Nordic Ideology

by Hanzi Freinacht

  This book raises a bid for that last part, the logic of the development of societies. It is Book Two of Hanzi’s “metamodern guide to politics”. We will examine how the state develops, how freedom develops, how equa­­lity develops—and suggest a narrow but workable path for the next step in society’s evolution.

  That the very social fabric of everyday life can and must be intelli­gent­ly developed is the essence of political meta­modern­ism. We take a creat­ive and playfully developmental stance towards society and existence as a whole. Wider and more abstract perspectives on soc­iety’s evolution can allow us the luxury—or at least the possib­ility—of forging the path that soc­iety takes. In other words: We can affect how society develops, what every­day life becomes. This is made possible by us understanding the dir­ect­ion­alities and poten­tials inherent to how societies function.

  To blaze new paths. To write new values on new tablets. The goal is to steer clear of the barren landscapes and breach the invisible barriers—so that the shack­led members of humanity can wake up on a lush summer day, grow their wings, buzz around in freedom, and relish in cow dung.

  Captain! Set the controls for the heart of the sun.

  The Last Book and This One

  If you haven’t read the first book, don’t let it haunt you at night; you’ll still get plenty of bang for the buck in this one, even if some of the wider context may be lost on you.

  So let’s begin where we left off in Book One, The Listening Society . The final words were:

  “We can go ahead to create a Green Social Liberalism 2.0, working non-linearly, co-developing ourselves towards a listening society. We go ahead with pragmatic idealism, with magical realism and informed naivety. At the crossroads of fact and fiction, we work and play with religious fervor, keep­ing an ironic smile at our own self-importance.”

  A lot to unpack in a few sentences. Here’s what it means:

  “Green Social Liberalism” is the dominant “meta-ideology” in the Nor­d­ic coun­tries today. Here, environmental and social-liberal val­ues have be­come so widespread in the general population that more or less all the major political part­ies compete to be the most trustworthy advocate of this ideology. Since there is a wide consensus that the best model for soci­ety is a competitive market econo­my with a universal welfare system, the tradi­tional ideo­logical str­uggle be­tween Left and Right has waned in favor of a rheto­rical spectacle that con­ceals just how similar the political parties have actually become.

  This is not a uniquely Nordic phenomenon. If things run smoothly long enough, Green Social Liberalism is where every liberal democracy with an industrial capitalist economy and publicly financed welfare is hea­ding. It’s just because Scandinavia has been exceptionally stable and pros­pe­rous for such a long time that we see the tendency most clearly here.

  For the same reason it’s also here we find some vague but substantial bids for what lies beyond this “mod­ern” equili­brium; the 2.0 version of Green Social Liberalism. This new updated meta-ideology is a synthesis that, by today’s standards, would be perceived as far Left, far (libertarian) Right and very Green. And if you look closely, it is taking shape in the Nordic countries as we speak, hence the name “Nor­dic ideology”.

  “The listening society” is the name for a vision of the future welfare sys­tem which expands and deepens the current universal welfare pro­grams by add­ressing the higher psychological needs of human beings such as belong­ing, esteem and self-actualization—a welfare system determined to ensure that as many as possible don’t feel lonely, socially inferior or trapp­ed in meaning­less lives.

  The listening society is a welfare society that considers the emo­tional wellbeing of people just as important as their economic welfare; a society that takes into account the more intimate psychological needs of human beings: good relationships, inner security, meaning, self-know­ledge. This would be a soc­iety where depression, stress and alienation have become political iss­ues in the same vein as security, jobs and housing are today.

  Metamodern activists are unafraid of putting forward such visions; of exposing our necks—although we hold these with a “sincere iro­ny”, al­ways admitting that we are probably, after all, mistaken.

  We think that society needs to move in some kind of direct­ion; and if we play with fic­tions, make exper­i­m­ents, and combine these with sound fact­ual analyses of our time, there is a like­lihood that something good will come out of it. Hence such “both-and” concepts as “prag­matic idealism”, “mag­ical real­ism”, “infor­med naiv­ety”, and working at “the crossroads of fact and fic­tion”. These concepts are central to meta­modernism. They put us in the space where we can play and be creative around large and seri­ous issues.

  In the last book we offered a view of developmental psychology , which explains how people grow “more conscious”—i.e. how we become more com­plex thinkers, become “happier” (long story, that one), come to adopt more uni­­­ver­­sal­istic or prog­re­ss­ive values, and relate to more profound as­pects of life and reality. A large part of this has been firmly established through psy­ch­o­logical research.

  This developmental perspective was linked to the vision of the afore­mentioned “listening society”. The central idea is that by cultivating a list­en­ing society, we can not only create much happier human lives, but also dramatically spur the psychological development of larger parts of the pop­ulation into the higher stages. Such development is necessary for people to create, part­icipate in, and uphold functional societies in this increasingly comp­lex world—an endeavor that has both incredible poten­tials and great risks.

  Now is the time to make it happen. It is time to achieve this goal.

  The Map, The Plan and The Proof

  If the last book gave you an introduction to developmental psychology, this book presents you with a developmental socio­logy , and then links it to a con­crete political plan of how you change society.

  The book has three parts:

  The Map

  The Plan

  The Proof

  The first part of this book is The Map. First I guide you through an understanding of what it means to be a realistic utopian, one who seeks to change and evolve the everyday games of life. Then I go on to argue that there is a certain kind of evolution of society going on—that we can see where things are going; again, a developmental sociology , i.e. a view of how society itself devel­ops. So I present you with a number of “att­ractor points”, or “attractors”. These constitute evolutionary steps: How do state and gover­nance evolve, what’s the next step? What is freedom, and what is a higher free­dom than the one we experience in the “free world” of today? What is equality, and how can it become deeper? Most people, still today, living in societies com­m­itted to free­dom and equality, cannot answer these quest­ions.

  Armed with this map, you may then reap the rewards: The second part of this book is a large-scale strategy being rolled out before you— The Plan for how to fundamentally transform modern society into a metamodern (rela­tive) utopia. I’d like to underscore that this plan fills a void : I can’t think of anyone else who has a plan like it—a plan for the design of global politics, for a new political system, and how to enact it. If you understand the plan, I hold, you are morally obliged to act upon it, to make it happen. If you see where this is going, you’re either obliged to act, or to come up with something better. It’s a bit vul­gar, I supp­ose, to straightforwardly put a plan out there, not a very scholarly or respectable thing to do. But on the other hand, people reading the first book all wondered: What’s the plan? What do we do? I’ll tell you what I think. We need a political program. This is a political program that con­stitutes , all said and done, the Nordic ideology. It inclu­des six new forms of politics, all explained in detail: Demo­crat­ization Politics, Gemein­schaft Politics, Existential Politics, Eman­cip­a­tion Politics, Empirical Pol­i­tics—and Pol­itics of Theory . It e
nds with zooming out and viewing the Master Pattern that connects all six forms of politics, including some tactical obser­vations for how to make it happen.

  Does this plan make sense? Does the Nordic Ideology work? Shouldn’t we subscribe to one of the existing political ideologies instead? This is where The Proof comes in. This third part of the book is, admittedly, perhaps a bit self-celebratory: It shows you how the Nordic ideology—or political metamodernism—eats all of the existing ideologies alive. It beats them on their own terms. Part Three presents you with the proof for why you can’t just skip metamodernism and stay with one of the old ideologies. Having this unders­tand­ing helps you organ­ize a transnational meta­modernist movement and to outmaneuver all the modern pol­it­ical forces: socialists, libertarians, con­servatives, anarchists and eco­lo­gists alike—while still helping each of them achieve their respect­ive goals. So you get armed with some well-needed tactics to go along with your strategy . At the very end, we discuss our three evil cousins, the total­itarian spec­ters of the 20 th century: commun­ism, fascism and the New Age. All of these dangerous dreams have uncanny but impor­tant lessons to teach us. So let us listen.

  These are going to be crazy days. We’re going to have to invoke a few forbidden phantoms™.

  But then again, that’s how the world is. To make sense of it, we some­times need to take wild trips to the outskirts of sanity and deep into the underworld. If you ever get a bit lost during this journey, simply remem­ber whether you’re reading Part One, Two, or Three and you will know what it’s really about: either I am drawing The Map of hist­orical develop­ment, or I am presenting you with The Plan to take over the world (apply sincere irony), or I am trying to provide The Proof that this is a sound plan. Map, Plan, Proof—it’s not so hard, is it?

  But still, we’re going on this trip together. Remember to work hard—and try not to have too much fun. It’s all quite serious, after all. And I bet you don’t have a better plan. If you do, please tell me. [6]

  Hanzi: Your Suspicious Friend

  Before we go on, let’s discuss our relationship, me the writer to you the reader.

  If you’ve read Book One, you might wonder why I’ve become so nice all of a sudden. Where is Hanzi, the arrogant and obnoxious prick that guided us through the last book? Why am I not bragging, or finding ways to bust the reader’s self-deceit, or just hitting soft-spots in my trademar­ked cal­culative, manipulative manner?

  Don’t worry; I’m still here. Still a prick. I haven’t become any humbler, not at all. Nor has my heart softened and, no, life has certainly not “taught me a lesson or two”.

  Au contraire . If anything, I hold my own entitlement with greater self-evidence than ever. Because I honestly believe I have something interest­ing and im­portant to say, I feel entitled—intellectually and mor­ally, mind you.

  I do recognize that many readers enjoy a good spanking from time to time, to be challenged and dominated, to have their weak-spots rev­eal­ed by psychoactive literature.

  Others, the ones with big egos, get really mad when challenged and start blaming the author (which, by the way, is the same as having an arg­ument with a dead piece of text). But those people aren’t going to play any major parts in creating the new develop­mental stage of society. They lack the emotional self-knowledge required for handling this level of depth and com­plexity.

  So if we alienate a few of them, good riddance.

  There is a masochistic side to most of us. We all love displays of power. Power feels real and substantial, somehow. People with poor self-know­ledge tend to deny this drive in themselves; but if you watch their actual behav­iors, their self-deceit becomes apparent. In fact, the deniers of power tend to be the most hysterically power hungry. Anarchists and moralistic far lefties come to mind. Power is very erotic, and in our fantasies, erotic or not, we display it in different forms: unhind­ered, deter­m­ined agency, being in the right, showing great con­viction, putting up heroic resist­ance, sport­ing impr­es­sive self-control, the earn­ing of res­pect, the eli­c­i­ting of admir­ation, displays of towering wisdom and equanimity, the inspiring of awe and perhaps even envy or fear. All of this stuff is ultimately about power, and the possession and expression of pow­er.

  Democracy, deliberation and good citizenship, alas, are just not as exci­t­ing as power and hierarchy. And our erotic minds exercise great influ­ence upon what we find worthwhile in terms of time, energy and att­en­tion. This is a paradox not only in writing, but as many psych­ologists have observed, in society and human relation­ships at large: especially in gender rela­tions, love and sex.

  But still, let’s go for good citizenship in this book, shall we not? We’re deal­ing with serious matters, after all. We can be grown-ups about this, can’t we? Let us calmly, rationally and maturely consider the future of hum­anity.

  Because, after all, you are far above those other readers. You are mat­­ure, aren’t you? You are not impressed with unst­oppable, throbb­ing, sex­ual power—not at all. You just want to discuss important ideas. And we already did most of that delicious power mongering and emotional butt­on pushing in Book One. The reason we did it (apart from me being a bad person; rotten to my core; bad to the bone, baby), is that we needed to get beyond the defenses most people have against metamodern thinking. In part­icular, we had to break through the mental barriers that protect peo­ple from under­standing the issues of dev­elop­mental psychology—the sta­ges of adult dev­el­op­ment—and go through the painful pro­cess of throw­ing the ridi­cul­ous modernist political iden­­tities (Left, Right, Lib­er­­tarian, Green, etc.) in the garbage. Then kick the gar­bage can.

  But in this book we’re doing something a bit less touchy: look­ing at wide, abstract patterns of political development. And most readers will already be acquainted with the work in Book One. So, we’re starting from a differ­ent place.

  You see, in the last book I had to write with the assumption that I was wor­king in an extremely hostile environment. Almost nobody has the same worldview as Hanzi, so most people start off at an adverse angle. And it paid off. But in this book, I write with the starting point that we are roughly on the same page. The last book was written for enemies; this one is for friends.

  Hence, I use a little less of the psychoactive judo, even if it might make the text a little less juicy.

  But one thing remains the same: the transpersonal stance . I am not an individual. I am much larger than that. I am a thousand voices criss­crossing and whispering within, from my earliest biological impulses to my some 10,000 year history of civilization, to my unconscious drives and weaknesses, to my spiritual capacities which link me to the skies and the unyielding mysteries of the cosmos itself. And so are you.

  As such, I don’t think of myself as an individual author, reaching out to you, a sep­arate entity—a single atom of a rational reader. Rather, we are both part of the same pro­cess of knowledge creation, and I some­times need to speak past you, to other readers, and sometimes I need to push a few of your buttons. Like­wise, you need to cut and paste me, and animate me, in creative and novel manners. You can cut me up and put pieces of me into places I couldn’t dream of. The reader, not the writer, has the power.

  I don’t expect you to leave me be, but to recreate me. And when you gaze into the transpersonal mystery that I am, I also gaze into you.

  —

  Why Hanzi Freinacht? Wherefore art thou Hanzi? It’s a fair question. Why not a humbler and more con­ven­tional per­sona, one who speaks mil­d­ly and invitingly? Most authors manage to do that. Hey, even people like Hitler can sound kind of nice in writing. There are a couple of reasons for this knowingly insolent diversion from the norm.

  The first one is just to shake you up and get your attention.

  But there is another, much more important reason: I want you to be suspicious of me. I am, after all, making very large claims. If I turn out to be wrong, and people follow these ideas with the righteou
s fanaticism that has shown its face time and again, terrible things can happen. And on a more mundane level, you can screw up your own life too, for that matter.

  But just including a “humble clause” against fanaticism here and there—and adhering to a general openness towards new infor­mation and per­spectives is not nearly vigilant enough. That opens up another kind of trap: “Oh, of course I am not fanatical. I bloody well live for good critic­ism! I have more clauses against fanaticism than anyone else. I labor by far the hardest to take in others’ perspectives… I know words, lots of words, all the best words!” [7] And voilà , another avenue of insulation ag­ainst being wrong.

  No, for our relationship to make any sense at all you have to be able to be reached by my ideas; but in the end, you need to really not like me. That’s the deal here. Hanzi isn’t nice. You’re not supposed to have too much fun or enjoy my company too much. On the other hand, this allows me the luxury of not concealing any of my thoughts or emotions, to write with pristine sincerity. Because I am not working to win your trust.

  Brutality is honesty’s flipside. All those humble and kind auth­ors out there are not brutal because they are, frankly speaking, not very frank. Whereas politeness certainly is a virtue, it’s often a good idea to master both virtues: the polite and the frank. And we need to know when each of these should apply. In a book like this, frankness must trump politeness. So, put up with a little writer brutality, and at least you’ll get to hear what I really think and feel. We can be polite later, like when we meet at a mingle party. Deal?