinary is that we’re not about to reach 80 billion.
We’re often led to believe that the Earth is severely overpopulated, but overconsumed is a more accurate description. Theoretically, we could easily sustain a much larger number of human bodies with the currently available resources and technologies. We have plenty of possibilities to go forth and be fruitful and populate the Earth as God told us in the Bible. But somehow this godly command wasn’t enough for the human race. We wanted something more. We wanted to become gods ourselves. Gods of electricity and economic growth. Gods of information. [3]
Evolution truly is a strange beast. The moment natural selection finally had produced a species capable of overcoming most of the natural barriers inhibiting its biological expansion from subsuming the entire biosphere, a new evolutionary principle enters the stage and takes the lead role: symbolic evolution.
Unlike the flies I callously froze to death, our ape bodies appear to be infected by a strange ghost that strives to expand its single self rather than the number of bodies carrying its genome. Our minds have been infected with an intricate and mysterious symbolic world that somehow convinced us that spreading our genes isn’t ultimately what life is about.
Instead, human life has come to revolve around the expansion of our inner world; a world that is both personal and intimate, and inescapably connected to the wider field of symbols shared with others. In short, all of us have values, ideals and ideas that we seek to imprint upon the world. That’s our way of expanding.
This has turned humanity into a restless creature, unceasingly on a quest to expand our consciousness: ever higher states of joy and pleasure, even at the price of great torment; new knowledge to satisfy our never-ending curiosity; deeper spiritual insights to relate to the unanswerable question of why we are here; and increasingly complex ways of thinking in order to make sense of it all.
Just like flies cannot stop multiplying until the entire world is consumed by their offspring, we can’t stop ourselves from expanding the scope of our inner world until we reach the impossible ideal of a god—even if it kills us. We just can’t help it; we reach higher and higher, deeper and deeper, in a futile attempt to transcend the many limits that insult our divine pretensions.
However, we cannot (foreseeably [4] ) escape the natural barrier that is the frailty of our biological bodies. No matter how far our mind develops beyond its primal instincts and impulses, no matter how abundantly our spiritual depth and intellectual complexity allow us to manipulate the world beyond our bodies, we still remain bio
logical creatures with all the limitations that entails.
Of course, bodies are beautiful. There is, as many have observed, an intelligence in the body—if we only listen to its signals, if we come “out of our heads”. But bodies are also messy, gory and vulnerable. The same principle that gives us life and mind also leaves us raw and utterly exposed.
Ernest Becker famously argued, in his psychoanalytical account of the denial of death in modern society, that we are “gods with anuses”. [5] This was meant to underscore the strange duality of the human condition: that we are conscious and intelligent beings who can strive for beauty, love and truth—but we can never escape the frailty of our bodies. Even the exalted Dalai Lama will solemnly shit his robes during a sacred ritual if his bowels betray him. Gods with anuses; the primordial mouths we share with the flies.
Yet nature is not the only barrier to stand between our god-like aspirations and all too human predicaments. Societal barriers, such as institutions, laws, common understandings, language structures, technology, markets and social norms are both scaffolds for our growth and expression, and prisons for our bodies and souls. The instances I mentioned above—the child soldier, the sweatshop worker and the brainwashed forced laborer—are all clear examples of how societal factors can limit our lives, our wellbeing and our psychological development.
Yet, even in more favorable environments, there will always be societal barriers limiting us: social conventions restraining us from becoming who we really want to be, economic circumstances preventing us from using our greatest talents, lacking support structures and so forth.
But thanks to our oversized brains and the wonders of symbolic language, we can conceptualize the barriers ahead and take measures to change the circumstances within which we live our lives and to which future humans and other sentient beings will be born. Or at least we can die trying.
As I write this, we are, as a global society, still waking up to the fact that there are significant natural barriers ahead of us: the multidimensional ecological crises, the most well-known of which is human-caused climate change. Science is part by part revealing the grim rules we have to play by. If we play our cards right, we can avert some or even most of these barriers, at least for a significant period of time.
What we haven’t woken up to, however, is the fact that we can change the societal barriers and social-psychological landscapes of everyday life. And indeed, because the different kinds of barriers interact with each other, we must change some of the struts and beams of society if we are also to overcome the natural barriers. But to do so, we need to know what it means for humans to grow and flourish, and we need to know the logic of how societies develop.