The Listening Society: A Metamodern Guide to Politics

The Listening Society: A Metamodern Guide to Politics Book One

by Hanzi Freinacht

Our mission, in a nutshell, is thus:

To unite the many struggles

of the exploited bodies of the poor

with the struggles of the lost,

suffering souls of the rich world.

And to expand that struggle 

to sustainability across time and space.

And to expand that solidarity 

to fathom the vast suffering

and multiplicity of perspectives 

of the animal realm in its entirety.

And to deepen the struggle

until it’s reborn as play.

PROLOGUE
Political metamodernism has the capacity to gradually, but profoundly, change the lives of countless millions of people for the better, by cultivating a deeper kind of welfare system and economy—propelling us towards a saner, kindlier world. The welfare system part of this is called the listening society.

Mixing fact and fiction is of course what children and the insane do.  But upon closer inspection, it becomes clear that everybody does it. The question is only how consciously and productively it is done.

The next “metamodern” stage of development…is aiming to outcompete liberal democracy as a political system, outcompete all of the political parties and their ideologies, outcompete capitalism as an economic system, and outcompete and replace our current welfare system.

Political metamodernism is built around one central insight. The king’s road to a good future society is personal development and psychological growth. And humans develop much better if you fulfill their innermost psychological needs. So we’re looking for a “deeper” society; a civilization more socially apt, emotionally intelligent and existentially mature.

There are three different parts of political metamodernism:

-The Listening Society—which is the welfare of the future, a welfare that includes the emotional needs and supports the psychological growth of all citizens. A society in which everyone is seen and heard (rather than manipulated and subjected to surveillance, which are the degenerate siblings of being seen and heard).

-Co-Development—which is a king of political thinking that works across parties, works to keep ego-issues and emotional investments and biased opinions in check, and seeks to improve the general climate of political discourse: “I develop if you develop. Even if we don’t agree, we come closer to the truth if we create better dialogues and raise the standards for how we treat one another.”

-The Nordic Ideology—this is my name for the political structure that would support the long-term creation of the listening society and make room for co-development. It is called the Nordic ideology because its early sprouts are cropping up in and around Scandinavia. It includes a vision of six new forms of politics, all of which work together to profoundly recreate society. A large part of this has to do with how to defend citizens from new sources of oppression that can emerge as a side-effect of a “deeper” society. These new forms of oppression are generally of a more subtle and more psychological kind than what we have seen in the 20th century. 

…political metamodernism is…useful for addressing society’s ailments, such as:

-the multifaceted ecological crisis;

-the instability of the economy;

-the excessive global inequalities;

-the widespread anxiety, or “alienation”, that modern people harbor;

-the challenges of global migration;

-the transition to a postindustrial, robotized and digitalized economy;

-and the challenges of transnational governance.

It is the solemn duty of the philosopher to piss on all that you hold dear and sacred, to show you that your gods are false.

To the dialectically inclined political philosopher, followers are made of bronze, informed critics of silver and spiritual adversaries of molten gold. Uninformed critics, however, are only the dirt on my boots and rolled-up sleeves. And then there’s a fair share of fool’s gold, too, unfortunately.

Zarathustra spake: “Companions the creator seeks, not corpses, not herds and believers. Fellow creators the creator seeks—those who write new values on new tablets. Companions the creator seeks, and fellow harvesters; for everything about him is ripe for the harvest.”

INTRODUCTION What We Must Achieve

the warrior’s code to changing the world

First question: What is human development?

Second question: What is the development of society?

Third question: What is freedom?

Just to say a few words about metamodernism…new trends within the arts…that…combine irony and sarcasm with sincerity and vulnerability. I will deepen this theme throughout the book. 

…metamodernism as a kind of cultural “phase”, a kind of fashion or spirit of arts and culture that has been showing up more often lately.

The first meaning is that metamodernism is a kind of philosophy, a kind of engine for your mind. The second meaning is that metamodernism is a developmental stage. 

You are to be equipped with a multidimensional political-psychological-developmental map of our time. 

Much more than we realize it, science is a whore dressed up as queen, a jester posing as king. We don’t recognize how easily it is bought and sold and how often it makes fools of us before the whole royal court.

We, including the scientists, have common sense understandings about society, the world and ourselves. We each have our own “social theory”, which is continuous with our “common sense” and philosophical outlook, loaded to the brim with emotions and unrecognized assumptions. 

The more radical the new idea, the more painful it is to accommodate.

I relate to you transpersonally, meaning that I meet you not as one single, rational individual, but as the cross-section of the beautiful and terrifying depths of your inner life and the conflicts and potentials inherent in the social, economic and cultural fabric of the digitalizing world. I speak to you as a thinker and seeker lie myself, who is also sensing soul, and who is also society itself in all of its multitudes. To treat you with the deepest respect is not to pretend that you are only your rational mind, but to speak to the totality of your transpersonal existence. You are, fundamentally, the world-soul itself; and you are simultaneously speaking and listening as you read these words. Future readers will understand this better than contemporary ones. 

Metamodernism is the marriage of extreme irony with a deep, unyielding sincerity. 

Part One The New Political Landscape

CHAPTER 1 How Politics Changed

…the clout and seriousness of every political movement is measured by its dedication to the dominant meta-ideology…

CHAPTER 2 Crisis-Revolution

Center-left and center-right compete with one another about who is the best at “creating more jobs” and “keeping industries” so that they can are playing the wrong game altogether. The game has shifted. 

…new progressive strata…the triple-H: hipsters, hackers and hippies. The triple-H people are not just annoying; they are also the main agents within crucial sectors such as IT, design and organizational development. The sociologist Richard Florida called them the creative class.

…the growing yoga bourgeoisie. The yoga bourgeoisie are rich and successful urban dwellers, usually working  in the private sector. They have found that money is not the answer to a happy life and therefore begin to cultivate self-awareness, authenticity and intimacy—often in and around yoga parlors, tantra group settings, contact improvisation dance, improvisation theatre, self-help courses and coaches, and to some extent the Burning Man festival and its wider cultural sphere. These people, funnily enough often work in tandem with the more anti-establishment triple-H people.

In this new society of digital culture and software, being in touch with the symbols and tempo of digital culture and software, being in touch with the symbols and tempo of society—having what is sometimes called “cultural capital”—puts you at a much greater advantage than before. Whereas money, in the Nordic countries, is scattered relatively evenly across the representatives of the old society and the new, cultural capital is certainly not. The more artsy, creative, well connected, socially intelligent, emotionally developed, idealistic, digitalized, diversified and educated you are—the more likely you are to be a rising star of the new society. And the more likely you are to be powerful and successful in the new global economy, even without much money. A sign of this is the growing number of humanities majors who make it big within the IT startups. 

A hacker is not just a person who illegally gains access to computer systems; the hackers I refer to, self-identified or not…produce digital solutions and software that reduce the complexity of society and make it manageable. Of course, not all IT-workers, computer engineers and programmers can be considered to be hackers in this sense. Only the ones who combine their IT and programming skills with an intimate, embodied knowledge of digital culture (and other sensitivities towards our day and age) can be considered as such. They combine software development of the culture capital and social capital, i.e. with a sensitive knowledge of the culture and age we live in, with a rich understanding of its symbols.

Hipsters are not just people with a particular style of fashion, or the pretentious college kids who show off their supposedly good taste in music and art. The hipsters I refer to produce the many symbols that help us to orientate ourselves in, make sense of, and find meaning in the global, digital age. Here you find a wide array of artists, designers, thinkers, social entrepreneurs, writers and bloggers. They develop the ideas of posthumanism, transhumanism, complexity and network researchers, participatory forms of politics and social movements, critique of wage labor (and the often irrational nature of work in the economy), ecological and social resilience, personal development, organizational development, the new interactions of different cultures—and much more. They also, notably embody these new thoughts by creating music, fashion, movies, books and games that embody these new values and ideas—by their ow taste in fashion, art, and lifestyle.

The hippies are not quite the same as the hippies of old…but rather people with highly developed skills in meditation, contemplation, bodily practices, psychedelics, diets and physical training, profound forms of intimate communication and sexuality and simple life wisdoms that apply to our day and age. You will find more rational and research based approaches to psychedelics, communities for self-development and eco-villages living, science-driven meditation and stress release practices, coaches of all kinds, and elaborate forms of practices for achieving higher mental states and spiritual experiences…So the hippies are becoming a force to recon with because they provide social and personal technologies for maintaining health, happiness, community and a sense of enchantment to an increasingly strange and alienating world….the sorts of hippies we are talking about here are generally highly educates and rely upon knowledge of medicine, physiology and psychology. This, too, can be seen as a form of cultural capital. Hippies without such cultural sensitivity fall behind and remain the old kind of hippies.

What then unites the triple-H population? One thing is that all three groups share an alternative relationship to work and the market: They are all driven by what psychologists of work call intrinsic motivation and self-realization, rather than extrinsic motivation, such as monetary rewards, consumption and security. This means that they work by another social and economic logic than any of the old groups in industrial society…the triple-H folks find it hard to “fit in” within the classical, hierarchical and meritocratic organizations. 

The second—and most significant—thing that unites them is the fact that they rely more upon cultural capital (and to some extent social capital) and less upon economic capital…cultural capital is becoming more powerful than economic (as a means of organizing and coordinating people’s actions and behaviors), the cultural capital can be traded for money or other valuable resources at a favorable rate. Hence, bit by bit, cultural capital is beginning to dominate economic capital in a new digital, postindustrial age.

…the third thing that unites the triple-H: their common vested interest as a postindustrial class. In this sense, these people are the real “creative class.”

For these people, the wage labor treadmill (and conventional work life) hinder the lives that they want to live, rather than being a source of security and empowerment. Each aspiring triple-H of course has relatively low changes of achieving financial success. She must win the trust and attention of other people in order to be able to perform her “real” work, her labor of love, full-time. So she must make many attempts, which often leaves her back at square one, where she must again tweak her ideas and modes of work. 

Hence, there is a revolving door between “the creative class,” which the triple-H population largely constitutes, and the precariat—people in economically and socially precarious situations, at the fringes or outside of the conventional labor market. 

The triple-H populations suffer from a number of things that aren’t an issue to most people. These are:

-uncertainty of levels of expectations

-bullshit

-empty networking

“Uncertainty of expectations” has to do with the extreme differences of responses that can be produced by their work. If you work hard and put your stuff out there most anything can happen: You can become a star, get a solid international upper middle class career, or you can be completely ignored for whatever reason. There can be fame and glory and a major breakthrough around any next corner, or there can be a lifetime of frustrations and precarious and embarrassing situations. Will your app help save a million lives or will you have wasted then years of your life?...This is the revolving door between the creative class and the precariat; there can be great distance between expectations, strivings, hopes and realities in these non-conventional lifestyles…expectations minus realities is how you calculate a major factor of ill mental health and human misery.

“Bullshit” means that there needs to be a lot of big talk when you deal with bigger and more abstract issues and matters. A new organizational paradigm?…Because there is so much understanding and context needed in all these projects, they may be difficult to explain, and sometimes you may need to find ways to package and sell them…The reason that it’s so valuable to society is just that some of it isn’t bullshit and even a small percentage of genuine innovations of software, culture or lifestyle can have a huge impact.

“Empty networking” is a wasteful activity that most triple-H people know all too well: those many coffees and lunches had, Skype conferences held and evenings attended that never really led anywhere. Because the triple-H people all rely upon large networks of people to collaborate with in different projects, they must always be open to new contacts. This means curiously inviting new people, surveying the skills and assets and building personal rapport, exploring new ways to work with new people. The people they meet are friendly, like-minded and always interesting. But the productive relationships that are mutually reinforcing and become stronger over time are rare: Because it’s so complete; os many expectations and assumptions and so much shared knowledge that must be in place.

We need directions, but these directions must necessarily be of an abstract, open-ended nature. We don’t need cookbooks; we need general ideas on ow to create good cookbooks, so to speak. We need stories about stories. Meta-narratives.

CHAPTER 3 In a Nutshell

The distinction between hedonic happiness (pleasure, enjoyment, fun) and eudemonic happiness (meaning, purpose in life, and peace of mind). Both of these can be supported for the long-term development of each person as well as society as a whole.

Authentic happiness includes hedonism (pleasure, fun) and eudemonia (meaning, contentment) as well as the productive and responsive acceptance of pain and sorrow.

But happiness and pain are “social” in an even more tangible and intimate way. Hurt, shame and fear make us become mean, controlling bosses, envious friends, lousy parents, bad teachers, thoughtless voters, uncritical consumers and ungrateful neighbors. We shift the blame, as immature people do, and believe that the ills of the world are due to people who are not like ourselves—we become poor citizens, incapable of meaningful dialogue, incapable of universal love and forgiveness. We are judgmental, short-sighted and self-righteous, raging at the “moral degenerates” and “hypocrites” and we fail to show common courtesy and respect to those we disagree with, not the least in politics. We fail to take responsibility, to act productively in the interest of ourselves and others. And in our attempt at a better life, we are often severely limited to thwarted by the immature and socially inept behavior of ourself and others. 

There is a great fabric of relations, behaviors and emotions, reverberating with human and animal bliss and suffering, a web of intimate and formal relations, both direct and indirect. Nasty whirlwinds of feedback cycles blow through this great multidimensional web, pulsating with hurt and degradation. My lacking human development blocks your possible human development. My lack of understanding of you, your needs and perspectives, hurts you in a million subtle ways. I become a bad lover, a bad colleague, a bad fellow citizen and human being. We are interconnected: You cannot get away from my hurt and wounds. They will follow you all of your life—I will be your daughter’s abusive boyfriend, you belligerent neighbor form hell. And you will never grow wings, because there will always be mean bosses, misunderstanding families and envious friends. And you will tell yourself that is how life must be.

But it is not how life has to be. Once you begin to be able to see the social-psychological fabric of everyday life, it becomes increasingly apparent that the fabric is relatively easy to change, to develop. Metamodern politics aims to make everyone secure at the deepest psychological level, so that we can live authentically; a byproduct of which is a sense of meaning in life and lasting happiness; a byproduct of which is kindness and an increased ability to cooperate with others; a byproduct of which is deeper freedom and better concrete results in the lives of everyone; a byproduct of which is a society less likely to collapse into a heap of atrocities. 

Of course, it should be noted that the fabric works in complex and often contradictory ways: One form of happiness of one person can be the downfall of another. But there are regularities to these patterns, and we can make the patterns work for collective, sustainable happiness—yes, for love. 

We desperately need a deeper kind of welfare, beyond the confines of material welfare and medical security—a listening society, where every person is seen and heard (rather than made invisible and then put under surveillance). How can this be achieved?

The answer is to be found in that we today know so much about the human mind, the brain, and the human being in her totality: her psycho-physiology, her behavioral responses and patterns (including economic behaviors), her emotions, her relationships, how to make her happy, how to decrease the likelihood of psychiatric disorders, how to prevent family tragedies, how to support her in the development stages of childhood, adolescence and adulthood, how to support (and to some extent increase) her intelligence and creativity, how to help her to heal after hurt and loss, how to support her tendencies for universalistic values, how to support her towards developing more complex thinking—even how to support the acquisition of existential and spiritual insights that make death, pain and life’s disappointments more tolerable and manageable.

And this knowledge is growing by volumes every day. There is increasing evidence that many different factors work together to help a human being flourish or to let her fall apart. In medicine this insight is called the “biopsycho-ecological paradigm”. In psychology it is similarly called the “bio-psycho-social model.” In politics and welfare policy we can call it the listening society, which is the deeper form of welfare that metamodern activity strive to achieve. 

We are talking about painstaking, slow reforms that nevertheless can be expected to have substantial effect on the quality of life of our fellow citizens—over longer period, and on average.

Such a cultural development requires…Building—or cultivating—the next and deeper layer of social welfare requires the ongoing posing of two questions:

-How can good conditions and prerequisites for human flourishing and “thrivability” be brought about?

-How can this be done in a manner that is open, democratic, non-manipulative—without a “creepy” undercurrent of control?

We are failing to evolve humanity to a maturity matching her newly won powers over nature that the information age (or rather: the multidimensional crisis-revolution) brings.

CHAPTER 4 Possible and Necessary

-Everybody should have the benefit of talking to a kind, listening professional therapist while growing up (just think of how the number of molestations would drop, how kids would treat each other better, how family life would improve).

-Everybody should get to learn to meditate, both with mindfulness and other such techniques so that one can handle stress and get in touch with one’s own emotions.

-Everybody should get a good gym coaching from early age so that they grow up to have fit bodies, good bodily awareness, positive body image, relaxed body language and healthy habits.

-Everybody should be trained in dialogue and get the chance to participate in public debates or deliberations.

-Everybody should get a year off once in a lifetime to go look for new purpose in life and make tough life decisions under professional care and support—in a kind of secular monastery.

-Everybody should be “nudged” and supported to consume both healthy and sustainable food that prevents depression and supports longterm societal goals.

-Everybody should be trained in social and emotional intelligence so that conflicts arise less often and, when they do arise, are handled more productively.

-Everybody should have a proper sexual education from early on, knowing things such as how to tackle early ejaculation, tensions in the vagina, sexual rejections, making approaches in a charming but respectful manner, how to handle competition and how to handle pornography or sexual desires that diverge from the norm.

-Everybody should get some aid in managing the fear of death and facing the hard facts of life—to help us intuitively know that our time here is precious.

It is a major challenge for people to stay sane in this world full of contradictions, temptations, distractions and stressful yet devilishly vague demands. No meaningful story is given beforehand (unless you are part of some religious sect, but even these positions are increasingly precarious). Not only must we stay sane; we must find and keep direction in all of this; we must stay active, even as our activities are rarely “necessary” in any direct, concrete sense. If we fail to do this, we can easily land in socially and economically precarious situations. Many of these challenges require us to develop higher stages of personal development…

We are leaving behind the economy in which you were defined by your profession. Increasingly, people are defined and acquire their social value through a wider array of identities, including civil, personal, aesthetic and existential ones. This has two major implications.

Firstly, people will need much more emotional support in order to grow into maturity and to be able to play with the many possible and confusing identities—instead of taking them too seriously, or clinging to one job description and be crushed if one is suddenly out of work…this necessitates a deeper form of welfare that supports self-knowledge and a rich life beyond the labor market.

Secondly, many new professional roles need to be invented to match the transformations of labor, as robotization and digitalization progress…Many of these jobs can and should be concerned with the meaningful activities involved in creating a listening society (a huge amount of work is needed helping kids, designing public spaces, supporting life stage transitions, improving upon diet, organizing citizen deliberation, evaluating and developing all of the above, and so forth). So the listening society is necessary both as support and as a new source of meaningful, productive work opportunities.

The point of meditation in schools is of course not to inspire woo-woo beliefs or anything of the sort, but to improve people’s lives and society at large. It’s not a matter of turning kids and citizens into quiet, complacent little Buddha statues, but a matter of psychological and cultural development.

The great economist Amartya Sen coined the term “development as freedom.” He meant that human development and civil liberties could be drivers to lift populations out of poverty. Psychological and social development can—and will—lift us out of spiritual and emotional poverty.

CHAPTER 5 The Alternative 

…the precariat (people in precarious economic and social positions, who fall outside the classic class categories).

…the revolution of cultural capital against economic capital.

Cultural capital…is a measure of the extent to which people possess a sensitive, intimate understanding of the time they live in.

…transpartisanism—the principle of seeing the interchange of all parties as vital to democracy, and to seek to implement one’s policies by means of affecting the other parties (rather than antagonizing them). The Alternative can be described as a transpartisan movement.

The people who end up on top in this strange new hierarchy are the most democratic ones—the people who have the personalities, skills and cultural codes necessary to create social settings that are more inclusive and nuanced. Such social settings can handle contradicting views, allow for more autonomy and experimentation, and can handle a greater number of relationships with fewer conflicts. 

The artistic, sensitive, complex and multitalented social entrepreneur is increasingly becoming the ideal type of the new economy. 

In the internet age pockets with concentrations of cultural capital (knowledge of arts, culture, philosophy and so forth) can contribute to the birth of metamodern political movements. And political met modernism is fundamentally a sensitive balancing of sincerity and irony. This balancing of sincerity and irony gives progressive movements (like The Alternative) a great competitive advantage in the media and on the political stage—a sharp edge.

The people who end up on top in this strange hierarchy are the most democratic ones—the people who have the personalities, skills and cultural codes necessary to create social settings that are more inclusive and nuanced. Such social settings can handle contradicting views, allow for more autonomy and experimentation, and can handle a greater number of relationships with fewer conflicts. Conflicts are resolved with greater openness and less charge. In other words, this is the golden age of caring, creative, social intelligent, psychologically healthy beta boys and girls.

The artistic, sensitive, complex and multitalented social entrepreneur is increasingly becoming the ideal type of the new economy. 

In the internet age pockets with concentrations of cultural capital (knowledge of arts, culture, philosophy and so forth) can contribute to the birth of metavmoern political movements. And political metamodernism is fundamentally a sensitive balancing of sincerity and irony. This balancing of sincerity and irony gives progressive movements (like The Alternative) a great competitive advantage in the media and on the political stage—a sharp edge.

Even if there is currently a widespread mental resistance and difficulty to both communicating and understanding metamodernism, it has all the deeper structures of society working in its favor. The long-term, game is rigged. In this way, metamodernism spreads like a virus, by hacking and hijacking the thoughts, words, practices and institutions of modern society, bit by bit sneaking its way into the programs of all parties, Left and Right. And it does not work by means of silent conspiracies—it works psycho-actively, in broad daylight, just as I am planting metamodern modes of thought in you right now, without any shame or apology. [Bitcoin works much the same way, out in the open]

The member of this group have to love power. But not the power of self over others; rather, the power of selves and others, the power to self-organize in complex fashions—transpersonal power. Not your power or mine, but yet, the brutal capability to coordinate living systems, to make events come into being. What we think of as oppressive power is really an expression of imbalances of power, between rich and poor, privileged and deprived, humans and non-human animals. The world does not have too much power, but too much powerlessness. If we have pathological, sickly wants for power, it is because we are really powerless. Lover of transpersonal power seek the empowerment of selves and others—realizing that power and freedom are sisters. 

Who are the members of the metamodern aristocracy, these softhearted lovers of transpersonal power?…the information age is creating a new class of “netocrats,” people who govern and control value creation on the internet and related media, where attention, rather than money, is the primary value. They further suggest that there are three forms of netocrats that ally with one another: the new kind of social entrepreneurs, the web-savvy philosophers who understand the deeply dynamic and transient nature of things (called “eternalizes”), and the networkers who actively and deliberately make themselves into central, connecting nodes within this new multidimensional web of people, perspectives an opportunities.

The metamodern aristocracy are people who have a combination of two things: great privilege and high personal development. 

…(so, total capital is a combination of social capital, economic capital, emotional capital, sexual capital and good health). High total capital means that you can live your life relatively unafraid. The second part, about personal development, is that we have “high” effective value meme…

Metamodern thinking involves an increased acceptance of the paradoxical nature of things. All this talk of aristocrats rests upon a central paradox of political metamodernism: the deep, unyielding struggle for greater egalitarianism, inclusion and democracy—together with a renewed tolerance towards and understanding of hierarchy and elitism. 

The new global vanguard is emerging; that is just a fact of life. And it must recognize itself as such in order to be fully efficient. On the other hand, the metamodern aristocracy fails its own moral standards if it does not work for a much more democratic, transparent and open world—it loses all legitimacy without a deep commitment to egalitarian values and the dignity of all humans and non-human animals.

So the metamodern aristocracy is not anywhere “high up,” at great distance from others, hoarding privileges from within certain organizations. Rather, its constituting principle is nothing else than the spontaneous self-organization of a new layer within the world-system—a cultural development pertaining to the globalized information age. They are simply the people who live metamodern lives, with metamodern values, within the still predominantly modern world-system. But as such, they do have an important role to play. [Transcending Paradigms Collective is metamodern]

CHAPTER 6 Political Philosophy

…the idea of the individual tends to blind us to the problems as well as to their solutions. The idea of the “individual” no longer fulfills its function as an effective unit of society’s self-organization. As a solution to the problems of society, it no longer does its job. This is because the problems of society increasingly stem from deep layers of the psyche—and their interactions with the world—that are hard to access for us as individual persons. [This is why TPC is a collective]

I am offering a related bid for anti-individualism: the transpersonal perspective. The transpersonal perspective holds two seemingly opposed, nut in reality complementary, positions. The first position is to see society as determined by the deep, inner lives—the most personal relations and tender emotions—of human beings. 

The second position is that this deeply human and personal experience is in turn created by societal processes that are largely invisible to each single person, and accessible only through a profound and systematic sociological and psychological analysis of society.

So this lands us in an apparent paradox: To really see the singular human being, to really respect her rights and uniqueness, we must go beyond this idea of the individual; we must see through it and strive to see how society is present within each single person as well as in the relationships through which she is born as a “self.” We go from the idea of the individual (vs. “the collective”), to simply seeing society as an evolving interlinked set of trans individuals. This is the transpersonal perspective It’s not just that we are each a billiard ball that “interacts” with other people. We co-emerge. Or, as the physicist-philosopher Karen Barad has put it: we intra-act.

The idea of the listening society serves the trans individual: The human being is seen as more than a unique, separate life story. The idea of the transindividual sees the human being as inseparable from her language, her deep unconscious, her relations, roles, societal positions values, emotions, developmental psychology, biological organism and so forth. Each human being is viewed as an open societal process, a whirlwind of participation and co-creation of society. Society as a whole is viewed as a self-organizing system which creates such transindividuals who are in turn able to recreate society…It is by looking at deep psychological issues, the inner development of each of us, and how such properties are generated within society, that we address the core of society’s problems. 

To see human beings as “individuals” in an obviously interconnected and co-evolving universe is not only poor social philosophy. It is an unforgivable insult to the greatness of the human soul. We are more than individuals; we are much larger beings. This is why, in a transpersonal perspective, I can say in all sincerity: Death to the individual. Long live the dividual—or the transdividual. 

The more primitive and stupid your ideas about society, the cruder your “bad-guy theory” will be.

To the metamodernist, there are almost no bad-guys left, nobody and nothing to blame: not even an impersonal structure. With the view from complexity, there is only the painstaking tweaking of many small things that can help us fix the failures of our society and mitigate the tragedies of existence. [I’m not here yet, there are large incentive structures, power structures and moral structures that need tweaking. There are many bad-guys left, left in the physical, the corporeal, the institutional, the guiding principles]

Going “beyond Left and Right” means that we make questions of the relations between public sector, private sector and civil sphere into open discussions where the best empirical arguments for each mechanism, in each case, must be taken into consideration. For instance, do “free markets” work more or less efficiently than state bureaucracies? The answer depends on what area of society we are studying, what values need to be taken into account in our common goals within this area, and what kind of state bureaucracy and how functional a market we have available.

People on the Left tend to believe, irrationally and a priori, that democratic control through the public sector is better in and of itself. The Right tends to believe that “the market” (whatever that is taken to mean) is in and of itself a more intelligent mechanism than bureaucracy, that it serves a naturally given order, sometimes compared to Darwinian evolution. People of Green (and often anarchist) persuasion often believe that civil, informal and personal relationships are in and of themselves kinder, fairer, and less oppressive than both markets and bureaucracies. 

But once we say these assumptions out loud, they somehow fall flat on the ground. They are revealed for what they really are: prejudices. To a priori assume that democratic control through public bureaucracy is more efficient, fair and morally superior to a “free market” solution is simply nonsensical. It is a religious belief in the negative sense of the world. In the future, people will look at these beliefs, being Left or Right, much as we today look at medieval beliefs such as being Christian or Muslim.

…to transcend one’s own political allergies…allergies to the Left: market, power, capitalism, authority, profit—and of the Right: radical, social, feminism, revolution, public. 

One needs to recognize that these are not inherent essences or givens. They can all be good or bad, depending on the context—and more pertinently, they are all good and bad.

All of these three systems—democratic bureaucracy, the market and civil sphere—are simply forms of governance that process information about the behavior of humans, coordinating our actions in order to create desirable common and individual results. Each of them has its pathologies, its own sicknesses, its own limitations as well as its own magnificent qualities. There are intelligent and unintelligent markets, intelligent and unintelligent bureaucracies and democratic institutions, and the civil sphere can be equally inclusive as it can be oppressive. 

The three systems depend upon one another for their functioning, for their very existence. There are no countries without markets—and no larger markets without regulating states and bureaucracies… 

The spheres gain a certain form of independence or autonomy. And this is a wondrous thing, really: Fair markets are ideally free from cozy friendships that make for crony capitalism, bureaucracy sees all citizens as equals and should ideally work independently of market interests, and love should ideally be free from power relations and gold-digging. 

However, such a teasing out (with a fancier word: differentiation) of the different dimensions of social life is never complete. The systems interpenetrate. They continue to affect one another. When a modern society fails to differentiate these three spheres, this brings all kinds of social diseases: corruption, favoritism, inequality before the law, misuses of public office, formations of cartels and unfair monopolies, breaches of the personal privacy of people—the list of horrors is endless. Consider what happens if your boss is sleeping with your wife, or the bureaucracy works to help certain ethnicities or clans over others. In modern society we want to be rid of such things. 

In our days, democracy, markets and the civil sphere are finding new ways of saturating one another. They are being integrate again—not like in traditional society, but in a distinctly postindustrial manner that pertains to the internet age. 

…keep three stages in mind. One: markets, politics and personal relations are not clearly differentiated; two: in modern society these three spheres gain a great measure of independence from one another; three: in metamodern society, these three spheres are being re-integrated, ideally without any one of them dominating or contaminating the other two.

The growing re-integration of these three different spheres of social life—the civic (politics, democracy, bureaucracy, public), the professional (market exchange) and the personal (the civic sphere, family life, communities)—requires of us a kind of political thought that does not take one of the dimensions as fundamental or inherently superior to the other two. We must see the totality of social and political life.

This is what it means to go beyond Left and Right, and this is the philosophy which allows us to update the Nordic ideology into effective metamodern politics. An example of such re-integration is the growing importance of “the fourth sector”, consisting of hybrid organizations, public-private initiatives and, above all, of social entrepreneurs—as mentioned, the social entrepreneur being the ideal type of person of the new global economy.

The philosophical principle of metamodern politics is as simple as it is elegant. This principle holds that social life is a fractal nature, and that society consists of three interdependent dimensions that always repeat themselves but ultimately depend on one another: solidarity, trade and competition.

—Solidarity—in all societies that have every existed, there has been cooperation and what the anarchist classic Peter Kropotkin termed “mutual aid.” And in all of our lives, there are always at least some aspects of such things as caring, brotherhood, friendship, cooperation, help, charity, alliances, affiliation, liking, love and so forth. The principle is: you rather than me.

—Trade—in all societies that have ever existed, and in everyone’s life, in every relationship, there is an element of exchange: tit for tat, something for something. The principle is: me and you, but only conditionally. “Only conditionally” serves to underscore that we only make trade transactions if there is something for us to gain.

—Competition—in all societies that have every exists, and in everyone’s life, in every goddamn relationship, there is an element of competition: conflicting interests, power relations, struggle, manipulations, violence, animosity, enmity and so on. The principle is: me, not you.

The unstated, irrational belief that people have, is that one of these three dimensions somehow makes up a higher truth than the other two. The Left somehow believes, in a subtle but pervasive manner, that solidarity is the highest ruth. The libertarian Right beiges that trade is the first principle. The conservative and the fascist believe in their hearts that fierce competition lies beyond the other two, that it ultimately defines social reality. 

The metamodern political activist makes no such mistake, has no such prejudices and recognizes that each of these three beliefs is equally dishonest and violent against the nature of reality. 

A fractal…The patterns of each level of zoom are still somehow self-similar…You can break up any dimension into smaller parts and see how it repeats itself. You can break up friendship and see how it consists of trade and conflict.

At its heart, metamodern political thought fully accepts and acknowledges these three dimensions of social life: solidarity, trade and competition (and their intertwined, fractal nature).

We begin to look for how solidarity, trade and conflict can develop together, into new forms of social life…this means that we no longer hate (or romanticize) the state, the market or personal life (with its often irrational and unfair complications). We can no longer believe that one of the categories holds the solutions to the “evil” or “problems” of the other two. We simply begin to grasp social life itself as a dialectical, developmental process, which is at least partly in our hands—and that its categories (state, market, civil sphere) are always slipping, always shifting. They don’t have eternal, inherent qualities of good or evil. They don’t have essences. 

You can play the same game with another, related triad: equality, freedom and order. They sometimes work against one another, sometimes create synergies—but they cannot even exist without one another. If you love freedom, you must also see that, at its very core, freedom is born through order and equality, both of which in turn need freedom to exist. Higher degrees of order is often what allows for greater freedom—but only if the order is go a general and abstract form. Simply making people “organized” by having them march together, as in North Korea, hardly makes for a free society. Having functional policing, orderly statistics and revision of public finances, might.

So when you begin to create a Green Social Liberalism 2.0, you use this fractal philosophy in order to go beyond Left, Right and feeble “center” compromises between the two.

There would be no Left without a Right. The Left needs the Right, would be impossible without it; it would lose all energy and meaning without this polarity.

To see that perspectives and movements co-evolve doesn’t mean that you cannot choose sides. Some people still turn out to be right, and others mistaken. But one group or movement or perspective is never continuously correct in all conceivable ways. The meta modernist can choose sides only from a transpartisan position—you understand that there is always a larger process that goes beyond and through your current idealogical, partisan position. 

The very fact that we manage to take ourselves this seriously, when we are almost certain to be utterly blind, confused and downright mistaken about so many, so fundamental issues, can only be described as a form of madness. We are all staring a the incomprehensible, absurd mess that is reality—and with the glazed eyes of mad conviction, we somehow manage to believe that we really get it. Preposterous, really.

Socrates, as you know, taught that the wisest of the Greeks is he who realizes that he knows nothing (which was himself, by the way). There are Chinese proverbs and Confucian teachings to the same effect. Socratic unknowing saturates the metamodern understanding of politics. This principle necessitates a certain approach to all matters social and political: the non-linear process.

The simplest definition of a non-linear system is that the output (outcome) is disproportional to the input (the effort made). More money doesn’t have to mean less poverty. Longer education does not have to mean higher understanding. Less regulation does not have to mean greater freedom. Social problems don’t necessarily shrink in proportion to social expenditure. Higher rates of immigration do not necessarily translate to greater cosmopolitanism and global solidarity. And so on.

A cute way of saying this, that a lot of people like, is that both the mind and society are ecosystems. They self-regulate, self-reproduce, keep up a certain “homeostasis” for periods of time, and then they either develop or crash through crisis. “Crisis” occurs when some variables are jacked up on self-strengthening feedback cycles and run off the charts in “far from equilibrium states.” …the ecosystem as a whole develops as a result of many autonomous parts that both compete and cooperate in complex (indeed, as I have said, fractal) ways…Society’s political thought and our political agency are like developing ecosystems.

So our goals and efforts evolve; they always turn out to be something different than we initially think.

…we need to engage in non-linear politics.

People have a strong propensity towards linear thinking. Non-linear thinking often befuddles us; it just seems counter-intuitive. But our intuitions betray us. Without noticing it, we continuously and repeatedly squeeze non-linear phenomena into linear models that our minds are more comfortable with—a kind of analytical violence stemming from the crudeness and developmental simplicity of our minds. 

The cardinal of all such linear models in politics is the belief that “if only people were like me, had my opinions, the world would be alright.” This is the point zero of political understanding. If yo have this feeling, you know nothing.

The point is that everybody already is like you—a very limited, vulnerable, hurt, single human being with almost infinite frames of her emotions, intellect and experience. And this is exactly why the world is a complete, utter mess. And because the world is a mess, you are a mess. You cannot trust yourself and your current conceptions and ideas.

What then, can we trust? We can—or, at least, we have to—truth the processes that come out of our communication with one another, given that such processes are fair, open, without excessive emotional pressures and are conducted in a shared language. We must trust that if enough people break their ideas and emotional investments against one another, on average, and over time, something better (authentic, resilient, sustainable) can come out of it.

We can partake in non-linear politics, where we simply know that whatever we think we are working for is going to turn out to be something entirely different and that we are going to need the best possible democratic processes for this dialectic to play out successfully. 

The more correct, abstract and complex your map of reality, the greater non-linearity you can afford in your thinking and agency, since you hook up with deeper and more universal structures of how society is evolving. That is how it works: The Heracles, Prometheus or Achilles of our age is whoever can think the most abstractly and act the most non-linearly—those who can live with and skillfully handle uncertainty and not be paralyzed by it.

Metamodern political thinking constitutes a breach with liberalism and liberal democracy as we know them. We can no longer take the stance of the liberal innocent. It is this innocent that has to die. We must hereby issue a fatwa; shoot on sight.

The liberal innocent holds a few deeply seated beliefs that hail from the modern, industrial view of life, existence and society—beliefs that I content are outdates and increasingly harmful. 

The first such belief is that one can hold a “pure” of “correct” idealogical position within a parliamentarian party system; that one can be “on the right side” of things, the Left, the Right or something similar. But this is increasingly becoming an untenable position. As I have argued, liberal democracy cancels itself the same moment as its ideals are approached.

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

Liberal democracy begins to reveal that it never worked in the first place. The different positions we are offered within its game of party politics no longer make any deeper sense.

That is—you can no longer be innocently Left or Right, no longer believe that you’re the good guy and that the other positions are false, because it is becoming apparent that the real action happens in the honest deliberation between your position and theirs.

You can no longer believe that you are the libertarian defender of freedom, up against the odds with so many nasty freaks of the Left and conservatives. You can no longer be the defender of the poor against the high bosses of neoliberalism and capital. You can no longer be the upstanding citizen, reacting against multiculturalism and relativist degeneracy, no longer a Green environmentalist reacting against the excesses of industrial society. 

There is something endearing, almost cute, about being so blinded by the current forms of liberal democracy, that you think you can take one position within it, and it just so happens to be the right one. It is innocent, in a way. It is very much like when people in pre-modern times used to believe in Jesus or Mohammad just because they happened to be born on opposite sides of the Mediterranean; the highest cosmic truth was in all seriousness believed to be determined by flukes of geography. Modern people are “religious” in a corresponding way; they believe that the people born and raised in their position in society have the “correct” beliefs and values; that the truth its somehow dependent on where you are situated on a sociological map. 

Once you adopt the metamodern perspective on politics, you lose that innocence. You become secular in a more profound and systematic way. The modern worldviews, such as those of libertarians or socialists, appear as irrational as Kali, goddess of creation, with blue skin and four arms.

You realize that there is no “safe” political position. Whatever position you take, it will work its non-linear way through reality and sneak off to murder, torture, maim, destroy, exploit, defeat others, deprive others of their meaning making, and press itself upon social and political reality. The truth is that you don’t have the truth; that you never will. And even if you turn out to be right about something there will always be a time when your opinion is outdated or at least incomplete. Whatever direction you move in, it will lead to contradiction, self-destruction and decay, sooner or later. Your perspective or opinion always has a systemic limit, a breaking point; it always breaks down under its own weight, just like any engine, organism or economic system. You never get to be the good guy in the end. You are not innocent. 

There is no “default position” to which you can revert, no way of “just being normal.” Our is a meat-eating animal-exploiting, cruel, capitalist, alienating, unfair, oppressive, unscientific, undemocratic, unsustainable society. If you partake in it, you are complicit in its crimes, mistakes and vices.

And if you tolerate this, your children will be next. When I make suggestions about how to improve society, and you say no, but offer nothing in return, you are not being innocent, a liberal defender of freedom—you are killing children and burying them in invisible graves. When you call yourself an anarchist, an environmentalist, an anti-capitalist or just an honest working citizen, you are not pure, not taking the “right path” and leaving it to others to mess up the world. You are hiding behind a small shard of the totality of human existence and failing to take responsibility.

Once you see, with a transpersonal perspective, that you are the whole process of evolving language games, that you are the polarities and dynamics of the social and political developments, you also recognize that all of your positions, all of your opinions, all of your choices, both do good and cause harm. You are causing harm, doctor. You are causing harm.

If you, like me, are against animal exploitation, you are also saying that you want to denigrate the social status and livelihood of millions of human beings, the honest folks working for generations with animal husbandry. Yes, I admit it. I would destroy their lives for the greater good of all sentient beings, if that is what it takes.

If you, like me, tend towards liberal stances on narcotics, you are also saying that you would cause many young, innocent people to suffer irreparable psychiatric harm, let them live through unimaginable hells, in order for humanity to stop the global terrorism, civil wars, criminality and prison-industrial excesses emanating from drug bans. Yes, I admit it; I will cause them harm.

It is a question of choosing totality over partiality. Partiality is only possible if you believe in the liberal innocent. Once you choose totality, once you begin to see society as a whole, liberal innocence is lost.

The universe seems to have presented us with a mean, ironic twist: Any true freedom, revolution or open horizon is simultaneously a call to power, a crown to grasp, an adversary to conquer. Even the most heartwarming idealism, be it feminism, peace work or abolitionist animal rights, must act violently to create new hierarchies, new winners and losers. In that violent act, we can never know for certain if we are good or evil; an inconvenient truth if there ever was one. We only know that if we choose innocence, we have chosen evil. [Bitcoin also has this attribute. There will be those who benefit and those who lose out on the transition to a Bitcoin standard. But choosing innocence in the sense of ignoring the state of the monetary system is evil. An informed stance is needed, becoming a violent act simply by being an action.]

To challenge their ways of thinking and sensing is also an act of cruelty and aggression; shattering people’s beliefs, their sense of security, self, ethics and reality. Nothing could be les innocent.

But the gods of modernity are false idols—the individual self, liberal democracy, liberal innocence, Left and Right, humanism, rationality (and “free will”), scientism, many forms of linear causation and to some extent even equality are all outdated ideas.

When analytical rifles shoot ideas, they also shoot the human should that worship them. We are attacking your time, your society and your way of life.

PART TWO Psychological Development

CHAPTER 7 On Stage Theories

A progressive thinker and activist of today must know and accept hierarchy; a rebel heart must love hierarchical development—and use it, against all masters, against all unjust hierarchies, and against the chaos and entropy inherent to the cosmos.

If you fail to understand hierarchies and human development, you end up being primitive, conservative and oppressive. You, not I, are the oppressor. You speak the language of oppression.

The Hitchhiker’s Guide to Hierarchy

1. Non-judgment. The first principle is that stages of development in humans and other organisms must be studied in light of a radical acceptance, a pervasive non-judgment…So whenever you see farther than someone else, whenever you are more ethical or intelligent or sensitive, you are manifesting a privilege over that creature…When you acknowledge this hierarchy, you are no longer judging. The perspective shifts from judging people for not being like us…to trying to give a universal account for why our own position is better than theirs…and explaining why the same insight or capability is not available to them at this time. 

2. Not a moral order. The second principle is that the developmental stages do not constitute a moral order, in which a higher or later stage would be morally “more worth” than a lower or earlier one. For instance…kids generally are of lower cognitive stage than adults—but they of course have the same priceless value. …Jeremy Bentham…“the question is not, Can they reason? no, And they talk? but, Can they suffer?”

3. Natural and dominator hierarchies. The third principle is that there is a difference between natural hierarchies and dominator hierarchies. Dominator hierarchies are the ones that you cannot find any universal arguments for and that are used to legitimize exploitation: men over women, whites over non-whites…Natural hierarchies are different—no exploitation is inherent to the hierarchy; it builds on a universal argument that benefits all parties, and it is limited to the specific area in which that benefit can be argues for. Examples: …child and parent, patient and doctor, pupil and teacher.

4. Does not transmit. The fourth principle is that the hierarchy does not transmit to other, irrelevant areas or power relations They should not give “halo effects.”

5. Humility. The fifth principle is humility. Hierarchical models with several stages are more humble, not less, than non-hierarchical visions of reality. 

6. Different dimensions. The sixth principle is simply to know that hierarchical stage theories of human development have different dimensions and that development in one dimension does not necessarily translate into development within another. 

7. Sensitivity. The seventh principle is sensitivity. One must recognize that all hierarchies can and do hurt people’s feelings…What does it feel like to recognize that someone I know genuinely understands deeper aspects of reality than I do? Of that I am less morally developed than another person, a person who adheres to values and ideals that are lost on me?…to deal with these issues, we have to be very emotionally sensitive to everyone involved. 

8. Not all there is. The eight and finally principle is that stages of development are important, but they are obviously not all there is to life, knowledge, talent and meaning, and so they should only be treated as useful physiological tools, never revered as anything more than that. Just as you can be blind by not understanding the stages of human development, so you can be blinded by staring too much at them. Like the sun, really: Without it, you walk in darkness—but if you keep staring at it all day, you also go blind. It’s when the sun shines on other things that you see them more clearly.

Hierarchy, correctly understood, serves the greater good. This only holds true if we follow the eight principles outlined above. Otherwise we can end up legitimizing dominator hierarchies, contributing to oppression of all sorts.

The point is not to obsess about hierarchy The point is that if you see hierarchies clearly and don’t imbue them with emotional value, you can relate to them in a more rational and detached manner.

The direction in which the hierarchical development goes: towards inclusivity, understanding and acceptance of others and towards challenging one’s own certainty.

Stages are different: They represent a logical sequence, where later stags build upon earlier ones; the later stage transcending and including the earlier stage. [This is the language of Ken Wilber]

CHATER 8 Cognitive Development

The model of Hierarchical Complexity (MHC)…

…cognitive development…one out of four fundamental facts of a person’s overall stage (their effective value meme). The basic idea of the MHC is that people are distributed across different stages of hierarchical development, so that some people can think thoughts and perform tasks that are more complex than others.

0. Calculatory Stage (molecules)

1. Automatic Stage (cells)

2. Sensor or Motor Stage (amoeba)

3. Circular Sensory-Motor Stage (insect, fish, newborn human)

4. Sensory-Motor Stage (rat, small baby)

5. Nominal Stage (pigeon, one-year-old toddlers)

6. Sentential Stage (two/three years old)

7. Pre-Operational Stage (three to five year olds)

8. Primary Stage (five to seven years old)

9. Concrete Stage (seven to eleven)

10. Abstract Stage (ages eleven to fourteen)

11. Formal Stage (ages fourteen to eighteen, if at all)

12. Systematic Stage (eighteen and above, if at all)

13. Metasystematic Stage (early twenties and above, if at all)

-Can compare and synthesize several systems with differing logics, put together “meta systems” or conclusion that hold true across different system, reflect upon and name general properties of systems.

-Understands that things can be “homomorphic”, “isomorphic”, etc. This means that you can see how one system can be changed in corresponding or differing ways to another system.

-Can be found in about 1.5% of the adult population, usually only after early twenties.

14. Paradigmatic Stage (mid-twenties and above, if at all)

-Can deal will several very abstract meta systems to create new ways of thinking of the world, new paradigms, new sciences or branches within science.

-Has a fractal way of thinking, so that the universal principles found are applicable to many different levels of analysis and phenomena.

-Prevalence unknown, but if the pattern holds and every stage seems to increase with about a standard deviation, it should be a little more than one adult in a thousand in a normal population, mostly at ages 25+. This makes it rare, but still some three million people in the world (one thousandth of the functional adults above 25). Although the stage is theoretically formulated, there is no reliable test for it.

15. Crossparadigmatic Stage (late twenties and above, if at all)

-Can deal with several paradigms to create new fields.

-Examples are: Newton’s reformulation of physics, Darwin’s theory of evolution, Einstein’s theory of relativity, the invention of quantum physics, the invention of chaos mathematics and complexity the invention of computing, the invent of postmodern philosophy, the invention of the holistic “integral theory of Ken Wilber, the intention of string theory, the invention of the MHC theory. 

-Prevalence unknown, found only in adults older than twenty and who have privileged circumstances. It most often shows up around 30 No reliable test for this stage.

CHAPTER 9 The Important Stages

Thinkers of each stage have this kind of complexity bias. Complexity bias means that we intuitively prefer forms of reasoning that correspond to our own stage of complexity. Explanations of lower complexity seem crude and simplistic to us, whereas higher stage explanations seem vague or counter-intuitive.

Downward assimilation means that, because of our ability to share a common language, you can take a word, symbol, sentence or even an attitude, that originated at a higher order of complexity, and still use it. Your use of that symbol will then inevitably follow the logic of your own stage, but it might still bring some meaning with it, and you can perhaps partake in conversations that would otherwise lie beyond your own stage of complexity. The complex symbol is assimilated “downwards.”

Through language and interaction you create a “scaffold” that helps the other person to partake in behaviors that would otherwise be beyond his or her cognitive stage. [Open source software: language]

The common language also “stores” structures and patterns for us to use, so that a certain thought or behavior becomes more easily attainable…So scaffolding is the other side of the coin of “downward assimilation”; when we grasp for notions that are out of our cognitive depth, we also stretch our minds, and we come under the influence of thoughts and ideas that would otherwise be beyond us. 

These two concepts, downward assimilation and scaffolding, explain a lot about why the MHC stages are so difficult to spot in the fussy world around us: We simply misinterpret the MHC stages because of their dependence on contexts and interactions. Add to this that we have three more dimensions of adult development (code, state and depth), and also IG, specific skills, different levels of education, psychological health, and different ways to evaluate each other’s smarts.

When the underlying order in the chaos is so difficult to see, it can be very tempting to conclude that the world s simply fussy, disordered—and even to wear that skeptical conclusion as a badge of anti-reductionist honor, as a mark of our own open-mindedness, humility and spirituality. But there is nothing open-minded, humble or spiritual in failing to see—and properly respond to—the undeniable regularities in human behavior that are revealed by the elegant but merciless simplicity of experimental, empirical science. [Empirical science isn’t always so empirical. Thomas Kuhn demonstrated just how flawed hypothesis and provability is within paradigms]

Developmental stages should not be confused with “types” (black/white, male/female, East/West, quiet/talkative, etc). Types are those things that really are beyond hierarchical comparison, indeed “same, same but different”. Stages constitute a logical, hierarchical and empirically verifiable order.

CHAPTER 10 Symbolic Development

My claim in this chapter is that there is a stage difference between the various forms of cultural code available to people today, and that this stage difference follows a logic inherent to the meanings of the symbols and their interrelations, rather than being inherent to the cognitive stage of the specific organism. Each such code contains within itself a toolkit consisting of interrelated symbols, which can be used to interpret the world. These symbolic toolkits determine a large part of how a person seems the world and how she acts within it.

We are looking here at a development quite different from simply how cognitively advanced our brains are. This development depends upon there being communities of people who speak a language—it is the development of that language: symbolic development.

A central claim here is that this stage difference follows a distinct, dialectical logic, a logic that I call, with a German word, Realdialektik. In English you might say “real dialectics,” but please note that the German meaning of the word “real” is more closely related to “factual necessity” than the English connotation “opposite of unreal” or  “not fake.”

Each of the stages creates language code that is inherently more advanced than the previous stage. THere is something real in the logic of how each symbolic universe is constructed, and this realness forces the direction of human history. It does not force specific events upon the world, of course, but it does compel society to develop in some directions rather than others: Large and old social systems are in the ones that develop a greater number of words, and find more abstract relations between these words, etc.

But in the meantime, the modern symbols have broken down under their own weight. This has produces a new cultural code, which is here called “post”-modernism. There is a pattern to this, a Realdialektik: You cannot go from traditional religion directly to metamodernism. Only when postmodernism has been around for decades, can metamodern symbols start breaking though and become part of society.

The seven meta memes or “symbol-stages” are:

A. Archaic: Earliest humans and their closest relatives, Neanderthals, etc.

B. Animistic (or “Post”-Archaic): The magical and ritualistic thinking of tribal society.

C. Faustian: The mythical thinking of agricultural warrior society, Neolithic and onwards.

D. “Post”-Faustian: The mythic-rational, transcendental thinking of traditional, religious society.

E. Modern: The rational, scientific thinking of the developed world today.

F. “Post”-Modern: The post-rational, systemic critique of modern life and society.

G. “Meta”-Modern: Read this book, please.

Each of these meta memes operates as a set of thousands of propositions and assumption about the world which interlock into a self-supporting whole, a kind of ecosystem or equilibrium. Each of them is a kind of underlying structure of the symbolic universes that constitute our lived and shared realities. She each one of them roughly have an ontology (theory of reality and what is “really real”), an ideology (“theory of what is right and good”) and an identity, an idea of who or what the self is. 

The language tools are not only meta memes, but also meta-narratives.

CHAPTER 11 The Symbol Stages

Symbol-Stage D: Postfaustian (or Traditional)

But, and this is a big but, this also means that no king, ruler or wielder of power can have any ultimate authority beyond serving the universal truth. So the saints and prophets are righteous critics and rebels, wishing to align their societies with a deeper, universal order of the cosmos. The Chinese emperor remains, but only as long as he upholds the Mandate of Heaven; no longer is he a god in earthly robes, now merely a divinely dressed man on a contract from God. And in India, all rulers must submit to the rajadharma, that path of kings. Sure, render unto Caesar what belongs to him; but remember, that in the last instance the law of the heart precedes any law of the land, says Jesus. And to speak out against an unjust ruler, adds another prophet, is the highest form of jihad. 

Traditional society is born from a radical postfaustian critique of injustice, war, slavery, oppression and degradation—of the arbitrary use and abuse of power. 

One becomes prepared to oppress and destroy others in order to resist such challenges to one’s ontology (sense of reality), ideology (sense of what a good society is) and sense of self (the social construction of an ego), to protect and maintain the boundaries of one’s symbolic universe. 

In its grasp for universality, this kind of code creates a mindless defense of its own particularity, where the deviant and the stranger are harshly discriminated against and punished. Where it reaches for universal solidarity and sisterhood, it creates boundaries and holy wars. Instead of setting us on a search for universal truth, it says it already has the Truth and installs the inquisition it suppresses all other perspectives in zeal and missionary madness. And as it reaches for mercy and kindness in the name of the poor and wretches, it creates justifications for kinds and bishops to rule us and fool us.

While most of our institutions are perhaps informed by modern thinking, humanity, demographically speaking, still mainly runs on the symbol-stage D Post-faustian code.

Symbol-Stage E: Modern

Reality is a harsh mistress. But in a way, reality is fair. People tend to get what they desire. The people who are strong enough to face the truth (and don’t cop out and start navel-gazing the hell out of the universe) will win out in the end. While those losers were on their knees fantasizing about a birthday cake from their gods, or hoping to be “special” with secrete magic powers, we were out in the real world and discovered evolution, relativity, quantum mechanics, genetics and computation. We had more fun and our knowledge produces results: real, clear, hard, effective, reliable, repeatable, delicious results. The truth, by logic, rewards those who know the truth. And those who shy away from it, by the same clear logic, are punished.

Symbol-Stage F: PostModern

…if your claim on reality is based on intersubjective verifiability, shouldn’t all perspectives be included and get a voice?

There is a central flaw to the whole idea of intersubjective verification: Namely that it presupposes that each individual is independent of her social context…the most absurd, violent and oppressive beliefs hailed as intersubjectively verified truths…

And how about big pharma, the meat industry, the sugar inductor and the tobacco industry? Suppose any of these little cuties ever affected science; this holy, objective, super-effective effectiveness to which all strong no-bullshit people like yourself are so committed?

The world, my dear modernist, before it ever becomes “objective” science, is phenomenological. First and foremost, you only every have your subjective experience of things-as-they-are, always in right-this-moment. And that’s the only “objective” reality you ever really get. 

Hey, modernist, sorry to break it to you, but there are a few things you need to catch up on. You do know that your science grew directly out of the ancient philosophy and medieval scholastics that you feel so superior to, don’t you? You do know that philosophy didn’t end with you, that you are not the end of history? You do know that your whole worldview and sense of reality will one day look exactly as infantile and stupid as the Old Testament does to you? Indeed, that it already does; that people better informed and more scientifically minded than you, have been laughing at you and ridiculing you for almost two generations already? And you do know, don’t you, that you are guilty of the worst crimes against life and humanity that ever been committed, all in the name of your superficially understood “progress”?

Symbol-Stage G: Metamodern

To have solidarity with someone, you must also have solidarity with their perspective.

We must learn to listen to another person and to see with her eye and to merge our reality with hers, to see how her perspective is a real, ontological, part of reality. Listening to a stranger becomes the highest form of jihad. 

If you want to transcend and leave behind the obsession with hierarchies, you must be able to dispassionately describe hierarchies and relate to them productively. If you sent hierarchies and deny them, you are still in their grip, still obsessed with them. Precisely by demystifying hierarchy we can free ourselves from this obsession. 

I, the metamodern mind, can no longer believe in the postmodern critique of modern society. I see it as lacking in crucial aspects. We must move on. By virtue of its own dialectical logic, by the structure of its symbols and their interrelations and by its inherent self-contradictions, postmodernism is the midwife of metamodernism. 

Each symbol-stage shreds the symbolic universe (ontology, ideology and self) of the former one—there is a Realdialektik that determines how they unfold, an inherent developmental logic, direction and sequentiality. 

The cognitive requirements for successfully operating the symbol-stages increase with one MHC stage per symbol-stage.

You can’t just transplant these stages. They all come with entire symbolic universes, belief-systems and emotional investments. They have “prerequisites” or “requirements”—of the cognitive, psychological, physiological, cultural and economic kind. We simply cannot let all people download the metamodern symbol-stage and be done with it.

The second, perhaps even more disparaging, implication is that fewer and fewer people can be expected to successfully operate the later symbol-stage. This means that even if people manage to install the symbol-stage G Metamodern, most of us will undeniably use a “flattened” or “downward assimilated” version of its code. People will tend strongly towards using very skewed and perverted versions of metamodern ideas. This is because literally 98% of adults are, in terms of cognitive complexity, simply below stage 13 Metasystematic. 

CHAPTER 12 Subjective States

“The hour-hand of life. Life consists of rare, isolated moments of the greatest significance, and of innumerably many intervals, during which at best the silhouettes of those moments hover above us. Love, springtime, every beautiful melody, mountains, the moon, the sea—all these speak to the heart but once if they in fact ever do get a chance to speak completely. For many men do not have those moments at all, and are themselves internals and intermissions in the symphony of real life.”—Man Alone with Himself, Friedrich Nietzsche 

“Once upon a time, Zhuang Zhou dreamed he was a a butterfly, a butterfly flitting about happily, enjoying himself. He did not know that he was Zhou. Suddenly he awoke, and was palpably Zhou. He did not know whether he was Zhou, who had dreamed of being a butterfly, or a butterfly dreaming that he was Zhou. Now, there must be a difference between Zhou and the butterfly. This is called the transformation of things.”—Zhuangzi

We can always (in theory, at least) change how reality is experienced for an organism: we can make a dark world of unspeakable horrors clear our and be filled with a quiet ocean of comfort and relief; we can make an enchanted universe seem dull and lackluster. When walking in the desert for too long, a simple drink of fresh spring water can change your entire cosmos. Resentment can be transmuted into acceptance and productive action. The heart’s longing and passion can fester and rot into self-hatred and a perverted will to harm. The vast inner landscapes can (and always do) transform—as Master Zhou into a butterfly, then back again, into a new Master Zhou, whose memories and experiences have now changed.

And, what’s more, it is an uncontroversial fact that these vast potentials of feeling, sensing and being have not nearly been exhausted through world history. Think about it. Has the worst possible horror occurred? Have organisms yet experienced the greatest possible realization of their ability to sense the world? Has bliss been fully realized? Have all the possible moods, colors and emotions been known, shared and experienced? The possibilities of the inner realm are far greater than the combined experience of world history, of the history of all life on our planet. The unfathomable potentialities of inner experience; this is serious business.

A respect for science does not necessitate that we turn the world into a dead object, the universe into a machine. 

Do you have memories of moments of simple lightness without worry, or when your heart was humbled by gratitude? [The Holy Grail]

…expressions of higher subjective states. Higher states are the lived, experienced moments in which reality itself becomes crisp, clear, self-evident: when there is a deep inner silence and the experience of life itself emerges in full. It is when the mind is brought to its knees, the soul surrenders and reality wins and reveals itself. High state. You have a sense that life is large, reality vast. Things are magical; reality becomes enchanted, even if only for a brief moment.

As Michel Foucault famously observed (in Discipline and Punish), “the soul” is also the prison of the body: the body is restrained and suffers from the ailments of the should, the should being molded by society’s power structures. 

This is the tragedy inherent to the self-aware, non-indifferent universe. Nature brings into being low states in organisms with the same self-evident automaticity with which life is created and perpetuated, and with which the physical world follows its laws.

Organisms don’t really seek or avoid certain emotions, but they seek to raise the level of their subjective state and avoid low states. 

State is generally developed by positive rewards from your environments (e.g. successfully accomplishing work, relationships, love and sex) and things that benefit health and physiological well-being. But state can also, and often more radically, be developed by means of meditation as well as other practices of body and mind.

CHAPTER 13

States are not the same as stages.

A fundamental difference between states and stages (as in the case in the stages of cognitive complexity as well as the symbol-stages), whereas states transcend and exclude the lower states. As Ken Wilber has noted in one of his talks, you cannot be sober and drunk, or awake and asleep, at the same time—you have to choose. Shifting state truly is a transformation, from one reality to another. The subjective state doesn’t just build upon what came earlier; each lived moment genuinely tears down all earlier moments and asserts itself as the full reality of now.

Subjective states are much more irregular and volatile than developmental stages. 

Everyday life is taken to be the “really real” reality, and all else to be dreams, hallucinations or fantasies. What this view tends to miss is that mental life is never a “correct representation” of some objective reality. So giving an “ontological premium” to medium states at the expense of the lower states and the higher ones just doesn’t make sense. 

The way I have defined it, high states are the ones we would count as spiritual or profound life-changing experiences if exposed to them for the first time. The first of these states, and the only one I have personal knowledge of, is a great, open vastness (state 11); a kind of meaningful emptiness that opens up at times when I work with philosophy and meditate, and on rare occasions when I have sociological or psychological insights or make informed life decisions while takin a longer walk.

Probably the highest states…occur when Sein (pure being) and Da-sein (being-in-the-world) merge into one.

It is sometimes said that only the depressed see the world clearly—the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan is often credited with the quote. In everyday situations we tend to be over-optimistic about everything from time use to our own abilities and guesses about the future. I would claim that beyond such rather banal estimations, we see the world much more clearly in the higher states. The higher one’s state, the wider and more relaxed one’s perspective: At higher states we see ourselves, the world, and our place in it more clearly. But—again—this is true only in the sense that we see the world without distortions of confusion that come with inner brokenness and suffering, not that we are more “correct” about factual matters, or that we think more completely.

What does a higher state person look like? It is someone who simply has a sense of peace within, a natural flow in their everyday activities and their life as a whole.

State is related to personal development, it seems, but it is not the same thing. Stage development does not predict state or vice versa. 

Sensitive people tend to be…both more vulnerable to the adversities of life and more in tune with the profound beauty of existence. 

You simply can’t build a good community with hierarchies derived from subjective states. It doesn’t make sense. Because, mon ami, communities and their hierarchies are intersubjective and relatively durable structures; inner states are subjective and very transient. 

A possible antidote to this social-psychological malady might be to democratize spirituality; to make it more participatory, transparent and based on measurable results. Such attempts are being made in and around the Burning Man festival culture, and notably in the Syntheist (“religious atheist”) movement which recently emerged in Stockholm—and some interesting prospects along these lines have been brought up by public intellectuals like Sam Harris (in his 2014 book Waking Up, Harris, a renowned critic of all things religious, makes his case for a scientifically supported exploration of spirituality). However, the are difficult matters; thus far, almost all spiritual communities have taken a long walk down Cult Avenue, so it is quite possible that these movements will do likewise. We’ll see.

To conclude: Yes, the subjective state of organisms is the most important thing in the world, and yes, it should therefore be made a central goal of society. And yes, it has great significance for the overall development of people and societies. But no, having higher states does not give you all the answers. And no, we should not build a society that creates hierarchies based upon vague and unverifiable phenomena such as subjective state. And YES, more research is needed.

But we must try to optimize subjective states, as a society as well as single organisms. We are all always-already in some kind of subjective state. It is an inescapable, merciless fact that the universe has us eternally by the balls. 

CHAPTER 14 Depth

…the fourth dimension of development…We can call this dimension a measure of a person’s inner depth. Whereas subjective states vary from moment to moment (and we can only meaningfully speak of medians and averages if we would seek to develop them0, a person’s “inner depth” is a more permanent feature of their psychological development—one that may be described in stages, albeit of a different kind than those of cognitive development and code. 

Depth is a person’s intimate, embodied acquaintance with subjective states. A person’s inner depth increases through her felt, lived and intuitive knowledge of a new subject state (lower or higher than previously experienced)—and when the intimate acquaintances of that state becomes an integrated part of her psychological constitution; a part, if you will, of her personality.

What I call “depth” can be thought of as a kind of existential or spiritual wisdom. This “wisdom” doesn’t mean that you are smart, right about things, or a complex thinker, or even that you have a balanced, healthy personality. But it does mean that you relate more profoundly to more fundamental aspects of reality as it is subjectively experienced.

So “depth” is the stretch between the lowest states that we intimately remember, know and accept, and the highest states that we have tasted and aspire towards. Depth is the number of states that have become inseparable parts of us; integrated into our memories and personalities. 

Depth is a person’s innermost recognition of the greatness and/or seriousness of reality.

It is only when such experiences yes becomes integral to our ways of seeing the world, of relating to existence, that they can be said to have become part of our depth. 

Greater depth doesn’t entail anything other than a psychological property of a person’s relation to the universe and existence: It is her remembered, embodied knowledge and agony and ecstasy. Or, more precisely, agony and/or ecstasy. 

Experiencing very high or low states, or learning any of the wisdom traditions, puts you face-to-face with existence as a whole in a more complete and direct manner. Hence, if you relate more deeply to reality, your answers will tend to sound religious, because they speak of “all things” and some kind of “final truth” and a very general mode of relatedness. And here’s the problem: so does any person who lives by a traditional religion (i.e. relying symbol-stage D Postfaustian); the sound quite similar. But most mainstream Catholics are by no means at greater depth than their more atheist or agnostic fellow citizens (even if some few contemplative Catholics definitely are). So whenever you look at this issue, either in research or just when you analyze people individually, you must be careful not to mistake religious beliefs—pertaining to symbol-stage D Postfaustian or below—with high-depth answers. 

Depth is not knowledge of any particular fact, it is not “code,” or theory or any particular belief. It’s just one’s wordless relationship to existence itself.

On a side note, I would like to underscore a problematic situation often occurring in mental health care and psychiatry: when therapists and psychologist are out-depthed by their own patients. Some psychiatric patients may have subjective experiences that are fundamentally alien to the people who have medical and sometime even legal authority over them. The patients can now worlds suffering, or have spiritual experiences, that are poorly or wrongly interpreted by the therapist and psychiatrists. 

There are three specific forms of inner depth that a person can develop. These follow the fundamental philosophical form of Plato’s “big three”: beauty, truth and justice.

Depth as Beauty.

Some, more than others, will be more moved by the subtleties of the world. This is a kind of lasting relationship to reality: It is depth in its subjective, 1st person aspect. And somehow, we see that beauty, for all its contextual contingencies, for all its dependencies upon the eye of the beholder, is “the truth”.

Recognizing the beauty of reality is not only a “matter of opinion”—it is a faculty, a capability. Seeing beauty somehow strangely seems to be the correct way of seeing. It means to gaze deeper into reality. 

Depth as Mystery.

There is a form of sublimity of reality that is recognized not by an aesthetic sense, but by a will to know, a search for truth for the sake of truth, by recognizing the fundamental mystery of reality. Indeed, are not all sciences and scientific paradigms based upon a fundamental mystery, an ability to ask questions and wonder?

In a world of misery and evil, at least there is the truth.

The recognition of mystery may be the most accepted and encouraged form of depth development in modern society. 

Depth as Tragedy.

The third form of depth development is the recognition of tragedy. It is the sense and realization that we live in a tragic universe If there is a fundamental divide between the innocence of (healthy) childhood and the maturity of adulthood, it is that children live in blissful unknowing of the utter tragedy of existence, whereas the (spiritually mature) adult lives in full awareness of suffering. To be spiritually mature means both accepting the unavoidability of suffering and being resolved to prevent and mitigate against it.  

But for all its blinding beauty and mysterious elegance, the universe is always broken. We have already discussed that our planet is perpetually screaming into the silence of the surrounding cold, empty cosmos. All systems, al living organisms, are always falling apart. A million things always can, and always will, go horribly wrong. 

CHAPTER 15 Wisdom Troubles

Light depth is the acquaintance with higher states and dark depth is the acquaintances with lower states.

Sue knows bow great potential and beauty there is to life and the universe, and has developed profound spiritual faculties and wisdoms…Sue lives, for all her spirituality, in what must be said to be a grave denial of tragedy. She will speak of universal love and sisterhood, but her eyes will glaze over into a blank state when confronted with any of the real, meaningless terror that is also part of reality: full stop—denial. She has developed a “light depth”, as is often the case in today’s yoga and spiritual circles, but she doesn’t understand the depressing insights of Schopenhauer, or indeed, some of the central teachings of the Buddha; the ones about suffering.

What we touch upon here is a bitter conflict that we can assume will be humanity’s companion for all foreseeable future: the double border drawn between people at different levels of depth as well as between different forms of depth. 

Being out-depthed is not fun. When someone out-deaths us, it means that they see either a seriousness that we fail to recognize, that our personality and expressions in life-goals, taste and arts are all superficial and frivolous—or that we have entirely missed out on some greater meaning in life and are in effect experiencing a quite reduced and impoverished existence. These are not things that are easy to swallow—not least because depth can hardly be transferred from one person to another, so we are helpless in face of the greater depth before us. It remains nebulous, vague, scary, strange and meaningless.

The greater the depth a social setting seeks to accommodate, the more difficult the social situation is to manage smoothly and productively. 

The truth is that very many of us harbor greater inner depths than we normally manifest in our lives, or than others normally recognize in us. 

A crucial aspect of the maturation of humanity is that we not only begin to actively and deliberatively cultivate depth in all three aspects (beauty, mystery and tragedy) as well as depth in both its light and dark form—but also that we create institutions and social settings in everyday life that are much more proficient when it comes to accommodating our inner depths. 

With sloppy variables, no reliable measurements and no stringent definitions (even if the researchers do attempt to be stringent), the field is wide open for people to have just about anything in mind when they talk about “wisdom.”

So here’s my take on a narrower, stricter, definition. Wisdom is great depth, plain and simple.

We might try another definition if you like, a more inclusive one: Wisdom is the combination of mental health, high complexity and great depth. With this definition, people can, be “wise’ regardless of which symbolic code they have (so you can have a wise person in ancient India, even if he’s hardly progressive by modern standards). 

The devil isn’t just in the details. He’s in the definitions. And, most of all, he’s in the analytical distinctions: in the ability to tell one thing apart from another. 

CHAPTER 16 Effective Value Meme

Put the four developmental dimensions of complexity, code, state and depth together into one model: the effective value meme of a person.

Spiral Dynamics model of Don Beck and Cris Cowan. Spiral Dynamics…postulates that people develop through a clear, recognizable sequence of value memes (or “vMemes”), which largely determine the overall pattern of their values, logics, personalities and behaviors.

Should we perhaps just give up the idea of vMemes, and simply stick with the four dimensions I have presented (complexity, code, state and depth), as well as other psychometric variables (IQ, mental health, etc.) in our quest to understand the political psychology of the world and its developmental demographics? After all, the four dimensions seem quite independent from one another. There is little about being at high MHC stage that would grant you greater existential depth, and there is little about great existential depth that would give you access to an advanced symbol-stage. Obviously, most scientific and social breakthroughs are not made by Zen masters or the like, nor are most spiritual revelations written by theoretical physicists. If complexity, code, state and depth are at all interrelated, they are probably still largely independent, and their interrelation is anything but straightforward.

The effective value meme is an overall pattern of the mind; it is an equilibrium upon which one’s values and worldview tend to stabilize, setting the framework for the political behavior of a citizen. The effective value meme is usually not an explicitly held body of thought—it’s more like the water a fish swims in; how your whole reality appears to you, even before you notice anything that dwells within that reality. 

We live, essentially, in a retarded world. Our value systems do not correspond to the society we live in. Our ways of seeing, sensing, feeling, acting and understanding do not correspond to the very society that we ourselves have created. This glitch is lethal. 

Your effective value meme is a kind of average between your complexity, code, state and depth.

Each of the four dimensions has its kind of width. Stage has IQ and other measures of cognitive capacity. In code, it’s how much and how high quality knowledge you have. For state, width means the length of the time period you manage to stay within different (higher) states. For depth it is the time you have spent at states and the variety of different experiences you have successfully integrated from these experiences.

….effective value memes…allows for four kinds of comparison.

-You can out-complex someone else, or be out-complexed by someone of higher cognitive stage.

-You can out-code someone else, or be out-coded by someone who has installed a more advanced symbol-stage.

-You can out-state someone else, or be out-stated by someone who has greater wellness and/or more spiritual experiences. 

-You can out-depth someone else, or be out-depthed by someone who has successfully internalizes wider range of subjective states than you have. 

So here is my rough hypothesis for you:

-Lower state and lesser depth tend to affect you to develop lower effective value meme than the surrounding society’s “point of gravity.”

-Medium state and depth tend to let you stay with the average effective value meme of your society, like most “mainstream” people today are at the Modern effective value meme.

-Profound experiences of higher states and the development of great inner depth (of the “light” or “dark” kind), tend to let you see beyond the confines of your own society, pointing you towards more universal issues, which can in effect help you manifest higher value memes than the people around you. [This is a prerequisite for transcending paradigms]

The symbol-stages are the most observable part of people’s overall development; they give us the words and templates we use to relate to the world. Whereas state, depth and even stage are all difficult to observe directly, the symbol-stage is relatively manifest.

But symbol-stages and effective value memes are not the same. The symbol-stages are the abstract logics inherent to the symbols, whereas effective value meme are descriptions of embodied behaviors. So even people with earlier symbol-stages can behave at higher value memes, if they have high stage, high average state and great depth. Likewise, you can live in a modern society and still have a pre-modern effective value meme.

The effective value meme is only a “master pattern” in your four dimensions of development. 

ANIMISTIC VALUE MEME

This value meme appears to have been born about 40,000 years ago, when artwork, pictures of imaginary realities, and more advanced tools began appearing and spreading around the world. You partake in a world of spirits and magic, where humanity is not differentiated from nature, and nature, in turn, is extremely anthropomorphized. In today’s world, this value meme still of course shows up in hunter-gatherer cultures, but it is also represented by a minority in modern societies. You have all kinds of “healers” and psychics, and beliefs in astrology, and ghost hunters (a modern form of ancestral worship), and casting of spells, and clairvoyants—and all the folks who believe in these things. The same people will tend to anthropomorphize their pets and prefer alternative medicine to Western medicine…the astrology precariat. 

I have used the division into 1st, 2nd, and 3rd person views many times in this book. When it comes to worldview, the 1st person view corresponds to our idea of a “self” (how I view the “I” in the world), the 2nd person view to our ideas about right and wrong, what you might call ethics or ideology (because it is about how I treat you) and the 3rd person view corresponds to our ontology, how we view the world itself (what we believe is “really real”).

One way of overviewing what it means for a person to be at the Animistic value meme is to look at general patterns of their self, ideology and ontology.

-Animistic self: Your social identity is not full differentiated from either the social or the natural surroundings, and your self is closely tied to the direct, visceral experience of your body. And you are your relationships. This means that your ideas of self are centered around the very direct and bodily relations between yourself and others: giving food, warmth, protection and comfort, producing something useful to the other people, and so forth.

-Animistic ideology: You tend to include your closet group of people—and often pets—and be very concerned that social taboos are not transgressed. The interests of the small group overshadow the individual. 

-Animistic ontology: Since your semantic world (world of words) is not differentiated from the natural world, you think that your words are the same as the objects themselves. Hence objects in the natural world can be related to one another just because they sound alike or share a certain number (as in astrology).

FAUSTIAN VALUE MEME

This value meme shows up first in the Neolithic age, when society beings to become agricultural. It is a kind of “declaration of independence” from nature and its spirits. You go from spirits to ambivalent gods who represent different functions in society, and you can defy these gods to rise above and beyond both society and nature. This is of course when the first warlords and armies appear. A system of honor and displays of social strength comes into being. 

-Faustian self: The self is part of a larger idea-world, related to gods (or present day equivalents, such as honor codes) and a generalized society. The self must find its destiny, i.e. which place the self has in the social hierarchy. Actions reveal your destiny. You can strive towards power in society and aspire towards supremacy over others. The human self is no longer the same as nature. Your self is part of a larger clan, an unimagined community, but it can ascend above normal life. Through acts of heroism.

-Faustian ideology: The power and interests of the clan (or other community) is the ethical basis: honor identity, to keep an imagined identity of power visible to a larger group. To survive, you need to appease (or intimidate and control) other people rather than nature; hence gods (and other symbols of human roles) take precedence over spirits. The “eye for an eye” morality emerges at this stage. You shouldn’t kill the whole family of an enemy if they poked out your brother’s eye. Just pole out one of theirs and you’re square. 

-Faustian ontology: In terms of cognitive complexity, this value meme corresponds to MHC stage 9 Concrete; this means that you have stories or narratives of gods, monsters and heroes—and that these stories connect many paragraphs and coordinate themes. The earliest paragraphs of the Bible don’t do this (the first few paragraphs in Genesis directly contradict one another); later on they do. These stories can tell you about the world, but not really about the abstract principles that govern it. The human and non-human worlds are seen as separate.

POSTFAUSTIAN VALUE MEME

…larger, ordered societies…the Axial age some 2500 years ago…All if the major religions are direct manifestations of this value meme. Unlike the Faustian value meme, the Postfaustian is against things like war, killing, slavery, oppression of the weak and arbitrary use of power (in theory, if not always in practice). This value meme has been dominant during a large part of recorded human history.

In today’s world you can find the Postfaustian value meme in people who are traditionally religious…But you might also count many of the nationalists and ethnocentric conservatives around Europe and elsewhere as postfaustian…they seek to reestablish a more ethnocentric order and generally root for a society more like the monolithic and hierarchically ordered societies of the past.

-Postfaustian self: The typical postfaustain self is based around the belief in a soul that has moral properties that go beyond your skills and capabilities. There is a universal idea that you can be good or evil, that there is an essence within you that relates to the truth. You “become someone” by serving the higher truth (either defined in religious or ethnic/nationalist terms), which is the same as finding and keeping your place in the social order: to be kind or peasant, but to play your part in the greater whole. Hence, your soul can be pure or not. The should is an early form of the modern conception of the individual. 

-Postfaustian ideology: This is where a generalized morality enters the picture. Up until this point, the interests of the group or tribe have been the basis of morality. But in postfaustianism all people who serve the truth faith will have their souls salvaged. Slavery, unwarranted aggression and exploitation are seen as unethical. All power myst be earned by the moral qualities and virtues of your character. 

-Postfaustian ontology: This world is second to the eternal world of God or spirit. Society should be ordered in relation to the eternal world. Humanity is imperfect but can approach the perfect or Absolute. Our connection to the universal goes not via the body, but by the abstracted soul and its ethical essence. The ultimate existence of God is the abstraction upon which all mythology rests—hence you can study theology, reason about it: “What is the ultimate abstraction?”

MODERN VALUE MEME

…dominant in modern society…The modern value meme encapsulates what mainstream Westerners are like: They believe in human rights, progress, science, democracy, civil liberties, fair competition, rule of law. They may or may not be religious, but their faith is kept as a more private concern and generally not relied upon as a source of authority in politics and debates. Daily life is still important, but it is no longer everything: It’s okay to have your own career, to date who you want, to have causal sexual encounters, to have your own opinion—to be an individual. …only accept explanations that make sense, not relying upon the authority of the Bible or similar.

-Modern self: Humans are individuals and have the right to express their individuality, not just in the next world (their moral soul), but in this life, hence moving within the social order to a place that they merit. This individual has inalienable human rights that go beyond even her nation and creed. One of the main faculties of humans is that they can think rationally. Since humans are the sole source of this rationality in the world, they are views as being at the center of reality. 

-Modern ideology: Modernists view themselves as harbingers of death to all myths and irrational beliefs. No kings can call upon gods to justify their power; only democracy can be justified. Humans are not only individuals but also citizens. This is an extremely powerful idea. Even all of the 20th century dictatorships used it: claiming to be by citizens, for citizens. Satisfaction of all human needs can be attained by use of scientific perspective on the material world, by the generation of economic growth, and the fair distribution of spoils among equal and deserving citizens. To the greatest possible extent, science should be used to organize society. You have the meritocracy, sports; life is a game. You need to know the rules and win. The best individual is whoever knows the truth the best.

-Modern ontology: The universe consists of its material constituents and the space between them. They present an absolute truth and people can know this truth by reason and science. But knowing the turret depends on intersubjective verification; otherwise it might be an illusion of the senses or a delusion of the mind. 

POSTMODERN VALUE MEME

The postmodern value meme is to be found in the many critics that have arisen within modern society in its later and more mature forms. I suppose you can say that proto- forms of Postmodernism have existed since around the beginning of the 19th century, where you first had Immanuel Kant’s critique of pure reason.

…the entire political and media landscape is dominated by such things as antiracism, gender equality issues, criticism of norms, general political correctness, environmentalism, multiculturalism, displays of post materialist values. People praise themselves for being critical thinkers, for not being mainstream, for being unique. 

The Postmodern value meme generally doesn’t believe in “progress”, but rather that societies change over time. After all, can you say that today’s society is really “better” than medieval times, given all the environmental degradation, materialist over-consumption, loneliness and anxiety? The postmodern mind focuses on questioning, criticizing and picking apart the things that are generally taken for granted.

-Postmodern self: The individual can question the categories of modern society and is defined in opposition to these, how she becomes a unique individual, how she is different, an irregularity, an exception. No longer humanity in creative opposition to nature, but rather in creative opposition to culture. You cannot be an individual unless you somehow oppose society...

You have the same notion in Heidegger’s das Man. The need for a sense of uniqueness grows from alienation. Alienation makes you miserable so you have a  pervasive sense that there must be something wrong: Is it the world, or me? Because we all need to maintain a positive self-image, we must conclude that the world is at fault rather than ourselves, and that we are somehow an exception from the world, hence not partaking in its badness. Thus it becomes very important to prove that we are an authentic exception; uniqueness. As the first proto-postmodern philosopher, Rousseau quipped: “If I am not better at least I am different.”

-Postmodern ideology: Modern society has gone terribly wrong…A central issue is to include the excluded. Another is to fight power structures. There is something real and authentic beyond the structures of modern society. All sentient beings in all times must ultimately be included and their interests taken into account. As we discuss in the following chapter, the “light” pomos (non-intellectual yoga-people etc.) don’t necessarily explicitly share all of these ideas, but they share in the sentiments: postmaterialism, relativism, solidarity with all sentients, environmentalism, praise of authentic (primarily of emotions) and the striving to being inclusive. 

-Postmodern otology: Symbols, structure and culture are, for all practical purposes, the ultimate reality—beyond that, we really don’t know. Even phenomenology (one’s direct 1st person experience) is steeped in symbolic meaning making. The universe is social and interactive. All knowledge is contextual. Even natural science is just another perspective and is based upon scientific communities, cultures, practices. We cannot access an ultimate reality.

METAMODERN VALUE MEME

The primary characteristic of people of this value meme is that they value qualitative development of human beings; that people go up in stage, that psychological development is supported and that you work to create a new society beyond the modern one. Because they have a more developmental perspective, they also accept, learn from and try to included all of the former value memes. This is quite unlike any of the other value memes, all of whom believe that they alone have the right path. The Metamodern value meme is less judgmental; its seeks to integrate elements from all the former ones; its sees partial truths in all of them; it wants to integrate them in one grand synergistic scheme, and seeks to accommodate them—to create a society in which traditional, modern and postmodern people live together harmoniously. 

But the metamodern mind also realizes that an inclusive and harmonious society cannot be achieved within the confines of modern life or by means of a postmodern critique thereof. Hence, a new society must be created from the modern one, which means that the meta modernist must ultimately be against modern society. 

The second characteristic is that they value inner dimensions much more. So you will find that people of this value meme seek to create more authenticity and intimacy in work organization, to democratize institutions with clever social innovations, to promulgate mindfulness and meditation practices, to emphasize more philosophical and existential issues in their work. They will tend to be very process-oriented, trying to involve people in interactive processes a lot more.

-Metamodern self: The self is a “dividual”, as described by Deleuze, a transpersonal self. I am not the voice in my head, I am all that arises; you create me as I create you, we are not sealed containers, we are often more transparent to one another and controlled by one another than we are to/by ourselves. We co-emerge, we are just bodies and fictional stories; consciousness is transformable and all stories can be developed. 

-Metamodern ideology: The mission is to help humanity and other creatures develop in a harmonious and sustainable manner. You strive for solidarity with all beings and their perspectives. This means that you don’t judge people because of their opinions. The metamodern mind is trying to stimulate development into higher stages and manage the ongoing relations between existing stages. All creatures have the right to be who they are. But for the sake of all sentient beings, long-term transformation towards higher stages should be supported in nicest and least painful manner possible. Avoid both “game denial” and “game acceptance”, work for “game change”. Create a photo-synthesis serving all perspectives by managing their interrelations and helping them evolve together in the most harmonious manner possible.

-Metamodern ontology: Potentials and potentiality, rather than facts and actualities, constitute the most fundamental or “more real” reality. What we usually call reality is only “actuality”, one slice of an infinitely larger, hypercomplex pie. Actuality is only a “case of” a deeper reality, called “absolute totality”. Realdialektik: History develops in certain directions for logical reasons. Perspective, physics and consciousness are inextricably intertwined, neither one of them constitutes the ground of reality. 

Metamodern artists will go beyond the postmodern irony and critique and instead focus on things like authenticity and existential growth.

By and large, you can spot the Metamodern value meme in people who have successfully internalized all of the postmodern values and thinking, but also add a developmental perspective and begin to value inner growth and authenticity to a much higher degree. They also have a transpersonal perspective, seeing that root causes of social problems are generally to be found in the great fabric of relationships that constitute society and that this is inseparable from the depths of our inner selves. The Metamodern value meme also accepts the importance of elites and hierarchies—something to which the postmoderns are deeply allergic—and it accepts the fact that not all people can be included in all settings: for instance, that not all people can become metamodernists. 

And, most of all, metamodernists don’t judge the perspectives of others. The postmodern mind seeks to include all voices, but only insofar as those voices say things that are acceptable to the postmodernists themselves. The clarion call heard by all metamodernists is: solidarity with all sentient beings also requires solidarity with their perspectives. 

CHAPTER 17 Major Implications 

For a value meme to manifest in society, it needs a code and language with which to program society and its institutions. At this point in history, there is simply no code with which to build a value meme higher than Metamodern.

Developmental imbalances (when e.g. depth and state develop far ahead of complexity and code), unfortunately, often bring with them pathologies, different social disease. I have already discussed why spiritual communities very often turn into cults which is partly due to such imbalances. To develop a spiritual depth and very high states, but lacking the code and complexity to match it, very often makes for some pretty sick stuff, which often leads to some deeply regressive and harmful behavioral outcomes.

Just because you have high state and great depth, it doesn’t mean that you are also a complex thinker and that you have access to advanced symbolic code; i.e. that you are of high effective value meme. 

You could say that the Animistic value meme is more secular than the Archaic one because it doesn’t take what is present to the senses as the only reality; it looks for how spirits, ancestors, intentions or otherwise invisible factors may have influenced the occurring events. As such it abstracts from the direct experience and takes the perceived world less at face value. This is secularism.

But the Faustian value meme goes beyond that: It points out that humans can use their will to force nature into submission, and they can live to tell the tale. And humans can recreate society itself; create orders of their own. The question is no longer who has the best spirit, but who has the biggest army. It no longer sees spirit as the fundamental essences. Secularism. 

But the Postfaustian value meme points out that there really is a universal order beyond all human affairs, and that you can’t rely upon patron gods, but only upon the truth itself. This truth cannot follow the whims of rulers or the ebbs and flows of political power, but must have a higher, eternal origin. If you go against the truth, you will be punished. This is also, relatively speaking, a kind of secularism. 

And then there’s the Modern value meme and what we classically think of as secularism, which points out that there can be no universal truths other than what is universally verifiable by a community of equals. You must also take into consideration the method of inquiry. As I said, Protestantism—both in Luther, Calvin and later developments—can either be seen as the pinnacle of postfaustianism, or, as an early form of modernism: The Bibles is translated into German and each individual is allowed to check the interpretations of church authorities for themselves. The Church itself is stripped of a lot of its colorful robes, its gold and its many saints. These saints are in fact a kind of lingering spirit worship. 

By and large, the Modern value meme explains problems in society as result of people acting irrationally or of their failures to take responsibility. Problems show up because people make wrong choices. So it’s not because you’re a bad person and broke the commandments of God, but because you did something unintelligent or unethical, that things went bad.

And then there’s the Postmodern value meme, which is where things begin to get really interesting. The postmodern mind doesn’t believe in the purported rationality of modern society and “modern man”—there are just too may cracks in the wall. Postmodernism sees that knowledge and rationality always seem to follow certain perspectives and power structures. And science is subject to any number of biases and blind spots. Indeed, our entire universe is only experienced through symbolic representation; through social constructions. Besides, there seems to be much more to life than what science manages to catch in its many journals articles. So it can hardly be that modern society is nearly as rational as it thinks. You no longer believe in the myth of the rational human, creating a rational order. Instead, you see the huge social machinery behind the curtains, which determines what people do—including, to a large extent, the thing called science. Secularism. More secular than the modern mind.

Which brings us to the Metamodern value meme. The postmodern mind believes in there being such things as “power structures”, “ideology”, “postcolonialism”, “patriarchy” and “discourses”. The metamodern mind sees beyond these explanations; it understands that the postmodern mind is still being essentialist, i.e. that it believes in essences which are inherent to these invisible forces. The postmodern mind thinks that there is some kind of metaphysical evil called “power structures” and that you can remove this evil by invoking its opposite: emancipating critique, deconstruction, inclusion, more soft and relativist values and so forth. But that means you still believe in there being some evil “out there” and you being the “good guy”: No longer the bad intentions of others, but certainly a collective and sociological evil that myst be destroyed. The Metamodern value meme doesn’t believe in anything like that. It sees that all of these things only emerge by necessity, as emergent properties of complexity systems. It sees the world as more mechanical, and less good and evil—all things are explainable, and there are no evil patriarchy spirits or ghosts of colonialism past. These are illusions, just interpretations of effects of self-organizing systems. These are illusions, just interpretations of effects of self-organizing systems. And the way to solve these problems is not by “crushing patriarchy”, but by genuinely understanding the ideas, perspectives and behaviors of all stakeholders, and by finding ways to develop them and otherwise affect their behaviors and interactions. More secular than the postmodern mind. 

Secularism isn’t really about religion vs. non-religion, or spirituality vs. non-spirituality; it is about expanding the ability to question and recreate reality. 

Only metamodernists can handle the relationship between all the other value memes productively. 

The technological, economic and social structures of our time automatically foster more metamodern ideas and values. The younger you are, and the better you are doing in life, and the more central your position in the new global society the more likely you are to pick up metamodern values. 

The Metamodern value meme can develop in a transpersonal space; you don’t necessarily need that many folks who see clearly what is going on. What you do need is a large quantity of people who contribute to the overall shift of pattern in society, each with their own piece of the puzzle.

So, for a society to begin to manifest some metamodern characteristics, it is enough that there are some people around with the code, some with the cognitive complexity, some expressing metamodern aesthetics, some with extra existential depth, some in high states, some creating more metamodern organizations, some doing research on complexity economics, and some creating metamodern economic structures. The Metamodern value meme is forming slowly but surely, from the structures of the emerging global society. 

The occurrence of the magic residual, i.e. that people have seen greater depth, mystery and beauty in the world than their cognitive minds—and their available symbols codes—can handle. Thus, there is a glitch, a developmental imbalance, through which magical beliefs and other superstitions can sneak in. 

You find magic beliefs in people who are of greater depth and higher state in comparison to their complexity and symbolic code. 

I have heard any number of serious psychotherapists and PhDs (even within the natural sciences) go on about this stuff. It is not because these folks are more stupid than your average Joe—on the contrary, they are above average intelligence—but because they out-depth and out-state themselves. 

This creates a rather strange matter of affairs: The people at the highest value memes—like Metamodern—are more likely, rather than less, to believe in preposterous and magical things. The magic residual has snuck in. The exact same openness towards the beauty and mystery of the universe, that sense of grand wholeness and awe, also cracks your head open so that the most dim-witted of ideas can sneak in and stick. 

This imbalance between your depth/state and code/complexity occurs especially in period of your life when you have had profound spiritual experiences or existential changes. 

So what you have is this ironic twist: Magical beliefs, albeit often of more complex nature, are drastically overrepresented in people who close in on the Metamodern value meme. This explains why intelligent folks like Ken Wilber will believe the most stupefying preposterous things (Wilber believes in miracles, in a love-first called Eros that propels evolution and inn Lamarckism evolutionary theory.

But there is another kind of developmental imbalance that is just as harmful: reductionism. The prickly people. It is when you out-complex and out-code your own depth and state. Whereas the harm in magic beliefs is quite obvious, reductionism is harmful in a more subtle way. It is when you out-complex and out-code your own depth and state. Whereas the harm in magic beliefs is quite obvious, reductiontionism is harmful in a more subtle way. It is when your mind picks everything apart and uses its intellect in a much-too-instrumental manner. The world appears too dead, too meaningless, too mechanical for you to really care about it.

At a subtle level, the reductionist feels a vague aggression towards reality and existence: “Was this all?” You gain a sense of satisfaction, a faint feeling of revenge, from exposing reality for the meaningless, dead piece of indifferent shit that it really is. You pick it apart and see that there is always hardness beneath the softness, selfishness beneath the love, mechanics beneath the wonder, and so forth. The reductionist mind is blind to the greater whole, blind to serving a deeper principle of life. It becomes a cancer: Thinking, thinking, seeing small and selfish desires by turning all of existence into an extraction project. And why not? Reality is dead, meaningless dirt. And I will use my hard, effective reason to show, that all that glitters is only eery grime. But at least I will get what I want.

This process of reducing the world to dead parst hinders holistic insight: it hinders states and the development of greater depth. 

Ideally speaking, the metamodern mind marries sense and soul—avoiding both magic beliefs and reductionism. 

Can you see now that development matters? That inner dimensions matter? Can you see that we need to balance science and cognitive complexity with inner growth—and vice versa?

What, the, are the characteristics of the philosopher? For all their different flavors and personalities and historical epochs and symbolic codes, all the major philosophers clearly share two things: high cognitive complexity and great depth. This separates them from mystics, yogis, sages, saints and prophets, who have great depth and high states (but not complexity)—and from major scientists and inventors who have high complexity (but not necessarily great depth). The philosopher’s stone is simply the cross-section of great depth and very high complexity. Of course, some philosophers are more on the depth-side, like Plotinus or Schelling, and some are more on the complexity side, like Kant or Hume. 

The “hue” of the philosopher’s depth can be light or dark; i.e. the philosophers don’t necessarily need to have high states: The inner lives of Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Adorno and Sartre were no festivals. People like Plotinus and Schelling  quite obviously did experience very high states.

Studying philosophy at the university unfortunately doesn’t give you either great depth or complexity. Just like studying the history of art doesn’t make you into Rembrandt. This is why there is such a great difference between philosophy professors and philosophers. Academic philosophy is good for all manner of things, but it’s not where you find the philosopher’s stone.

Robert Kegan…says there are five stages that the “self” evolved through—first becoming socialized and conventional, then some folds becoming self-authoring individualists, then some folks (fewer yet) becoming self-transforming people who see themselves as part of a greater dialectical development of reality as a whole, and must always be in flux, always transforming. 

Development Matters

Development is real and it matters. Humans develop through a series of stages—albeit in a tricky, complex and often seemingly contradictory manner. But underneath the confusion is a relatively simple set of progressions, an elegant simplicity.

Our ability as a society to support the growth into higher stages is not only an ethical imperative—as our current societies are full of inexcusable suffering—but a requirement for our emerging global society to thrive and survive. 

The main idea of metamodern politics is to create a listening society that mitigates the suffering of “normal” life and uses a wide range of social technologies and political strategies to support the psychological growth of all citizens.

It is not a simple thing to do. But why aren’t we even starting a conversation about how it can be done? As a society, we do all sorts of difficult things: vaccinating everybody, guaranteeing schooling, keeping the airplanes flying, inventing new ways to use the internet. It is really beyond our ability to create institutions that support our happiness and development?

Increasing the average value meme only becomes a societal goal if you are at metamodern yourself.

Why the Postmoderns cannot save the world.

To the pomos, the metamodern revolution looks like something that crawled straight out of hell. Suddenly, it’s all back: hierarchies and developmental models and grandes histories and social engineering—even spirituality. 

Except this time, you keep losing the arguments. Every time you attack this obvious evil, you end up being the bad guy. When you say that they are hierarchical, they admit it and say that if you don’t accept hierarchies you are being judgmental yourself…

When you say that they are being mystical and “new age”, they point out that your own position is based upon beliefs that cannot be proven, and that you are excluding and degrading minorities if you devalue all their spiritual experiences…

When you say they don’t oppose patriarchy, they point out that patriarchy is context dependent and so you cannot categorically hate it…

When you say that they think they have the one truth, they say that their developmental model implies that there are yet higher value memes, which your own model does not…

Postmodernists have shown very little mercy against the modern mainstream people these last few decades: Using all manner of judgmental shaming strategies and political correctness to make people comply with moral causes like gender equality, anti-racism and animal rights.

Note, however, that the real difference between postmodernists and metamodernists is that the latter have solidarity with the perspectives of others. Hence, unlike the postmodernists, the metamodernists don’t judge people for their opinions. 

And because the metamodern mind can see that, because she takes responsibility for and cares about people working from all perspectives, she is superior to the postmodern mind. She doesn’t judge capitalist society, or conservative Christians, or even the terrorist bombers. She sees that only by understanding their perspective—and synthesizing them so that they can work together, or at least find less destructive outlets—can you affect their behaviors. And she doesn’t judge the postmodern, but has solidarity with her.

Because the fact is, for global society to become genuinely peaceful, non-exploitative, sustainable and free from animal slavery, you would need a solid majority of the world population at the Postmodern value meme. Since that isn’t going to happen anytime soon—perhaps not for another century—our society can and will crash if people don’t actively and consciously manage all of the existing value memes: from animistic to metamodern.

And since Postmodern value meme doesn’t admit the existence of value memes—and believes that all will be fine if you go on “fighting patriarchy” and “explaining abolitionists animal rights” and “curbing racism” or “crushing global capitalisms” or “creating a movement of protestors” or “criticizing society’s power structures” or making more causal words and expressions taboo—they simply cannot productively manage the other value memes.

The postmoderns end up alienating a vast majority of normal modern people, making them feel confused, insulted and frustrated. And once that has gone on for a long while, the majority revolts and begins voting the Trump and the nationalists. Non-postmodern people begin to feel a subtle sense of revenge when somebody speaks our against political correctness. 

The Metamodern value meme can and will manage people of lower value memes, finding ways to include them in more productive manners. This is what the postmoderns cannot do. Nor can they devise a plan for increasing the effective value meme over a few decades. 

The new game of life looks a lot like this: Whoever has mastered the most perspectives when she dies, wins.

We are living in the age of the great stretching out. Never before has there been such intense and close contact between so many different value memes. Not only that: The interactions work across all stages of complexity, symbolic code, inner states and levels of depth.

Do you really think that a modern perspective, just defending science and the individual, will cut it? Will it successfully manage all of these different lived experiences and their interactions?

The great stretching out means that the difference value memes begin to compete more openly. The metamodernists may be outnumbered, for obvious reasons, but they are also the most developed and privileged group. 

Metamodernists define themselves through the struggle of value memes against value memes: It’s not if you’re Right or Left that matters the most, but how complex your thinking is. Hence they can work across religions, political ideologies and different developmental profiles (light vs. dark) as long as their interests are defended against the interests of the other value memes.

The paradox is just that people of the other value memes really don’t want a metamodern society. We will have to start ;icing by such paradoxes. Value memes cannot be friends.

APPENDIX Metamodernism

Three Meanings of “Metamodernism”

Meaning 1: a cultural phase.

Meaning 2: a developmental stage.

Meaning 3: a philosophical paradigm.

Metamodern Stance Towards Life

-To be exquisitely ironic and sincere, both at once.

-To be both extremely idealistic and extremely Machiavellian.

-To intellectually see, and intuitively sense, the intimate interconnectedness of all things: “The universe in a grain of sand.”

-To accept and thrive in the paradoxical, self-contradictory, always incomplete and broken nature of society, culture, and reality itself. 

-To have a general both-and perspective. But note that it is not either “both-and” or “either-or”—rather, it is both “both-and” and “either-or”. In each case, it is still possible to have well-argued preferences:

-both political Left and Right (and neither one!);

-both top-down and bottom-up governance;

-both historical individuals and social structures;

-both objective science and subjective experience;

-both cooperation and competition;

-both extreme secularism and sincere spirituality.

-To accept and thrive in both manifesting, systematizing philosophy (like Plato or natural science) and non-manifesting, process oriented, open-ended philosophy (like Nietzsche or critical social science). 

-To recognize the impermanence of all things, that life and existence are always in a flow, a process of becoming, of emergence, immanence and ever-present death.

-To see normal, bourgeois life and its associated normality and professional identity as insufficiently manifesting the greatness and beauty of existence.

-To assume a genuinely playful stance towards life and existence, a playfulness that demands of us the gravest seriousness, given the ever-present potentials for unimaginable suffering and bliss.

Metamodern View of Science

-To respect science as in dispensable form of knowing. 

-To see that science is always contextual and truth always tentative; that reality always holds deeper truths. All that we think is real will one day melt away as snow in the sun.

-To understand that different sciences and paradigms are simultaneously true; that many of their apparent contradictions are superficial and based on misperceptions or failures of translation or integration. 

-To see that there are substantial insights and relevant knowledge in all stages of human and societal development, including tribal life, polytheism, traditional theology, modern industrialism and postmodern critique. In another book, I call this evolution of “meta-memes”.

-To celebration and embody non-linearity in all non-mechanical matters, such as society and culture. Non-linearity in its simplest definition, means that the output of a system is not proportional to its input. 

-To harbor a case sensitive suspicion against mechanical models and linear causation.

-To have “a systems view” of life, to see that things form parts of self organizing bottom-up systems: from sub-atomic units to atomic particles to molecules to cells to organisms.

-To see that things are alive and self-organizing because they are falling apart, and life is always a whirlwind of destruction: the only way to create and maintain an ordered pattern is to create a corresponding disorder. These are the principles of autopoiesis: entropy (that things degrade and fall apart) and “negative entropy” (the falling apart is what makes life possible).

-To accept that all humans and other organisms have a connecting overarching worldview, a great story or grand narrative (a religion, in what is often interpreted as being the literal sense of the word: something that connects all things) and therefore the necessity of a grande historic, an overarching story about the world. The metamodernist has her own unapologetically held grand narrative, synthesizing her available understanding. But it is held lightly, as one recognizes that it is always partly fictional—a protosynthesis. 

-To take ontological questions very seriously, i.e. to let questions about “what is really real” guide us in science and politics. This is called the ontological turn.

Metamodern View of Reality

-To see that fractal nature of reality and of the development and applicability of ideas, that all understanding consists of reused elements taken from other forms of understanding. 

-To be anti-essentialist, not believing in “ultimate essences” such as matter, consciousness, goodness, evil, masculinity, femininity or the like—but rather that all these things are contextual and interpretations made from relations and comparisons. Even the today so praised “rationality”: is not an essence of the universe.

-To no longer believe in an atomisitc, mechanical universe where the ultimate stuff is matter, but rather to view the ultimate nature of reality as a great unknown that we must metaphorically capture in our symbols, words and stories. To accept the view of a world being newly born again and again.

-To see that the world is radically, unyielding and completely socially constructed, always relative and context bound. 

-To see that the world emerges through complex interactions of its parts and that our intuitive understandings tend to be much too static and mono-causal. This is called complexity. It is the fundamental principle of not only meteorology but also of social psychology, where patterns (such as the “self”) emerge through the interactions of interrelated, interdependent dividuals.

-To accept the necessity of developmental hierarchies—but to be very critical and careful with how they are described and used. Hierarchies are studied empirically, not arbitrarily assumed. 

-To see that language and thereby our whole worldviews travel through a much greater space of possible, never-conceptualized worlds; that language is evolving.

-To look at the world holistically, where things such as scientific facts, perspectives, culture and emotions interact (this form of interactivity is called hypercomplexity, because it involves not only many interacting units, but interacting perspectives and qualitatively different dimensions of reality, such as subjective vs. objective reality).

-To see that information and management of information is fundamental to all aspects of reality and society; from genes to memes to money and science a political revolutions.

-To accept an informational-Darwinian view of both genes (organisms) and memes (cultural patterns) competing to survive through a process of developmental evolution that involves negative selection (that disfavored genes and memes go extinct, but continue to exist as potentials).

-To see that Darwinian evolution depends equally on mutual cooperation and competition; that competition and cooperation are always intertwined.

-To see the dynamics interplay of the universal and the particular, where for instance humans in more complex societies become more individualized, which in turn drives the development of more complex societies where people are more interdependent and more universal values are needed to avoid collapse.

-To see that the world runs on dialectic logic, where things are always broken, always “stumbling backwards” as it were; that things are always striving for an impossible balance in that accidental movement create the whole dance that we experience in reality. So the development of reality doesn’t have directionality, it’s just that we are always blind to this direction; hence the metaphor of “stumbling backwards”.

-To see that reality is fundamentally open-ended, broken, as it were, even in its mathematical and physical structure, as shown in Godel’s incompleteness theorem and in some of the core findings of modern physics.

-To recognize that potentials and potentiality, rather than facts and actualities, constitute the most fundamental or “more real” reality. What we usually call reality is only “actuality”, one slice of an infinitely larger, hypercomplex pie. Actuality is only a “case of” a deeper reality, called “absolute totality.”

-To explore visions of panpsychism, i.e. that consciousness is everywhere in the universe and “as real” as matter and space. But panpyschism should not be confused with animistic visions of all things having “spirits”.

Metamodern Spirituality, Existence and Aesthetics

-To take existential and spiritual matters very seriously; to view humanity, intelligence and consciousness as expressions of higher principles inherent in the universe.

-To recognize that the esoteric, spiritual disciplines and wisdom traditions East and West relate to real insights of great significance—a recognition of the importance of mysticism.

-To have a careful, unknowing and explorative mindset in matters of spirituality and existence. 

-To understand that elevated, expanded subjective states relate to higher existential and spiritual truths than do most of the experiences of everyday life.

-To see that inner experience—and the direct development of the subjectivity of organisms—is crucial to all things, and is perhaps the main ingredient lacking in the perspective of the modern world; acknowledging inner experience is often the golden key to managing society’s problems.

-To take philosophical, cultural and aesthetic matters very seriously, as they are seen as inherent dimensions of reality, not just “additional woo-woo” on top of physics. 

-To create art and architecture that allude to the depth and mystery of existence, without putting it “in your face” or trying to tell you what to think or what is real.

-To support a democratic, intersubjective, participatory, scientifically supported, peer-to-peer created spirituality, rather than traditional paths, teachers, gurus or authorities.

-To see that both a spiritual and non-spiritual life experience and worldview are fundamentally okay. Spirituality and non-spirituality: Neither is inherently better than the other. 

-To understand that people are fundamentally crazy, that our everyday consciousness is not a sane reflection of reality, but a bizarre, psychotic hallucination that is utterly contingent, made up and arbitrary. 

-To intuit that the central spiritual and existential insight is the perfection of absolute totality as it always-already is; that there is a pristine, serene clarity underneath all the chaos and contradiction; that there is an underlying elegance even in the often tragic, hell-like experience of life; hidden, as it were, in plain sight. This can be called the recognition of “basic goodness.”

Metamodern View of Society

-To see no fundamental divide between nature and culture.

-To see that we live in a new technological era (the information age), and that human societies evolve through different developmental stages for better or worse.

-To believe that history has some kind of directionality based on logic, but that this directionality can never be certainly known, only metaphorically and told as a story-playfully and purposefully.

-To believe that we can always synthesize the knowledge we have about society to some kind of overarching narrative, a meta-narrative, but that this metanarrative is never taken to be complete synthesis, but rather always a self-critically held, but necessary protosynthesis. 

-To have a nomadic view of social life; knowing that our “self” is part of social flow, a journey—and that we are becoming more tribal and nomadic in the internet age with our virtual identities.

-To celebrate participatory culture and co-creation of society through non-linear, interactive processes where the whole is more than the sum of its parts.

-To see the importance of collective intelligence (not to be confused, as it unfortunately often is, with collective consciousness, often associated with Carl Jung, etc., which is not part of the metamodern paradigm). Collective intelligence is simply the ability of a group or society to solve problems and respond to collective challenges.

-To understand that technology is not neutral, not just “a tool in our hands”, but that it adopts its own agenda and logic, shaping and social life.

-To see sustainability and resilience as fundamental questions to all social life.

-To see that sexuality and sexual development are widely overlooked centerpiece in the mainstream understanding of all human societies. Sexuality has extraordinary explanatory, behavioral and predictive power.

-To see “everyday life” as something that humanity can and should transcend in favor of a more actual and authentic form of life and community.

-To take the rights and lived experience of all animals very seriously, human and non-human. Human society is just a cognitive category, and this category can just as well include all cultures, all deep-ecological entities (ecosystems, biotopes) and all sentient beings. 

Metamodern View of the Human Being

-To see that humans are behavioral, organic “robots”, controlled by our response to the environment, and that we are simultaneously subjective, self-organizing and alive—being of great existential depth.

-To see that my identity and “self” are not ultimately my body or the voice speaking in my head; or at least that my fundamental identity is not exhausted by that everyday conception of a self (my body plus the voice talking in my head), what is sometimes called “the ego.” The ego is just an idea, an object of awareness as any other created category that describes an object. 

-To adopt a depth psychology stance towards humanity, seeing that her consciousness is transformable by changing her fundamental sense of self and sense of reality. This is achievable through psychoanalysis (or “schizoanalysis”) and love relationships as well as athletic, aesthetic, erotic, intellectual and spiritual practices—where contemplative mysticism stands out as a very valuable path.

-To see that every person has a three-dimensional view of reality of her own, consisting of an ontology (a strong sense of what is real), an ideology (a strong sense of what is right) and a self (a strong sense of one’s own place in reality)—and that these three dimensions can be described in a pattern of sequentially unfolding developmental stages.

-To understand the transpersonal view of the human being, where her deepest inner depths are intrinsically intertwined with the seemingly rigid structures of society. She is not an individual—her deeper identity reaches through and beyond the individual, the person. The “person” is just a mask, or a role, dependent on context. It is not inherent to the individual—even if the human organism can of course be described with behavioral science.

-To see that in the transpersonal perspective, individual people cannot really be blamed for anything. All moralism is meaningless. This translates to a radical acceptance of people as they are; a radical non-judgment that can also be described as a civic, impersonal and secular bid to love thy neighbor.

-To see that the human dividual has many layers, that she is both animal, “human” in a multiplicity of roles, and that she has higher potentials within herself—and that she is born through the interactions, (or even intra-actions) of such layers within different people. This has some important implications:

-The multi-layered psyche has both subconsious, conscious and supra conscious processes (where the supra conscious processes constitute higher and more subtle intelligence than our normal thoughts, such as universal love, philosophical insight, deep artistic inspiration and the like).

-The higher layers of the psyche follow more general, abstract and universal logics, whereas the lower layers follow cruder, more selfish and concrete logics. But they operate simultaneously and interact with one another.

-The multilayered nature of the dividual psyche means that we can often see unconscious and supraconscious layers in one another; we can often understand one another better than we understand ourselves. This is what makes practices such as psychoanalysis or psychiatry possible. It also means that my agency can originate from you and vice versa. 

-This transpersonal perspective holds that our selves, even our bodies, are not “sealed” or “autonomous”; we develop together in one great, multidimensional network. This network follows a logic that is often largely alien to our individual thought processes and agencies.

-To acknowledge the inalienable rights of every creature to be who she is. 

-To have a non-anthropocentric view of reality, where human experience is not seen as the measure of all things. [YES]

-To accept that idea that humanity’s biologic and fundamental life experience can and will change through science and technology, what is called transhumanism. [This is a very dangerous road to walk down and will reshape human organization and competition and society fundamentally]

-To stretch solidarity towards the highest possible universality: Love and care for all sentient beings, in all times, from all perspectives, from the greatest possible depths of our hearts. 

Postmodernism is closely related to such things as relativism, social constructivism, and a kind of cynicism that comes from seeing many different perspectives, with no longer being a naive believer in religious, political or even scientific movements. Postmodernism is interested not so much in what is true, in what should be done, but rathe in questioning everything, in picking things apart, deconstructing them, to make us think again, to make us less sure, to make life harder for those who would control or manipulate others: the politicians, the media moguls, the scientists and the medical professionals. To the postmodern mind, the goal is to reach an anti-thesis—the critique or criticism of the existing is what counts as a real result; not to give answers but to refute old answers and dwell on new questions.

Only now, in the age of internet and social media, are we approaching a time which can truly be described as postmodern—where surface truly is everything, and where everything becomes a cut-and-paste collage, an endless pastiche.

But history is always on its way—we never seem to catch it. So while society in the rich parts of the world is finally becoming postmodern, the philosophers and cultural theorists are already spotting the next tendency: metamodernism.

Metamodern Manifesto…The manifesto proposes such ideas as informed naivety, magical realism and pragmatic romanticism. 

Some societal phenomena of our day and age could be described as metamodern ones, because they require a metamodern mindset to understand and respond correctly towards. Take ISIS (the Islamic State). Can it be seen as part of the metamodern Zeitgeist? To really understand what is going on with ISIS, why it emerged with such force, you must be able to understand the logic of a globalized information society in which sincerity and irony merge.

Although ISIS is hardly run by people at the metamodern stage of development, its very occurrence is, in a way, a metamodern phenomenon—its very occurrence is, in a way, a metamodern phenomenon—its rise pertains to the logic of a globalized, online society and its developmental pathologies. Viewed form this perspective metamodernism is, as Seth Abramson has observed, the dominant, underlying cultural logic of the internet age. But that cultural logic has yet to come fully into play. [Fourth Turning]