Okay, ya get it? Democratization needs Gemeinschaft needs Existential needs Emancipation needs Empirical needs Politics of Theory and so on. None of these are “the most important one”, or “the most fundamental”; they are all part of one six-dimensional open-ended process—ze Master Pattern. Montesquieu 2.0.
Of course, these different processes balance each other out in a more abstract and indirect manner than do Montesquieu’s three powers. Each of them pushes for a certain form of development, and the long-term quality of each dimension is guaranteed by the other five intersecting and challenging it. If one ring rules them all, you get either totalitarianism or fragmentation—possibly sharp swings between both.
All of this rests upon a central paradox: These are six different forces that, to a significant extent, work against each other! Emancipation Politics is out to get Gemeinschaft Politics, and Existential Politics is out to get Empirical Politics and vice versa. They aren’t friends. They are enemies; they are different competing forces, just as capital and labor. The master pattern is not brought to life through one harmonizing totalizing “plan”, but through a number of processes pushing against each other, refining, challenging and defeating each other. That’s dialectics for you: Realdialektik , as we said in Book One—there is a logical, recognizable sequence to this development, and a recognizable shape to it.
This process sets in motion the generation of a self-aware and self-organizationing political culture, the hallmarks of metamodern society; a society that gazes deeper into its own structures, its own becoming, its own citizens, its own future and place in the universe. And this master pattern is self-reinforcing; it is already an attractor on the maps of history. Not because I said so, but because it makes sense.
Inherent Semiotic Structure
Semiotics, as you may know, is the study of signs and symbols and their use or interpretation. It’s about, among other things, how symbols such as words are used to reference or point to objects around us: a chair, this chair, chairs in general, the picture of a chair, the chairness of chairs, something that could serve as a chair but isn’t quite, and so forth.
One of the key findings of semiotics as a discipline is that there are certain structures, a certain form of logic, to symbols and their referenced objects that seem to hold true across languages and cultures. And an important and recurring theme within semiotics is the study of 1st , 2nd and 3rd person perspectives: I, you, he/she/it. That’s the important part here.
I claim there is an inherent semiotic structure to the master pattern that unveils a logic for why it must be this particular pattern of interrelated political processes that emerge together .
Take a look at this:
Existential Politics develops the relationship of me to myself, my subjective inner world, the relationship between 1st person and 1st person.
Gemeinschaft Politics develops the relationship between us and us, between people in general, relating to another as a “you”, in 2nd person.
Democratization Politics develops the relationship of the single “me” to society, to all other people, empowering my participation and so forth.
Emancipation Politics develops the relation of society to me, of how I have the right to be treated or not treated by society as a whole, by all of you.
Empirical Politics puts 3rd person constraints upon what forms of relations can be had between self and society (all of the four above relations between 1st and 2nd person); it is thus the relationship between 3rd person reality and the self/society relation.
Politics of Theory develops the relationship of self/society to reality as a whole , i.e. to reality in 3rd person. It is thus the relationship of all the first four processes (1st and 2nd person) to a commonly constructed 3rd person view.
It’s a bit technical, I know. But there is a simple elegance to it: We must develop the relationship to ourselves, to one another, between self and society, between ourselves and objective reality—and make certain we stay within the boundaries of objective reality while never failing to see and act upon real potentials that may always lie beyond our current conceptions thereof.
We should be wary of being seduced by simple elegance, it’s true. But sometimes, if something seemingly complicated comes to the fore in a unifying simple pattern, it means we’re onto something. And today might just be that day—the day we’re approaching a self-reinforcing attractor. Here it is again, presented schematically, ze Master Pattern:
1p means 1 st person, 2p means 2 nd person and 3p means 3 rd person, and 1&2p means both 1 st and 2 nd person and their mutual interrelations.
Existential Politics
1p -> 1p
Gemeinschaft Politics
2p -> 2p
Democratization Politics
1p -> 2p
Emancipation Politics
2p -> 1p
Empirical Politics
3p -> (1&2p)
Politics of Theory
(1&2p) -> 3p
I wasn’t joking when I put all of these six processes in a hexagon; they really do fit together. We certainly do need to develop society across all of these semiotic relations if it is to function at a new and more complex stage. You can’t cherry-pick these processes, each of them calls forth the others—just as the structures of our language and its relation to reality call forth a me, a you and a shared world of he/she/it—1st , 2nd and 3rd person perspective.
This is the underlying structure of the attractor point of metamodern politics. You see there’s an inherent symmetry to it, which makes resonance all the more likely to occur. It doesn’t mean we’re determined on a set course of history or that we must submit to the ideas in this particular book. But it does mean there is something we can and should relate to; these relations are there either way, whether we like it or not. That’s how historical attractor points work. I believe we’re looking at one.
So there has been a common thread all through this second part of the book, even though we have covered seemingly distant and only vaguely related areas. But it’s not potpourri. There is an elegant and simple order beneath the surface. Relate to it and use it creatively.
What Must Be Done
Okay, so now we’re really closing in on the point: You have six new forms of politics, and these function, over the long-term, together or not at all, and they reinforce each other and they are already emerging in society.
But who then makes it happen, and how? If you’ve been a good reader, you already know the answer to this question. Then again, everyone might need a reminder from time to time, and there are still a few blanks to fill in.
You have two main agents in this world-saving drama: 1. the metamodern aristocracy and 2. the process-oriented party , both described in Book One. The metamodern aristocracy is the transnational networks of people who understand and embody the Metamodern value meme (and the symbol-stage Metamodern G). They also happen to have the time, energy and resources available to commit themselves more or less fulltime to working for a more conscious society. They play a key role in affecting the arts, academia, media, global institutions, political discourses and industries in a metamodern direction—whether or not they explicitly think of themselves as “metamodernists” in my terms.
You can spot metamodern aristocrats among some leading people and some less noticeable “garden gnomes” (folks who stay in the background and quietly lift a great and complex burden, largely unbeknownst to most) within the process-oriented parties that are beginning to crop up in the Nordic countries. [120] The metamodern aristocracy has a relatively clear understanding of the developmental map and the attractors ahead of us. They combine high cognitive complexity with inner depth and are relatively psychologically and physically functional and healthy. But such people remain rare. It’s simply unlikely for them to emerge in great numbers in any given society.
Metamodern aristocra
ts play key roles and plant the seeds. But most of political metamodernism must be brought into being by wider movements. Such movements don’t necessarily have to be very large in terms of numbers of participants, but they have to be strong enough to be able to meaningfully participate in the political arena.
And that’s where the process-oriented political party comes in; its role is to be a vehicle for infecting the whole political spectrum with the metamodern virus. The process-oriented party gathers wider ranges of people from the triple-H population (hipsters, hackers and hippies) and what I have called “the yoga bourgeoisie”, and it acts to slowly but surely spread metamodern structures throughout the political system.
Here’s how it works.
The process-oriented party pries its way into the conventional spectrum somehow; this can happen in any number of ways: by taking over key positions within centrist or center-right or center-left parties; by taking the initiative within green movements, for example The Alternative in Denmark; by riding on a wave of radical newcomers such as the pirates (as in the Pirate Party in places like Germany, Iceland, Sweden or the Czech Republic) or feminists—or simply by forming its own party structure when the time is ready (the only example I know of being a small thing called “The Initiative” in Sweden). It is more difficult to imagine this thing happening from the basis of a classical Left party, a hardliner libertarian party, or a nationalist anti-immigration party. Somehow, the process-oriented party must be able to draw upon an accumulation of cultural capital (innovation, creativity, ability to manage relationships and draw attention, command over status symbols and so forth) and hence the interests and worldviews of the triple-H populations and what is sometimes called “the creative class”. You need to be able to build upon the dominant ideology of Green Social Liberalism and work your way towards some version of a Green Social Liberalism 2.0.
In today’s world, 2019, we have some basic elements of process-oriented politics in France’s En Marche under Emmanuel Macron, Italy’s Five Star Movement and Spain’s Podemos —but they all lack a clearly metamodern political foundation (such as an underlying theory presented in this book) and none of them act within the space of a sufficiently high value meme population. Hence, they can only be premonitions of the metamodern process-oriented party and its emergence as a transnational network at the center of the emerging global polity.
So first, the process-oriented party pries its way into politics wherever it can. From there on, it begins to transform public democratic discourse by taking the moral and rhetorical high-ground in terms of how to treat others’ arguments, how they stick to rules of relative transparency and how they commit to ideals of co-development . As we saw in Book One, co-development means you take a transpersonal, dialectical, and developmental view on politics: If you get the best possible processes for debate, dialogue and deliberation, you get the best possible politics, even as people have conflicting interests and values. It also engages more people more deeply by more systematically trying out ways for setting up meetings, idea workshops, feedback processes, deliberations and all the rest of it—hence building a versatile platform for citizen engagement.
It is hard work to get co-development right, but if you do this as your top priority, you eventually hit a nerve in every functional late-modern democratic society and the process-oriented party gains a central position.
The process-oriented party focuses primarily on the political process and on keeping very high standards of behavior. That doesn’t win mass votes and quick landslide elections, but it makes it become the most trusted and respected of all parties—or, seen differently, the least hated by all other positions on the spectrum. It does not maximize quantitative success (number of votes), but becomes part and parcel of the most central nodes of society—respected by public actors, industries and civil society.
The party branches out, working within these different categories. It gets to the center of the network of power and it keeps up very high standards of behavioral conduct, having solidarity with the perspectives of others.
“The center of the network of power”, aye? What does that mean? It doesn’t mean that political metamodernism takes a “centrist” position. It means, because it has solidarity will all other perspectives and the people who embody them, and their partial truths—and because it works deliberately to co-develop transpartially with all of them, and because it attracts higher average cognitive stage folks who are more able to do so—political metamodernism has the shortest average distance to all other positions . It is closer to socialism than the conservatives, closer to conservatism than the ecologists, closer to ecologism than the libertarians, closer to liberalism than the social democrats, and even closer to the political fringes than the center and vice versa. It is not the most popular of positions, but it is the least hated . It is thus, in a sense, the opposite of cheap-scoring populism—and yet it can approach and deal with populism more easily than does conventional centrism and liberalism. Populism sounds exciting but is boring in terms of its potentials. Co-developmental politics sounds boring, even goes out of its way to look harmless, but it is truly radical and transformative.
So the question is not to have one strong relation or alliance. It is to have many weak ties , and to compete by having the most such weak ties. In network terms, you thereby reach the highest centrality ; you are more connected than all the other positions. And as you have co-developmental ties and processes with all other positions, you also gain higher “gravity”, i.e. you pull them a little more than they pull you, not least because you always have more contacts to draw upon.
The centrality and gravity of power is most concentrated to “bridges” in the network. And as metamodernism is itself often an expression of reintegrations of the three spheres of life that modernity differentiated—the professional, the political and the personal—this also means that the people it attracts are more likely to have contacts across various economic, political and cultural spheres of life. This also facilitates the concentration of power into the hands of political metamodernism.
Who would vote for such a party? In Appendix B in this book under the section titled “Too Dumb for Complex Societies?” you can read how IQ scores tend to line up neatly along the axis of the value memes represented by the political parties. If a co-developmental party shows up, the same pattern will show: You will get the smartest and highest stage constituency, and you will integrate them in a more multidimensional manner, meaning that your metamodern movement gains a disproportionately large degree of agency in politics, media, public discourse, industries, academia and civil society.
And it can and will attract people with higher cultural capital, which is itself taking an increasingly dominant position within society and the economy. You get the triple-H population and creative class on your side, combined with the higher stage populations.
Ideally, such a process-oriented party should be able to balance the “liberal” minds with the “conservative” ones in terms of what people are attracted to. As you may know, it has been shown and widely discussed during the last ten years or so, that people’s personalities are at least partly genetically determined. Personality types have different biological blueprints, gearing the levels of sensitivity to negative emotions, the degree of empathy, one’s orderliness and so forth. And these different blueprints turn out to be strong predictors of people being leftwing “liberals” or rightwing “conservatives”. Liberal minds tend to really dislike unfairness and restraints to personal freedom and creativity, whereas conservative minds tend to really dislike disorder, crime, cheating and loafing, wastefulness, and so forth. Liberal is high openness on the Big Five personality scale, and conservative is high conscientiousness. This has been said by more people the last ten years than I could name, perhaps most famously by Jonathan Haidt.
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p; So even if you can see a good ten points of average IQ difference between the UK Greens and nationalists, [121] for example, this doesn’t mean that being more conservative in terms of personality is in itself correlated with being less intelligent; in fact, there have been many studies to suggest there is no significant difference. The essential thing to do is to marry the high stage conservatives to the high stage liberals. This isn’t so easy to do, as the “triple-H populations” from where you draw the members and whose interests you represent often have very liberal minds, which skews the recruitment and alienates the conservative types. But orderliness and creativity fit together; they need each other—especially in metamodern politics. If you get this mix right, you will have a very powerful potion.
What do you do with that power? You introduce “stealable” ideas, and do so by “show it, don’t tell it”. You start advancing the six new forms of politics, one by one. First, you say you want to revitalize democracy (as En Marche , Five Stars, Podemos, Pirates and others have already been doing, only without much of a theory behind it or a larger perspective), showing everyone that Democratization Politics is a thing. As this is a powerful and competitive idea in late modern societies with semi-bankrupted political party systems, others will follow suit. Some of the Green, centrist and leftwing parties will steal your ideas and find their own twist on them, which is fine. Then you go on to Gemeinschaft Politics—and others will try to steal it, such as social democrats, center-right conservatives or even nationalists who seek to revive obsolete forms of social integration. Once the other parties have stolen this idea and compete about having the best Gemeinschaft Politics, the process will have taken hold in society… at which point you introduce Existential Politics, only to see it stolen by Christian democrats or equivalents, making it their hallmark.
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