Then Emancipation Politics, and libertarians rejoice at their new-found weapons. Then Empirical Politics, and serious governing parties take after. And then you introduce Politics of Theory, and you assert your own position at the center of society’s deliberation about its own fundamental assumptions about itself and reality, forcing all other parties to deepen their discussions about what they really believe and why, and deepening their deliberation with the process-oriented party.
Other parties will steal not only your policies, but also your co-developmental party structures, and hence their political culture will shift and collective intelligence of governance will increase across the board.
You will then have introduced all the six processes into the political spectrum as a whole, and from there on, the six forces will be competing with each other and the process-oriented party will be at the center of this dialectical development, at the heart of the master pattern. The metamodern political program will have infected all of society with its political virus; it’s a benevolent hostile take-over. And the listening society grows slowly from these forces pushing against one another: We will find a thousand new empirically sound and affordable ways of advancing people’s inner development, their relations and empowerment as citizens.
That is what must be done.
More Sinister Plots
Once all of these processes are in place, we are on our way to cultivating a listening society; this society will be much more efficient at spurring (in)dividual development and increasing collective intelligence, and hence it will be highly competitive in the world economy. It will have an easier time attracting some of the highest value meme populations, gathering more cultural and economic capital than other regions. Because that’s what all of these processes do; they improve people’s lives and their relations in profound and far-reaching ways.
To make metamodern politics happen, you don’t have to ask nicely. You just have to outcompete the crude politics of modern society, on its own terms. Hence, other regions of the world will need to compete by trying to copy some of the processes—and this embodied know-how of metamodern society will in itself become an important export.
These processes naturally require decades to play out and properly affect and saturate society. Hence only people who will be able to work for decades long projects will be truly motivated to seriously partake in the development. The modern welfare state took a good 80 years to build, cultivate and refine. The listening society might take just as long.
According to the late adult development psychologist and organizational theorist Elliot Jacques, people have different “time spans of discretion”, i.e. the longest timeframe for a task they can undertake independently, without supervision. High stage folks tend to have longer inner time horizons, at least if we believe Jacques. So we will see a lot of high-stage folks involved in the process-oriented party, and the recruitment base will grow as society becomes better at generating conditions for such people to emerge. And from there on you have a new society, one that is able to resolve what today’s society cannot, and voilà —relative utopia. And yes, that does include a world “saved” and oceans of human and animal suffering and degradation being prevented and a few ecstatic dances and prances at the highest reaches of human freedom.
You see it? There’s an attractor point here; a bunch of interrelated processes that potentially reinforce and resonate with each other in a new way, a way that is different from modern society. And yet they are highly competitive—not in the short run, but in the long run.
Remember how I half-joked in the introduction to Book One that the metamodern aristocracy must “take over the world”? Now you see it; now you see our sinister plot. So it’s true—just in a very abstracted and “informed naivety” kind of way.
The good news is it doesn’t even require you to do anything evil. All you do is act very politely and be super-nice to your political “opponents” and co-develop the political realm. Learn from them, listen, really try their arguments out and work on getting a more solid grounding for your own. If you fail to act transpartially and co-developmentally, you wreck the plan. You can even be entirely transparent about the whole “hostile take-over” plan!
In some ways all of this is more than a little byzantine and Leninist: the elaborate plot of a small vanguard, and so on. But on the other hand it is entirely non-violent, requires no coups, no lies, no deceptions, no hypocrisy, no manipulation, no low blows in debates. It requires highly ethical and impeccable behavior, and honesty about one’s own will to (transpersonal) power. That’s all.
Why do you get to be part of this? I suppose some of the answer lies in the fact that you actually chewed your way through almost twenty chapters on pretty dense theory—and theory means “seeing”. Now you see where we’re going, or at least where I believe we are. If you can coordinate this stuff with your own life, I guess you’re part of the journey—in a big or small way.
So now you have a map and a plan to travel it. But before we burst into clamor, let’s give a word of caution. For certain, this is a sketchy plan that only works in countries relatively similar to the Nordic ones, and you will need to adjust and change the plan as you go along—co-develop it, that is.
But it certainly is better than no plan at all, don’t you think? And you haven’t heard such a plan anywhere else, have you? That’s the metamodern mindset for you: informed naivety, putting a proto-synthesis out and taking it from there. A sound plan, or a minimally un-sound plan—or perhaps even a sinister plot—that needs to be revised, is better than no plan at all. Take the plan, use it, and revise it.
That is, ultimately, what must be done.
Simmering Micro Movements
In late modern societies you can actually see all of the six new forms of politics cropping up already in different miniscule shapes and forms, like little fungi in the forest. If you know where to look, you can spot them.
Because each of the new forms of politics is an attractor point, they are also low-hanging fruits; i.e. people are likely to come up with ideas that point in these directions and start projects here and there. Hence you get a constant simmering as these micro movements come and go at an accelerating pace.
The reason the micro movements can only ever remain small but promising projects at the fringes of society is that they are all based on only one of the six forms of politics. They all lack a metamodern political theory to back them up, and they all work without ze Master Pattern. In other words, they are all left to play according to the rules and limitations set by the surrounding modern society. They don’t have a plan and a roadmap so as to hack their way past these limitations, and hence they cannot gain real power, even if some of them have good ideas.
A minority of the micro movements do, admittedly, have a hold of two of the new forms of politics, but that is still quite insufficient. What the micro movements can do, however, and which is exceedingly important, is to more generally prepare the ground for political metamodernism to emerge. When they do their projects that never really take off, at least they gather invaluable experience for their participants, and at least they spread some early versions of metamodern ideas. They don’t simmer in vain; they simmer with potential for a new society. They are a set of complex forces that can be harnessed and coordinated by the activists of political metamodernism.
Let’s give some descriptions and examples of such micro movements. If you’ve been in and around grassroots activism and political or civil society startups, you will have noticed them around—perhaps you will even have joined or started one of them. Once you see the pattern, you will be able to spot them and see how they fit into the larger master pattern.
Democratization Politics has been recognized as a potential by all of those little political parties and civil society groups who seek to radicalize democratic governance. Wikipedia counts 38 of them worl
dwide at the time of writing; Sweden has three. You will notice all the direct democracy parties, often with creative ideas about how power could be more equally distributed; far from all of them support the idea of a crude direct democracy. There are also a bunch of innovative IT companies working to strengthen democracy by means of online communication, as I mentioned earlier, and there are people working very eagerly with methods for democratizing organizations.
Gemeinschaft Politics is prevalent among the many volunteering-based groups of civil society—and some professionals within public social work—who work to create “meeting places”, “melting pots” for the cultural integration of immigrants, dialogue clubs for common issues, fora for dealing with cultural traumas, and so forth. These groups understand you can work with Gemeinschaft itself, with community itself, and that you can repair it, upgrade it, create new social settings and do relational maintenance. In terms of political parties, you have the Swedish Feminist Party, which deals specifically and primarily with issues of identity politics, and hence with finding ways to develop everyday relations between people.
Existential Politics in rudimentary forms exists within a lot of spiritual circles, even with spiritual political parties such as Die Violetten in Germany (started 2001, some 700 members), Enhet (“Unity”) in Sweden, Integrale Politik in Switzerland, Partij voor Mens en Spirit (Party for Human and Spirit) in the Netherlands. You have these little gatherings in other countries as well. They emphasize the importance of spiritual and inner development, but do so of course without the larger metamodern framework. They also tend to be linked to peace movements. Millenarianism, magical thinking and what I in Book One called “the magic residual” are rampant here—and I mean rampant. And game denial reaches extreme levels. These groups generally attract what I have called “light pomos”, people high on depth and state but low on complexity and code. So know that this force exists, but don’t get too cozy with these folks; they tend to be nice guys in the not so flattering sense. Besides these New Age inspired groups, you have movements like Syntheism, and to some extent the Burning Man Festival community, which seek to explore and co-create new forms of spirituality and existential development. Also, you see civil sphere movements here and there for philosophy and/or meditation in schools, which is promising.
Emancipation Politics, or an early form thereof, exists within the pirate parties, as these specifically guard the rights and integrity of (in)dividuals vis-à-vis governments and big corporations. They fight against excessive surveillance, creepy control and for personal informational security. You are probably familiar with the axis of political thinking dominant among hackers and Silicon Valley people: libertarianism, anarcho-capitalism and transhumanism. All of these share a libertarian ethos and are in some way on to what could be called Emancipation Politics in the metamodern sense.
Empirical Politics shows up among all those science and “evidence based politics” parties. You have one of them in the UK (established in 2010 by quantum physicist and science writer Michael Brooks), one in Australia, there have been beginnings of such parties in Sweden, there is a Partei der Vernuft (“Party of Reason”) in Germany from 2009—and I am certain there are more of them around. On a more promising note, within the legal profession and academia you have the strand called “therapeutic jurisprudence” seeking to find empirical support for desirable outcomes for the legal justice system, which is also arguably a kind of Empirical Politics.
The only thing we have to struggle a bit to find as a micro movement is Politics of Theory—and this shouldn’t surprise us as it is the most abstract and least intuitive of the six new forms. (It was also the one I thought of last. If it weren’t for semiotics I would have missed it.) And yet, it is the most distinctly metamodern form of politics. You can find it in networks and think tanks which have as their explicit goal to change the meta-narrative of society. Except for my own work at Metamoderna, I can think of two such contexts: the Ekskäret Foundation in Sweden (they have a private island where they gather people to talk about the future of society) and Perspectiva in the UK (they, especially the UK chess Grand Master Jonathan Rowson, write about spirituality and personal development connected to e.g. climate crisis). Both of these are associated with the Swedish entrepreneur and author Tomas Björkman.
Anyway, now hopefully you can see these micro movements cropping up across society—with increasing frequency as they are all responses to attractor points ahead of us. I am sure you can add more examples. For instance, basic income movements tend to have significant overlaps with some of these, as does the Dutch animal rights party, Partij voor de Dieren . And then there are a bunch of interesting Green movements who have some common themes with these dimensions.
The micro movements show up with the greatest regularity, and in higher quality versions, around “progressive” countries such as the Nordic ones. And they do so in tandem with the shifting political landscapes of such societies where the receding classes and parties of modernity leave room for new and more deliberative and co-developmental politics to emerge. This is part of the structural emergence of the Nordic ideology.
The secret here is, of course, not to get stuck in the partial narratives of any of these micro movements—quite a few of them are steeped with glaringly incompetent folks on the fringes, so don’t gorge on the mushrooms. Rather, the secret is to be able to see them from the bird’s eye view offered by the master pattern. When you go ahead to introduce political metamodernism, others will try to reduce your project to one of the six dimensions and some will try to pin the failures of any of the micro movements onto you. Don’t let them distract you.
This, my dearest comrade, is non-linear politics . We’re not going from A to B in a straight line; we’re playing the field of potential to let things emerge. The task is to draw upon these micro movements and find ways to channel them and coordinate them—to play strategically to align all these forces with the emergence of a metamodern society .
Trouble Shooting / FAQ
Okay—by now we’ve got it down. But new questions and problems of course pop up as our understanding grows. Some of these would require longer discussion, but we need to keep it brief in order to close this second part of the book. I’ll just go at it.
“Statism! Ah, my good Dr. Freinacht, interesting ideas, but all of this is within a statist paradigm (you think of changing society through conventional state-based politics), and the state is losing its grip and we need to think in non-state terms! Facebook and Google are beating the CIA! Besides [adds the libertarian or anarcho-capitalist] the state is evil, as it is based upon a monopoly of violence!”
Good point. With the emergence of the internet, the truly global markets, increasing freedom of movement, the growth of megacities with very powerful administrations, global super-corporations, an exponential increase of transnational NGOs, and a thickening layer of supra-national structures—not to mention crypto currencies and other applications of blockchain technologies—it is understandable that some people see the state itself as withering away. Of course, it is well known that the predictions of political sociology and libertarian economics from the 1990s concerning the end of the state were exaggerated. Rather, what we are seeing is the transition to a world in which the state takes a less dominant and more partial role in governance and the coordination of human agency. There is still plenty that can and should be done through conventional politics.
That being said, I’d like to stress again that even if other means of action-coordination take over and prove to be more dominant in the coming period, they still have to deal with all the six dimensions. So whether it’s corporate or federal or supra-national or local or pertaining to the civil sphere or “pure market relations”, you can still apply these six dimensions and coordinate them and try to make certain they balance out. The patte
rn holds either way; you just have to adapt it to the forms of governance that turn out to be dominant in the future.
But the state isn’t the hero of this story and neither is any other specific mode of governance. The new heroes are the transnational networks or tribes of people who subscribe to metamodern values and ways of thinking—the metamodern aristocracy and the process-oriented party are but two examples. What the Nordic ideology is getting at is not for a paternal or motherly state to take care of us and wipe our behinds. What it does is to create a solid background or generative foundation for people to swarm . For networks to swarm.
Yes, swarm. Just as the micro movements are popping up, so are literally thousands of fascinating projects, with such a diversity and complexity that we can hardly imagine it. These are showing up because there is a rich plethora of networks of people across the world who share interests and find compatible skills to do things together—often for other reasons than monetary gain.
These self-organizing swarms of people—and the larger super-structure of interacting and intersecting swarms, which is in part shaped by the new dynamics of the internet—these transpersonal entities of agency are the heroes of our time. In the last instance, this rich multiplicity of agile collaborating human beings is most likely to respond flexibly and accurately to the multidimensional challenges that the world faces, and most likely to be able to see the great potentials. Politics, for all its power, is always constrained by the many. Smaller groups of like-minded and compatible people are not . So whatever we can do to facilitate the emergence and agency of the networked swarms, we should do. The listening society, even in its early forms, empowers people to partake in such shared projects that come and go. Such projects, in turn, strengthen the potential for all of the six new forms of politics, not least through the accumulation of micro movements.
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