So, as I mentioned earlier, you don’t have to be the most liked alternative—that’s the populist position. You just have to be the least hated one. The socialists will think you’re a cheap fake, sure, but they will hate you a little less than they hate people who sing the advent of global neoliberalism. Libertarians will think you’re a dangerous control-freak, but they will hate you a little less than people who explicitly want to tear down the free market. Conservatives will be disgusted with your idealism, but a little less so than with actual anarchists. Greens will think you postpone the necessary transition to a sustainable society, but will certainly think better of you than all those groups that uncritically embrace economic growth and couldn’t give a damn about the collapsing environment. Even anarchists will hate you a little less—if for no other reason because they really hate everybody else. Political metamodernism is at the center, not of the left-right political spectrum, but of the network—suspended clear in the sky.
As we have seen, you can only beat each of the modern ideologies on its own terms: They simply won’t accept other terms than their own. The holders of these perspectives arrived at them by maximizing certain values determined a priori , so if you try to propose other values, they won’t go along. That’s a large part of the reason why the modern ideologies are perpetually stuck in a trench war in regards to each other.
What you get instead is a multidimensional puzzle where you maximize your centrality and gravity in transpartisan space. I.e., you become friends with the socialists, as viewed from their perspective, relative to all other positions. They won’t see you as trusted allies, but at least they find you less despicable and more respectable than other opponents. And this is where you need to really kill it with genuine perspective taking: You need to be able to truly show them that you understand where they are coming from and then share in the pleasure of dismantling all the other modern ideologies.
That won’t “convert” most of them, but it will lessen the negative ties and increase the weak positive ties. Then go to the libertarians and repeat. And then to the conservatives. Show them that you understand what they don’t like about all the other alternatives, show them that you understand what they don’t like about you, and show them that you appreciate their partial truths. And as you are capable of launching more devastating attacks on all the other ideologies by beating these on their own terms, they will gladly steal your ideas and arguments and thus do some of the “dirty” work for you. The modern ideologies will deconstruct each other. As our ideas spread—first slowly, then like wildfire—all that remains to do is to lean back and undisturbedly tweak the developmental processes that step by step bring about a listening society, ascending in smoke and fire.
That’s how you use this guide to attacking all the modern ideologies: The point is not to go bash all the others because you can. It is to show all the others that you’re a little less despicable than their other opponents, and that you have something relevant to offer in their attacks upon others. The power of weak ties, yes, but also the power of non-negative ties.
As we have noted earlier, there is an intimate relationship between three fundamental dimensions of all social life: solidarity, trade and competition. These dimensions develop together. So the better you are at having solidarity with the perspectives of others, the more centrality you will have and the more functional communication you will achieve, and that will give you better things to trade for the favors of others (or withhold if they won’t play fair), and hence you will be able to outcompete them. Perspective-taking is key here. This is the power of transpartisanship and co-development—and of a transpersonal, non-judgmental perspective. The purest heart wins out in the long run, not because there’s a God who rewards your virtue, but because it judges other people less, and hence understands them better, and hence defeats them more easily. Jesus was right: Turn the other cheek.
And this, need I add, requires a kind of ironic sincerity. You have to sincerely take the perspectives of others, you must sincerely care for the people who hold these perspectives, and yet you must ironically distance yourself from these same perspectives—so that you don’t jump in their hoops, but they eventually jump through yours. You draw everyone in by showing them ways to defeat their loathed enemies. This takes a whole lot of both-and thinking, a whole lot of “superposition”—the holding all possibilities and potentials contained in one position. And that requires not only “high cognitive complexity”, but consistent practice and honing of skills—skills of political poetry.
Never mind winning every debate. Sun Tzu said it: “Victorious warriors win first and then go to war, while defeated warriors go to war first and then seek to win.” Don’t mind every petty argument. Don’t get caught in justifying political metamodernism and the Nordic ideology to the modern mind; that would be like justifying liberal democracy to the Spanish inquisition. Of course they will think you are hopelessly vague, spineless and/or totalitarian. Let them. Meanwhile, the long-term attractors are driving the political landscape in your direction. Just make sure you strengthen those attractors and win the damned world war.
Look harmless. Take every opportunity to improve the dialogue and debate climate: The better the political processes are, the more level and fair the playing field is, the more difficult it becomes for others, and yourself, to hide from logic and reason. Tilt the game in the direction of truthfulness, and that will tilt it in the direction of greater depth and higher complexity, which is the essence of political metamodernism.
Become chums with the most complex thinkers of all camps; find ways to ally transpartially, to share the credit. Slowly improve your position, hone your perspective taking skills—and go for the check mate: to destroy modern society.
The underlying message isn’t “please listen, guys”. And it certainly isn’t “come join us”. That would be creepy. The bottom-line is: Do what you want, think what you like—but at the end of the day, you can’t stop us.
Chapter 20:
DANGEROUS DREAMS
“A paradigm is needed that without apology takes both an uncompromisingly cynical view of society and a deeply idealistic one.” [140]
Totalitarianism. We keep coming back to it. And for good reason too: As we begin to formulate a new meta-ideology —an overall pattern that does not fit within the scale of modern politics but rather corresponds to liberal democracy itself—some core principles of democracy, at least in its conventional sense, are being curtailed. We are trying to get a hold of “the whole”, trying to relate to the totality of society.
The modern political spectrum is contained in its entirety within the meta-ideology of “liberal capitalist welfare parliamentarian party politics” (an order in turn married to the attractor of Green Social-Liberalism). The Nordic ideology builds upon Green Social-Liberalism (and works its way towards a Green Social-Liberalism version 2.0) but challenges the modern meta-ideology by redefining how governance works. A small group, in practice, infects and hijacks the modern system and works for a new holistic order; that’s a trait shared with the totalitarian movements of the 20th century.
No apologies should be made for this kinship—and yet it is of utmost importance to underscore that A) metamodernism is not reducible to any form of 20th century totalitarianism, and B) that there are real risks that new forms of totalitarianism can spring from political metamodernism.
Forbidden Phantoms™
This is how it works.
As the traditional political scale and its representations of class interests become less relevant in a postindustrial, digitized and globalized society, people in stable highly developed countries begin to gravitate towards co-development and deliberation.
The co-developmental process takes over some of the core principles of party politics: Co-development hijacks representative democracy and its parties; it takes over the whole scale, slowly but sure
ly. States like the Nordic ones gravitate towards something more along the lines of what the Founding Fathers of the United States imagined, or indeed of what the communist “people’s republics” intended and pretended to be: an organic, holistic system of governance with checks and balances for the common interest. The people who identify with this attractor point and consciously reinforce it—the metamodernists, roughly—gain influence (but not full control) over this dynamic. Metamodern politics inserts itself on top of conventional modern politics.
The divisions at the heart of industrial society kept modern democracies from devolving into totalitarian and authoritarian states: No one group or individual could ever gather enough power to curtail the information feedback processes. The societies that took totalitarian paths turned out to be less competitive in terms of information management and the successful coordination of human actions in the long run. Democracies kept a vital balance of power. That is the main difference between the democratic societies and the totalitarian alternatives proposed during the 20th century.
Hence we are left with a pretty strange predicament: If we take the modern democratic ideals to their utmost limit, democracy ends up cancelling itself. If you become super-democratic (no manipulation, only healthy discourse, taking the perspectives of others, improving upon the process of communication, getting the best possible science, representing the wider and more complex common good, etc.) you also, automatically, challenge democracy in its current party-political representative form and gravitate towards holistic and deliberative forms . The most democratically inclined people are the very same who end up working to dismantle democracy as we know it. The very things that splinter us into party politics (which is a good thing) are the same that hold us back in terms of a deeper, shared process of co-development (which is a bad thing). That is how dialectics work: Every system breaks down under its own logic and turns into its (relative) opposite at a new level.
And that puts us in the territory of dangerous dreams. There’s a simple formula for why this is the case:
as society grows in complexity;
the number and multiplicity of processes and emergent events increase;
and this increases the quantity and complexity of “externalities”, i.e. adverse and unexpected effects that the processes and emergent events have upon each other (this is “fragmentation”);
hence, the need for deeper and greater integration increases in order to curb the harmful effects of fragmentation;
and this requires more holistic perspectives and processes;
and holistic processes try to control the interactions between the many parts of “the whole”, which is a difficult and sensitive task;
and when any one holistic process gains too much power and gets anything wrong, it pathologically dominates and harms all other processes;
and that oppression by one process of all other social logics than its own has a name: totalitarianism.
Fundamentally, that’s the choice we are left with: either A) certain disintegration as rising complexity increases the multiplicity of processes and events to the point of complete deterioration (by means of climate change, ecological collapse, culture wars, haywire technologies, developmental imbalances, etc.)—or B) taking decisive steps to make a holistic move for deep reintegration, knowing full well that we risk awakening the specter of totalitarianism.
The “liberal innocent” chooses alternative A, simply ignoring the likely prospect of global civilizational collapse due to exponentially increasing fragmentation. He stays to polish the brass on the Titanic. He flips a few pages of Steven Pinker and concludes that all will be well—and totalitarianism is always thought to be due to the faults of someone else.
The metamodern activist chooses alternative B—owning up to her own inner totalitarian, seeking to understand and counter it, but also to create holistic solutions that deepen and refine the processes of integration of human actions throughout society. She ventures into the transpersonal depths of the human soul—and she invokes forbidden phantoms ™.
Alas, forbidden phantoms™. We could be creating the new communism here, or the new nazism, or even the new Scientology, so let’s be very careful. Remember, holism and totalitarianism are, essentially, the same word: striving for the whole.
The difference between holism and totalitarianism is, fundamentally, that holism relates to and coordinates the pieces of the whole, whereas totalitarianism takes on the impossible and destructive task of controlling the whole. Totalitarianism fails because it subjects all pieces to the logic of one piece. Totalitarianism is holism without a corresponding capacity for perspective taking; coordination without solidarity with others’ perspectives. The necessary power balance is curtailed.
And how do you stop any one part from controlling all the others? You make sure as many perspectives as possible are empowered in an open-ended process. You make sure there are information flows to tear down any one governing logic that would assert itself. And you make sure the best possible processes are cultivated for such resistance to take place. Mobility, flow, multiplicity, sometimes gory dispute—these are the pillars of truth.
Totalitarianism is failed holism, and we need successful holism. What is the most honest and straightforward way ahead? Here’s what I believe: We revisit the totalitarian ideologies of the 20th century to view them with fresh eyes, with the perspective of political metamodernism. We salvage the parts that are good and true—no excuses made for their great evils—and we see how these kernels of truth reflect higher developmental potentials of humanity and beyond.
Most importantly, we make an effort to see that the ghost of totalitarianism’s past is not “in someone else”; it is a transpersonal affair, inherent to each of us and to the configurations of our relations. The better we see and acknowledge our own flirtations with totality, with our longing for power and our greedy claims for possessing the truth—the better our chances of productively balancing holism and freedom.
It’s a slack line to walk, admittedly, two gaping hells below us: fragmentation and decay on one side, totalitarian oppression on the other—both of truly unprecedented magnitudes. If we crash global civilization and its surrounding ecosystems, it will likely be a calamity greater than the black plague or the wars of Genghis Khan. And if global totalitarianism takes root in a time of unlimited surveillance, genetic manipulation, and advanced forms of brainwashing—the sheer terror of that oppression can and will be worse than nazism. In this chapter, I invite you to walk with me out on the wire.
We discussed earlier how (in)dividuation and integration are always interconnected and how they always breed oppression and alienation. We must now own up to the risk: If we want survival and relative utopia, we must also accept the risk that we can end up birthing the new oppression. To walk the line, we also need to own that potential for evil within ourselves, every damned day. Liberal innocence lost. [141]
Both and. Can you stretch your mind that far? Can you go to the greatest evils of history and find them within yourself, see how they in part reflect your highest good? We need to marry uncompromising idealism to the most unapologetic cynicism.
We didn’t defeat the powers of totalitarianism once and for all with the Second World War and the fall of Soviet communism: They were only defeated in their modern versions. Their metamodern counterparts are still alive and kicking as potential horrors deep within us; embryonic monsters waiting to be born as we unleash the forces of the postindustrial and digitized world economy. Let’s take a walk on the dark side of the road.
And because we will need to deepen and refine the integrative processes of society in the coming age, because we must think and act more holistically—we are bound to come face to face with totalitarianism.
The greatest risk is to deny this tendency and try to be a “liber
al innocent”. It will not only blind us to all the necessary transformations towards a listening society and all it entails; it will also let the totalitarian powers sneak up on us and take over as frustrations and fears surface in the wake of social fragmentation and decay. The liberal innocent is defenseless against evil because he is convinced he’s not the bad guy. And evil always comes from deep within, disguised as your trusted friend in a seemingly dark world.
So we’re back to that profound old insight: If you want to have any chance of being the good guy and doing something worthwhile, you have to face the dark side; to face the shadow, to look into the mirror and see the devil’s twinkle in your own eye, to travel to hell—and come back wiser and stronger. And you always discover that the evil was much like yourself all along, and that at its core, there lies a higher, golden truth.
In the end, you never know if you’re the good guy; but one sure way to be the bad guy is to stipulate a priori that you’re innocent and that you are combating the evil of others, and never try to see how their perspectives may apply to you.
Ladies and gentlemen, esteemed non-binaries—I give you communism, fascism and New Age. I give you dangerous dreams. To be approached, nota bene , with the sincerest irony you can muster.
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