Nordic Ideology

by Hanzi Freinacht

  Social constructionism , as described by the sociologist Peter L. Berger and Thomas Luck­mann in 1966 (or its closely related strand social constructivism), describes how people are socialized into and main­tain socially constructed universes—from everyday habits to explicit theories. These socialization pro­cesses and acts of maintenance should be studied and brought under public scruti­ny.

  Mythologies and archetypes , as described in Jungian psychology and made famous by the mythologist Joseph Campbell, and intuitively described in Daniel Quinn’s 1992 novel Ishmael (in which a telepathic gorilla guru teaches the protagonist about the mythical and limited nature of the stories that “modern, rational man” tells himself). The idea here is that there are certain recurring mythologies, creation myths, symbols and basic ideas we all share, and that the structure of these can be elucidated and developed.

  Narrative analysis is a big thing in humanities and qualitative critical social science. Whenever anyone writes a text, for instance, they rely upon a larger underlying narrative; assumptions that may be unconscious but make up necessary struts and beams for the narrative to make sense. Such underlying narratives can be studied, mapped and compared to each other.

  Discourse analysis is a more critical, left-leaning version of the former, based upon the tradition of Foucault. This kind of method works to see underlying patterns regarding society’s power relations and whether they somehow distort how truth claims and everyday social facts are made. Hint: Usually, we’re pretty unfair and biased.

  Hermeneutics and the hermeneutic circle , is a rich tradition of interpretative methods and philosophies in which one’s own understanding of the world is viewed as affected by the act of studying a foreign world of understandings.

  Ethnomethodology (invented by Harold Garfinkel) is the study of a group’s underlying assumptions and “hinted at” shared realities that make the abbreviated forms of everyday life possible. How does someone “indicate” they are a police officer, a hipster, a professor, and so on? All of this builds upon con­cepts that are shared and always reconstructed real-time by a large number of implicit references made.

  Imaginaries , a concept coined by the Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor. You can study whole inner worlds of imagined things, and how these reflect into people’s behaviors, relations and society at large.

  Studies of cultural values , such as the World Values Survey or Hofstede’s studies of the organizational culture in different countries. This is important to see bigger structures of how people think and what they value.

  We could go on for much longer, naming more research traditions and pathways to create a shared knowledge and understanding about the world­views prevalent in society—and for creating frameworks for discuss­ing how they could be developed, spread or tweaked to become more internally co­her­ent and harmonize better with each other. A whole book could be written about it. Many books. [117]

  But let’s stay with this conclusion: There are already lots of useful meth­ods for studying the “theories of reality” prevalent in society; we just need to start doing it at scale, in a more coordinated fashion and link it to the world of politics and democratic governance. That’s all. From there on we will have begun to take the very development of culture itself into our hands. It’s easier said than done, but it’s doable.

  We will move from simply being ruled by culture, to both governing culture and being governed by it —there­by reshaping the direction of the evol­u­tion of all life on our planet.

  —

  That was Politics of Theory, so close to the kernel of political metamoder­nism. It only truly makes sense in the context of a metamodern outlook on life. Politics of Theory requires us to be ironically sincere. It is the ess­ence of always suggesting a proto-synthesis, of co­creating a meta-narra­tive.

  Six new forms of politics. Six new processes. Now let’s take a look at how all of this fits together.

  Chapter 18:

  THE MASTER PATTERN

  “The very nature of materiality is an entanglement. Matter itself is always already open to, or rather entangled with, the ‘Other.’ The intra-actively em­ergent ‘parts’ of phenomena are coconstituted. Not only subjects but also ob­jects are permeated through and through with their entangled kin; the other is not just in one’s skin, but in one’s bones, in one’s belly, in one’s heart, in one’s nucleus, in one's past and future. This is as true for electrons as it is for brittlestars as it is for the differentially constituted human […] What is on the other side of the agential cut is not separate from us—agen­tial separability is not individuation. Ethics is therefore not about right res­ponse to a radically exterior/ized other, but about responsibility and acco­untability for the lively relationalities of becoming of which we are a part.”

  Well said, dear Karen Barad, theoretical physicist, philosopher and writer of the above quoted 2007 book, Meeting the Universe Half­way , in which she marries quantum physics to critical feminism and pres­ents her view of the fundamentally relational nature of reality.

  Of course, Professor Barad says it in an intricate and nuan­ced manner, but she cuts right to the heart of what I am proposing in this book: nam­ely, that society and our perspectives of it, in large part, are one and the same thing . It is only by developing our perspective of society that we can change it, and it is only by changing society we can change ourselves in lasting and meaningful manners as society sets the limits of our pers­pecti­ves.

  And that’s what political metamodernism does; it develops our shar­ed capacity to hold, coordinate and use perspectives . That’s the Nordic ide­o­logy, thus far only vaguely emerging in the Nordic countries and a few other places. These faint glimmers will grow to sparks which light flames that spread like bonfires throughout the central nodes of the global world-system.

  In this somewhat longer chapter, we explore the “master pattern” of the Nordic ideology and how it connects to the listening society and how it can emerge in actual reality (through the process-oriented party and its prac­tice of co-develop­ment).

  Once you’ve read this chapter, you will know exactly what political meta­moder­nism is; the goal we set out at the beginning of Book One. Feel free to open a bottle of champagne.

  Let’s admit it; it’s been quite a journey. May your feet not fail you now; let them take you to the finish line.

  Resonanz, Bitte!

  At the heart of the emergence of metamodern society lies neither the object (“society”, the thing we’re chan­ging) nor the subject (“we, huma­nity”, do­ing the changing). At the heart of it all lies a transpersonal pro­cess of emer­gence. This process can be harm­onious or disharmonious; it can have grea­t­er or lesser resonance or disson­ance.

  A harmonious development of society has little to do with “harmony” as in per­fumed mass­age par­lors with relaxing elevator music—and every­thing to do with how well and how deeply all parts of society fit together, and thus how each one of us comes into existence as a sensing and breath­ing world citizen.

  It’s the universal problem of coordination, of fit . In this broken uni­verse, most of the time, most things don’t fit: people with circumstances, people with peo­ple, different parts and layers of our inner selves with each other, society with the biosphere, and so on. So we have to work to impro­ve the fit of things so that they can evolve until they don’t fit again. Ours is a broken universe, always perturbed, always striving for deeper resonan­ce—as patt­erns of cymatics (sound made visible, see chapter 7) that are broken again and again only to produce more intricate weaves.

  Resonance. This has become a growing theme among leading thinkers and res­earchers of our day, from Nancy S. Love’s 2007 book on political the­ory, Musical Dem­ocracy ; to Barbara Fredrick­son’s neurological studies of inter­personal res­onance where people’s affection and trust are shown to grow as they succ­essfully and repeatedly resonate in terms of brain activi­ty while interacting with one another (popular­
ized in her book Love 2.0 ); to Daniel Siegel’s theory of inner health and growth; to the rise of studies of complex systems and ecologies. And then there’s the parallel discussion about coher­ence , which touches upon similar themes. I could go on; it’s a thing, and it’s emerging across the sciences.

  In social science, the place to look is the German sociologist Hartmut Rosa’s magisterial 2016 work Resonanz , [118] a thick and potent book that works its way through many aspects of what it means for a human being to “reson­ate”: alone, together with others, as a part of society or even as a part of nature. One of Rosa’s main points is that, in an ever-accelerating society of global capitalism, such spon­taneous resonance becomes more difficult to achieve, and our lives become subtly impoverished as a result: His is a theory of alienation and subtle societal decay. We need to find our way back to a deeper resonance. [119]

  So—by looking differently at society, can we change it? Can we offer a perspective (or set of perspectives) to resonate with the living conditions of the internet age?

  Here’s what I believe: The fundamental pattern of our emerging trans­national society is that it is no longer modern (even if we still live in what may be called a “late modern” society); the emerging digitized post­indust­rial society is metamodern in its memetic DNA. We’re shifting from one pattern, one societal creature, to another. And as long as we conceive of society, the world, and our place in it, from a distinctly modern perspect­ive, we will have mounting disson­ance until our ears bleed. A postmodern per­spective helps us see this dissonance and perhaps remedy some of it, but it doesn’t bring harmony. In many ways, it even adds to the cacopho­ny.

  My claim is that a meta­mod­ern politics—one that takes a self-critical but develop­mental per­spec­tive on humanity and soc­iety and its institu­ti­ons—can bring us-as-society into great­er reson­ance and manifest a deeper form of soc­iety than has hither­to exist­ed: new forms of govern­ance, eco­nomy and welfare. New forms of emergent networks of divi­du­als.

  Just as with cymatics—or the structure of snowflakes, for that matter, as these form different crystals depending on temperature, etc.—you find that different developmental stages resonate differently. Now—today—we need to find the politics that resonates with the life conditions of the inter­net age.

  All of the six new forms of politics deal with actively and deliberately creating and maintaining res­onance thr­oughout society. But not only do they address the new dem­ands created by the life conditions of the globa­lized internet age; they also resonate with each other . They balance each other out. They hold each other in check.

  They constitute a pattern; the emergent master pattern , I hold, of meta­modern politics. To celeb­rate the achievements of German sociology, we can call it ze Master Pattern.

  Here it is again, in its simplified graphic form. Behold its splendor:

  Montesquieu 2.0

  My suspicious friend, as you no doubt have heard, the road to hell is paved with good intentions. We need to remember that cocreating a metamodern society is risky business.

  I have said it before, but it can hardly be overstated: Each of the six new forms of politics is, taken by themselves, deeply harmful and des­tru­ctive. Each of them will lead to worse clusterfucks than we could rea­son­ably imagine—unless they emerge, and develop, together . They are a symph­ony. Play it wrong and the phantom of the opera is let loose. Being the good guy or hav­ing the best intentions isn’t enough, or even such a big deal. You have to get it right—your understanding and co­creation of soci­ety, that is.

  This is because each of these political processes is an aspect of political metamodernism . In the environment of a distinctly modern society, each of them will mix poorly with existing institutions and cause all sorts of dev­elopmental imbalances. It’s like we’re on one cliff and need to make a dec­isive jump to the next. It’s not impossible; we just need to know what we’re doing before we take the leap.

  There’s a sequence to these six. You can start by only doing Demo­crat­iza­tion Politics, for pragmatic reasons—the world and our current society may not be ready for all at once. But before long, you must add another of the six processes, in the right sequence, until you get to Politics of Theory. Only then will you have set in motion the transformational whirlwind that is political metamodernism. And to be clear, the sequence is:

  Demo­cra­tiz­a­tion, Gemeinschaft , Existential, Emancipation, Empirical and Theory.

  The reason I didn’t tell you about all of this earlier in the book, or even in Book One, is that you first needed to know what each of the six political processes really mean, just as you needed a clear idea of the attractors ahead in terms of value memes, state formation, freedom, equality, and norms. Plus you needed to get a taste of the general metamodern philo­sophy. Now you can see that we’re going somewhere: towards higher per­sonal develop­ment in the population and a new layer of society. These two things go hand in hand.

  Think about that when you try to communicate this stuff to others; if they hear you talking about one of the forms, Existential Politics for inst­ance, they’ll most often assume you’re being naive and failing to under­stand some basics about the current state of affairs; that your idea of such a pol­itical process just isn’t realistic. They don’t see there is a new wider context within which this makes sense, and that it’s only stupid and naive when viewed from within the framework of today’s society.

  Let’s take a look at some examples of how these six forms of politics bal­ance each other out, much like Montesquieu’s separation of powers (leg­is­lative, executive and judiciary), albeit at a more indirect and abstract level—which is to be expected, as we are talking about a more complex and advan­ced stage of society. We’ll just do a general crisscross, so you get the picture, without exhausting all combinations.

  Here goes:

  If society gets “democratized” (through Democratization Politics) without there being a corresponding development of people’s sense of real, embodied Gemeinschaft , we will gain more and more intimate control over one another while failing to actually identify with and trust one an­other. We will feel that the participatory and deliberative develop­ments are not nice freedoms, but rather burdens, as we don’t really “feel it” and, frankly, don’t really care that much about common and public matters. We will get stuck in many more discussions and debates that funda­mentally stem from lacking trust as well as lacking social and emo­tional intelligence. Rather than collective intelligence, we’ll get collective stup­idity: the whole being dumber than its parts, let alone their sum. This is the highway to hell.

  If we were to cultivate an expansive Gemeinschaft Politics, this would quickly get very creepy unless there are also deeper forms of democratic governance. We don’t want groups of distant elites to redesign the intimate dynamics of our sexual relations; such deeper power must be owned by the public, mea­ning that it would require a much deeper form of democracy than is pre­s­ently available in modern societies.

  The same can definitely be said about Existential Pol­itics: It must be held in place by Empirical Politics and it must be a democratically owned, open-ended and transparent process. Just imagine the avenues of New Age woo-woo tak­ing over society with meditation, coaching, bodily practices and dumb explanations for most anything in the name of crystals, glitter and acid. I once gave a talk about Exi­stential Politics and the discussions that followed were promptly taken over by people who th­ought all citizens should be given a proper astrological reading. True story.

  Gemeinschaft Politics must also be matched by a functioning Emancipa­tion Pol­itics in order to combat the new sources of oppression stemming from a deepening Gemeinschaft . It also requires Politics of Theory so that we can develop the underlying narrative around which Gemeinschaft is cultivated. And it must be complemented by Empi­rical Politics to ensure the many ways of improving human relations actually work in measurable, repeatable and tangible
ways. Whatever we agree upon, empirical reality always slaps us back with a cascade of candor.

  For Emancipation Politics to work we must have much deeper and more embodied democratic institutions (Democratization) so that we can actually discuss and deal with all the vague and complex issues regarding boundaries of social rights and the different dimen­sions of personal integrity and privacy. And we need much higher stand­ards on the truth claims—experiential and factual—in such a discussion, which necessitates Empirical Politics.

  Empirical Politics that would make everything “evidence based” would amount to a coldhearted technocracy without much legitimacy unless it is matched by a corres­pon­ding democratization, and it would be alien­ating and dysfunctional unless it resonates with the embodied Gemein­schaft of society and the shared narr­atives about reality (Politics of Theory). You can’t have truth and empiricism without shared theories and narratives about what that means. In whatever way we may try to collectively approach the truth as a society, we will always be limited by the narratives and worldviews that we share, or don’t share, and this unfailingly leads Empirical Politics to its deeper source: Politics of Theo­ry.

  Politics of Theory, the most complex and profound of all the open-ended processes of political metamodernism, must be coordinated with the real, embodied comm­unities that exist in society ( Gemeinschaft ) and be held in check by veri­fiable factual claims (Empirical), and any attempt to force perspectives down people’s throats must be challenged and coun­teracted (Emanci­pation), and it must be reconnected to a transpar­ent democratic process (Democratization), and whatever narratives and value memes are strengthened through this process must be matched by the inner development of the population (Existential). It needs all five other processes up and running in order to emerge in a functional, heal­thy way.