For all its terrible and visceral materiality, our slavery to negative social emotions at least protects us from the responsibility of being creators of our own lives or co-creators of the world. In actual slavery under penalty of death, at least we need not take any real responsibility for our own selves, beyond obedience. In slavery to guilt, we need not construct our own morality. In slavery to shame, we need not find our own path in life; only comply with what the neighbors might think.
And in slavery to Sklavenmoral , we need not take responsibility for our own highest dreams and aspirations, for our will to power, for our longing for creation and transcendence; for our greatest potentials and our sorrows for all sentient beings and our identification with society-as-a-whole, in its entirety and dialectical multiplicity of perspectives. We can leave that to someone else; “I’m just a usual person, I have no such pretensions, I am humble” we tell ourselves. But it is a deceptive humility, hollow and life-less as a plastic baby doll.
The truth is that once we have traveled the long road to freedom, we are back at the very point where we started: at fear, at sheer terror. It’s just us and the blank page of our life that we must fill—the blank canvas of the artist staring right back at us, screaming, roaring: CREATE ME! It’s just you, all alone, defining and recreating reality itself. You turn away from the canvas, trying to do something else, but you find that society itself is a canvas, begging for co-creation. You hurry outside, restlessly pacing in the pouring rain, staring up at the grey skies, tears running from your eyes, washed from your face by the cold rain, but no mercy is found: reality itself is a canvas. Blank.
Blank.
Blank.
Bam, motherfucker.
Go create. No excuses. Ever. Because you’re free.
Suddenly, like on a bad psychedelic trip, you find yourself lost in the hall of mirrors, with no beginning and no end of “the self” vis-à-vis “the world”. Just pure creation and full, unyielding responsibility for the universe. This whole “crossroads of fact and fiction” business just got eerily real.
Is it so strange that we usually turn at the doorstep and escape back into the relative safety of whatever slavery we just struggled to shake off? Man, have I felt this before I began writing these books. Man, do I feel it every bloody morning. The terrible truth is this: freedom is struggle; freedom is terror; it is the terror of facing pure chaos, the pristine meaninglessness of reality, the vastness of potential, and the weight of the responsibility that follows.
Three Voices Whisper
I’d like to mention three authors, each of whom have described an important aspect of the fear of freedom.
A keen observer of this predicament was Erich Fromm, the Freudo-Marxist social psychologist who wrote Escape from Freedom back in 1941 as a commentary upon the rise of nazism and other authoritarian movements. To embrace freedom, Fromm argued, human beings must have the proper spiritual support—we need to practice to be able to recreate ourselves at higher levels of individuation. We must grow as human beings in order to manifest positive freedoms (“freedom to”), lest we retreat in fear and try to recreate the imagined safe havens of the past. That’s what totalitarianism and reactionary movements promise—an escape from freedom itself.
But the totalitarian and fundamentalist movements betray us; they are entirely devoid of art and creativity, and if we subscribe to them we subtly feel that our souls have been oppressed and violated. They offer only perverted paths to submission and destruction, satisfying only these wishes and never reaching fulfillment.
This actually links rather elegantly to the work of Robert Kegan. I usually have little good to say about his developmental theory of “the self”. You may remember I took some swings at him in Book One. But in this instance, we may well listen to him and learn. Kegan argues that the “self” progresses from a stage of a norm-conforming “Socialized” mind to a “Self-Authoring” mind, which in turn—in a small minority of adults—can make way for a yet higher “Self-Transforming” mind.
Stage 1 — Impulsive mind (early childhood)
Stage 2 — Imperial mind (adolescence, 6% of adult population)
Stage 3 — Socialized mind (58% of the adult population)
Stage 4 — Self-Authoring mind (35% of the adult population)
Stage 5 — Self-Transforming mind (1% of the adult population)
Even if I don’t subscribe to this theory at the level of individual analysis, I do think it has something to say at an aggregated, societal level. It does make sense that modern life requires many more of us to advance to a Self-Authoring kind of mind—and if this transition fails, but our life circumstances still demand a strong inner compass of self-organization, we can regress to the Socialized mind, or the Imperial mind, and subconsciously even to the Impulsive, i.e. to childish tantrums and wanton aggression (like nazism, etc.).
If our societal freedom is not matched by a corresponding level of personal development, we are terrified by the freedom gained. We don’t experience it as wind blowing through our hair on an American highway, but as utter confusion and a horrifying abyss. Wild, staring eyes—and a mad urge to fly. The Chevy is driving off a cliff. We want out. We want to escape from freedom. [47]
One important aspect of this training for higher freedom that is not fully caught by either Fromm or Kegan is described instead by the novelist Steven Pressfield. In his book The War of Art , he vividly and intimately outlines the enemy of all artists: what he calls “resistance”. How many of us can truly overcome the resistance to create? Can we tolerate the empty canvas staring back at us? How many of us keep stalling our innermost dreams indefinitely? How many of us can bear the terror of freedom and muster the discipline and die-hard motivation to defeat the inner demons of distraction and excuse? Simple procrastination can also be an escape from freedom.
Pressfield points out it is this denied and undealt-with inner resistance that shows up as an urge, not only to deny our own higher potentials, but to unproductively criticize and try to smother it in others —what I have called Sklavenmoral (and its two cronies, envy and narcissism).
So it’s not just a matter of individual inner struggle. Even at a civilizational level, we are facing the onslaught of the inability to overcome inner resistance, which translates to envy, which translates to Sklavenmoral , and this translates to narcissism—all of which are corrosive, if not antithetical, to the collective good of higher freedom. [48]
Fromm’s words are prophetic. Kegan’s theory offers some useful hints to the structure of this challenge. But to get at the heart of the matter we must recognize that a profoundly free society would be one where all of us become artists in the most general sense. We would all have to bear the terrible burden of creation that Pressfield describes.
And by yet another tragic and ironic twist of fate, it just so happens that we live in a digital capitalist society in which every corner and every moment and every shelf is overflowing with excuses, distractions, quick rewards and new promises. How many ways are there not to lose our focus and sense of direction?
It’s even worse than that; it is the case that the relative success of one person’s manifested deeper potential and creative outlet easily becomes the source of distraction for others—if I am to be a successful writer, I must distract at least some of my fellow co-creators from their higher callings. The same goes for so many other creators. So much “amusement” and “support” around, so many workshops to take and genuinely breathtaking talents caught on YouTube-clips to be shared on Facebook. Millions of views. Billions of clicks. Digital weapons of mass distraction.
Higher freedom from extrinsic emotional pressures must grow in pace with higher stages of inner development, lest we be doomed to deceive ourselves into new sugarcoated escapes from freedom. We must learn to discipline ourselves—to crack
the code of how inner self-discipline is taught and acquired.
Max Weber famously described modern life and its rational, disenchanted bureaucracy as an “iron cage”. As we approach a postindustrial society of abundance, more and more of us suddenly find that we are caught in a gilded one. The gilded cage, if you will, of metamodern society. [49]
Not only must negative freedoms be matched by positive opportunities; both of these must be matched by a corresponding degree of inner growth.
When the intergalactic gods look upon human civilization on Cosmic Judgment Day, what will be their verdict? Will they see that we grew up and became artists, co-creators of the universe? Or will they see that we have escaped from freedom, into new Pleasure Palaces? Will they scoff:
“This species has amused itself to death”.
A Simple Scale of (In-)Dividual Freedom
Thus far we have discussed and described freedom as a collective good in which your freedom is largely co-dependent upon mine and vice versa. This is probably the best way to understand freedom as a societal phenomenon because it treats freedom as something that can be approached through political and cultural development.
But there is still room for describing the different levels of freedom enjoyed by citizens as (in)dividual people. There are bound to be minorities within each country who have significantly lower degrees of freedom than others, just as there are elites whose freedom is significantly higher. Let me suggest this simple scale without lingering much upon it:
Slavery —your rights and freedoms are at the whim of another and you do not own even your own body.
Serfdom —you formally own your body but your lowly social position is predefined and you are not allowed to travel freely and others can take a significant portion of the fruits of your labor.
Subjected citizenship —you can travel around freely and do what you want but have no say in public matters.
Impoverished citizenship —you have a basic enfranchisement and entitlement in public matters but no real say in them without taking significant risks, such as in socialist republics.
Basic citizenship —as above, but you can try to have a say without significant risks.
Socially active citizenship —you have a meaningful and substantial relationship to public affairs that affect your life.
Integrated citizenship —you have real and effective ways of affecting things happening around you.
Norm-defining citizenship —you also have real and effective ways of affecting the political discourses and arenas around you.
Co-creative citizenship —society at large, its arenas, institutions and functions feel and effectively are as your own home and you feel comfortable and entitled to participate in any part of it.
Viewed from this perspective, it is clear that the majority of citizens even in the “most free” countries of today are quite far from the highest reaches of freedom. If you consider countries such as Sweden, Germany or the US, most people have a freedom level of “5” according to this scale, while significant minorities have freedom levels of 1-4: trafficking victims, illegal immigrants, kids stuck with tyrannical parents and so forth. If you look at countries like China, most people are in the ballpark of freedom 3-4.
The point here is that there are real demographics out there with different distributions of these levels of freedom. Even in theory it is impossible to imagine a society in which “everybody” has the highest level of freedom, freedom level 9. But it certainly is conceivable that we could create societies in which much larger portions of the population climb the ladder by one or two steps, and where there are smaller pockets of oppression.
Roughly speaking, however, it is clear that these different levels of freedom must be tied to the overall cultural and institutional development of freedom in society. It is difficult to imagine a society run by fear and guilt in which a significant part of the population would feel as deeply enmeshed cozy co-creators of the whole of culture (levels 7-9)—or even as dignified and protected citizens (level 5).
The Highest Reaches of Freedom
Let us return to freedom viewed through a more transpersonal lens, with the emotional regimes. A part of us wants to escape from freedom. And yet, the future of society depends precisely upon our ability to cultivate such a higher freedom and embrace it.
What, then, happens after the emotional regime of Sklavenmoral ? What lies beyond the chains of fear, guilt, shame and Sklavenmoral ; beyond hatred, judgment, contempt and envy?
If a person is no longer constrained by such negative emotions, but still remains socially and ethically functional, I would argue that she is approaching a more profound existential freedom, one that Nietzsche personified in the concept of the Übermensch .
As we noted, this Übermensch can only come into being if there is sufficient inner personal development: self-discipline, intrinsic motivations, a strong compass, self-knowledge—and the four dimensions of psychological development: cognitive complexity, access to the right symbolic maps of the world, higher inner states and greater inner depths (intimate knowing of both the light and darkness of existence).
Übermensch is usually translated as “superman”, but this translation is somewhat misleading. There is a distinction in the German language between different uses of the word über— it can mean “over” or “above”, but it can also mean “through” or “across”.
A better translation may thus be “the trans-human”, a category that reaches through and goes beyond what we normally think of as human existence. In this interpretation, the Übermensch is not a superhuman comic hero, but rather a person who lives relatively unrestrained by the normal dynamics of everyday life as we commonly experience them.
And, in this view, the Übermensch is not really a description of a certain kind of person, but more of a social category. We have seen that my freedom depends on you. The Übermensch state in a particular person is only possible to the extent that the larger patterns of our social interactions and emotional exchanges can bring it into being.
So at the end of the painful and winding road towards freedom, a wheel turned through endless painful variations of dividuation and integration, waits that crazy Nietzschean moustache: the Übermensch , which renders the very concept of freedom obsolete. Human beings long to be emancipated—the Übermensch wants to be unleashed.
What then, would a human being—her relational body and mind—be, if she were entirely unrestrained by fear, guilt, shame and Sklavenmoral ; freed from the shackles of others’ hatred, judgment, contempt and envy?
This is not a question of fantasy or theoretical speculation, but indeed a real and empirical one, even if the answer at this point remains hypothetical. If these regimes that control us weren’t there, but we were still highly functional members of a global society, what would we do? What would we be?
I’ll tell you what I think. A life form unrestrained would begin to consciously self-organize in ways that create higher subjective states, greater existential depth, grasping for greater complexity. It would gaze deeper into the universe and recreate it, while recreating herself in the image of the order of the cosmos.
In sheer terror before the empty meaninglessness of the universe that reveals itself at the end of all external and societal oppression, we must garner superhuman courage to resist folding over and escaping from the formlessness of pure freedom.
I believe that we would—we must—plunge head-on into the mysteries of existence, not as individuals, but as an evolving global network of posthuman transindividuals, living in volitionally organized virtual tribes. Unhinged, uninhibited, we would explore with rapacious curiosity, play with religious fervor, worship with trembling devotion, fuck like beasts—dissolving our very sense of self into the crystal-clear night.
Serving beauty and mending tragedy, we would dance, fight
and laugh our way towards more terrifying heights and depths of consciousness, manifesting pristine universal, impersonal love—a love that fathoms and embraces reality, and all sentient beings, with mathematical precision. We would co-create worlds and we would co-destroy them. And we would bear the heavy burden of such responsibility.
At the top of this edifice we call civilization, when this tower of Babel touches the skies, a profoundly familiar call echoes through all of us: the call of the wild. This is the alpha and omega point. Before civilization, there is the wild, the untamed, the naked. After civilization, there is the wild, the untamed, the naked. But this time the call echoes into higher complexity and into the terrifying emptiness of outer space. Freedom must be hard and it must be wild.
At the highest reaches of what we think of as “freedom”, we can explode beyond what has hitherto been thought of as human. Art conquers everyday life and subdues its tamed structures to a radical creativity. The wild. We become poets. And the poet acts ; to create relative utopias, to pursue dangerous dreams.
To the sound of roaring electric guitars we recognize that we are indeed gods with anuses; and as the flies buzzing through the enchanted meaninglessness of the cosmos, in an act of necessary vanity, we set our controls for the heart of the sun.
Chapter 6:
Nordic Ideology Page 15