Nordic Ideology

by Hanzi Freinacht

  Okay, ya get it? Democratization needs Gemeinschaft needs Existential needs Emancipation needs Empirical needs Politics of Theory and so on. None of these are “the most important one”, or “the most fundamental”; they are all part of one six-dimensional open-ended process—ze Mas­ter Pattern. Montesquieu 2.0.

  Of course, these different processes balance each other out in a more abstract and indirect manner than do Montesquieu’s three powers. Each of them pushes for a certain form of development, and the long-term quality of each dimension is guaranteed by the other five intersecting and challen­ging it. If one ring rules them all, you get either totalitarianism or fragmen­tation—possibly sharp swings between both.

  All of this rests upon a central paradox: These are six different forces that, to a significant extent, work against each other! Emancipation Poli­tics is out to get Gemeinschaft Politics, and Existential Politics is out to get Empi­rical Politics and vice versa. They aren’t friends. They are ene­mies; they are different competing forces, just as capital and labor. The master pattern is not brought to life through one harmonizing totalizing “plan”, but thr­ough a number of processes pushing against each other, refining, chall­eng­ing and defeating each other. That’s dialectics for you: Real­dialektik , as we said in Book One—there is a logical, recognizable sequen­ce to this development, and a recognizable shape to it.

  This process sets in motion the generation of a self-aware and self-organ­izationing political culture, the hallmarks of metamodern soc­iety; a society that gazes deeper into its own structures, its own becoming, its own citi­zens, its own future and place in the universe. And this master pattern is self-reinforcing; it is already an attractor on the maps of history. Not be­cause I said so, but be­cause it makes sense.

  Inherent Semiotic Structure

  Semiotics, as you may know, is the study of signs and symbols and their use or interpretation. It’s about, among other things, how symbols such as words are used to reference or point to objects around us: a chair, this chair, chairs in general, the picture of a chair, the chairness of chairs, some­thing that could serve as a chair but isn’t quite, and so forth.

  One of the key findings of semiotics as a discipline is that there are certain structures, a certain form of logic, to symbols and their referenced objects that seem to hold true across languages and cult­ures. And an im­portant and recurring theme within semiotics is the stu­dy of 1st , 2nd and 3rd person perspectives: I, you, he/she/it. That’s the important part here.

  I claim there is an inherent semiotic structure to the master patt­ern that unveils a logic for why it must be this partic­ular pattern of inter­related political processes that emerge together .

  Take a look at this:

  Existential Politics develops the relationship of me to myself, my subjective inner world, the relationship between 1st person and 1st person.

  Gemeinschaft Politics develops the relationship between us and us, between people in general, relating to another as a “you”, in 2nd person.

  Democratization Politics develops the relationship of the single “me” to society, to all other people, empowering my participation and so forth.

  Emancipation Politics develops the relation of society to me, of how I have the right to be treated or not treated by society as a whole, by all of you.

  Empirical Politics puts 3rd person constraints upon what forms of relations can be had between self and society (all of the four above relations between 1st and 2nd person); it is thus the relationship between 3rd person reality and the self/society relation.

  Politics of Theory develops the relationship of self/society to reality as a whole , i.e. to reality in 3rd person. It is thus the relationship of all the first four processes (1st and 2nd person) to a commonly constructed 3rd person view.

  It’s a bit technical, I know. But there is a simple elegance to it: We must develop the relationship to ourselves, to one another, between self and soc­iety, between ourselves and objective reality—and make certain we stay within the boundaries of objective reality while never failing to see and act upon real potentials that may always lie beyond our current conceptions thereof.

  We should be wary of being seduced by simple elegance, it’s true. But some­times, if something seemingly com­plicated comes to the fore in a uni­­fying simple pattern, it means we’re onto something. And today might just be that day—the day we’re app­roaching a self-reinforcing attractor. Here it is again, pres­ented schem­atically, ze Master Pattern:

  1p means 1 st person, 2p means 2 nd person and 3p means 3 rd person, and 1&2p means both 1 st and 2 nd person and their mutual interrelations.

  Existential Politics

  1p -> 1p

  Gemeinschaft Politics

  2p -> 2p

  Democratization Politics

  1p -> 2p

  Emancipation Politics

  2p -> 1p

  Empirical Politics

  3p -> (1&2p)

  Politics of Theory

  (1&2p) -> 3p

  I wasn’t joking when I put all of these six processes in a hexagon; they really do fit together. We certainly do need to develop society across all of these semiotic relations if it is to function at a new and more complex stage. You can’t cherry-pick these processes, each of them calls forth the others—just as the structures of our language and its relation to reality call forth a me, a you and a shared world of he/she/it—1st , 2nd and 3rd person perspective.

  This is the underlying structure of the attractor point of metamodern politics. You see there’s an inherent symmetry to it, which makes reso­nance all the more likely to occur. It doesn’t mean we’re deter­mined on a set course of history or that we must submit to the ideas in this partic­ular book. But it does mean there is something we can and should relate to; these relations are there either way, whether we like it or not. That’s how historical attractor points work. I believe we’re looking at one.

  So there has been a common thread all through this second part of the book, even though we have covered seemingly distant and only vaguely related areas. But it’s not potpourri. There is an elegant and simple order beneath the surface. Relate to it and use it creatively.

  What Must Be Done

  Okay, so now we’re really closing in on the point: You have six new forms of politics, and these function, over the long-term, together or not at all, and they reinforce each other and they are already emerging in society.

  But who then makes it happen, and how? If you’ve been a good reader, you already know the answer to this question. Then again, everyone might need a reminder from time to time, and there are still a few blanks to fill in.

  You have two main agents in this world-saving drama: 1. the meta­mod­ern aristocracy and 2. the process-oriented party , both des­cribed in Book One. The metamodern aristocracy is the trans­national networks of people who understand and embody the Meta­modern value meme (and the symbol-stage Metamodern G). They also happen to have the time, energy and resources available to commit them­selves more or less fulltime to working for a more conscious society. They play a key role in affecting the arts, academia, media, global institutions, political dis­cour­ses and in­dustries in a metamodern direction—whether or not they expli­cit­ly think of them­­selves as “metamodernists” in my terms.

  You can spot metamodern aristocrats among some leading people and some less noticeable “garden gnomes” (folks who stay in the back­ground and quietly lift a great and complex burden, largely unbekn­own­st to most) within the process-oriented parties that are begin­ning to crop up in the Nordic coun­tries. [120] The metamodern aristocracy has a relatively clear under­stand­ing of the develop­mental map and the attr­a­ct­ors ahead of us. They combine high cognitive complexity with inner depth and are rela­tively psycholo­gically and physically functional and heal­thy. But such peo­ple remain rare. It’s simply unlikely for them to emerge in great numbers in any given society.

  Metamodern aristocra
ts play key roles and plant the seeds. But most of political metamodernism must be brought into being by wider move­ments. Such movements don’t necessarily have to be very large in terms of numbers of participants, but they have to be strong enough to be able to mean­ing­fully participate in the political arena.

  And that’s where the process-oriented political party comes in; its role is to be a vehicle for infecting the whole political spectrum with the meta­modern virus. The process-oriented party gathers wider ranges of people from the triple-H population (hipsters, hackers and hippies) and what I have called “the yoga bourgeoisie”, and it acts to slowly but surely spread metamodern structures throughout the political system.

  Here’s how it works.

  The process-oriented party pries its way into the conventional spec­trum somehow; this can happen in any number of ways: by taking over key pos­itions within centrist or center-right or center-left parties; by taking the initiative within green movements, for example The Alternative in Denmark; by riding on a wave of radical new­comers such as the pirates (as in the Pirate Party in places like Germany, Ice­land, Sweden or the Czech Republic) or fem­inists—or simply by forming its own party struc­ture when the time is ready (the only example I know of being a small thing called “The Initia­tive” in Sweden). It is more difficult to imagine this thing happening from the basis of a classical Left party, a hardliner liber­tarian party, or a nation­alist anti-immigration party. Somehow, the proc­ess-oriented party must be able to draw upon an accumulation of cultural capital (innovation, creati­vity, abi­lity to manage relationships and draw attention, command over status symbols and so forth) and hence the inte­rests and worldviews of the triple-H populations and what is some­times called “the creative class”. You need to be able to build upon the dominant ideology of Green Social Liberalism and work your way to­wards some version of a Green Social Liberalism 2.0.

  In today’s world, 2019, we have some basic elements of process-oriented politics in France’s En Marche under Emmanuel Macron, Italy’s Five Star Movement and Spain’s Pode­mos —but they all lack a clearly meta­modern political foundation (such as an underlying theory presen­ted in this book) and none of them act within the space of a sufficiently high value meme popula­tion. Hence, they can only be premonitions of the metamod­ern pro­cess-oriented party and its emergence as a transnational network at the center of the emerging glo­bal polity.

  So first, the process-oriented party pries its way into politics wherever it can. From there on, it begins to transform public democratic discourse by taking the moral and rhetorical high-ground in terms of how to treat others’ arguments, how they stick to rules of relative transparency and how they commit to ideals of co-development . As we saw in Book One, co-dev­elop­ment means you take a transpersonal, dialectical, and devel­op­mental view on politics: If you get the best possible processes for debate, dialogue and deliberation, you get the best possible politics, even as peo­ple have conflicting interests and values. It also engages more peo­ple more deeply by more systematically trying out ways for setting up meetings, idea workshops, feedback processes, deliberations and all the rest of it—hence building a versatile platform for citizen engagement.

  It is hard work to get co-development right, but if you do this as your top priority, you eventually hit a nerve in every functional late-modern democratic society and the process-orien­ted party gains a central position.

  The process-oriented party focuses primarily on the political process and on keeping very high standards of behavior. That doesn’t win mass votes and quick landslide elections, but it makes it become the most trus­ted and respected of all parties—or, seen differently, the least hated by all other positions on the spectrum. It does not maximize quantitative suc­cess (num­ber of votes), but becomes part and parcel of the most cen­tral nodes of society—respected by public actors, industries and civil society.

  The party branches out, working within these different categories. It gets to the center of the network of power and it keeps up very high stan­dards of behavioral conduct, having solidarity with the perspectives of others.

  “The center of the network of power”, aye? What does that mean? It doesn’t mean that political metamodernism takes a “centrist” position. It means, because it has solidarity will all other perspectives and the people who embody them, and their partial truths—and because it works delib­erately to co-develop transpartially with all of them, and because it att­racts higher average cognitive stage folks who are more able to do so—politi­cal metamodernism has the shortest average distance to all other posi­ti­ons . It is closer to socialism than the conservatives, closer to conser­va­tism than the ecologists, closer to ecologism than the libertarians, closer to liberalism than the social democrats, and even closer to the political frin­ges than the center and vice versa. It is not the most popular of posi­tions, but it is the least hated . It is thus, in a sense, the opposite of cheap-scoring populism—and yet it can approach and deal with popu­lism more easily than does con­ventional centrism and liberalism. Populism sounds exciting but is boring in terms of its potentials. Co-developmental politics sounds boring, even goes out of its way to look harmless, but it is truly radi­cal and trans­formative.

  So the question is not to have one strong relation or alliance. It is to have many weak ties , and to compete by having the most such weak ties. In network terms, you thereby reach the highest centrality ; you are more conn­ected than all the other positions. And as you have co-developmen­tal ties and processes with all other positions, you also gain higher “gravity”, i.e. you pull them a little more than they pull you, not least because you always have more contacts to draw upon.

  The centrality and gravity of power is most concentrated to “bridges” in the network. And as metamodernism is itself often an expression of reinte­gra­tions of the three spheres of life that modernity differentiated—the pro­fessional, the poli­tical and the personal—this also means that the people it attracts are more likely to have contacts across various econo­mic, politi­cal and cult­ural spheres of life. This also facilitates the concen­tration of power into the hands of political metamodernism.

  Who would vote for such a party? In Appendix B in this book under the section titled “Too Dumb for Complex Societies?” you can read how IQ scores tend to line up neatly along the axis of the value memes repre­sented by the political parties. If a co-developmental party shows up, the same pattern will show: You will get the smartest and highest stage con­stituency, and you will integrate them in a more multidimensional man­ner, meaning that your metamodern movement gains a disproportiona­tely lar­ge degree of agency in politics, media, public discourse, indu­stries, aca­de­mia and civil society.

  And it can and will attract people with higher cultural capital, which is itself taking an increasingly dominant position within society and the eco­nomy. You get the triple-H population and creative class on your side, combined with the higher stage populations.

  Ideally, such a process-oriented party should be able to balance the “lib­eral” minds with the “conservative” ones in terms of what people are attrac­ted to. As you may know, it has been shown and widely dis­cussed during the last ten years or so, that people’s personalities are at least partly genetically deter­mined. Personality types have different biolo­gical blue­prints, gearing the levels of sensitivity to negative emotions, the degree of em­pathy, one’s orderliness and so forth. And these different blueprints turn out to be strong predictors of people being leftwing “liberals” or rightwing “conservatives”. Liberal minds tend to really dislike unfairness and restr­aints to personal freedom and creativity, whereas conservative minds tend to really dislike dis­order, crime, cheating and loafing, waste­fulness, and so forth. Liberal is high openness on the Big Five personality scale, and cons­ervative is high conscientiousness. This has been said by more people the last ten years than I could name, per­haps most famously by Jonathan Haidt.

&nbs
p; So even if you can see a good ten points of average IQ difference be­tween the UK Greens and nationalists, [121] for example, this doesn’t mean that being more conser­vative in terms of personality is in itself correlated with being less intelli­gent; in fact, there have been many studies to suggest there is no signif­icant difference. The essential thing to do is to marry the high stage conser­vatives to the high stage liberals. This isn’t so easy to do, as the “triple-H populations” from where you draw the members and who­se interests you represent often have very liberal minds, which skews the recruitment and alienates the conservative types. But orderliness and creativity fit toge­ther; they need each other—especially in metamodern politics. If you get this mix right, you will have a very powerful potion.

  What do you do with that power? You introduce “stealable” ideas, and do so by “show it, don’t tell it”. You start advancing the six new forms of politics, one by one. First, you say you want to revitalize democracy (as En Marche , Five Stars, Podemos, Pirates and others have already been doing, only without much of a theory behind it or a larger perspective), showing everyone that Demo­cratization Politics is a thing. As this is a powerful and competitive idea in late modern societies with semi-bank­rupted poli­tical party syst­ems, others will follow suit. Some of the Green, centrist and leftwing par­ties will steal your ideas and find their own twist on them, which is fine. Then you go on to Gemeinschaft Politics—and others will try to steal it, such as social demo­crats, center-right conservatives or even nat­ionalists who seek to revive obsolete forms of social inte­gra­tion. Once the other parties have stolen this idea and compete about having the best Gemein­schaft Politics, the process will have taken hold in society… at which point you introduce Existential Politics, only to see it stolen by Christian demo­crats or equi­valents, mak­ing it their hall­mark.