Ah, the paradoxes of sex, love and gender! What a relentless production plant of human angst and desolation! How elusive that inner peace, that simple sense of aliveness and safety, that sensual and embodied fullness of being alive! If you’re not very clear-sighted and well-informed on this one, you will tend towards a simple explanation for all the suffering you’ve been through: “it’s patriarchy” or “it’s those rabid bitches”.
But it’s not those rabid bitches. It’s a complex host of emergent properties of the games of everyday life. We are mutilated not by an evil patriarchal structure, but by a blind and meaningless chaos engine, which is incidentally also the source of all goodness and beauty of life.
And we can hardly do ourselves a greater disservice than denying the existence of these games (crime 1: game denial) or accepting them in their current, cruel forms (crime 2: game acceptance). These paradoxes of love indeed constitute a vast killing ground of the human spirit. But it is also on these fields of battle and suffering that we grow the most as human beings—it is here we find the most fertile ground for inner transformations. Could society be geared towards making us much better equipped for managing these paradoxes and relating to them more productively? The answer is yes. Inner progress grows from the manure of human trouble.
These paradoxes and problems cannot really be “solved”. They will be around whether we like it or not, at least until we change the very behavioral biology of humans. What we can do, however, is to change how well they are understood and productively related to, and thus how pathologically they play out in society at large.
Erich Fromm once wrote that for society to prosper, we need not more distant intellect, but “men and women who are in love with life”. But to be in love with life, we must also successfully fall in love with one another.
How many of us will get to have genuinely happy love in our lives? I mean really ? There are few greater tragedies in life than our inability to awaken deep positive emotions in others, our inability to have our trembling hearts and aching bodies met with genuine love and desire. And how cruel is not the opposite, to be loved and included but that our hearts respond only with coldness and inertia—when we are unable to genuinely love and respond to others’ emotions?
How important are not these issues to society, how central to human misery and happiness? How fundamental to any qualitatively rich notion of freedom and equality? How many souls are we unnecessarily condemning to lonely lifetimes of cold and darkness? How many broken hearts are we generating? How many failed attempts at BDSM?
Can we really afford to keep this issue outside of politics, outside the ongoing discussing about the conscious self-organization of society?
We must, as a society, cultivate higher likelihoods for better relationships, developing people’s sexual faculties and reducing gender antagonism. That’s what a metamodern post-feminist Gemeinschaft Politics would aim to do.
Let us evolve the game of love. Let us shift the landscapes of desire.
Empty Rituals and Unritualized Emotions
When people are emotionally stunted and existentially mutilated by the emergent deformities of everyday life, we can often find ourselves having other emotions than those that are “appropriate” to the situations we find ourselves in. Or we can feel a growing emotional distance to everyday life for any number of other reasons.
There is a distance between what is going on around us and what we are really feeling. This is the essence of alienation. We become “imposters”, strangers in our own lives. Life flows, and we participate, but we don’t quite feel it.
The party. Christmas evening. Our wedding. The birth of our own child. What happens if you don’t feel what you’re “supposed to”? There is a quiet, subtle betrayal of all our social bonds—emotions of anxiety, dissatisfaction, indifference, estrangement, alienation, disenchantment. In the folds and wizenings of everyday life, there is a subtle resistance. But sometimes, at least in the lives of most of us, we really do feel it. Something really fits, and we’re suddenly intensely alive.
An effective Gemeinschaft Politics must work to increase the likelihood of such “inner world / life situation fits” occurring. It must work to enact (or make possible for civil society to enact) transformations of everyday life itself—so that our true emotions can be present in our manifest lives, and our manifest lives can play out in harmonic resonance with our innermost thoughts and feelings.
The subtle transformations of relations in everyday life are of course not only ethnic and gendered/sexual. They make up pretty much all of life. Everywhere we go there are norms, customs, habits and more or less formal regulations telling us what are the appropriate behaviors and feelings in each situation. We’re quiet at libraries, energized at parties, aloof in elevators, sweet on romantic outings, professional at the office, and so forth.
As countless sociologists have pointed out, the most prominent ones perhaps being Erving Goffman and nowadays Randall Collins, everyday life is organized around rituals specific to each situation. But not only are street-walking, library visiting and beer drinking at pubs ritualized—so are all the major markers of human relationships. We marry by having weddings (ritual), we put our new employee’s name on the office door (ritual), we have school graduations (ritual), we have birthday parties (ritual), we have Christmas celebrations (ritual), we have funerals (ritual). From birth to death, our lives are ritualized.
Rituals charge spaces, roles, titles and relations with meaning . Without rituals, we are lost in a formless void in which events are not delineated and organized. All resonance, all concerted action pertaining to a shared human world of meaning, break down.
We are ritual creatures and we create social reality by means of rituals. These rituals may have more or less specific liturgies, but the rituals certainly are powerful behavioral mechanisms that coordinate human beings. It is when a ritual breaks down that people feel an intense confusion and a host of extremely negative emotions: If a respectable lecturer sets off contemptuous laughter in the students who then begin to throw tomatoes at him/her, that’s traumatic. If someone disrespects the bride or groom at a wedding… you get the picture.
Rituals of course also create and uphold all sorts of wider social and political identities: from constructing the majesty of Her Majesty, to the fervor, unity and obedience of the North Korean people as they dance and march for the glory of the Supreme Leader—none of this is possible without the proper rituals. In fact, there aren’t so many commonly understood and accepted social realities that do not depend upon the performance of rituals.
Within mainstream sociology, the analysis generally stops right about here, at this pointing out of the ubiquity and importance of rituals. Then sociologists usually go on to try to enumerate rituals and describe their specifics. That can be an interesting exercise, but it’s not that relevant in this context.
What we should look for, if we wish to transform society in a positive direction, is the relationship between the rituals of everyday life and the authentic emotions people experience .
There are so many rituals that go on throughout our lives which many of us don’t quite “feel”. Ever went to a school graduation that just felt like a boring formality, anyone? Spent a vacation eating good food but not really enjoying yourself? Had a romantic evening where you more or less just played along?
Luckily, with the late modern proliferation of subcultures, people who find it hard to get into the Christmas spirit can find a group of fellow Satanists who like to dress up in black rubber and get a good whipping, or they can find a punk scene in which sad, hopeful songs are sung by folks who drink beer, quote Noam Chomsky and imagine revolution or at least a romantic resistance to capitalist consumerism. There’s even a growing mermaid community in Seattle. Such venues offer sorely needed outlets for many of us. There is a greater v
ariety of social scenes, more rituals to gather around. People can shop around and see which ones “work” for them.
Still, however, it does remain a fact that for many of us, a lot of the time, life doesn’t really resonate. Something is subtly off. Alienation is there. The rituals we partake in feel empty; they don’t match our emotions.
Can you see what an enormous loss of value that is? Think about the resources put into, say, a New Year’s Eve celebration. Just the fireworks make up a large chunk of humanity’s global yearly release of led into the atmosphere. If you don’t “feel the sparkles”, it was all for nothing—and it may even have made people more miserable and estranged as the ritual wasn’t successful and felt meaningless. When other people around us seem to happily participate in something that doesn’t awaken the corresponding emotions in ourselves, we can’t help but feel a growing subtle resentment.
On the other hand, people whose minds and inner subjective experiences are less conflicted and broken—people in more harmonic, “higher” states as discussed in Book One—tend to resonate more deeply with a wider range of rituals. People in high states can notice the sparkle in a lover’s eye, the subtly present sense of togetherness at a mundane lunch diner, and so on. When we frequent the higher inner states, there is a fundamental sense of “okayness” and we have an easier time resonating with the rituals and situations around us.
Hence, creating a deeper and more harmonious resonance in everyday life is not only a matter of critically reconstructing the rituals, but also of increasing our ability to genuinely participate in them.
And then there are the lowest inner states, the darker depths. These are naturally more difficult to gather around in commonly shared rituals. How, after all, do we create a shared ritual experience of failure and humiliation, to take one example? There are so many rituals concerned with the successes of life, with celebrations of small victories or progress. But all the emotions of rejection and failure constantly go unrecognized and never get to take their place as shared, manifest, ritual social reality.
What about anxiety, angst, the fear of freedom? These dark inner worlds are harbored secretly by most of us. What about confusion about reality itself and our place in it?
And then there are the highest and subtlest states, with emotions such as greatness, vastness, cosmic love and majesty. Can these be shared in productive and non-oppressive or non-forced ways?
Just as there are many empty rituals, so are there many unritualized emotions , ever present at the fringes of our conscious minds, throughout society. These are the untidy, dark basement rooms of our culture. They show themselves in our dreams and those deviant thoughts that keep coming back. And on the positive end, there are the unearthly heights of existence, the subtle beauties and wonders that never quite seem to fit in but which we deep down know are possible and real.
Just as the body is the seat of the soul, so is society. Can we then make society become a proper home for the soul? Can we recreate society and its rituals of everyday life so as to let our souls feel at home in society, at home in the socially constructed universe? That would be a central—and most difficult—task of Gemeinschaft Politics.
Golden Keys
As Gemeinschaft Politics grows into an organic part of society—saturating more aspects of everyday life, redressing and evolving the nature of human relations across all sectors—the shared knowledge will grow about “what affects what” in the realm of social relations. In other words; as a society, we will grow wiser when it comes to understanding what the key variables are and how to improve upon them.
There will be an accumulation of the depth of our understanding regarding what these variables really mean. Sometimes, one variable will be shown to be explained by others. Different composites will catch different essential patterns, and tell stories back to us.
What is “trust”, really? Is more of it always better? Can it be improved upon? What is the average “security of a family”? Does it cause trust, or the other way around? What buttons are there to push, what levers to pull? Or is there a third variable which can explain both of these, such as the emotional intelligence of a population, or the “degree of flatness of informal peer group status hierarchies”? And how does all of this interact with a conventional variable like the unemployment rate? These are, naturally, not matters of simple statistics—but need to be crunched as big data by AI so that we can see patterns we couldn’t have thought of. But there are patterns, and they can be used to create generative conditions for humans thriving together, as relational beings.
The point is not to have all the answers; we can’t really expect to find “once-and-for-all” answers to these questions. The point is merely, that if a proper ongoing process of Gemeinschaft Politics were in place, such knowledge—and its many situation-depended practical applications—would grow and take roots throughout society.
I think that we, as a society, should explore this field of development. There are certainly risks, but I believe we would come out wiser, stronger and healthier. We will find key variables and use them; golden keys to unlock the hearts of women and men, to unlock the dormant potentials of fellowship, solidarity and love.
Go on, find the golden keys.
Chapter 13:
EXISTENTIAL POLITICS
“To see the universal and all-pervading Spirit of Truth face to face, one must be able to love the meanest of creation as oneself. And a man who aspires after that cannot afford to keep out of any field of life. That is why my devotion to Truth has drawn me into the field of politics; and I can say without the slightest hesitation, and yet in all humility, that those who say that religion has nothing to do with politics do not know what religion means”. [89]
—Gandhi
To base a political ideology or program on an entirely “rational” or “secular” foundation is and remains a fool’s errand.
Pure rationality can never answer what politics ultimately should be about, only how we’re most likely to achieve what we set out to do. The means of politics can be more or less rational; yes, there are ways of organizing society which are more well-reasoned than others, but it remains utterly beyond the scope of rationality to determine which goals are worth striving for in the first place.
Existential Issues Determine the Goals of Politics
What we cherish most in life determines the goals we set for society. Politics is thus deeply subjective. I dare to say that it is inherently existential , since how we relate to the world, one another and ourselves determine what we believe to be just and ethical. The political thus cannot be reduced to a purely secular and objective affair.
Reason is forever destined to be the slave of passion, as David Hume once famously argued. So as rational creatures, we’re stuck with serving the will of the political animal.
We are emotional creatures, first and foremost, and what we feel determines what’s rational to do. We are also ideological creatures, whose ideas about society are always dependent upon that same society and our position within it. And we are religious creatures, who always adhere to some overarching narrative about reality, some kind of religion in the most general sense of the word. And, we are existential creatures; beings that can only be by somehow relating to “what is”.
That the aim of politics, then, should be to find rational objectives, in-and-of-themselves, free of any beliefs and assumptions about what’s just and beautiful, must remain a fairytale.
Rationality can only be applied to factual truths claims; it can establish how well-reasoned a particular line of action is in regards to the objective it is to address. How well-reasoned the objective itself may or may not be, however, can only be established by:
Weighing the subjective truth claims about its perceived value with
the intersubjective truth claims about its justness.
Hence, what’s rational to do is simply senseless to ask without firs
t having established what’s beautiful and just. And in turn, what’s beautiful and just depends on our narratives about the world, which in turn are the result of how we relate to existence as such.
Politics is thus a deeply existential affair. It is and will always remain utterly impossible to detach the political from the huge diversity of different personal experiences of being-in-the-world and the ways in which we relate to existence accordingly.
As such, if the political is already undeniably existential, does it then make sense to leave the existential permanently beyond the political; confined to the personal or “private” realm? Doesn’t that leave the whole realm of the political—the arena of human self-organization into a society—completely subjected to the inner processes and deep psychologies that determine why we act as we do, why we want what we want? Should we really shut down all processes of openly discussing how we can support one another to reach, in a deep sense, more productive fundamental relations to ourselves and our place in the universe?
Such questions drive us beyond conventional, instrumental rationality and into the realm of a deeper, second layer of shared, spiritual rationality; if you like, into the realm of transrationality . What we are looking for, then, is to create a society that is, yes, more rational and secular, but also —and perhaps primarily—more transrational and secular in a deeper sense. This second secularism, which I described in Book One, does not take the modern rationality and its gods for granted.
Schopenhauer once wrote that “Man can do what he wills. But he cannot will what he wills.” [90] But that is true only on an individual level of analysis. There is crushing and conclusive evidence that our wills, hopes and desires are shaped by sociological circumstances—and these circumstances, in turn, can be affected by deliberate human agency. Wouldn’t it make sense, then, to try to collectively develop what “man wills” in the first place?
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