That’s what would be going on at the Ministry of Emancipation : All forms of oppression that people experience in their lives would be gathered as data and analyzed. There would be public discussions about the interpretation of these data, and there would be an ongoing debate about what can be done to defend people, according to what rights. Human rights will no longer be enshrined and taken as religious absolutes, but be recognized for the social constructions and social deals they really are. What rights do you have, and whose obligation is it to uphold these rights, under what circumstances? This will become an ongoing and central discussion in metamodern society.
Just as a key difference between modern and metamodern society is that in the former, the system of governance is a given, and in the latter, it is an ongoing developmental process, so it is with human rights and civil liberties—in modern societies these are seen as naturally given and immutable background variables, in the latter they are seen as a productive field of expansion, development and critical restraint. This is human rights reloaded.
In today’s society we are already slipping into this redefinition of rights within many areas: culture wars, identity politics, issues of migration, expensive healthcare (do we have the right to medications that cost millions, if these save lives?), nudging, environmental impact, basic income, free speech and false information; all of these seep into every part of politics and the media—who has what rights, who is oppressed and in what ways, and who has what obligations. But as things stand today, there are only weak and haphazard institutional frameworks for dealing productively and systematically with these issues, which results in a host of pathologies: liberal politicians pursuing untenable expansions of people’s “rights”, single court decisions getting too much power over major societal issues, people being attracted to extremist positions on both ends of the political spectrum.
Our societies need a “human rights 2.0”, an ongoing updating of which rights apply in which contexts, and an ongoing cultivation of frameworks which counter any new forms of oppression that may arise as society progresses into a metamodern stage. Consider this: You have the “great stretching out” of value memes, i.e. more people encountering one another across all of the different value memes than ever before, under the increased ability to monitor and control one another, not only technologically but also psychologically. Do you really think that a static set of given “individual rights” can and will protect everyone from oppression in all of its forms and guises? That would be a terribly naive belief.
As we create a new layer of dividual rights or transpersonal rights , these will need to be less static than the human rights of e.g. the UN Declaration: “No one shall be held in slavery or servitude; slavery and the slave trade shall be prohibited in all their forms”, etc. They will be less formulated as rules and more a “meta-rights ”, and they will need to be more case sensitive. I will leave examples aside at this point, but I hope to discuss the matter in future Hanzi books. [105]
The cultivation of such Emancipation Politics—and the gathering and coordination of emancipatory and libertarian forces of society—is a necessary counterweight to the integrative forces of the other forms of politics. Gemeinschaft Politics, Existential Politics—just imagine how wrong these things can go. And yet, necessary they are.
For metamodern society to materialize, it must ultimately always prioritize higher freedom and creativity over equality. But such a priority can never be a concluded affair. The ghost of totalitarianism can and will show its face again and again in the coming period, in increasingly subtle and seductive guises, within ourselves and in the cracks of our reasoning.
It may be tempting to claim that we, as humanity, will find freedom beyond the political realm. But even in such utopias, if they were credible, people would still need to coordinate their actions on a large scale, and to do so successfully would require inescapably subtle forms of self-organization: coordinating deeper and deeper parts of our psyches.
The answer, then, is not to avoid deeper integration of human agency and further development of the intimacy of control, but to put the struggle for deep emancipation—a principled defense of dividual rights—at the heart of this development. Failure to do so can and will set us on a drifting course towards totalitarianism.
Integration and (in)dividuation are in a perpetual dance. Emancipation Politics can never by itself create higher (in)dividuation. You can’t “do politics” on someone and make them advance to a higher stage of personal development. Such processes of development must always belong to the person or group themselves who find new ways of acting, thinking or feeling independently. As such, (in)dividuation can only occur spontaneously at so many local and unique sites, at specific historical micro-events. Micro-revolutions—acts or insights that reassert autonomy—happen in people’s lives much like falling stars appear in the night sky. Such things cannot be controlled or governed.
But Emancipation Politics can stop the systemic suffocation of such instances of (in)dividuation. If people are failing to find their inner voices of conscience or to develop their unique talents because they are being pressured or manipulated or made invisible or systematically ignored—this can be made visible for the public and measures can be taken to counteract the forces of oppression.
La Résistance, Direct and Indirect
We have mentioned that Emancipation Politics can, in practice, take two distinct forms in terms of measures taken: direct and indirect defenses of freedom. Let us examine what Emancipation Politics can look like more generally and these two forms of defense specifically.
The Ministry of Emancipation should monitor trends of experienced oppression in society, publicize its data for public discussion, gather expertise about the possible sources of such oppression and organize fora in which different competing interpretations can be put forward.
Such monitoring can take three different forms: 1) quantitative data gathered through surveys, web analysis of big data and the like, 2) qualitative data gathered through ethnographies and undercover participatory studies, analyses of current discourses in society and so forth, and—most importantly 3) people’s own filed complaints. This last instance would be made possible by a new public framework of civil service, which has the obligation to listen to complaints and try to see if their experienced oppression can be resolved. So: measure, define, publicize, discuss, remeasure, compare trends over time, discuss reasonable solutions, remeasure…
Somewhere in that seemingly tedious process, awaits higher freedom, ready to bloom—more so than on top of any barricades I can think of.
Questions that must be answered on a yearly basis are such as:
What unhealthy and unwanted dependencies do people feel control their lives?
In what contexts are people afraid to speak their honest opinions, and for what reasons?
In what contexts are people being held back from legitimate initiatives and through what means does such holding back take place?
What levels of personal (in)dividual freedom do different groups of the population have, if we use the 1-9 scale suggested in chapter 5 of this book?
What hooks and points of leverage do people have upon one another and how do these things play out in their lives?
In what contexts are people being limited by bureaucracy and red tape?
In what contexts have single persons or small groups been rolled over by collective or stronger group interests?
In what contexts do people show obvious unwillingness to take personal responsibility, and what are the mechanisms causing such learned helplessness?
What uses of authority can and should be questioned within policing, criminal care, healthcare, psychiatry, education and social work?
In what contexts are people being manipulated and treated as means to an end?
In what contexts do p
eople feel pressured by civil society and family relations, and what are the consequences?
As a society, we should have institutions, arenas and fora for collectively thinking about freedom and oppression in society—and for implementing solutions to reduce oppression and increase the degrees of freedom. That requires the development of a language for speaking about these matters and a strong basis of knowledge and expertise about the sources of oppression. That’s what Emancipation Politics would aim to provide: an improved collective awareness of freedom and oppression throughout society, a richer shared self-understanding.
The direct defenses of freedom would have to do with citizens’ legal rights and things that can be treated by courts. If someone steals our information, subjects us to unjustifiable surveillance, or excises undue medical authority, or limits our speech through forms of censorship, or actively threatens us to adopt social or political views lest we lose our unrelated job, or if someone unfairly has manipulated the stream of information that reaches you; such matters—at least some of them—should be able to be treated by courts or similar (e.g. a hospital might have its own system for receiving and dealing with complaints).
If the “new layer of negative rights” is defined too sloppily or widely, this will quickly devolve into a society bogged down with ridiculous amounts of legal cases, as everyone will feel oppressed by everyone else. The main issue here must remain that people should have at least some lines of defense against the growing powers of states and corporations as these gain ever greater access to technology. But to begin with, we must institute Emancipation Politics so that a discussion can be held about what such new rights should entail in the first place. Again, we’re talking about a developmental process, not a set destination.
The indirect defenses of freedom are all other measures that are taken to support citizens and hinder oppression: regulations, supportive services, scrapping regulations, changing governmental practices, trying to strengthen weaker groups, increasing the monitoring of those who have power over others, increasing transparency and accountability, limiting the powers of authorities—and so on.
Any suggestion motivated by an attempt to hinder some kind of oppression that has been identified in society—governmental or not—and which does not specifically bestow people with rights they can then use in order to take others to courts or file direct complaints to be rectified, is an indirect form of Emancipation Politics. Sometimes emancipation can be as simple as lowering a tax rate or removing a regulation—but it often won’t be that simple and will require elaborate plans.
It is not easy to know beforehand how all of these policies and practices should look like and work because it is all so contextual and must build upon gathered data, expertise and public dialogues. But we can know that without a serious and ongoing such process, many new oppressions will sneak in and wreak havoc as society develops, and many opportunities for empowering and emancipating people will be missed. If we’re serious about raising the average level of (in)dividual and collective freedom beyond what has been known to modern societies, we must make emancipation a central concern to metamodern politics.
Four Dimensions of Oppression
Lastly, I would like to offer a simple map of four categories of oppression within which new emancipations will be necessary in the future. Being oppressed can mean quite different things, and the different forms of oppression should be treated and prevented in different ways—the four dimensions, if you will, of Emancipation Politics.
The first category has to do with being oppressed by external state and/or market structures , and this is perhaps how we conventionally think of oppression. If someone hinders you from expressing your opinions, spies on you, forces you to say words you don’t believe in, or unfairly drives you into poverty and degradation by ruining your means of income, all of these things are different forms of direct oppression by the system or the collective, of you as a single person. You are being violated or suffocated by the formal systems of society. In such cases, negative rights should be there and be defined clearly enough so that you can fight back against your oppressors. But not only can the singular person be oppressed by the system—the system itself can also be oppressed, when it is hindered from functioning according to its key principles of universality.
So we need to look beyond the old narrative of innocent individuals stuck in a big nasty system; that’s not necessarily the case. Many forms of systemic oppression stem from the fact that the system is hindered in its functioning. A lack of good accounting and the disorder it causes also creates leeway for many unfair power relations to emerge, and hence for oppression to show up in unexpected guises.
The second category has to do with the limits of everyday life interactions , the cultural forms of oppression. For instance, if you are of a disdained minority group and people habitually ignore or downplay your perspectives, opinions and interests, this is also a form of oppression. Or if you are of a lower effective value meme than most of society and you are pressured to take on a straightjacket of morality requiring an inner depth and cognitive complexity that you simply lack, this feels like oppression. You try to be a good person, but even if you try your best, people keep attacking and degrading you for being shallow and evil, and you never quite see it coming. In such cases, you are being culturally oppressed. Of course, higher value memes can be oppressed by lower ones as well, like when the Nazis went after “degenerate art” or when today’s speciesist society penalize people who don’t think we should torture two-year-old toddlers to death (vegans being against factory farming).
Cultural oppression includes such things as language structures: Words have connotations (consider “a fat nigger” or “a cheap slut” and a lot of unflattering things about our culture come to the fore). Language can also be too poorly developed; we may lack the words, expressions and social rituals to express certain commonly held experiences or feelings. As I have mentioned, there are empty rituals as well as unritualized emotions. In these cases, culture itself is oppressed. Here, much of the emancipatory potential may lie in the arts and other forms of experimental cultural expression. And some may lie in critical resistance to the discourse (as proposed by e.g. Chantal Mouffe and Ernesto Laclau).
The third category of oppression has to do with other people and their behaviors more directly standing in your way . On the crudest level, this means things like someone forcing you to live at their apartment and have sex with them, but there are any number of oppressive relations that come in different levels of directness and severity.
Ideally “your freedom should end where mine begins”, but—as I have argued earlier—in actual social reality, people and their everyday lives are always layered in social relations: parents have power over their kids, larger family groups over single persons, bosses over employees, teachers over pupils, bossy and manipulative peers over peers. Your freedom doesn’t start at my outer border, but at the center of my heart. You try to express a new interest or idea, but you’re pushed aside, ridiculed, threatened or silenced. You try to affirm your autonomy, but people use whatever leverage they have over you to put you in your place. You try to start a business, but your competition sabotages your efforts. All of these are direct, interpersonal forms of oppression. They cannot be viewed as originating from the system, or from culture at large (even if they do of course interact with these categories), but simply from the behaviors of others—from specific bullies in all their forms and guises. A society full of bullies and oppressors is, naturally, less free than one in which we don’t play such roles in the lives of one another. An Emancipation Politics worth its name should work to reduce the prevalence and severity of such bullying and oppression throughout all of society.
The fourth and last category of oppression has to do with our own inner oppression of ourselves . In the last instance, freedom is always depe
ndent upon us having sufficient skills and faculties to act freely and make use of what resources we have for the benefit of ourselves and others. For instance, if we cannot recognize what emotions and deeper motives arise within ourselves, we will be slaves to motives that lie beyond our conscious awareness—often being stuff such as greed, envy, power hunger, or an unreasonable sense of insecurity. And others will have greater leeway to manipulate our perceived needs, wants and motives to serve interests that we may not even be aware of.
Or on an even more basic level: If our minds spin and we can find no inner peace, we cannot be happy and feel free even if we have all the riches in the world at our disposal. And when people have trampled our wills and pride many times over, eventually we will stop ourselves from acting upon our higher impulses and deeper wishes; we internalize the oppression of others and begin to oppress ourselves. This last category links us right back to Existential Politics: Obviously, there is an intrinsic connection between our relationship to existence and the deeper freedom in our lives. [106]
Political metamodernism holds within itself the best means to defeat the other strands of political metamodernism. Be the power—fight the power! Both and. Let the struggle for higher freedom commence, and may we defeat the demons of oppression that a deeper and more intimate politics unavoidably brings to life.
Chapter 16:
EMPIRICAL POLITICS
“Never in the history of human scholarship has so much been written by so many to the benefit of so few.” [107]
Nordic Ideology Page 38
