Nordic Ideology

by Hanzi Freinacht

  Religion, reflection, self-knowledge and contemplation have—even if they still exist—undeni­ably taken a back seat in modern society as a who­le. Via contemplativa is thought of as something exceptional, some­thing for the few rather than the many. Sky­scrapers have dwarfed the once do­minant cathedrals in their taller sha­dows. Skiing resorts, exotic safaris and wet summer fuck­fests on Ibiza have replaced pil­gri­mages and periods of mon­astic seclusion. People such as myself, who like spending time alone walking in the Alps for no other reason than to contemplate existence, are often seen as ecce­ntric, dis­connected or even frivolous.

  During the emergence of modern­ity, this “life-affirming” attitude may very well have made sense: With so much to do, so much to be achieved, and yet no major risks of systemic and civi­lizational collapse on the hori­zon, it may be a good thing that people primarily focus on creating world­ly things. Useful things. And then you may just as well savor the hedonic, Dionysian richness of what modern life has to offer while you’re at it. After all, what good is staring at a wall (to come to terms with the blissful but terrifying mean­inglessness of Emptiness) when you could be out there making sure more kids get polio vaccine, or take part in any other of the seemingly infinite growth potentials of the modern world?

  We are, however, now reaching a point in history where our very sur­vival depends upon our collective inner development. In today’s late mod­ern society, in which the pot­entials of our tech­no­logies are so incompre­hensively vast, the con­sump­tion of one single human so stagger­ingly im­pactful, the con­sequen­ces of our actions so global, the possibility of ecolo­gical collapse so present, the acc­eleration of our chan­ging life con­ditions so dizzying—we may need to reintroduce the via con­tem­pla­tiva , an updat­ed and recyc­led version of monastic practices. On a very serious, collecti­ve—yet deeply personal—level we may have to stop and think, quiet as the snow.

  And breathe. And reflect.

  Consider. Reconsider. Doubt.

  Rest. Concentrate. Heal. Suffer. Digest. Grow.

  Rise.

  We may have to take the issue of life as a contemplative path very seri­ously, meaning that we, as a society, should be prepared to expend con­siderable time and economic resources on inner growth.

  Inner growth. Being with oneself. Introspection. These act­ivities may come off as less manifest, tangible or visible than “going to work”, “play­ing foot­ball” or “winning”. But they are verbs nonethe­less: breathe, reflect and so on—they are actions, flows, processes and events. The inner jour­ney is some­thing that really happens , something that counts for some­thing, a difference that makes a difference. Tectonic shifts of our lives may occur, shifts of our perspect­ives, of our beings, aspirations, motives and life-goals. Such inner shifts of the heart reverberate across the larger patt­erns of our life-spans, and thus they affect the world in a thousand subtle ways.

  This way of thinking is not only counterintuitive to the modern mind. It is downright offensive:

  “Should people spend more time in idle solitu­de? But what about the growth of the economy! What about climate chan­ge, an issue that requires action, now ! What about all the social pro­blems! And you want people to meditate and contemplate in the stillness of their minds? And how could we afford such a thing!”

  But it is a simple fact—despite the pervading sense that we are bu­sier than ever—that many or most of our daily activities and life goals are quite poor­­ly thought-out, rather shallow, and often quite unneces­sary. We pur­sue shall­ow life goals, because we get stuck on relati­vely sim­ple and basic inner needs that still “have us by the balls”. [95] The goals of our actions are themselves “ineffective” (transrationally speaking), our motivations and drives hardly con­ducive to sustainable human flourish­ing, development, love and last­ing happi­ness. And in these days of expo­nentially growing human power, the failure to pursue deeply worthwhile goals in as many people’s lives as poss­ible, can and will be nothing short of catastrophic. And the only way to get many more of us to develop much more global and worth­while goals is to support our genuine inner development. Global scale calamities are likely to follow pretty soon, un­less we start looking inwards.

  In other words, it may be a very sound investment—in terms of “the eco­nomy of happiness”—to put much, much more of society’s time, ef­f­ort, resources and attention to people’s inner worlds, to the existen­tial journey of each of us.

  Take a moment to consider this: All that really “is” and all that we genuinely care about revolves around the conscious, inner experience of humans—and ani­mals for that matter. What is a theme park without the ability to have fun? What is ice cream without the ability to enjoy? What is music with­out the bewon­dered list­ener? What, indeed, are family and friendship without love? What is even truth and enlightenment without the pro­found recog­nition of the observing mind?

  The vast inner landscapes of subjective experience are not a fringe issue, not a small detail.

  They are everything.

  They are all that we will ever have. Inner experience is all that society ultimately produces and all it ultimately relies upon. It’s what all of it ulti­mately is about.

  What madness, then, to build a civilization that does not work actively and seriously with the development of inner experience! Whatever else we change or build or create or develop, it all has zero value without the eye, the mind, the heart and the soul of the observer, of the experiencer, of the participating co-creator. We’re always-already here , cast into being, meet­ing the universe half-way.

  Nothing explains more about what humanity creates than her inner­­most relatedness to existence. Will we create prisons, conflicts and collap­se, or will we manage to respond productively to the great challen­ges ahead of us—a struggle reborn as play?

  Contemporary commentators like to point out that this is an exist­ential quest­ion: “Will we fall on our own sword, or rise to the challenge?” What they generally fail to mention, however, is that this exist­ential quest­ion itself depends upon how the inner path of each human being is supp­orted and scaff­olded—or thwarted and undermined—by the struct­ures of soci­ety. They fail to see the political and transpersonal nature of the exist­ential questions, and they fail to offer bids for a renewed via contem­pla­tiva .

  A metamodern politics would need to reintegrate key aspects of all the former value memes, which means that even some aspects of post­faustian society and its traditional religions should be re-examined and judiciously reinvented. We may need to co-create a more existential civi­lization, one that values inner growth and earnest spiritual exploration considerably higher than today’s late modern society.

  Life Crisis and Development

  How, then, could a via contemplativa be properly reintroduced in a meta­modern context, in the context of an advanced welfare system we call the “listening society”?

  One way to go about this is to endow all citizens with the “right” or “posi­tive freedom” to, once or twice in a lifetime, take a longer time off from work (or whatever they’re doing)—for half a year, maybe a year—in order to go through a supported period of prac­tice, learn­ing, contempla­tion and self-scrutiny.

  It is safe to assume there is much to be won, in a myriad of non-linear ways, if a large part of the pop­ulation successfully and productively mana­ges to deal with one or more of the different “crises” that pertain to a nor­mal life course: the existential crisis of early adulthood (which has been growing in recent years), the major stress breakdowns many of us suffer during our professionally active years, or the crises of death, ill­ness and ber­ea­vement that all of us must face to­wards the end of our lives. [96]

  Add to this the fact that people can have all sorts of other crises that don’t pertain directly to one of the Eriksonian life phase tran­sitions: there are family crises, fail­ures in life, crises due to unemployment and other struc­tural s
hifts in society. Then add the fact that we coll­ectively respond to crises at a societal level in more or less composed and productive (ver­sus reactive and destructive) manners. Each of all these mentioned instan­ces of crisis can either lead to tragic collapse, painful stagnation, or to higher stages of dev­elopment and flou­r­ish­ing.

  We all have such turning points in our lives, and our ability to manage them largely determine our adult personal develop­ment, which in turn collectively determines how our lead­ers govern socie­ty and how society collectively responds to challenges.

  As things currently stand, most of us respond only so-so to the crises that inevitably show up in our lives. And then we walk on, wounded, hurt, numbed and stunted in our growth as adult human beings. And that sha­pes all of our lives, the lives of those around us, our children, and society at large.

  The word “crisis”—as so many like to point out these days—is both a mom­ent of great difficulty and an opportunity for “purification”, for re­solv­ing long-standing issues or tensions, or for transitioning to new stages of development. In scientific terms, crisis only ever shows up in “complex systems”, never in non-complex ones; so you have an “economic crisis” or an “identity crisis”, but never a “crisis of the car engine”. Etymologi­cally, the word goes back to the ancient Greek word for “decision”. The crisis is the moment of decision . It’s when the shit hits the fan—and the whole thing either collapses or pays the painful price to reorganize and grow.

  When it comes to existential issues such as handling the deep crises of life, it is common to think in terms of moral purity and innate character. Some people, we like to tell ourselves, are the ones who really have the courage and heart to muddle through, the composure and self-con­trol to see clearly in stormy weather, the faith in our… blah, blah, blah. And then we like to assume that we are those people and people we don’t parti­cularly like or who don’t share our values are weaker and less wo­rthy at the innermost level. We must recognize this line of reason­ing for what it is—namely moralism: i.e. the judgmental and self-congratula­tory bullshit of our habitual minds.

  Truly metamodern Existential Politics departs from a very diffe­rent start­ing point: Whether or not a person pulls through during a mo­ment of crisis is not a matter of God-given moral character, but simply a question of behavioral psychology and the extent to which she has the nec­essary resources available.

  So the issue becomes, not to judge or congratulate, but to soberly and effectively strengthen those inner resour­ces and societal support structu­res available through­out the popula­tion.

  Just as a society will have a certain GDP growth over a period of years, and just as every society repro­duces its murder and suicide rates with frightening precision from year to year—so must every society have a spe­c­ific number of shattered dreams, a number of broken hearts, a percen­tage of lifetime spent in subtle self-doubt, a number of crises suc­cess­fully passed (or not), a num­ber of psychological stage transitions that occur harmon­i­ously or in wren­ching agony. Is it unreasonable to ask how each of these num­bers can be studied and improved upon?

  That’s Existential Politics: reducing the number of shattered minds and broken souls while increasing the number of inner phoenixes rising.

  Chapter 14:

  THE AWAKENED PUBLIC

  “I want to live,

  I want to give

  I’ve been a miner

  For a heart of gold.

  It’s these expressions

  I never give

  That keep me searching

  For a heart of gold

  And I’m getting old.” [97]

  —Neil Young

  It is as though civilization itself is getting too old. And with age foll­ows either decay, dementia and despair—or wisdom and self-knowledge. Can then modernity, the present world-system, begin to know itself?

  This would be the * meta* -modern mission: to create a deeply self-reflective modernity ; a modernity operating not only upon nature and the environ­ment, but one that reexamines its own perspective, its own choi­ces—if you will—its own soul.

  Modernity did peer into the soul of individual human beings, under the auspices of psychiatry. But it never developed a full process for look­ing into its own existential foundations and to treat the maladies of civili­zation.

  Modern society has, as Foucault famously argued, been profoundly mar­ked by “the birth of the clinic”. Metamodern society and its existential civ­ilization must usher in “the rebirth of the monastery”, echoing and care­fully re­cycling some of the finest aspects of medieval society.

  Secular Monasteries

  The pur­pose of metamodern monasteries would be to offer all citizens nec­essary periods of seclusion (and/or community) and con­cen­trated ho­ning of inner skills, such as heal­ing from trauma, mak­ing crucial life dec­is­ions or transitions, learning new life philo­sophies, pract­icing meditation and tak­ing care of the body, forgiving people who hurt us, sorting out ethical dil­emmas, and other transformational practices. We all have a few toys in the attic to deal with.

  It would make sense to create a great network of secular monasteries, properly equipped with teachers, coaches, therapists, libraries, gardens, gyms and simple accommodation. People would be trained in one or more wisdom traditions, be supported in making nec­ess­ary changes of habits, face their traumas and so on. Instead of an authoritative priest­hood like in traditional religions, the main agent would be a professional group of “exist­ential social workers”, trained to deal with people’s diffe­rent life crises and to act as advisors. They should be highly skilled in one or more mind­fulness and meditation techniques, in turn scrutinized by scien­tific studies.

  An important aspect of such a neo-monastic societal infrastructure would be to include different kinds of bodywork and “subtle body pract­ices”, refining the skills of dealing with direct bodily experiences and sen­sations and developing the general wellness of our bodies. Such develop­ment is not only of great value for its own sake, but also a necessary tool for strengthening our overall body-mind systems so we can handle the difficulties inherent to life’s crises and the stage transitions of per­sonal dev­elopment.

  So we’re looking at a major project of the listening society, one that is indeed comparable to the construction of the welfare state. You need new facilities, new infrastructure, new groups of professionals, new educatio­nal and career paths (which can generate quite a few new and very cool jobs by the way), and new institutions to govern, evaluate and devel­op the whole endeavor. It’s going to take decades to build and/or culti­vate, and yet it will produce few tangible, manifest things. But it will pro­duce a more listening society, and an existentially mature civilization. Millions of people will untie subtle knots in their inner worlds and manage their lives more com­passionately and skillfully. If the listening society is to fulfill its pro­mise—a society where everyone is genuinely seen and heard—it must rest upon a foun­dation of inwards listening.

  All of these services should be backed up on a collective level so that people are guaranteed a year off from work and be guaranteed a basic live­lihood during the per­iod. Hope­fully, it could be possible even for parents of children to attend such periods of seclusion, just switching their day-time work for monastic life.

  “What’s the point of all this? And, again, can we afford it? Should we really be sucking our thumbs and navel-gazing when there are so many issues to attend and so much suffering in the world?”

  Still not following, modernist mind? Sigh.

  The point is that it is only by seriously helping people to get what they really need and want from life—by supp­orting serious adult devel­op­ment, development of the mind and the per­sonality as a whole—that we can raise the level of behavi­oral functioning through­out soc­iety and the level of mental health through­out all social groups. It is in this man­ner we can raise the average “eff­ective value m
eme” of the popul­ation above the modern stage.

  And, just to remind you of the stakes: With­out a deep and lasting chan­ge towards higher effective value meme, we’re pretty much all going to die in a horrible car crash as we enter this age of super-tech­nologies without a corresponding shift of psychological and cultural devel­op­ment.

  So it’s not that we can’t afford to do it, it’s that we can’t afford not to. “Can’t afford” a medicine that will save your life from an aggressive dis­ease? Well, then, too bad, you’ll just have to suffer and die.

  Existential Politics isn’t navel-gazing. Things are only navel-gazing if they are not conducive to growth and social change. If something does prevent oceans of human suffering, improves lives in so many ways, and saves soc­iety from collapse because it spurs human growth into deeper mat­urity—then it’s not navel-gazing.

  As things stand today, many of those who belong to the social groups I have called the Yoga Bourgeoisie, the Triple-H Population and the Inte­gralists already find ways of getting support for growth during trans­itional periods: they go to workshops and retreats, do shadow-work (busting your own bullshit with a therapist) and whatnot.

  But there are several pro­blems with this privatized and individualized app­roach of present-day spiritual seeking. One thing is that it’s only really available to these privileged seg­ments of the population. So it’s miss­ing where it’s needed the most. Another problem is that the norms of soc­iety aren’t really up to speed: Most people think it’s a waste of time, too idle and boring. Society as a whole should make sure more people see the pro­found value of prolonged, serious inner work. And a third pro­blem is that there is no concerted effort on society’s behalf to guarantee the quality, reliability and safety of such practices, which enables all kinds of swindlers and quacks to prey upon the Astrology Precariat (chapter 7). Making this a priority of Existential Politics would work to remedy many of these issues.