THE BEST book I've read in the past few years: Metamodernism is Here to Change the World for Good: "The Listening Society" by Hanzi Freinacht

This is the BEST book I've read in the past few years. What're my criteria for being 'the best'? Importance to society. I think it was personally impactful, too.

My grade of the book: A+ (using American grading system) - one of the best!

Since I loved it so much this is a bit of a lengthy read. Feel free to bookmark it and come back to it later.

The core

"The king's road to a good future society is personal development and psychological growth."

"Inner experience - and the direct development of the subjectivity of organisms - is crucial to all things, and is perhaps the main ingredient lacking in the perspective of the modern world; acknowledging inner experience is often the golden key to managing society's problems."

"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 and evil "power structure" out there, which you can 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."

"If you want to change society, you need to change these games. You have to change minute things in people's behaviors and you have to develop the quality of their relationships."

"To have perspective, any perspective, be it that of a four-year-old German kid or Master Zhou or a butterfly, is, in some sense, to care. When the world is conscious, when it sees and feels, it also cares."

"There is a great fabric of relations, behaviors and emotions, reverberating with human and animal bliss and suffering, a web of intimate and formal relations, both direct and indirect. Nasty whirlwinds of feedback cycles blow through this great multidimensional web, pulsating with hurt and degradation. My lacking human development blocks your possible human development. My lack of understanding of you, your needs and perspectives, hurts you in a million subtle ways. I become a bad lover, a bad colleague, a bad fellow citizen and human being. We are interconnected: You cannot get away from my hurt and wounds. They will follow you all of your life - I will be your daughter's abusive boyfriend, your belligerent neighbor from hell. And you will never grow wings, because there will always be mean bosses, misunderstanding families and envious friends. And you will tell yourself that is how life must be."

Three different parts of political metamodernism:

"? The Listening Society — which is the welfare of the future, a welfare that includes the emotional needs and supports the psychological growth of all citizens. A society in which everyone is seen and heard (rather than manipulated and subjected to surveillance, which are the degenerate siblings of being seen and heard).

? Co-Development — which is a kind of political thinking that works across parties, works to keep ego-issues and emotional investments and biased opinions in check, and seeks to improve the general climate of political discourse: “I develop if you develop. Even if we don’t agree, we come closer to the truth if we create better dialogues and raise the standards for how we treat one another.”

? The Nordic Ideology — this is my name for the political structure that would support the long-term creation of the listening society and make room for co-development. It is called the Nordic ideology because its early sprouts are cropping up in and around Scandinavia. It includes a vision of six new forms of politics, all of which work together to profoundly recreate society. A large part of this has to do with how to defend citizens from new sources of oppression that can emerge as a side-effect of a “deeper” society. These new forms of oppression are generally of a more subtle and more psychological kind than what we have seen in the 20th century."

Developmental psychology as a foundation

I am going to quote another review here: "Freinacht insists you can't build an effective politics unless you understand that people - and sometimes whole cultures - are at different developmental stages, and try to work with those stages.

He gives the reader an overview of various different developmental theories - those of Ken Wilber, Robert Kegan, Michael Lamport Commons and others - before suggesting none of them are comprehensive, because they fail to see that development occurs at multiple variables, and one can be advanced in one variable but not very advanced in another. Freinacht's own developmental theory looks at four different variables - cognitive complexity, symbolic code, psychological state, and depth."

Here, I am going to describe only two of them. Want more? Get the book. It's worth it, really ;)

State: one of the 4 developmental variables

"Lower states:

1. Hell
2. Horrific (phenomenological reality breaks down0
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"

"How much freer and more secure and effective in everyday life must not the person at median state 8 be compared to median state 7, all else equal? Just one state up. The behavioral difference must have massive societal and political implications."

"We live in a screaming world. Because there is suffering untold, existence has us eternally by the balls. The inescapable, unyielding by-the-ballness is our predicament - to which there can ultimately be only one response: to care. The question, then, is only how we care."

"The higher states, because they are subjective experiences rather than intersubjective facts, cannot be communicated or "proven" to those of us who do not experience them for ourselves."

"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. Ever noticed that strange hysterical happiness that sect people display?"

"Even if your guru really does frequent high subjective states; he or she can still be low MHC (Model of Hierarchical Complexity) stage, work from defunct cultural codes, and have all manner of psychological issues and problems. Just listen to a person like Eckhart Tolle, the author of the book The power of Now, who has been featured on Oprah Winfrey and gained great traction. He obviously has high states. But his answers on any social or societal issues, and the theories propounded in his books, are of average complexity (MHC stage 11 Formal, more precisely). He just doesn't have the answers. Which is okay. The only problem is that he makes all sorts of analyses of society, from politics to mental health to gender and sexuality - and many people listen."

"We need to, above all, improve the subjective states of all humans. It is the only dimension that is ethically unproblematic to wish for people. And it is more volatile; hence easier to affect. A happier world is probably a saner world."

"Most conflicts are avoided in everyday life because we tend to keep most everyday institutions related to shallow aspects of life. It is much easier to create and maintain social settings and institutions that revolve around lower depth: It takes considerably less sensitivity and skill to set up a manual labor team, a movie night or a game of golf, than it does to set up a successful psychotherapeutic treatment, a genuine talk about the meaning of life or a truly sublime shared spiritual experience. When spiritual communities, sensitive discussions and purpose-filled movements are set up, they very often become oppressive and full of painful contradictions. The greater the depth, the more sensitive the social process involved: More things can go wrong, affecting even softer spots of our souls."

Depth: another one of the 4 developmental variables

"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 of 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 is a person's innermost recognition of the greatness and/or seriousness of reality."

"How can it be, that a human being can look into a deep-space telescope and recognize faraway galaxies as aesthetically pleasing or awe-inspiring? Beauty, in this sense, is a kind of recognition. We recognize things such as harmony, balance, proportionality, contrast, pattern, variation, rhythm, repetition; aspects of the world that we spontaneously seem to appreciate. We appear to be able to deepen our relationship with reality by expanding this recognition."

Some ideas about what all this could mean in practice:

• "Everybody should have the benefit of talking to a kind, listening professional therapist while growing up (just think of how the number of molestations would drop, how kids would treat each other better, how family would improve).
• Everybody should get to learn to meditate, both with mindfulness and other techniques so that one can handle stress and get in touch with one's own emotions
• Everybody should get a good gym coaching from early age so that they grow to have fit bodies, good bodily awareness, positive body image, relaxed body language and healthy habits.
• Everybody should be trained in dialogue and get the chance to participate in public debates or deliberations.
• Everybody should get a year off once in a lifetime to go look for new purpose in life and make tough life decisions under professional care and support - in a kind of secular monastery.
• Everybody should be "nudged" and supported to consume both healthy and sustainable food that prevents depression and supports long-term societal goals.
• Everybody should be trained in social and emotional intelligence so that conflicts arise less often and, when they do arise, are handled more productively.
• Everybody should have a proper sexual education from early on, knowing things such as how to tackle early ejaculation, tensions in the vagina, sexual rejections, making approaches in a charming but respectful manner, how to handle competition and how to handle pornography or sexual desires that diverge from norm.
• Everybody should get some aid in managing the fear of death and facing the hand facts of life - to help us intuitively know that our time here is precious."

Details:

"This is a central flaw to the whole idea of intersubjective verification: Namely that it presupposes that each individual is independent of her social context. But what if something in that context affects all the individuals present, so that they all verify something that, under different circumstances, would be seen as false? There are things like common language, social hierarchies, peer pressure, hidden or unconscious assumptions, prejudices and economic interests."

"Cultural capital is a measure of the extent to which people possess a sensitive, intimate understanding of the time they live in."

"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."

"The process oriented party is a party that is less about content and more about the political processes that lead up to the best policies. A party about nothing."

"In metamodern, non-linear politics we don't work according to a certain plan going from A to B, but we see the larger, deeper structures of an evolving global society and we play the game of life in accordance with the long-term trends of that picture, in order to increase the likelihood of certain desirable events to occur."

"We can - or, at least, we have to - trust the processes that come out of communication with one another, given that such processes are fair, open, without excessive emotional pressures and are conducted in a shared language. We must trust that if enough people break their ideas and emotional investments against one another, on average, and over time, something better (authentic, resilient, sustainable) can come out of it."

"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."

"Secularism isn't really about religion vs. non-religion, or spirituality vs. non-spirituality; it is about expanding the ability to question and recreate reality."

"All of the value memes claim to be secular. All claim to speak of universal truth. The problem is that they can only see as far as their own value meme; hence they all believe that they have dispelled the myths and reached "reality". They are all wrong. Even metamodernism is wrong. But unline all the others, we know it ourselves."

"The metamodern activist can cut through the irony of everyday life and media and aspire towards higher ideals, without looking like an embarrassment or a joke. Instead, the joke is on anyone who lacks the same sincerity, who never dared to be vulnerable."

"It is my responsibility that they left home for the madness of the Syrian war. It is my responsibility that most people do not see the wrongs in how we let the farm animals suffer slavery, torture and mutilation. It is my responsibility that the integration of immigrants is working poorly, that so many young women suffer from anorexia, that so many people live their lives with a pervasive lack of meaning and never truly work to improve the world."

"I could have changed social reality, thereby changing the lives of these fellow beautiful creatures under God. It was me all along. It always will be. This is the commitment of the metamodern activist."

"A large part of the issue is to transcend one's own political allergies. Let's try out a few words, allergies on the Left: market, power, capitalism, authority, profit - and of the Right: radical, social, feminism, revolution, public. If you get a sense of spontaneous disgust or aggression upon reading any of these words, if the word itself comes out on paper sheet as repulsive, you have a political allergy, hijacking your political mind. One needs to recognize that these are not inherent essences or givens. They can all be good or bad, depending on the context - and more pertinently, they are all good and bad."

"Every person has a three-dimensional view of reality of her own, consisting of an ontology (a strong sense of what is real), an ideology (a strong sense of what is right) and a self (a strong sense of one's own place in reality) - and that these three dimensions can be described in a pattern of sequentially unfolding developmental stages."

"P.S. In case you still don't get it: Development matters."

Podcast with Hanzi

Some of you might know about the podcast I'm part of, Learn2Learn. Our guests are leaders in the L&D field, researchers, and professionals knee-deep in the quest of transforming their organizations into communities of learning. We will try to take Hanzi on to talk about learning and education in the metamodern age, will send him an invite one of these days! And if you, Hanzi, are reading this - consider this an invitation, would be great to hear from you!

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Thanks for sticking till the end! I publish book reviews every Wednesday. If you are curious about what I do in my job as a startup CEO, check out https://panda-training.com/ Change management and learning programs are ineffective: only 12-20% of people change their behavior and apply the learning to their work, according to research. We provide a personal coach for every employee, in their pockets, to solve this problem. We work with companies like Universal Pictures, Bayer, Posti.