In order for a majority pomo society to be genuinely “socialist” (here just meaning inclusive and fair), and not creep the hell out of over half of the population, it would still need to be led by a minority of memos who subtly but effectively snatch many of the key positions in society.
For pomo-land to exist and function at all, you need to have a significant number of memos to man the steering wheels.
None of this was included anywhere in Marxist thought or in any of its heirs. Lenin had the notion of an avant-garde , an idea which he had inherited from other Russian radicals, but he did not describe the developmental psychology of such an elite. And he thought he could simply reprogram people to be socialists by means of a combination of education, propaganda and violence.
Reason Two: Socialist values require postindustrial abundance. But the problems with socialism don’t end there. Where do the pomo populations of the world start showing up in significant numbers? Again, only in highly developed postindustrial countries. As long as life in general still revolves around industrial production, and most of us still need to endure hours every day in boring factories and offices, partaking in other menial, soul-corrosive work, there’s just no way people are going to become postmodern post-materialists. Why would they? If you get rich, it means you can stop wasting your life doing something extremely boring. So you’ll want to get rich. And if your work is that unrewarding and uncreative, of course you’re going to be in it for the money, to want compensation for your troubles. You won’t become post-materialist.
Hence, the precondition for significant parts of the populations to display the necessary psychologies is that you need to have a genuinely postindustrial society. But—and this is important—you also need the system to function on a massive scale, preferably on a global scale. Just some islands of relative progressive values cannot create a truly postmodern society. This is because they still function within a larger modern, industrial capitalist world-system, which means you need to make serious concessions to that same system.
Looking at some central parts of the current economic world-system, you have postindustrial islands which trade machine-made goods and abstract services to others, but the world-system as a whole is still largely industrial. Hence, we can hardly expect the Postmodern value meme to take over on a global scale anytime soon, which would be necessary for anything like “socialism” to function. I’ll get back to this part of the matter in Outcompeting Capitalism .
Phew. And we’re still not done.
Reason Three: There simply aren’t enough pomos around to uphold the Postmodern value meme throughout society. For people to function within a postmodern society, you would need to have a culture that corresponds to this value meme. You also need the “cultural code” of postmodern society. You would need to have what we called “symbol-stage E Postmodern” readily available for people to “download” and then use in their everyday lives—i.e. people must gain access to the postmodern ideas and learn about them early on in life. And this generally requires at least some higher education within the humanities and/or critical social science.
But other than that, you must have vast cohorts of artists, writers, poets, filmmakers, professors and others who recreate and transmit this cultural code—being critical, inclusive, multiperspectival, and all the rest of it—who make these ideas and symbols active and alive within society.
And even if you manage to institute a system of production that is non-capitalist, you must have some clever way of self-organizing people’s efforts, time and attention in an efficient manner that works on a transnational scale—something other than the capitalist markets. You need a very efficient information processing system to uphold such an economy—one that is more receptive to instant feedback processes, than is modern capitalism. How else will you successfully coordinate the everyday work and activities of billions of interconnected people on the world market? This, our Marxist friends never offered us. [161]
Alright. Now, dear Watson, can you see the murder weapon? Imagine you try to create a postmodern economic system, like “socialism”, except:
there are almost no genuine socialists (in a political-psychological sense of a corresponding effective value meme);
society is not sufficiently economically and technologically developed;
people are all stuck in games and incentives for non-socialist motives (making money, gaining power, etc.); and
there is no postmodern culture that would support an inclusive multiplicity of perspectives.
What would happen? The society would simply fail to materialize the way you imagined. You would only be able to create it by force, never by spontaneous self-organization. And once you use force, people resist, and they get oppressed or killed. And once you have instituted the system by force, none of it behaves as you would expect, because in its very DNA, it is non-socialist. Hence, you get shortages, corruption and collapses. And you must respond with a reign of terror just to keep things in place, at least somewhat. And lots of people die.
Mystery solved. Murder she wrote.
A Diagnosis of Our Time
All of this brings us to an understanding of what is fundamentally wrong with the world of today. It’s quite simple really. It is, again, a developmental imbalance. Can you guess what it is?
It’s the obvious fact that we have an economic and technological world-system that has advanced far ahead of the three other fields of developed . We live in an increasingly global, transnational, digitized, postindustrial world-system, with an increasing number of “disruptive technologies”, i.e. inventions that redefine people’s lives dramatically. But we lack a corresponding global, transnational, digitized, postindustrial system of governance. So the system goes tits up and creates large pockets of economic, social and cultural losers around the world: the working and middle lower classes in affluent societies, the exploited poor in poorly governed and failed states, the animals suffering under industrial farming, climate change refugees and other desperate migrants, the disenfranchised urban immigrant populations in ghettos and banlieues , the tribal and traditionalist religious populations who suffer from confusion and alienation, the fish and other aquatic animals, the biosphere itself.
But these issues would be self-regulating if the populations, economic agents and leaders of the world were up to pace with recent developments. The crux is that we are not. That’s the issue. That’s what’s wrong with the world.
We lack a cultural sphere and understanding of our time, an overarching narrative that matches this new economic and technological order of the world. We, as global humanity, lack the corresponding value meme. And we display behaviors that are unsustainable and downright destructive, given the current systemic circumstances. In other words, we have fallen behind in cultural, psychological and behavioral development . As noted in Book One, we live in a “retarded world”; we have developed too slowly—mentally, culturally and emotionally.
Immense quantities of human and animal suffering are at stake here; if we fail to actively and deliberately generate the conditions that foster personal growth, new behaviors and new cultural understandings, we cannot expect the coming age to be a fruitful transition to a postmodern or metamodern society. We can expect confused and limited overreactions that worsen the maladies of people and animals around the world.
Today, the world-system, for all its wonder and power, is not functioning in a socially, economically or ecologically sustainable manner. We, the global community, have in some sense become as the Soviet Union—a global bronze colossus on feet of clay.
Thus, we must orchestrate an extensive moral, emotional and cultural development. I am not saying, as some idealistic observers think, that we should “follow our hearts” and “return to our moral intuitions and shared va
lues”. Rather, the point is that our moral intuitions and shared values betray us; they can and must evolve.
To master this situation, to navigate the ongoing global “multi-dimensional crisis-revolution”, we must look to the subtlest and most intimate details of what it means to be a developing human being in an evolving society.
It is an ironic twist of fate that, in order to solve the hard and large problems of the world-system, we must learn to look inwards —into our emotional lives and into the nature of our intimate relationships with ourselves, one another and our place in the universe.
And we must do so, not as an individual matter of personal seeking, but as an inherently political issue that involves all members of society.
Appendix C:
EFFECTING GAME CHANGE
There are different levels of game change, some more fundamental than others, but all are necessary. There are many different “levers” to pull. We explore these throughout the book, but here are some general suggestions to get us started. The levers are:
Studying the rules of the game and teaching them to as many as possible (Sun Tzu’s Art of War , Machiavelli’s The Prince , Neil Strauss’ The Game etc.). This actually makes the game fairer because it works against game denial and towards a more even distribution of knowing the rules of the game. But emphasizing this side alone can land us in the cynicism of game acceptance.
Change the game settings by changing the supply of resources. In richer societies where resources are more equally distributed, the games of everyday life are generally less cruel since people have more of what they need and thus feel less tempted to take advantage of others.
Change the game framing by changing ethical discourses. What is considered acceptable or not in order to get ahead in the daily games of life can be altered by making new ethical guidelines more prevalent; and if everyone tends to follow the same rules, people will be more inclined towards “playing nice”. Even who is to be considered a “loser” can be changed, for instance by making it okay to be poor or uneducated.
Evolve the game by increasing cognitive capacity for social perspective taking (higher cognitive stage and value meme, as described in Book One). This makes the whole game fairer, where people at higher cognitive stages accept John Rawls’ “veil of ignorance” (not knowing who in society you will be). Yet higher levels of complexity breed even more refined games, like accepting solidarity with all sentient beings and making room for different kinds of consciousness in the public.
Amassing stronger and wider monopolies of violence (states can uphold the rule of law, but the lack of global polity or transnational governance sets limits for how far solidarity through rule of law can reach). A big and strong monopoly of violence stuck in a crude game can of course cause a lot of relative suffering (Fascist states caused more suffering than representative republican, capitalist, meat-eating societies, even if they managed to amass considerable monopolies of violence). But a strong state simply makes it more likely that interpersonal misdeeds are penalized, that people’s lives and property are protected, and hence that losing in the games of everyday life doesn’t entail death or absolute poverty.
And last but not least, changing the lived relationship to life and death through increasing contemplative insight, hence changing the needs and wants the games are played for . This changes which goods are ultimately seen as most real, most substantial. Goods that are deeper, more immaterial, are easier to distribute more fairly (insight and bliss vs. food and oil, etc.). This affects the economy of roles to be attained for enactment of imagined immortality. In a society where power over others is the ultimate fantasy, people will have to play for roles like “supervisor” or “great dictator” or even “conqueror” and these roles will be the most desired ones, resulting in very dire games where only few can win and only through great cruelty. In a richer “economy of happiness” , people may play for roles such as “the wise person”, “the saint” or “the trustworthy friend”. That will still produce losers and winners, but the results will be determined through much less bloodshed and losing will come at much lower costs.
I urge the reader to look at these suggestions and compare them with our current political reality—which levers for changing the game are we currently using? Even critical social science seems to take the game too much for granted, seeing too few levers.
If we stay on our current track, we will miss valuable opportunities for changing the game, for changing the logics through which our social interactions function.
Evolving Markets, Polities and Civil Spheres
In Book One, I argued that neither the market, nor the state bureaucracy, nor the civil sphere (including our associations, clubs, media and personal relationships) can be seen as inherently “rational”, “free” or “humane”. Rather, each sphere can be more or less intelligent and display varying degrees of collective intelligence .
They develop together and depend upon each other for their proper functioning. In this view, it makes less sense to be a classical libertarian, socialist, conservative or anarchist because each of these positions is inherently biased towards and against market, state and civil sphere solutions respectively. They each have “political allergies” and infatuations limiting their perspectives upon all things political. In this sense, it is necessary to go “beyond Left and Right”, letting go of irrational allergies and infatuations.
I also argued there are different analytical “fractal triads” which are becoming increasingly intermeshed and re-integrated in the digital, postindustrial economy that relies more upon sustainability, creativity and innovation.
These fractal triads are:
1. The systems :
the market,
the state,
the civil sphere.
2. The spheres of life :
the professional,
the civic (citizen and public engagement),
the personal.
3. The political base-suppositions :
solidarity,
competition,
trade.
4. The basic political values :
order,
equality,
freedom.
I suppose you could add a fifth triad consisting of an expanded form of Habermas’ duality between “the system” (all impersonal exchanges via money and formal political power) and “the lifeworld” (everyday life experience and the relations in it) by adding a third category of “imagined communities” or “imaginaries” (the shared ideas and preconceptions about society at large including ethnicity and nationality, such as has been proposed by Benedict Anderson and somewhat differently by Charles Taylor). It is not difficult to see these three categories are also in a dialectical dance with one another and that neither of them is “the most real” or the ultimate source of legitimacy.
Each of these triads develop as triadic fractal systems ; their constituent parts develop together or regress together—even if there may be times when one aspect can and should be emphasized over the other two. The triads can be intelligently weaved together, or their parts can work against each other and cause mutual harm. And, more fundamentally, the parts depend upon each other in their logical structure. Fractals.
The game deniers tend to dislike and deny the aspects of competition and trade that are in fact logically necessary parts of life and society. The game accepters tend to deride and underestimate the very real aspects of solidarity, moral concern and love, trying to explain these by reducing them to the “underlying hard facts” of political realism and crude economic interests. They think competition is the most real.
The game change position avoids such biases against markets, states and the civil sphere, or against solidarity, competition and trade. Rather, the idea is to work for game change across all of these: to see how they interact, how they strengthen and
/or impede each other.
Notes
* * *
See: Ruelle, D., Takens, F., 1971. On the nature of turbulence. Communications in Mathematical Physics . 20 (3): 167–192.
See: Norberg, J., 2013. How Laissez-Faire Made Sweden Rich. Libertarianism.org. Oct. 25 th 2003.
Welzel, C. 2013. Freedom Rising. Human Empowerment and the Quest for Emancipation. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
See: Graham, C., Zhou, S., Zhang, J. 2017. Happiness and Health in China: The Paradox of Progress. World Development . Vol. 96, pp. 231-44.
The other such category is “loopholes” , i.e. when the values of modern society can be set aside and the ethics of earlier stages of society de facto reign. For instance, modern society transposes (and relabels) slavery and serfdom beyond its own shores under colonialism and, in our days, under the complex sub-contractor chains of production and distribution of major corporate transnationals. You could say that these categories are special cases of “residual problems” and “new emergent properties” problems. I discuss these in another book titled The 6 Hidden Patterns of History .
By the way—I don’t mean to equate conservatives with pickup artists or vice versa. I am just looking for the general “let’s keep it real” sentiment, which they both share.
See Scott, M. B., Lyman, S. M., 1968: Accounts. American Sociological Review , Vol. 33, No. 1: 46-62.
See also: Buttny, R., 1993. Social Accountability in Communication. London: Sage.
When the conservative philosopher Edmund Burke in the early 19 th century wrote his critical commentary on the French Revolution he was noticing a related but distinct aspect: that you cannot just force a system into being without the corresponding psychology and culture within the population, lest you will experience a huge backlash. But Burke, too, overgeneralized. He was noticing another developmental imbalance and took it as universally applicable. But in reality, dramatic shifts of systems have been made successfully throughout history. It’s just that some are sustainable because they match the development in the three other fields, while some aren’t. The political systems that aren’t based within all four fields simply lead to severe pathologies: planned economy without a socialist (postmodern) population will lead to breadlines and oppression, an industrialized society with a modern bureaucracy governed by faustian principles of dominance and war will lead to nazism.
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