And if you want to be prudent and respect the narratives and traditions that have grown through history, which alternative treats such folk narratives with the greatest care and respect; one that has a Politics of Theory to continuously see if culture has gone off the rails and become destructive, or one that has no such mechanism? Having a Politics of Theory is—together with Empirical Politics—like buying an insurance.
The classical conservative wants to refuse to buy the insurance in an accelerating time that is changing very quickly and in which crazy ideologies are popping up again. The prudent thing to do—indeed, the responsible and conservative thing to do—is to buy the damned insurance and make sure you pay its premium. The same can be said about Democratization Politics: Again, it’s like buying an insurance.
And when it comes to the conservative concern for the soul, or the loss of connection to it in our fast-paced fast-food society, what could be more important than Existential Politics? Would you like to go on not having inner development as a political topic, with good data to look at and discuss? Not to mention Emancipation Politics—how will you defend individual rights without an institutional framework to do so? Wouldn’t it be reckless and irresponsible—which is what every conservative claims not to be—to reject such politics?
And then there’s the whole issue of the value of elites that have done hard inner work to earn their place and who lead with a gentle hand and a long-term perspective. Political metamodernism has a developmental psychology to back it up and can help identify and gather such elites and make sure they can wield and maintain power. Can classical conservatism do that? Do the conservatives have any better strategies for how the educated and competent elites of society should organize themselves to avoid an uninformed mob rule from taking over? Recent populist developments suggest they don’t.
And you want to not have a partial, ideological perspective, but to relate to the slow and organic development of the whole? How exactly can you do that without seeing that the other ideological positions are also a part of that whole—without the metamodern principle of transpartisanism and the metamodern method of co-development? How can you lead and represent the whole when you always splice off about half of the population and their worldviews? You cannot let society grow organically without the holistic multi-perspectivalism of metamodernism. Or rather, you can, but you won’t be overviewing and leading that growth.
As you can see, good monsieur , your conservatism is only a cheap fanfare for political metamodernism. The modern form of conservatism is immature, childish, irresponsible and imprudent compared to the Nordic ideology.
The Nordic ideology is, simply, more conservative than conservatism.
More Radically Rebellious than Anarchism
Anarchism may be the least serious challenge to political metamodernism in terms of real politics in the world: there are no tangible or relevant real-world examples, it is not a force in international politics, and it mostly attracts youngsters, punks and cranks—and a few intellectuals.
Because of its unrealistic ideals and tendencies towards extreme game denial, it has failed to materialize societies beyond brief flickers in history since its proper modern formulation in the writings of the Russian thinkers Mikhail Bakunin (1814-76) and Peter Kropotkin (1842-1921).
We are considering here, of course, not all forms of anarchism (there are quite a few), but those linked to communal anarcho-communism—a stateless society in which people would work together in free and voluntary association, agreeing upon how to share spoils and help one another when in need. Such ideas naturally blend into socialism, and they are subscribed to by several major intellectuals of the Left, such as Emma Goldman in the early 20th century, and in our days, Noam Chomsky.
Anarchists of this kind generally view worker unions as instrumental for governance and are hence closely linked to syndicalism, i.e., the idea that worker unions should be self-governing and similar ideas. And—as I discuss elsewhere—anarchism is closely tied to the postmodern [132] critique of modern society.
But if anarchism offers little serious resistance in terms of real political power—that is the realm of conservatism—its challenge is of another kind: one of spirit and soul.
Anarchism is the purest and most idealistic of modern ideologies; it insists upon uncompromising rebellion against all unjust power, against all injustices, against all limits to freedom, against all violence and uses of force, against all disenchanted and instrumental life and all reductions of humans to a means for an end. No power is self-justifiable; any and all power must always be justified by moral principles and the will of the governed.
Anarchy: it means without rulers ; its fundamental principle is resistance. You resist all that does not hold up to the highest ethical standards, you refuse to compromise with “the powers that be” as they will always try to sell you the current state of affairs as the only “realistic” one—and you refuse to sell your soul to what the mainstream holds to be “realism”. Another world is possible.
Anarchism is at the opposite end of the spectrum from conservatism, echoing (but not relying upon) Rousseau, in believing that humans are inherently good but society is messed up and corrupts us and holds us back. Anarchist thinkers find ways of exemplifying all the ways humans work together, and like to point out the ubiquity of such friendly cooperation—most famously, perhaps, in Kropotkin’s work Mutual Aid . [133] There is not a society on Earth, nor has there ever been one, where people have not cooperated.
In this context, it is important to understand and feel into the healthy and positive aspects of anarchism: a kind of inner purity married to a tender hurt and sadness, a kind of intense and deeply felt longing and hope amidst a world obviously wrought in tragedy—a profoundly tired, exhausted sense of struggle, struggle, struggle. Life shouldn’t have been this way. Something else was possible all along, and it still is.
This genuine and spiritual aspect of anarchism—the naive eyes of the child simply asking why the world isn’t fair and irreverently demanding an answer from any purported authority—is generally missed by other observers. As we discussed in chapter 2, to conservatives and others, the game-denying anarchist mind is the real sell-out, as it sells out the truth and the commitment to any realistic goal and engagement for self-flattery and moral superiority. And more often than not, this suspicion is true: Much of anarchism is obviously hypocritical; just look at violent demonstrations, vandalism, mob-mentality, aggressive puritan obsessions and the unwillingness to try to understand any other perspective while labeling them “Strasserite” (to them, it simply means nazi). [134] Anything but the purest anarchism is always bad, and if it’s bad, it’s nazi. And nazis merit the most contemptuous and hostile treatment. You couldn’t get farther away from a co-developmental “solidarity with all perspectives” position. Anarchism is often an excuse to be a bully.
So yes, in practice, the vast majority of anarchists are little more than deluded dregs. Go to their online forums and see for yourself. [135]
But there is still something else going on in anarchism: a real, bleeding heart, a simple and uncompromising wish for good, a longing for a genuinely moral society. If you don’t understand and meet this true underlying impulse, you will never have met the real anarchist’s core, exemplified by great and beautiful minds like Bakunin, Kropotkin, Goldman, Chomsky or perhaps James C. Scott.
The anarchist mind may share with the conservative a resistance against grand schemes and large structures of governance, against a flattened and disembodied intellect that forces itself upon the complexity, multiplicity and particularity of the world. But more fundamentally, its challenge to political metamodernism lies in the question of purity of intent: Aren’t you, the metamodernist, really compromising with the existing power structures? Aren’t you, in truth, sellin
g yourself short? Isn’t there a harder, harsher and more direct struggle, a more obvious and concrete path to a sane and fair society? Aren’t you really making excuses for not taking up that struggle, instead of your cute co-developmental plan? Isn’t this one big compromise with the cold hand of the market, with the oppression by military and police—a grand sell-out to subservience and comfortable complacency? Shouldn’t we simply stop doing extreme oppression and exploitation, and stop doing it today? Isn’t there a deeper transformation of the economy from which you are distracting yourself with all of these exercises in perspective taking? Aren’t you hiding from your own potential for greater compassion, from your fear of what it means to pay the price to truly resist—resist what you deep down know is just wrong?
As Bakunin himself said it:
“To revolt is a natural tendency of life. Even a worm turns against the foot that crushes it. In general, the vitality and relative dignity of an animal can be measured by the intensity of its instinct to revolt.” [136]
Isn’t the Nordic ideology one great excuse for copping out from doing what is right and natural, but difficult and dangerous—to revolt?
Okay, fair questions, dear anarchist mind.
I could answer by attacking your unrealistic ideology, the fact that you only ever materialize political structures when you have extreme common enemies (e.g. the Spanish Civil War, the Kurds of Rojava, brief moments of major strikes and labor conflicts, moments after large-scale natural disasters), or I could point out that I offer a much more realistic path that doesn’t rely on forcing your ideas down the throats of others (because anarchists have no plan about what to do with all those conservatives), or that I don’t rely upon moralistically judging others. Or I could show empirically that the vast majority of your friends are authoritarians looking for an excuse to bully other kids. [137] Or I could point out that even if you start an anarchist commune, you will not be freeing all other people, but leave them stuck in the capitalist world-system. Or I could underscore that your anarchist communes are less radically emergent than idealistically purpose-driven virtual tribes and swarms of dividuals made possible by metamodern internet society.
But that would of course, again, be cheating. It wouldn’t be taking you seriously. You must be beaten in your own Olympic discipline: rebellion.
For all its game denial and attachment to anti-thesis and utopia (as compared to metamodern game change, proto-synthesis and relative utopia), anarchism is the spiritual pinnacle of modern society because it keeps reminding us of the unfulfilled potential of higher freedom and deeper equality. As such, it thus comes closest, of all the modern ideologies, to the spiritual core of political metamodernism. And political metamodernism must hence deliver by showing that it is consistent with the radical resistance of a generous and glowing rebel heart.
Said Bakunin:
“I am a fanatic lover of liberty, considering it as the unique condition under which intelligence, dignity and human happiness can develop and grow ; not the purely formal liberty conceded, measured out and regulated by the State, an eternal lie which in reality represents nothing more than the privilege of some founded on the slavery of the rest; not the individualistic, egoistic, shabby, and fictitious liberty extolled by the School of J.-J. Rousseau and other schools of bourgeois liberalism, which considers the would-be rights of all men, represented by the State which limits the rights of each—an idea that leads inevitably to the reduction of the rights of each to zero. No, I mean the only kind of liberty that is worthy of the name, liberty that consists in the full development of all the material, intellectual and moral powers that are latent in each person; liberty that recognizes no restrictions other than those determined by the laws of our own individual nature , which cannot properly be regarded as restrictions since these laws are not imposed by any outside legislator beside or above us, but are immanent and inherent, forming the very basis of our material, intellectual and moral being—they do not limit us but are the real and immediate conditions of our freedom.” [My bolds] [138]
If we are to take Bakunin’s striving for freedom seriously, we must seek to climb the highest reaches of human development, and—as Bakunin agrees—this is a collective endeavor. Anything that hinders human flourishing is detrimental to freedom in this deepest sense of the word.
And here is the decisive blow: Without a conscious self-organization of human activity to improve and optimize inner development, humans will never be able to enter into free and creative association with one another. The moment someone reaches “the full development of all the material, intellectual and moral powers” inherent to them, they become devoted to helping society and to the development of all people. And people can be free to develop only if others are there to help them to do so, rather than to hinder them.
Hence, any truly anarchist society, loyal to the goals set by Bakunin, must be shaped to support the inner growth of all citizens. Even in a society with no state and no use of force, you would still need Existential Politics, Emancipation Politics, Democratization Politics and Gemeinschaft Politics to achieve this end. And without Empirical Politics, people would still be subjected to the power relations that come from transfigurations of facts and truth. And without a Politics of Theory, we will still be slaves to whatever narratives that are made invisible and forced upon us.
Go ahead and rebel against the state and the global capitalist market if you want. But it’s peanuts. I, the metamodern mind, rebel against the very social construction of the modern universe. That is irreverent. Compared to that, your anarchist rebellion is one of a smaller soul, of a smaller imagination—of a coward heart, of idle complacency.
The most radical and uncompromising rebellion has a new name—a name whispered under the breath; hidden under a polite, awkward smile, superficially indistinguishable from that of a Swedish social democrat: the Nordic ideology. It has no followers—only co-developers. It is more radically rebellious than anarchism. The metamodern mind defies not only its position in society and society’s configuration; it spites the heavens.
Strategic Considerations
In each of these lines of reasoning we have taken the modern ideologies at face value, just to show how they are conceptually inferior to political metamodernism. But that doesn’t mean we should let them define which path we take. If you submit political metamodernism to the demands of any of the modern ideologies—which all of the subscribers of modern ideologies will try to get you to do (“yes, but economic class…” etc.)—it will become vulnerable to critiques of all other modern ideologies. And they’ll tear you down according to those premises. Don’t let them do that. Just smile through the bullshit.
So yes, anarchists can claim that the Nordic ideology is a weak liberal centrist position. But the political metamodernist knows that the spiritual ideals of anarchism are not approached in the space of resisting and destroying the modern state and the market, but in the structures that emerge on top of modern society: the post-capitalist, digitized, co-developmental space emerging in the most developed economies of the world.
And socialists can claim that we are weak capitalist apologists. And conservatives that we are compulsive Stalinist utopians and copout dreamers, libertarians that we are extreme socialists—and so on.
All of these accusations are attempts to submit political metamodernism to the premises of a certain modern ideology. If anything, it is pretty exciting that political metamodernism can be viewed so differently and attacked for so seemingly contradictory things. At a surface level, this would seem to signal a very disorganized and poorly thought-through position. But as we know, in this case, it is because we have a more deeply organized ideology, one centered around higher and more abstracted principles: both-and thinking. Because we are both-and thinkers, the either-or people will always be objecting either to the “
both” or to the “and”. We have the ability to fold through a higher dimension and show up anywhere on the political spectrum, moving transpartially to co-develop our way towards a metamodern society. It’s a bit like being a time-traveler in a sci-fi movie where the protagonist knows the possible paths of the future and can thus crop up at the most critical events to affect them in a more desirable direction.
Late modern societies tend to gravitate towards green social liberalism, as we have seen, with some reactions of conservative and nationalist sentiments here and there. Hence, a good place to start may be in the Nordic countries and specifically as a kind of Green Social Liberalism 2.0. A sound strategy may be to support the creation of smooth, libertarian markets with a highly functional safety net underpinning them, while taking decisive steps to spur green innovation and efficient use of natural resources. But remember that these are truly secondary questions: The real issue is to introduce all the six processes of metamodern politics , so that society can be transformed deeply and in earnest into “a listening society”. As long as it’s ethically justifiable and non-violent, whatever you can do to make this happen is a step in the right direction.
There is little reason to play along with the accusations of the modern ideologies. They can and will all persistently misunderstand political metamodernism. There is little reason to appease them; if you make serious efforts to appease one, you will lose all the others. Instead, the plan is, again, to capture the imagination and attention of a small but significant part of the population and to increase your centrality in the networks of power from there on.
An often-overlooked aspect of network science is the so-called negative ties . It is common knowledge that network positions of high centrality and bridging are powerful. And most people will have heard of “the power of weak ties”: Because you can have so many “weak ties”, the likelihood that someone will have some useful property goes up if you learn to make many and diverse contacts. But there are also negative ties: all the folks who will want you to not succeed and who will work—subtly or actively—against you. [139] And here’s an important thing: Most ties are going to be both positive and negative . The composition of your ties to people across the political spectrum is in turn determined by how well you rank, in their regard, relatively to all other positions on the spectrum.
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