Nordic Ideology

by Hanzi Freinacht

  Your effective value meme affects whether you, for instance, consider the environmental degradation of the planet a primary concern, or believe foreign religions are the greatest threat to your existence. It affects whe­ther you believe transnational solutions should be imple­mented to add­ress the dire issues of our time, such as migration, global poverty, and finance, or consider increasing the military bu­dgets of your own nation the best way to manage international relations. It affects the extent of your care and consideration towards others; the number of people and other sentient beings you include in your circle of solidarity. While people sub­scribing to higher value memes tend to be more concerned with the well-being of all humans, in all countries, no matter their back­ground, people at lower value memes tend to have a much smaller circle of solidarity, usually those within their own country, often only of a certain kind, and rarely non-human animals unless they’re considered pets. And learning from the communist experiment, solidarity cannot be enforced from the top; it cannot be taught, and you certainly cannot force anyone to be solidary. True solidarity can only emerge spon­taneously and voluntarily from people’s hearts and minds.

  Our values are derived from our level of psychological development and play a critical role in the way societies evolve. It sets the limits for how far society can progress, and it determines how well our societies function at the current technological level.

  Please note, however, that the effective value meme is not considered an overall stage of cognition that people are functioning in accordance with. With effective value meme I simply mean the values of a particular stage of societal development, such as modern or postmodern, towards which a per­son tends to gravitate the strongest. This is not estimated by the com­plexity or depth of a person’s thought, but by the values they ex­press sincere devotion towards.

  This means, for example, that if a person considers gender equality, environmen­talism, and animal rights more important than economic growth, freedom of consumer choice and protection of private property, then they can be said to be gravitating towards the postmodern value meme. If a person expresses faith in a certain set of values, and if it can be confirmed with minimum doubt that these are truthfully what the person believes in, then that is their “effective value meme”.

  Every society has a kind of demo­graphic where diff­erent percentages of the population can be said to man­ifest and em­body different “value memes”, each being more or less pro­gressive—each corres­ponding to different economic and societal environments. This changes over time, usually moving towards higher value memes as society gets more com­plex.

  The different value memes can be seen as kinds of political-psych­o­log­ical sta­ges of development. Larger and more complex societies require high­er value memes in the population in order to function and be sust­ain­able. The value memes aren’t really an exact measure of how a person is and how she thinks, but there are certainly clear differences between people of different value memes.

  For instance, today’s Swedish population (generally believing in demo­cracy, human rights, secular science, fair debate, gender equality and self-expr­e­ssion) have a “higher” average value meme than today’s Afghani popula­tion (man­­ifesting more tradition­alist values, particularistic religion, purity and sin, and em­pha­sizing sur­vival over self-expression).

  When a traditional society modernizes and people get wealthier, happ­ier and more educated, the majority of the population will usu­ally advan­ce to higher value memes in a manner of a few gener­ations. So there is a connection between prolonged periods of pol­itical sta­bility and inclu­sive econ­omic growth, and higher average value memes within a pop­ulation.

  As I said, higher value memes generally correspond to the functioning and needs of larger and more complex societies. For instance, being a fun­da­mentalist Christian nationalist who thinks a woman’s chastity is more imp­or­tant than her education hardly helps in creating a sustainable order in today’s hypercomplex, interconnected, increasingly postindus­trial glo­bal soc­iety. The Postfaustian, or “traditionalist”, value meme and its moral intuit­ions are sim­ply not com­patible with the actual systems of today’s emer­ging global society.

  The dynamic here is fairly simple and intuitive in a way. If a society is doing well and the games of everyday life become milder, fairer and more forgiving, people have the luxury to think in more universalistic, far-sight­ed, nuanced and complex manners. If people get the opportunity to spend years educating themselves and freely following their interests, they also explore more complex ideas and values. They can “afford” it, so to speak, and this generally spurs psychological and cultural development.

  If things go poorly, people tend to retreat to being less trust­ing, men­tally hinging upon simpler and smaller worlds and circles of soli­darity—naturally emphasizing short- or medium-term surv­ival and avoiding per­sonal risks. As we discussed earlier, the development of society always brings with it new challenges and back­lashes, new nasty pro­blems. Hence, the negative sides of societal development towards grea­ter prosper­ity and complexity periodically cause pre­ss­ures that decr­ease the aver­age value meme in a population—as has been apparent with recent pop­ulist, anti-immigration uprisings in the West.

  It is the people with the higher value memes who will tend, on average, to create and sustain institutions and practices that su­pport (make poss­ible, make sus­t­ainable) larger and more complex societies. This does not mean they are “bett­er people”; just compare the spoiled and narcissistic brats in Swe­den’s sch­ools to the cute and kind, hardworking and grateful pupils in a girl school in rural Sudan. The late-modern Swedish kids are horrible, as any honest teacher in its liberal an unruly school system will readily attest. Can they put down their iPhones already? But still, the Swedish kids certainly do manifest higher average value memes.

  The point is that there is a collective difference that has to do with value memes. It might work fine to have no formal laws and to believe in ancestral magic if you’re a tribe of 150 people in the rainforest. Being a global world-syst­em of seven plus billion in rapid econ­omic and tech­nological transition and a host of ecological crises that may hit home in the coming decades and centuries—not so much. Rain dances, invoking spirits and perfor­ming passage rituals will only take us that far.

  The Four Fields of Societal Development

  If we zoom out a bit, we can see that the average effective value meme in turn is only one out of sev­eral factors that can be used to describe how “developed” a society is.

  The effective value meme descr­ibes how a person or a population sees the world and intuits their own place in it, their moral codes, and so forth. This is, you could say, “psych­ological development”. But just as the value memes consist of four aspects, so does the dev­elopment of society itself consist of four different, but intim­ately related, fields of development . The four fields are:

  Psychology (including, but not exclusively, value meme)

  Behavioral development

  The system; systemic development

  Culture; cultural development

  Hence, the value memes, the political psy­chology of a pop­ul­ation, con­stitute only one out of four fields of develop­ment. So let’s describe and briefly discuss the other three fields.

  The sec­ond field of development revolves around people’s actual beha­viors , which have to do at least as much with the situations they are in as on their psychological development: the interactions they par­take in, which behav­ioral cues are elicited, what be­haviors are rewar­ded, and so forth. The effective value memes of people need to be distinguished from their behav­iors, as these are always affected by the situations of everyday life. These concrete, obser­vable behaviors can also be devel­oped; they can be brou­ght into new and more productive relations that together form more com­plex and res­il­ient patt­erns.

  But it doesn’t stop there. These overall
patterns of behaviors can in turn be seen as part of a larger societal system : the flows of the market, the tech­nological chains of production and distribution, the bureaucracy, transportations and communications; even the system of governance, edu­cational system, media, judi­cial and healthcare systems—all of which reside within what­ever frames the eco­systems and the biosphere allow. And these systems can in turn be developed: You can go from fossil fuel to renewables, from constitutional monarchy to parliamentary represent­ation, from sub­sistence farming to industrial capitalism, and so forth. That’s the third field of development.

  Depending on how you see it, you can either view the systems as emer­gent patterns in the results in the concrete behaviors of many real, existing peo­ple—or you can see the many actions of individual people as deter­min­ed and guided by the overarching systems, which are larger than the behav­iors of any one person. Yet a cleverer way to view it is that behavior, psy­chology and systems continuously interact, or, more preci­sely, that they co-emerge ; that they emerge together and determine each other.

  And then there is the fourth field of development: culture . Here you have things such as norms, values, traditions, languages, art, philo­sophies, religious practices, gender roles, habits and customs of every­day life, sha­red imagined worlds, shared ethnic boundaries, cultural refer­ences, taken-for-granted facts, expectations—whole cons­tructed universes of sto­ries about the universe and our place in it.

  The development of culture is the dev­el­­opment of our symbolized per­spective on reality.

  Consider the differ­ence between contemporary France and its medieval predecessor. Would you say that culture has developed? Do people have more words, more nuanced pers­pectives, more univers­al­istic values? I think we can safely make that case.

  I have thus mentioned four fields of development :

  Figure: The four fields of development. The top two quadrants describe micro processes, the two lower ones macro processes. The left-hand quadrants describe “inner”, subjective development, the right-hand ones “outer”, objective development.

  As you can see, there is one micro-macro axis (in this version it’s up and down, referring to things you study at the level of small, everyday inter­actions and singular people, vs. things you study on a massive scale: struct­ures, statistics, averages, and so forth) and one interior-exterior axis (left-right; referring to things that must be intimately known and inter­preted, or that can be seen and described more “from the outside”). The two micro quad­rants (psychology and behavior) study single people and their every­day inter­actions, the two macro ones (culture and systems) study soc­iety as a whole. The two interior quadrants study that which is felt and exper­ienced (psych­ology and culture), the two exterior ones study “objec­tive” realities (behav­iors and systems).

  Please note that this model actually has much more to it—I am merely giving you the very simple version because that’s all we need for the sake of the argument we’re making in this book.

  You have early premonitions of this model already in the great sociol­ogist Talcott Parsons’ mid-20th century theory about “struc­tural function­alism”, but it was not quite there yet. Since that time, a num­ber of major thinkers have more or less independently come up with the exact model above: Jeffrey Alex­ander’s sociology (one of the top names in Amer­ican sociology, which still insists that macro phen­omena determine micro phe­nomena more than vice versa), Georg Ritzer’s meta­theory (the num­ber one walking encyclopedia of social science in the world, who thinks all four fields interact on equal grounds), Søren Brier’s cyber­semiotics (Den­mark’s coolest nerd star, who I once crashed a party to get to talk to, who created a more philosophically grounded model, by using an entirely diff­erent method), and Ken Wilber’s four quadrants (which is the one theory that is most clear on both the developmental aspects of all four fields, and their fractal relation­ship to one another). All four thinkers came up with more or less the same theory in­dep­endently of one another within a peri­od of fifteen years following 1980. Wilber’s theory is the youngest, but also by far the most elegant one.

  And then there’s a whole host of other, related, theorists who say other, but closely related, things: Jürgen Habermas, the late Roy Bhaskar, Ed­gar Morin, Fritjof Capra, and the Gulbenkian Commission… None of these present this exact model, but they are all in the same holi­stic ball­park, saying roughly the same thing—and they all emphasize different parts of the story and work with different topics, of course.

  And then there is another kind of thinkers who don’t necessarily like to divide things up into four distinct fields (because it can feel a little too mechanical and simplified, too much Kant or even Descartes linger­ing), but still say some­thing similar; i.e. that the different kinds of social pheno­mena emerge together and are entang­led with each other. Here you’ll find people like the physicist-philo­sopher Karen Barad, the poli­tical scientist Alexander Wendt, the political psych­­ologist Shawn Ros­­­­­en­berg, the philo­sophers Alexander Bard and Jan Söderqvist—and many others, depen­ding on how far you are willing to stretch the argument. You can even find versions of this model in psychology, psych­iatry, and even med­icine.

  Basically I am saying, in some version or another, that this holistic vis­ion of reality and society has taken a strong hold during the last few deca­des—the simp­lified one I presented above is not necessarily the best one; it all depends on what analytical uses you are looking for.

  Taking stock of a few general implications of such a model, we can say that:

  1. Both interior, subjective experiences and exterior, material real­ities are honored and seen as parts of reality. So if you ignore one field or try to reduce it to the others, you “flatten” your view of reality. Hence it is a “holistic” view, as opposed to a reductionist view.

  2. Many forms of thinking reduce all of reality to one of these four fields. Marxism and much of the scientism mainstream think that “only” the material realm is really real, spiritual idealism thinks that only psychological (“phenomenological”) reality is real, extreme postmodernism thinks that only culture and discourses are real, and so forth.

  3. The different fields of development are actually interdependent upon each other.

  4. You can view the different fields either as different aspects of real­ity (diff­erent areas of concern or subjects to study) or as differ­ent injunctions into or perspectives upon reality: as the home bases of different sciences and other forms of inquiry.

  But let’s not talk more about theory in general; let’s get on with the point: These four fields of development—psychological, behavioral, sys­t­emic and cultural—interact. Indeed, they define each other—they make each other possible, they set mutual limits, they cause hard crashes and burns in one another. They emerge together: psych­­o­logy, be­hav­ior, culture and system. They are in a perpetual devel­op­men­tal dance. They co-emerge . That’s the point.

  By the way, by far the majority of professors in sociology, history, psy­cho­logy, economics, cognitive science, philosophy and the natural scien­ces still do not understand this model . And hence they spend meaningless life­times of work trying to resolve questions that have already been resol­ved. With mechanical, relentless tenacity they systematically keep igno­ring one or more of the four fields of development. They discuss, as if there was some great mystery here. They go on, and on, with long and purportedly intell­ectual discu­ssions. “What could it be? Does culture drive the econ­omy or the other way around?” And so forth. And so on.

  At any rate, if you have actually understood this model and you are able to see its implications, you are now—in the department of general under­standing of society and reality—far ahead of most intellectual and scien­tific author­ities. Congratulations. Just like a fourteen years old mod­ern kid is far ahead of the greatest medieval intellectuals, not because she is smarter, but sim­ply bec­ause the medieval i
ntell­ectuals were inves­ted in (what are today) out­dated symbolic code systems, in outdated ideas.

  Metamodern philosophy eats modern philosophy alive and spits on its grave, just like modern philosophy did to all earlier worldviews. But that’s not what this appendix is about. So let’s get on with it.

  Marxian Blindness

  Okay, back to the murder mystery. Why did communism kill a hundred million people? What was the murder weapon? It was the developmental imbalances between the four fields of development . Let me explain, dear Watson.

  When Marx wrote, already before he became a full-fledged communist (the “Young Marx”), he displayed a number of traits that can safely be classified under what I have called the Postmodern value meme. [154] There was something about Marx, his way of thinking, of sensing the world, of grasping society, that might loosely be termed pro­gressive : ex­pressing values that correspond to a later stage of societal devel­opment than the one most prevalent in 19th century Europe.

  As I discuss in The 6 Hidden Patterns of History , you can see this either as the culmination of a former kind of thinking (modernism) or an early form of the new kind of thinking (post­modern values). It’s either the pinnacle of modernism or an early form of postmodernism, depending on your perspective.

  How is Marx “postmodern” in this sense? Marx’s vision is spiritual in a secular sense (humanity seeking self-att­ai­n­­­ment by knowing herself and becoming a consciously creative agent of the universe); it is egalitarian, dialectical (not one explan­a­tion or path holds the truth and reality isn’t seen as static and defined), relatively feminist (with a little help from his lifelong friend Frie­drich Engels), and its circle of solidarity includes all humans.