Nordic Ideology, Part 3: The Proof

Denys Bakirov
Nov 6 · 20 min read

Requiems for Modern Ideologies

When the Christian Church offered a paradigmatic for the Greco-Roman world, “it didn’t simply blaze out… saying ‘here’s the truth, you must believe it!’” — speaks Rowan Williams — “They said ‘look, this is what you say and that’s very interesting as it echoes with what we say, and if we talk this through you might find that what you’re saying has a much fuller expression in what we’re saying’.”

In a similar vein, metamodernism goes after modern ideologies, beating each its own terms. “The better you are at taking perspective of others — and emphasise with them — the greater your ability to defeat them.”

“You can’t win over the fascists by telling them they’re evil — they’ll be flattered and take it as a badge of their edginess and toughness! Why do you think they got those bad tattoos in the first place? You can’t go after the libertarians accusing them of being elitist and selfish; they’ll smirk and enjoy thinking they’re John Galt. Nor can you tell ecologists and socialists they’re being naive; they’ll take it as a validation of the purity of their souls and poetically flip a few more pages of Rousseau. You need to show each of them that, unless they accept metamodernism, they will end up being the opposite of what they identify with.

You kill fascists by revealing their inner weakness (as intellectuals have done since the Second World War); you destroy socialists by revealing they aren’t really egalitarian — and you bring dowb liberalism by showing that it’s authoritarian.”

And you do so not by means of some kind of mental gymnastics. No, it requires some real intellectual legwork. I understand that both metaphors actually mean the same thing, but you get the point.

“You must show the adherents of each of the modern ideologies that if they accept premise and goal A, they must also accept conclusion B. In this case that conclusion is political metamodernism. If you want to be a good socialist, you have to accept that a listening society is far more egalitarian than anything Marx or Lenin ever came up with.”

Look, all of us have known for some time that all these positions on the ideological spectrum are lacking and partial in many important regards. But we had to pledge allegiance to them because in the formal political processes those were the vessels of power, the dialectical levers of bringing the change we deemed needed. But we lacked the overarching framework to really hold all these directions in balance, kind of picking them up one by one in times of need. Metamodernism offers this overarching structure that helps in seeing the forest behind the trees — having the overall picture in mind while now and then using methods from particular ideologies. Being able to utilise tools from the opposite frameworks without being obliged to pay due to the inner logics of any of them. In this way, metamodernism is precisely a meta-ideology — it lets one be a freewalker within the confines of seemingly contraposed ideologies, without losing sight of the broader metanarrative.

“If you want to be a freedom-loving libertarian, you have to accept that Nordic ideology holds far greater prospects for human liberty than Nozick’s imagined minimal state or Ayn Rand’s John Galt land could ever deliver. And if you want to be a masculine badass, nothing is more potent and explosive than being a die-hard metamodernist.”

And how can it be otherwise if we see very clearly that all these modern ideologies are out to get each other, if all of them are merely reactions to one another. The logics of how they operate is programmed to bring infinite conflict and regress. They cannot see above their heads, because they will at once lose sight of their enemies. Metamodernism can see above their heads, because it isn’t fixated on this dialectics of binary rivalries. Metamodernism just doesn’t have intellectual allergies that stifle all the other ideolgoies. It is above these debries of derbys.

Dogs are modern ideologies (no speciecist offense to dogs), metamodernism is opening the gates

More Egalitarian than Socialism

“The fundamental goal of all authentic strands of socialism is to attain shared (and fairly distributed) ownership of “the means of production”. But this state of affairs is not quite the goal-in-and-of-itself: it is merely a means to ahieving a higher socialist goal: a classless society that is fair, equitable, and in which everybody has what they need for a secure and dignified existence. The goal is to enact politics with solidarity in order to bring forth a society that is equitable, the structures of which make possible wide and deep solidarity between all people, which in turn emancipates the human soul. The socialist goal is an equitable society, not merely in terms of opportunity, but also of outcome. Because so much of society is always and forever bound up with the situated social relations between people, it is unavoidable to also seek to level out the outcomes in terms of income and wealth — otherwisethe priveleges tend to stack up over time: wealthy family dynasties, economic classes, cartels and monopolies, corporations that flee from social responsibility and taxation, and so on. So if you don’t care about outcome, you will end up reproducing inequality of opportunity as well. And only if people are reasonably equal can they resist exploitation, and only if they resist being exploited can they be free and fully human. And right there is the killing point, my dear comrade. If you have the goal to create a fair and equal society, you must also support equalities of outcome to some extent. Can you get equality of outcome without a developed Gemeinschaft Politics? No, because there will be so much social, emotional and physiological inequality left, and these will reproduce new forms of inequality. And even if “everybody” would own the means of production together and manage them democratically, this process would always be limited by whatever form democracy takes. If the mode of governance is not itself a process of incremental and self-critical development, you will always be stuck with the power relations inherent to that particular system. So without Democratisation Politics, you cannot actually have socialism in any real sense. Both Gemeinschaft and Democratisation Politics require the other four new forms of politics to funciton. Thus, you simply cannot call yourself a socialist unless you also accept political metamodernism. All said and done, the Nordic Ideology is more egalitarian than socialism.”

More Liberal than Liberalism

“The fundamental goal of liberalism is to maximise the freedom of the individual. It is hard enough for each of us to figure out how we should lead our lives and what is good for us and our kids — let alone know what might be good for others. Hence, it is unwise to put too much of your life in my hands and vice versa.

There is, to a considerable extent, a trade-off between how much should be decided upon politically and how much each of us can decide for ourselves. For instance, if you have high taxes, the political system controls a large share of human activity, and with lower taxes more of that decision power lands in the hands of individuals. Generally speaking, individuals will be more empowered in the latter case, and this fosters responsibility, innovation, hard work, independent thinking and economic growth, which in turn increases individual freedom.”

The easies way to defeat liberalism is by attacking its core presupposition: the individual. Hanzi uses Deleuze’s famous term dividual instead, but I am more keen on emphasising Rowan Williams’ distinction between the individual and the person: “It is in turning away from an atomised artificial notion of the self as simply setting its own agenda from inside towards that more fluid, more risky, but also more human discourse of the exchanges in relations in which we’re involved, and grounding that on the basic theological insight that we are always already in advance spoken to, addressed, and engaged with by that which is not the world and not ourselves.”

“But “libertarians and classical liberals won’t give up their belief in the individual anytime soon, so in order to beat them on their own terms you must show them that the maximisation of individual liberty cannot be done without political metamodernism.”

Not only must there be a state to guarantee the safety of individuals against the violence or oppression of one another, it must also warrant legally binding agreements and protect property rights.

If the governance of such a state does not include an active and deliberate Emancipation Politics, there will be fewer ways for the oppressed and disfavored parties to resist. This in turn would require a Democratisation Politics to make certain that the form of governance is something that is entered into voluntarily in the first place. Empirical Politics is necessary to ensure that the minimised governmental action actually does maximise human freedom.”

What about anarcho-capitalism?

“Even if you had no state and security was up for sale, the best security solutions would still be those that provide people with a “listening society” so that people feel heard, seen and represented. The best security is still preventive security. This would in turn require a development of all the six forms of politics. In market terms, this service would be more competitive.

Imagine that you’re a “client-citizen” of the kind envisioned by anarcho-capitalists: You have blockchain money and you shop around for the best state services. In one such state service, the metamodern one, you can affect the mode of governance, people are nudged to treat you better and you get a framework that helps you find profound meaning in life, and the fellow citizens will be much more peaceful and socially intelligent, and it’s all empirically proven to work.

The only way to stop people from voluntarily choosing the metamodern solutions would be to stop free competition by some kind of threat or violence or monopoly. The only thing that can stop liberalism from being eaten alive by metamodernism is authoritarianism.”

More Sustainable than Ecologism

Image (of consumerism) is from here

According to Jonathan Rowson, addressing climate change cannot be productive without reference to democracy (because it is a mechanism for making collective decisions, and climate change is the biggest collective action problem of all time. On the one hand, short electoral cycles militate against the kinds of long-term thinking that climate change requires. On the other hand, if we can mobilise the requisite political will in civil society, politicians will follow with the appropriate regulation and market signalling), culture (because our response to climate change is informed by everything from its place in formal education to implicit consumerist values in advertising to how the media frames judgments on systemic risk as scientific “uncertainty”. Culture is the ideological dimension where the battle for the relative importance of climate change compared to other priorities has to be fought and won) and behaviour (because while our choices are shaped by the facts (science), the rules (law), the resources (money), the tools (technology), the institutions (democracy) and the ideas (culture) around us, it is ultimately what we individually and collectively choose to do (behaviour) that matters.)

“You can’t have ecological sustainability without social and economic sustainability”, adds Hanzi Freinacht.

“You need to get people to a point in their lives where they genuinely understand and care about issues larger than themselves. That’s Existential Politics. You need to make sure people have good enough social relations to not get stuck in materialistic status games. That’s Gemeinschaft Politics.” And so forth — we need all the six forms.

Scarcity mindset spurs consumerism — seeing the world as an open reserve of resources, ready to be utilised to calm our anxious insecurity. This is what makes us ecocidal in the first place.

More Prudent than Conservatism

An ideot /ˈɪd.i.(j)ɪt/ or /aɪˈd.i.(j)ɪt/ (comp. of idea + idiot). A person possessed by ideology; incapable of taking a ‘meta’ stance towards this ideology and disidentifying his/x/er ego from it.

“The central conservative principle is a resolve to escape the traps of infatuations with utopian ideas and puritan ideals — and to settle for “the real world”. The insight that underlies this realisation is one of humility: the world is always larger, more complex and more terrifying than our limited intellects and perspectives can imagine.

After all, aren’t “our dreamed visions and “creative ideas” usually end up wrecking what works in the first place?

As soon as modern society was showing its first glimmers and it became apparent that the human world was about to drastically change, “smart” but unwise people from priveleged strata of society took upon themselves to use their intellects to try to shape the direction of this development”, forcing their “neatly arranged ideas and ideals upon the richness and complexity of the world.”

Conservative thinkers “held that modern society had to grow organically, and that the role of the intellect was not to force itself upon the world, but to refine the human spirit on an individual level by self-reflection and hard work — even beyond the intellectual realm: linking to the spiritual, the mystical and the aesthetic”.

“The fundamental conservative principle is to be responsible and prudent; it is to avoid what I have called “game denial”:

The conservative wants to be prudent and to respect tradition and let society grow organically without effacing natural hierarchies that have been established between competent and less competent members of society.”

We can ask the conservative: What scenario is most respectful of people’s relations and traditions — one in which you have an active and deliberate Gemeinschaft Politics, or one in which such a thing is lacking? With a Gemeinschaft Politics you have the means to look at cultural, ethnic and national values and relations and to defend them or develop their interrelations.”

As Jordan Peterson likes to say, we have to embody the process of Logos that mediates between culture and nature. Culture is our great father who protects, shelters, educates, and disciplines, but unfortunately he is dead. He is in constant need of being renovated and readapted. And it is us — culture’s faithful sons and daughters — who are the only ones capable of rejuvenating it. “Tradition is not the worship of ashes, but the preservation of fire”, sunshine!

“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 mechanism? Having a Politics of Theory is — together with Empirical Politics — like buying an insurance.”

What about “the value of the 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? Recent populist developments suggest they don’t.” And so does Trump’s overtake of the Republican party.

“The Nordic Ideology is, simply, more conservative than conservatism.”

More Radically Rebellious than Anarchism

“For all its game denial and attachement 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.”

Let’s look at what the father of anarchism, Russian philosopher Bakunin had to say:

“The only kind of liberty that is worthy of its name, liberty that consists in the full development of all the material, intellectual and moral powers that are latent in each person; liberty that recognises no restrictions other than those determined by the laws of our own individual nature…”

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.

“Without a conscious self-organisation of human activity to improve and optimise inner development, humans will never be able to enter into free and creative association with one another.

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 will still need Existentian Politics, Emancipation Politics, Democratisation Politics and Gemeinschaft Politics to achieve this end.”

More Solemn than Communism

“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 lofic 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.

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… The liberal innocent is defenseless against evil because he is convinved he’s not the bad guy.

Communist mind, its kernel of truth, grows from this solemn venegefulness against the injusticies and insufficiencies of everyday life and from the determination that comes with it: a moral determination to transform all of society.”


“The more modernised a society becomes, the more clearly it manifests Green Social Liberalism, something the Nordic countries have become prime examples of. In countries like Sweden, all parties in effect have more or less become one version or another of “green social-liberals”. Much can be said in the analytical (and moral) defense of Marx, but after all, he did not claim that a huge middle class would grow up through the dynamic interrelation between private enterprise and public welfare, or that these populations would increasingly adopt individualism and cosmopolitanism, identity politics and ecological awareness as the ecological limitations of society’s growth became apparent. That’s just not what he wrote, I’m sorry.”

The biggest miskate of Marx consists in being ignorant of “how crucial it is to raise teh average effective value meme” in society. “The most brilliantly designed constitution and all the best democratic institutions in the world are null and void if the majority of the population subscribe to a Viking warriorethos; e.g. gravitating towards the Faustian value meme. Likewise a listening society cannot fully materialise as long as the vast majority remains firmly imbedded within a modern, rationalistic worldview.” Solidarity cannot be enforced top down, it has to emerge organically.

“If you grow up as Oliver Twist, the Postmodern value meme is just not going to happen. You are going to be angry that they beat you as a kid, concerned with getting food, be easily seduced by promises, care little about foreign cultures, have little democratic fiber and skills, be prone to want quick reliefs for your aching body and soul, be very anxious to get much richer by any means possible, not have the opportunity to educate yourself.”

You’ll exist in recurrent flux of zero-sum-game dynamics, not capable of transcending the scarcity mindset that would make you see any interaction as trade-off and every other fellow human as threatening competitor.

“One of the main differences between postmodernists and the metamodernists is that the latter include the persepctives of the earlier value memes and emphasise with them (since the metamodernists have a developmental, hierarchical perspective which postmodernists don’t). The postmodernists just think there is something wrong with moderns and traditionalists, and that they need to “open up”, stop being so dogmatic and greedy, or that the spell of “bourgeois ideology” must be broken and so forth.

And indeed, this was what Marx and Engels wrote about when they used terms such as “ideology” and “false consciousness”; workers were not socialists because they were, in effect, brainwashed by their oppressors. Similar schemata show up again and again in postmodern thought: there is a structure or ideology that fools people into being non-socialists, non-vegans (“carnists”), non-environmentalists, non-feminists, mindless consumers, and so on.”

So instead of extending the hand to help others develop into higher stages, they alienate everybody who doesn’t subscribe to postmodern symbol of faith. They see evil everywhere. Very bad strategy. As it is very famously put in the Scripture, “fight not evil”. Instead, do what is good.

So what was wrong about communism? “Imagine you try to create a postmodern economic system, like “socialism”, except:

1. there are almost no genuine socialists (in a political-psychological sense of a corresponding effective value meme);
2. society is not sufficiently economically and technologically developed;
3. people are all stuck in games and incentives for non-socialist motives (making money, gaining power, etc.);
4. there is no postmodern culture that would support an inclusive multiplicity of perspectives.

Consider four quadrants (most famously described within Integral Theory): psychological development, behavioral development, cultural development, and systemic development. They are contingent and interdependent, but each cannot be reduced to another.

“Marx was blind to three out of four fields of development. And so was the communist movement that followed. They had their eyes gouged out by materialist reductionism.”

More Erotic & Fierce than Fascism

“There is “something exquisitely demonic about fascism”, suggests Hanzi. “This demonic aspect can be understood in terms of relations between “metamemes”: Fascist and nazi thinkers used early postmodern insights (like mass psychology of Gustave Le Bon and ideas about image control in the media, some pretty advanced psycho-analytical and situational-psychological ideas as well as socialist critiques and the communist art of agitation) to manipulate a distinctly modern society at a moment of crisis in order to wrest control over modernity’s advanced political machinery and economic prowess; to restore what is nominally a postfaustian society (traditional), but in practice amounts to a number of faustian goals and ideals (the conquest of the world, a master race, sheer power for the heck of it, war for the sake of war, the return of esoteric power gods, skulls on the sleeve, and so forth). That’s exactly what the archetype of a demon signifies: a fallen angel, one close to God who uses an elevated and exalted position, an access to rare truths and insights (postmodern), for crude and narrow purposes (faustian).”

There is one gem to rescued from the fascists, unapologetic embrace of heroism:

“For all its wackiness and evil, for all its developmental imbalances and inherent pathology, fascism is the ideology that most effectively honors this basic existential truth: the longing for heroism, power and transcendence through our deeds.

For all its moral and practical superiority (even military, as it turned out), democracy is a bland nice guy. Fascism promises us an edgy bad boy and a sublime feminine surrender into uncontrolled explosive orgasms that shake the foundations of the cosmos. Fascism is the opposite of refined democracy: it is pure dominance and submission. It is speed, excitement, violence, blood, iron, autonomy, force, will, power. It is untamed — erotic in the deepest sense of the word.”

There is something in it that modern life never offers us: “an epic, heroic struggle with no irony, no distance, no second thought, no excuses made”.

It is this directness that romantics often mistake for the “deepest truth”. For the “no bullshit” value of open and honest confrontation.

“A lack of meaning and lacking sense of strength and vitality take hold in many young men, and some women, in our days, they turn again to these themes. From their imprisoned anguish grows new streams of fascism. Ones that emphasise “cyclical civilisational patterns where you need to rescue “civilisation” by becoming more manly.

The women want it too, the fascist mind murmurs; they only came up with their angry feminism because they’re subconsciously enraged with the too weakly and nerdy men of late modern society.”

So what do we salvage from fascism? Heroism meaning… what?

“Once you admit you want shitloads of delicious power, that you crave pure co-creation, and you see and accept that same will in all other creatures — a profound sense of equality descends upon your soul; I guess you could say “equanimity” as we mentioned earlier.

At the heart of the will to power rests the most radical egalitarianism and universalism. This is what allows us, among other things, to study stages of adult development in a truly non-judgemental manner. The competitive element of life becomes purified and falls in its proper place — eternally balanced by love and exchange, solidarity and trade; God doesn’t love one more than another.”

There is space for everybody’s hungriest strivings. Once you embrace and live up to your lust for power. Once it is not a source of anxiety and guilt — why would you percieve others’ lust as a threat? Once we see that the ground of this lust is the infinite creativity of co-creating spirt, scarcity mindset evaporates.

“Don’t hate hate the will to power of others — love it, balance it, and play with it. Again: love the game and love its players. Allow for others to relate to you in the same manner. Let us build that transpersonal trust, cultivate that transpersonal integrity. That is the metamodern perspective; the one that has solidarity with all perspectives.”

“Thus, steadfast and beautiful, let us also be enemies, my friends! Let us strive against one another like gods!” — just as Nietzsche bequeathed.


The Eulogy

“Don’t get caught in justifying political metamodernism and 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 it be. “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.” In the end, “modern ideologies will deconstruct each other”.

The idea is not to “win space” on the battleground of modern politics. The idea is to try to make its debate climate more favorable for the view from greater depth and complexity. We are not trying to “impose” a set of “ideological assumptions”; we are trying to cultivate a new “playing field”. It might be painful to see what we are doing because, in a way, we are preparing the ground where any “static” ideologies become irrelevant. Like a Viking warrior code that might have been alluring and dangerous and even productive sometime in the past, now became merely irrelevant, so do the modern ideologies. Thus ends their last eulogy.


FAQ

1. This is statism!

“even if other means of action-coordination take over and prove to be more dominant in the coming period, they still have to deal with all the six dimensions. So whether it’s a corporate or federal or supra-national or local or pertaining to the civil sphere or “pure market relations”, you can still apply these six dimensions and coordinate them and try to make certain they balance out. The pattern holds either way; you just hae to adapt it to the forms of governance that turn out to be dominant in the future.”

In other words, Hanzi doesn’t hold a wager on the state solutions. He has no dog in the fight between libertarianism and statism.

2. “But what about climate change! The runaway climate doesn’t have time to wait for generation of shifted human consciousness”

Metamodernist folks do all they can to promote the implementation of comprehensive sustainability policies. But if you leave just that and take away the other layers of metamodernism (developmentalism being the most crucial), we as a society will not be able to collectively develop the intuitions and values that grant us real ecological action in the first place. “Besides,” adds Hanzi, “do you really think you will get even the resemblance of good environmental politic swithout Empirical Politics?”

3. This is elitism!

Well, “at a minimum, you need to be able to read this book and critically reflect upon it, and you need to have the time and opportunity to do so”, says Hanzi. But, apart from that, nothing holds one from partaking in the processes described in this book. Granted, “we need to be relatiely exclusive and hold ourselves and one another to high standards”, but it doesn’t imply judgement or condescension towards those who stand apart from metamodern projects (these high standards only apply to those who pledge formal metamodernist affiliation).

“And then again, seeing political metamodernism as a virus which aims to eventually infect the entire political spectrum and then nimbly surf the dialectics that flow from competing political parties, it does actually include “everybody”. Metamodernism works by finding ways to include deeper partial truths of people’s perspectives and to have solidarity with these: and in that sense it is not exclusive at all.”

4. “And how does all that connect to general cultural metamodernism? Magical realism, pragmatic idealism, informed naivety, proto-synthesis, transcend and include, both-and thinking, reconstruction following deconstruction, dividualism, the view from complexity and attractors, fractality, the death of the liberal innocent, supersecular but radical spirituality, the expansion of arts into all realms of life, a non-deterministic, self-critical developmentalism and sincere irony?”

“The point is that if you have this cultural background understanding, this kind of embodiment, you are capable of planting metamodern seeds throughout society. Without this battery of breathed and lived understanding you can still play a part, but you cannot be that real change in the world because you’ll get stuck in the contradictions of modernism or postmodernism”

“What causes pathologies above everything else? Developmental imbalances” — it is worth repeating again. “You need to be metamodern to do political metamodernism.”

Denys Bakirov

Written by

A lecturer and a PhD student at the University of Kharkiv

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