High value meme is to some extent also tied to mental imbalance and dysfunctionality. A minority of adults develop to higher value memes (e.g. Postmodern and Metamodern) but must thereby also face greater inner obstacles. Many of those who develop exceptionally high complexity and great depth have minds oscillating in “far from equilibrium states”. I don’t have the data to prove it, but just by looking around my own circle and the people who respond to metamodernism, there is a striking pattern: very high intelligence, Mensa-level is standard, very high prevalence of ADD and ADHD, some autism (especially among the most gifted), dyslexia, very high prevalence of depression, some people who have very extreme personalities if not necessarily diagnosable, high prevalence of strong spiritual experiences, high prevalence of psychedelic experiences, high prevalence of psychotic breakdowns and so forth. In my own family, there is schizophrenia, epilepsy, depression, anxiety and chronic pain due to nerve diseases just as there are highly intelligent and creative people. And among post-conventional thinkers you find lots of gay people and folks with non-binary gender identities and polyamorous lifestyles, however that fits in. Shine on you crazy diamond.
You get the point, right? There seems to be a pattern here: exceptionally high value meme seems to correlate with a lower level of mental health and stability, and in some sense “unusual minds” or atypical neurological structures . If you look at the biographies of spiritual masters, like Jiddu Krishnamurti and Eckhart Tolle, a similar pattern appears. Before their “awakenings” to recurring higher states, these people went through extreme inner turmoil—the edge of madness.
As my friend Nick Duffell has argued in his studies of British elite boarding schools, each society and subgroup have their own “psychohistory ”, a collection of social conditions that affect the psychological development and personalities of the group. [103] In sociology, similar arguments have been made, not least in the study of generations (from Karl Mannheim and onwards) and “cultural trauma” (Jeffrey C. Alexander). [104]
Different demographics seem to have specific psychohistories, and the generative conditions for people’s life-shaping events can be affected. There appear to be social and genetic factors that cause the high value meme folks to also have greater mental vulnerability. I don’t pretend to understand the intricacies of this relationship, but I do believe the relationship is factual. The “most civilized” people, in a sense, tend to be slightly bonkers.
If this is correct, the conclusion should be clear: We need a society that helps more of us to marry high effective value meme to inner peace and stability, to mental health. In some few select people, you have the marriage of exceptional development with childlike purity of experience, mind and emotions. This, of course, is what society can and should strive to support, knowing fully well this is a tricky ride: A more complex civilization requires higher effective value memes, which seem to require greater inner obstacles to be surmounted, which is married to a greater propensity for losing grip on reality.
The only hope for civilization is found, thus, on the brink of madness. Think about it: informed naivety, magical realism, the crossroads between fact and fiction, the transpersonal perspective, the hall of mirrors, sincere irony—doesn’t it all reflect the madness of a psychotic episode? A few slips, and you’re suddenly mad as a hatter. When we open up reality to be co-created in a transpersonal space, is this not an act of enlightened madness?
What kind of person can dive into madness and come out a deeper and more complex thinker? The kind of person we need. The metamodern mind, ideally speaking. Applied Existential Politics should support the spontaneous emergence of higher subjective states and greater existential depths in the population as well as a greater psychological robustness.
The acceleration of the developing world-system is a dizzying ride. As new and increasingly phantasmagoric and bizarre and subtle and complicated and mind-blowing phenomena press themselves upon us, life becomes a rollercoaster of an unearthly height—even touching the stars—and deeper valleys as nightmares crawl through the television screens and enter our living rooms. Not to mention social media and smartphones hijacking our limited attention spans. Subtler and more multidimensional games are played for higher spiritual stakes. More of us try to surf the waves of this madness, in the service of higher ideals. Those of us who try psychedelic drugs less often do so in the context of Dionysian “partying” and more often as serious Apollonian “soul-searching”.
Something lurks at the back of our minds. And we wake up at night. And the ground shakes and our heads spin and the skies crack open. Utter and profound confusion. Even a scent of madness; but also an opportunity to change our socially constructed universe, to shift our maps of meaning.
The question is not—as Fromm and many other humanist Marxists believed—how to create “a sane society” once and for all. That’s just not going to happen. Because madness is civilization’s shadow. And now as we’re crashing into a whole new level of civilizational complexity, we’ll get a whole new level of crazy to go with it. Hey, I told you it’s a tragic universe.
The question is, rather, how to create a society where a sufficient number of us develop the resilience to hold on during this crazy ride. That’s why we need an ongoing process that supports the development of higher states and the successful integration of greater inner depths. This process serves to cultivate an awakened public.
Messieurs dames —let’s give a warm welcoming hand for Existential Politics.
Chapter 15:
EMANCIPATION POLITICS
Now we are shifting to a higher gear of complexity in thinking. The first three forms of politics—Democratization, Gemeinschaft and Existential—serve to spur subtle but pervasive transformations of society and everyday life, until we reach a higher equilibrium of human wellbeing, as we achieve a listening society. As I argued in the first part of this book, this follows a long-term historical trend of increasing intimacy of control : larger and larger parts of our minds, behaviors and bodies are coordinated in more complex and deliberate ways.
Emancipation politics, the politics of defending (in)dividual rights and increasing the degrees of freedom, seeks to counteract the new forms of oppression that can and will occur as the intimacy of control increases.
You may recall that we noted an intrinsic connection between any “holistic” view of society and the “totalitarian” impulses of many movements, the two words mirroring one another. If we want a society whose different parts harmonize and create coherence rather than nasty paradoxes and contradictions that wreck people’s lives (and civilization itself), we must deal with the inherent risks of relating to society in a more holistic manner.
Emancipation Politics must be animated by the earnest grasping for “another kind of freedom”, for the highest reaches of what it means to be free. It must want more for all of us than the rather superficial and unevenly distributed freedom in today’s liberal societies: to climb the spectrum of judgment, to transcend the emotional regimes, to go beyond the hidden negative emotions that control us.
As I have pointed out several times already, it is insufficient to simply denounce all holism and deeper integration as totalitarian and cast ourselves as defenders of freedom, pitched against “those control freaks”. As soon as people get what they want and enjoy freedom, new things emerge and thus complexity increases; and as complexity increases, there is a renewed need to coordinate behaviors and organize things—and that’s control, whoever or whatever system may instantiate and exercise it.
Higher freedom is paradoxically married to greater and more intricate forms of control. If you throw out all complex coordination of behaviors, you don’t get absolute freedom, but simply fragmentation and alienation; things painfully falling apart.
That being s
aid, society must counter its processes of governance and integration with corresponding and principled defenses of the singular person, her uniqueness, her lived experience, her rights. In modern liberal democracies, this is guaranteed by the rule of law and independent courts—in theory, powerful citizens cannot trample even the meekest beggar because her rights will be protected by the courts. In theory.
New Sources of Oppression
But can the “legal rights” of the modern division of powers really protect us against the subtler forms of oppression that can and will arise from the new forms of politics as the intimacy of control increases? Here are some examples of such subtler forms of oppression:
You go through school as a child and the staff use all kinds of psychological tests and diagnostics to see your likely developmental trajectory, and many of them think of you as a future criminal, which subtly but noticeably affects their treatment of you negatively. Adults talk behind your back, “What’s your major malfunction?” they ask. And you are surveilled and judged beforehand, resulting in a vague but pervasive sense of having been violated and betrayed. This sense follows you throughout life.
You partake in a culture where people generally value deep authenticity of emotional bonds, mutual openness about vulnerability and spiritual goals in life—but you can’t quite “feel it”. Whenever people share deep emotions or talk about their spiritual or meditative experiences, which happens a bit all over the place, you feel pressured to do likewise, but it often leaves you with a sense of numbness, and you notice that people seem to disapprove of you whenever you honestly say you’re not quite feeling all that stuff they’re talking about. You then end up embellishing the truth just to fit in, which in turn leaves you with an icky feeling that follows you throughout life.
You are part of a society in which self-governance and participation is highly valued and you are pressured to partake in any number of panels, ballots and committees, even if you don’t enjoy it or think it’s very meaningful. Deep down, you know you’re wasting your time and not making a difference, but at least the people around you seem content. A part of you whispers that you should break free from all of these tokens of responsibility and cultivate your own unique skills and projects, but these inner doubts are squashed under the weight of peer pressure to be a good democratic citizen. A subtle sense of disempowerment takes hold and follows you throughout life.
You go to work but your ideas and values are somewhat different than those of the people around you, including some of the nice and well-meaning leaders. It’s just that you know you have other ideas and talents that would take a longer time to explain and would require others to listen to you. But they control the money and decision-making, so you go for years and years and never quite act on your deeper intuitions and intentions.
You get the point. I’m sure we can come up with a multitude of nasty scenarios that are more or less plausible and could affect different parts of the population in different aspects of their lives. The common denominator would be that people are somehow subtly oppressed , in the sense they are being held back, pressured into things, feel suffocated and manipulated, or just aren’t treated in a dignified manner. It is important to understand that such oppression is not only a theoretical future risk, but something that goes on in all contemporary societies. We’re just not very used to thinking of these things in terms of oppression, but we will become more acquainted with them as the intimacy of control increases. With more intricate forms of social self-organization come new sources of oppression.
Except for such subtle and indirect forms of oppression, we are of course likely to see renewed oppression in obvious and gross forms as the means for state surveillance and manipulation increase with abundant surveillance cameras, advanced AI systems for facial recognition, online activity monitoring, DNA tracking, new forms of censorship, you name it. In criminology, Gresham Sykes and David Matza famously formulated the “neutralization and drift” theory of delinquency and crime, in 1957. Basically, they argued that people become criminal offenders by inventing a large number of excuses or “neutralizations” for their behaviors and that they “drift” into increasingly criminal behaviors and criminal social environments. With today’s explosive development of technological means for surveillance and manipulation, it is not difficult to see pathways towards criminal and oppressive governance that go via “neutralizations”, trivializing breaches of personal integrity and “drifting” towards full-fledged oppression of dissenting opinions, practices and ideas.
New subtle oppressions derived from a new layer of “metamodern” politics and new forms of gross oppression pertaining to the technological properties of the information age—these are two categories of human misery that make necessary a corresponding level of emancipatory struggles.
The idea of Emancipation Politics is to create a permanent framework for society’s ongoing debate and dialogue about freedom and oppression: If new forms of oppression emerge, in whatever subtle or obvious guise, there should be a forum for bringing this to the public eye and a framework within which new solutions and responses can be discussed and devised.
Rights Reloaded
There is a profound connection between emancipation at this abstract and subtle level and the ongoing negotiation of negative human rights in society—and corresponding responsibilities (because your rights are inevitably my responsibilities and vice versa ).
“Negative” human rights (or negative freedoms), as we have seen, include such things as not being arbitrarily imprisoned, freedom of speech, freedom of movement, freedom of religion, profession, trade, etc. These freedoms or negative rights were relatively straightforward when applied to the powers of early modern states: don’t tell people what to believe in terms of religion, don’t threaten them, don’t throw them in jail and torture them, don’t crack down on the press, and so forth. And as we have seen, from there on—from the establishment of the modern state—the complicated and difficult questions in established democracies have to do more with delineating sound social rights or positive freedoms: should someone have the right not to starve, even if they don’t work, or right to education, right to have a job? Modern politics of Left and Right have largely been about finding a reasonable and sustainable level of social rights, whereas only extremists and totalitarians have seriously sought to infringe upon the negative rights.
As we begin to understand the new political landscapes of the globalized, digitized and postindustrial era, the discussion of negative rights is reborn, if you will, on a new and higher level of abstraction. We can all agree that we, as citizens, should be free from threats of violence on behalf of the state if we speak out against some perceived injustice. But what about the vague but real threat of Islamist extremist terrorists, or the right not to have our “free will” manipulated by technocrats and special interests, or the right not to be brought into social situations in which we are “out-depthed” and feel utterly confused and horrified as a result, or the right not to be subtly held back by narrow-minded definitions of the societal system, or the right to not have our attention span invaded by a thousand addictive smartphone apps and commercials?
This is where a renewed and revitalized discussion of rights is in order. And not only should there be such a discussion in the civil sphere, but there must also be a strengthened institutional framework to define and/or contest claims for such rights. There must be clearly defined arenas in which we can defend such rights, try to understand which boundaries are being trespassed in what ways—where we can design countermeasures that will either hold people and authorities, companies and employers directly responsible, or (more likely and more often) remedy the harm that has been done, while preventing further harm from occurring.
In short…
a) as society’s complexity increases,
b) this also creates pressures to increase the reach
and density of governance,
c) and this creates new sources of oppression (both the increased complexity of society at large and the new layers of governance),
d) and this creates an increased need to expand negative human rights and freedoms, i.e. the right not to be subjected to a host of new oppressions,
e) and as these new negative rights must be of a subtler and more abstract nature, they will be harder to define, defend and make sound and socially sustainable,
f) which thus makes necessary an ongoing political process through which information is gathered, rights and obligations are perpetually discussed and tested, and new institutions are created in order to defend people against new forms of oppression.
And that process (point f), is Emancipation Politics.
It’s not a binary “thing” that you can do to “guarantee freedom”. People aren’t either free, or not. As we have noted, freedom is a scale, both at the level of the single person and for society as a whole—and it develops together with order and equality. Even new (in)dividuation will eventually lead to new forms of oppression.
And since society’s development is full of uncanny paradoxes and contradictions, it is unavoidable that efforts to improve the human condition can and will create new forms of oppression. The point is that this emergence of new oppression should be preempted in the best possible manner and be made visible and a subject of public debate and political agency.
Nordic Ideology Page 37
