These arguments need to be taken seriously. If we have to choose between negative freedoms and positive ones, we should opt for the former. But the reality of the welfare state speaks its clear language: welfare systems exist in all advanced societies and they seem to increase, rather than decrease, the freedom of people. If carefully and skillfully implemented, they seem to subtly change the games of everyday life, leading to more progressive values, to higher effective value memes.
All of this leads us back to Michel Foucault and his observation that modern society has gradually expanded the system’s control over every aspect of everyday life. His answer to this dilemma was to muster a staunch, intellectual resistance: to criticize and unmask power wherever possible. This, of course, only offers us an anti-thesis, and no clear pathway ahead, no visions for society. [32] I have a different take on it, as you will see in the next section.
Basically, again, we see that the increasing intimacy of control works in tandem with the evolution of a more complex society. We see that this increasing intimacy of control is, in fact, that which allows highly complex and free societies to function. What would happen if it—the massive control apparatus of the welfare state—was entirely removed, by a magic spell, next Monday morning? Would people be more free, or less?
Less.
4. The Listening Society
Okay, this chapter has thus far been working its way towards a conclusion directly relevant for the future of free and democratic societies. Let’s bring it home.
Can we really expect the next stage of society, following the modern industrial one, to have an equal pervasiveness and intimacy of control as compared to the current one? To have less? I’d be hard pressed to draw the latter conclusion. The pattern over history is clear: more complex societies have more intimate mechanisms of control. It is a development which has been ongoing for at least the last 500 years, and it is unlikely to be reversed for more than short periods.
Rather than dismantling or shunning this pervasive control we must make it publicly owned, talked about, transparent—full of checks and balances. The issue is not to avoid any control, but to avoid bad, unscientific, corrupt or despotic control. We need intelligent information systems—in an abstract sense of the term: not computers, even if they do play a part, but good ways of handling the huge amounts of information about which services work to emancipate us, and which ones oppress us, and who this applies to and why and under which circumstances.
After all, we do want someone to look into our mouths and vaginas to find out if we’re healthy; this lends us more freedom rather than less. The question is just if it will be Kim Jong Un peering into our bodily cavities or an emissary of our own enlightened self-interest. The historical attractor is there, working with tremendous force, and we are left with the question: Who will gain this control and how will it play out?
With all the new science and technologies cropping up—neuroscience, psycho-physiology, collective intelligence, complexity science, bio-engineering, epigenetics, technological body enhancements, digitally supported education, virtual reality, AI—this power will increase by yet another magnitude.
A bold suggestion presents itself: We should embrace it. Carefully, kindly, openly.
That is what the vision of the listening society promises: creating an even more sensitive welfare system on top of the existing one. The welfare state is insufficient when it comes to match the sheer complexity of the period we are now entering (transnational, global, postindustrial, digitized, etc.). We can and must make certain we use these new powers to develop society. We should monitor and aid the growth of deep existential relationships to reality, of our growth as citizens, of pro-social and sustainable behaviors, of empathy, caring and norms, of complex thinking, of which meta-narratives we organize ourselves by.
Such development doesn’t necessarily have to be organized around “the state”. We can imagine other solutions in which civil society and markets play a larger part. But we cannot avoid the question altogether: Given these greater powers of intimate control, what should we do? Most likely, this greater control will need to be developed in a meshwork of state, markets and civil society.
Depending on how far Left, Right or anti-establishment you are, you are likely to want to see different balances between these elements. But let us leave that discussion to the side for now and focus on the main point: that the listening society can be built. And that it should.
No doubt, once political metamodernism grows, it will split into a right wing and a left wing—but these factions will still be relative allies when compared to the modern ideologies of socialism and libertarianism. The most important issue at hand, however, is to recognize this pattern in the first place and to raise it as a political, social and economic issue of primary importance and urgency: the cultivation of a higher form of welfare, of a listening society.
We have the possibility of creating a society in which we are happier, healthier and more of us have more universalistic values and strivings in our everyday lives. Such a society would be more stable and less prone to crisis—economic, political, social or ecological. It would be more resilient.
So after the welfare state, the next attractor ahead is yet another major increase in the intimacy of control: a listening society where the inner lives of all citizens are supported, where many more of us reach the later stages of personal development, and where there is much less alienation, loneliness and misery.
Utopian? Yes, in a relative sense.
The Pattern:
(In)dividuation and Differentiation
How do humans change as the intimacy of control increases?
A strange matter of affairs under this increasing intimacy of control is that populations don’t really seem to become more complacent and homogenous as it unfolds. Quite the opposite seems to be the case, at least in the countries that maintain a solid rule of law and a strong civil society besides an efficient bureaucracy.
In larger and more complex societies, people seem to develop more individualized personalities, values and worldviews, not less. Or to be more specific and analytically correct, we could say that people in more complex societies develop more dividualized selves (borrowing the term “dividual” from Gilles Deleuze, which replaces the “individual”).
An important aspect of this is that people develop into higher value memes and, despite their apparent individualism, also seem to develop more universalistic, inclusive and non-sectarian values. As we have noted, the people of welfare-jacked Sweden display much higher average value memes than their Afghani fellow world citizens. You will, for instance, find more environmentalists and animal rights activists in Sweden than in Afghanistan.
This is due to the dynamic, dialectical and painful dance between two poles: (in)dividuation and integration , an idea that has been proposed—albeit in simpler forms—by many theorists. The classical sociologist Émile Durkheim famously observed that modern society progresses by increasing the differentiation of the division of labor, which in turn makes each person work with more and more individualized tasks, hence developing more unique skills and experiences. These unique contributions are then integrated with each other in a more refined economy. Accordingly, this was an analysis of what Durkheim called “differentiation” and integration.
Erich Fromm, the 20th century social psychologist, argued that the development of human personalities evolve as each person finds an individual path and relationship to life, which in turn always reasserts more universalistic values and strivings. Fromm used the word “individuation”—but since I believe in the “dividual” rather than the “individual” I’ll stick with “dividuation”.
You can find a corresponding idea in classical American theorists of social psychology and education, such as George Herbert Mead and John Dewey. An
d, of course, you find similar theories in contemporary social philosophers like Jürgen Habermas and Axel Honneth. And all over philosophy, really. And there are even versions of it in complexity and systems’ science.
I would like to offer a similar but distinct bid for this theory, one that relates more closely to the present theory of the increasing intimacy of control and history’s developmental direction—a theory of “dividuation” and integration.
The idea here is, again, that richer, larger and more complex societies offer much greater opportunities for people to develop unique experiences, skills, ideas, relationships and perspectives. Societies that integrate larger quantities of human activities, natural resources and flows of information create fertile soil for the growth of a myriad of human perspectives and experiences. Greater economic and social integration spur higher dividuation: People are finding and recasting their “selves” and their relation to life on new, higher and more subtle levels.
The tragedy of the matter is that this increasing dividuation also entails a corresponding difficulty for each of these unique souls to find ways to really match their inner drives, hopes, motives, ethics, skills and distinctive gifts with the world around them. If you identify as a farmer, a family member and a good Christian, these identities are relatively simple to act upon and it is rather easy to have them accommodated by your social surroundings. If you instead become a vegan whose greatest talent is to write poetry and criticize society, your family members and colleagues are less likely to be as accommodating.
It is often our highest hopes and dreams, the parts of ourselves that are most universal and most intimately held and cherished, that are not seen, heard, given recognition and successfully integrated into society. Hence, more and more people simply feel alienated . It is not really that the world has become a colder, lonelier place. It’s just that the integration of these many unique souls is a more complicated and difficult matter. Because people have come farther in their dividuation, more people also feel estranged, lonely and subtly dissatisfied.
As alienated and highly dividuated people we naturally struggle to find new social settings and environments in which we can truly “be ourselves”—hence the obsession with this imperative in today’s culture. Sometimes we are at least partly successful in these strivings and feel we have “finally found a home”: in a particular social network of likeminded activists, in the expressions of certain forms of music, anti-establishment sub-cultures, more personally sensitive forms of business management and so on. We find ways to reintegrate our new selves into correspondingly new social settings. But by doing so, we have again increased the integration of society. We end up creating new and even subtler forms of oppression. From there on, we can dividuate even further, starting the painful cycle again: Our new homes help us grow, but eventually we may outgrow them and end up demanding even more delicate forms of integration.
Modern society, for all its mechanisms of intimate control, has produced more highly dividuated people than any former society. And, as a result, you have a whole army of sensitive souls who feel unseen and misunderstood. Society as a whole becomes increasingly emotionally sensitive and in greater need of more subtle, profound and complex forms of social integration. When such integration fails, life feels empty and meaningless. The road to greater freedom and higher development of the self is a beautiful—but also tragic and ultimately very lonely—journey.
As such, modern society suffers from a chronic lack of deeper and more complex forms of integration. Societal development spurs the growth into higher stages of personal development, but higher stages of development create an increasing pressure upon society to break the prevailing alienation.
But—and this is a big but—every attempt to create more intimate integration risks becoming a new source of oppression . Whenever people try to relate to one another at a deeper and more intimate level, including larger parts of our authentic emotions and inner selves, to some it may become suffocating and pressuring.
New oppression—albeit on a higher, subtler level. When we, for instance, create new playful ways of organizing our corporations, in which everyone is invited to partake more authentically, we also share larger parts of our inner selves and are expected to show up more “fully” and to be more emotionally involved. But some are bound to not quite “feel it” and will necessarily feel pressured and subtly manipulated. When we create greater social engagement and caring, those who are unable to experience the same emotions feel suffocated and that unrealistic expectations are being shoved down their throats.
New oppression. When we democratize governance and more people get involved in decision-making, many of us feel stuck in endless discussions. When we introduce mindfulness and yoga at work, some will feel they are expected to waste their precious time with meaningless woo-woo. When we make our organizations more personal, some of us feel stuck in more personal issues and conflicts in which our vulnerabilities become all too apparent. When we create greater transparency, some feel more surveilled.
New oppression. When we use “nudging” to promote sustainable and prosocial behavior, some will feel that others are pulling their strings. When society becomes more tolerant and multicultural, some of us feel confusion and estrangement as we are expected to successfully interact with people from more varying cultural backgrounds—and may be shamed as racist if we fail to comply. When social movements adopt more profound communication techniques (such as Art of Hosting and Theory U ), people can easily feel drawn in farther than they had expected or wanted. When spiritual and “self-development” communities create more intimate ways for people to share their inner lives, some feel pressured to overshare and end up having their intimate secrets used against them.
When we feel alienated, we seek reintegration. Metamodern politics, and the listening society, must empower people to reintegrate the parts of life that have been spliced into shards: the personal, the civic and the professional. We must be allowed to live as whole human beings. We need to live fuller lives. We need to be able to show up as a vulnerable, real person at work, and do work that is meaningful to us in terms of our values and views of society.
But the dark side of deeper reintegration of the spheres of life—the personal, the civic and the professional—is the emergence of new and more subtle forms of oppression. Integration is necessary for more complex societies to function, but it can always, sooner or later, become controlling or even icky and creepy.
This is the tragedy at hand: a painful wheel turning from integration, to oppression, to resistance and emancipation, to greater dividuation and alienation, back to new integration. [33]
The different political strands of mainstream Western politics relate to different parts of this wheel of dividuation and integration. None of them have successfully identified the whole process.
Socialism is largely an integrative movement, seeking to create greater integration by means of democratically governed bureaucratic measures, working against alienation—beginning already with the pre-Marxist socialists. Libertarianism and neoliberalism defend the rights of the individual against oppression, but they largely lack an understanding to balance out the alienating effects of modern society and its way of turning everything into a matter of money, material gain and calculated exchange.
Fascism and populist nationalism can be viewed as integrative over-reactions to the alienation of modern society, seeking to revive obsolete forms of community and belonging (corresponding to earlier value memes). And ecologism is largely an integrative movement, seeking to reintegrate human life into the biosphere and often into local communitarian initiatives.
The metamodern view is to support the necessary reintegration of highly dividuated modern people into deeper
community—or Gemeinschaft —but to do so with great sensitivity towards the inescapable risks of new, subtler forms of oppression.
Hence, the task is to balance out and support the forces of integration and dividuation. This is what the listening society must be able to do. [34] Nobody said it was going to be easy. But there it is: The increasing intimacy of control is linked to higher personal freedom, though in a difficult and painful manner that easily spirals off into oppression. We must relate productively to this dynamic.
See the model below for a graphic summary:
Figure: (In)dividuation and integration. The necessarily tragic and painful wheel of societal progress.
If things go well, the turning of this wheel—for all the pain and complication it involves—leads to higher freedom, to a profound kind of societal progress. We dividuate as people and integrate in more complex ways, and this changes the nature of society, which in turn affects who we are as human beings. If it goes poorly, it leads to oppression and/or alienation—and sometimes fierce overreactions against these.
This development of higher freedom is the topic of the following two chapters.
Chapter 4:
ANOTHER KIND OF FREEDOM
Are we free? Are you, me and everyone else in the democratic West, the supposedly “free world”, as free as anyone is ever going to be? And how do we even measure how free a society is in the first place?
The mainstream way of measuring freedom in a country these days is championed by Freedom House. [35] This institute monitors the rights in each country, if there is free press, if there are free and fair elections, freedom of association, human rights violations and so forth. Each country is graded from a score of 7 (least free) to 1 (most free). Countries like Sweden and the US get a rating of 1, whereas countries like North Korea and Saudi Arabia are rated “not free” with a bottom score of 7. Russia is also, notably, “not free” with a score of 6.5.
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