People stuck in the modern ideologies all resist the Nordic ideology : people with conservative minds think it’s almost identical to socialism (it’s not), leftists consider it a cheap sellout and a betrayal—a kind of neoliberalism—libertarians find it overbearing with state control and downright totalitarian, anarchists think it’s mainstream centrist liberalism, centrists that it is dangerous fringe extremism, and nationalists see it as an radical form of dehumanizing globalism. Ecologists come a little closer; some of them can see what it’s really about, but most of them just think it’s weird and that it focuses suspiciously much on human happiness and too little on poisoned creeks and acid rain.
And yet, all of them also find metamodern practices such as co-development, process-focus and deliberation to be signs of weakness and wishy-washy. They are not. And they find ironic sincerity to be either naive and harmless, or vague and insincere. It is not. But we can let them think so because it makes it difficult to see us coming. They won’t know what hits them before it’s too late.
Political metamodernism touches upon and comes strangely close to all of the abovementioned positions. But since it is not entirely identical to any of these, it does provoke allergies in all of them. Yet, metamodernism provokes somewhat less resistance than each of these do to each other. The winning point is, as we have seen, that political metamodernism is closer to all the other positions than they are to each other. For instance, if we look at the “space” within which all of the modern positions exist, political metamodernism can move in an extra dimension, and hence “fold through” the conventional ideological spectrum. The result, then, is that metamodernism has by far the shortest average distance to all other points in the modern ideological space. In the “conceptual space” of modern ideology, political metamodernism has the highest centrality. And that’s where the power is.
So even if the Nordic ideology has few explicit followers, it is still, on average, the least despised, and thereby capable of gaining the greatest centrality and gravity within all power networks: political, economic and cultural. The emerging Nordic ideology has as its ultimate adversary not any specific modern ideology; they are only stepping stones to get to the real enemy: modern society itself.
The modern ideologies all shout their messages and practical concerns at their best—but under their breaths, they are all whispering chants for the invocation of the Nordic ideology. There is a deeper resonance that chimes between the partial truths represented by each of the ideologies, subtle and hardly noticeable, but quite pervasive. Listen hard, and you can hear it: It is a requiem for modern ideologies and a hymn for the advent of metamodern relative utopia.
Yet, the task is, as we have seen, to beat all of these ideologies at their own game, to infect them with bits and pieces of political metamodernism so that metamodern society emerges through the interactions of all the different modern (and postmodern) forces. Our sinister plot is, as shown earlier, to sneak up on all of them and “remote control” them in a decentralized, co-created and dialectical fashion until they’re all caught in the metamodern master pattern and thus begin to work towards the attractor points of deeper equality and higher freedom that come from a listening society through the tragic dance between dividuation and integration.
And because we, the metamodernists, have the arguments and ethics on our side and the historical attractors are working in our direction, we don’t need to be secretive about anything. We just need to communicate sensitively and effectively.
That doesn’t mean you automatically win all debates and that there is nothing to learn from your modern interlocutors; it just means that on average, over time, we win out. We can lose battles, even wars—but we need to make sure to win the world war. Many iterations later, memetic evolution lays its verdict and condemns the statistical losers to death. In this memetic game of likelihoods, you win or you die.
The aim of this subtle memetic revolution is, by extension, to stage a hijacking of the democratic parliamentary party system under the non-linear and co-developmental leadership of the minority process-oriented party. Political metamodernism is supposed to infect and eventually kill off the host ideologies. This is why the Nordic ideology is a sworn enemy of liberal parliamentary democracy—it seeks to transcend the modern divisions (and of course, this will land us in new ones).
Since the Nordic ideology works to transform the basic institutions of society, it is also an enemy of modern society itself. Kind and transparent as we must remain, we must unapologetically crush our memetic enemies; crush the defenders of liberal democracy in its current form.
Hey, if modernity and postmodernism didn’t want to die, they shouldn’t have given birth to us. [124]
At the same time, bound by metamodern ethics, [125] metamodern activists work hard to have solidarity with the embodied carriers of all perspectives and to acknowledge the suffering that memetic evolution entails. People aren’t actually your enemies; they are just folks invested in outdated memes.
Power and kindness, both. Both-and. Ruse and tenderness, guns and roses. Just remember that applying “both-and” isn’t throwing around a catch-phrase; it takes life-long commitment and relentless practice. It takes a painful stretching of the mind and soul. And it is unavoidable that we often fail at it.
Let’s go on. Starting with socialism, we shall now solemnly spank the modern ideologies. The key here is that each of them must be beaten on its own terms . This is exceedingly important. The better you are at taking the perspectives of others—and empathize with them—the greater your ability to defeat them. Whoever has mastered the most perspectives when they die, wins.
You can’t win over the fascists by telling them they’re evil—they’ll be flattered and take it as a badge of their edginess and toughness! Why do you think they got those bad tattoos in the first place? You can’t go after the libertarians accusing them of being elitist and selfish; they’ll smirk and enjoy thinking they’re John Galt. Nor can you tell ecologists and socialists they’re being naive; they’ll take it as a validation of the purity of their souls and poetically flip a few more pages of Rousseau. You need to show each of them that, unless they accept metamodernism, they will end up being the opposite of what they identify with.
You kill fascists by revealing their inner weakness (as intellectuals have done since the Second World War); you destroy socialists by revealing they aren’t really egalitarian—and you bring down liberalism by showing that it’s authoritarian. Relatively speaking.
You must show the adherents of each of the modern ideologies that if they accept premise and goal A, they must also accept conclusion B. In this case that conclusion is political metamodernism. If you want to be a good socialist, you have to accept that a listening society is far more egalitarian than anything Marx or Lenin ever came up with. If you want to be a freedom-loving libertarian, you have to accept that the Nordic ideology holds far greater prospects for human liberty than Nozick’s imagined minimal state or Ayan Rand’s John Galt land could ever deliver. And if you want to be a tough masculine badass, nothing is more potent and explosive than being a die-hard metamodernist.
That’s Realdialektik for you; an attractor point. All roads lead to Rome—not by the triumph of the will, but by the triumph of dialectical reasoning.
Roll up your sleeves.
More Egalitarian than Socialism
The fundamental goal of all authentic strands of socialism is to attain shared (and fairly distributed) ownership of “the means of production”. This can and should lead to democratic control over said means of production. But this state of affairs is not quite the goal-in-and-of-itself; it is merely a means to achieving a higher socialist goal: a classless society that is fair, equitable, and in which everybody has what they need for a secure and dignified existence. The goal is to enact politics with solidarity in order to bring
forth a society that is equitable, the structures of which make possible wide and deep solidarity between all people, which in turn emancipates the human soul.
The idea of socialism took root in the wake of capitalist industrialization, although the word originated as a derogatory term already in the mid-1700s as Catholic theologians criticized the legal philosophies of Grotius and Pufendorf who had the insolence to think that law should be based upon the relationships between people rather than divine revelation. Such “socialists” wanted a societal order defined by human relations. [126] And modern socialism echoes some of that original meaning: Socialists want the economy—and thus everyday life—not to be ruled by any blind, mechanical system, but by the relations between sensing and thinking human beings brought into benign relation with one another.
There are, naturally, more forms of socialist thought and practice than we could possibly deal with in this context—from Proudhon to Marx, to Bernstein’s democratic reformism, to Rosa Luxemburg, to Western humanist Marxism and Freudo-Marxism and their “New Left” and so on. But it is safe to say that anything falling outside of the above delineated boundary (in regard to the means of production and equality) is not “socialism” in any meaningful sense of the word. By going to the root shared by all socialists, we can compare socialism as a general category to the Nordic ideology.
The socialist goal is an equitable society, not merely in terms of opportunity, but also of outcome. Because so much of society is always and forever bound up with the situated social relations between people, it is unavoidable to also seek to level out the outcomes in terms of income and wealth—otherwise the privileges tend to stack up over time: wealthy family dynasties, economic classes, cartels and monopolies, corporations that flee from social responsibility and taxation, and so on. So if you don’t care about outcome, you will end up reproducing inequality of opportunity as well. And only if people are reasonably equal can they resist exploitation, and only if they resist being exploited can they be free and fully human.
And right there is the killing point, my dear comrade. If you have the goal to create a fair and equal society, you must also support equalities of outcome to some extent.
Can you get equality of outcome without a developed Gemeinschaft Politics? No, because there will be so much social, emotional and physiological inequality left, and these will reproduce new forms of inequality. The “classless” society in an economic sense is a very superficial utopia: Most of the intimate and hurtful inequality remains, and the stakes cannot be fair by any means. Inequality is economic, social, physiological, emotional, ecological and informational—and all of these are interconnected. Only metamodern politics can address inequality at that level of complexity. Without it, you will never get a classless society.
And even if “everybody” would own the means of production together and manage them democratically, this process would always be limited by whatever form democracy takes. If the mode of governance is not itself a process of incremental and self-critical development, you will always be stuck with the power relations inherent to that particular system. So without Democratization Politics, you cannot actually have socialism in any real sense.
Both Gemeinschaft and Democratization Politics require the other four new forms of politics to function. Thus, you simply cannot call yourself a socialist unless you also accept political metamodernism. All said and done, the Nordic ideology is more egalitarian than socialism.
Where does this leave the Left in its existing modern and postmodern forms? If political metamodernism charges ahead and becomes the standard bearer of a more embodied and deeper equality—connecting specifically to the emerging postindustrial and digitized economy—what purpose does the residual old Left have to play?
To understand this we may look at the role of Christianity during the 19th century. There can be little doubt that the fundamental “game change” shifts of this period were made possible by the emergence of a distinctly modern society: abolition of slavery, protests against rapacious exploitation in the colonies, the expansion of suffrage, the early forms of welfare. But—and this is a big but—radical born-again Christianity played a pivotal role in the mobilization of social movements and moral demands during this period. Hence, you can see how the morally driven “utopian” movements of the former metameme (postfaustianism) finally managed to reach the “low hanging fruit” that came into reach by the maturation of the next metameme—in this case modern society. The born-again Christians and Pentecostals were hardly the “most enlightened” or “most modern” citizens of their time; but they emphasized relatively simple and specifically moral and collective demands that had now finally become realistic and achievable. They weren’t fans of Darwin, and still they had this progressive role to play in history.
That is the future role of socialism and the Left more generally in an increasingly metamodern world-system: being a source of popular moral mobilization within metamodern society. A lot of the things postmodern intellectuals and social movements may have wanted to achieve—animal rights, levelling-out international terms-of-trade, protecting the unemployed from marginalization and stigma—can become much more feasible in a society that is taking steps towards metamodern institutions, not least because it will make the average value meme and norm systems develop more rapidly. We may perhaps not be looking at a “socialism in the 21st century” as many like to imagine (i.e. viewing the Left as the key force in organizing and governing society in the period ahead of us), because it will be outcompeted by political metamodernism. And it will be torn by the populist Right and new versions of conservatism from the other side, and it has no present-day real-world governments to point at as positive examples. But just as Christianity was dealt its fatal blows during the 19th century and still managed to be morally transformative, so can the Left be a stepping stone for moral transformations in the 21st century.
More Liberal than Liberalism
I will lump together classical liberalism , libertarianism and neo-liberalism under one banner, much like with the many strands of socialism above. For the sake of convenience I’ll talk about “liberalism”, even if this in an American context tends to just mean “left-leaning” which of course isn’t what I mean here.
So the fundamental goal of liberalism is to maximize the freedom of the individual. It is hard enough for each of us to figure out how we should lead our lives and what is good for us and our kids—let alone know what might be good for others. Hence, it is unwise to put too much of your life into my hands and vice versa . This means that the realm of the public and the political should not unnecessarily infringe upon the private sphere and the voluntary exchanges on the market. Rather, government should be stretched only so far that it guarantees our protection from one another and ensure that we don’t breach our freely entered agreements: As long as you don’t do anything that directly limits or harms me, you should be free to do it.
There is, to a considerable extent, a trade-off between how much should be decided upon politically and how much each of us can decide for ourselves. For instance, if you have high taxes, the political system controls a large share of human activity, and with lower taxes more of that decision power lands in the hands of individuals. Generally speaking, individuals will be more empowered in the latter case, and this fosters responsibility, innovation, hard work, independent thinking and economic growth, which in turn increases individual freedom. Such freedom should also have as few legal restrictions as possible; you need very good arguments if you want to use the monopoly of violence to threaten people to comply with some rule.
What do you say, will that do as a general idea of liberalism? From John Locke and John Stuart Mill, to Hayek, to Ayn Rand, to Milton Friedman, to Robert Nozick (before he changed his mind) and Reaganomics—the above position would be shared by all of them.
Th
e easiest way to defeat liberalism is by attacking its core supposition: the individual. The moment we are shown that it is a surface phenomenon and that the real unit of analysis is the dividual or the transindividual, and that freedom must ultimately be defined in transpersonal terms, we can see that liberalism must be subjected to metamodernism: Ultimately, you can never be free unless the people around you develop well, because their development affects not only your choices in every moment of your life, but even the degrees of freedom by which you can think, feel, and be in the world. We co-emerge, and freedom is a social category that functions through different emotional regimes.
Libertarians gather around the hacker and startup communities of Silicon Valley and the East Coast of the US—they don’t set up shop in Somalia or Afghanistan, where there is indeed no state power to limit “individual freedom”. It’s just you and the desert (and a few warlords). A dynamic market ultimately rests upon a strong monopoly of violence that provides enough stability for freedom to prosper. Security is a service, and the state is an efficient provider of just that. As Max Weber noted so long ago, states and markets develop together.
But that, of course, is cheating. Libertarians and classical liberals won’t give up their belief in the individual anytime soon, so in order to beat them on their own terms you must show them that the maximization of individual liberty cannot be done without political metamodernism. And that’s perfectly doable, too.
The weakest spot is, unsurprisingly perhaps, the role of the state. As much suspicion as liberalism harbors against the state, it ultimately always depends upon it. Not only must there be a state to guarantee the safety of individuals against the violence or oppression of one another, it must also warrant legally binding agreements and protect property rights. No capitalist market is possible without at least some minimum state action. And if such a state does exist it will always have to make priorities, which will always limit at least some freedoms of some individuals.
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