The post is a summary of “The Listening Society” – a groundbreaking work written by Daniel Gortz & Emil Enjer Friis under the alias of Hanzi Freinacht. In this book, Hanzi explains an emerging philosophy known as Metamodernism and its importance for the future development of our society. If you are interested in growing holistically you will find this writing is full of gems. 

*All sentences in quotations are direct quotes from “The Listening Society” and are attributed to Hanzi Freinacht. Bold is added for skimmability. 

 

What is Metamodernism?

• “Metamodernism is a cultural phase, a certain kind of “mood” or Zeitgeist.”
• “Metamodernism is a developmental stage.”
• “Metamodernism is a Philosophical paradigm.”
• “Metamodernism is the marriage of extreme irony with a deep, unyielding sincerity.”

The Metamodern Stance Towards Life:

• “To be exquisitely ironic and sincere, both at once”
• “To be extremely idealistic and extremely Machiavellian”
• “To see that God is dead and humanism dying and to accept and celebrate this by taking meaning-creation into one’s own hands.”
• “To intellectually see, and intuitively sense, the intimate interconnectedness of all things: “The universe in a grain of sand.”
• “To accept and thrive in the paradoxical, self-contradictory, always incomplete and broken nature of society, culture, and reality itself.”
• “To have a general both-and perspective. But note that it is not either “both-and” or “either-or” — rather, it is both “both-and” and “either-or””
• “To accept and thrive in both manifesting, systematizing philosophy (like Plato or natural science) and non-manifesting, process-oriented, open-ended philosophy (like Nietzsche or critical social science).”
• “To recognize the impermanence of all things, that life and existence are always in a flow, a process of becoming, of emergence, immanence and ever-present death.”
• “To see normal, bourgeois life and its associated normality and professional identity as insufficiently manifesting the greatness and beauty of existence.”
• “To assume a genuinely playful stance towards life and existence, a playfulness that demands of us the gravest seriousness, given the ever-present potentials for unimaginable suffering and bliss.” 

 

Metamodern Aristocracy 

• “The metamodern aristocracy are people who have a combination of factors in their psychological, existential, and cognitive constitutional that allow them to play a certain role on the new historical stage. But they are also people of social, economic, and cultural privilege, who have the time, energy, and emotional fuel to expend for abstract endeavors such as developing the future of the world system.”
• “The metamodern aristocracy are people who have a combination of two things: great privilege and high personal development.”
• “The more artsy, creative, well connected, socially intelligent, emotionally developed, idealistic, digitalized, diversified, and educated you are — the more likely you are to be a rising star of the new society.”
• “Cultural capital is a measure of the extent to which people possess a sensitive, intimate understanding of the time they live in.”
• “Cultural capital is becoming more powerful than economic”

The Triple H Population: 

• “Hackers are those who combine their IT and programming skills with an intimate and embodied knowledge of digital culture. The hackers depend on a combination on digital skills and cultural capital
• “Hipsters include a wide array of artists, designers, thinkers, social entrepreneurs, writers, and bloggers. The hipsters rely on a greater cultural capital only — combined with social capital (personal networks).”
• “Hippies are the people who produce new lifestyles, habits and practices that make life in postindustrial society happier, healthier, and, perhaps, more enchanted. They have highly developed skills in meditation, meditation contemplation, bodily practices, psychedelics, diets and physical training, profound forms of intimate communication and sexuality, and simple life wisdoms.”
• “Hackers, Hipsters, and Hippies are all driven by intrinsic motivation rather than extrinsic rewards.”
• “For these people, the wage labor treadmill (and conventional work life) hinder the lives that they want to live, rather than being a source of security and empowerment.”
• “Each aspiring triple-H person of course has relatively low chances of achieving financial success. She must win the trust and attention of other people in order to be able to perform her “real” work, her labor of love, fulltime. So she must make many attempts, which often leaves her back at square one, where she must again tweak her ideas and modes of work.”
• “For them, there is no clear line between fun and work.”
• “The triple-H population generally support ideas of basic income: This would insulate them against falling into precarious situations and emancipate them in the face of demeaning bureaucratic control.”
• What the triple-H people often don’t understand, is that most people do not function like them and do indeed still find meaning and security in the conventional work life.”

 

Applying Metamodernism to Politics 

• “Political metamodernism sees through the current spectacle of Left and Right and begins to formulate a Green Social Liberalism 2.0. But it does take sides: It chooses the new society of digitalized, transnational post-industrialism, its structures, and values, over the old industrial capitalist nation-state.”
• “Metamodernism looks to create an extremely social, extremely libertarian, and extremely green society.”
• “As a society, we haven’t fully admitted to ourselves and one another just how sensitive, how utterly emotionally vulnerable, we really are. The aim here is to make this embarrassing truth publicly obvious so that we can together reshape society thereafter — until even the most sensitive among us can blossom.”
• “One of the best things that we can do for the good of the world is to make sure that the richest and most privileged people have enough psychological security not to worry about how fancy their cars are or if they look a little fat.”
• “The suffering and stunted development of our citizens are not individual concerns, but matters of utmost importance to society as a whole.” 
• Metamodern politics aims to make everyone secure at the deepest psychological level, so that we can live authentically.

 

The Most MetaModern Political Party  

• “The closest thing to a truly process-oriented political party to date is the Danish party ‘The Alternative’”
• “Instead of being based on a ready-made political program, the party was formed around a set of principles and values for how to conduct good political discourse and dialogue.”
• “The most central tenets of the party are a set of six core values: courage, generosity, transparency, humility, humor, and empathy.”
• “The party has rather loose policies, but does not shy away from holding its members to strict “dogma” when it comes to behavior and demeanor.”

Dogmas of Debate:

1. “We will openly discuss both the advantages and the disadvantages of a certain argument or line of action.”
2. “We will listen more than we speak, and we will meet our political opponents on their own ground.”
3. “We will emphasize the core set of values that guide our arguments.”
4. “We will acknowledge when we have no answer to a question or when we make mistakes.”
5. “We will be curious about each and every person with whom we are debating.”
6. “We will argue openly and factually as to how The Alternative’s political vision can be realized.

 

The limits of Individuality 

• “The idea of the “individual” no longer fulfills its function as an effective unit of society’s self organization. As a solution to the problems of society, it no longer does its job.”
• “The problems of society increasingly stem from deep layers of the psyche — and their interactions with the world — that are hard to access for us as individual persons.”
• “To really see the singular human being, to really respect her rights and uniqueness, we must go beyond the idea of the individual; we must see through it and strive to see how society is present within each single person as well as in the relationships through which she is born as a “self”.”(Transindividual) 
• “To the metamodern activist, the rights and interests of the transindividual are seen as much deeper, more real and more important than the rights of the individual.
• “With the view from complexity, it becomes apparent that you can’t really blame the individual behaviors of the many people who interact, and you can’t really identify an evil “power structure” out there, which you can just get rid of and things will be fine. You have to look at the rules of the game, at the patterns of interactions, and how we create one another through those interactions — and how that in turn produces society as a whole.”
• “Racism is an emergent pattern; a phenomenon that emerges not through the actions of individual people, but as a result of the interactions of many different people.” 

 

The foundation of all societies 

• “Social Life is of fractal nature, and that society consists of three interdependent dimensions that always repeat themselves but ultimately depend on one another: solidarity, trade, and competition.”
• “Solidarity — in all societies that have ever existed, there has been cooperation”
• “Trade — in all societies that have ever existed, and in everyone’s life, in every relationship, there is an element of exchange”
• “Competition — in all societies that have ever existed, and in everyone’s life, there is an element of competition”
• “The unstated, irrational belief that people have, is that one of these three dimensions somehow makes up a higher truth than the other two.
• “You can play the same game with another, related triad: equality, freedom, and order. They sometimes work against one another, sometimes create synergies — but they cannot ever exist without one another.”

 

Understanding and applying Developmental Thinking 

• “One of the most important aspects of understanding behavior, human or animal, instrumental or moral, and what can reasonably be expected from an organism, is the overall developmental stage of that organism.”

• “Understanding the developmental stages of humans is mandatory for all who seek to change and develop society.”
• “Not understanding the hierarchical stages of human development leaves you more judgmental, more prejudiced, more arrogantly narrow-minded, less competent to understand and empathize with others, and less likely to successfully interpret and predict behaviors (and the events in society).”
• “We are looking for clear patterns in the thoughts and behaviors of people — even in our ways of sensing and experiencing the world — and how these patterns tend to evolve under favorable circumstances.”
• “Most people, the vast majority, stall in their (hierarchical stage) development relatively early during adult life. Most of us never experience any profound shifts of worldview or perspective after adolescence, let alone increases in the overall complexity of our thinking and behavior.”
• “A developmental stage is simply not possible to achieve unless you have passed through the earlier stages.”
• “A stage is an equilibrium at a certain degree of complexity, a form of self-supporting balance within your mind, brain, organism.”
• “Changes of stage usually happen in relatively short leaps that bridge more stable and longer periods of equilibrium.”

 

The 8 Principles of Development Stage Theories: 

1. ”The stages of development in humans and other organisms must be studied in the light of a radical acceptance, a pervasive non-judgment.”
2.  “The developmental stages do not constitute a moral order, in which a higher or later stage would be morally “more worth” than a lower or earlier one.”
3. ”There is a difference between natural hierarchies and dominator hierarchies. Dominator hierarchies are the ones that you cannot find any universal arguments for and that are used to legitimize exploitation. Natural hierarchies have no exploitation and they build on a universal argument that benefits all parties, and it is limited to the specific area in which that benefit can be argued for. All dominator hierarchies disguise themselves as natural ones.” 
4. ”The hierarchy does not transmit to other, irrelevant areas or power relations. They should not give “halo effects”.”
5.  Stance of Humility – “Hierarchical stage models don’t make the mistakes that an anti-hierarchy view makes which groups everyone into two levels… those for hierarchy and those who are above it (hence putting themselves in the highest stage. Instead, they oblige people to describe all the relevant stages, how they relate to one another, and you must always admit that there can be higher stages than your own, stages that you don’t yet understand.”
6.  “Simply to know that hierarchical stage theories of human development have different dimensions and that development in one dimension does not necessarily translate into development within another.
7. Embody sensitivity –  “One must recognize that all hierarchies can and do hurt people’s feelings.”
8. “These stages of development are important, but they are obviously not all there is to life.”

 

• The problem with most developmental stage theories: “Holistic adult development theories smash together different forms of development into one and the same model, and force these (interrelated but still distinct and often independently developed) dimensions into the same stages.” 
• Hanzi goes on to present his own theory which differentiates people’s development based on four aspects: complexity, code, state, and depth. 

 

The Importance of Complexity and the MHC Model in Human Development  

• “The basic idea of the Model of Hierarchical Complexity (MHC) is that people are distributed  across different stages of hierarchical development, so that some people can think thoughts and perform tasks that are more complex than others.”
• “High IQ allows for Horizontal complexity but not vertical complexity.”
• “Both IQ and MHC appear to have rather large genetic components.” 
• “The more correct, abstract, and complex your map of reality, the greater non-linearity you can afford in your thinking and agency, since you hook up with deeper and more universal structures of how society is evolving.”
• “Complexity bias means that we intuitively prefer forms of reasoning that correspond to our own stage of complexity. Explanations of lower complexity seem crude and simplistic to us, whereas higher stage explanations seem vague or counter-intuitive.”

The most important stages of MHC: 

Stage 10 Abstract

• “Who? Emerges at ages 11-14. Observed only in humans.”
• “How many? About 30% of a normal adult population in modern countries reach and stay at this stage throughout their lifetime.”
• “Stage 10 thinkers cannot see the general rules that govern when our abstractions should apply, when they can be expected  to have certain properties and so forth. This means that we will tend to focus on one single variable and want to either increase or decrease its quantitative value: less immigration, lower taxes, more love, more dialogue, less greed etc.”

Stage 11 Formal

• “Who? Adolescent and adult humans. Emerges, if at all, at ages 14 and older.”
• “How many? About 40% of adult humans in a normal, modern population.”
• “Can now invent our own rules or principles that describe or guide the relationship between several abstract variables.”
• “because we know the rules guiding the relationships between different abstract variables, we can guess the value of an abstract variable simply by knowing the values of the other related variables.”
• “Most people never construct complex systems of thought or behavior. But most tasks in everyday  life can be successfully managed with stage 10 Abstract and stage 11 Formal behaviors or below.”

Stage 12 Systematic 

• “Who? Adult humans, or late adolescents.”
• “How many? about 20% of a normal adult population in modern countries”
• “Intuitive example from science? Darwin’s theory of evolution” 
• The main problem of many of the adult development theorists, from Jane Loevinger and Susanne Cook-Greuter to Robert Kegan, stems from the fact that their authors are at this cognitive stage. This is why their minds smash development into one unified model of one-dimensional development.
• “Stage 12 Systematic thinkers will tend to have less rigid opinions but more rigid argumentations. So one way to spot them is simply to ask them questions about their opinions: If there are few rules of thumb and clear conclusions, but much weighing of different factors, it may be stage 12 Systematic.”
• “Stage 12 Systematic thinkers tend to believe that the world consists of systems and their properties. So you find a strong bias towards explanations of this kind: structures, patterns, regularities, the economy, the biological body, Darwinian evolution, the gender norms, and so forth.” 

Stage 13 Meta systematic

• “Who? Adult humans from early 20s and onwards.”
• “How many? Only about 1.5-2% of a normal adult human population.”

• “Downward assimilation means that, because of our ability to share a common language, you can take a word, symbol, sentence or even an attitude, that originated at a higher order of complexity, and still use it.”
• “Through language and interaction you create a “scaffold” that helps the other person partake in behaviors that would otherwise be beyond his or her cognitive stage.” 

 

Understanding Meta-Memes (Code) 

• “Memes are non-biological cultural patterns that spread through communication — where some memes can only show up in more complex societies.”
• “You cannot go from traditional religion directly to Metamodernism. Only when postmodernism has been around for decades, can metamodern symbols start breaking through and become part of society.”
• “Language has evolved throughout human history, crystallizing into different code systems, some more advanced than others, and a person living today can “download” and “install” any of them — depending on her own capabilities, her position in the world and so on.”

The Seven meta-memes or “symbol-stages” are:

1. Archaic – Stage 7
2. Animistic – Stage 8
3. Faustian – Stage 9
4. “Post”-Faustian -Stage 10
5. Modern – Stage 11
6. “Post” – Modern – Stage 12
7. “Meta”- Modern – Stage 13

• “Each of these meta-memes is a kind of underlying structure of the symbolic universes that constitute our lived and shared realities. So each one of them roughly have ontology (theory of reality and what is “really real”), an idealogy (“theory of what is right and good”) and an identity, an idea or story of who or what the self is.””
• “The stages of symbolic development show up as structures in language, logically organized into ever more complex, differentiated and integrated patterns. They each create a blueprint for the creation of narratives: So the language tolls are not only metamemes, but also meta-narratives.” 
• “High MHC-stage folks can develop new code, in effect reinventing or updating the symbolic construction of the world they live in. Of course, by far the most developments of new code die out in the Darwinian struggle between memes.”
• “Higher MHC stage makes the “installment” and “downloading” of a higher symbol-stage of code more likely.”
• “If you want to include all perspectives and treat them fairly, you have to be able to compare them to one another, and see how they are each an important part of reality, and how they fit together.”
• “Later symbol-stages are more difficult to install, which means that fewer people will manage to install them.”
• “Fewer and fewer people can be expected to successfully operate the later symbol-stages.”

 

Understanding and developing Subjective States 

• “Subjective experience, not the facts of the world, lies at the heart of reality.”
• “The economic system, science and logic, even the development of our brains and symbolic universes, are only of value insofar as they translate into or otherwise affect subjective experiences.”
• “When the world is conscious, when it sees and feels, it also cares.”
• “These vast potentials of feeling, sensing, and being have not nearly been exhausted through world history.”
• “The world is screaming, right-this-moment, and that’s a fact no matter how well your own life turns out. And it seems highly unlikely that our (we, the universe) greatest suffering lies in the past; it is very, very likely to lie in the future.”

“Lower states:

1. Hell
2. Horrific (phenomenological reality breaks down)
3. Tortured
4. Tormented

Medium States:

1. Very uneasy
2. Uneasy, uncomfortable
3. Somewhat uneasy, “okay”, full of small faults
4. Satisfied, well
5. Good, lively
6. Joyous, full of light, invigorated

High states:

1. Vast, grand, open
2. Blissful, saintly
3. Enlightened, spiritual unity” 

 

• “Organisms don’t really seek or avoid certain emotions, but they seek to raise the level of their subjective state and avoid low states.” 
• “We see and recognize different aspects of reality depending on which subjective state we are in”
• ““Spirituality” is a catch-all phrase for those human activities, experiences and practices which concern the three highest categories of subjective states — and the perspectives on life and the world that flow from such states (and the elaboration and teaching of these perspectives).”
• “Low states are the ones in which the organism loses its will to live.”
• “Median state is the state you are most often in” 
• “State variability: a measure of how easily, to what degree, and how often, your state shifts”
• “The higher one’s state, the wider and more relaxed one’s perspective: At higher states we see ourselves, the world, and our place in it more clearly.”
• “Just as people at lower complexity only understand flattened and caricatured versions of ideas, perspectives and behaviors of higher complexity, so are the higher states difficult, if not impossible, to convey to people who don’t share the same experiences. This creates a problem of lacking credibility for all experiencers and communicators of higher states: other people simply won’t believe them.”
• “When people communicate across too vast distances of subjective state, the ones who talk of higher states necessarily appear frivolous, naive, confusing, insulting  — or even deeply dishonest.”
• “All of this creates a great rift between people who have experienced higher spiritual states and those of us who haven’t, which can be confusing and frustrating for all parties involved.” 
• “The subjective state of organisms is the most important thing in the world, and yes, it should therefore be made a central goal of society.”

 

“To develop the subjective state of an organism means to either:

• Increase the median state
• Increase average state
• Increase the minimum state
• Increase maximum state
• Increase state variability (decrease stability) in an organism — if that would be beneficial given its current average state and context.
• Increase state stability (decrease variability) in an organism — if that would be beneficial given its current  average state and context. “

 

Understanding and Developing Depth 

• “Depth is a person’s intimate, embodied acquaintance with subjective states. A person’s inner depth increases through her felt, lived and intuitive knowledge of a new subjective state (lower or higher than previously experienced) — and when the intimate acquaintance of that state becomes an integrated part of her psychological constitution; a part, if you will, of her personality.”
• ““Depth” can be thought of as a kind of existential or spiritual wisdom.”  
• ““Great-depth” people are the ones who have experienced a wider range of subjective states, who are well acquainted with being in such states and who have learned to handle them.”
• “Existential depth can be developed through the experience of lower subjective states.”
• “We may measure depth by asking “What is of ultimate significance? “
• “Depth is only gained when subjective states are integrated”
• “Depth is not knowledge of any particular fact, it is not “code”, or theory or any particular belief. It’s just one’s wordless relationship to existence itself.”
• “A problematic situation often occurs in mental health care and psychiatry: when therapists and psychiatrists are out-depthed by their own patients.”
• “Some psychiatric patients may have subjective experiences that are fundamentally alien to the people who have medical and sometimes legal authority over them. The patients can know worlds of suffering, or have spiritual experiences, that are poorly or wrongly interpreted by the therapists and psychiatrists.
• “3 specific forms of depth we can develop: beauty, truth, and justice.” 
• “Light depth is the acquaintance with higher states and dark depth is the acquaintance with lower states.” 
• “When we are stuck in social settings or relationships in which our inner depth — light or dark — are not honored and included, we feel that we are unable to act upon our most profound impulses and motives. We are unable to successfully express ourselves and make our everyday lives revolve around the things we find most significant.”
• “Under these circumstances it becomes difficult not to feel very alone and alienated — and not to harbor a subtle anger towards our all-too-shallow social surroundings. And we are likely to eagerly, sometimes hysterically, seek to have our depths met, recognized and included.”
• “It is much easier to create and maintain social settings and institutions that revolved around lower depth.”
• “The greater the depth a social setting seeks to accommodate, the more difficult the social situation is to manage smoothly and productively.”
• “Many of us harbor greater inner depths than we normally manifest in our lives, or than others normally recognize in us. We are just not offered the social situations to manifest these inner depths.”
• “A crucial aspect of the maturation of humanity is that we not only begin to actively and deliberately cultivate depth in all three aspects (beauty, mystery, and tragedy) as well as depth in both its light and dark form — but also that we create institutions and social settings in everyday life that are much more proficient when it comes to accommodating our inner depths.”
• Wisdom is great depth, plain and simple.
• We might look at wisdom as a combination of mental health, high complexity, and great depth although that would make it harder to qualify people as wise

 

The Problem of Spiritual Communities 

• “Whenever a community is built, there is a hierarchy. Hierarchies of some kind are necessary for people to successfully cooperate, evaluate the efforts of one another: who puts in the most effort, who is reliable, and so forth. Spiritual communities like these are built primarily around a hierarchy of “subjective state”.
• “The leader is taken to be one of higher subjective state than other members of the community, which is why people want to follow him or her. To advance within this hierarchy, one should also be able to rest for longer periods in higher subjective states.”
• “The main problem is that subjective state is not something that can easily be measured, and that it changes from moment to moment.”
• “If each person can hardly know her own state, how can we be expected to build a reliable community upon not only our own state, but the states of a whole group of people?”
• “In spiritual communities, social pressure arises to present oneself as being in as high states as possible (both by personal prestige and because people want to hear that you are doing well in order to validate the spiritual enterprise as a whole. So people begin to subtly lie to themselves and to one another about how lightly and profoundly they experience the world at any given moment.”
• “You simply can’t build a good community with hierarchies derived from subjective states.” 

 

Understanding Effective Value Meme 

• “The effective value meme is an overall pattern of the mind; it is an equilibrium upon which one’s values and worldview tend to stabilize, setting the framework for the political behavior of a citizen.”
• “Developing the effective value meme of the general population is one of the most important things in the world right now.”
• “Your effective value meme is a kind of average between your complexity, code, state and depth.”
• “You can out-complex someone else, or be out-complexed by someone of higher cognitive stage.”
• “You can out-code someone else, or be out-coded by someone who has installed a more advanced symbol-stage.”
• “You can out-state someone else, or be out-stated by someone who has greater wellness and/or more spiritual experiences.”
• “You can out-depth someone else, or be out-depthed by someone who has successfully internalized wider range of subjective states than you have.”

• “​​High state and great depth often lead people to break with the conventions of their society.”
• “Lower state and lesser depth tend to affect you to develop lower effective value meme than the surrounding society’s “point of gravity””
• “Medium state and depth tend to let you stay with the average effective value meme of your society, like most “ mainstream” people today are at the modern effective value meme.”
• “Profound experiences of higher states and the development of great inner depth (of the “light” or “dark” kind), tend to let you see beyond the confines of your own society, pointing you towards more universal issues, which can in effect help you manifest higher value memes than the people around you.”
• “The symbol-stages are the abstract logics inherent to the symbols, whereas effective value meme are descriptions of embodied behaviors. So even people with earlier symbol-stages can behave at higher value memes, if they have high stage, high average state and great depth.”
• “The Metamodern value meme also accepts the importance of elites and hierarchies — something to which the postmoderns are deeply allergic — and it accepts the fact that not all people can be included in all settings: for instance, that not all people can become metamodernists.”

 

Other Important Points 

• “Science is a very powerful method — or set of methods — for understanding the world. But real human beings, participating in all manner of everyday situations, base their worldviews and political opinions on much more than science.”
• “If there were a value meme beyond the Metamodern, there would be a murderous critique of the Metamodern code — which is nowhere to be found.”
• “Some people have seen greater depth, mystery and beauty in the world than their cognitive minds — and their available symbolic codes — can handle. Thus, there is a glitch, a developmental imbalance, through which magical beliefs and other superstitions can sneak in.”
• “You find magic beliefs in people who are of greater depth and higher state in comparison to their complexity and symbolic code.”
• “If there is magic in the world, anyone who you believe has more contact with this magic than you do, gains arbitrary power over you.”
• “Reductionists out-complex and out-code their own depth and state.”
• “We need a group of people — a Metamodern aristocracy — who are complex thinkers, who never resort to magic beliefs or reductionism, and who are moved by a profound inner depth, who can work transnationally and work to create a more listening society, and who can treat all of the other value memes with kindness and respect.”
• “The metamodern position is closer to all the others than they are to one another. This makes it quite a powerful position.”
• “The new game of life looks a lot like this: Whoever has mastered the most perspectives when she dies, wins.”
• “Metamodernists define themselves through the struggle of value memes against value memes: It’s not if you’re right or left that matters the most, but how complex your thinking is.”

 

If you enjoyed this summary you may enjoy my summary of Hanzi’s second book Nordic Ideology.