1. BLATAR AND SILOVIK EDUCATION

In 1935, after Fr. Sergii Bulgakov published his book Lamb of God, Russian Orthodox Church split into opposing factions. Metropolitan Sergius of Moscow, head of the church effectively under Stalin’s control, accused Bulgakov of heresy. A committee in Paris investigated the treatise and issued a preliminary verdict freed Bulgakov from charges of heresy. However, a final conclusion was never reached. Many of the thinkers who joined the condemnation, including its key figure Fr. George Florovsky, were rooted in the movement of so-called Eurasians — reactionary anti-Westerners who dreamt of a conservative landmass empire under the rule of Moscow. On the receiving end of condemnation, Fr. Sergii Bulgakov belonged to the tradition of Russian democratic socialism and, at one point, was an elected deputy in the party presided over by V. D. Nabokov. The crux of the controversy is this. In line with the Orthodox doctrine, Bulgakov elaborated on the idea that evil is lacking in substance, is a mere privation of the good (Latin privatio boni). However, having examined this dogma at length, Bulgakov inferred that, when it comes to humans, evil is the breakdown of democratic representation, the refusal to participate in politics because of the illusion that “I am self-sufficient”, that “my own power will suffice”, and a corresponding (in Bulgakov’s view) artificial hardening of the border between “my identity” and the other. When this breakdown occurs, people are divided into the ‘gated communities’, ‘us’ and ‘them’, the ‘saved’ and the ‘damned’, and, before we know it, fascist politics ensues.

Bulgakov envisioned the doctrine of universal salvation (Greek apokatastasis) as the antidote to fascism because it declared that all humans are substantially good, but what happens if they’re severed from political representation, if they’re constrained within purely private life, is their privation, which in turn is the privation of good, and which in turn is the definition of evil. Evil is the severance of representation, erosion of the responsibility of the citizens for the policies that are undertaken in their name — and it is this feedback between the privatisation of citizenship and imperialisation of policy that constitutes the ‘pattern of escalation’, the degradation of society into the society of war.

In this article, I use Bulgakov’s logic to answer three questions.

• First, “Are Russians responsible for the war waged in their names?”
• Second, “What kinds of education escalated Russia’s demise into something approximating slavery?”
• Third, “What kind of education can prevent us from following the same route?”

(a) The People

“Are Russians responsible for the war waged in their names?” We could talk of responsibility if Russians had any genuine influence on the decisions that their government makes in their names. The whole of this essay has been an attempt at showing the gradual diminishment of the context in which Russians could have been made responsible for the acts of their government. Under Putin, Russians were gradually stripped of their status as citizens — of their say in common affairs. It meant that Russians were less and less represented by their authorities — the bonds of political representation were broken — and the elites whose task it is to create new social worlds were creating worlds without the habit of asking Russians what world they would prefer to inhabit. And since they had less and less of a say in the decisions that affected their lives, since their lives were more and more governed by a power they couldn’t influence, a power that was more and more arbitrary, politics increasingly began to resemble fate: distant, abstract, immutable.

Since the arbitrariness of the authorities had made policy-making immune the public criticism, people were left with no leverage to change the course of political action. And when people have forgotten that an alternative regime of life and statecraft is possible, they cannot help but think that conformist participation in the ‘party line’, in the top-down command, is the only way to slip out of the pervasive sense of powerlessness, the sense of being subject to the thunderbolts of fate.

Not being free to express their will through politics, to rationally influence their fate, they were left to participate in her arbitrary dispensation — that is, to partake in forms of coercion mandated by the state, to impose the will of the authorities on the weak. Every level of society was subordinated to the will of the boss — people were allowed to act at will with their subordinates as long as they uncritically executed decisions of their superiors, their nachalstvo. Within this vertical of power, people’s communicative power was reduced to only two legitimate forms: flattery towards the authorities and denunciatory complaints (Rus. donos) against all the others.

Russians felt that the whole system was based on unjust dominance. But they were bought — they sold their political freedom, their ‘soul’, for the price of freedom to choose among consumer goods that were becoming increasingly affordable thanks to the rising gas prices during the early cadences of Putin’s reign. This bargain that made Putin’s tyranny possible was comprised of the countless compromises with evil. But Putin bought impoverished Russians just like he bought rich Western elites. The latter’s compromise with evil is, I would argue, harder to digest.

Although the system was based on pure dominance, it operated under the hypocritical veneer of democracy, under the pretence of much more sound moral principles. Russians sensed that they were destroying the fabric of society through their participation in the vertical of coercion, but at the same time they sensed that they live in the state that seemed to be based on the standards by which their lifestyle would have been judged evil. As a result, Putin’s system was shot through with deep cynicism.

This is why, when Putin declared the ‘special military operation’, a totally arbitrary act of unprovoked violence, many people felt at last fully free. Violence cleansed people from the need to pretend, “from that illusion of moral sterility and hypocrisy that held us tight in its clammy embrace for so long.” At last, dominance was revealed as the sole principle of the regime. The violence, the setting aflame of countless Ukrainian cities, shattered the pretence that life is anything other than a contest for power. People were happy to see their assertion of dominance from which they derived all their status mirrored in Russia’s power over Ukraine. Not being able to articulate and verbalise their will, having their will reduced to the conduit of top-down domination, many Russians saw arbitrary violence of the state as the cosmic endorsement of their way of life.

Blatar freedom of will is essentially the freedom of law-breaking, the revolt against all kinds of law — laws of nature and laws of state. In the state based on arbitrary domination, people’s caving into the blatar dream of freedom from law (as discussed in the first part of this article series) became a matter of doing justice to this harsh reality. If it’s not pretty, at least it’s true, and thereby a relief. The attack on Ukraine, a blatant violation of all international laws, was the reflection of people’s private lawbreaking on a planetary scale — they felt like their lawlessness was finally attuned to the lawlessness of the universal order.

Hence the political freedom they were denied, the sense of participation in communal self-legislation, the joy of being in touch with reality, came back in a paradoxical, inverted way, for to see the common affairs conducted in way that is totally arbitrary, totally possessed by violent domination, is to see them conducted in unison with the arbitrary domination which people couldn’t help but to choose for themselves. And now, all of a sudden, it was no longer a matter of choice. The world as such proved to be like this — product of irrational struggle.

‘Masters’ and ‘slaves’, nachalstvo and the narod (Rus. ‘people’), were at last coming back together in the sameness of their freedom — the general population with their will reduced to reactive assertion of dominance and the reactive dominance of the government against a neighbouring country — at last, they were one, and the thing that united them was the joy of being free to act with impunity. Make no mistake, once it is fully unconstrained by any political responsibility, freedom of will always reveals itself for what it truly is — the freedom to do evil.

In this regard, I think Vlad Vexler had nailed the meaning of the main symbol of Russian aggression when he said that “Z stands for ecstasy about being evil”, “the freedom, the liberation, the joy of doing bad things”. It stands for that ‘death camp morality’ of the blatar we’ve discussed earlier. It is as if they’re cynically saying, “deep down, it all comes to dominance… So, being so strong and victorious, why aren’t we allowed to act with impunity?” This is why they paint Zs on walls and doors — they want this regime to penetrate everywhere — so that it is not them who are evil, but life itself. Appropriately, Russian for evil is Zlo.

(b) The Authorities

But what about the authorities? The irony is that the closer one was to the upper echelons of the Kremlin, the less free one was. One’s life was in the shackles of regulations, agreements, obligations and expectations, and the conversation that could renegotiate these arrangements was becoming less and less feasible. The highest authority, Putin, was singularly unable to have such a conversation. What negotiation of relationships could there be if his presidential office was absolutely non-negotiable? At the zenith of power, there was either his will or the will of his enemies. The arbitrary sovereign is the least free because he is possessed by the will-to-power — his decision-making is constrained by the necessity to create artificial escalation so as to sustain demand for his strong leadership.

Therefore his choices were becoming increasingly reactive and reactionary attempts to prove his sovereignty by the war against moral laws, international laws, and even the laws of nature. For example, against time — for how can one explain these pervasive attempts to freeze time, to resurrect old imperial unity, to hold on to ‘traditional’ values? Sovereign’s freedom of choice becomes limited to only one choice: “To rebel against life itself” — because it is ‘her’, the new generations, who tell him to step down.

This takes us to where we began this series of articles — to the relation between private and political freedom. In the absence of politics, in the absence of a chance to express your will politely, all there’s left is violence.

It is as if you’re left to scream “Look, I actually have a will!” But how can you prove that you have the will at all? You can prove it by making decisions that no one would have guessed before-hand because it gives you a chance to say “If there is nothing on which you can put your finger and say ‘This determined your decision!’, ‘This caused your choice!’, does it not prove that my will is free?” In short, if you want to prove that you have the freedom of will, you have to act “at will” — seemingly arbitrarily. Freedom of will does not have a positive substance, no creativity, but is merely reactive — it does not seek to upgrade its context, it revolts against its context. And therefore it is not free in any deeper philosophical sense — it does not transcend present reality, it merely reacts to it. (This is why — paradoxically — we can overcome the evil produced by the freedom of will only by giving people even more freedom of will — so that people won’t have to prove that they actually have it).

Think of all the endless attempts to read Putin’s mind. His intentions, his calculations, his emotions, his spirituality, you name it. He feeds on our attempts to ‘understand’ him because our inability to do so only proves his sovereignty. For him, to be unpredictable is the point, the end in itself. And if we actually ‘understand’ Putin, it means that we have settled into the same imperialist worldview where people can claim security guarantees on the merit of military musculature. This is why, in ethical terms, a big portion of infamy must go to the so-called Putinverstehers (German portmanteau for ‘Putin-understander’), Westerners who’ve ‘surrendered’ to the logic of geopolitics.

Natural politics is almost the opposite of geopolitics. It stands or falls on the condition of responsible democratic representation — which in turn stands or falls on the condition of social trust, on our expectation that others are imbued with dignity and empathy. First, representation requires trust that other people have dignity — that they can be self-legislators who stay true to their word, to their contracts, to their long-term relations — which implies that they can be left free to think together and decide by which laws they should live. Second, representation requires trust that other people can act based upon empathy for one another, that people can take perspective of the other and act in the name of that perspective. At its core, representation requires ‘good faith’ in our ability to share fairly in the excess that will be produced by our cooperation — it must be directed toward some future and yet unknown surplus.

In contrast to this, Putin focused people’s attention on the past, on the eye-catching geopolitics struggle for the land, territory, one resource that has a visceral zero-sum dynamic because it is already there to be seen. Because of this, the Russian regime became characterised by the pervasive doubt with regard to both dignity and empathy. Instead of thinking and loving, the trustful openness to the strange and the unknown, Russians began to believe in the supremacy of the will and participation in the imposition of will, participation in the vertical of power. As a result, every domain of life was stifled by a miasma of servility, cowardice, conceit, and utter mediocrity.

Russia failed to be a representative democracy because its government was infiltrated by the ethos of secret service, by the people who are by definition never fully present to others. His whole life Putin shied away from truthful converse. Many a time, he had said “I’m not a politician”. Putin is fundamentally apolitical because he cannot be anyone’s representative, he’s not present to anyone and no one is present to him. One of the funny features of Putin is that he often forgets or outright refuses to call people by their names. For example, he never says “Alexei Navalny”, he refuses to recognise perspectives different to his as real, as belonging to a subject of politics.

Putin doesn’t recognise the dignity of others, the fact that all people can be subjects of politics who act in the interest of the abstract common good regardless of immediate harm or benefit. Not being able to recognise dignity of people, their ability to honour their contractual relations, he’s not able to trust anyone, he’s always afraid of the private agenda that lurks behind hypocritical pretence of moral high ground.

As I’ve mentioned before, the person in the classical sense is the opposite of a secret agent — empathy makes her present to others and dignity makes others present to her. To ask myself “How do I become a person?” is to ask myself “How do I become subject to my own self-legislation?” “How can I honour the contractual relationships I consented to?” “How can I be true to the promised word?” The answer is this: “If I know that you made the same promise and that you care about how not keeping it will affect me”. And where does such care appear? In relationships of trust — relationships where partners are willing to persistently take each other’s perspectives, continuously “walk in each other’s shoes”, increasingly abstract relationships between lovers, relatives, friends, citizens and their representatives, relationships where the will is disciplined to let go of its scheming and settle into roles it’s assigned within various relationships: a friend, a son, a father, a teacher, a student, a voter, an elected representative. This is where we become present to each other and present at all. To be free is to inhabit this actual, concrete interaction without ulterior motives. To throw off reserve and ‘gift’ yourself to the particular relationships you’re in, to be ‘wounded’ by the pattern of something higher than you. But how can the secret agent do this, if, like a Bronze Age hero, he is taught to think that trust and empathy make one vulnerable to betrayal and ridicule?

“That girls are raped, that two boys knife a third,

Were axioms to him, who’d never heard

Of any world where promises were kept,

Or one could weep because another wept”

But we have to see that the secret agent is a peculiarly postmodern version of a Bronze Age hero. This is where we approach the heart of Putin’s regime. After World War II there was a widespread sense that we have to become cynical to avoid sincere engagement in grand ideologies. It seems that the post-war postmodern societies were ‘vaccinated’ against the possession by modern ideologies and straightforwardly heroic leadership. Unfortunately, cynicism produced its own kind of developmental salto-mortale: Putin was able to climb the ladder of government not thanks to his resolve and courage but thanks to their exact opposite. In contrast to the heroic resoluteness of a Bronze Age hero, the secret agent is characterised by extreme irresoluteness. Putin’s secret service training equipped him with the pathological unwillingness to take responsibility for one’s choices, to be answerable to the continuous conversation within the relationship in which this choice took place. In my judgement, the unwillingness to be contractually obligated, to honour the laws which you yourself legislated — marks the essence of Putin’s regime. To conclude I want to sum up the way in which irresoluteness leads to the same arbitrariness as the unchecked freedom of choice.

And this allows me to ask the most provocative question so far: “How can the pathologically irresolute man be responsible for the war he had waged?” Putin is simultaneously a very strange and a very quintessential tyrant. He is very weak and irresolute: “he can’t even rebuke his own bodyguards”. On the surface, his reign does not look like a triumphant journey of sovereign will. But it makes perfect sense if we realise that it stems from a fundamental refusal to take responsibility. To take responsibility is to stake your identity on this particular choice within this particular history of relationship. This is precisely what Putin can’t do because he does not know what real freedom is — because he fears trapdoors and he leaves backdoors open so as to escape any relationship at will — so as to break contracts. Putin knows not the safety found in relations of sustained trust: he never throws off reserve, he wears many personas and alters them at will — that is, when they no longer serve his purposes, when it’s time to halt this relationship and rely on another one. The life of a secret agent is the ultimate triumph of will-hood over person-hood. Putin avoids being answerable to lasting relationships, he stays ‘free’ from relationships so as to always secure the possibility of arbitrary choice that betrays them.

Thereby we can understand why Putin’s irresoluteness caused his arbitrary rule. It’s not even that Putin is an arbiter who adjudicates between various warring factions, the ‘towers of Kremlin’. If I’m irresolute, the palette of my choices stays wide open. It’s just that the secret service training adds a peculiar spin to this age-old ‘freedom of will’ dynamic: the spin of secrecy, of refusal to invest your identity into concrete relationships and therefore letting others make choices so as to later take — not responsibility — but only credit for those choices that played out well. I stay ‘free’ to entertain any choice — it’s just that these choices are brought upon a platter by my aides.

Therefore the main question is this: “Who tend to be my aides?”. And the answer is this: “Those who please me most, who say what I most want to hear, who say what I already believe”. Putin became surrounded by people who indulged his sense of safety, who made him feel secure. This is how Putin lets the logic of arbitrariness unfold at length: around him the loyal and sycophantic careerists grow like wildflowers. Putin’s decisions are not his own, they are made by the people who are the least dangerous, independent and critical of him. These are the apolitical people distinguished by the will-to-power, those who are willing to say and do whatever it takes to climb the ladder of dominance. These people will naturally tend to make choices informed by reactionary and geopolitical considerations — they’re afraid of changes in the status quo and of losing their possessions to a perceived ‘other’.

At the end of the day, the people who decided how the country is run were the siloviki for whom it is only natural to worship power. Gradually, thanks to the character of his coterie, Putin became enmeshed within reactionary politics and imperial geopolitics: people who are bureaucratic careerists tend to be obsessed with preserving the status quo domestically and ‘winning’ the zero-sum competition abroad: ‘in Putin’s Russia, neo-colonial posturing is the surest display of loyalty to the president’. Thus the professional irresoluteness of the secret agent, a man without faces, becomes hostage and a useful front for the bullies.

At the end of the day, Putin was constrained to a set of choices that were detrimental not only to Russia, but even to himself. This is why arbitrariness is worse than randomness. Arbitrariness narrows attention to short-term and short-sighted interests at the expense of true and natural interests. This is how arbitrariness sets itself at odds with the long-term interests of those possessed by it. Someone who acts at will also betrays his future self. If Russia is a body politic, it was left without eyes and thrown itself into the abyss.

‘Neither fear nor courage saves us’. Both extreme irresoluteness and extreme resolve lead to the same curse of arbitrariness. Our resolve, our will, our choice, is not the end in itself, but it also must never be abdicated. We can’t return to our primordial innocence, any notion of such innocence will be an artificial and frankly delusional construct. Rather, our choice must be disciplined by being answerable to the scrutiny of relationships in which it takes place.

We must have the resolve to make the choices which we’ll be willing to answer and argue for, choices we’ll be able to explain to those affected by them. In other words, our choices must withstand the trial by politics. If there’s no such trial, choices fall into arbitrariness — no matter how virtuous individual choice-makers may be, sooner or later the anti-social actors will elbow out the pro-social ones and even the pro-social ones will say to themselves “If we don’t do it, someone else surely will”.

“Neither choose for the sake of choosing nor withhold choice for the sake of fantasised innocence, rather, embrace responsibility, have the resolve to make choices that will withstand the scrutiny of reason and love”. Thinking and loving are the prerequisites of dignity and empathy. Only thinking and love (both of them together) can teach respect for the choice of another person. Apart from each other they cannot do it, because loving alone runs the danger of not letting the other make risky choices and learn on his own mistakes and thinking alone runs the danger of using the knowledge about the other as an asset to manipulate his choice to my advantage. It is this union of thinking and loving that lets the other be other; it is this political freedom that frees the will of the other. Freedom of will cannot be conquered, it can only be received as new social context, as gift of politics.

(3) Blatar and Sivolik Educations

By creating the only anti-war films that actually worked for the intended purpose of revealing the sheer ugliness and atrocity of the war, Soviet filmmakers managed to break the curse of the cinematic medium. They managed to do this because they did not need to adapt to the demands of the market where only spellbinding blockbusters that show war as an attractive spectacle could make it at the box office — the films they produced were ordered by a socialist state that aspired to educate its citizens. How could Russian society turn into a society of war?

We must shift focus from individual heroism or villainy to the community within which the choice between the two takes place. We humans are political animals and there is only so much we can ‘betray’ our nature by making choices closer to wordless war than peaceful exchange of words. The important question is this: “How do our choices get narrowed down to war?” “How do we end up in a society where we can’t help but to betray our nature?”

In contrast to individuals, society can become completely unnatural: by nature any society is the communication that creates persons — that is, politically free self-legislators, humans in their natural glory. The unnatural society is the one where decisions that affect everybody are made not by political communication but by arbitrary authority — of commanders over executors, of master over slaves. In a fully natural society evil is impossible — for if everyone is in communication with everyone else, the evildoer won’t be able to make an argument that justifies his actions to his victims, won’t be able to pass the trial by politics. We are free as far as we are allowed to grow into increasingly complex responsibilities within increasingly complex communities — relationships governed by conversations.

But if communication no longer connects people, if people don’t represent each other, the bonds of responsibility become broken. A society in which no one is responsible for anything is one where decision-making becomes arbitrary — that is, divorced from anyone’s interest, even the sovereign’s. The blind logic of war for scarce resources becomes the only real actor by whom everyone becomes to various degrees possessed. And if you’re possessed, you’re by definition not free.

In the absence of democracy, both the ruler and the ruled, both Putin and Russians, could not grow. And since they could not grow into responsibility, they were less and less responsible for the choices that were made in their name. All responsibility was abdicated — no one had to respond to the critique of anyone — peace depended on the individual virtue — and it is precisely what peace must never depend on.

We can’t be responsible for what the government does in our name if the government does not represent us, does not respond to how we articulate our desires. However, we are responsible for letting them not represent us. To the extent that we had political freedom and made decisions against democracy, we are guilty as charged. In my mind, if we stand accused of anything, it is this: of losing our hope in politics, in democracy, in critical exchange, in open debate, in the word, and choosing to worship the will. But this guilt is constituted of endless choices that everyone makes every day, the routine weakness, cowardice, connivance, and nescience of finite beings. No one rationally chooses to be not represented, to be detached from politics, detached from rational exercise of power. By nature we are not evil, but we can compromise with evil. These compromises amalgamate into an unnatural political system, a regime based on coercion. Humans cannot be irredeemably bad, but political regimes often are; masters and slaves are not evil, but slavery always is. The bonds of political representation were broken — and our task is to see what processes are responsible for it.

There are different ‘shades of guilt’. The citizens are responsible for their private decisions. The elites make decisions in the name of all citizens.

The task of the elite is to not choose for the other.

The task of the citizens is to not let the elite make choices for them.

The task of the elite is to not legislate arbitrary decisions.

The task of citizens is to not execute arbitrary decisions.
But if the citizens only receive arbitrary commands, they’re left with no choice.

I don’t think that the Russians persistently legislated and executed irresponsible decisions, I don’t think that Russians persistently made up for the authorities that did not recognise the dignity of the other to make her own choice and for the citizens who allowed the authorities to steal their right to choose.

The cause of the enslavement has to do with the character for which the elites were selected. Putin’s elite was consistently selected from the fundamentally irresponsible people, from the people who did not question authorities and did not respond to the questions of their constituencies.

I argue that this unnatural selection of an essentially anti-political elite was ‘washed ashore’ by the successive waves of explicit and implicit political repressions. Seeing the suffering that political activism entails, Russians en masse abdicated their responsibility to be citizens. After the elite was formed, it was no longer important whether you’re a good person who exercises virtue — sooner or later the palette of your choices will narrow and you won’t be able to help but to exercise vice. When you escape politics, politics returns to you as coercion.

Russian identity became suspect after it went through a trauma of guilt and victimhood, political repressions and resistance to fascism. Putting the problem into words brings its own kind of change, it puts trauma on the path toward healing. However, the Russian 20th century never went through the therapy of politics, never came under trial of public debate. As a consequence, unable to cope with its trauma, Russia couldn’t come to terms with its crime — with the fundamental perversion of morality brought upon it by the waves of political repressions — with the inversion of freedoms, putting arbitrary freedom of will above political freedom, putting law-enforcement at the service of law-breaking rather than law-making.

There is an uncanny feedback between politics and education, between form of governance and form of life.

I blame two kinds of education that formed Russian society after the Second World War — silovik ‘secret service education’ and blatar ‘crime syndicate education’; two role models of the majority of late Soviet children, a spy and a thief. Soviet boys were romantically infatuated with the two role models: a thief-in-law and a secret agent. When these forms of life came to power, and in turn began to recruit the elite from apolitical loyalists, corrupt thieves and patriotic imperialists — people very easy to control, people who don’t have taste for political freedom, who don’t critique tyrannical policy as long as it does not go against their private interests.

At the end of the day, these educational role models come down to their relation to the law. In today’s Russia, the population educated in the lawlessness of blatar free will became attuned to the lawlessness of the state.

But the secret service education has a different relation to law. It teaches honouring contractual relations only so as to break them when the right time comes — only insofar as they are expedient to oneself. The expectation of dignity is used arbitrarily to promote loyalties ulterior to the present contract.

It teaches perspective taking, but only so as to use people’s weakness against them. Perspective taking that is totally devoid of empathy. Siloviki’s ethical fusion with the blatari taught them to use the law for the sake of private and, later. It resulted in a silovik elite that was able to use the law for essentially blatar purposes.

Under Putin, there was raised a generation of essentially apolitical politicians, officials for whom the most fundamental distinction is not between virtue and vice, but between strength and weakness. Ramzan Kadyrov, its most picturesque specimen, once produced one of my favourite sentences: “I am strong, I am never weak!” He is today’s head of Chechnya Republic. His rise is a collateral damage of the war on the wings of which Putin cast his performance of strong leadership in 2000. Remember the geopolitical spectacle in Chechnya which Putin used as means of ensuring populist support? Kadyrov’s father became head of Chechnya in the wake of the war as a head of the Chechen military group that agreed to collaborate with Moscow. Kadyrov the son inherited the ‘throne’ in the wake of his father’s death in 2004. Now his fighters, “kadyrovtsy”, make up a salient part of the Russian troops in Ukraine — although they’ve earned the reputation of ‘attention whores’ thanks to all those hilarious videos of staged ‘combat’ they’ve uploaded on TikTok. People like Kadyrov see the talk of abstract virtues — freedom and justice, dignity and empathy — as suspect, as but the attempt to weaken their hold on power, to constrain their sovereignty. Their rule is the product of codependency between inarticulate passions of the population and arbitrary rule of the populists.

Populists are popular precisely because their denigration of abstract virtues feels relatable to the people who see abstract considerations as farfetched and hypocritical, divorced from the lot of toiling folk. The populist appeals to the people who were depoliticised because they were reduced to struggle for subsistence. One of the most revealing moments in the documentary on the communication between Russian war-supporters, people who blindly root for their identity, and war-opponents, people who are led by abstract virtues, is when a mother accuses her daughter of having an ‘exacerbated sense of justice’. By mocking the hypocrisy and double standards of the politicians and intellectuals, ‘deep state’ and ‘high academy’, populists like Putin, Kadyrov, and Trump give voters an indulgence against the moral standards of a complex society, freedom from need to conform to the increasingly intricate and intimate legislative prescriptions, law’s subtle penetration into the private life that was earlier under the sovereign control of the dominant will, usually the patriarch.

It is as if the public says — “Do whatever you want in our name as long as you leave our private lives alone”. They sell their political freedom for the sake of not having to discipline their will. Authoritarians then take their ‘popular will’, ‘the general mess of imprecision of feeling, undisciplined squads of emotion’ as if it were a raw resource, amorphous clay, interpret it arbitrarily and mould it into policy that represents nothing of what the general public actually had in mind. And since the policy of populists is not disciplined by critical feedback, not co-authored, their rule becomes authoritarian. And, although it sounds creative, authoritarian policy is always the same: populists mobilise the most visceral identity of their constituency against that towards which passions are most easily mobilised: the ‘other’, the stranger who is glaringly non-identical to us (black skin colour, LGBTQ+ aesthetics, etc.) and who therefore can most easily be marketed as an enemy.

The platform capitalism only exacerbated the rise of populists. In the digital age, the sheer pace of communication is the primary cause of populist mobilisation — reduction of people to their passionate and possessive faculties.

The pace of digital communication leaves no room for the political and polite articulation of will, for the negotiation and education of desire, rather, it is the spectacle of identities, polarised silos that addict attention to the most outrageous provocations because social media feeds on our attention and our attention is vulnerable to the thrilling spectacle — false information spreads many times faster than factual one. The Internet became a kind of ‘zoo’ where human self-expression is monetised by a few social networks. It’s as if society itself — varieties of human interaction — became the means of production, a resource that is extracted and profited off by the capitalists.

Instead of producing persons with names who can be subjects of politics, social media produces nameless patches of sensational material. On social media, people stay essentially anonymous, they’re not named as particular persons, they’re rather choosers of this or that identity. They’re not yet animated as persons who are responsible for long-term relationships, they’re akin to secret agents opting in and out of various uncommitted connections, digital ‘casualties’. Alas, as it stands now, social media tampers with representation. If the people is not properly named as such, their representatives cannot act in their name; they simply have no real representatives, people to whom they are fully present and who are fully present to them. Social media feeds on promiscuous interaction and does not provide a ceremonial space-time for graceful self-articulation. If culture is the distance and silence in which mature communication and self-expression can occur, then today’s internet is the corruptor of culture.

Kadyrov is the first Instagram tyrant, but unfortunately not the last one. Russia, a society that proved most vulnerable to becoming a kind of political ‘zoo’ where there is always soundproof glass between electors and the elected, rulers and the ruled, is the first Instagram tyranny, but unfortunately not the last one. People’s passions are manipulated by the dictate of the ruler but this manipulation then plays against the ruler because he becomes imprisoned by the support of people who have lost touch with reality because they have got lost in their own passions — and the more irrational these passions get, the more irrational the ruler’s policy get. All this led to an apolitical autocrat, an apolitical elite, an apolitical citizenry, all obsessed with raising the status of their national identity — Russia’s imperial struggle for scarce land against other powers — mainly that of the West.

Today’s pace of communication fuels policy based on primitive anti-Western sentiment. The Russian elites who stole so much from their people that they had to justify it by the foreign threat had found an ally in the pervasive anti-Western sentiment across the world. Why is this sentiment primitive and malign? It is crucial to see that anti-Westerners take issue with the West not because it is too free, but because, for their perverse taste, it is not nearly free enough — Westerners are not free to bully, steal, beat, rape and kill. Anti-Western sentiment comes from people who don’t have a taste for personal freedom, but only care for the freedom of will — the freedom to dominate. It takes time to develop the taste for personal freedom because its exercise requires the ability to choose wisely — to choose in tune with the law and the spirit of the law, that is to think and love, it requires to be responsible for one’s choice, to explain it to all who are affected by it.

The West had disciplined the freedom of will to dominate and developed the freedom of a person to think and love, engage in argument, cooperation, and diverse kinds of love.

To become truly free, the will has to be disciplined by culture and nature, by the metaphysical realm of ideas and laws and by the physical realm of feelings and desires. Thinkers of the Orthodox tradition identify natural functioning of the will with the functioning of the heart, the centre of the human body — they argue that the will has to be a mediator between the intellect and the body. Thus, in the natural state, “The height of my spirituality reaches the depths of my sexuality”. But if we think that will becomes free only if it has an unconstrained freedom of choice, the will will rise against both physics and metaphysics — it will desire not just to eat and think of not how to produce food better — but how to secure as property such a large amount of food so as to never ever be hungry again, so as to become virtually invulnerable. The natural desire to eat turns into the passion of gluttony, appetite becomes insatiable. The natural desire to exercise power turns into the lust for domination, wielding of power for its own sake. As soon as I privatise some good — be it food or power — as my property, as soon as privation of the good happens, the good becomes scarce and all the others become excluded from having a say in how to use it. And since no one wants to be left without goods, everyone begins to exercise will in order to take goods from rivals.

Point being, unchecked passions lead to war. When subservient to the intellectual statecraft of politiki, both blatar’ gratification of desire and silovik’ will to power are fine and natural, but when the hierarchy of developmental stages is inverted, nothing is fine and natural anymore.

Negotiation could have easily reconciled any impediments to neighbourly coexistence between Russians and Ukrainians, but the policy of the authorities was more and more determined by the pattern of artificial escalation, leading all the way to war, which, once in motion, unfolded the spiral of excessive vengeance — atrocities drive grievances, grievances drive animosities, animosities drive new atrocities — and as the escalation unfolds, lasting peace between Russians and Ukrainians drifts farther and farther out of reach.

Irrational conversation Putin was having with his tiny coterie made him fall victim to the irrational faith in his power and the power of his identity — Russia. Because of this pagan faith Putin unleashed the bastard timeline out of the wedlock of rationality and desirability, a timeline that was unanticipated by and detrimental to all the sides involved. We are now imprisoned within the delta between Putin’s expectations and what’s actually the case, within the ‘reality gap’ with the size of the Russian elite’s pagan faith in their own military might and unfaith in the willingness of their enemies to sacrifice themselves for the sake of political freedom. In these days, this ‘reality gap’ widens as far as both Russia and Ukraine find themselves in a situation where negotiated settlement, wherever it is in the above-described delta, leaves them at odds with the popular will — both Ukrainian and Russian governments opt out for the risky gamble that we have to exert more will so as to come to the negotiation table with a better position — governments can’t help but to take these risks because the popular will demands them to do so — people have faith in their armed forces. Irrational ‘mess of imprecision of feeling’ returns to haunt populists who used it promiscuously — people’s passionate faith in the power of their identity is what escalation feeds on. And the larger the delta, the larger the space for escalation.

We may think that, because Putin acts in disregard to his and Russia’s interests, he is mad. But we must not think so. There’s a reason why he limits escalation to Ukraine — terrain where no nuclear states run the danger of mutually assured destruction (abbreviated as MAD), and the reason is that Putin is not totally irrational, he prefers life to death. Ukrainians, overwhelmingly, are willing to risk death for the sake of anticolonialism, but it is a risk for which not only soldiers, but also civilians pay with their lives. Yet even if Ukraine prevails, we should not think that this is how autocracy ends once and for all. We have to defeat autocracy within every heart — defeat the choice of voluntarist action instead of communicative action, choice of faith in my own power instead of faith in the power of the word. We have to avoid making the Russian mistake of turning anti-fascism into fascism proper. If we believe that ‘might makes right’ we only help the might. We only encourage the powerful everywhere in the world, including the West, to think that their power is the pivotal agency that will always have the last word in shaping the world.

War in essence is the contest between wills. Which is why as soon as we are in war, we fall victim to the illusion that our salvation depends on our own will and power. Today the wills are puffed up by nuclear technology that can destroy the world a few times over. Therefore, the more we have faith in power, the closer we are to mutually assured destruction. In the world of nuclear weapons, we either kill this ‘escalation imperative’ or kill ourselves.

2. THE REALPOLITIK EDUCATION

(1) The Insecurity of Fascism

The ‘age of strongmen’ begins in Russia, then it is replicated round the globe by Putin’s doppelgangers, ‘strong leaders’ like Trump and Bolsonaro, Orban and Erdogan, Xi and Modi. Of course, the insemination of ‘strongmen statecraft’ is nothing new. Like the upsurge of totalitarianisms in the 1930s, it is just another reincarnation of the Bronze Age ethos, of the language the usage of which culminates in the codependent phenomena like tyrants and their palaces, emperor-gods and their cults, warriors and their conquests, masters and their slaves, heroes and their myths. Fascism shies away from open and factual conversation and finds refuge in secrets and fakes, mysteries and mythologies. ‘Fascism is not a debating position, but a cult of will that emanates from fiction. It is about the mystique of a man who heals the world with violence… It can be undone only by demonstrations of the leader’s weakness. The fascist leader has to be defeated… Only then do the myths come crashing down”. ‘You can’t win over the fascists by telling them they’re evil — ’, says Hanzi Freinacht, ‘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?’ Many thinkers have pointed out the sad secret of fascism — its obsession with power comes from a trauma of powerlessness, the intense experience of insecurity. Once they acquire power, they confuse it with total security, even omnipotence. This is why they get into insane wars. Once this happens, we can defeat fascists only by revealing their weakness.

The age of strongmen begins in Russia, but it may end in Russia as well. It began with war and may end with war as well. But for this to happen, after Russia’s defeat, we’ll have to connect the dots. We’ll have to exorcise our own spectres of Putinism. Guilt by association must discredit those in the West who admired and emulated Putin’s character. There can be no ‘strongmen leaders’, no siloviki who, if given time to bring their governance to its logical extent, would not wage wars.

What should be the response to a regime based on escalation? I think we must embrace “double standards”. We have to think in two regimes at once. First, in the regime fascists understand, and second, in the regime fascists understand not.

Yes, in the short run, we have to break the hold of the mystique of power. But we also have to break its hold on us. We can break it only if we retain our ‘good faith’ in the possibility of judgement by other means than violence or profit incentives. In the long run, societies built on cooperation prevail over societies built on coercion simply because the former tap into fountainheads of creativity and inventiveness that are unavailable to the autocratic regimes of life and governance. As soon as you believe that your own might might suffice you become weak because you lose touch with the creativity that defines human civilisation.

These two regimes are insufficient apart from each other. The first alone divorces us from our creative potential, the second alone divorces us from the reality of evil. But together they constitute the ‘informed naiveté’ that shapes the metamodern character. All that falls short of sustaining this creative contradiction also falls short of the task to confront and counter the threat of rising autocracy.

(2) Fascism as an Inevitable Reaction Against Neoliberalism

We must confess it: Putin’s fascism would have never emerged if not for the fertile ground of Western politics. Without answering the question of why the neoliberal order is providing such a suitable climate for the emergence of autocracies we won’t be able to understand how to defeat them. ‘World leaders have hypocritically talked for years about a “pragmatic approach” and the benefits of international trade. In so doing, they enabled themselves to benefit from Russian oil and gas while Putin’s grip on power grew stronger. Considering sanctions, military and economic aid, this war will cost hundreds of times more than those lucrative oil and gas contracts, the signing of which used to be celebrated with champagne’. The fact that Western policymakers were so vulnerable to the imperative of money meant that the Russian regime could buy political influence in the West that was unheard of by the local citizens.

The autocracies will learn their place only if ‘Putin’s long-standing cynical view that everyone in the West could be bought, and that commercial imperatives would always outweigh any moral or other concerns’ is frustrated. Russia and its fascist replicas will come crashing down only if the West forsakes its lucrative ways. Think about it, if the market logic was allowed to govern to its extreme, if we had nothing but profit considerations, the EU would have imposed sanctions on Ukraine and provided aid to Russia.

For too long society had been fractured by the strict Modern separation of private and public spheres — religion was cornered into a private sphere and the public square was being gradually subordinated to the ‘secular’ concerns like power and wealth. We had abstracted violence to the level of nation state, but when capitalist companies went global, they began to exercise an undue power on the state.

In brief, I see the the story in this terms: In the Modern Age, the nation state monopolised power, secured all the sovereignty from the feudal lords. This sovereignty then guised itself in king’s sacred right, in religious systems, in ideologies — in different kinds of political power.

However, this sovereignty of politics was gradually truncated. After the religious wars brought upon by the protestant reformation Westerners were so afraid that peaceful dialogue between warring worldviews is impossible, that we were only too ready to give up on dialogue altogether, surrender decision-making to the imperative of profit and surrendering sovereignty to the Leviathan of the nation-state. This was a way to peacefully arbitrate between seemingly incompatible interest groups while ensuring the prosperity of the commonwealth and thus benefiting them all.

However, a new problem appeared — after the Westerners secluded religion from politics, secular politics became possessed by various ideologies that mobilised popular support against the present order and created dictatorships, be it of the white race or of the proletariat, of ‘masters’ or of the ‘slaves’. After the war between ideologies culminated in the atrocity of the Second World War and postmodern thinkers decided to seclude ideology from politics — the public square became virtually free from any beliefs and ideas, from any moral judgements — the ‘end of history’ was the triumph of economy over politics. We have outsourced the painful arbitration of moral judgement to the market in hope that it will save us from outsourcing it to outright war.

Now, when politics was emancipated from ideas, from language, from the dictate of the best argument, all the sovereignty was usurped by the capital and rentiers by whom it lives. Now when politics becomes subservient to the conglomerates, an overlapping system of sovereignties has reinstated itself and we’ve came back to where we started — to feudalism, albeit to the one where the sovereigns are not the mightiest lords, but the richest capitalists. Whereas in the Pagan Age, politics no longer connected private will to the expansionist empire, in the Secular Age, politics no longer connects personal self-enrichment to the expanding capitalist conglomerates. We no longer have robust politics where moral judgements outweigh calculation of profit.

Today we see that if there is no place in politics for the articulation of people’s deepest desires into ideas, if the religion does not lend weight to moral judgements in the public square, does not reveal certain arguments as participating in the timeless truth, love, and beauty, then there is no way for the different ideas to meet in ‘good faith’. As a result, the reactionary inarticulate ideas win by default — primitive retranslation of passions is the surest way to mobilise attention and popular support. If religions and ideologies are not there all sovereignty ends up oscillating between capitalist conglomerates and nation states — two actors that are particularly inept at taking on the challenges of our trying times. And — like in Russia’s case — if the wrong people come to power, they will reduce politics to geopolitics and take on imperialist conquest.

Which also means that the West must come to terms with what its ‘political realism’ brought about. Fascists use the assumption that, at the end of the day, it is only power that shapes relations, and so they increase their power at the expense of human rights as ask for more and more concessions, more and more appeasements — all because we believe that these tyrants can define the security interests of their nations at will. To teach autocrats a lesson, we must escape our realist pessimism that relationships can only be defined by brute power or power mediated through money, through the market. The free world has to base its politics on moral judgement. And it seems that the only way to take down profit considerations from the pedestal of policymaking, to make sure that the moral judgements deliberated in the public square have the last word in determining domestic and foreign policy, to empower politics over against economics, to instil political language with religious authority, is to retrieve our faith in the authority of language.

If politics is practised naturally, if the language is not used for our expedient goals, i.e. if we neither lie nor manipulate, then language holds the potential to educate and guide society. This happens if for us the representation of the other is the end in itself, which also means that communication is the end in itself. After all, the speech as such is representation, an attempt to present what is there by other means — by new symbols.

3. THE POLITIK EDUCATION

Aid Ukraine. Yes. But it is a ‘yes-and’ — we have to constrain escalation. As Thomas Merton wonderfully wrote, ‘If you face an enemy with the conviction that he understands nothing but force, you will yourself necessarily behave as if you understood nothing but force. And in fact it is highly probable that if you say he understands nothing but force, it is because you yourself are already in the same plight’. It is true that we can defeat existing fascists only by revealing their weakness but what is more important is to make sure that fascists don’t emerge in the first place.

Our most effective weapon against tyranny is to create a world where there is no demand for it, to create a ‘listening society’ where people are given space and time to verbalise their feelings and desires into rational judgements, where they can express their will non-violently and non-tyrannically — politically and politely — so as to fulfil their duty of citizens by gifting their unique perspectives to the statecraft, equipping body politic with more ‘eyes’ to see reality. The body politic has a ‘head’ insofar as its citizens participate in representation — make themselves present to each other, calling each other by name and keeping each other in mind — thus empowering the authorities to act in their names.

Throughout this series of articles, I’ve been alluding to the difference between geopolitics and politics, between ‘reactionary’ and ‘renegotiatory’ governance, between siloviki and politiki. The difference comes down to an age-old question of whether the world is created through the ‘struggle’ or through the ‘word’. It is true that power relations are basic to any society, but it doesn’t mean that human response is essentially limited to counter-violence, to reaction. Conversation, expressing ourselves through words, allows us to renegotiate relations so as to make them more graceful, more subtle, less violent. This is why I would argue that the human world is created through the word — it allows us to legislate new contexts for our lives, new societies. The only alternative is the imprisonment within the struggle for Lebensraum. Aleksandr Dugin, a reactionary apologist of Russian imperial aggression, claims intellectual inheritance of the Eurasians who, decades prior to siloviki accomplishing it in practice, advocated for a theory of shedding the shell of communist ideology and fashioning Russia under the auspices of purely identitarian imperialism. Dugin once proposed to assess the success of statesmen by taking the modulo of land acquisition. This allowed him to come to a conclusion that Stalin’s reign was a success. But of course every part of Stalin’s territorial gain is some another nation’s loss and a new casus belli. Dugin’s modulo curses us to sing along to the echoes of violence.

Hebrew scripture also presents an example of territorial acquisition, but of a totally different kind. The Jews were granted promised land only if they kept their promise of social justice, acted upon the laws that urged care for the poor, the weak, the stranger, the orphan, and the widow. The Jews saw their history as an escape from slavery through the process of self-legislation. Accordingly, Jews never boasted of their military might, saw their victories not as merited by their own power, but as totally undeserved gifts from God. Gifts received because they were lucky that their relationships were shaped by the laws that graced them with imagination, ingenuity, cooperativeness, reciprocity and mutual aid.

Law is the ground of peaceful coexistence, the result of people agreeing on the fairer rules of the game. For both ancient Jews and classical Greek philosophers laws were the steps on the ladder of spiritual development, the milestones of growth into humaneness. Having forsaken the classical faith in excess through infinite growth into increasingly lawful communities, into collectively and individually desired forms of life, the secular West has offered the vision of infinite economic growth as the excess at the basis of peaceful and lawful cooperation between nations. Now this dream has shown itself to be unsustainable. First, ours is a planet of finite resources. Second, the lawless nations, those who like to make the point that resources are scarce, will bully the lawful ones and cause the tragedy of the commons on the planetary scale. Third, since this economic vision is divorced from the concrete image of life which humans aspire to conduct, it is blind to the moral arguments which should constitute the core of healthy political discourse.

Hanzi Freinacht reimagines the vision of excess by offering an image of ‘democratisation politics’, of infinite growth into the ‘listening societies’ whose citizens are taught to articulate their will politically — to become participants of multi-layered self-legislation. I want to be clear here. By educating ourselves to be participants of political communication, of conversation where consensual and consequential choices with regard to how we should live are made, we teach ourselves to share in what is truly infinite — in language that, as we know at least from Chomsky, can go on forever and therefore can be shared by all. The Jews had knew it all along, from their perspective, language is a non-zero-sum game that creates everything out of nothing (ex nihilo). I think that this is the only excess on which the future international peace can be modelled. The context of our life, the planet, is finite, but we can tap into symbolic excess of the material world by talking of and with it: “giving nature a seat at the table”, inviting parts of the world into rational conversation and unlocking their inner logic, logoï (Greek for ‘words’). Humans can become interdependent parts of ecology only if they return to the language-game where they animate nature by giving it names and reanimate themselves by escaping the instrumental attitude that asks “What do I stand to gain from this or that part of nature?”

World understood as communication is a body of representations. Humanity within this world is a body of political representations, body politic. This is why, in Bulgakov’s view, for humans to settle into our natural niche is to engage in politics. That said, human representation can go wrong, can turn into conceit, can become arbitrary — doing less than justice to what it represents. For example, practices like science and contemplation do allow us to tap into this ‘talkativeness’ of nature, although science can too easily ‘colonise’ the material world in service of lucrative strategies — let nature ‘speak’ only so as to sell the power of its ‘speech’ for its market price (let alone all the animals tortured for the sake of empiricism); and contemplation can too easily become a strategy of individual spiritual progress juxtaposed against ‘lower-stage’ and ‘spiritually underdeveloped’ retards, yet another strategy of avoiding exchange of perspectives, mind-changing and heart-breaking encounter with the stranger.

Evil is the refusal to participate in representation, refusal to see my reflection in the other and the other’s reflection in me. It is the refusal to be a politician, to acknowledge that what I ultimately lack can never be conquered, but can only be graciously gifted by the other — that what I lack is cooperation and that to achieve it we need to negotiate, politely articulate what we want from each other. This refusal to negotiate comes from the illusion of self-sufficiency, our faith that our power will suffice.

If the world is communication, the person is the centre of the world, the intersection where all conversations intensify to the degree of becoming self-conscious, crystallising into identities — from most concrete to most abstract. This is why personal choice is reflected on all levels in a fractal fashion. Large social structures can be ‘more powerful’ than individual persons, but all their power rests on the fact that certain powers act upon what is expected of them within the conversations that constitute this identities — and there is always a chance, a possibility of a tempting choice, which every person must feel, to let the large structures eat shit (that is, be judged by the abstract principles that are even larger than them).

But of course there is also the possibility of the person’s mediocre choice of putting faith in the power of his or her own identity instead of putting faith in the interdependent network of representations. It is this choice that spirals evil into reality by artificially tearing the representational network into pieces, creating unnatural frontlines between nameless identities. Whereas political representation presupposes people acting in the name of one another, war is the opposite of politics because it is the contest of wills that dehumanises humans by reducing them to their wills — it ‘steals’ their names without which they can’t be recognized as particular persons in whose name their representatives can act. In the booklet on the honour of a Russian officer, one of the dictums reads: “I agree to live and die without a name”. What it means is that their authorities can dispense with them in any way they see fit. This is why war is a rebellion against the law of the people and law of nature, law of life.

Growth into increasingly intense communication, increasingly intricate and intimate conversations, allows people to articulate themselves to the extent of having their desires so well taken care of within the body politic that they can safely lend their names to it — let their representatives act in their name. This is what politics is. And this is why personal growth is inseparable from politics.

The late Soviet thinkers knew this and began to create the society based on the child-like pursuit of infinite transformation. Alas, their project was destroyed and surpassed by the regressive project of the KGB men. (The USSR was not a univocal thing, its history consisted of starkly different ideological projects). The Soviet educators argued that the education of complex communities requires coordination of paideia, classical education of citizens, interdependent participants of self-legislative communities, and Bildung, i.e. Romantic education of unique persons whose strangeness and idiosyncrasies are irreducible to their roles in the communities. This is a matter not of the exercise of will, but of being lured into traditions of shared speech, personal relationships that let our wills be disciplined by our highest desires.

The person who to his own later regret brought Putin to power in 1999 through a series of spin campaigns and electoral schemes, Sergei Pugachev, warned us that we should never interfere with God’s work through the institutes of democratic empowerment, however flawed they may be. There is hardly any system that demands more faith in humanity than democracy. But, as he says, regardless of our realist doubt with regard to people’s ability to choose, we must have this faith. We should not manipulate the processes of democratic empowerment. But what if we can make it more immune to manipulation? What if we can put the government at the service of educating communities of self-legislators?

Doing justice to the interaction of abstract systems takes abstract thinking and that takes time. It necessitates a kind of education that will allow people to partake in self-legislation of the increasingly abstract orders: family, company, city, nation, planet. Such education teaches us to attend to what is truly relevant, to see events as they stand in relation to the history of universal escape from slavery, the history of Exodus. The history of learning to make peace with the fact that what we lack can only be provided by the other — the history of outgrowing zero-sum gaming. This is the education of political freedom — freedom as “the process by which you develop the habit of being inaccessible to slavery”. All of this is a painstaking curriculum, but we don’t invest in it at our peril. Law, not power, is what we must educate ourselves in.

Investment into the education of interdependent self-legislators is our only alternative to autocracy. Trump infamously said “I Love the Poorly Educated”. The autocrats despise humanist education, because it helps people see through the spectacle of populism and geopolitics — to see through the people who say that “We have to gnaw out the piece of something we lack before rivals take it first — and we have to act now, time is ticking away, it’s simple, don’t think, do it now!” Thinking that was not allowed to take time is the thinking that falls victim to the manipulation by the powerful — they offer a few choices and scream “This one is the best choice and the other choice is awful — choose quickly!”.

It seems that at least one of the tasks of metamodern education would be to reconnect people to the terrains of ceremonial stillness in which they can be disciplined by the patterns of time, space, and quiet to outgrow their urge to have, compulsion to produce and consume, and be transfigured by the inexhaustible meaningfulness of their environment, that is, transfigured by grace. The strongmen dislike people who dare to think for themselves because it’s hard to turn them into inarticulate and unquestioning executives of vertical coercion. Their imagination won’t let them believe that social relations are limited to zero-sum struggle for lands and resources. Education helps see excess where the uneducated only see scarcity.

Conclusion

For Jürgen Habermas, the intellectual ‘godfather’ of the EU, representative democracy rests on faith in the ‘ideal speech situation’ in which speakers are able to represent each other truthfully. “Does it ever really happen?” This question is off the mark. The truth is that language itself operates like this — if I want to have a good conversation, if I want to be understood, I have to take your perspective, which means that if the conversation unfolds naturally, we inevitably go through sustained perspective taking and consequent reciprocal transformation. “Does it mean that we ever really exchange our names?” No, and why would we want to do that? This is not the education of the secret agents who pretend and steal different identities. We aim to be politicians who represent. Representation is a ‘dance’ between the extremes of saying “Oh you’re so different that I can’t possibly know what you want!” and stealing your name while saying “I know what you want better than you do!” It is the keeping of distance, neither staying so far away that you lose touch nor closing up upon the other so as to collapse into (totalitarian) identity — it is both the remembrance of boundaries and the conscious embrace of the transiency: I become present to you and open myself to your presence. We stay ourselves, but we learn from each other: I become a bit of a stranger to myself, and you become a little less of a stranger to me. At the end of the day, politics is a process of learning.

Today neoliberalism stifles representation because only the rich can buy the lobbyists and make campaign contributions that dwarf the ability of ‘ordinary’ people to exert any influence on governance. This inevitably reflects in the radicalisation of what is left of politics: people feel that their citizen efficacy had declined, that they’re not heard, and they begin to ‘scream’ — they feel that it is only by arguing for outrageous policy that they can provoke society to listen to them. Look across the world and you’ll see how many people even today look up to Putin because he questions neoliberal order in the starkest manner. People are either radicalised and begin to ‘scream’ even louder, no longer listening to the others, or, if they’re decent people, they leave politics because they see it as something that corrupts their soul. Politics becomes impossible because representation becomes impossible and representation becomes impossible because conversation becomes impossible: money ‘speaks’ louder than words and popular will turns into unintelligible screaming. The principle of ‘might makes right’ has returned, albeit the might is now mediated through the market.

In Russia this dynamic between neoliberalism and a people shackled by ressentiment about voicelessness and infringed greatness was intensified by the advance of plebiscitary democracy — in which people’s democratic participation is limited to voting. This is the contrast towards which I’ve been building in this article: the contrast between representative democracy and plebiscitary democracy, between articulation and acclamation. If politics is reduced to voting, to plebiscite, to mere freedom of choice between options, then the quality of public debate which depends on articulation of observations and desires into facts and moral judgements, on the interplay of science and religion, is sabotaged. Acclamation (from Latin ‘to scream’) deafens argument, shared exploration of reality and its wealth of potentials — it only intensifies whatever people already believe in, makes popular opinion louder and more radical.

Since both the market mechanism and the popular will are inarticulate, they are possessed by passion, be it greed or envy — their task is the mobilisation that runs contrary to the interests (and prospects) of humane life. For both of these forces, the concrete vision of a form of life is not something that guides them — therefore they bring about the destruction of the context of human life — ecocide, genocide, culture-cide. Apart from the face-to-face converse where we call each other by the names, there can be no personal responsibility, no ‘lending’ of names to the representatives to act in our names.

Both arbitrary power and lobbying dissolve responsibility in various forms of contests, be it war or economic competition. We have to measure our policies by the form of life we dream to live — we have to ensure that representatives and the represented are conjoined by communication — so that the desires are given time, silence, and imaginative space to be dreamed of, articulated, and put at the centre of politics.

We’ll know that we have restored natural politics when we’ll see both the capital and the popular opinion ‘silenced’ by the practice of argument. This will be the politik revolution — our only chance to halt the rise of the ‘strongmen statecraft’ that nowadays fills the vacuum between lucrative neoliberalism and its resentful reflection: a fascist identitarianism that reacts against the individualism of neoliberal order. Ukraine — fixated and asphyxiated in the midair between Western neoliberalism and Russian fascism — is a symbolic image of this chasm. To aid Ukraine and to aid democracy at large, we need to think in two regimes at once, we have to outgrow both the dictate of market and the dictate of might.

1. THE FASCISM OF GEOPOLITICS.

(1) The Fascism of ‘Realism’. ‘Abstraction of Violence’.

Vladimir Nabokov spent the 1930s in Germany. His 1936 story Tyrants Destroyed distils the essence of the Nazi regime by revealing the link between obsession with willpower and obsession with land. He describes the fictional ruler who gnaws his way into power thanks to ‘that deaf, focused, gloomy, and deeply self-conscious will, which in the end moulds a triumphant monster out of a mediocre man’. The ruler has a myopic belief that willpower alone is enough to break and refashion the fabric of social and material reality as one sees fit, at one point he suffers from toothache and he promises to ‘overcome his teeth’ by sheer exercise of will. But what’s interesting is this: this ruler is obsessed with farming. At one point he awards an old lady with the highest state honour for victory in the contest of growing the largest pumpkin. He even introduces an ‘agricultural hymn’ as the national anthem. Why does Nabokov connect worship of willpower with — of all things — farming? The reason is simple. There is a tight correlation between agricultural success and hardwork that goes into the cultivation of land which indulges our illusion that “we reap what we sow”, that teaches us to think that our success is of our own making, that we are self-made and self-sufficient, while teaching us to forget the ecology of loves, cultures, and material environments, that precedes and creates us. Before farming emerged, hunter-gatherers humbly relied on the gifts from wild nature. Farming taught us to see nature as a passive instrument of our will. Farming taught us to think that possession of land is merited by all the hardwork they’ve put into it. We turned wilderness into pasture or arable land and wild animals into livestock or workers to graze or plough the land. We colonised patches of wild nature — wild plants and wild animals — were enslaved as property of the humans. Once our environment was privatised by various individuals, everyone became afraid that he’ll be left without resources that began to seem very scarce, and started trying to secure some of the resources for himself. People began to protect their property from rival claimants by any means necessary. The war for scarce resources, geopolitical struggle for Lebensraum (Ger. ‘Living space’), began to escalate out of anyone’s control — to the extent of people beginning to enslave other people and create unnatural societies based on slavery as model of relationships. These unnatural societies are the product of the feedback between the tyrant and the popular will. Because, in absence of politics, popular will cannot be articulated past ‘the general mess of imprecision of feeling, undisciplined squads of emotion’, natural desires and appetites mutate into passions, and since the passions arise from competition, the ruler has no choice but to appease them by imprisoning himself within the geopolitical logic of a zero-sum-struggle for scarce land against threatening foreign rivals. This is why Nabokov’s fictional ruler uses a fortified prison as his palace — ‘this tyrant calls himself a prisoner of people’s will’. Why does geopolitics resemble a prison?

In his 1937 novel Gift, Nabokov describes geopolitical thinking as a ‘clichéd’ and ‘trivial’: ‘the world Shchyogolev created came out as some kind of collection of limited, humorless, faceless and abstract bullies, and the more brains, cunning and circumspection he found in their mutual activities the more stupid, vulgar and simple his world became’… ‘France was afraid of something or other and therefore would never allow it. England was aiming at something…’. Nabokov was able to see how the geopolitical presumption of a zero-sum struggle for scarce Lebensraum as the ultimate context of all human affairs turns us into ‘bullies’ by locking our imagination into a scarcity mindset, a mindset that provides us with a seemingly ‘realist’ excuse for violence against all sorts of threatening others: ‘There is no avoiding war: it can only be postponed to the advantage of others’.

But what if there is a way to avoid war? In his memoir Speak, Memory!, Nabokov discards the idea that the world is a creation of the struggle for scarce resources because it teaches humans to live an inhumane form of life: ‘Struggle for life” indeed! The curse of battle and toil leads man back to the boar, to the grunting beast’s crazy obsession with the search for food’. Nabokov countered it with a different outlook, the ‘excess mindset’, that restores the primordial understanding that life ultimately is an undeserved gift by insisting that we are spoken into existence. It is the inability to see life as the gift of language is what makes the geopolitical lens vulgar and clichéd, makes it astoundingly unimaginative and uncreative. Geopolitics narrows our attention on securing our domination, our free will to do what we choose with the passive stuff like land before our rivals take it from us, but distracts our attention from our freedom to create laws under which we can intensify our cooperative responsiveness to the gifts that land has to offer. The geopolitical outlook is uncreative because it locks people out of legislative conversations in which new social worlds are created — it distracts our attention from imagining new vistas of creativity that tap into new vistas of excess. And since we can avoid war only if we have faith in the excess in which we all can partake, the geopolitical lens gives us a hard time imagining a possibility of lasting peace. It leads to a life where people fight for their share in what is already there, to a life that is essentially just a living out of a cliché, life that partakes in only one kind of excess — the spiral of violent revenge.

“Tolstoy said that patriotism is the last refuge of villains. Today, in my view, we should replace ‘patriotism’ with ‘geopolitics’”. So says Dmitry Muratov, the Nobel Peace Prize laureate who sold his medal for $104 million and donated the money to the Ukrainian children refugees. Geopolitics is the only meta-narrative that tyrants allow to propagate because it diverts national attention from domestic problems to foreign affairs. Leaders adjust propaganda’s lenses to geopolitics when there is no democratic support for what they’re doing. I want to be precise in what I mean when I say ‘no democratic support’. It is not the approval ratings or plebiscitary acclamation. During his whole reign Putin relied on genuine popular support, of which the polls and election results are proof, but never allowed people to develop their opinions. People could check boxes on multiple choice questionnaires, but with such an inarticulate expression of will, passions remain easily manipulated with the propaganda toolkit. This I believe is the warning of where not to tread that recent Russian history ought to teach us: Democracy is more than listening to the people’s opinion, it depends on educating people into those whom Shalamov described as politiki, into citizens who can verbalise their will to the extent of genuinely shaping decisions that legislate the context of their lives, articulating themselves to the degree where policy undertaken in their names genuinely reflects their will — not just choosing between options, but shaping which options are available. Democracy, in essence, is communal self-examination — thinking in public, persistently asking “What do we truly want?”, “Is this how we would really love to live?’ and persistently making authorities answer to it. Statecraft is to be examined and judged in light of the forms of life that are desired by the people. The unexamined society is not worth living in because the absence of communal self-examination leads to dictatorship.

Geopolitics is precisely what allows communities to avoid self-examination. Geopolitics permits us to not pay attention to the actual forms of life. It allows people to stay within the ‘echo chamber’ of certainty and never be disarmed by confrontations with the apparent facts on the surface of the world. Notice how today’s Russian official war apologists distract people’s attention from both the ‘facts on the ground’ and ‘gut feelings’ by using a geopolitical lens that narrows attention to issues of territory, one resource of zero-sum nature: ‘Russia’s main interest in this war is neither cities nor people, but the land’, pushing Russian borders farther from Moscow, so as to secure total invulnerability of Putin’s regime. Putin does not want Kharkiv, my home city, but he repeatedly stressed that he would not tolerate the risk of having foreign nuclear warheads within a 7 minute reach of Moscow. ‘Russia doesn’t need Mariupol. Russia needs another supply corridor to Crimea. Russia doesn’t need Odessa. Russia needs another sea outlet’. War apologists implore us to “take the geopolitical situation into account and see that Russia was left with no choice but to react to the encroachment of foreign powers on its sacrosanct sphere of influence!”. By making it seem that Russia was totally bereft of all negotiatory faculties, totally reactive, talk of geopolitical necessity permits decision-makers to shed all responsibility.

In this regard, John Mearsheimer and other acolytes of the ‘realist’ school of foreign policy are in fact idealists. It is just that their ideal is grim: humanity stuck at the impasse of imperial power struggle. They think that the emphasis on the self-legislative rights of all nations is just moral posturing, a distant echo of what the ideal world should be. But one may just as well argue that it is the ‘realists’ who are out of touch with the reality of progress towards international relations that are less defined by power struggle and more by creative cooperation. For example, they are out of touch with the anti-colonial resolve of Ukrainians, with the fact that people who defend their freedom will always shatter the neat predictions of military analysts upon which the ‘maps’ of the balance between great powers are drawn. And since “when we make peace with the idea that ‘might makes right’ we only help the mighty”, the ‘realists’ only help imperialists like Putin. From their perspective, it doesn’t matter what Ukrainians self-legislate. The floor has to be given to the interests of great powers. It does not bother them that these security interests are often dictated by dictators. In one of his prison letters, Navalny says that, in the long run, any nation’s security interest, including Russia’s, is to be a democracy. For a very simple reason — democracies actually don’t go to war with each other, democracies don’t pose a threat to each other’s security because it is in no people’s natural desire to go to war. Sadly, from the ‘realist’ perspective, Navalny’s voice does not count because he is just a political prisoner — he’s not in power.

We shouldn’t let Putin define Russia’s security interests because the only interest of his regime is to stop democracy. “What threatened Putin was not NATO expansion, but the democracy expansion”. We have to understand that long before the talk of ‘national interests’ and ‘spheres of influence’ we’ve already walked the walk of appeasing the people who can’t let go of their power and use the talk of ‘national interest’ as a guarantee of their personal security — which for them means forever staying in power. Putinverstehers perpetuate the idea of Russian innocence because it was left without a choice — but to accept this is to let every tyrant justify violence with the mythology of national interest: ‘the Russian foreign ministry claiming Russia will be “forced to take retaliatory steps” if Finland joins NATO’. No, it will not be “forced”, in the same way that Russia was not “forced” to attack Ukraine. This decision appears “forced” only if one accepts the whole set of ideological and geopolitical assumptions that sustain Russian politics’.

But for the ‘realist’ there is no difference between democracy and autocracy. The ‘realist’ equivocates all ‘great powers’ and then asks us to listen to every last one of them. At the end of the day, it is a recipe for the appeasement and subservience to the bullies, for an international order based on balance of power between the strongest empires. Putin wants to build an international order like this — where strong states do things at will but disguise it by the sacred ‘security interests’ which they define according to their caprice. He had established the new axis of autocracy that includes India’s Modi, Brazil’s Bolsonaro, China’s Xi, and infiltrates even well into NATO and Turkey. This is why ‘realism’ plays into the hands of imperial ambitions. Putin points to the double standards of Western policy when it falls short of its espoused ideals, but Putin wants an order where there will be no ideals to fall short of, a world without hypocrisy. Yet today we must learn to think of hypocrisy as a good thing because the world where hypocrisy is impossible is a very dark place. “Yes, the liberal west is hypocritical, applying its high standards very selectively. But hypocrisy means you violate the standards you proclaim, and in this way you open yourself up to inherent criticism — when we criticise the liberal west, we use its own standards. What Russia is offering is a world without hypocrisy — because it is without global ethical standards, practising just pragmatic “respect” for differences. We have seen clearly what this means when, after the Taliban took over in Afghanistan, they instantly made a deal with China. China accepts the new Afghanistan while the Taliban will ignore what China is doing to Uyghurs — this is, in nuce, the new globalisation advocated by Russia. And the only way to defend what is worth saving in our liberal tradition is to ruthlessly insist on its universality”.

The problem is not power itself, but its arbitrary exercise. The West’s ‘sphere of influence’ is postcolonial (rather than simply ‘colonial’) because it is not imposed at will — in contrast to the fundamental disregard to human rights and life by the autocratic regimes, the West presents a form of life that people aspire to emulate, providing the individual with a space, time and silence for growth: be it Swedish spacious public spaces, German observance of recreation on Sunday, or Swiss laws of silence, be it the flamboyance of ‘American dream’ or the normcore of ‘Nordic minimalism’. This is why many nations voluntarily choose to be integrated into the West. This self-determination principle, inscribed into international law, is what is being threatened by Russia’s recent transgressions. If the international law does not function properly, empires (nations that have problem with recognising their borders) will simply impose their will on the weaker nations because empires don’t recognise them as subjects of politics. But if all nations are given voice, there is a chance of creating legislative communication on the planetary level and then abstracting violence to that level.

Can we break the sovereignty of strong states just like in the past we broke the sovereignty of strong individuals? In the past, we managed to abstract violence to the level of the state — to the legislative communication between citizens — and from that level to enforce it onto the lawbreakers. We abstracted violence to polity, allowed the police to apportion violence onto the brutes, bandits and bullies — and called it justice. We said to them — “You cannot act with impunity, you have to attune your conduct to the laws that are conducive to the common good”. And now wherever, say, domestic abuse takes place, police can intervene and punish the abuser. The household is not a sovereign order unto itself with the man as a sole dictator of moral judgements, the local arbiter of good and evil. The human rights legislation does not recognise the right of the strong to impede on the liberty of the weak.

However, having abstracted sovereignty to the level of the state, we must not stop there. Today, when bandits and bullies come to power in the state, they use the image of foreign threat to usurp power forever — to take on the colonial expansion and incite the police against their political enemies whom they target as foreign agents — and to market all of this as defence of sovereignty. Today we are gradually degrading into the state of international relations where the sovereignty of stronger states allows them to impede on the freedom of weaker ones and justify it by the talk of ‘national interests’. If powerful enough, nation states are allowed to act arbitrarily. We have confined thieves and thugs to the prisons, but fail to deal with the thieves and thugs who come to power and weaponise the state to bully and steal.

Today, to abstract sovereignty above the level of nation states, we have to stand up for the sovereignty of all countries, their right to self-legislate. First, consider Ukraine — the only nation that agreed to give up the world’s third largest arsenal of nuclear warheads and that, because of it, is now painfully aware of its reliance on the family of interdependent nations. Second, consider Russia — the nation whose unrivalled nuclear capacities allow it to be the vanguard of contemporary neo-colonialism.

Putin sees dominance as the only legitimate model of personal and international relations: “In order to claim some kind of leadership — I am not even talking about global leadership, I mean leadership in any area — any country, any people, any ethnic group should ensure their sovereignty… There is no in-between, no intermediate state: either a country is sovereign, or it is a colony, no matter what the colonies are called”. In Putin’s view, there are two categories of state: The sovereign and the conquered, and Ukraine should fall into the latter category. ‘Russia’s strategic plan is to profit from global warming: control the world’s main transport route, plus develop Siberia and control Ukraine. In this way, Russia will dominate so much food production that it will be able to blackmail the whole world. This is the ultimate economic reality beneath Putin’s imperial dream’.

The reason Putin’s imperial ambition ‘should be unconditionally rejected is that in today’s global world in which we are all haunted by the same catastrophes, we are all in-between, in an intermediate state, neither a sovereign country nor a conquered one: to insist on full sovereignty in the face of global warming is sheer madness since our very survival hinges on tight global cooperation’. Putin’s neo-colonial obsession with strength and weakness is out of place in the twenty-first century where the strong and the weak are equally interdependent in the face of global challenges.

Perhaps there was a way to prevent Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine — a bilateral ‘divide-and-rule’ meeting between the US and Russia. This is what Putin wanted all along since he took office in 2000. It would have saved Ukraine from the insufferable toll of pain and death, but it would have reshaped international architecture in a manner that would have made planetary cooperation all but impossible. As things stand now, the resolve of the Ukrainians to self-sacrifice for the sake of anticolonialism — the right of a nation to self-legislate — has reanimated the ideal of the international community in which every country is endowed with the dignity of an inter-independent (independent and interdependent) self-legislator.

Today, the true Russian patriots must support Ukraine because Ukraine is the key to saving Russia from suicidal imperialism. Zbigniew Brzezinski repeatedly claimed that Russia could only part ways with its imperial habits if it were willing to surrender its claims to Ukraine: “Without Ukraine, Russia ceases to be an empire”. By limiting our attention to the struggle for imperial ‘spheres of influence’, geopolitics distracts us from the history of outgrowing zero-sum relationships. Geopolitics is a reductive perspective that does little justice to the long history of breaking zero-sum dilemmas. Democratic politics frees us from this zero-sum optic and allows us to renegotiate our relations with our rivals so as to become collaborators who find ways in which our environment is actually not so passive and who can hence share in the excess it has to offer more intensely.

To not see the difference between democracy and autocracy is fail to see social development over the axis of time. This is why ‘realism’ is a clichéd worldview — it attends only to the present status quo; it is interested in making great powers avoid war, but does not attend to the growth into such international relations in which every nation can pursue the policy under conditions of freedom and sovereignty. ‘Realist’ concern for preserving status quo so as to avoid escalation by not provoking the unnecessary violent reaction from the powerful is important, but it has to be incorporated within the wider history of growth into relations where brute force does not have the last word. Since democracy presumes the exchange of critical perspectives, the painful process of acknowledging errors, it poses a unique threat to the dictators — people whose authority is based on the myth that they don’t make mistakes. The acknowledgement of errors is exactly what the tyrants cannot stomach because to do so is to show weakness, and, in the strongman’s ‘system of coordinates’, weakness is precisely what shouldn’t be shown. “The weak”, as Putin is keen on reminding us, “are beaten”.

(2) The Fascism of Putinism. ‘The Failure of Definition’

The insistence on the primacy of division into the strong and the weak, masters and slaves, is the essence of fascism. Russian officials often point fingers at Ukrainian neo-pagan neo-Nazis, but what makes you a Nazi is not the surface insignia, but the worship of will (at the expense of morality and truth, as discussed in the first essay).

Granted, Putin’s Russia does not have an explicit theory of the supremacy of the white or Russian race, but its exceptionalism is based on an arguably even more dangerous premise — the memory of shared suffering. Not of the kind that says “Never again!”, but of the kind that seeks vengeance and says “We can repeat it!”. Russians simultaneously believe in their absolute innocence because they have been victimised and in their absolute power because they have been victorious. This blend of innocence and omnipotence makes for a very poisonous compound — it has led Russians to cling to their identity in a very uncritical way, to a fundamentally fascist stance of ‘us-theming’ and ‘othering’ all that is strange — no matter if it is a swastika or a rainbow flag. “This kind of reception of the cross [of victimhood and victoriousness] becomes little more than a somewhat magnifying mirror of my condition — and a mirror also for my self-approval, my defining of a secure and righteous position over against the other. Self-pity, leafing into the pleasure of knowing the impregnable moral armour of innocence: this is indeed how the cross can be made the ego’s servant”.

If society is a political conversation, then the political purges of the 1930s broke Russian society. And when there appeared a chance to go through a therapy through the means of a renewed political conversation, the above-mentioned fusion of fantasies about innocence and omnipotence expiated Russia from the necessity of coming to terms with the traumas of its past, from the necessity to take responsibility for the errors of the political lineage in the wake of which Russians received their newfound freedom. Inability to name the evil that was visited upon them in the 20th century led to inability to notice the same evil perpetrated in their name, to take responsibility for the Great Terror, which in its own turn led Russians to repeat it anew. Russians turned their past into a weapon because they were not able to (literally) come to terms with it — to define it correctly.

Plato strongly emphasised the importance of the search for correct definitions. He believed that the practice of definition keeps statecraft in touch with reality. Correct definitions allow people to let language govern their lives, that is, to create laws that are conducive to the common good because they are written from the perspective of society as a whole (remember that Aristotle called society koinonia, which simply means communication). In contrast to this, when people use definitions that are expedient to them, language becomes the instrument of private will, one more tool of coercion. In the Soviet Union, the right to define was in the hands of the authorities, who reduced the definition of fascism to the primitive geopolitical practice of ‘us-them-ing’. Not able to define the fascism they faced in the 20th century, Russians were left without a working definition of what brought them so much suffering, of the evil they saw with their own eyes. And it meant that the authorities had an extremely powerful and cynical tool for psychological coercion — they could mobilise the populace by exploiting the shared trauma of wartime terror.

‘Soviet anti-fascism… was a politics of us and them. That is no way to define fascism. After all, fascist politics began, as the Nazi thinker Carl Schmitt said, from the definition of an enemy. Because Soviet anti-fascism just meant defining an enemy, it offered fascism a backdoor through which to return to Russia. In the Russia of the 21st century, “anti-fascism” simply became the right of a Russian leader to define national enemies’.

The failure to define fascism made Russians miss the warning of Matthew 5:39, ‘resist not evil’: having defined themselves in primitive opposition to fascism, Russians did not grow beyond the essence of fascist zero-summism. This is how evil perpetuates itself: you “look at the speck of sawdust in your brother’s eye” and then you base your identity on being its adversary, you invert the flavour, but preserve the substance. Russians talked at length about fighting fascism only to themselves become fascists. This is not rare. Today, Republicans justify gun ownership by saying that they are afraid of tyranny, while it is their party that holds conventions in the viciously illiberal Hungary of Victor Orban. By focusing on (perhaps real) problems in our opponents, we become mere reactionary copies of what we were supposed to fight against, we turn ourselves into what frightens us in our enemy. The optics of ‘us-them-ing’ is what makes fascism evil. It is not just that this optics is evil; the evil is this optics. Evil is the vision that sees evil everywhere.

Russians en masse never reckoned with similarities between German Nazism and their own Bolshevik crimes — if there was such reckoning, they would have recognised themselves reflected in fascism as if it was a mirror. But reflecting and thinking are incommensurate with the fascist exaltation of willing.

Real thinking is nothing less than love because it requires letting the other be other, letting the other evolve in accord with her very own nature. It is the search for the correct definitions through the critical exchange of perspectives, letting the other define and name herself instead of imposing my definitions on her. It presupposes the mind-bending and heart-breaking process of coming to terms with the strangeness of reality, its otherness in relation to my beliefs and hopes, acknowledgement of errors and persistent work of repentance. Willing, on the other hand, is all about having enough power to impose my arbitrary choices on the other. ‘Fascists calling other people “fascists” is fascism taken to its logical extreme as a cult of unreason. It is a final point where hate speech inverts reality and propaganda is just pure insistence. It is the apogee of will over thought. Calling others fascists is the essential Putinist practice’.

Russia began to espouse the primacy of the will on the international scale. The only ‘others’ which Russia condescends to speak with are the powerful actors on the world stage: US and China, Germany and India, those on whom it is not so easy to impose will. Russians wanted these powers to divide the world into their respective ‘spheres of influence’ so as to secure one piece of the ‘pie’ for Russia according to her merit as a military and monetary force. Because it presupposes that the countries that constitute this partitioned ‘pie’, ‘those on whom the will is imposed’, are devoid of wills of their own, geopolitics does not leave any room for democracy. To promote this geopolitical logic Russia was inseminating populist sentiments all around the globe — so that the ‘master’ nations could not help but to carve the world map into imperial ‘spheres of influence’ over the ‘slave’ nations, over the passive land and people who are unlucky enough to dwell there. It was an offer to re-colonise the world.

And this is where the fluid definition of fascism came in handy — the fascists were able to distract everyone from their fascism by pretending to be profoundly anti-fascist. And whom did they label as fascist? Behold a comical acrobatic stunt: the fascists were now those smaller nations that refused to bow down to the ‘strong’. The Russian definition of fascism itself became fascist. That is, arbitrary in the sense that those who decide, the arbiters, are the powerful. The powerful states simply designate their enemies as fascist. And the worst fascists are the weak states that dare to pursue independent policies, to self-legislate, to profess democracy. The Kremlin hated countries like Ukraine the most because their freedom puts the order based on violence in question, because their democracy renders violence obsolete and meaningless. And there you have it: “Ukrainian fascists!”

(3) The Fascism of Paganism

The book that had a formative impact on the key ideologue of Putin’s war on Ukraine was the 1928 Pagan Imperialism by Julius Evola. I am of the strong opinion that not enough is made of the deep link between fascism and paganism. Why do the fascists have this pervasive adoration of heathen symbolism, of polytheist power-gods? Because paganism was the first worldview that presented power as the highest ideal. Heathens, be it Greeks, Nordics, or Slavs, had many gods who all somehow personified various crafts and skills which empower people to impose their will — but at the top of the hierarchy of gods, which is the same thing as the hierarchy of values, was always the god of war, wrath, and will, god who personified sheer dominance by throwing arbitrary thunderbolts — be it Zeus, Wotan, or Perun.

Earlier in this essay I described the silovik ethos by using the chronological sequence of ‘hiding’, ‘lying’ and ‘killing’ that led people to fall into paganism. If we’ll see that ‘hiding’, ‘lying’ and ‘killing’ have indeed become the core of Russian policy, one may in a sense argue that Russia has become paganised.

Siloviki turned hiding into secrecy. You will recall that the thing Putin and his siloviki detest most is the democratic idea of personal agency, the idea that ‘ordinary’ citizens can be subjects of politics, of the process where people can face each other and renegotiate the laws by which they live. The siloviki realised that they had to distract social attention from genuine politics because genuine politics would have instantly turned the country against their thiefdom. The way to do this was to divert all attention from the political discourse on the desired forms of life to the geopolitical drama of imperial struggle. Geopolitical mythology proved to be very useful because it provided siloviki with a rationale to declare discussion of discrepancies between desired and actual forms of life in Russia a treasonous activity of foreign agents who have to be silenced.

To be contrasted by the form of life people dream of living is the tyrant’s worst nightmare. This is why Navalny was poisoned, imprisoned, and silenced (Navalny jokes that authorities had put him into an aquarium so as to muffle his voice). At the same time, Russians, entranced by the mythos of geopolitics, began to see the world as the place of secrets and conspiracies, the place where political debate means and leads to nothing, but only prevents ‘us’ from ‘winning’, where debate only destabilises the state machinery behind which all must rally.

In this political reality, the Russian people is a formless mass, passive but impassioned on demand, “alternating between passion and passivity”, locked into a gridlock of consumerism: passionate regarding their private choices between options predetermined by the government, but too passive to articulate a sustained any critique of governance.

In Putin’s Russia policymaking is concealed from the people. Decisions are made in secret and then presented for the plebiscitary acclamation. “Time and again Putin has publicly demonstrated that he in principle does not understand what a discussion is. Especially a political discussion — there should be no discussion between the lower rank and the upper echelon. And if the subordinate dares to question things, then he is an enemy”. Gryzlov, Putin’s first parliament speaker infamously said in 2003 that “parliament is not the place for discussions”. “Independent information, available online from a dwindling number of sources, is impossible to find without an unaffordable outlay of time, energy and know-how”. The only information ‘within walking distance’ is ushered by the TV propagandists whose very tone and manner of speech indicate disregard for the natural exchange of questions and replies. Their certainty comes from their belief there is no truth except that which is expedient to the powerful. And this leads to lying.

Siloviki turned lying into a kind of rape of language. It is not that Russian propaganda presents an alternative picture of reality, the peculiarly incoherent worldview it offers is but a by-product of its much more sinister main task — to deny that there can be any coherent picture of reality at all. Gideon Rachman describes how, upon visiting Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov in 2008, he noticed on Peskov’s screen the mantra from Orwell’s 1984: “war is peace”, “freedom is slavery”. Rachman assumes that Peskov was poking fun at him and other journalists, but I suggest that Peskov was also educating himself on the postmodern regime of post-truth, one which the Russian regime would prove itself most adept at navigating in the years to come.

Postmodern sleights of hand allows Putin’s regime to slip out of democratic control. When logical consistency of language is no longer an aspiration, when it becomes a mere tool which the powerful be stupid not to use to his benefit, when language itself is made impotent and reduced to an instrument of power, everyone loses power except those who are already in power. Because of the ennui from politics, many Russians gladly accepted a truncated zone of private responsibility, say, in matters of financial success. Their citizen efficacy dwindled because they couldn’t see connection between personal experience and governance — propaganda instilled them with the sense that in the world run by secret conspiracies there is no truth available for inspection by the citizens. The authorities no longer have to yield to what is correct and factual, they don’t even have to try to pay respect to the coherence of their lies. They just have to fill the public discourse with noise to the effect of making people believe that “All is not so straightforward!” “We’ll never know the whole truth!” “If the President made this decision, there must have been a reason for it!” “The owls are not what they seem!”

Russia also uses this postmodern cynicism to justify its imperial aspirations. If there is nothing except attempts at power grab and any rhetoric is a veneer for that, it is appropriate for Russia to react against the encroachment on its fictional ‘sphere of influence’ — she’s left no other choice. If all perspectives are just someone’s power grab, then other perspectives don’t have transcendent supremacy over ours. There is no way to adjudicate different perspectives. Which is why there is no purpose in arguing, dialogue, even politics as such. Whereas the ‘politics of correct definition’ unleashed the true meaning of words to govern the polity, freed the power of language to shape decision-making, today’s Russian propaganda insists that there be no correct correspondence to reality at all, that language is inherently impotent to do justice to reality. Which means that if we have a controversy with regard to our perspectives, it is of no import how sound our arguments are, all that matters is whether we walk the walk of backing our talk with the one argument ‘to rule them all’ — the argument of brute force.

Since authorities no longer yielded to what is true, no longer cared of whether what they say resembles reality, they were able to argue anything they wanted with the help of circular reasoning: “We’ve begun the war so that war doesn’t begin!” “We attacked you so that you don’t attack us!” Circular definition that comes to the opposite of the natural meaning of the word is what I call the ‘rape of language’, it is the anti-definition. In today’s Russia, words are not what they mean. War is not war. You go to jail for seven years if you think otherwise [Link: https://theins.ru/en/news/252983].

In this way any action could be defended by a simple paranoiac explanation that “if we didn’t do it, it would have been done to us”.

It was a country-wide inception of the Machiavellian principle which Putin describes as his main takeaway from childhood on the streets of Leningrad: “If it looks like the fight is coming, make sure to strike first!” And this leads to killing.

Siloviki turned killing into a cult of death. When Putin became president, Pugachev, the choreographer of his enthronement, told him to choose the place for his burial — so that Putin will know that his mortal fate is connected to the fate of the land and Pugachev will know that this land to be in the right hands. But Putin was afraid to think of death. For him, he said, “life has just begun”. One may suspect that this refusal to come to terms with one’s vulnerability, to remember death as the guarantee that one’s identity is not everlasting, returns as an obsession with the idea of inflicting death on others, with the power to kill.

Long before the invasion, Putin had centred Russian ideology around the cult of war. He has turned previously solemn remembrance of the price paid for victory over fascism on May 9th into a celebration of military might, the spectacular display of Russians as quintessentially heroic — long suffering but victorious. Special because of their unsurpassed ability to kill.

I challenge you to watch some of the parades Putin had put together in celebration of the Victory Day — these are the clearest contemporary examples of the worship of your own might which prophet Habakkuk identified with pagans, “guilty people, whose own strength is their god” (Habakkuk 1:11). By offering war as a glue for national identity and territorial conquest as a model of growth, Putin effectively forced Russia to linger in its cultural growth, to be stuck at a lower stage of development. Think of why we can easily imagine a very popular or academically successful highschooler becoming a very unsuccessful adult. Whereas the ‘losers’ among highschoolers will gladly learn to play by the different rules and will become successful in a new kind of game, why would the ‘winners’ give up on a game in which they were so successful? Why would a popular teenager give up on bullying, telling greasy jokes, and acting upon notions of shame, honour, strength, and instead focus on becoming a responsible participant in the boring routine of adult relationships? Why would a diligent pupil leave the comfort zone of cramming and instead engage in more creative and subversive ways of getting things done? In a way not so dissimilar to these examples, spectacular victory in the Second World War and a miserable defeat in economic competition in the time of peace, has led Russians to ask themselves a question: “If we were so good in the game of war — why should we quit playing it?”

Russia has a cult of the dead. In recent years, the parades were complimented by the marches of the so-called ‘immortal regiment’ whose participants carry pictures of relatives or friends who fought during the Second World War with the aim of venerating and ‘immortalising’ the memory of the veterans. It is as if Russia is a Valhalla that hosts the souls of brave soldiers. In recent years, the state TV has been filled with seemingly joyous talk of the final annihilation, reduction of the world to ashes. This is the Pagan idea of Ragnarök, the final battle and the triumph of death. One of its most colourful displays are Russian Orthodox priests blessing a nuclear missile called ‘Satan’ (a symbolism that has precedent, of course, in North Korea). Satanism, in this sense, is not some group of human rights and social justice activists playing with the imagery of the devil (I’m thinking of the Satanic Temple) or the groups of hermetic youths playing with the imagery of paganism (though both are symbolically inadequate and ridiculous if you ask me), rather, satanism is this — idolatrous adoration of your own weaponry. Since Russians began to believe in their own power, the army, it gave them the illusion that Russia has the right to become the arbiter above moral principles of international law. If there is a threat of real neo-Pagan neo-Nazism in the 21st century, it stems from the Silovik Revolution, not from Azov soldiers with the kolovrat tattoos. In its arbitrary treatment of the law, of the individual, and of political debate, the language in general, the essence of Putin’s regime is the triumph of the will over the word.

2. THE MARKET CAN’T SAVE US

(1) The Fascism of Neoliberalism. The Danger of Outsourcing Moral Judgement to the Market

If the essence of the Russian regime is the triumph of will over the word, it was able to take on the West because there a different sort of triumph happened — of wealth over the word, of capital over politics. The outsourcing of moral judgement to the market made the West vulnerable to the corrupting influence of Russian money.

Earlier I argued that Russian liberals erred in their expectation that capitalism will save Russia from tyranny because the siloviki used the very mechanisms of capitalism to subvert democracy and install tyranny. In this chapter I’ll argue that the same mistake was committed by the liberal West. The liberal strategy of integrating Russia into the global economy had backfired because the insatiable appetites of the Russian elite had made it impossible for them to operate under the same transparent laws as everyone else.

The Western world order is premised on the liberal idea of infinite economic growth. The idea that all economic actors who play by the rules of a free market economy can be shareholders of the ever-growing profits from global trade. It was the image of excess that promised the possibility of prolonged planetary peace: Pax Americana. It had many flaws that were visible even before the Russian invasion — the fact that mutual enrichment has been skewed to serve the interests of the ‘first world’ countries, the fact that infinite economic growth is impossible on the planet with finite resources and the fact that this system can always be violated by the actors who don’t abide by the rules. Ironically, these problems are connected — the actors who take most comfort in the fact that the resources are scarce are the same actors who use it as an excuse for the destruction of domestic democracy and assault on the foreign foes. It is Russia that puts the nail to the coffin of neoliberal order.

Unable to integrate his kleptocratic regime within the (comparatively) fair rules of Western order, Putin decided to subvert it from within. The money and power stolen from the colonised Russians were to be weaponised against the West. And since the West had put economics over politics and had outsourced its moral judgement to the market, it proved to be very vulnerable to the corrupting effect of Russian cash streams — frankly, there wasn’t much of what money couldn’t buy. ‘The weakness of Western capitalist system, in which money ultimately outweighed all other considerations, left it wide open for the Kremlin to manipulate’. In effect, Putin made the West sign a Faustian contract: selling democracy, the soul of society, for the power that came with Russian cash. Seeing through the hypocrisy of Western elites, he became extremely cynical: “Putin laughs when he’s told of [western] values…”, says Dmitry Muratov, “because he had bought sixteen of first-tier Western politicians — a couple of chancellors, a few prime-ministers, a few presidents — to chair the boards of his state companies, putting them on millions-of-dollars annual payrolls… Putin doesn’t believe in their values because he sure knows their value”.

Not many people heeded Andrei Illarionov’s warning that “Western companies are actually building long-term relations with those forces in Russia that are destroying the very pillars of modern society: a market economy, respect for private property, democracy’’. Not many people heeded Robert Amsterdam’s advice that “Western leaders must take a realistic and long-term view of the implications of appeasing the Russians on such issues of fundamental human rights and the rule of law… If not, those presently in power in Russia will take Western double-standards as a licence for impunity. To deny, dismiss or discount the gravity of the consequences is to turn a blind eye to the lessons of history”.

And then it was too late. ‘Instead of Russia being changed through its integration into Western markets, it was Russia that was changing the West… Instead of bringing Russia into line with its rules-based system, slowly the West was being corrupted. It is as if a virus was being injected into it’. Putin used Western economics to corrupt Western politics. And Western politics has lent itself to corruption — there were no mechanisms whereby the moral judgements could have been put in the way of Russian cash streams. Money simply ‘spoke louder’ than words. To undermine Western democracies, Russians decided to inflate the legitimate concerns of many Westerners that neoliberal economics enriched international conglomerates at the expense of the local working classes whose living standards were corroded by the flows of immigrants and use of the labour overseas. Soon, all across the EU, through official channels like Gazprom and through the black cash slush funds, the old networks of KGB clientele were being reloaded so as to influence local policy.

The idea was to fracture the West from within by funnelling money to its populist movements. Russians were funding the populists on both right and left ends of the spectrum with the eye to narrow national attention on their private or national interests as if they necessarily were in an irreconcilable zero-sum struggle against the interests of their fellow countrymen or foreign countries. The US against NATO, the UK against the EU, the EU nation against another EU nation, the poor against migrants. Trump, Brexit, Orban, Le Pen.

(2) Putin’s Geopolitical Turn

Catherine Belton argues that Putin’s geopolitical turn happened in 2004. It was the year of the Orange Revolution in Ukraine. It became a useful scarecrow to mobilise Russians against what was presented as West’s imperial power-grab cynically disguised as a pro-democracy protest.

You can hear the vocabulary of geopolitical zero-summism creeping into Putin’s speech: “Russia has been unable to fully understand the complexity and the dangers of the processes at work in our own country and in the world [read: Russians are ignorant of the secret struggle of mythical geopolitical forces]… We showed ourselves to be weak. And the weak get beaten [ultimately, it is about the strong and the weak] … We must create a much more effective security system [we have to attain invulnerability] … Most important is to mobilise the entire nation in the face of the common danger [Us-Them-ing]… There are certain people who want us to be focused on our internal problems [since we’re besieged by the external threat, internal critique is nothing less than treason], and they pull the strings here so we don’t raise our heads internationally [so we don’t bully other countries]”.

Putin began to turn Russia into a ‘Shchyogolev country’ [Nabokov’s sad dictatorial character, as discussed earlier in this article] of his fantasies, a country cursed to be a bully surrounded by bullies, albeit with the difference that, in contrast to the geopolitical musings of an emasculated white émigré, Putin’s fantasies were reinforced by his sycophantic retinue and propaganda.

Because the security services, afraid of sounding critical, have stopped reporting news that did not fit into their president’s worldview, Putin has gradually been settling into the world of such bully-countries where Russia has to assert its rightful dominant position. “Cut all the ‘democracy’ bullshit”, I imagine Putin saying, “there can be no motives other than to bully, to assert dominance. Only the weak don’t do it. And Russia will never be weak again”.

In Ukraine, that Russia’s imperial ambitions were threatened. Security men’s power was based on falsification and fabrication of the political landscape at home and colonial expansion abroad. Thus the revolution that was Ukraine’s response to the falsification of the elections threatened them in both respects at once — they feared that Ukraine would slip out of their ‘influence sphere’ and that a similar popular uprising would topple their power in Russia.

The Kremlin had put money into propaganda that presented all revolutionary movements as proxies of foreign foes, as their imperial power-grabs. They considered the idea that social arrangements can be rearranged through instruments of civil society or social resitance blasphemous. Order can only be imposed from above, via the sacrosanct vertical of power.

In response, Putin decided to use Russian gas as a lever for coercing Ukrainians. The gas scandal of 2005–2006 gave him the opportunity to use the extreme amounts stashed in the trade structures like Rosukrenergo and local structures of organised crime to corrupt, control and coerce Ukrainian politicians. “Ukraine was the training ground for Russia’s undermining of the EU”.

In 2007 Putin openly voiced his discontent with the West’s refusal to guarantee Russia an exclusive mandate to lord over a ‘sphere of influence’ that would include all the border states and more. It was a regular practice in the 1990s for the organised crime groups to make deals the police with regard to taking control over certain patches of territory where all businesses would have to pay them tribute (say, the bandits of Solntsevskaya syndicate were handed over the whole areas of Moscow like Solntsevo).

Racketeers were famous to justify their racket by the need to protect the entrepreneurs from certain dangerous competitors. The same is true of the organised criminal group which takes control over the whole country and its inhabitants under the pretext of protection against certain foreign enemies: it declares itself a defender of national interests.

Isn’t it the case that today’s autocrats act in the same manner as the racketeers of the 90s? They enslave local people under the pretext of providing protection against the more dangerous racketeers from the foreign countries. Their power is based on the myth that there can be no other means of adjudicating contradiction except war, the myth that language is impotent, the myth that your enemy understands no argument but force. As in the timely play Drakon by E. Schwarz, the people who suffer under the yoke of the power-hungry dragon because they cannot be persuaded out of their delusion that they need their dragon to protect them from certain foreign ‘dragons’.

Putin wanted to make the same deal with the ‘world policeman’, the US, so as to delineate Eurasia as his ‘sphere of influence’, his fiefdom. In this regard, ‘realist’ school of international relations only plays in the hands of such ‘dragons’ that justify their tyranny as defence of mythical ‘national interests’ against the infringements of the ‘dragons’ overseas. This belief in the inevitability of dragons, belief that they’re somehow inscribed into the fabric of reality, is the myth that feeds all autocratic regimes. ‘Realist’ school presumes that dragons in power are a natural state of affairs, whereas in fact it is an unnatural and unfortunate deviation from humane politics.

However, the White House was more willing to listen to the self-legislative voice of the locals, the vox populi expressed in revolutions in Georgia, Ukraine, and various Arab nations. It is sometimes speculated that the events of the Arab Spring angered Putin. President Dmitry Medvedev supported the UN resolution that allowed NATO to topple Kaddafi’s regime in Libya — which may have led to Putin’s subsequent decision to suspend Medvedev and become a President again in 2012.

In 2014, another revolution occurred — the Revolution of Dignity. At its core, it was Ukraine’s response to the violent beating of protesting students. Again, two pillars of the Russian regime were threatened at once. First, the secrecy of decision-making because Ukrainians were willing to die for their dignity: the right of every human to be a self-legislating subject of democratic politics. Second, the closedness of the public square for the voicing of discontent and violence as a means to deal with discontent. One after another, the pillars of Putin’s regime were crumbling down in Ukraine — and the Kremlin feared that the Russians might take notice that an alternative to their form of life is possible. “Any western move by Ukraine, especially so soon after the political backlash that greeted Putin’s return, posed a serious threat to Putin’s KGB men” (Page 384). This time, Putin decided to act — to annex Crimea. After it happened, Putin’s plebiscitary approval surged to more than 80%. Geopolitics became the favourite word of the Russian elite because it justified and strengthened their hold on power.

3. GROWTH & CONQUEST

(1) At Rest Only In War

Once Putin realised that his Russia cannot and ought not to be integrated into the Western world order, he decided to destroy this order from within. His strategy of corrupting West’s politics through economic means led to, among many other things, the election of Donald Trump, an old client of KGB patronage. But Putin also needed to provide a ‘positive programme’ upon which to build a new kind of world order. It was to be the order based on coercion and conquest, violent imposition of will, because Putin realised that the only contest in which Russia has the upper hand is that of war, the only game which a nuclear state without a competitive economy stands a chance to win. It was to be the order where ‘master’ nations bully ‘slave’ nations that are unlucky to find themselves within the imperial ‘spheres of influence’.

In October 2022 Putin will celebrate his 70th anniversary. As someone obsessed with legacy, he must revel in the fact that by the twenty second year of his reign he has achieved almost all of his wicked aims: the levers of democratic efficacy are destroyed: independent media silenced, elections rigged, judges corrupted, civil society annihilated, opposition discredited, public square closed, debate abolished. EU, UK and US politics are polarised and penetrated by populists, NATO is almost dysfunctional, ‘brain dead’ as says Macron. Across the globe, copypaste ‘strongmen’ leaders look up to him as to their role model. Geopolitical order is being questioned. China is an ally. Russian economy, although controlled by Putin’s incompetent friends, is doing fine because extraction of raw materials does not require a visionary skillset. A genuinely powerful army is built. Imperial control over Belarus and Kazakhstan is strengthened. The only fiasco of his legacy is Ukraine — a glaring example of a different, democratic lifestyle and governance right at the Russian border, inhabited, as he sees it, by a bit strange but essentially fraternal ‘Little Russians’. A country whose 2004 and 2014 revolutions have uttered a resolute “No!” to the style and essence of the Russian regime: to manipulations and falsifications in 2004, to violence and corruption in 2014.

During the pandemic Putin became even more paranoid, making himself all but totally isolated from the outer world, including from the advisers and aides who should have briefed him on the current state of affairs. Instead, it is speculated that he maintained close contact only with a handful of most loyal men, his friends from the KGB cohort — who also happen to be old guard of Cold War zero-summism. Putin was excommunicated, excluded from the free and truthful exchange of perspectives that would have grounded him in reality and became hostage to his narrow perspective, reinforced in the echo-chamber of his sycophantic coterie that couldn’t provide him with the critical feedback that is necessity for the sanity of a finite mind. During his first term in power, Putin balanced between the Yeltsin era liberals (Pugachev, Chubais, Kasianov) and the siloviki (Patrushev, Ivanov, Bortnikov). Gradually he began to rely on siloviki more and more simply because they were telling him what he wanted to hear. Siloviki were the masters of flattery and adulation because for them the truthful exchange of information was never as important as serving their own lust for power. And since ‘when language decays, possible views of the world disappear’, Putin became a prisoner of a very limited view of reality. He, to put it mildly, wasn’t allowed to ‘see the whole picture’. At the end of the day, Putin’s decisions were no longer grounded in reality — they were grounded on the palaver of courtly clowns — “Yes sir, Ukrainians long to be liberated by you”, “Yes sir, Russian army is incredibly well-prepared”, “Yes sir, it will take up to four days to conquer the whole of Ukraine”. The decision to invade Ukraine on February 24, 2022 was made by the man who was least informed and competent to make it.

The Bronze Age is not yet over. It is the playing out of God’s playful curse that humans “will become like gods”. Finite humans revolted against their finitude, their circumstances and environment, the nature within and nature without, in hope of subjugating it and attaining godlike invulnerability and immortality. But the only thing they attained was slavery, subjugation of fellow humans. The price which rulers paid for attaining arbitrary power over slaves was the deterioration of the quality of their communication. Since the rulers are not gods but mortals and since to stay in touch with reality mortals need sincere critical feedback from one another of which the only instrument is politics, the exchange of contradictory opinions with regard to the decisions that shape communal life, because of all this, rulers who exert arbitrary power, who are feared to be critiqued, fall out of touch with reality.

Yet there is one thing they understand perfectly well — their authority rests on war. If there is neither war nor threat of one, there is no need for them. War fosters dictatorship because its time-constrained context justifies concentration of decision-making in the hands of a dictator whom no one dares to contradict. The time for contradiction is simply not there. War calls for simple, essentially heroic traits: resolve, courage, valour, risk-taking, will, power, and the will to power.

The people who are distinguished solely by their strength will artificially put the world in such conditions where strength is the only argument, conditions in which they stand to gain the authority — they will start wars. In the normal democratic conditions, such people are kept in their place — in service of intellectual deliberation. But in Russia, the healthy hierarchy of law-making and law-enforcement was turned upside down. Without the necessary check of democratic politics, siloviki were able to degrade society to the relationships of pure dominance, the state of war — because only in the state of war the dominating faculty of humans, the freedom to own, becomes totally free. In the slang of the Russian army, soldiers are called ‘property’. They are stripped of personhood, they can’t participate in the questioning of whether the commands by which they live are correct or not.

The silovik revolution led to war because only in war power based on the logic of war is redeemed. Only war can justify the enslavement of the domestic populace. Once siloviki had clung to power, Russia was stuck in the spiral of enslavement and war — within the ontology, call it Thrasymachian or Nietzschean, where the freedom of will is exciting and the freedom of legislation boring, where peace is slavery and war is freedom. But Homeric epic myths and subversively cynical philosophies only take us so far. They excite as long as they remain on paper. Once they break out into the real world of real politics, all hell breaks loose.

(2) Privation & Empire.

The distinction between two kinds of freedom — political freedom and freedom of will — has been a leitmotif of this study. Another way to think of it is to think about the difference between growth and conquest. To be free means to grow in accordance with one’s nature. Animals are always free — they grow into their natural niches, instinctively adapting to the changes in their habitat. They’re not clinging to their established identities — whenever it happens, whenever a literal or figurative ‘cell’ refuses to die, it becomes cancerous and brings death to the whole organism. In the case of self-aware animals like us, natural growth requires acceptance of the transiency of identities, acceptance of the need to change: “We are in time, and thus what we are we must grow into”. Human growth requires making peace with the inevitability of lack, with the fact that what we lack can only be provided by the other, and with the fact that to get what we lack from one another we must negotiate — we must help each other discover and develop our unique gifts which we have in excess and exchange these gifts with each other. And since we can find out what our respective gifts are only by talking to each other, by reasoning together, in this sense, thinking and loving are one — they are the constituent instruments of humane growth, of change through exchange of perspectives, becoming other to yourself by letting others be other to the extent of changing your mind and breaking your heart. For the humane growth to happen, meeting what is strange and other has to be the occasion for learning. This learning is what I mean by politics, the process of reciprocal self-emptying, our only chance to “have life, and have it abundantly”. Our natural niche is the evolving self-legislating community, creation of new social worlds based on increasingly intense participation in the abundant agency of the environment. For humans to grow naturally is to grow into increasingly political life.

Alas, where there is the awareness of transiency, there is also the awareness of death. To accept the need to change is also to accept the inevitability of death. And this is what makes us different from the rest of nature — “for us there is always the possibility of failing to grow as we should”. Human sin, human fall from nature, is the choice to refuse to grow because growth reeks of decay and death. Self-conscious beings run the danger of refusing to think of their destiny in terms of growth because they are painfully aware of the causal link between growth and decay, ageing and death. Thereby we opt out for the illusion of self-sufficiency, defence of what we already are and conquest of what we need to feel secure. We choose to halt growth in time and instead opt for spatial expansion. Human sin is this confusion of growth with conquest, colonising patches of our environment for the purpose of turning them into the ‘guarantees of security’, tokens of invulnerability and immortality. Thus, when we focus on securing the already known resources, instead of being an occasion for learning, any meeting with the other becomes a meeting with a potential rival and an occasion for war. In which case politics degrades into the practice of identifying your enemy — that is, becomes fascist.

With regard to nation at large, it halts growth if its ruler refuses to let go of his ‘throne’, refuses to remember that he is transient, not indispensable — if the continuity of succession is broken and the nation clings to the one identity, to the one self that refuses to transfer power and die. From that point on, for a nation to grow would mean throwing off his yoke through a revolution, a ‘change of mind’ on a national scale. Hegel once identified thinking with revolution: just as thinking casts away erroneous ideas so does the guillotiné cut off the heads of those stuck in power. And if the nation is not allowed to grow as it ought to, that is if the idolised idiots are not questioned and tamed in the public square (Think of how Boris Johnson was ousted by the public uproar, how he was fined by the police for violating the quarantine rules. This is utterly unimaginable in today’s Russia, although it could have been imagined in 1990s, when Yeltsin was under fire from media, criminal investigation by the chief prosecutor, and general discontent of the people.), a nation becomes an empire and displaces accumulated hatred overseas — instead addressing it to the usurpers, people start to address the cry “Off with their heads!” to the foreigners. Wherein the contest of internal politics gets asphyxiated, therein it overflows overseas as the geopolitical conquest.

The ruler who wants to stay in power forever can’t tolerate the notion that there can be any politics — any opposition with an alternative vision of how the country should be governed. The ruler has to ensure that there is no room for the public articulation of the form of life by whose standard his governance can be judged, that there is no politics. But since he still has to ensure some support in order for the system to operate smoothly, he has no choice but to somehow rely on the people who never get a chance to articulate their will into a ‘name’ which they can lend to their representatives as a right to act in their names. In short, the emperor has to rely on people’s feelings and desires that, in absence of the space for political articulation, become insatiable, irrational and self-destructive passions. And since people are most impassioned by struggle and war, to mobilise popular support, the ruler has to indulge people by entering into a feedback with the worst passion — the appetite for imperial conquest. Politics would have kept their concrete personalities, their names, in touch with policies undertaken in their names, but the unnatural passionate feedback spirals out of anyone’s conscious control and imprisons both the citizens and the ruler on the path toward the waging of war, the choice that this particular Ira or Igor or Inna or Ivan would never had consciously chosen, but who were given neither time nor silence to think and speak, to make their distinct opinions heard — because the politics was reduced to plebiscitary acclamation — all that is heard within is unintelligible screaming — after all, acclamation comes from Latin “to scream loudly”. People became possessed by the suicidal pattern of escalation. In the documentary by Andrei Loshak you can hear people’s voices crack and change when they start to reproduce inhumane talking points that justify imperial aggression.

Today’s Russia is the most advanced plebiscitary democracy — the system in which the will of the people is connected with decision-making not by communication, but through plebiscitary acclamation. It is the opposite of representative democracy — of the system where the ladder of representation is held together by communication. Hence all the levels of representation are shattered — discarded as ‘elitist’.

And since there is no transcendent standard of rationality (since language is not god) which can judge the popular will, it becomes a god unto itself, a sovereign. But sovereignty still has to be exercised somehow. Since different perspectives, wills, cannot be judged by the standard of rationality, all that is left is the argument of force. Thus sovereignty gradually concentrates in the hands of the most powerful. Thus only one link of representation remains — without any intermediate levels of representation — the direct link between the ruler and the popular will. But since they exist on utterly different planes of reality, because of their radical discontinuity, opposite sides of power-relation between which there can be no communication, they’re linked only by wordless feedback of passions. Therefore, the ruler has no choice but to appease the worst passions, passions that demand blood — or else people will choose an even more populist ruler.

The regime based on plebiscitary acclamation is the product of the lack of faith in language’s ability to represent reality, in the ability of political representatives to act in the names of those whom they represent. From this perspective, representation only fabricates popular will which has to stay pure. Will can be expressed (Russian for ‘voting’, vole-izyavlenie, means exactly this, the expression of will), but not disciplined, not educated into an intelligible image (Russian for ‘education’, obrazovanie, means shaping into an ‘image’, obraz). If there is no language to ensure the continuity of representation, responsibility disappears — no one has to make their decisions intelligible to others.

Plebiscitary acclamation links privation with empire. If citizens constrain themselves to the private domain and only engage in voting they forsake their political responsibility to elaborate on their unique viewpoint so that they can truly lend their names to the policies that are undertaken in their names, if there is a chasm between citizens and decision-making, politics degrades into unintelligible feedback between inarticulate popular will and imperial conquests. Across the world we see politics degrade into populism. To end this degradation, we have to stop thinking that the popular will is sovereign. It has to be subordinated to language — to the abstract conversations that do justice to the intricacy of modern society. If this happens, it would mean that we’ve gone through the politik revolution.

Conclusion

In this chapter I tried to name the pivotal kinds of unnatural governance, of regimes based upon coercion. Imposition of will takes different forms — if strong individual uses brute force to compel others to recognise him as divine, it is paganism; if powerful nation uses its technologically advanced army to compel weaker nations to give up self-legislation and recognise her as sovereign, it is imperialism; if the Fuhrer uses geopolitical propaganda to impassion the popular will to consume the other, it is fascism; if the capitalist conglomerate uses market incentives to subjugate public square to the imperative of profit, it is neoliberalism, if the siloviki put pagan faith in power, imperial expansionism, fascist “us-them-ing” in service of their lucrative state-capitalism in which they secured all the entreprises through political coercion, then use neoliberalism to buy influence in the West and go on imperial conquest of the neighbouring country, all the while being justified by Western ‘realists’, it is Putinism.

1. DEATH CAMP REALISM.

(1) Blatari, Siloviki, Politiki.

“What made Russia’s attack possible?” Ever since I woke up from ‘the rocket’s red glare’ and ‘bombs bursting in air’ on February 24th this question was on my mind. I now offer the first fruit of this search, a story of how the friendship between secret police and organised crime forged in Stalin’s GULAG laid the foundation for the imperialism of Putin’s regime.

In 1937 Varlam Shalamov was sent to the coldest place on Earth and the grimmest part of GULAG — Kolyma. It was the year of unprecedented political purges, the year when Stalin sent countless members of the educated civil society, or simply intelligentsia, to the labour camps where they were to be terrorised by the thugs of the criminal world. Shalamov’s Kolyma Stories and Chronicles of Criminal World offer (for my money) the starkest witness to the forms of life that embody the difference between freedom of choice and freedom of legislation. He refers to them as that of blatari and that of politiki. Blatari were the thieves with a Nietzschean code of conduct that legitimised their crimes on the grounds that it was a matter of justice for the strong to impose will on the weak. In contrast to this, politiki, the victims of political purges, refused to impose their will or the will of the authorities on their fellow inmates because they knew that by participating in the vertical of coercion they would betray their human essence, their nature of political animals. They, as Shalamov insisted time and again, were the only people who ‘stayed human’ in GULAG. It was their memory that a different life is possible, a memory which, in the darkest hours, was preserved only by recitation of poetry remembered by heart, that allowed politiki to be a part of a conversation, a language-game, that freed their imagination from the compulsion to cave in to a zero-sum-game of the ‘death camp realism’.

It is crucial to see that both ‘politicians’ and ‘thieves’ are defined by their freedom in relation to the law, but in ways that are the exact opposites.

(2) Lawmaking & Lawbreaking.

Consider two kinds of freedom. First, the freedom to choose among a given set of choices. Say, to choose among the products on a supermarket shelf. Second, the freedom to legislate a different set of choices. Say, to reason together about the laws that should regulate the market so as to nudge our behaviour closer to what we agree on as a life worth living. The freedom of choice is a basic but private kind of freedom because although it secures the sovereignty of the customer’s choice against material constraints and moral concerns, the range and arrangement of available products remains outside her control and is always already manipulated so as to maximise the profit of the seller, not the consumer wellbeing. The freedom of self-legislation is of higher order because it allows me to examine the form of life into which our choices coalesce and then to politically renegotiate our relationships so as to make the desired form of life possible, so as to maximise our wellbeing. Thus, political freedom legislates the context in which our freedom of choice takes place. Just like thinking legislates the context of willing by allowing me to say ‘these are not my only choices!’, so does politics legislate the context of private lives, allowing us to say ‘this is not the only form of life we can have!’ From the Jewish perspective, to collectively imagine a form of life that differs from the one we conduct now and to renegotiate our relationships so as to bring it closer, is the highest form of freedom. This is the freedom of political debate to which humans are called by Yahweh: ‘Come now, let us reason together, says the Lord’ (in Isaiah 1:18). But what happens if this hierarchy of freedoms is inverted?

If I only have the freedom of choice I lose creativity: I am cursed to choose between many clichés. I don’t care if all my options are flawed and trivial, all I care is the power to decide for myself, to choose what I will. And if I want to secure the sovereignty of my will, if I want to ensure that my choice stems from my own volition and stays unconditioned by things outside my control, then I want to widen my choice to the extent of pure arbitrariness — so that people can’t wrap their heads around why I did what I did, can’t put a finger on anything that determined my course of action — except my will. Although it may sound that freedom of will makes me creative, it does not. I don’t invent unexpected solutions to the problems we’re faced with, I just make defective choices that break the necessary level of trust and reciprocity on which the problem-solving could have been accomplished. Instead of devising a way for the team to win the game, I cheat at the expense of teammates. I don’t create anything new, I break the laws of cooperation and tear social fabric apart. The point of acting arbitrarily is not to experiment with mutations that grow out of random acts — acting at will is not the same as acting at random. The point of acting arbitrarily is to prove that I am the arbitre, I am the one who decides — not any other principle or agent. Thus the more my choice is in revolt against the context that might have determined it, that is in revolt against reality itself, against laws of nature and laws of the state, the more I prove the freedom of my will. In contrast to this, thinking means letting the will be disciplined by reality (including the reality of my natural desires) until I no longer has to choose and becomes with the truth — “Until with thee I will one will”. Whereas the will’s claim to freedom lies in having as many choices as possible, thinking in essence means narrowing on just one choice — the truth. Reason’s claim to freedom lies in its attunement to reality — “you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free” (John 8:32). This is why, after a certain point, the emphasis on the will’s freedom to choose at the expense of political freedom becomes the emphasis on freedom not to think and, ironically, on freedom not to be free.

In this essay I argue that there is perhaps no greater threat to a society than the subordination of political freedom of self-legislation to private freedom of choice because, once it happens, thinking becomes subordinated to willing. Although it may sound inconsequential, it is the essence of fascism, which, ‘in all its varieties, was a triumph of will over reason’, of a decision “by doing ill to prove that we possess free will” (W. H. Auden. (1940). The New Year Letter. In Collected Poems, Vintage International. 1991. New York. Page 209).

(3) Enforcement of Lawlessness.

Politiki go ‘beyond the law’, they upgrade the current legislation so as to make it fairer, whereas the blatari ‘go against’ and ‘break’ the law because they think it is too fair — that it prevents them from doing whatever they want with the weak. Politiki used peaceful civil disobedience, activism, for the sake of changing the status quo. Blatari used violent disobedience, criminal offences, to advance within the current status quo. In the scarcity of Soviet death camps, where the impossibility of communal self-legislation led human relations to be shaped by brute force, intellectual and communicative faculties that constitute political freedom became useless and powerless — politiki and their higher education were turned into objects of simultaneous envy and ridicule. At the same time, the blatari, the thieves of the underworld, saw their dream come true — once the constraints of the law were lifted they were finally freed to have their way with yesterday’s judges and prosecutors, professors and politicians, lords and landlords. The world has turned upside down.

To understand how this could happen, it is necessary to consider a form of life that has neither freedom nor trouble with regards to the law — the so-called siloviki, ‘strongmen’. Their task is to enforce the current law, regardless of how corrupt it is. Siloviki have no quarrels with the present order as long as they stay in the position of dominance. They were, to use Cornel West’s indispensable adage, ‘well adjusted to injustice’ — and any threat to the regime is a threat to their privilege. I hypothesise that in the state built upon pure dominance, in the state whose ruler himself was a convict, the authorities had realised that the blatari pose less threat to their regime than politiki precisely because politiki’s critique of unjust dominance undermined the pillars of the order based on unjust dominance in ways that blatari never could. The targets of blatari were the weak. The targets of politiki were the authorities. Blatari, although they were breaking the laws, were doing it for their private sake and had neither complaints nor grudges against the authorities. Since blatari understood only sheer dominance, they were used as perfect partners for cooperation with the corrupt state — easily bribed, easily used as deniable assets to do the dirtiest job, to be used as instruments of terror, as means to produce fear in people. Since the authority of tyrants rests on fear, siloviki produced fear artificially so as to perpetuate people’s delusion that they are surrounded by enemies. Politiki, on the other hand, strived to hold authorities answerable to the form of life people dreamed of, a natural humane life endowed with abstract ideals like freedom, decency, dignity, distance and privacy that make room for graceful relationships, relationships whose participants have a say in current affairs — all the things which a dictatorship can’t provide.

It’s as if the security servicemen, the people who were called to enforce the laws devised by the political conversation between the citizens and to protect these citizens from the zero-sum impingements which would have made them susceptible to putting their private will above the common good, betrayed their calling and forged alliance with the thieves whose parasitic crimes constituted the greatest threat to the integrity of that conversation. Thus, at the time when politiki targeted as ‘the enemies of the people’ were tortured and slaughtered, the blatari who tortured and slaughteted them were dubbed ‘the friends of the people’ and gradually ‘befriended’ by the law-enforcement. The first fruits of this friendship were the piled up corpses of destroyed intelligentsia. It was the textbook example of the descent into tyranny from Plato 101: the will (thymos) becomes allied with the appetite (eros) against the reason (logos). If the politiki were essentially cerebral, were governed by the intellect, and siloviki were personifying heroic traits like courage and loyalty, were guided by the will, pursuit of honour, blatari were neither people of language nor people of honour. They were the people of the body — blatari ‘dance’ through their life path, they are guided by their carnal appetites. One of the funniest of Shalamov’s descriptions of a typical blatar is that he could ‘dance’ a newspaper article. The intellect, the will, and the appetite are all ‘good’ if their hierarchy retains this natural order, but when the appetite and the will subjugate intellect, the desires, instead of being rationally articulated, become insatiable and degrade into passions.

Once the room for self-legislation is reduced to the closed cabinet of the autocrat, our reason becomes reduced to our will, our faculty of renegotiating the laws of contest so as to make competition more graceful and mutually beneficial becomes reduced to our faculty of winning the contest by beating the hell out of our current competitors. On the individual level, it corrupts our capacity to critique the current order and addicts our attention to securing our dominant position within it — no matter how unfair, irrational or even dysfunctional the status-quo is. The limit case of this zero-sum ethos is the ‘death camp realism’ expressed in the blatar saying “You die today, but I tomorrow”. In absence of the instruments to imagine and legislate a different context for our lives, we cave in to the idea that “this is how the real world is” — we must either play by its rules or die.

With regard to the society writ large, when it loses the ability to self-legislate, relationships within it come to be defined by the powerful — by those who can impose their will through the exercise of force. They come in two species, siloviki who have power to enforce the law and the blatari who have power to break it. But, once they merge, lawlessness and law-enforcement mutate into ‘enforcement of lawlessness’ (Rus. proizvol, arbitrariness). Once people entrusted to serve the law had put the law at their service, the state fell into the hands of ‘thieves-in-law’. The cooperation between blatari and siloviki led to the state where the law was identified with the interests of the powerful and, at the end of the day, with the interests of the powers that be. The arbitrary will of the sovereign became the law-of-the-land — no matter how far it was divorced from reality and morality, no matter how harmful to the common good.

2. THE SILOVIK REVOLUTION. ‘How Three Despairs Aligned to Cause the Unlikely Rise of Putin’.

(1) Patriotism & Greed.

After a merger with the criminal underworld, siloviki faced two problems. The old problem was that their Communist Empire couldn’t match the power of the capitalist NATO. The new problem was that they couldn’t own property. But now they saw a way to kill two birds with one stone. The solution was to conduct such a transition of the USSR to market capitalism in which the KGB men would simultaneously preserve power to take on the West and make lots of money for themselves. “Unlike the Communists, the new generation of siloviki… declared themselves in favour of the market. But they aimed to use and distort the market as a weapon. They wanted to establish a form of quasi-state capitalism that would further their own — and as they saw it, Russia’s — power”.

Already before the collapse, secret servicemen had established themselves as the exclusive economic mediators between the West and Russia because, before in the Soviet times any joint venture in the foreign country could be established only with the KGB approval. Also before the collapse there was a big wave of immigration which was fully under their control. The secret policemen were steeped in using diaspora for their own confluence of lucrative and imperial purposes. But the KGB “also needed more subtle ways to launder cash through business, not directly through US banks”. And with the help of the joint ventures and curated immigrants, they were able to make connections with the local Western businessmen. “There was”, for example, “Trump and his financial problems — it was a solution that was very much on time”.

When the USSR started to collapse, the siloviki were able to quickly syphon Russia’s wealth to their secret offshores. The international spy network of the KGB succeeded in functioning as the key conduit of the ‘party wealth’ to the slush funds in the West. This solved both of the siloviki’s problems: they secured the ‘gold of the communist party’ for themselves and infiltrated the West with a system of black cash laundromats.

Thus at the early dawn of Russian capitalism, KGB were already many steps ahead with their off-shores, slush funds, laundromats, friendships and resident agents. When the privatisations began in the 1990s, the secret police with its access to mountains of ‘hard currency’ had a head-start. It was in fact the KGB people who selected and fostered a first generation of the richest Russian entrepreneurs among the young apparatchiks of the Commust Party. For example, they funded the early privatisations by a moscovite Mikhail Khodorkovsky, a leader of the local Komsomol chapter, who would become the richest man of Russia’s early 2000s.

Yet soon the KGB faced a serious problem. As capitalism was ushering in, siloviki were gradually losing control over Russia to the nouveau-riche capitalists whose iconoclasm and inventiveness were better adapted to the wilderness of the nascent free market. Siloviki understood that they can stay in power and subsume these pesky billionaires only if they take Russian business in the pincers of the power structures of the fatherland and the criminal structures of the gangland. They could outcompete the oligarchs only if they’d built a regime based on the kleptocratic interdependence of corruption and coercion, kleptes and kratos. Thus, even though Russian liberalism was just being born, the coalition of law-enforcement and organised crime has laid the foundation for a different kind of order, the regime of ‘crime-enforcement’. All of this made the FSB (freshly renamed domestic branch of the KGB) desperate and ready to go to great lengths to ensure the election of one of their colleagues as the president of Russia.

After the fall of the USSR the liaison between the siloviki and blatari was most pronounced in the newly renamed St. Petersburg. There it was conducted by Vladimir Putin, a former KGB liaison officer in East Germany and by then an aide to the local mayor. He was among those younger siloviki who realised early on that Russia can overpower the West only if it adopts market capitalism. He was able to infiltrate the ascendant liberal circles and win the trust of the members of Yeltsin’s family whose corruption made them desperate to seek reliable protection from the secret services. This despair of the liberals together with the despair of the FSB had found a fertile ground in the despair of the majority of Russians who after long-suffering having their private lives intruded upon (by the tyrannical regime that tried to masquerade the absence of any genuine politics as communism by educating ‘political consciousness’ in its citizens) and who then had put their hope in the pursuit of private prosperity only to see it frustrated after realising that the promised financial fruits of liberal economy were nowhere to harvest — all the wealth seemed to end up in the hands of bandits and oligarchs. Like stars three despairs of siloviki, liberaly and rossiyane aligned to cause the unlikely rise of Vladimir Putin.

(2) Secrets & Conspiracies. ‘Back by Popular Demand’.

Once the public square ceases to be a place where consequential decisions are made it becomes a dumping ground of lies and manipulations. In the society where communal self-legislation is thrown out the window, language itself becomes inflated to the extent of rendering all political conversation naïve ‘idle talk’. Hence to tap into the lost sense of agency, people are left to believe in secret conspiracies — plots that lurk behind the surface of public rhetoric. They step on the gnostic path of initiation into orders of secret knowledge and participation in the struggle of invisible forces. To feel empowered, people imagine themselves as in the know of a certain cosmic battle and identify themselves with the winning side. In the modern age, these cosmic struggles are often substituted by the imperial struggles. So that to feel empowered people will often identify themselves with the fate of their country on the geopolitical arena — that mythological battleground between Us and Them. The conspiracy theorists think along these lines: “Real knowledge is kept secret”, “What is truly relevant is hidden from clear sight”, “Unseen powers manipulate reality”, “We have to go beyond appearances to unveil encrypted truths”. This in turn further strengthens the belief that nothing relevant is ever decided in the open public square. It is the secret conspirators, people with access to the power and information of the ‘deep state’ and ‘big corporations’ who really run the world, and it is only them who count. In this sense, movements represented by the letters Z and Q are the sides of the same coin — of the gnostic / pagan conspiratorial mindset obsessed with secrets and strength, worship of ‘power gods’ and expectation of ‘coming storms’. In any case, both conspiracy and geopolitics don’t pose a serious threat to the authorities because both are cynical about speaking truth to power in the public square.

After the collapse of their socialist experiment Russians ended up as arguably the most cynical people on earth. By the time when the postmodern intellectuals aimed to discredit and deconstruct the notion of ideologies, Russians were firmly ‘vaccinated’ against any hope of boosting progress artificially. It is as if Russians went ‘beyond’ modernity but took the ‘wrong turn’. They, especially the elites, just opted out for ‘making money’ which led to the lucrative privatisation and political turmoil of the liberal 1990s. This time, after what they (correctly) saw as the looting of their common wealth by a handful of greedy oligarchs, Russians became even more cynical. After the idealistic belief in the importance of glasnost (political transparency) they began to abhor debate in the public square. They were taught to scoff at political conversation as idle and even pernicious activity. As far as they were concerned, nothing good could ever come from democratic politics — only chaos. They were taught to believe that, in the world of populist promises and verbose manipulations of spin doctors, the real agency can come only from a bit terse but willful and effective ‘strongmen’. They were taught to believe that in the world full of secrets and conspiracies only the the secret police can make the real difference, only the agents skilled in extorting testimony through torment and obsessed with the the secret, hidden information, the so-called podnogotnaya, which literally means ‘under the nails’ after one torture technique of inserting a needle under the nails. In short, Russians were taught to think that the ‘power vertical’ is an indispensable tool of governance and violence of justice and truth seeking. And, in contrast to the eloquent and emasculated politicians of the 1990s, it was the silovik who was identified with absolute secrecy and absolute power.

To make a long story short, the succession of disillusionments was paving the way for Russians to accept the idea that a silovik would make a good ruler. And when Pugachev, one of those desperate to ‘anoint’ a puppet silovik to cover up the shady shenanigans of the liberal government, began preparing Putin for presidency, ‘The plan was to cast him in the image of the most popular fictional TV hero from Soviet times. He was to be a modern-day Max Otto von Stirlitz, an undercover spy…’. But the disillusionments were not enough. There was a need to create an even more suitable context for the election of a strongman.

Part of it was already in the air. The insufferable scarcity of Soviet death camps and, frankly, of Soviet life writ large, caused many people to cave in to the ‘realist’ worldview of the thieves which, although totally sinister, at least rang true and sincere, free from naive idealism and unsullied by hypocrisy. They sometimes called it lagernaya pravda, the ‘camp truth’. Its essence is simple: ‘Sauve qui peut’ — ‘Save himself who can’. Or: ‘Every man for himself and the devil take the hindmost’. Or more elaborate: ‘I swear by my life and my love of it that I will never live for the sake of another man, nor ask another man to live for mine’. And whatever Russians saw in their society only seemed to confirm this cynical stance. The less the law stemmed from people’s self-legislation and the more it was just whatever the powerful wished, the more popular demand for arbitrary command was created. I like to call this pervasive pattern the ‘spiral of realism’. Every step closer to a zero-sum relations, every step closer to war, creates a popular demand for a tough commander-in-chief because it leads people to feel that, since in the Real World™ ‘matters are settled with gas and bomb’, anything less than straightforwardly strong statesmanship misses the mark of times.

To instil such a feeling in people was the task of the FSB. They couldn’t take risks and decided to undertake drastic measures. To secure the electoral victory of a strongman, the clear fascist boundaries between Us and Them had to be drawn. First, Russia had to face and become afraid of the obscure but powerful terrorist threat. Second, to address this fear, Russia had to be put in a state of war. It is now becoming clear that FSB arranged the explosions to hit four apartment buildings in the Russian cities of Buynaksk, Moscow and Volgodonsk in September 1999, killing more than 300, injuring more than 1,000, thereby spreading a fear of pervasive terrorist threat across the country and thereby justifying waging war against Chechnya. The longing for strong leadership was successfully manufactured. An official whom almost no one knew, by all accounts a nondescript ghost of a man, was suddenly all over the prime time screen-space, swearing that he would serve his revenge on the hated Chechens. It is not that Putin was transformed into the right guy for the job, rather, the job was transformed into the right one for Putin. In 2000, tyranny was back by popular demand. It was a sinister omen of the times to come. As we’ll see time and again, the people who are the greatest in the game of war will put the state in the state of war so as to make themselves great again — to become indispensable. For the siloviki, escalation is not a means for some end, it is the end in itself. They don’t escalate with some desired future in mind, they cling to power and depend on escalation as an excuse and pretext for their rule.

(3) Kleptocracy: Corruption & Coercion.

This friendship between thieves and spies laid the foundation of Putin’s regime. Even in the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany, the KGB and Gestapo were the people in service of the ideological agenda of the ruling class. Now, in synergy with the structures of organised crime, security servicemen have weaponised the state in service of their own kleptocratic agenda.

It is important to see that, for a dictatorship, corruption is not a problem, but a solution — it is the glue that keeps the system going. Corruption is advantageous for the dictators because it allows them to exercise subtle but absolute control over the country’s officials — it gives them a lever to sack anyone down in the command chain. The secret policemen have understood early on that they can use corruption as a means of coercion: “D’you remember how you’ve got what you have, thief? Now do as we say. Or else!” At the end of the day, since corruption makes all state officials vulnerable to the arbitrary top-down command, a system based on corruption makes independent opinion and public critique all but unimaginable.

By the time of the 2000s, the criminal world and world of secret services were all but the same. It can only get so bad when the country is ridden by criminal gangs, but it is an absolute horror show if the criminal gangs themselves become the police. The contrast between the two most popular Russian movies of the time, Brat (1996) and Bumer (2003), depicts Russia’s transition from the ‘gangster paradise’ of the free-for-all 90-s to the police state of the 00-s. Balabanov’s Gruz 200 provides an insight into an even more sinister pattern: an impotent policeman kidnappes a girl who personifies Russia and lets a convicted blatar rape her. When Putin became president, the whole of Russia fell victim to the cooperation between the secret police and organised crime.

Older generations of the criminals loved to make the point that dirtying hands by collaboration with the state is the worst form of humiliation for a thief. They even fought wars against the so called suki, those of the thieves who cooperated with the state when it promised them amnesty in return for joining Red Army’s fight against the Nazi invaders. In the old days, thieves equally hated the politiki who designed the laws and the siloviki who enforced these laws on them. But now they saw that their code of conduct has become the new law-of-the-land. This meant that they could at last fully redeem one of their monikers, at last turn into the literal ‘thieves-in-law’, holders of the arbitrary power above any law, reason or justice. They saw that they could become a natural part of the state that was founded on coercion of passive people and extraction of raw resources — a state that had no need for artists or intellectuals, but cherished heroic warriors and industrial executors. They felt at home in “a feudal system in which Putin’s role as the ultimate arbiter between rivals fighting for business was the source of his power”, in Putin’s Neo-Bronze Age empire.

In moral terms, a strange marriage had occurred — between the silovik’s genuine concern for the grandeur and security of the empire and the self-seeking greed of the blatar. As a result, the looted Russian wealth ended up firmly in the hands of a small circle of Putin’s friends who justified it by thinking that ‘at least it is now secure in the hands of true patriots’. The coalescence of imperial and private agenda in the minds of strongmen resulted in the distinctly Putinist morality that combines extreme extents of corruption with the patriotic rhetoric. For instance, take the confiscation of the riches of the oligarchs. Siloviki were simultaneously trying to secure national riches from the Western control and enrich themselves in the process. A win-win. It was the “takeover of economic, judicial, legislative and political systems” by Putin’s FSB that soon would accumulate enough wealth and power to turn against the West and, at the same time, to build themselves a dozen palaces.

It may seem that, considering their corruption, siloviki’s patriotism is ludicrously hypocritical, even farcical. But there is no contradiction. Internal and external colonisations go hand-in-hand because there is an inevitable a feedback loop between private greed with imperial ambitions: people who are afraid of sharing their disproportionate share of wealth and power with their community through the instruments of communal self-legislation will inevitably use imperial expansion as an pretext for stifling communal self-legislation and as the only means for buying off private citizens by allowing them to share in consumption of the looted booty. A country that can’t renegotiate laws of its relationships because the authorities fear losing their dominant position is a country whose people can’t cooperate to tap into vistas of creativity. And for a country that creates nothing but only extracts resources from the earth, its citizens and neighbouring countries, racket is the only means of growth. Imperialism just extends the logic of private greed to the national scale.

Make no mistake, Russia was colonised by the KGB. By the time of the second half of Putin’s rule, “$800 billion had been stashed offshore since the Soviet collapse, more than the wealth held by the entire Russian population in the country itself… the flood of money leaving the country multiplied many times over the rates seen in the Yeltsin years” [Page 400]. Raw resources were extracted and indigenous people denied any status of political subjects — while the mistresses and offspring of the elite were being integrated into the Western metropoly through investment in real estate and education in the private schools. But while the wealth was syphoned from Russia, it was funnelled to the West only so as to create secret networks by means of which to infiltrate, influence and subvert the West. Using Plato’s terms, empire is a product of a ‘monstrous will’, of a link between monstrous appetites of the insatiable criminals and spirited patriotism of secret police, a synergy of internal and external colonisation.

3. THE CULPRITS OF COLONISATION.

(1) ‘The Dark Side of Statecraft’ or ‘What is the Secret Security Service?’

It is often said condescendingly that, after all, we all know that Putin was a KGB agent and that it explains so much. But I think it’s worthwhile to examine what exactly does it explain. What does the secret service represent? Graeber & Weigrow argue that the secret service is essentially a weaponisation of previously unimaginable potency of the modern state. It’s as if the secret service is the dystopian ‘dark side of statecraft’ to which the nation has outsourced its coercive faculty. “Secret agent has become the mythic symbol of the modern state… James Bond, with his licence to kill, combines charisma, secrecy and the power to use unaccountable violence, underpinned by a great bureaucratic machine”. In a certain sense, we can think of the secret police as the ego of the state: just like my ego is a schemer obsessed with my status in the dominance hierarchy, the secret police is obsessed with the state’s status in the geopolitical realm. Secret service is like a paranoid conspiracist who doesn’t believe in anything except the argument of violence.

To put it even more provocatively, the secret agent is the opposite to the version of personhood upon which the West is predicated, the inverse of everything a Christian should be, a sort of antichrist. You can think about antichristian ethos by considering the chronological enactment of vices that comprised the biblical account of human Fall into the Bronze Age slavery: ‘hiding’, ‘lying’, ‘killing’. Is the secret agent a ‘hider’, a ‘liar’, and a ‘killer’? First, the secret agent is of course a hider, he is secretive. If, in Christian terms, the person’s identity comes from actual participation in conversations and relationships, the identity of the secret agent is nothing but a mask behind which other interests and relations lurk. In this sense, secret servicemen embody Faustian modernity — they sell their soul, the faculty of participation in relationships, for the sake of acquiring power, knowledge and (in siloviki’s case) wealth, provided by the modern nation state. It is the modern reenactment of pagan preeminence of ‘having mode’ over ‘being mode’, the will over personhood, as if personhood is nothing but property of the will, as if the personality was indeed a mere persona, a mask. Masha Gessen insighteously referred to Putin as a ‘man without face’. The secret agent is a killer, an unlikely fusion of refined mendacity and savage cruelty, a cagey beast — the inverse of the non-violent ‘cheek-turning’ of Jesus. The secret agent is a liar — the inverse of a sin-confessing parishioner. Moreover, he mistrusts everyone and everything, he is a paranoid conspiracist — the inverse of the believer who ‘always trusts’ (1 Corinthians 13:7). And since the secret police approaches everything as if there is a secret plot hidden behind it, a cabal plotting to subvert and steal the power of the state, they run the danger of getting lost in the debris of their own conspiracy theories. Their misfaith makes them particularly susceptible to willful blindness.

And this is the irony of the secret service — the people who are entrusted to collect intelligence often become the ones most detached from it. The enthronement of the secret agent brings this detachment to comical proportions. Recall that the siloviki don’t have any issues with the government as long as they stay in the privileged position. It means that the ruler who relies on siloviki is bound to become blinded by their sycophancy: they will filter out everything that might sound as critique. As the Russian saying goes, “To be promoted, you need to report only what the boss wants to hear”. The ruler gets out of touch with reality because his courtiers are possessed by their will-to-power. ‘For most of history, this was the dynamic of sovereignty. Rulers would try to establish the arbitrary nature of their power; their subjects… would try to surround the godlike personages of those rulers with an endless maze of ritual restrictions, so elaborate that the rulers ended up, effectively, imprisoned in their palaces…’ (The Dawn of Everything, Page 396). In Tyrants Destroyed, Nabokov brilliantly articulates this dynamic by describing how a ‘tyrant calls himself a “prisoner of people’s will”’. Tyrant’s palace becomes an echo chamber and an echo chamber becomes a prison — a dim place where the tinder of truth rarely flickers. This reciprocal enslavement is key to this essay: as your choices get more arbitrary, that is more free from morality and reality, your repertoire of choices narrows. The information, the intelligence you get deteriorates because your relationship with other people deteriorates. And for limited mortals like us, whose sanity depends on exchange of perspectives with each other and whose freedom depends on renegotiation of our relationships with each other, this spells disaster. The more ‘freedom of will’ you have, the less free you become.

(2) Dictatorship & Contradiction.

I like to think that proper statecraft is a rational ‘contradiction’ between science and desires — a creative converse on a healthy ratio between the forms of life we want to conduct and the forms of life we know as realistically possible. Statecraft turns into dictatorship when it stops being a place for such contradiction, a place for dialogue, and turns into a monologue of those who happen to be in power. Because dictatorship is the state where statesmen dictate but can’t be contradicted, can’t listen, dictators lose their critical feedback with reality — get out of sync with facts and values. When it happens, governance succumbs to the will-to-power of the authorities whose arbitrary decisions cease having any relation to the common good.

The styles of central governance are promiscuous: they tend to be replicated on all levels of society. Across Russia, administrators ‘build imitations of Mr. Putin’s regime — in local government, the charity sector, even volunteer associations — just to prevent anyone from starting something not subservient to the state’. Once people lost their agency of self-governance to the vertical diktat of the sovereign, they found themselves at odds with their own nature of political animals. Once people stopped being citizens who have a say in common affairs they felt as if their lives were handed over to fate. In absence of political efficacy, the only way to regain the sense of control was to embrace the arbitrariness of life and displace their agency on those down in the ‘food chain’ in the form of violence. Hence the vertical of arbitrary power had penetrated all levels of society. The so-called dedovshchina (Rus. for violent ‘hazing’ or ‘bullying’) creeped into every level of relationships: in households husbands coerced wives and children, in companies managers coerced staff, in the public realm siloviki coerced activists, and soon on the international scene big countries would coerce the small ones. Without the chance to verbalise their desires within the processes of communal self-legislation, without the chance to articulate their will non-violently, that is politically, people were left to attune wheir will to the will of those who could articulate it — that is, they were left to participate in the imposition of the will of the authorities on the subordinates, of masters on slaves. Unable to articulate their passions and resentments politically were used as fuel for the vertical of coercion. A state where there are no conversations in which people deliberate on sensible and desirable decisions is a state where, behind closed doors of cabinets, ‘little putins’ make decisions that are arbitrary — that is neither desirable nor sensible, but calculated to make those who make them stay in power. It is a society where ‘might makes right’ in every dimension of life, where the anti-law, call it Thrasymachian, Machiavellian, or Nietzschean, has at last triumphed.

Law proper is designed to promote cooperation or at least make the current style of competition less self-destructive for the competitors. In contrast to this, the thieves’ law (Rus. blatnoi zakon) is the anti-law — a legalisation and legitimation of antisocial violence, of the right of the strong to act at will. In short, blatnoi zakon centres around the principle of non-cooperation. And, in a state where human freedom was fettered by the asphyxiating artificial limits, in contrast to the drab monotony of Soviet life, the life of a thief seemed to epitomise freedom. Against this background occurred a romanticization of thievery. Across the country, when asked who they want to be when they grow up, the boys answered — “We want to become thieves!”

But this was only the underworld of society. It is only once this ‘underworld’ came to concord with the ‘dark side of statecraft’, the siloviki, that the whole society started to be corrupted by the evil of kriminalitet. The silovik ‘starter pack’ of ‘hiding — lying — killing’ was supplemented with the blatar practice of ‘stealing’. Admittedly, secret police and crime syndicates exist in every country. Yet only in Russia they became allies and filed a joint bid for power. It happened because, in contrast to post WW2 Germany, in Russia, dictatorship was never condemned. Russians en masse never came to terms with the Stalinist perversion of morality through inversion of freedoms.

It is arguably a necessary evil, perhaps a ‘dark side’ of statecraft, when secret servicemen exercise hiding, lying, and killing for the sake of national security, but it is something else entirely when they exercise it for the sake of stealing — their own kleptomania. Before their confluence with the thieves, the secret servicemen might have been used in service of the democratic politics. After the merge, they were in service of one thing — greed. Once it happens, slowly but surely, governance becomes undermined by violent zero-summism. And because the critique of democratic politics poses the biggest threat to the kleptocrats, they narrow the public square to just one kind of politics, the geopolitics, the rooting for a state’s zero-sum war fight for the ‘spheres of influence’ against other states. It’s as if the ‘dark side’ of statecraft devours the whole of it.

(3) Capitalism & Self-legislation.

Contrary to widespread predictions, instalment of free market capitalism did not prevent the enthronement of the siloviki. Liberal reformers of the 1990s themselves openly to their policy of rapid transition of Russia to free market economy as ‘shock therapy’; instead of Sakharov’s theory of convergence between capitalism and socialism into a more complex equilibrium, Russians were left without a state altogether because it was flooded with the triumphant neoliberals who seduced it with the idea that free market economy marks the end of history, the final destination of civilisation.

The laissez-faire approach (light-touch regulation of the market) does not take into account that the free market functions properly only if its players stay lawful and rational. The FSB men were neither: they leveraged the state’s power to manipulate the law in favour of their short-sighted interests. “Instead of seeking to strengthen institutions in order to erase the abuses of the past, Putin’s allies simply took them over, giving themselves the monopoly of abusing power” (Page 280). ‘Those who believed they were working to introduce a free market had underestimated the enduring power of the security men. “This is the tragedy of twentieth-century Russia”, said Pugachev. “The revolution was never complete”. From the beginning, the security men had been laying down roots for revanche’ (Page 500).

When the liberals manipulated the elections in 1996 and 2000 to prevent the people from electing the communists, (decisions that led to the election of Putin), they erred in equivocating freedom and the free market. They thought that it was the communist preoccupation with equality that made freedom impossible — as if equality and freedom are fundamentally irreconcilable. In reality, freedom depends on the ability to participate in public self-legislation. And once it was undermined by the liberal anti-communists, the people — including Putin — became cynical. The 1996 election of half-alive Yeltsin was the point when Russian demos were denied a right to choose for itself, to be its own policymaker. Pugachev, who stood behind manipulations that propelled Putin into presidency, says that the error he regrets most was to undermine the process of democratic empowerment: “I’ve learned an important lesson… Power is sacred. When you believe people are stupid, and that if you don’t act they will vote in the Communists, that was a big mistake. We all thought people were not ready, and we would install Putin. But power comes from God. And if power comes from God, then there is no need to interfere…” (Page 499). The Western and Russian liberals thought that the market would save Russia from tyranny, that it would automatically transform it into a free and lawful nation. But it was a Cold War error to think that the divide that separates freedom from unfreedom and law from lawlessness is the divide between free market and command economy. In fact, capitalist Russia would threaten and undermine the West in ways which communist Russia never could. People thought they’ve defeated communism and became free, but their problem was not communism, it was imperialism — the fundamental disregard towards all levels of local self-segislation. And the Russian imperialists did not care about protecting communism at all, they gladly accepted capitalism as a powerful weapon to pursue their private and imperial ambitions in a new mode.

The neoliberal West erred in inverting the logic of capitalism. The fair market becomes possible within the context of a certain form of life. Contractual relationships that make consistent collaboration tangible were based on a trust that every individual can be a self-legislating agent who keeps his promises, that he will not spend all the money on lavish displays of excess but will reinvest over and over again so as to make sure that the enterprise will keep bringing dividends in the long run. Although capitalism does incentivise human vices for the sake of mutual enrichment (mediated through growth of economy at large) it ultimately depends on virtues that put the market within the wider context of mutual aid — “integrity, decency, honesty and generosity”. The market is the consequence of these civic and civil virtues, but it does not have a civilising effect vice versa — it does not turn thieves and bullies into vessels of Protestant work ethic. The framework of human rights that stems from the realisation of the dignity of every human person. The cultures that didn’t come to terms with the form of life which made the market possible, cynically confused the vices it incentivised with the traits of the ultimate standard of a life worth living. So what we get is a billionaire Jack Ma espousing a mythological American Dream of selfish enrichment. No, economic prosperity does not magically usher democracy. It is the economically stagnant Ukraine that demonstrated the rather unprecedented ardour for democracy: revolution against electoral machinations and kleptocracy in 2004, revolution of dignity in defence of human rights in 2014, war against the autocracy in 2022. What other people had repeatedly made so many sacrifices for the sake of political freedom? In striking contrast, the countries that were getting prosperous after the abandonment of communism — China, Russia, — were becoming autocracies marked by gradual erasure of human rights. Why? Because the crucial divide is not capitalism vs. communism; but imperialism vs. self-legislation. Installation of the free market does not bring democracy; the cultural education of citizens to be articulate participants of communal self-legislation does. But the West chose to appease the new Russian regime in hope that as Russians were getting richer, they were getting interested in tasting democracy? No. They were bought by the regime. And after a certain point, the option of democracy was simply no longer on the table. Self-legislation was something that the new Russian leadership couldn’t allow.

“As the four years of his first term passed, he understood things had happened that would never allow him to step down”. Putin understood that the extent of wealth and power his people secured after the collapse of the USSR was unsustainable under democracy. Their corrupt way of doing business did not lend itself well to the transparent marketplace of western capitalism. “Putin had gotten to the point where he had built this kleptocracy that was the source of his power in Russia. Controlling the money, finding sources of money, was absolutely essential to maintaining his hold on power, continuing to buy off elites. And an integrated Russia that had to play by the rules, that had to be transparent, that had to be open, was totally antithetical to sustaining that kleptocracy. The two things couldn’t go together. At a certain point it became against Putin’s personal interest to pursue Russian integration [into Western system] because he couldn’t accept the rules, the transparency, the norms that come with that. That would undermine the kleptocracy that he was building… By that time we really were in the zero-sum world where, from Moscow’s perspective, Russia’s strength was our weakness, and our gain was their loss”.

The transparency for which the liberals fought in the 1980s was simply not compatible with the kleptocracy Putin had built. Like the siloviki of the Stalin’s era who perceived that the greatest threat comes not from the criminals but from the civil society, Putin’s siloviki were coming to the conclusion that the West’s aspiration to promote democracy posed the greatest threat to them. Friendship of secret police and crime forged in GULAG had brought the ideology of the death camp, lagernaya pravda, to the level of national governance. And before the world knew it, this absolute zero-summism became the essence of Russia’s foreign policy.

Conclusion: The Character of the Elite

I think that to ask “Who is responsible for the death of democracy?” is to pose a sloppy question. Autocracy is the end game of the erosion of responsibility itself. If there is an exchange of perspectives at the heart of decision-making, then we can talk about responsibility, if there is none, then there is no responsibility at all — the ruler stops being responsible to the critique of other people and thus becomes detached from reality. In absence of critical feedback, the ruler will only ‘respond’ to the imperative of staying in power, thus becoming possessed by the logic of escalation that justifies concentration of decision-making in the hands of arbitrary authority. In other words, the emperor will inevitably confuse himself with a god and take on the conquest of the world. The critical feedback ends when people who ‘say truth to power’ are eliminated from decision-making so that the ruler no longer talks with people who pose unpleasant questions. Which means that the key question is this: “What is the selection process of the people who have a say in common affairs?” “How the elite is formed?”

We often forget that to talk of any political regime is to talk of a regime of human life, to talk of a certain character for which the people who take part in decision-making are selected. Putin’s regime is downstream of political repressions in Soviet Russia which, perhaps for the first time in human history, has put the process of ‘unnatural selection’ of industrial proportions — with “philosophical steamships” and “political cleansings” of all who were devoted to abstract principles from whose height the power could be critiqued. People were taught to believe power cannot be critiqued — that “those on the top see better”. Putin’s regime’s preference for the law-breakers and law-enforcers over law-makers led to an unnatural style of governance that didn’t take any human interest into account — except the insatiable greed that necessitated escalation, self-destructive imperialism.

They laid the foundation for their ascent even before the collapse of the Soviet Union, but by 2004, thanks to the first cadence of their fellow secret serviceman in the presidential office, they’ve occupied all the tidbits of bureaucratic hierarchy, gained control over the entire country, colonising it to serve two interdependent aims: private enrichment and imperial expansion, internal and external colonisation.

First, the people: Russians hated the didactic idealism of Soviet culture. With each song, movie, painting, book and theatre play, Soviet authors taught people how to live, how to become conscientious citizens. In reaction to this, people wanted to throw politics out of their lives and breathe the air of private freedom, freedom of will. The liberal turmoil of the 1990s, when politics was seemingly everywhere, also did not seem to do Russian any good. By the 2000s, Russians essentially abandoned their civic duty of holding the authorities responsible by giving them carte blanche as long as they did not impinge on people’s private lives. There was this ‘Faustian’ contract by which people sold their political freedom for the freedom of private enrichment. This helped to recruit the elite among thieves who were only interested in private enrichment and ‘patriots’ who were only interested in the geopolitical supremacy of their fatherland — both had nothing against arbitrary rule and neither taste for political freedom and social justice.

Second, the ruler: Putin’s secret service education taught him radical distrust. Instead of being an integrated person, he changes many personas at will so as to infiltrate and gain trust within various communities. Since he fears double loyalty behind everyone he meets, it is easier for him to deal with ‘his people’ stained by the blood they shed during their secret in the secret police, and with the thieves, whose corruption gave Putin absolute control over them. Since he fears ulterior motives behind everyone he meets, it is easier for him to deal with the siloviki who are just as obsessed with imperial pride and the blatari whose greed demonstrated a lack of ulterior loyalty — for them, enrichment was visibly an end in itself. Putin selected the elite on the basis of loyalty.

In short, as a result of Putin’s secret serviceman’s habit of paranoid mistrust and the political apathy of the people, it were the thieves-in-law and secret police who became the prime recruits for the elite. Yet, with the passage of time, these people less and less resembled the elite. By the point of the February 2022 Security Council meeting, Putin was able to tie all the upper echelon officials with shared responsibility by forcing them to dip their hands in blood, to voice support for the launch of a ‘special military operation’, because they visibly feared saying anything that won’t please him. The elite that couldn’t contradict the dictator couldn’t prevent the development of a regime based on the intelligence detached from reality, law reduced to ‘might makes right’ and narrative reduced to the mythology of geopolitical struggle between empires. At the same time, history as the process of civilising, outgrowing zero-sum-gaming, history that was the backbone of the Soviet regime, was deemed naïve and replaced by the history of zero-sum fluctuations in the carve-up of ‘influence spheres’.

In the next chapter I’ll narrate the story of how the zero-sum ‘deathcamp realism’ of the Russian elites entered into chemical reaction with zero-summism on the international scale, the so-called geopolitical ‘realism’, and gradually came to see territorial conquest as the answer to all problems.

ABSTRACT

The hypothesis is that it is the abstraction that ‘saves’ and leads people out from the Bronze Age infatuation with concrete power to the communication about the invisible ideas (anagoge) and faith in the promised future of social justice and the common good (synagoge). Abstraction is something that does justice to the difficulties of social life and therefore has to be the milieu of statecraft (Plato dedicates four books of the Republic to simply set the stage for the definition of justice). One thing that can be said about abstraction is that it takes time, and the real ability to think from abstract perspectives is a result of the gradual development of literary traditions. There is an insistence in the Scripture that reverence to the time taken is a necessary habit of statecraft. E.g. the Jews were divided into Israel and Judaea when Rehoboam, son of Solomon, ‘rejecting the advice given him by the elders, he followed the advice of the young men’ (1 Kings 12:13–14). I distinguish between the Axial Revolution and the Axial Age. This chapter is dedicated to the former, whereas the next will be dedicated to the latter.

Keywords: Plato, Aristotle, Prophets, paideia, Axial Revolution, abstraction.

The Exodus from the Bronze Age: Jewish Synagoge and Greeks Anagoge, the Two Ways of Abstraction.

The first birth pangs of both traditions were not very promising, though it must be obvious that the outgrowing of a lifeform has to begin by outcompeting it on its own terms.

Greek mythological corpus was a very long eulogy of various passions and heroic accomplishments.
The first pangs of abstract thinking were the attempts of natural philosophers to use language to further the project of enslavement of nature, this time with the help of abstract concepts. But this project has failed because it did not give Greeks power to predict and control natural phenomena. However, the Sophists directed mastery of language against other fellow humans.
Another project that had put abstract thinking to atrocious use was the Sophist project of rhetorics — the skill of eloquent persuasion. This was the another skill that gave one power to impose one’s will on others and climb the ladder to the hierarchical dominance, not brutally, but by imbuing the electors with one’s viewpoint or simply getting money for the teaching of their skills. They were continuing the unmistakably Pagan lifeform because their enterprise was oral, oratory is a concrete skill of (many a teacher of rhetorics will insist) mastery over your tongue (Russian word for the Paganism, язычество, is connected to the word язык, tongue, and all connected to the word nation, ethnos, implying the blood and soil, concrete, visible and even audible (one can discern the subtleties of one’s accent) level of solidarity) that results in the concrete interactions in which I can persuade the other thanks to the eloquence of my utterance, of the sounds I emit from my mouth. It should not amaze us that Hitler, the master of oral persuasion in the age of a new oral medium, the radio, reproduced the Bronze Age struggle (Ger. Kampf) and enslavement in his XX century’s Drang Nach Osten (Ger. spread to the east). (* The annoying translation of certain words into German is aimed to demonstrate the ‘rhymes’ that link the Paganism of the Bronze Age to the Paganism of Modernity).

Only Socrates was able to radically shift the direction of abstract thinking — instead of imposition of one’s will, one’s perspective, he focused on the exchange of perspectives in the pursuit of truth.

The Jews were also initially good at the Bronze Age skill of coercion. Jacob is a manipulator par excellence and Joseph literally dreams of ascension — both of them have the will to climb the ladder to supremacy, they are very successful in the Bronze Age terms. During the years of famine, Joseph manages to enslave the whole population through a sequence of — there is no other way to say it — financial machinations. Yet in the world of endemic power struggle, the Jews end up enslaved. The logic of the Bronze Age is more contagious than its practitioners would want to admit — the enslavers end up as slaves. All of which ought to convince us that, regardless of our intentions, regardless of whether it used for good or bad purposes, the Bronze Age techniques that are used by willpower — violence and coercion — inadvertently lead people towards zero-sum war and enslavement of its ‘losers’ — once you begin to play by the rules of violent power, you begin to participate in the evil. The mindset that considers willpower to be the answer to the problems of life is the same thing as the scarcity mindset that locks us up in zero-sum-struggle in which my success must come at the expense of others.

JEWISH SYNAGOGE

1 Individual stories were summoned into a national history — from the concrete slavery to the abstract land of promise. This is connected to the unique rule of language — Syriac-Palestinian semites had the first alphabetic literacy, then adopted by many other nations, including the Greeks. Thus they uniquely organised their lives around more intense and continuous tradition of shared speech, while Jews experienced their verbal abilities in unique historical circumstances — continuity of conversation summoned them out of slavery.
2 Historical progress depended upon keeping the commandments, obey the law.

And the law focused on the preclusion of enslavement, on social justice and common good (synagoge). Torah implored Jews to care and attend to the widow, the orphan, the weak, the poor, the stranger (Exodus 20, 21, 22, 23). The right of the Jews to use the land was premised on them keeping it open to the other, on leaving certain amounts of grain uncollected, on forgiving debtors so that they do not become slaves.

3 And this system of interlocking interdependence and attendance resulted in the establishment of theocracy which resembled the immortal life of divine relationships of love, of thoughtful being-in-the-other, of the ‘kingdom of priests’, and its material consummation was the building of the Temple of Father: the space at the heart of Jerusalem was sacrificed beyond the contests for ownership, ‘it was the space that belonged to no one, but could give room to everyone’.

Yet, simultaneously with the Fall, another story is narrated in the Bible, that of Salvation.

The real loci and revelation of intelligibility is the communication between persons, a bodily face-to-face exchange of information. This is where history reveals itself; this is where embodied forms of life interact. But in the manipulative conflict of wills this intelligibility is muted and obscured. There were people who were emphatically not hiding from the presence of the truth. ‘And Abram was ninety-nine years old, when Jehovah appeared to Abram, and said to him, I [am] the Almighty God: walk before my face, and be perfect’ (Genesis 17:1–2); the same is said to Solomon: ‘if you will walk before my face, as David thy father walked, in integrity of heart, and in uprightness, to do according to all that I have commanded thee, [and] wilt keep my statutes and mine ordinances; then will I establish the throne of thy kingdom over Israel for ever’ (1 Kings 9:4–6). Jews heard their God consistently calling and inviting them into intelligent communication: ‘Come now, let us reason together, says the Lord’ (Isaiah 1:18). This implies that Israel, whose history was launched by wrestling with God, not by hiding from God, ought to be ruled by those who are willing to continue wrestling with God in their personal and public life. This story is the story of urbanism, a dream of a ‘city upon the hill’, a dream of Abraham who ‘wanted to live in the city whose architect and builder is God’. There is an insistence in the Bible that this dream is connected to Abraham’s xenophilia, love of the stranger, his hospitality. His knowledge that, in the end of the day, his house can only belong to him, if it becomes a place of warm and unconditional welcome of what and who is strange.

The Exodus records Jewish exit out of this zero-sum-game of privation.

Farmers had circular time — they invested effort into the soil and obliged time to yield return in crops. They related only with the concrete, limited and evident time, with the ‘change of seasons on the face of the earth’, exemplified in the wheal of a swastika, a seasonal cycle, a finite but ever-recurrent story of aiming, effort, and success (or failure). The story of a profit, of future reward, at a certain point in the future.

Now they could store grain and then purchase your freedom from toil — fight against slavery by toiling.

A seasonal cycle is important and it returns real harvest and it returns to where it has begun — an ever recurrent cycle. But it is but a short fragment of time, which is confused by Pagans with Eternity. They think that the fruits of their will, their effort they had put in soil, which they harvest every year, is the eternal pattern of being. However, they lack the perspective that would relativise these concrete cycles and events — that would put them in the perspective of history — but to do so is to order concrete historical events from the vantage point that is essentially outside of history, from the abstract perspective of eternity, from the perspective of God.

Pagans have the concept of individual history, a story, a myth, an epic, a legend, — all about a hero who through his effort and competence, his will, deserves and gets a high place in the the hierarchy, in society, but they lack the concept that a society as a whole, a hierarchy, and all the concrete events can be seen from the perspective of eternity, can be ordered intelligible by truthful language into a meaningful sequence of changes that locates a society within the axis of historical progress.
‘The grass withers and the flowers fall, but the word of our God endures forever’ (Isaiah 40:8).

The Jews began communicating with exactly this thing that could fit all these straying events into perspective — with the truthful and intelligent communication in the hypostasis of God the Father. That is, their religion was patriarchal, it was a cultural tradition that passed from generation to generation, each receiving the words of scripture with awe and reverence, mediated through the Patriarchs.

The life of the Bronze Age centres around a palace, a lavish display of a ruler’s power, a building that has no social value except to show off the exuberant excess and superiority of the male who tops the dominance hierarchy. It is society that succumbed to the ultimate phallic dream of grandeur. No wonder that the Axial thinkers would build their lives around an outright denial of the palace life. Buddha would famously flee the comfort of his castle and become a vagabond engaged in the spiritual pursuit of equanimity, and Marcus Aurelius would say, grudgingly, that ‘it is possibly to be happy even in a palace’, implying that — for the Axial mindset — life of excessive hedonism is not a cause for happiness, but an obstacle.

The Book of Exodus describes how the Jews aimed to escape from their enslavement to the epitome of the Bronze Age, that is, from Egypt, into the land of the abstract promise. From the fictive and self-deceptive illusion of omnipotence to at-one-ment with abstract, heavenly, eternal realities.

In the Torah, all these things — including the idea of ownership itself — were radically questioned by the new pivotal mode of being, that is, by language — because, by means keeping the commandments of the Mosaic, Law the Jews somehow entered into communication with the Infinite and were able, in their scriptures which they consider the Word of God, to scale stories up unto eternity — to infinite repetitions of interactions. By doing so (or by having these done to them or visited upon them) they undermined the logic of storytelling — the willpower will yield place to communication, sensemaking, love and truth, logos and agape — all the things that cannot be brought into being by a sheer act of will, things that require sacrifice of will. Therefore, Bible repeatedly insists that the accomplishments of the Jews were not a merited by their effort or wisdom, but were the sheer gifts of God who loves those who communicate with Him:

‘You did not do it with your own sword and bow. So I gave you a land on which you did not toil and cities you did not build; and you live in them and eat from vineyards and olive groves that you did not plant’ (Joshua 24:12–13).

Jews would find themselves win against a stronger and bigger enemy and think why did we win, we were not better, it was thanks to God that we have won. The truth is that the other nations simply lacked meaning, lacked historical direction, whereas the Jews ‘knew where they were going’.

But what does it take, spiritually, to get from this mythological infatuation with the surfaces to the insight to what is behind the appearances, insight to what is truly relevant in the long-term? It is the process of abstraction.

Latin abstrahere means to ‘draw away’ — and draw away it does. From the abstract perspective of the common good we can judge the choices of the autocrats. But abstraction itself is the result of the conversation that takes time.

The inner contradictions of the Bronze Age lifeform create a zero-sum-game of mutual enslavement that could only be overcome by a ‘good faith’ in a higher order of reality, the heavenly realm. It is this realm to which people were ‘atoned’ by the participation in the tradition of intelligent communication on the increasingly abstract themes in the dialogues of Greek Classical philosophy (‘come now, let us reason together, says the Lord’ (Isaiah 1:18) of the Jewish Biblical tradition) and in the history that led to the abstract future Jews were participating on condition if they kept the commandments of their Law. Participatory knowing of abstract ideas, laws, and virtues taught people how to become — wise, just, and righteous. And then judge individual stories and choices by whether they participate in the virtues or in the vices.

In the Bronze Age, humans developed great literary traditions. Or, rather, humans did not, literary traditions grew because time itself accumulated enough stories so that their ‘rhymes’ and commonalities became self-evident. Growth of literary traditions revealed the abstract vantage point of the common history from which to judge individual success stories. Great literary traditions afforded a vantage point from which to abstract recurrent patterns in various ‘success stories’: to judge whether they participate in the virtues and the laws or in vices and lawlessness. Literacy taught people to discern which success stories bespoke vice and which bespoke virtue. Not just any choice will do, there were now a structure in light of which choices were judged as either arbitrary (sinful) or as doing justice to the reality (rightful).

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Jews considered their literary tradition — the Hebrew Scripture — to be the Word of God. They dedicated their lives to participation in the history which is recorded in their Scripture.

Jews believed in God who was the only one to know their hearts (1 Kings 8), not the surface righteousness, but the inner motives — whether they are pure, self-sacrificial, or self-seeking. God h9iad objective insight into everything. Belief in such God allowed Jews to relativise concrete apperennces of present order — it was to be judged from the perspective of eternity — it was not a thing in itself, but a mere part, fragment of history. And what this meant is that Jews were able to recognise other Jews as not specs in the everlasting hierarchy of today’s order of things, but as ‘fellow-travellers’ on the historical path to substantially different and better hierarchies.

Point being, societies in which the stories of people strictly divide them into winners and losers are bound to have a short history.

Therefore, the Jews, the first irrevocably historical nation, found themselves on the axis that led from the ultimate case of inequality, from Egyptian slavery, to the promised land of social justice.

The struggle for glory and authority is a zero-sum-game:

“As the women danced, they sang, “Saul has killed his thousands, and David has killed his ten thousands.” Saul was very angry at this for the saying displeased him. He said, “They give David tens of thousands, and me they only give thousands. What else is he lacking but the kingdom?” From that time on, Saul kept an eye on David” (Samuel 18:7–9).

We see how, very gradually, David concedes space to the authority of God, communicated through the prophets. Already in 2 Samuel 12 we see how prophet Nathan rebukes David because he acted upon the passionate desire to own someone else’s wife: “Why did you despise the word of the Lord by doing what is evil in his eyes? You struck down Uriah the Hittite with the sword and took his wife to be your own” (2 Samuel 12:9).

But David was elected by God because he was a believer in a different kind of glory, one of self-deprecation, he was willing to look foolish because he clearly saw his authority as grounded not upon his arbitrary will, but upon that of the Lord: “I will play and celebrate before the Lord. I will become even more undignified than this, and I will be humiliated in my own eyes” (2 Samuel 6:21–22).

Solomon exemplifies a more mature version of kingship, one that is concerned with the common good. Solomon confesses that he does not have what it takes to govern the nation because it should not be governed arbitrarily, and so prays God to give ‘thy servant an understanding heart to judge thy people, that I may discern between good and bad’… So God said to him, “Since you have asked for this and not for long life or wealth for yourself, nor have asked for the death of your enemies but for discernment in administering justice, I will do what you have asked. I will give you a wise and discerning heart… Moreover, I will give you what you have not asked for — both wealth and honor — so that in your lifetime you will have no equal among kings. And if you walk in obedience to me and keep my decrees and commands as David your father did, I will give you a long life.” (1 Kings 3:9–14).

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GREEK ANAGOGE

1 Gnosis allowed Socrates to become nothing less than a political radical whose life will end in trial, death sentence, and execution. New science of participatory knowing allowed Socrates to judge the ‘people in power’ and ‘people in-the-know’ by whether their participate in the abstract laws and virtues; in wisdom (Apology), in justice (Republic).

2 Dictatorship is the opposite of conversation, because it does not stand any feedback except the implementation of orders. There is no exchange of perspectives going on.

This reduced communication to commands and sycophancy.

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But the Socrates is doing the opposite: he says that parrhesia is the cause of his unpopularity; he does not strive to attune to the will of the powerful or the masses, for they are the monster possessed by passions; rather, Socrates is using frank speech, unintimidated speech, to speak truth to power, to transform the will. And this is painful to people because it requires to go through the process of ‘intellectual surgery’, metanoia, radical examination of one’s beliefs and opinions, choices and pictures of ‘self’. This cuts right through the unexamined choices of the arbitrary will — ‘the unexamined life is not worth living’, says Socrates. Socrates is not interested in getting in tune with the ‘palace’ because its ‘tune’ is disfigured by arbitrariness; Socrates aims to attune the the eternal abstraction that govern everyone’s life.

3. BUT WHAT ABOUT MORTALITY? PHARAOH CLAIMS TO OVERCOME DEATH.

Socratic engagement in the agora led him to death which he accepts courageously because he is willing to obey the laws of the city because for him these laws are the will of God.

In his last dialogue, Socrates addresses the root of the fallenness, the fear of death. “The one aim of those who practice philosophy in the proper manner is to practice for dying and death”, says Socrates (Phaedo 64a3–4).

Yet his ‘summons to faith, courage and energy in the face of death isn’t a call to heroics for the ego. It is an invitation to attend, to be absorbed in value, depth and beauty not our own. It is to recognise the gentle insistent pressure of a shared reality which tells us to make room for one another.’

The task of human life is to inhabit, to ‘own’ one’s frailty. ‘Recognising our mortal limits, and those of others, amounts to admitting that our management capacity is not infinite: there are features of our world that we are not in charge of and never shall be.’

A “good” funeral tells us that these limits to human life don’t make the life that has ended meaningless, and that our own lives may be limited but are still a proper occasion for wonder and respect. (https://www.newstatesman.com/uncategorized/2020/08/covid-and-confronting-our-own-mortality).

Socrates claimed to know ta erotika, he attended to the things that are relevant.

‘things and people I love, value and depend on are not destroyed by my death. If I have been in the habit of acknowledging what is loveable and worthwhile in my life, death can seem less of a total catastrophe’

‘Homer’s “Iliad” was the cultural encyclopedia of pre-literate Greece, the didactic vehicle that pro- vided men with guidance for the management of their spiritual, ethical, and social lives. All the per- suasive skills of the poetic and the dramatic idiom were marshaled to insure the faithful transmission of the tradition from generation to generation.’ ‘In the “Republic,” Plato vigorously attacked the oral, poetized form as a vehicle for communicating knowledge. He pleaded for a more precise method of communication and classification (“The Ideas”), one which would favor the investigation of facts, principles of reality, human nature, and conduct’ (The Medium is the Massage, Page 113).

Plato attacked this ‘method because it discouraged disputation and argument. It was in his opinion the chief obstacle to abstract, speculative reasoning — he called it “a poison, and an enemy of the people.” because it was so easy to eloquently impose one’s opinion on others without partaking in the dialogue.

Mythological account may be defined as one that understands fate, Latin Fatum or Greek Mœræ, the arbitrary dispensation of fortune, as the governing force in people’s lives. How can one bring fortune on one’s side, how can one ‘befriend’ it? When human wellbeing depended on nature we figured that the vessel of communication that could propel our attunement to it was what is most natural and material in humans — the body. So the question to ask is what human faculty corresponds to the contingency of fate, ‘what is most arbitrary in human beings?’ It is their will, the sheer exercise of free choice which rebels against the logical consistency of reason and the material continuity of the body. And the thing about fate is that it is speechless, you can’t communicate but you can bargain with it, make a deal with it in which you sacrifice natural desires or anything important now in order to achieve goals of security and invulnerability, you can just have the power of will to get what you can, so as to align your unjust will with the will of an unjust universe. If I become powerful enough, I can dispense fortune and misfortune in the same arbitrary way that gods do.

Socrates struggled to replace the Homeric, poetic, mythological account of citizenship with something different. Socrates thought that statecraft has to be grounded in the belief that what orders the world is a rational agent with whom communication is possible. Socrates wanted to emasculate the myth because it placed arbitrary will at the centre of the order of things, because he wanted the city to be governed by rational argument and intelligent communication, by the exchange of viewpoint and not by the arbitrary and narrow viewpoint of the ruler, whose arbitrariness could correspond to the will of God only in the minds who think in concrete terms and think that the world is governed by arbitrary whims of fortune. To make this possible he needed to show the people that it is rather the Logos, the Word, that is the heart of the world. It was important because in this case people could have ‘good faith’ political argument, believing that they have to yield to the best argument because it will be evocative to the common good, because it is important to have the city grounded in the abstract truths, in communion with the Logos. Socrates wanted to make language — not the brute force or mastery of skills — the main judge of social life, he wanted society to be governed by the strongest arguments, not by the strongest per se.

But what is it that ‘saves’ them from this delusional search for immortality? What mends particular rivalries by relativising them under a higher rubric of the common good? It can no longer be participation in nature because material reality does not provide a vantage point from which to manipulate concrete procedures. It can no longer be atonement with nature.

It is important to note that Plato’s concern was not with the some kind of falseness of the material realm as such, but with the fact that we sensed it through our private perspective — how it appears to me; whereas ideation, abstract thinking and rational conversation, could rigorously conform be to the common, non-subjective, unchanging realm.

Now it was the abstraction that began ‘saving’ humanity. In the course of the fifty or sixty years of the Axial Revolution, abstraction had ‘conquered’ the world — or at least the worlds of the literate scribe classes of the most advanced civilizations like Greece, Israel, India, and China. In this brief walkthrough, I will concentrate on Greek and Jewish forms of abstract life — Greek science sustained by the participation in philosophical conversations that ascend from talking of the concrete things to the discussion on highest levels of abstraction and the Mosaic law (Exodus 22, Leviticus and Deuteronomy: Every so often human beings, so to speak, stand back from cultivating the earth and making things out of it. They let it be. Debts are cancelled, slaves are freed, and the earth is allowed to lie fallow. It’s as if there is a great Sabbath, a kind of mega moment of rest and standing back, so that our human lives are not totally dominated by seeking to exploit, to transform according to our own purposes. There is a breathing space in our history every so often… God reminds God’s people through the mouth of Moses that although they are brought into a land of promise, the earth of that land does not literally belong to them. [The earth is ‘theirs’ as long as they ‘keep it open’, make it a hospitable place where the stranger is welcomed, a place of xenophilia]) sustained by the Prophetic calls to participate in the correct historical path from the concrete present to the abstract promised future (God saved you from Egyptian slavery and now you’re busy making slaves of and for yourselves?!). ‘the distinctive literary medium of “prophecy” — ritualised challenges and promises addressed to the community, which build on older shamanistic forms of utterance’

The prophets returned society to the Stone Age project of conforming to something other than the will of the ruler. Akin to the shamans, they aimed to restore the people to their natural state, albeit this time not simply to their material environment. By scarifying Israel to return onto the historical path of salvation by keeping the commandments of the Law, the prophets were attuning Israel to the will of their Father — God of the open future.

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Because the story of Salvation does not end with the reaching of the Promised Land — the Bronze Age does not stop if the injustice still reigns.

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“In those days there was no king in Israel; everyone did what was right [or just] in his own eyes” (Judges 17:6, 21:25). As a result of this the strong were able to do what they wanted with the weak.

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Both Greeks and Jews entered the ‘Axis of salvation’, Greeks did so through abstract thinking, philosophical anagoge, and Jews did so through their faith in ‘things not seen’, through social justice and synagoge. Both strived to establish theocracy — the rule of heaven on earth, kingdom of God — Plato did so by urging philosophers who deal with eternal abstractions to become kings and Jews did so by acting as if only God was their Lord, by acting as if theirs was a kingdom of priests.

This came to be, so that after a period of separation from Mother Nature, humans ceased to be orphans and became adopted to God the Father, adapted to the eternal ideas and laws of the culture. It was now not at-onement with Earth, with the physical environment, that saved them, but at-onement with Heaven, with the culture. since humans had to adapt to very different circumstances, say, climates, our genom favored offloading most of the work of adjusting our behavior to the ‘software’ layer, the culture. We are not programmed at birth, we are our own programmers. Our culture is the adaptation to the truth of nature and people had to adapt to culture already sufficiently adapted, but always in need of updating.

After a period of arbitrary revolt against reality, a new period of adaptation to it had began, albeit it was a different order of reality; A new kind of selection or, rather, election began to take place: God was not choosing the strongest or the wisest, but those who were willing to listen and communicate with him, to wrestle with God, to wrestle with the hard eternal truths and ideas.

The name Israel means ‘wrestling with God’, Jewish nation wrestled with God, tried to enter into communication with God, tried to maintain coherence and integrity of their answer to the call of God, aimed to be at-one with and at-oned by the Creator.

This is actually the essence of growth — it is when things become relativised by something bigger they grow, they become relatives of something bigger.

The thing that was able to attract and abstract the attention of people so as to save and lead them out of the Hell of the Bronze Age was their participation in the increasingly abstract ‘language games’.

Great literary traditions provided an opportunity to generalise recurrent themes into law-like patterns, which led people to realise that what really deserves attention and honour is not the brute power of will but the laws and virtues that can order relations between people so that they do not degrade into a zero-sum game.

An account of salvation is revealed in the grand history of the Hebrew Bible, an abstraction of the numerous concrete stories. The lives of the Jews were from the very beginning centred around language — around the Scripture which they understood as the Word of God. Instead of the worhip of concrete power, they worshipped God who said ‘come now, let us reason together’, and hence instead if being selected by the arbitrary will of the strongest, they strived to be elected by God. Jews were selected by God because they were willing to be governed by language — to be the ‘people of the Book’. Here we see a relativisation of concrete present reality thanks to the faith in the abstract promised future, a relativisation that assembles (synagoge) stories of individual achievement into a common history.
Another way of salvation was the ascent (anagoge) to the heavenly realm of eternal abstractions. Greek classical philosophers Socrates, Plato and Aristotle wanted to make the mythological Fatum subservient to the Logos — the new governing force of their lives, communication with whom was conducted in the medium of abstract ideas like laws and virtues that were now made subjects of philosophical discussion among friends who were growing into the likeness of themes they discussed — into the lawful and virtuous lifeform.

To save themselves from this state, philosophers began to adapt no longer to nature, not to the earthly order, but to the ideal order, to the heavenly reality of language. Instead of a need to be truthful to the material environment, humans needed to become truthful to the ideal reality, to each other: to start the conversation. Finally, to do justice, humans needed to ‘wrestle’ and to ‘come to terms’ with various abstractions that organise social life, they had to, literally, define them, including justice itself, so as to release them from arbitrary manipulations of the demagogues.
The primordial men hunted material food; the Axial philosophers ‘hunted’ for correct definitions — I use this metaphor in the wake of Plato.

So while the Stone Age life depended upon ‘coming to senses’, the Axial life depended upon ‘coming to terms’.

Philosophical ‘game’ were the correct definitions liberated or restored the true significance of words (logoi) so that the inner logic of language, the real meaning of words, would rule the state through the intelligent conversation of philosophers, not the arbitrariness of Sophists who use the language for their private self-interest through the practice of manipulation; thus the philosophers partake in the shared enterprise of thinking, to examine and legislate the common good (who are learning to ‘come to terms’ with their vulnerability and mortality: the practice of philosophy is to ‘die daily’), so that it is not legislated by the unexamined passions of the strongest few (who can’t stand and so overcompensate their vulnerability and fear of death). Thus the language starts to rule, but the real instantiation of its rule, ‘thy will be done on earth as in heaven’, is threefold: utterer (shared tradition of speech, the milieu of written law), uttered (incarnate word, rational subject), uttering (the spirit of communion, the exchange of perspectives).

Socratic questioning: Since I am is produced by the (often accidental and arbitrary) choices of myself and others, if I am to have any linkage to reality I have to be open to the painstaking critique and correction. If I am not constantly learning to be available for scrutiny, judgement, and change, if I am not willing to ‘stand accused’ and ‘stand corrected’, I will end up as a consumer at the mercy of unexamined passions. “… I shall see myself as a bundle of ‘natural’ phenomena — instincts, desires, affinities — not open to critique, not capable of being thought through or articulated in recognisable speech. In political terms, this is the seedbed of fascism and violent xenophobia’ [Lost Icons, Chapter 3: Remorse, Page 111].

‘… the self which is… a finished object to itself, a work of art, is precisely that: a work of art, a constructed thing, a fiction in the most literal sense.’ [Tragic Imagination].

Both ways presupposed the ‘Two World mythology’, the juxtaposition of the concrete present and abstract eternity, where the former has to be judged by the latter. Classical Greek philosophers and Jews strived to establish theocracy, the rule of heaven on earth, Greeks in the form of philosopher kings who would govern the city by contemplating ‘eternal ideas’ and Jews in form of ‘kingdom of priests’ who live in the city whose ‘architect and maker is God’.

CONCLUSIONS

The key concord between the key teachers of the Axial Age — Buddha, Jesus, Mohammed — is their conviction that the violent feedback loop of the Bronze Age cannot be escaped by the exercise of the will, for it is the will that launches this spiral in the first place. Buddha says that yoga, the imposition of willful control over body and mind does indeed turn will against itself but is still using the same old techniques. Jesus notoriously states that his yoga, his ‘yoke’ — ‘is easy’ (Matthew 11:30). The way out is, rather, the complete surrender, becoming like a flower, like a tree that merely participates in nature, but stays wide awake. Buddha escapes the castle in which he lived at the expense of others because he realises that castle is a tomb of humane life; he escapes the ‘having mode’ in which one imposes his or her will on the surroundings. The fruits of the Axial Age may be heard in the words of Marcus Aurelius who found it very hard, but still ‘possible to be happy even in a castle’ [my emphasis]. Jesus says ‘Fight not evil’, because to retaliate against evil is to echo its violent logic, to play a zero-sum-game between wills-to-power. ‘All who take the sword will perish by the sword’, says Jesus in Matthew 26:52. If I am to transcend zero-sum-dynamics I have to ‘Turn the other cheek’, surrender my will to something other than yet another side of the conflict. I have to surrender to God who is by no means another participant in the contest of Earthly powers. And, obviously and remarkably, the word ‘Islam’ means simply that — peaceful surrender to this kind of God. If I surrender to God I no longer have to fear and make deals with the authorities that advance my standing in the hierarchy. Rather, I can judge it with the sentence of God. In an ‘impeccably authentic’ Hadith, we read: ‘A man asked the Messenger of Allah, peace and blessings be upon him, “What is the most excellent jihad?” And the Prophet answered, “To speak the truth in the face of an unjust ruler” [Musnad Aḥmad 18449]. In the Axial Age, people can hold on to an abstraction, which they consider more real than anything concrete within the world, and from this faith they can speak truth to the powers-that-be — because their concrete might fades in comparison with the faith in the abstract ideal.

To delineate the Axial Revolution I will attend to the two of its pivotal players — nations of Greece and Israel. Both Greeks and Jews were able to install Axial law in their societies (with a caveat that Jewish legislative tradition bore fruits of which the Greek one was bereft). However, the difference between them was mainly this: while the Greeks based their lawmaking on a new kind of science, the Jews based their lawmaking on a new kind of religion that was being revealed to them.

Teaching in Agora: Socratic conduct of oral philosophy.

‘the accomplishment of a teacher like Socrates is twofold: he instills a desire to seek the truth (as opposed to the sophistic desire to defeat an opponent or entertain onlookers); and he teaches in situ a method to guide the search (as opposed to adopting the canned truths offered in speeches that will later be forgotten or found to be indefensible)’. (Nails, Deborah. 1993. Agora, Academy, and Conduct of Philosophy. Page 201).

Socratic virtue is the best one can get at in terms of the oral conduct of philosophy. The tack that is taken by Plato is to develop a literate system out of Socratic method.

And the genius of Deborah Nails is to show how this difference in media cuts right through the heart of the Platonic corpus by distinguishing between Socrates’s oral conduct of philosophy in the agora and Plato’s literary work at the academy: ‘Socrates was a public figure in Athens who con- versed in the agora and elsewhere with anyone who would join him in serious conversation. In Plato’s dialogues, Socrates is found in discus- sions, of strictly elenctic and other question-and-answer formats, that are short enough to be plausibly carried out in a few hours’ (Page 202). Socrates worked on the individual scale, while Plato — after the atrocity of Socrates’ death — is convinced that the change has to occur on the level of statecraft; on the level of common history, not individual stories.

Thus Plato starts to preach a teaching (didache) and a form of life of which he writes to his friends in Syracuse.

‘This is not the same thing as learning by example, for they do not then simply mimic Socrates’s formal steps of refutation in their own later elenctic duels, having acquired through engagement in the elenctic process a set of philosophical tools (though they gain those too)’

‘the students of the elenchus are themselves changed by their rigorous pur- suit: because it is their own beliefs that are tested in the elenchus, their beliefs are altered as they proceed to justify them. ‘ (207).

‘virtue, even if it is knowledge, is not transferable like the (propositional) knowledge of the Pythagorean theorem or (the procedural knowing) how to tie a shoe, and work- ing through discrete elenctic (elengchein means shame or guilt, which implies a certain amount of necessary pain) situations is how the knowledge is acquired’ — learning of virtues is painful because it implies a certain kind of unlearning, disillusionment in one’s opinions and one’s pictures of oneself as if they were mere fictions.

This knowing has nothing to do with the skill of eloquent persuasion of my viewpoint. This is about the inherent terror of thinking, making one’s viewpoint questioned, examined, from the common perspective of certain words whose abstract definitions is something all people share as people do share one language. Thus habits are distinguished by whether they participate in the common good, if so, these are virtues, is not, these are vices.

‘while they hone their technical skills, and refine their beliefs about such issues as courage and

justice, they also acquire an enhanced sense of judgment about the appropriateness of using such skills in other contexts’ — both techne and gnosis amount to development of certain habits, but while the habits of techne are simply habits or competence, the habit of gnosis is the participatory knowing of what kind of situation, circumstances we find ourselves in and so what sort of competence is appropriate to it. Knowing certain skills empower me to impose my choice, my pristine will, knowing certain, say, ideas, makes my choice vulnerable to change. And since this is done against my will, people are generally averse to Socratic education.

But Socrates searches for the masters of various crafts (especially statecraft) and beautiful youths (in short, the closest to apparent excellence) with whom to share the pursuit of correct definitions of virtues and development of character.

The individual will fails to be virtuous in the inherently Pagan society.

The Greek project of ‘Exodus’ had to become political, as it does in the λειτουργία of Plato.

‘Socrates was claimed as the founder or taken up as the inspiration behind nearly every philosophical movement of the fourth century’ (Page 212).

⅖: THE BRONZE AGE. PART 1: GENESIS. “THE PRISON OF THE WILL” [Lat. DE SERVO ARBITRIO].

In this paper, I aim to examine the three dimensions of Bronze Age culture: science based upon the procedural knowing of skills (techne); law based upon the arbitrary will of the powerful (despotism); and the cult of willpower (Pagan Polytheism). The hypothesis is that procedural knowing and mythological storytelling as a medium of communication teach people servility, subservience to the will of the powerful, and idolatry, the worship of willpower. Since the Bronze Age people value the power to impose will above all else, their law justifies and their cult sanctifies arbitrary exercise of power — the freedom of choice of the strongest. I use the Book of Genesis for the hints that help us trace the human Fall into slavery, the form of relationship that defines the Bronze Age.

I stipulate a feedback loop between science, law, and cult, dissociates humans from reality as such. Procedural science loses contact with reality because it becomes the enterprise of manipulating and enslaving the environment: a sequence of procedures is a sequence of acts that one performs to coerce, that is, to transform the world so as to avoid being transformed by it. Thus education becomes divorced from transformation. People were educated to become those who have the power to impose will on their environment, to become masters of skills and masters of people. The will is poised in mid-air, excluded from the natural course of time and change that might have afforded transformation, freed only to dabble in the delusion of impregnability. A society at the mercy of the ruler’s freedom to choose whatever he wants is a society dangerously divorced from the truth — a society where the feedback between the government and the ‘news’ about reality is no longer there. In the Bronze Age, the law loses any meaning because it becomes a mouthpiece for the will of the powerful, it is bound to justify the whimsical and arbitrary choices of the rulers. This is the situation where the country’s officials “oppress the poor and needy and mistreat the alien, denying them justice”, and “prophets whitewash these deeds for them by false visions and lying divinations” (Ezekiel 22:29, 22:28).

1. The Science of techne. Procedural Knowing.

The Fall began when human “eyes were opened” and “they saw that they were naked” (Genesis 3:7). Once humans became insecure, awake to their vulnerability, aware and beware of impending death, they began the pursuit of invulnerability and immortality through the exercise of will. Their first exercise was to hide from direct conversation: “the man and his wife heard the sound of the Lord God as he was walking in the garden in the cool of the day, and they hid…” (Genesis 3:8). Their hiding was the first consequence of their insecurity — “I was afraid because I was naked, so I hid”, says Adam (Genesis 3:10). Their second exercise was to lie. Considering that this alienation became a regular state of the fallen humanity, ‘orphaned’ from the truthful and transparent communication within the material world, humans were condemned to the tacit manipulations so as to bend the environment to their will. If I hide from the conversation it is because I want to impose my will on you, to choose a course of action to which you’ll never give consent. I enforce choices that are calculated to serve my unexamined ends. I do not need any feedback that can question my pristine choices — I need to coerce you without the danger of being coerced by you. This imposition of will is the essence of evil because it is the root of violence — when we lose the common ground of language as the means to define the common good and adjust our choices to correspond to it, we end up on the battleground, in carnage where the strong simply impose their choices on the weak. Deprived of choice, the weak no longer have a say in how things are run. It is this process of privation, of excluding certain parts of the world from communication by acting upon them as if they were a numb “standing reserve”, a raw resource, a means for our unexamined ends, is the essence of evil.

In the Bronze Age, humans no longer relied on the gifts of nature as hunter-gatherers did in their reliance on wild plants and animals, and hence no longer had to adapt to their environment. For them, it was the other way around: in order to secure their livelihood and survival they had to adapt the environment to themselves. Human wellbeing came to depend upon their power to change their material circumstances. After the point when humans put their hope in the exercise of will, they were condemned to “painful toil” “by the sweat of their brow” (Genesis 3:17, 19).

“Painful toil” was done with the help of procedural knowledge of skills which gave the power to tame nature. Even the name of the Bronze Age shows that its people were not content to use natural materials like stone and preferred to use artificially produced composites like cast bronze — nature was to be reduced to raw resource and reshaped into what humans willed. But the will was also imposed on the living beings — people started to enslave free and wild animals into livestock and wild plants into agricultural produce. Procedural knowing results in coercion and violence. No predator except humans has its prey fully under control, fully enslaved. And of course to own something is to engage in privation par excellence: my freedom to do whatever I want with what I own means that what I own is ‘excommunicated’ its natural freedom. And when humans began to own other living beings, they were not far from owning other humans.

The hunter-gatherers always had a chance to avoid intertribal violence because there was always a bountiful expanse of nature where to migrate so as to hunt and forage without struggle for living-space (Ger. Lebensraum) with other tribes. But the first humans born after the Fall were no longer hunter-gatherers: “Abel was a keeper of sheep, but Cain was a tiller of the ground” (Genesis 4:2). Settled pastoralists and agriculturalists couldn’t migrate because they invested their time and effort to utterly change their landscape — having, say, cut down forests to create room for the fields and pastures, they now believed to own it. The self-reliance of the agriculturalists made them arrogant. Since their travail demanded the painstaking investment of willpower, it made humans think that they merited ownership of land and cattle. Therefore, people began to compete for possession of limited resources. Humans began to fight for Lebensraum. In addition to that, since the pastoralists and agriculturalists were able to sustain themselves without each other, they were able to exterminate each other without apparent detriment to their own wellbeing. Many a time, the story is the same. The pastoralists are more successful because animals give a better supply of food and make up for a better sacrifice. The agriculturalists grow resentful because their sacrifice, their labour, which is arguably more painstaking than pastoralism, is not rewarded accordingly. “On Cain and his offering he did not look with favor” (Genesis 4:5). St Augustine would argue that Cain was the builder of the first earthly city (Lat. civitas terrena), city of idolatrous reliance on human merit. Abel ‘walked closer’ to the face of God because, as a shepherd of grazing flocks, he had to deal with a more animated part of creation and to migrate so as to adjust to the outer circumstances.

An example from recent history: pastoralists and agriculturalists pushed away some local hunter-gatherers to settle in a certain African country. The agriculturalists were becoming resentful because of the prolonged supremacy of the pastoralists. Resentment led to an ethnic cleansing that wiped out up to 800,000 people, many of whom were tortured to death. The country is Rwanda, agriculturalists are the Hutus and pastoralists are the Tutsi. The myth is by no means a false counterfactual story about the distant past, it is the account of the everlasting constants of human experience, of the invariable ‘rhymes’ of life.

Once Cain kills Abel, violence unravels and spirals into the feedback cycle of perpetual revenge — Cain is “avenged sevenfold” (Genesis 4:15), but his descendants, the inventors of weapons, are “avenged seven times sevenfold”: “I have killed a man for wounding me, a young man for injuring me” (Genesis 4:23), says Lamech. He was not going to tolerate his vulnerability and so was willing to start the spiral of violent vengeance.

The Bronze Age is the fall into the state of permanent war, into the mutual enslavement carried out by the ultimate passion, the will to possess, the will to power (Ger. Wille-zur-Macht).

The medium of information exchange that allowed humans to communicate the knowledge of the ‘know-how’ skills like husbandry or blacksmithing was the instruction algorithm that linked various procedures into a sequence, which, if followed diligently and stubbornly, issues in a habit of manipulating the material world, in a skill of mastery over the environment.

Education became the matter of communicating skills and traits that empower humans to bend the world to their will. But since the obstinate and consistent execution of its routine procedures demanded the exercise of willpower, it led humans to the blasphemy of supposing that their success was merited by their voluntary choice of hardworking.

The procedural skills are communicated through the instruction manuals, but how does one acquire the will to exercise them? What makes people desire to acquire skills? The will to power. For anything to be communicated, it has to be somehow expressed in human language and proportion, it has to be personified. Communication is something that by definition happens between persons. One develops any trait by being in contact with and imitating those who personify it. So the key question is what are the personifications with whom the people of the Bronze Age communicate.

First, the skills (Greek τέχνη). To master a skill, humans had to enter into communication with it as if it were a person. So it is very convenient that the personifications of crafts were worshipped by the Pagans as gods because they understood their wellbeing as a function of human skillfulness, human mastery. The Bronze Age religion progressed to the limit of the meritocratic continuum — from the early Pagan gods still personifying the elemental forces of nature to the late Pagan gods personifying the human skills. Polytheists came a long way from relying on their environment to coercing it to their will. The worship of personifications of skills like agriculture, cattle breeding, and military art as if they were gods taught humans to become better craftsmen.

Second, the will (Greek θελημα). The brave and daring Heracles, dogged and treacherous Jason, vengeful and furious Achilles, sly and stealthy Ulysses, they taught humans to become heroes. The skills and traits that gave the power to impose will over the surrounding world and achieve dominance in social hierarchy were deified because people always consider what seems to be their primary source of power sacred. Heroes who personified traits like courage and cunning had the status of demigods. The Pagans worshipped these heroes as divine because they were so good at what Pagans valued most — at dominating, at accommodating the environment to their will.

But what could be the medium for such communication? What ‘bears witness’ to the life of willpower? That which narrates the hero’s journey towards dominance. That which relates heroic accomplishments under the rubric of a single piece of information: a success story. A story is a medium that orders, relativises many sentences — the Stone Age limit of linguistic complexity — into a sequence of sentences, into a coherent narrative, be it a myth, a legend, or an epic tale.

In contrast to the primordials who refused to follow a narration of discrete events because they did not see it with their eyes, Bronze Age humans began to “think in stories” because they were taught how to follow procedure after procedure when learning a skill.

But why do stories lead to the deification of willpower? Due to the fact that the medium of oral storytelling functioned under the selective pressure of human memory, only those stories survived that impressed and captured the audience with the memorable accounts of the vehement deeds, passionate actions, and courageous accomplishments — spectacular ‘triumphs of will’. And since for the stories to be interesting, they have to be full of passion, stories in which things were not accomplished were not able to capture attention, and so these stories could not survive the evolutionary pressure of human memory because they were not impressive, they could impress themselves into human memory. Singers of tales that do not narrate the fabulous deeds of heroes fall short of the constraints of oral storytelling. But what kinds of stories are thus selected for? But in which conditions there is even a place for the compelling story of the triumph of will? In the condition of struggle and warfare. But these kinds of drama are only manifested in conditions of competition for scarce resources, in the zero-sum-games. In the condition of a zero-sum-game, where there is an intense competition for the possession of what can’t be shared. And so to succeed in these conditions one has to be able to focus on and pursue a concrete goal. And let’s look closer at who exactly are those who are able to accomplish impressive feats, who are able to bring desired changes to the outer world, who can make a difference? People who are willing to take risks, to dare. People of great willpower, daring and assertive, “obstinate and stubborn” (Ezekiel 12:4). Technically speaking, a hero has to be a single-minded maniac, possessed by a single goal and pursuing it by any means necessary. A typical heroic ordeal is disturbingly close to addiction.

And since passion is a derivative of intense rivalry, it all makes congruent sense: myths tend to be about strife and warfare. Passion is a ‘fuel’ of the struggle for dominance over other potential contestants for the possession of this scarce good that cannot be shared, cannot be made common. The passion is deeply unnatural because our evolutionary past did not know the idea of ownership. This deeply possessive form of relationships only comes with the dawn of the Bronze Age.

Having listened to their success stories, ancient youths began to imitate their beloved heroes.

By making a lasting impression on the youths, the heroes impressed themselves unto their memory thus becoming participants in their internal conversations. Via the medium of mythology, the youth entered into conversation with the personifications of willpower. By accommodating the personifications of willpower into their psyches, the youths were accommodating passions. The point being, mythological storytelling makes people addicted to passions.

Passion (Greek πάθος) is the ‘fuel’ of competition because it stems from my revolt against vulnerability and so always aims to have the ‘upper hand’ against others. It seeks to possess and dominate. Since passion is essentially rivalrous, it makes me see a zero-sum-game in all circumstances — either I win or you, without a possibility of mutual benefit. Passion engulfs everyone in the feedback loop of privation because it excludes me, my desired object, and other contestants for this object from the transformative conversation about the ways to share it or about who should really have it — conversation that could have made the desired object ‘speak’ by doing justice to its nature, by defining it properly, after all, by asking it, giving it space, time, and silence to respond (especially if it is a living thing). Thus we will know how it is to be used or maybe emphatically not used as a means for our ends.

The passion frustrated education of desire because it bends our desire to a particular choice with regard to how to use a particular object.

The passion not only narrows my attention to a particular thing but makes me addicted to the particular end I have in mind for it. The passion transforms parts of the world into idols by addicting my attention to what I can make of them. The passion excommunicates the desired thing from any other relations it may participate in, including with my ‘real’, my ‘long-term’ self. The passions lead us to use and discard others as a raw resource, as essentially passive slaves. “Being stronger than she”, the prince “forced her, and lay with her. Then Amnon hated her exceedingly; so that the hatred wherewith he hated her was greater than the love wherewith he had loved her. And Amnon said unto her, arise, be gone” (2 Samuel 13:14–15). The object of passion is raped, made speechless, de-personalised, excluded from the conversation as a passive and voiceless means for satisfaction. Evil, the possessive turn of mind, is the result of privation: ‘excommunication’ of the other from the world of intelligent exchange so that it no longer “speaks of something else”, of something it is not, and therefore is reduced to what I say it is, to my private choice with regard to what I own, the property I possess. Privation deprives parts of the world of the chance to intelligently negotiate its choices so as to grow according to its nature.

The privation has the same structure as addiction because it is the reciprocal narrowing of the owner and the owned: the master also cannot negotiate with the environment which he has enslaved, made speechless by reducing it to a single function. His choices also become passive, that is, dictated, even possessed, by numb passions. He succumbs to a short-term, unthinking, narrow, ‘retarded’, developmentally stuck version of himself. And since humans like him become passive instruments at the mercy of passions that possess and discard them, humans who value domination above all else cannot help but regard and serve their passions as if they were gods. “The sudden unaccountable feeling of power, or the sudden unaccountable loss of judgement, is the germ out of which the divine machinery developed”, wrote E. R. Dodds. The passions are always plural: “I am Legion, for we are many” (Mark 5:9), they are always envious of each other, always in competition to possess a scarce resource. And since the world, including the human beings, is more easily ‘possessed’, owned, controlled, coerced, and consumed, from the height of the hierarchy, this passionate, possessive attitude to the world is always aimed at social dominance, is always the will to power. The will to power is the will for the arbitrary exercise of sovereignty, whose choices are totally free and therefore totally coercive. Choices that are arbitrary, that is, unintelligible to others, require the pure imposition of will. Merciless violence is the only means to impose choices to which the others would never give consent — the choices are dictated by essentially un-communicative and egocentric passions — wrath, pride, envy, lust, you name it.

Thus we can see how the feedback loop of procedural thinking and Pagan mythology led Bronze Age humans to the worship of concrete and tangible power — a dominant position in the social hierarchy. Because of this the education of this Age was aimed at teaching those skills and traits that empower people to impose will on the environment — skills of coercion and traits of willpower.

Yet from the Biblical perspective, to serve the willpower is to serve the devil: it was the devil who “took him up, and showed him all the kingdoms of the world in a moment of time, and said to him: “To you I will give all this authority and their glory; for it has been delivered to me, and I give to whom I will. If you, then, will worship me, it shall all be yours”” (Luke 3:5–7). Once people began to accept this offer, the Bronze Age had begun. It is sometimes called the Faustian Age because, like Faust, people were now willing to “sell their souls” to the devil in order to acquire the knowledge and power that would bend everything to their will. When I sell my soul I sell my participation in direct communication to get the knowledge and power to manipulate the world indirectly, secretly, so as to impose choices to which no one would ever consent — irrational choices dictated by passions. Thus instead of intelligently defining the common good with others and shaping my choices so that they become intelligible with regard to the definitions we have agreed upon, I simply impose my pristine choices, my uneducated and unexamined will. If this happens, social relations become mediocre: society outsources moral judgement with regard to the definition of the common good to mediating competitions like war or market where the strongest or the richest can impose their will through brute violence or clandestine scheming without being accountable to society at large. In this way he hides from converse and relation in which he could have been growing into increasingly mature and humane identities. Because of “selling his soul” a ruler is condemned to live in the prison of a narrow and self-serving standpoint and the society is condemned to be governed from that prison.

2. The Law of the Powerful. ‘Might makes right’.

When people begin to vie for domination they have two vehicles of ascent at their disposal: the skill and the will. Mastering a skill empowers me to impose my will on the outer world. Having willpower empowers me to heroically persevere in imposing my will. Yet both faculties fade if compared to the opportunity to dictate people of skill and willpower what to do. One who is in command of craftsmen and heroes is the one whose ability to coerce is virtually limitless. This means that the key question we should be asking ourselves is “who becomes a ruler in a society?” And if the dominance contest is all we rely upon, then the answer is the one who combines mastery of skills and heroic character. But this is a serious problem: skills of mastery would not be of much use because of having very little to do with the skill of governance. It is not good enough for a ruler to be a good trader, a good military leader, or a good orator, he needs to organize a government where different experts “talk to each other”, he needs to be a good mediator between different procedural skills, needs to provide space and time for the synopsis of different fields of expertise. The statecraft is not a procedural craft because it has a very abstract or general task: to sustain a robust conversation between multiple specialists, to sustain politics — the process of defining the common good and legislating choices of it. A skilled craftsman often cannot do this because he tends to think that his expertise in a given field of knowledge makes him knowledgeable in all the other disciplines. And the people who are characterised by the will-to-power are not noted for either trust or care for other people’s points of view. Their quest for autonomy and autocracy, their unwillingness to be vulnerable to the exchange of perspectives, leads them to the utter arbitrariness, to the revolt against reality: ‘They have eyes to see and but do not see and ears to hear but do not hear, for they are a rebellious people’ (Ezekiel 12:2).

And so it comes to be that the only thing that distinguishes the ruler is the fact that his exercise of power is less constrained in comparison to other people. That is to say, his choices are more arbitrary or, frankly, more stupid because they are bound to do less then justice to what is the case, they are unintelligible to the intricate fabrics of material and social life. A despot is autonomous and autocratic, he can legislate for himself and for others whatever he wills, whatever comes to his mind. But since his freedom of choice is divorced from material continuity and logical consistency, it is ultimately at the mercy of what is most arbitrary and unnatural — the passions. It is important to understand that arbitrariness is not the same as randomness. The apparent independence from carnal continuity and abstract logic is not about seeing the world randomly, but about the narrowing of our purview to a self-centred question: “what’s in it for me?” This is why the freedom of choice does not lead to the freedom of will. On the contrary, our choices are always contingent upon our limited stance in time and space and if we are obsessed with the freedom of choice, our choices will be undertaken in a sort of revolt against its own terms. The stress on the freedom of choice is ultimately arbitrary — it comes from a place of dissatisfaction and insecurity. Arbitrary choices are those that seek to deny the very terms on which they are exercised. At the end of the day, arbitrariness stems from our refusal to come to terms with our carnal predicament. We refuse to be incarnated because we abhor our mortal bodies. Ruler’s fear of death leads him to enslave the outer world to his unexamined desires, that is, to his ‘free’ will that is understood as the freedom of choice — the will that is free from ‘constraints’ of reason and education because it is possessed by the passions. When the ‘free’ will of the rulers became the ‘law of the land’ the social life degraded into fundamental injustice, into arbitrary domination and slavery, a form of relationship that defines hell. The arbitrary rule is fundamentally unjust — its only instrument is coercive power.

If we define injustice as a condition where disagreement is resolved by the exercise of power, the feedback loop of the Bronze Age lifeform creates the fundamentally unjust zero-sum-game where nothing stands in the way of the strongest to do whatever they will. “No thinking is going on: the processes of power are still working at a pre-reflective level… In plainer English, oppression is a situation where people don’t talk to each other”. The society which understands the zero-sum-game, the enslavement of the weak by the strong, as a fair and eternal state of affairs, justifies coercive imposition of will with the help of the law. The unjust state is the one where the statecraft is contaminated with the privative, possessive attitude. Ownership implies freedom with regard to the property. And if the state is understood as the property of the ruler, his will becomes the law of the land. The unhappy society is the one whose ruler is an autocrat, a tyrant who is invulnerable to the extent of immunity to the viewpoints and choices of others who might have challenged his will but cannot because they are automatically considered to be dangerous rivals who are only interested in power. But the tyrant is also deeply unhappy because he cannot grow — cannot live in harmony with his own nature, his potential that can only be actualised through living as a responsible participant of relationships. The despot cannot grow because he cannot participate in political relationships in which people grow into more complex identities, in which the character is forged. He is stuck because he is never answerable to other viewpoints, his conversations are limited to issuing orders and receiving reports, there is no feedback except the execution of his orders, there is no critique except reassurance and flattery, his identity is constantly reinforced, never challenged. The master and the slave are shut-in within the privative cycle: the master’s choices are not constrained because he has freedom with regard to his property; the slave has no choices; and so the both cannot grow, cannot learn, cannot think together about their common good and the choices that are conducive to it.

Yet the crux of the matter is that the people who are obsessed with securing their freedom of choice mistake precisely this sovereignty, voluntarism, autonomy and autocracy, — the exercise of power to choose any course of action whatsoever — for the mastery of the techne of lawmaking and governing. People who measure competence by the ability to impose one’s will confuse the “collateral damage” of acquiring power, that is, the fact of having a freedom of choice, with a genuine competence in statecraft. They see the fact that the ruler’s choice is not constrained as the sign of skillful leadership (Ger. Führung).

The lawmaking of the Bronze Age is succinctly expressed by the infamous soundbite “might makes right”, derived from Thrasymachus’s “‘justice is nothing else than the interest of the stronger” (Republic 338c).

3. The Cult of Willpower. Idolatry.

Self-made men. In the Stone Age, humanity was embedded within the natural course of creation, it was a work of God’s art. Since human life did not depend on the artefacts, we could not believe that we created our world, that we were self-created, a work of our own art. But this is exactly what happened in the Bronze Age — humans began to think that their wellbeing is their own doing. Humans succumbed to the sacrilege of thinking that they are self-reliant, self-created, self-made. And, since religion is always the practice of communication with what seems to create our life, Pagan gods were either the masterful patrons of useful skills, personifications of various techne, or the personifications of various passions and heroic traits that empower humans to dominate. The Pagans revered the tempestuous passions and skills that gave the power to impose will on the world so as to satisfy these passions.

Idolatry. Yet feedback of procedural knowing and mythological medium of communication reproduced a far more disturbing pattern than the addiction to passions, crafts, and heroic deeds.

It reinforced the belief, or, rather, the myth, that the faculty of making a choice with regard to how the world should be and persistently remaking the world so as to conform it to the desired state of affairs, that is, the will — is the real creator of the world and that those in society who are the best at imposing their will (not only masters of crafts, but also masters of people, not only those who have power, but also those who are in power) are the rightful objects of worship. They worshipped their ability to remake the world into artificial stuff: “They praised the gods of gold and silver, of bronze, iron, wood and stone” (Daniel 5:4). “You praised the gods of silver and gold, of bronze, iron, wood and stone, which cannot see or hear or understand. But you did not honor the God who holds in his hand your life” (Daniel 5:23).

But the worship of our capacity to remake the world is the definition of idolatry. The idols are what our “hands had made” (2 Kings 22:17), results of handiwork and exercise of will. “Do men make their own gods? Yes, but they are not gods!” (Jeremiah 16:20). The Pagans “bow down to the work of their hands” (Isaiah 2:8). A craftsman makes the idol “in the form of man, of man in all his glory…” (Isaiah 44:13). “Cursed is the one who trusts in man” (Jeremiah 17:5). Instead of attuning our attention to the world as it is, idols addict us to the majestic display of what we can make of it — to our own mastery. The idols corrupt attention because the dazzling light of temporal glory blinds people — they “set their eyes on” (Ezekiel 20:8) the stardom of the celebrities instead of attending to what is truly relevant. Attention of the idolaters is addicted to the lower-order of creation, concrete created objects instead of a more abstract and long-term creative processes: “craftsmen are only human beings” (Isaiah 44:11), says the Lord, whereas “it is I who created the blacksmith who fans the coals into flame and forges…” (Isaiah 54:16).

Worship of the ruler. There is an insistence in the Scripture that “all the makers of idols will be put to shame and disgraced” (Isaiah 45:16). “Those who make [idols] become like them, as do all who trust in them” (Psalm 135:18), they “followed worthless idols and themselves became worthless” (2 Kings 17:15). Bronze Age people “are taught by worthless wooden idols” (Jeremiah 10:8) to worship not only the craftsmen and heroes who are courageous or skilled at various techne, but mainly the rulers who merely happen to stand in a position of power.

Mythological media taught humans to value coercion. One cannot but notice that both the Iliad and the Ulysses are the stories about wrath and vengeance. Myths, legends, epics, are the media that convert any content into the eulogy of concrete might. Yet since the rulers were the living embodiments of the “success stories”, they appeared to the naïve concrete thinkers as the gods on earth, as divine. It was happening because it is the people in power who have the ultimate freedom of choice — their will is not constrained and so can be totally arbitrary.

Survival of the strongest. As was said earlier, while the skills and heroic traits give you power, they fade in comparison with the authority to govern craftsmen and heroes. Therefore, at the top of the Pagan value hierarchy, say, the hierarchy of Olympic gods, is not the most masterful craftsman, but a tyrannical rapist, one who is distinguished by wrath, envy, lust, and willful pride (Isaiah 10:12). The worship of Zeus who was possessed by passions even to the extent of multiple rape cases justified the people of power to to do whatever they want. Natural selection, survival of the fittest, gave way to unnatural selection, the survival of the strongest. In the Bronze Age, people no longer adjusted to nature but adjusted nature, including themselves, to the strongest men, to the whimsical arbitrariness of the rulers whose perspective was as narrow as their only criterion: “what do I stand to gain from it?” “Those the king wanted to put to death, he put to death, he put to death; those he wanted to spare, he spared” (Daniel 5:19).

Adapting to the arbitrary and lying will. Religion is the practice of communication with what is most valued in society. In the Bronze Age, the shamanic project becomes redundant due to the irrelevance of tamed nature, instead, religion becomes a means of communication with the powers that be, which means that instead of adapting to the physical reality of the environment, society began to be adapted to the arbitrary will of those who happen to be in power. At the heart of the Bronze Age is the cult of those who are presently empowered to coerce anyone as they will, the worship of the strongest. Paganism is the cult of the ruler. In contrast to the Stone Age shamans, the Pagan priests did not communicate with nature, but, being the servants of the rulers, they conformed to what is most unnatural in the world, with the human will. “Even the stork in the sky knows her appointed seasons, and the dove, the swift and the thrush observe the time of their migration. But my people do not know the requirements of the Lord” (Jeremiah 8:7). People have fallen from the natural course of creation, from adapting to ecological equilibriums. It happened because humans began to adapt to the lies of the rulers: “the decree that anyone who prays to any god or man… except to you, O king, shall be thrown into the lions’ den” (Daniel 6:7). “you must fall down and worship the image of gold that King Nebuchadnezzar had set up [out of arbitrary whim]. Whoever does not fall down and worship will immediately be thrown into a blazing furnace [because only coercion can force people follow arbitrary commands that are unintelligible to them]” (Daniel 2:5–6) People were educated, borrowing Cornel West’s brilliant soundbite, to be “well-adjusted to injustice”. It is so because the willpower is essentially arbitrary, it revolts against whatever the structure, logic or continuity the outer world threatens to impose. The will is never content with what the world is — it aims to make a difference. Thus the religion whose sacred task is always to attune people with what is ultimately the case became subservient to the unexamined self-deception of the autocratic authority. The Pagan religion is estranged from reality because it is bound to sanction and sanctify the wickedness of earthly authorities. This means that a ruler ceased to have any real feedback from other humans.

David’s “Here I am, living in a palace of cedar, while the ark of God remains in a tent” (2 Samuel 7:2, 1 Chronicles 17:1) is a clear indictment to the imbalance between religious and governmental authorities. In the Bronze Age, religion became a mere mediator of the ruler’s will.

Palace, Pyramid, Prison.

Coliseum. At the end of the day, the Bronze Age education nurtures competitive fighters for a zero-sum contest for scarce resources. Mythology often shows Pagan gods entertaining themselves by devising violent contests whose winners could merit a demigod status. One such instance is the journey of Jason and the Argonauts. One of the keys to understanding a given society is figuring out what kinds of long-term projects it is invested in and what kinds of monumental buildings located at the centre of its cities it results in. Therefore, since the real-life of mortals always reflects their beliefs, to this day at the centre of Rome stands the Coliseum, a corporeal testimony to the Pagan atrocities, an embodiment of belief that the world is ultimately a zero-sum game where the strong shred the weak into pieces — which is exactly what the gladiators did to merit a precarious respect and (an extremely precarious) similitude to the Emperor. Around half a million innocent people were raped, dismembered, tortured, and eaten alive in the Coliseum — all to entertain the passions of the cruel contemporaries in the audience who were sick to the point of taking pleasure in the spectacle of human slaughterhouse. Yet what else can we expect from people whose hierarchy of values, that is, whose pantheon of gods, was crowned by the thunderers (a bolt of lightning is the symbol of arbitrariness) and sometime rapists like Zeus, Jupiter, Baal, Wotan, and Perun — gods of war, wrath and willpower?

The Bronze Age is the state where the whole society falls victim to the ruler’s pursuit of invulnerability and immortality.

Palace. The competition for scarce resources taught people to protect their goods from potential rivals.

Thus the ‘winners’ of competition hoard scarce resources behind the tall and thick walls of their palaces. In the palace a ruler and his possessions become protected to the extent of being virtually invulnerable. But the taller the walls and the higher the towers, the closer a ruler is to life in the prison, because these walls also ‘protect’ him from communication. A palace becomes a prison “because this tyrant calls himself a ‘prisoner of people’s will”. He is possessed by that aspect of humanity that is rightly called demonic. The pursuit of invulnerability culminated in the construction of a palace, the edifice of the ‘having mode’, of unlimited ownership. The two most prominent empires of the Bronze Age are Rome and Egypt. Both have palaces at the centre of their cities, private property consecrated to the comfort and security of the ruler.

Pyramid. Yet the Bronze Age gets much uglier than a bunch of palaces because a palace does not solve the second problem of fallen humanity — the problem of mortality. The Bronze Age way to solve this problem was figured out by the Egyptians. At the centre of Egyptian life is the will of the pharaoh. He has succumbed to the self-deceptive belief that his wellbeing is his own creation: “you great monster… you say “The Nile is mine, I made it for myself”” (Ezekiel 29:3). Therefore, he cannot come to terms with his death — he confuses it with the end of the world at large. He wills to avoid death by all means necessary. To do so he needs to make a lasting impression, to cater such an ornate display of grandeur that would make it impossible for the Bronze Age mindset to think that his blatant manifestation of luxurience will be relativised or annihilated by death — to think that it will not overflow onto the netherworld. The pursuit of immortality had to culminate in the construction of a grave that would make life after death as comfortable as life in the palace. To do just this, Pharaoh wills to let thousands of slaves die on the construction in the scorching heat of Egyptian summer, and, in addition, to let countless underlings, finery, and food that might have belonged to the starving populus, all rot with him in his tomb, only so as to see to it that his afterlife will taste just as good as the business as usual — as his life in the palace. But if the afterlife is just as comfortable as the life proper, was there any death at all? Well, as far as the Pagans are concerned, there was not, because the exuberant spectacle and affluent splendour were too salient for the concrete thinkers who worship what appears powerful as if it were divine. It is a cliché yet it ought to be repeated: the Pharaoh acted as a cancer cell that sucked the life out of society because he refused to come to terms with death, to accept his mortality — he feared to die to such an extent that he was willing to do anything — enslave anyone — to escape it. A pagan society inevitably becomes enslaved to the self-deception of its ruler — this is the ‘triumph of the will’ (Ger. Triumph des Willens) at the very heart of the Bronze Age. Having built their pyramids, the rulers took their prisons to the netherworld. Even in their graves, they remained unfree. This is how God’s sardonic remark that ‘the man has now become like one of us’ (Genesis 3:22) comes to actuality. “We have entered into a covenant with death… we have made a lie our refuge and falsehood our hiding place…” (Isaiah 28:20).

Prison. The Fall is the gradual imprisonment of society to the ruler’s passions, his self-deceptive wish of invulnerability and immortality, his narrow perspective of short-term self-interest. To secure themselves against death and to grant themselves eternal life, the rulers began to take a ‘defensive posture’: began to coerce others to construct palaces to dwell before death and pyramids to dwell after, to construct an ultimate stronghold to protect property and withhold death. The palace and the pyramid are the Pagan solutions to the problem of vulnerability and mortality. But there are two problems: first, these solutions only work for a single strongest man (I use the masculine advisedly); second, these solutions do not really work. The ruler himself ends up in the prison of his own self-deception. The Scripture is a record of the conversation that is especially kind on pointing out that the time itself takes care of it. To bring the point home, I will dedicate the next paragraph solely to quotations from the prophet Isaiah:

“The grass withers and the flowers fall, because the breath of the Lord blows on them. Surely the people are grass’ (Isaiah 40:7). “You said in your heart, “I will ascend to heaven; I will raise my throne above the stars of God”…” (Isaiah 14:13). But “All your pomp has been brought down to the grave, along with the noise of your harps; maggots are spread out beneath you and worms cover you” (Isaiah 14:11). “Is this the man who shook the earth and made kingdoms tremble…?” (Isaiah 14:16). “The Lord Almighty planned it, to bring low the pride of all glory and to humble all who are renowned on the earth” (Isaiah 23:9).

That is to say, societies that are ruled not by the conversations that do justice to reality but by the unexamined private self-interest of those who happen to be the strongest, not by intelligent argument, but by the arbitrary and coercive will of the powerful, do not last. All the Bronze Age empires had collapsed — for such is the fate of organisms that are defined by conquest and ownership.

Conclusions

Once science, law, and cult became subservient to the will, education was reduced to the empowerment to impose one’s arbitrary choices. But these choices are not really random, these choices were determined by the passions, by the short-term self-interest. Therefore, education was reduced to the empowerment of evil. Fallen people “… are blind, they all lack knowledge; they are all mute dogs… they never have enough… they all turn to their own way, each seeks his own gain” (Isaiah 56:10–11). Even Hezekiah, an otherwise decent king, provides a spectacular exemplar of a self-serving short-sightedness. After the prophet Isaiah tells him that “… your descendants, your own flesh and blood, that will be born to you, will be taken away, and they will become eunuchs in the palace of the king of Babylon”, Hezekiah replies that “the word of the Lord you have spoken is good… There will be peace and security in my lifetime” (2 Kings 20:18, Isaiah 39:8). And so it came to be that the most thorough education in the spirit of the Bronze Age, education in blindness and bondage, was visited upon his descendant Zedekiah, the last king of Judaea, who was made to watch his children murdered right before his eyes were put out so as to make this cruel scene the last thing he sees: Babylonians, “the most ruthless of nations” (Ezekiel 30:11), “killed the sons of Zedekiah before his eyes. Then they put out his eyes, bound him with bronze shackles and took him to Babylon” (2 Kings 25:7, then in Jeremiah 39:6–7).

It has to be said for the purposes of local audience that this piece is a first chapter in a series of papers that are published in the Theory of Culture and Philosophy of Science Journal of Kharkiv National University. It is an attempt to draw a very broad and grand map that leads straight to and puts the political project on Hanzi Freinacht in its proper historical context. How we as a society are educated to grow up and live up to be truly listening, so as to let our institutions and routine interactions be shaped not by arbitrary whimsicalness of the powerful nor by the blind forces of the market but by the intelligent conversations of conscious humans?

The method of ‘Big History’ [Christian, 2011] — an academic study of the past from a very broad perspective — may be the most relevant pedagogical initiative of our days. This paper aims to offer the ‘big history’ of education — to narrate the story of civilization in light of conditions it creates for the development of adult persons. I hypothesize, provocatively, that every culture is essentially a cult, an ecology of practices that cultivates people into a worshipped ‘form of life’. And since a given society ‘worships’ exactly that ‘form of life’ which is most conducive to solving its key problems, as society ‘ages’ so do the worshipped forms of life ‘grow up’ to face more complex and abstract problems, sustained by the ecology of the complementary educational practices, the ‘feedback loop’ between science, law, and church: from the concrete knowing to the abstract, from the lawmaking by the strongest to the universal declaration of rights, and from the zero-sum competition of wills-to-power over limited possessions to the non-zero-sum communication of persons which creates everything out of nothing. These ‘loops’ grow as the increasing abstraction of the common good requires people to comprehend and abide by the increasingly complex system of law — requires us to join increasingly abstract ‘language games’. If the ‘ages’ of the progress of civilization indeed match the ‘ages’ of the ethical maturation of a person, we ought to rethink and thence attend to what is most relevant: the education that transforms numb wills-to-power who compete for private possession of finite goods by inviting them into increasingly abstract conversations between persons who communicate and cooperate for the sake of the common good. Thus, the relevance of education lies in the fact that it is the primary means we have for transforming the hell of the Bronze Age Paganism, the strife of all against all, in which the artificial ‘scarcity mindset’ locks Late Capitalist society, into a relative utopia which Hanzi Freinacht calls the Listening Society — a term coined in his seminal and eponymous treatise [Freinacht, 2016]. If the educational project based on this account takes hold in schools and universities, our systems of learning shall come closer to vindicating the Hegelian definition of education as ‘the art of making man ethical’. In this first out of five papers, I will examine and idiosyncratically synthesize the recent publications on the education of the Stone Age.

Stone Age, the ‘Garden of Nature’.

This brief walkthrough will proceed by answering three questions: what kinds of science, law, and cult constitute the educational ecology that transforms into a ‘form of life’ which is fine-tuned to solve the existential problems of a given ‘age’ human society, its problems of ‘life and death’.

In the Stone Age, the life and death of the tribe depended on its adaptedness to the environment, on whether it ‘succeeds’ in the ‘survival of the fittest’. Nature is the key power in the lives of primaeval humans because it is ‘she’ who ‘conducts’ natural selection, it is she who ‘selects’ who is fit to live and who is fit to die, and it is to ‘her’ that people have to adapt if they wish to survive. To escape the sense of powerlessness, humans always seek to get ‘in touch’ with the power that governs their lives. Thus, in the Stone Age, people were taught to get ‘in touch’ with nature. Since this is a task on which survival depends, it becomes a sacred duty of a special caste of priests who minister a cult that is the communication with what people perceive as the main source of power in their lives — thus, the whole society becomes an ecology of practices that educated its practitioners into a worshipped form of life. Thus, the first human religion was the ‘church’ of nature that cultivated people into creatureliness, into those who abide by the ‘law’ of nature, into being more natural, more creaturely. In other words, the Stone Age religion adapted the tribe to its environment. But if the ‘law of nature’ is the survival of the fittest, how should humans know in order to fit in the environment, in order to be at one with it? How does one communicate with nature? The shaman was at the centre of the Stone Age tribe — he was its scientist, lawmaker, and priest — because it was he who spoke the language of nature. Shaman’s task was to coax and cajole nature, to turn her from the worst foe into the best ally. But what kind of ‘science’ did a shaman use to know nature?

1. The Science of Incarnation: Sensual Knowing. The proper vessel of communication with nature is what is most natural in humans — our bodies. And it is this sensual knowing which shamans used to ‘get in touch’ with nature — by dissolving in their five senses shamans entered into an intimate relationship with their material circumstances, by ‘becoming their bodies’, becoming corporeal, shamans were becoming in-corporated into nature. They were bequeathed with the task of incarnation — inhabiting their carnal limits. Their survival depends on whether they ‘come to senses’, to the ‘doors of perception’: whether they strain their eyes to notice the footprints of hunted game, strain their ears to hear the rustles of predators, strain their noses to smell the odour of the forest fire — whether they intensify their sensitivity to the extent of becoming ‘at one’ with nature, to the extent of the atonement. So the task of the Stone Age knowing was to sense, to feel, to intuit: to become ‘all ears’ and ‘all eyes’ so as to be receptive to the subtle changes in the physical environment. The better the tribe folk’s five senses functioned, the faster they adapted to what happens in the environment and thus settled into an evolutionary niche, the more chances they had to survive the natural selection. If their bodies worked diligently — if they were sensitive to their material environment, to their feelings, to their instincts, they stayed ‘on the same page’ with nature, stayed adapted to ‘her’.

To do so, shamans were taught to let instincts and feelings prevail over the sprouts of their consciousness: they isolated themselves in the wilderness to shove off cultural constraints, they ate psychedelic mushrooms to lose self-awareness and become nothing except their bodies, nothing but a part of nature. Their sacred task was to attune to nature, re-member nature, to restore the tribe to being harmonious members of nature because if the tribe wanted to prevail in the ‘game’ of natural selection, it had to become a mere part of the broader ecology, if the tribe wished to match, to fit their environment, it had to become more natural.

How did they transmit sensual knowledge? What was the Stone Age medium of informational exchange? Since primaeval humans had no literacy, their speech could only represent unmediated sense experience — an act, an event, a sensation, a visible thing — complexity of their communication never surpassed a single sentence like a magic spell or a taboo (which corresponds to the ‘sentential stage’ of Commons’ Model of Hierarchical Complexity). Hence the only medium of their speech, their only vessel of communication, their language, created feedback that returned them to the belief that only material, immediately present things are of the ultimate reality. Shamanic means of communication with nature were unmistakably corporeal — a shaman danced like flowing water thereby implying that nature owes us the rain. Primordial art, the cave paintings, displayed still-pictures of concrete animals and hunters. Caves were used not as a home, but as a space where the shamans were performing rituals: they animated the drawings by emitting animal sounds and burning the flickering fire of torches which made pictures move. By immersing the youths into the simulated environment of the ritual, the shamans were conducting their controlled exposure to the experience of hunting, thus preparing them for the ‘real thing’. A shaman used magic spells that were not more complex than a single sentence that carried concrete, material meaning. Their laws — taboos — were meant to keep people in the ‘state of nature’ because they were the prohibitions of concrete bodily acts — ‘you shall not eat this berry’, ‘you shall not have sexual intercourse with your sister’. Point being, primaeval humans named things with the help of language, but it did not have much say on how to conduct their lives, they were much more reliant on the cues from nature, on what nature was saying than on what they themselves had to say — after all, they felt dwarfed by ‘her’ power. Nature was the language that was being spoken to them, and they were listening very intently. To discern what she ‘says’, primaeval humans were educated to become sensitive, that is, to heed their five bodily senses. The higher the degree of receptivity of their sensual perception, the better tribes conformed to the ‘law’ of nature.

2. The Law of Nature: Survival of the Fittest. Stone Age humans were hunters of wild animals and gatherers of wild plants. This means that their life depended on the ‘will’ of nature — a natural disaster like a drastic drought would automatically mean their extinction. But on a more positive note, the herbs, fruits, and the prey were material resources that could have been shared only equally and could not have been a cause for war between tribes because food could have hardly been stored for a long time in the conditions of, say, a rainforest. Moreover, it is barely possible to own anything in the Stone Age circumstances because there were not many ‘things’ at all, and little that there were, were most often provided by the abundant environment. Therefore, there were not many reasons for the fighting for the possession of space or resources between groups of foragers — nature has hidden resources all around them, ‘out there in the wild’. And even if a certain niche, say, a mushroom meadow or an oasis with lots of animals, became a matter of conflict because of its foraging quality, the nomadic lifestyle of the tribes allowed them to avoid bloody escalation by simply packing little possessions that they had and leaving the territory to hunt and gather somewhere else — the expanse of nature seemed too immense to fight for the living space (Ger. Lebensraum). In short, our hunter-gatherer ancestors were very peaceful if we compare them to the societies that came later.

By following hunted fauna and foraged flora Stone Age humans followed the ‘law of nature’, they stayed ‘fitted’ to their environment and ‘passed the exam’ of natural selection. Nature’s choicest creatures are not the toughest ones, but the most malleable. To win in the game of the ‘survival of the fittest’ is not to be the strongest, but to be the fastest to attune to the ecological niches, to be most sensitive by the changes in material reality. This task was inherently communal, a tribe had to work cooperatively if it wished to fit in the environment — broader vicinities are seen by the two pairs of eyes than by one. Characteristically, to level the ‘social playing field’, to prevent the ablest hunters from an accumulation of hierarchical authority, tribesmen practiced mocking those who came back with the trophies from a wickedly successful hunt.

Primordial hunting was a reverend practice of participation in nature because humans considered the hunted game to be their family, and, characteristically, they considered animals to be closer related to God, to still live ‘in Paradise’. Now and then tribe folk would say things like this: ‘We do not know where God lives, but the eland does’ [Zournazi and Williams, 2021]. They realise that the eland still ‘walks with God’ in the Garden of Nature, whereas we humans were alienated from it.

3. The Cult of Environment: Pantheism. But there must have been a time when people were still like elands, still a part of nature, still ‘her’ children. Since in the Paradise of the Stone Age people merely followed nature, that is, were acted upon by their natural drives, they merely carried out the will of the Creator of nature. They were not responsible for their behaviour because they could not explain why they do what they do — they never chose what to do, they sensed, felt, and intuited what to do. They lived from their bodily senses, they were virtually possessed by the raw instincts and impulses, they were being created, they were fully creatures, flexible clay in the hands of Creator.

Back then, human beings had no self-consciousness, because they were only conscious of tending the Garden: they were called by God ‘to cultivate it and take care of it’ (Genesis 2:15). The Garden is a place where nature is transfigured by language, where plants and animals are named, that is, invited into increasingly intense communication, into intensified attention and care. The task of primaeval humans was to expand the Garden by the process of naming — until the whole Earth is ‘taken care of’. By attending to the forces of nature as if to the persons a shaman restored the tribe to this task. It is as if a shaman tried to make people stay in the Garden of Nature, tried to prevent the Fall from the intimate adaptedness to the environment, from kinship with nature.

At this point, we can see the essential features of education in the Stone Age societies. To ‘win’ the ‘game’ of natural selection, tribes had to be adaptive to their environment, had to abide by the ‘law of nature’. To know ‘her’ laws, to ‘get in touch’ with nature within — their instincts, impulses, feelings — and without — the ever-changing environment — humans had to ‘come to their senses’, had to know through dissolving in the undifferentiated synesthesia of the five senses. According to Saint Maximus the Confessor, in Paradise humans did not think ‘now I’m seeing’, ‘now I’m hearing’, but as it were ‘swam’ in the sensual fusion with their physical environment.

By elevating their material environment into a cult, people were turning the most formidable agent in their lives into something they can communicate and negotiate with, they were turning a ruthless judge into a nurturing Mother. Primaeval people think with their bodies, follow their instincts, and pray to elemental forces, their science is sensual, their lawmaker is nature, their cult is that of nature. Since the Stone Age humans depend on their fittedness to the environment, the ‘feedback loop’ of its culture is bent on educating people to reproduce nature’s ‘form of life’ — it is bent on adapting humans to Mother Nature and Mother Nature is bent on adopting humans as ‘children’ over and over again. And if this sounds like a nice feedback loop, we should not be surprised why the Bible describes it as Paradise.

The Book of Genesis, the Fall from the Garden.

To comprehend the structure of transition from one stage to another, we have to realise that these crucial shifts are most prominently revealed in religious revelations. This is because religions are most sensitive to the radical alterations of values at the heart of social life, they document a story of how certain ‘forms of life’ come to be understood as most important, as sacred. On that note, to fathom the essence of Fall from Stone Age to Bronze Age, from nature to hell, we have to read the very beginning of the Bible. The Book of Genesis begins in the Garden of Eden and ends with the descent of the Jews to Egyptian slavery. This is the text that records the Fall from being one with material environment, from atonement with and by nature, to the state of revolt against it in consequence of the self-deceptive dream of immortality.

The Fall from the ‘feedback loop’ of Paradise begins with becoming aware and beware of death.

Adam could not have been the first to grapple with death because the most precious thing in the lives of primaeval men was their own life — and once they were dead, they could not reflect upon it, they could not be burdened with the weight of the tragedy. Males also did not care for the death of infants since, because of the promiscuity, they often had no idea and could never be totally sure who their children were, and even if they were sure, they could not develop affection for children because they did not nurse them. But this is precisely what a mother does — she develops an intimate connection with her child. It was the snake who opened the eyes of Eve because snakes and people co-developed within a tight evolutionary niche, ‘squeezed’ through a shared evolutionary bottleneck. When people lived on trees, snakes were the only predators capable of silently crawling to climb a tree and kill humans, especially human babies.

Imagine this: your infant, the single thing you were supposed to take care of, is murdered by a snake.

It is you, the mother, who is awakened to the terror of death. It is you who now has to ‘come to terms’ with this loss, who has to become conscious of death.

It is you who has to recall all the choices that made this catastrophe visit upon you. Thus, you are awakened into responsibility for the selection of a father who failed to provide security for your offspring, who failed to assure the continuation of your genetic code.

As a result of this evolutionary pattern, women became more selective, they began to choose who to mate with more carefully, picking those partners who would make reliable fathers for their precious progeny. A woman no longer relied on her natural instincts and desires — they had failed her. On the contrary, she began exercising willpower to inhibit her sexual drives. Once Eve ate the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge, she passed it to Adam — he found himself under the watch of selective pressure that was not merely natural, but conscious, Adam has found himself under the unnaturally picky sight of the arbitre who thirsts to be provided with security because it is awakened to the perspective of death.

Once ‘their eyes were opened and they knew that they were naked’ [Genesis 3:7], humans ceased being conscious of the Garden and became self-conscious.

Once humans became conscious of the perspective of impending death, they started to feel insecure, ashamed and hence began to hide their vulnerability from the sight of truth, from the eyes of God. They failed to inhabit their carnal state, to be incarnate. Instead of attending to the whole ecology of creation, they began to focus on their private life. Humans began to make active decisions that bend the world to their will-to-security, to their will-to-avoid-death. Thus, the will became their new lawmaker — they started to feel that they were created by their own choices.

The meaning one reads into this news may vary. On a positive note, humans grew out of being mere creatures because they have begun to create their own environments, to construct artificial niches. On a negative note, humans stopped being natural because instead of the bodily feelings the centre of their life became occupied by their willpower.

And on a still more negative note, it is once humans began to choose, to select the partners that were useful for them and to act so as to be chosen by others, in other words, to follow their own will instead of innate instincts, that they started to sin. The natural selection that ‘adopted’ people to material reality was substituted by the arbitrary selection that ‘orphaned’ people into self-deceptive isolation from reality.

Humans ‘had got the choice’, but were immediately enslaved by their will-to-avoid-death which corrupted and limited their view of the world. Their choices became inclined towards evil because their vision succumbed to a short-term and ego-centric perspective. They have started to ‘know good and evil’, but their knowledge was distorted by their egocentric perspective — they started to see the world as it relates to their selfish goals, not as it relates to God, they started to see the world through the narrow lens of ‘what’s good in it for me’, not as it really is. Humans became habituated to evil to the degree of ‘total depravity’ — because, according to the definition of Saint Maximus the Confessor, evil is the ‘demonic vision’ that sees the world from the short-term and self-serving perspective of the will, in contrast to the ‘angelic vision’ that sees everything as it really is, as it relates to God who is not yet another will in competition with others. Because of the Fall, human vision is bound to oscillate between the two.

To see why it is the will that distorts reality we have to understand that a child begins to lie precisely when he accumulates enough willpower to inhibit and surmount his natural instinct to represent reality truthfully. To rebel against reality, to accept not the reality as it is but to choose a different kind of reality that will be more comfortable to live in, to make this choice and stand by it, a child has to have willpower. And the fact that the faculty that affords heroic strive and the faculty that affords lying is the same faculty ought to raise questions about the essence of heroism. It is not a coincidence that Sam Harris, a prolific critic of free will [2012], is also a ruthless opponent of all forms of lying [2013] — these two go together and both enslave their practitioners to the particular ways in which their supposedly ‘free’ choices deviate from the truth.

In the Stone Age, by communicating with forces of nature as if they were persons, people themselves were growing into personhood, into ‘knots’ in truthful exchange of sensual information. In the Bronze Age, the opposite of communication took precedence — instead of recognising nature as their collocutor, humans began to violently impose their choices on it. Once nature stopped being a partner in dialogue, once it stopped being a ‘she’ and became an ‘it’, the corporeal environment became a raw resource for the manipulations of our numb will. From this we can infer that the opposite of communication that creates the world from nothing, the violent coercion, is the consequence of willing — because the will by definition refuses to participate in conversations where its choices would have to be articulated and thus dangerously exposed to examination by others but silently imposes its own choices whose sovereignty stays unadulterated by concern for the common good, reason, or truth. The will is the faculty that commands and coerces the environment to carry out its arbitrary decisions. Generally, a man goes on such ‘power trips’ because he thinks that only the arbitrariness of his decisions can prove the extent of his freedom — prove that there was nothing that caused and conditioned his decisions — prove that they were made ‘against all odds’, that they are totally free and voluntary, totally of his own will; prove that he is not a ‘trembling creature’ but self-made self-legislator, a product of own creation. To cut the long story short, ‘power trips’ happen when a man forgets he is not a god.

What is it that gives us the power to impose our will on others and the environment? What kind of knowledge gives me the power to manipulate? When humans severed their family ties with nature and became orphans, no longer adopted by nature, but adapting nature to themselves, they did so with the help of various manipulative skills — not isolated bodily movements, not instinctive reflexes, but the sequences of deliberate acts, series of procedures. It was the procedural knowing of skills and techniques (Greek techne) that empowered humans to impose their will on the environment.

Once the Bronze Age encouraged bending the world to one’s will, the shaman has lost his social authority — nature was no longer to be communicated with, it was to be manipulated, subjugated, enslaved — wild animals were to be enslaved as livestock, wild plants enslaved as crops — all with the help of procedural skills like cattle breeding and agriculture. In the Stone Age, hunters and foragers ‘walked with God’ because they viewed their environment as a provident gift to which they had to attend and adapt with due reverence. In the Bronze Age, herdsmen and farmers began to adapt the environment to themselves — manipulating nature with the aim of shaping ‘her’ into secure niches, to grind ‘her’ into conformity with man’s will.

A critical caveat is that ‘worlds of difference’ separate the natural instinct of self-preservation from the imposition of will. Granted, predator and prey have a brutal and painful relationship, but its brutality is nothing compared to the stale cruelty of excommunicating our prey from the natural ‘food chain’ of the wilderness and imprisoning them within an artificial ‘niche’ where their existence serves our purposes. No animal systematically and deliberately manipulates the lives of other animals with an intention to enslave them into subservience. Except humans. This coercion was not dictated by any instinct or natural necessity, it was unnatural because it was our choice, it was an exercise of will — and it is this arbitrariness that constitutes and implicates humans in the ‘original sin’. By excommunicating wild animals from their natural participation in the web of creation humans entered the path of disturbing the ecological equilibrium.

Whereas the Stone Age people who thought with the senses of their bodies were bound to accept the immediately present reality, bound to adapt to the material environment ‘here and now’, in the Bronze Age, people began to think in seasonal terms, to think in terms of ‘how can I sacrifice effort ‘here and now’ with an eye to make the future my debtor and harvest bountiful crops at the end of the year?’ As the old saying goes, ‘you reap what you sow’. Once we thwarted our gracious acceptance of the present environmental reality on its own terms, we heard something like this: ‘Cursed is the ground because of you; through painful toil you will eat food from it all the days of your life. It will produce thorns and thistles for you, and you will eat the plants of the field. By the sweat of your brow you will eat your food… ’ (Genesis 3:17–19).

Humans began to invest hard labour into the manipulation of their natural environment — cutting down forests and digging irrigation canals — so as to create artificial niches, pastures and arable land. Gradually, as humans were becoming dependent on the ploughed fields and domesticated livestock, as our nomadic ways gave way to the settled lifestyle, we started to think that our success is our creation, is the result of our free choices. This egomaniacal myth of self-made heroes who deserved what they have because they exercised their willpower, provided humans with a justification for a new kind of economy — one where we began to own land, cattle, and, soon enough, other humans.

Bronze Age humans managed to impose their will on nature with the knowledge of procedural skills, with the help of techne.

After the empowerment that the Bronze Age techniques gave them to successfully subjugate their main foe, nature, humans applied ‘Bronze’ logic to the other domains of life, they began to frame every problem as such that should be addressed with the problem-solving toolkit of the Bronze Age. As the saying goes, ‘if I carry a hammer, everything looks like a nail’. But the ‘Bronze’ framework turned out to be more toxic and contagious than humans might have predicted. As nature was becoming enslaved, the logic of enslavement overflowed into relations between humans. And as soon as it happened, the honourable place of nature as an existential threat to humanity was ‘stolen’ by fellow homo sapiens, by the ‘others’.

Since it was no longer nature on ‘whom’ survival depended but human willpower, the shaman’s task of worshipping nature became redundant. The chieftain (German Fuhrer) became the preeminent object of worship because, from now on, those began to be admired and emulated who were able to coerce their environment into subservience. And who is better at coercing than those who are in power? Accordingly, in almost all of the Bronze Age societies, their rulers, their pharaohs and emperors, come to be worshipped as divine because Bronze Age people cannot help but pray to those who have their will imposed, cannot help but idolise the ‘powers that be’.

The ‘feedback loop’ of hoarding privately owned property and accumulating power led to such an unprecedented degree of inequality that those on top of the dominance hierarchy came to be deified — smallfolk could not tell their rulers from gods because they thought in terms of power and success. As claims Sapolsky, ‘Humans committed themselves to a unique trajectory when we invented socioeconomic status. In terms of a caustic, scarring impact on minds and bodies, nothing in the history of animals being crappy to one another about status differences comes within light-years of our invention of poverty’ [Sapolsky, 2017].

Conclusions

In the Stone Age, the tribe’s self-preservation was the communal task of adaptation to nature. In the Bronze Age, with nature tamed, people’s self-preservation began to depend on their adaptation to the will of the ruler. Once the communal task of attunement to the truth was undermined by the fact that society became hostage to the whimsical and arbitrary choices of its ruler, human connection to reality as such was corrupted. Bronze Age societies began to suffer from the self-deceptive illusion of the ruler that he can achieve omnipotence and immortality, that his power makes him a god. And, from the Scriptural perspective, as soon as societies began to worship their own power, they began to ‘…sweep past like the wind and go on — guilty people, whose own strength is their god’ (Habakkuk 1:11).

The Bronze Age ‘educated’ people to exercise their willpower in an attempt to choose their way into socio-economic dominance, they were taught procedural knowledge of skills that empowered them to impose their will on the environment. Since people always aim to communicate with the most formidable power in their lives, once selection ceased to be natural, people began to communicate not with nature but with willpower. But how does one ‘communicate’ with willpower, with what by definition refuses to communicate? One does so by manipulating the social fabric, by flatter and bribery. As a result, the vices of sycophancy and corruption — leper’s bells of the Pagan mindset — continue to curse even our modern societies into repeating the patterns of life that should have been buried in our Bronze Age past.

Very Short Summary

This article curates Rowan Williams’ theology to fill in certain lacunae of John Vervaeke’s Relevance Realization framework and strengthen certain presuppositions of Hanzi Freinacht’s Political Metamodernism. Relevance Realization requires both closing upon what is relevant and opening up to the inexhaustible more-ness of revealed reality; it requires a sustained shift of perspective. Freinacht’s Metamodernism is premised on the idea that the development of society requires psychological growth of individuals that affords partaking in the more complex games that are based on the more non-zero-sum principles. Williams resolves both issues by using the idea that, at first glance, has nothing to do with neither: “We and God do not share the same space”.

Zero-sum games turn into non-zero-sum games when looked through a point of reference that renders the winning of the game less relevant than the way in which we play it. Transformation occurs when we are opened up to a perspective that includes the game “within itself” and allows us to see it for what it is: a mere puzzle in a bigger picture. This broadening of framing makes us go beyond a particular game and start playing the “meta game” with the aim of making the games we play better for everyone involved. The question is how to promulgate a sustainable conditions in which such opening up to a new perspective happens consistently and reliably.

Williams argues that in order to expand our framing we have to start from a point of reference that renders struggle for living space and scarce resources just vulgar precisely because it is a struggle for something that is scarce and finite. And that in order to make it viable in terms of construction of personal identity through social interaction, this point of reference has itself to be a person, a self, who has radically transcended the limits of the “conventional game” and showed the limit case of playing the “meta-game”, a game whose victory brings the reward that is beyond of the earthly realm, the reward that is abstracted all the way up to heaven. And it is this concept-narrative of the God who gives up space for creation that affords the ultimate broadening of perspective towards playing the games as if they were non-zero-sum and through this actually transforming them into such.

Rowan’s latest book Christ the Heart of Creation comes down to one point: God and the world do not occupy the same space. God is not another being added to the list of beings. Or, as Rowan himself puts it,

“God is not an item inside the universe” which is why “there can never be a simple contradiction between what is going on in the agency that we see in ourselves and around us and the agency of God”.

It means that there cannot be any competition between God and humanity, because “the difference between God and creation is utterly unlike the difference between you and me”. You and me are beings who can differ in all sorts of finite ways, including our position in space: if I take up this space, then you cannot. In this sense, our relations are exclusive because they presuppose competing for finite resources. Our relations with God, on the other hand, are not exclusive: my taking up this space does not preclude God from doing so, because the way in which God can be understood to take up space has nothing to do with ousting or supplanting, but everything to do with the the way in which an actor that takes up this space acts. God is not present in reality as something somewhere that we can put a finger on. God is present in how reality lays itself out for us.

All of it may sound like a wordplay, but it implies very particular consequences: Whenever there is a dynamics of religious normativity forced upon people, we ought to say at once that the proper theological understanding of God has been compromised; that a power-grab has occurred. If someone thinks that he can contain God in any kind of definition and then impose whatever his definition implies on others, then we are not talking about God anymore but are talking about something that has to do with power relations, with the fight for territory, a struggle for living place. Which is something that God, as properly understood, never engages in.

Granted, history (and actuality) of religion is full of power dynamics that compromise language about God, again and again. But Rowan Williams is adamant about overcoming this dynamics with the help of non-zero-sum thinking: “Just as Jesus is simply there for the world, so is the Church. It doesn’t have to compete with the world or conquer the world. It is here to be the presence of God’s compassion and God’s transformation.”

In essence, what can be said about God is that God is exactly the thing that transcends containment and relations of power in the first place. God is that by which the struggle for territory is overcome with, because God does not share any territory. God is the overcoming of space. And isn’t it exactly what love is? Love brings everything together, brings people closer to each other, gathers them in Church (Greek word for Church ecclesia means gathering). If I am allowed to paraphrase Williams, if there is a way out of the competitive struggle for status and space, it has something to do with creating a space between people that belongs to neither but can give room for everyone — “perhaps that is what faith finally has to offer in the world of walls and ditches and wires and border controls”.

So why does Williams feel necessity to argue this at first glance merely technical point? I believe that he is trying to set up a scene for answering a very interesting question:

How can unconditioned and unbounded love be realized in the world of conditions and boundaries? How can infinity express itself within the world in which everything is finite? How can a creator inhabit his work of art, his creation? How can God reveal god-self in a world that is utterly unlike God without undermining its contingency? Without upholding its freedom? That is, without changing its nature, its essence?

“When you look at anything in the world there is a set of things you might say which tell you what kind of thing it is,’’ says Williams, “and there is another set of things you say which tell you what this particular agent or subject is.”

For example, we might say that Jesus works with two hands, sees with pair of eyes, and speaks with his mouth. It tells us what kind of thing he is. He is a human being. And then, we can add that Jesus speaks only the truth, does not work in order to possess anything, and is willing to give his life for the sake of others. Now we are talking about what makes Jesus who he is, what makes Jesus Jesus. And it is this kind of speech that allows us to say that the act of being that makes Jesus Jesus is also what makes Jesus God.

“You need to talk, looking at the world, about the essence that makes a thing the kind of thing it is. And about whatever it is, that is mysteriously making up the sheer thisness, the uniqueness of this particular reality you are looking at.”

About “the active reality by which we are this rather than that” — about the act of being.

Williams is now going to make a point which I find to be almost impenetrable for a modern mind to come to terms with. Yet without understanding this point, any Christian contribution to the world will be vulnerable to truncation and corruption.

“What makes Jesus Jesus, this unique human person, is absolutely bound up with and inseparable from what makes God the Word, the second person of the Trinity, creative reality in which all things exist, be the Word. So what is this that makes the second person of the Trinity God in that way is exactly what makes Jesus Jesus, in the unique way he has of being Jesus.”

The gist of what Rowan is saying is this: the act of being that makes a particular human individual Jesus to be Jesus is the same act of being that makes the Word, the second person of the Trinity, to be the Word. And it is this analogy that reveals Jesus as God.

But what does this act of being looks like?

“what we are saying about the everlasting Word of God is that he or she or it eternally gazes, lovingly, into the depth of the Father, the source from which life arises.”

It is the act of being that returns without residue the gifts of its creator.

It is the way of being that accepts reality as it is, not as we’d like it to be, not as it suits us to be. As it really is — so as to say — in the eyes of God. It demands a constant refusing to possess things, to control the others, to take up space. And it implies, surprise surprise, a self-dispossession: to truly become who I am, I have to dispel the identification with everything that looks like it going to tell me who I am, including the deepest reaches of my soul. If I can feel it or think it or name it — it is not me. All that I am and all that is is a disclosure of gift. And the act of being that is being talked here is nothing less than a gratuitous praise for it. This is what makes Jesus Jesus — his termless willingness to give out the whole of his being — flesh and spirit — by being nailed on the cross.

“For Jesus, the supreme, defining reality in him is that capacity to look lovingly into the depth of the Divine source, Divine parent.”

Williams confesses that “that is in itself a very abstract set of ideas”, but goes on to explain how

“it does at least save us from the idea that at Christmas, what happened was that somebody living in heaven started living on earth, it saves us from the idea that in order to become human God as if were had to hang up his clothes at the door, it saves us from the idea that Jesus, in order to be Divine, could not have had real human freedom or real human feelings. In fact, it deals with rather a lot of complicated questions, though it requires a bit of intellectual legwork. But that’s what Thomas Aquinas is after. To affirm what we need to affirm about Jesus, we have to hold on to that idea of a Divine action which animates and finds expression in the unique human identity that is Jesus of Nazareth.”

Christian meditation implies freeing oneself from being identified by the things “that look like they are going to tell you who you are” but constructs an identification with the central principle of creation — with the locus of intelligibility and meaning — with the Word. In this sense, Christianity always stays personal, or at least returns to the personal level. It attempts not at the full-blown change of human nature in order for it to match some kind of utopian standard (which is what modernist project arguably waters down to), but at the certain kind of existence within the real boundaries of nature, at the certain act of being. It locates the full potential of the Divine status in the contingent living of a finite person. This theological consistency saves us from many awkward mistakes:

“we don’t need to ask what do you need to leave out of God in order for God to become human. And you don’t have to ask what do you have to leave out of the human nature of Jesus for Jesus to be Divine.”

Williams is pointing out how untroubled the writers of New Testament were with this kind of “co-living” of human and divine within Jesus. Take St Paul’s 1st Letter to Corinth:

“Paul cheerfully tells us, in the first couple of chapters, that Jesus Christ, the Anointed Jesus, is the power of God and the wisdom of God. And then, a few chapters later, Paul says that Jesus took bread and broke it and shared it, the night before he died. And Paul feels no obligation to make this strange transition easy for us. It doesn’t seem to worry Paul that somebody once sat at a table with his friends, tearing a bit of pita in two and passing it around, knowing the likelihood that the day after he would be executed, and calling that person “the outflowing of the divine nature, connected with God like steam rising from water.” Paul doesn’t seem to think that is difficult.”

Williams is at pains of showing us that accepting Jesus as God does not necessitate suspending of regular understanding of the world — nothing is “added to the world as we know it” — but affords an opening of the finite world to the expression of the infinite divine love. An opening that is not an exclusive event of revelation as photographed in the Gospel, but a perpetually accessible dimension in which the right ‘where’ marries the right ‘when’ — in which you are in the right place at the right time and with the right people — in the kingdom of heaven. For what’s it worth, St Augustine wrote that an embrace of the husband and wife is the foretaste of the kingdom of heaven.

The boundless love of God flows unhindered through the world, not in a way that incapacitated everything else in the world, but right through the lowest and most unexpected lacunae of human existence — it flows outward right through the mutilated and humiliated body, dying on the cross, without this body being somehow magically overcoming regular human condition by transforming into a kind of Ubermensch:

“Whatever you say about Jesus you have to say that nothing less than complete humanity is at work here.”

And, at the same time:

“Whatever you say about Jesus you have to say that nothing less than God is at work here…”

Because it is this usual human agency that is enough to serve as a ground for the expression of truly divine love. What is being said comes down to one insight: this very life that we live every day is the vessel of God’s disclosure to the world. By our, “all too human” act of being we can give expression to the infinite love that created everything in the first place.

“It is possible to be part of the created, finite world, and yet for the immeasurable, infinite, agency, energy of God, to be there in the heart of it all”, says Jesus of Nazareth is not only the presence of the power the Creator in the middle of the world; Jesus of Nazareth is the ideal creature, the ideal human being, allowing the Creator to make him what he is, to bring to absolute fulfillment and freedom what he is made to be. And so, we can begin to see that in him, in Jesus, Divine and human, creation finds its focus, its center, its climax.”

All this is safe and sound, isn’t it the case that as humans we have to take up physical space in the world? We are bodies, involved in causal and casual processes that take place on earth. We are not suspended above the earth in a kind of ethereal introspective or contemplative non-spin zone. We are thrown into the contingent processes of interaction, interrelation, interpenetration, and interplay. Isn’t it a wishful thinking to suggest that we can somehow have any kind of insight into what might be a way of being that is not of that kind that we as bodies are engaged in?

I think this is exactly what the incarnation of God is about. Granted , we are physical entities that do not have access to a world that is not bound to scarcity of time and territory: we always depend on the little time we have and on the struggle for living space that we endure. What Jesus opens up for us, however, is the way of being that in no way suspends these laws of physical causality that make being human what it is, but shows what kind of action this contingent human agency allows if the will behind it was solely the will that created reality in the first place — a will that is called God by those who dare to call it so. So this is it — we transform zero-sum games into non-zero-sum games by referring to a common ground that belongs to no one but gives room to all.

Jesus exemplifies a life that overcomes struggle for living space because he refuses to engage in it. Not in some nihilistic way that accepts the games we play or an idealistic way that denies it altogether, but in a way that breaks the frames of the oppressive games we are endulged in, in order to give birth to a transformed game that is closer to one where the ultimate “winners” are those who choose loving self-effacement for the sake of others instead of self-affirmation at their expense.

It think that if Williams was asked what is the main thing that he would like the readers to take from his book, it would be this: “a technique of transforming zero-sum games into non-zero-sun games”. This is what this whole “100% human, 100% God” business was all about — creating a space for co-creation without corrupt competition. “God and humanity in Jesus are, so to speak, a non-competitive pair… God is not out to diminish us or demean us… And for Jesus to live in that abundance of Divine life without conflict, rivalry — that as it were releases into the world a possibility of not regarding competition between human beings as the last word. There is something in human relationships beyond competition and the struggle for living space.” Williams offers three examples of applying this vision:

1. Body’s Grace. “If it is true that in Jesus there is an absolute, harmonious coming together, a coincidence of God and humanity without contradiction, then the truth is that it can never be right to think that God demands that we be less than human. If we were to think of a god who wanted us to be less than human, we’d be trying to think of a god who is actually in some way a bit jealous of us for being human. As if, our growth in being human was some sort of offense to God being God.” It can hardly be right, because “the New Testament very strongly gives us a picture that the whole purpose and narrative of creation is coming to expansion, joyful and glorious fulfillment because of Jesus. The more God is present in our midst, the more human we become. It can never be right to think that God wants us to be less than human, or less human.” God is not a threatening rival to us, and we are not a threatening rival to God. God does not want to amputate certain areas of being human. Rather, God’s vision for us is nothing less than actualise as much of our created potential as possible — otherwise, why bother to create it at all? We should not circumcise our humanity under the pretense of God being uncomfortable with it. It is the other way around: “To serve God is perfect freedom”. erotic satisfaction fully enjoyed is one of the most power- ful glimpses we can have of what union with God is like — a point entirely consonant with a great deal in the tradition of Christian contemplation. (Rowan Williams, page 56).
2. Ecology. “God has made us to be human. God has given us a unique particular role within creation. Within creation—not at a distance from creation, not floating six feet above creation, but within creation”, argues Williams. “The physical world we are part of is the world we depend on. That is part of being human. And the wellbeing of that physical world depends in some measure on us. There is in God’s creation a to-ing and fro-ing of gift. We as human beings have something to give to the wellbeing of the created order around us. It is what gives us life. We might say that we are reminded by this that our creation is a neighborhood. We live in a neighbourhood. We live in a dwelling place. This is what the word ecology refers us to. The balance, the interaction, the giving and receiving within creation — that is part of being human. If God is calling us to be fully human, if our full humanness is not something that prejudices or diminishes God, equally our full humanness does not deplete or demean the created order. And at a time of unprecedented crisis in the human relation to the material world it does rather help to know this. We belong in a neighbourhood whose shared good is significant for each and everyone of us, each and every aspect or part of the created world.”

The Christian reason for regarding ecology as a matter of justice, then, is that God’s self-sharing love is what animates every object and structure and situation in the world. Responses to the world that are unaware of this are neither truthful nor sustainable. To be aware of this is to enter into relationship, for the self-sharing love of God is not simply something we admire, but something in which we fully participate. We are not consumers of what God has made; we are in communion with it.

Rowan Williams offers

“a way of being human which by acknowledging our dependence on the Creator and our interdependence with creation, warns us against isolating our good, our projects, our purposes over against the rest of creation or the rest of humanity. It tells us that in discovering that we move further towards the freedom that God wants us to exercise. To exercise with the grain of his creative loving work. All focusing on this notion at the heart of everything: God and the world do not compete. God’s own act of being — what makes God to be God, and what particularly makes God to be God the Word, the Word in whom all things come into being — that that is fully, unequivocally at work in the living and dying and rising of a human being, a part of the created order in whom we see what each and every one of us as creatures may gradually grow towards.”

What can Metamodernists learn from Christian Theology?

I was driven to write this piece after contemplating some discussions about metamodernism and contemporary politics in general. I realised that the degree of how adamant the conservatives and semi-fascists are in their renunciation of metamodern thought depends on how rootless, toothless, and self-deprecating they perceive it to be. They see it as a continuation of the self-effacement of European civilization. They see it as a further divorce from the tradition and grounding of good old Europe. I don’t see value in concepts like that on their own, they are a set of symbols that bind people together in not the best way at all if we take into account the conditions of the global contemporary world. However, I think that they are right to be weary of the “soulless” political vision that uproots and dispels the grounding of the culture that gave rise to it in the first place. Let’s face it — metamodernism is not possible outside of the specific culture that was developed within the Western world. It seems that the conservatives and nationalists will get on board of the changes that need to happen in order to bring us closer to metamodern state of affairs only if this decision to get on board will be demanded by their Christian heritage. We cannot demand from our culture (and from us as its representatives) to pretend to be something else than it really is. Ours is a cult(ure) grounded in the example of self-effacement.

Postmodernity had this valuable insight that any kind of metaphysics serves as a justification of oppression — therefore it has to be deconstructed. But through this deconstruction we have effaced something that makes us human — the ability to break the frame of reference, to open up to a higher perspective, to see from above and use this vision to elucidate where to go. That is, to speak the language of transcendence — which is what doing metaphysics really is about. Metamodernism gives us an opportunity to reclaim the language of transcendence that is not totalitarian in a modernist sense. It provides a comprehensive socio-cultural vocabulary for, at first naively and cautiously, applying this metaphysical vision in the messy tranches of everyday talk and action.

What strikes me about Rowan Williams the most is not his thinking, but his character. The two are interrelated — he wouldn’t be able to cultivate a character of this kind without a proper underlying philosophy; yet character really strikes me the most. I would like to hypothesize that this kind of character stems from the intimate realization of a relationship with the uttermost ground of reality, a communication with the world as such — not depleted or structured or categorized in any way — as if world, in every its corner, had something to say. As if there is — despite any number of things that seem like utter nonsense and evil — an overarching theme to the world — and it is a theme of the overabundant love and intelligent design. There is something about reality that just cannot escape to be felt like it has meaning. And when the whole of reality is accepted as a gift, then the whole of it is also considered valuable, because gift presupposes a conscious and loving giver. This affords a metamorphosis of any game we play — no matter how convoluted — into a non-zero-sum game. It humbles us down to a path of unlimited horizons, but within the sane self-estimation. It grounds us in the tradition that places its own transformation at the top of its value hierarchy.

“This is flesh and blood” — says Rowan — “It’s not about exotic mysteries. It is about how God makes it possible for us to live a life that isn’t paralysed by guilt, aggression and pride. It asks us to come down to earth and face what’s wrong with us.”

If you allow me a very a very broad and straightforward simplification, I would suggest that modern project was concerned with creating a comprehensive and systematic ontology. It’s totalitarian stance towards control and knowledge led to a postmodern reaction — a nihilistic abandonment of any attempt of constructing an ontology. In this context, metamodern project lies in the work of creating something that points towards ontology, but without claiming of ever finding of the final scheme, of saying the “last words”. In this sense, metamodernist project is identical with the core of theology — its sensibility of cultivating the optimal conditions for the infinite to actualise itself, instead of building it with its own, limited abilities. To quote the text of the invitation of students to the New Trinitarian Ontology conference, “Modern ontology has often attempted to build a towering structure of being, but, by failing to secure its foundations, has tended to evacuate being into nothing in postmodern nihilism.” It continues with these words: “ontology cannot contain but rather points to God”. And, as a reader would of course recall, Van der Akker and Vermeulen allegorized the essence of metamodernism with an image of a rabbit who chases the carrot but never quite gets there, never reaches it. This “never quite gets there” is a point at which Christians might find themselves able to help.

What if there was a coincidence once? One coincidence between human life and what it means to be the loving God. An outflowing expression of the Divine in a particular life of a particular human individual? If that is the case — what would it be like? So what a Christian would want to say, I guess, is that Jesus of Nazareth is a likely candidate to be this expression. He loved unconditionally, he had taken upon himself all the evil deeds of others, he only spoke the truth, and was lifted up on a instrument of execution for divine parent to contemplate.

“God and creation do not occupy the same space”. This little insight gives birth to a pattern that transforms zero-sum games into non-zero-sum games. There is something to humanity that is more than just competition and struggle for space. And it is this something that opens up a possibility that is not known to nature or AI — a possibility of giving the whole of yourself to the other. Not for the sake of continuation of your genes in children or tribe as some animals instinctively do, and not through some brilliant sacrifice of a computer that would be paid-off in the, at first, very unlikely turn of events that it had calculated in advance. We are talking about this pure act of sacrifice despite of not knowing what it will bring into being. Hopefully, it will bring something that redeems what was lost. Something like resurrection. In the end, it is life that redeems death.

As John Vervaeke puts it, “the no-thing-ness of God takes into itself the nothingness of meaninglessness and overcomes it”. No-thing-ness of God has a transformative power over the nothingness of despair because it makes us dispel our idolatrous infatuations with “things in the world that look like as if they’re going to dictate us who we are” — to quote Williams for the last time — and, hence, has a power to transform us into the free agents of meaning making. In this sense, What makes theology viable is that it affords serious play with the cognitive machinery of aspiration, transformation, and transcendence. The reason why Atheism often looks transformative and freeing is because it denies the kind of god that is understood as a thing among other things. But this is exactly what the God of Christian theology is not.

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.

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

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

“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.”

So how exactly does Hanzi envision our infiltration into the tangled fabrics of society’s functioning? How to bring the change we so desperately need? Granted, we ourselves have to be this change, embody it to prototype further — but apart from that? Hanzi offers six new forms of politics, intricately vowen into one network. Six processes to check and balance one another — and one Master Pattern to rule them all.

Let’s recap how personal growth shapes societal progress:

“Psychological development of people through four dimensions (cognitive complexity, code, state and depth) largely determine their “effective value memes”, and achieving a higher average effective meme of the population is exceedingly important for the development of healthy postindustrial, transnational, digitised societies.”

Society changes one person at a time. We cannot direct its development without “a new political movement to put such psychological growth on the agenda.” That is, without political metamodernism:

These theories are metamodern because they synthesise the ideas of modern progress through successive stages with a postmodern, critical sensitivity towards modern society. They offer a direction and a roadmap without relying upon a naive, materialist, linear and mechanical faith in science, rationality and humanity. There’s no state of Lenin pointing us towards a glittering future… Rather, the metamodern view of progress takes as its point of departure the very failures, limitations and insufferable tragedies of modern life. It is born not from the glory of the modern project, but from its frailty and futility. And more; it is born not from the postmodern critique of modern society, but from the relative fruitlessness of that very critique.”

The frameworks that people use to address reality grudgingly become outdated.

“If you see that it’s not only modern society and its institutions that are futile, but that even the postmodern criticism of the same is equally so, you must also recognise that the postmodern “deconstruction” must be followed by a corresponding re-construction: We must create new visions and pathways towards a relative utopia. This is where political metamodernism enters the picture.”

1. Democratisation politics.

“Is the form of governance prevailing in the west today the most democratic there is ever going to be?”, asks Hanzi in the beginning of this section. His answer is “no”. Moreover, adds Hanzi, democracy is not a binary thing (society is not either democratic or not democratic). Rather, democracy itself is an instrument of becoming more and more democratic, which involves:

1. increasing dispersion of leadership;
2. increasing volume, complexity and efficiency of information processing;
3. increased accountability and balancing of powers, putting greater demands upon the verifiability of decision-making;
5. a deepening and thickening of de jure and de facto participation and popular support in processes of decision-making and opinion formation; and
6. the growth of democratic, egalitarian and multi-perspectival culture and values.

“If you like”, offers Hanzi, “you can see these five dimensions as a way of increasing the collective intelligence of a given society; a means to “deepen” democratic participation. In this regard, a deeper democracy is one that lets solutions of higher orders of complexity emerge and gain legitimacy, thereby allowing for more complex forms of society to exist and strive.”

Societies seem to have been progressing in this direction for some time now. There is no point in thinking that our current forms of politics, equilibrated around the attractor of liberal democracy is the last word. What we have is not the end game. Rather, it is always more prolific to consider contemporary situation as a medium point of history’s progress. In this sense, we never leave medieval times.

“There is simply no conceivable reason to believe our current forms of governance in modern democratic societies would be the only possible and best forms of governance for all posterity. If all other forms of governance have emerged in historical time, have had beginnings and endings, is it really a feasible supposition that liberal parliamentary democracy is an exception?”

Hanzi hypothesises that in order to promulgate democratisation we have to harmoniously advocate for the proliferation of the four fundamental tenets of democratic process: (1) direct democracy, (2) representative democracy, (3) participatory democracy, and (4) deliberative democracy.

“We start at the meso-level (a “triple-helix” of companies, local administrations, and universities) and then we use the increasing organisational and institutional leeway to gradually go back and forth between the micro- and macro- levels. Development starts at the middle and bounces its way up and down in increasing magnitude: from changing people’s ideas and habits, to changing national, transnational and supranational structures of governance. Democratic development oscillates.”

2. Gemeinschaft politics.

German sociologist Ferdinand Tönnies differentiated between Gesellschaft (formal societal structures addressed in the section on Democratisation) and Gemeinschaft (fellowship, intimate relationships within communities).

“We need to apply scientific knowledge to improve the quality of human relations, long terms, at all levels of society — just like Franklin D. Roosevelt said it. The value of social bonds and relationships is of course immeasurable. Yet, besides this value-in-itself, the quality of human relationships is a source of unimaginable wealth or poverty… There in today’s affluent societies are almost no real material or economic problems left — pretty much none of the fundamental problems of late modern society are due to a de facto lack of economic resources… The main source of society’s ailments is that people’s behaviors, psychologies and social relations don’t function properly. In late modern society, suffering is social rather than economic.”

I’m going to delve into this chapter at great depth because I think it is of utter importance in the context of my own work with these same issues and the metamodern clairvoyance of Rowan Williams who sees it as a loadstar of society’s development.

If you look at any of our problems a bit closer you’ll see how much it has to do with the damaged fabrics of interpersonal relationships.

Take climate:

“it is not difficult to see that a society in which people have less reason to feel insecure about their social status would also be one in which a more post-materialist culture could flourish and people could more easily make sustainable choices.”

Take poverty:

“the challenge isn’t really to feed and shelter the unemployed, but rather to provide them with social status, meaning, dignity, activities and a daily rythm — to prevent social decay.”

All these challenges to our wellbeing stem from defective

“human relationships, including: those between residents in local communities, cultural and sports activities and other forms of volunteering in civil society, how well community builders and local leaders are treated and supported, how class distinctions play out, relations between different ethnic groups, the integration of immigrants, relations at work, gender relations and sexual and romantic interplays, family relations, domestic conflict and violence, relations in school, how much loneliness there is, how much bullying there is, how much peer pressure there is, cross-generational relations, social safety nets for old age and disability, the quality and prevalence of friendships, acquaintance network relations, distributions of social capital and status, levels of interpersonal trust, levels of average interpersonal care and solidarity, the degree to which people are willing to help strangers, norms for treating one another in public spaces and in general, the level of kindness and understanding people show one another, how judgemental or forgiving we are towards each other, how people reject one another and handle norm-breakers and delinquents, how many grudges and perceived “enemies” we have, what resources there are for conflict resolution, which taboos we can’t talk about, how good we are at social perspective taking.”

We have been focused too much on which particular norms are valid or not, in place of focusing on how we impose any kinds of norms on each other in the first place: “how to handle norm-breakers and delinquents”, how to treat “one another in public spaces and in interactions at large.” Norms may be important, but the way in which we impose these norms on others is arguably not less important. But what can we do to inhance the situation? Just talking about it… helps, it actually does, for it at least brings the subject to awareness, makes it salient to us.

“In highly unequal societies governed by earlier emotional regimes, the norms are upheld through more brutal forms of penalties and rewards: ostracism, corporal punishment, ideas about going to heaven or hell, etc. In more equal and free societies, where the underlying emotional tensions are lessened, the norms are upheld with fines, definitions of psychiatric pathology, withheld social support, withheld recognition, subtle behavioural cues, ridicule and mockery, slander, etc.”

Your bad mood is a virus. Every time you interact with another person, you create an inprint in her psyche, your careless remarks and subtle signal do not exasperate with the end of the encounter, but swirl and cave in the basement of her mind forever, ready to be passed on to another unlucky host. We have to understand how important these baseline everyday interactions between people are. They are the context, the background atmosphere to everything we do. To tune them in the right way we need Gemeinschaft Politics. Hanzi offers four examples of what it might look like:

1. Measures to train emotional, social and collective intelligence: “training sessions in school to successfully read facial expressions and body language, guessing the hidden motivations of others, participating in games of perspective taking, training team formations and task delegation to compete against other groups in tasks of collective intelligence — and so forth.”
2. Organised community housing for families and the elderly: “elderly citizens could move to shared spaces that are safe for frail and weak bodies, letting families with children move into their houses rather than the seniors holding on to them, partaking in shared gardening projects, sharing some burdens of cooking, baby-sitting and so forth. There would be a facilitated framework for democratic decision-making and partly shared ownership — with relevant training offered to key people.”
3. Support for local citizen discussion clubs led by professional facilitators: “New arenas for public deliberation are needed and more people should be trained and equipped to become local leaders and facilitators of such meeting places… demand is huge for spaces in which people can be “general citizens” and speak their minds on current events and pressing topics and listen to the perspective of others.”
4. Making room for civil society projects in public spaces: “It is somehow taken for granted that most of the public spaces of a modern consumer society should be reserved for commercial activities. Busy shops in the center of town have long been considered the yardstick of a thriving community… People and organisations should be able to book public areas that are frequented by many fellow citizens and use them as meeting places and platforms for artistic, cultural or social ends.”

Let’s also address gender antagonism. There can be no stable and happy society in which the basic matrix of sexual/family relations is corrupted by bitterness, resentment, and disproportion.

“Erich Fromm once wrote that for society to prosper, we need not more distant intellect, but “men and women who are in love with life”. But to be in love with life, we must also successfully fall in love with one another.”

Granted,

“in liberal societies, we see that people in general can be viewed as interesting and attractive in a wider variety of ways than in the past. Scandinavian men are to a lesser degree held to macho ideals and standards of professional success than was earlier the case (and is still the case in most other societies) and have a wider range of positive masculinities available which can still be viewed as attractive. People can be gay, have metrosexual styles, be more childlike, more androgynous and so forth. People can hook up around weirder fetishes than before. And people can form a wider variety of love relationships and family constellations.”

But there is still a lot of misery and suffering going on connected to the relations between genders. Hanzi gives us one example:

“So if a girl has a bad dad (who because of his insecurities treats her and her mother poorly), and then gets a lousy boyfriend who just uses her for sex (because he wasn’t really in love with her, just really pressured to get rid of his stigmatised virginity and desperate to gain sexual experience and she was all eh could catch), then she’s quite likely to not like men in general very much. And then she’ll reject approaching guys at bars very contemptuously, cold and blank behind her smile, hence feeding into the bitterness of these trembling souls who had been trying to work up the courage to go and talk to someone like her for over a year…”

Almost everything that was mentioned in this example could have been the subject of conscious amelioration on the societal, communal, and personal levels:

“The level of gender antagonism can be reduced only by changing the games of everyday life, by developing people’s abilities to give themselves and one another what they need. If our anti-heroine above met a really sweet guy, who deeply satisfied her needs, after a few years perhaps her shields might go down and she might feel less bitter about men. And then she will stop feeding into this slugfest of resentment between the sexes. Or imagine if the first guy would have been much better trained at seducing women, so that he wouldn’t have had to “settle” for her, because he wasn’t in a scarcity mindset about sexual validation, and if he were less pressured to get sexual experience at any cost.”

All of this reminds of the type of discussions one might sometimes have within one’s family, talks about something that was always determining the flow of events, but always resisted being brough up into articulated awareness. These hyper-conscious deliberations are the core of what it means to be “meta” — no matter how awkward these surfaced subterrean strats can make us feel under the scrutiny of mindful dialogue, there is no coming back. There is this idea in Christianity that after Adam and Eve were exiled from the paradise of Eden by via becaming conscious and self-aware, there was no coming back through becoming unconscious again, rather, the new paradise — heavenly Jerusalem — was now reachable only through becoming more and more conscious:

“Can we really afford to keep this issue outside of politics, outside the ongoing discussing about conscious self-organisation of society? We must, as society, cultivate higher likelihoods for better relationships, developing people’s sexual faculties and reducing gender antagonism.”

3. Existential politics.

There can be no politics without the underlying overarching narrative about reality, “some kind of religion” in broad terms.

“What’s rational to do is simply senseless to ask without first having established what’s beautiful and just. And in turn, what’s beautiful and just depends on our narratives about the world, which in turn result of how we relate to existence as such”.

We can talk about what is rational to do in relationship to certain goals, but these goals themselves cannot be defended through rational argument. Means can be rational or irrational, but goals we pursue can be what Hanzi calls “trans-rational”:

“We pursue shallow life goals, because we get stuck on relatively simple and basic inner needs that still “have us by the balls” [needs to maintain self-image in eyes of others, etc.]. The goals our actions are themselves “innefective” (transrationally speaking), our motivations and drives hardly conductive to sustainable human flourishing, development, love and lasting happiness.

What systems of knowledge, what wisdom traditions would help us to ground our goals in their transrational ethos?

“A metamodern politics would need to reintegrate key aspects of all the former value memes, which means that even some aspects of post-faustian society and its traditional religions should be re-examined and judiciously reinvented.”

This is the sentence I was fishing for: “some aspects of post-faustian society and its traditional religions should be re-examined and judiciously reinvented”. This is precisely what I’m trying to do in my own work where I revisit eastern orthodox Christianity to find what it might offer to this growing field of wisdom-cultivating practices.

We need these practices at the core of our societies if we want our societies because collective integrity is always grounded in the integrity of the individual. And because inner worlds matter:

“Just as every society reproduces its murder and suicide rates with frightening precision from year to year — so must every society have a specific number of shattered dreams, a number of broken hearts, a percentage of lifetime spent in subtle self-doubt, a number of crises successfully passed (or not), a number of psychological stage transitions that occur harmoniously or in wretching agony.”

And this is what I would like to point out — aren’t these two sets of statistics correlate? Doesn’t a shattered dream often lead to a suicide? So isn’t it our duty to non-linearly save millions of bodies by preemptively saving millions of souls?

Secular monasteries.

John Vervaeke often laments that modern society doesn’t have an institution where people can apply for wisdom. We have schools for eduction, academia for science, entertainment industry for pleasure. But where do we turn for wisdom? We used to have monasteries for that, but the protestant countries decided that they’re better off without them. And since these countries were and still are at the vanguarde of west’s development, this societal structure bereft of monastic routine became the norm even in the Catholic countries which nominally still have monasteries. In one of his lectures Vervaeke brilliantly demonstrates how Lutheran narcissistic individualism miltiplied by the doctrine of undeserved grace trumped any notion of spiritual work, striving, excersice, metanoia, development, and led to the abandonment of monastic institutions and the birth of modern society.

If modern society has, as Foucault argued, been marked by “the birth of the clinic”, Metamodern society must usher in

“the rebirth of the monastery”, echoing and carefully recycling some of the finest aspects of medieval society… The purpose of metamodern monasteries would be to offer all citizens necessary periods of seclusion (and/or community) and concentrated honing of inner skills, such as healing from trauma, making crucial life-decisions or transitions, learning new life philosophies, practicing meditation and taking care of the body, forgiving people who hurt us, sorting out ethical dilemmas, and other transformational practices. All of these services should be backed up on a collective level so that people are guaranteed a year off from work and be guaranteed a basic livelihood during this period.”

Today’s global problems can become “solvable” only through the global awareness that includes many previously “othered” perspectives. The ailments of modern world can only be treated if we grow into the adults whose level of inclusion surpasses family/nation/and race identities and broadens to include queer/animal/and ecological perspectives. We are after the full-blown adultisation of society, as argued by Alexander Bard:

“If we are to turn the tide of spiritual poverty and alienation inherent to modern life, we must begin to nourish the souls of millions. Only then can we develop a metamodern society, a society that takes its own development — interior and exterior — into its own hands. If there is one thing that characterises the emerging meta-ideology I call the Nordic Ideology, it is this: a systematic and deliberate nourishing of the human soul throughout the life course; a clarion call for adult development.”

As potential adults, children would be better off if they begin self-cultivation early on. Real adult development begins before one can walk:

“All children can and should be offered therapeutic talks with a trusted adult professional throughout their years in school... So basically, it should be a long-term goal to train everybody in contemplation, self-observation and meditation, starting from early childhood when our brains are especially malleable. If we transform not only the content of people’s minds and the nature of our human relations, but the very base structure of how our brains function, we transform society.”

What are we after here? Integrity.

“Integrity is a measure of how and to what extent the different parts of your psyche — be it thoughts, beliefs, emotions, habits, reflexes, assumptions, perceptions, evaluations, intentions, motives, or identities — contradict and undermine each other, and/or how well they reinforce and strengthen one another. Integrity is the measure of how well your psyche is integrated.”

Integrity, wholeness, chastity and oneness versus fragmentation, disparity, and separation; god vs devil. It is Jung’s individuation process; it is every religion’s call for unity. Same goes for us, regular human beings — with all due respect to polytheist traditions, our personalities function properly when they are united under the auspicies of “One God”, not when its divergent subpersonalities serve different power-hungry principalities.

It may seem ubiquitous and irrelevant to a regular reader, but you know what is also ubiquitous? The most terrifying crimes committed against humanity. Evil is banal, as argued Hannah Arendt:

“most evil acts could often be understood by studying surprisingly banal processes, actions and events.

It all starts from small things. “If we are to belief her”, says Hanzi,

we should also see that the forces of good, of human integrity, solidarity and reason, are equally banal. The banality, if you will, of virtue”.

But personal identity cannot exist separately. It stacks up to cultivate the transpersonal integrity, which

“builds upon not only how well the different parts of our inner selves are integrated, but how well all of us jive with one another, and how well all of us jive with society around us… We’ll never have a harmonious, kind and functional society without extensive inner work being done by many or most of us on a regular basis. And this is where the neo-monastic institutions would be of help: At major transit stations and periods of crisis in life, people would be supported to do the hard work that inner integration requires.”

The point is not to transcend the ego once and for all — for eveybody:

“we can’t just “get rid of the ego” and be done with it. Everybody needs to have a sense of self and maintain a reasonably positive self-image to feel okay as they go about their day. But we are staring at a very crucial correlation here, one that is possibly instrumental to the very survival of our civilisation: the average underlying fear of death in society is proportional to the identification with the ego, refusing to stiff procession to the grave. The identification with the ego is proportional to our tendency to identify with certain moral and political conclusions, which curtails any attempts to challenge these notions. Forms of inner work that let us deal with the fear of death and help us to disidentify with the ego, such as serious meditation practices, will — on average, over time and as a collective — help us maintatin a more functional and sane discourse in which people more honestly seek to know the truth… The point is not to “transcend the ego” so that we “can all see the truth”. That would be silly. The point is that society — and its members — can be more or less emotionally and existentially mature, more or less invested in identities, political or otherwise.”

“Even as these things are indeed often based on lies, even if they are conceited and steeped in falsehood — they are still the greates values of existence: the true, the good and the beautiful. Due to our collective existential immaturity, however, we perpetuate a situation in which people’s strivings for these noble ends cannot be trusted.”

“That’s the ultimate goal of the Existential Politics: to see that ego identification can be rolled back, that fear of death can be eased at the deepest level. Thus the genuine striving for the good, the true and the beautiful can be unleashed in our lives and beyond — to see that truth and idealism can be sought with the metamodern rebel wisdom we have called informed naivety.”

And much like Nordic and German Bildung centers,

“A neo-monastic institution, offering its support to the wider population, should of course also be linked to activities such as criminal rehabilitation, psychiatry, social work, palliative care… to education, where the opportunities for psychological and existential support should not only be a background structure as it is today, but a central and prioritised feature of life in schools and universities. Not to mention healthcare more generally; most present-day healthcare systems are bogged down with people seeking medical attention when they in fact have social, emotional and existential problems — as any general practitioner can attest to.”

4. Emancipation Politics.

a) as society’s complexity increases,
b) this also creates pressures to increase the reach and density of governance,
c) and this creates new sources of oppression (both the increased complexity of society at large and the new layers of governance),
d) and this creates an increased need to expand negative human rights and freedoms, i.e. the right not to be subjected to a host of new oppressions,
e) and as these new negative rights must be of a subtler and more abstract nature, they will be harder to define, defend and make sound and socially sustainable,
f) which thus makes necessary an ongoing political process (Emancipation Politics) through which information is gathered, rights and obligations are perpetually discussed and tested, and new institutions are created in order to defend people against new forms of oppression.

“The idea of Emancipation Politics is to create a permanent framework for society’s ongoing debate and dialogue about freedom and oppression: If new forms of oppression emerge, in whatever subtle or obvious guise, there should be a forum for bringing this to the public eye and a framework within which new solutions and responses can be discussed and devised.”

“what about the vague but real threat of Islamist extremist terrorists, or the right not to have our “free will” manipulated by technocrats and special interests, or the right not to be brought into social situations in which we are “out-depthed” and feel utterly confused and horrified as a result, or the right not to be subtly held back by narrow-minded definitions of the societal system, or the right to not have our attention span invided by a thousand addictive smartphone apps and commercials?”

Hanzi lists four main dimensions of oppression:

1. External state and/or market structures;
2. Limits of everyday life interactions, the cultural forms of oppression: “if you are of a lower effective value meme than most of society and you are pressured to take on a straightjacket of morality requiring an inner depth and cognitive complexity that you simply lack, this feels like oppression. You try to be a good person, but even if you try your best, people keep attacking and degrading you for being shallow and evil, and you never quite see it coming. In such cases, you are being culturally oppressed. Higher value memes can be oppressed by lower ones as well, like when the Nazis went after “degenerate art” or when today’s speciesist society penalises people who don’t think we should torture two-year-old toddlers to death (vegans being against factory farming)”;
3. Other people and their behaviors more directly standing in your way: “Ideally “your freedom should end where mine begins”, but in actual social reality, people and their lives are always layered in social relations: parents have power over their kids, larger family groups over single persons, bosses over employees, teachers over pupils, bossy and manipulative peers over peers. Your freedom doesn’t start at my outer border, but at the center of my heart”;
4. Our own inner oppression of ourselves: “freedom is always dependent upon us having sufficient skills and faculties to act freely and make use of what resources we have for the benefit of ourselves and others. For instance, if you cannot recognise what emotions and deeper motives arise within ourselves, we will be slaves to motives that lie beyond our conscious awareness — often being stuff such as greed, envy, power hunger, or an unreasonable sense of insecurity. This last category links us right back to Existential Politics: Obviously, there is an intrinsic connection between our relationship to existence and the deeper freedom in our lives.”

5. Empirical Politics.

“Science itself doesn’t point us towards appealing to human rationality as the best means for transitioning to sustainability. Within disciplines such such as environmental psychology and behavioral economics, it is becoming abundantly clear that emotional and personal development evolves our values, habits and goals in terms of sustainability. Consequently, science itself seems to point us beyond “rationality”, and towards a meta-rationality that includes our emotions, relations and narratives. A scientific society would not only change our minds, but also our hearts… We are far, far away from a truly scientific society. We are medieval.”

Always medieval, as I have put it in a previous part of the review. Or, rather, metadieval, because one thing differentiates us from the medievals: We are at least becoming conscious of our perpetual predicament.

Hanzi is also very kind to offer us the ten tenets of what this “Ministry of Truth” would do:

1. evaluate, survey, rate and publicise the degree of evidence-based practive in all areas of public sector work and civil service;
2. aim to improve the quality, relevance and reliability of science, throughout all bracnhes;
3. cultivate and develop the critical meta-discussion about science and its role in society (we should make certain that science as a whole and our “politics of science” are properly critiqued from as many and systematic angles as possible);
4. increase the number of networked contacts adn exchanges between the scientific fields (interdisciplinarity);
5. increase the average ability for critical thinking and logical reasoning in the general population;
6. found crosschecking media institutes;
7. support a co-developmental political structure (we need our political culture and debate to take on more civil and respectful forms);
8. support the development of popular culture in an empirically correct direction (whereas the arts must always remain free, it should be noted that blockbuster movies and popular outlets play a crucial role in forming people’s background understanding of reality… Efforts should ebe made to proliferate more factually correct stories);
9. develop the precision and reliability of everyday language;
10. support the “ontological security” of the population (Ontological security is a term coined by the sociologist Anthony Giddens, and usually refers to “the sense of order and continuity in regard to an individual’s experience”… Our commitment to truth and our ability to challenge our own opinions and conceptions depend upon how safe we all fundamentally feel in the universe. By strengthening this sense of security, we serve truth-in-society at its most essential level. Which links us back to Existential Politics).

“In metamodern society, “truth is God” (Gandhi said it). The point is not to obsess about “hard, rational empiricism!” with those strict eyebrows of a narrow-minded modernist, or to reduce the richness of life and existence to hard, crunchy data and chew it like a jawbreaker until the end of days… The point is to gradually increase society’s capacity for information processing and event prediction by developing our collective capacity for intersubjective crosschecking.”

6. Politics of Theory.

Hanzi begins this chapter with being radically honest:

“The basic idea of Politics of Theory (or “of Narrative”) is to monitor, steer and regulate the fundamental “theory of everything” that people subscribe to; our shared narrative or worldview. Straight talk: It’s the politics of massive population brainwashing.”

It is as if Hanzi is saying Hey, dear children. It is a cliché to say that I was just like you. But I mean really. Look around. I am sitting nearby — that guy you notice the least, sometimes you smile at him but he’s too shy to retaliate. That’s me. «Hi!» I returned to teach you a lesson or two about how the world operates. To brainwash you, to infect you with a certain kind of ideology and philosophy. Because that’s what you actually need to live a happy life, have family, have children, see dreams come true.

“All societies more or less brainwash their citizens into a certain story (or set of competing stories) about reality, society, humanity and life. We are all socialised into a certain identity, ideology and ontology — ideas about our “self” and our place in the universe, about what’s right and wrong, and about what’s really real in the first place.”

“The modern conception of a historical development towards higher levels of individual autonomy in thinking (they used to tell people to believe in Jesus, but now we’re free to believe what we want) is manifestly wrong… The modern project and its reach for freedom is undergirded by a corresponding growth of intimate mechanisms of control, mechanisms through which minds, bodies and behaviors are controlled and coordinated to an unprecedented degree. The most obvious of these mechanisms is schooling…

So the question, then, is not “should we have massive and extensive brainwashing of millions?” — we already do, and we probably must: Modern society relies upon an educational system, and all societies rely upon shared narratievs and intricate coordination of people’s perspectives and streams-of-action. Rather, the question is, “should this underlying theory of everything be brought under continuous, explicit, democratic scrutiny, or should it remain beyond our reach in terms of democratic governance”?

“Modern society and its project of enlightenment and progress uses science and economic growth to reshape nature in accordance with the inner projections of the human mind — but it does not see its own culture and fundamental worldview as subject to change. It doesn’t recognise that not only does our knowledge of the world evolve, but so does our perspective of our knowledge of the world… The postmodern critique of the modern world revealed that underlying patterns of thought and ideas governing the lives of people can be questioned, analysed, deconstructed, unveiled. It led intellectuals to question the universality of the modern project in its entirety. Metamodern society takes that fundamental code, our very own perspectives, into its own hands, and shapes it, just as it shapes nature; metamodernism is the historical point when society becomes conscious of itself.”

“To the modern mind, nature is the object, the “great it” and culture is the subject, the “great me” who acts upon a silent cosmos. To the metamodern mind, culture and nature are both part of the object, whereas the subject is the transpersonal developmental process itself.”

The great process of Logos incarnated by Jesus of Nazareth, who mediates between Great Mother Mary on earth and Great Father who is in heaven, if you’re into symbolic theology.

With the new technology advancing with an unprecedented pace, “we will be able to create new life and new conscious experience: extremely high and extremely low inner states. If anything goes wrong, we can all but literally create hell.” After all, I think that only one episode of the Black Mirror series has a real happy ending. You get the picture.

“Under the current historical conditions, we have democratic institutions; rights and liberties that enshrine a somewhat free and fair “market of ideas”, even if distortions and manipulations necessarily occur. What we don’t have is a proper set of institutions with the explicit goal of monitoring and steering the worldviews of the population… The brainwashing should be domocratically up for grabs by all contenders, and all political actors will need to specify which worldview they would like to spread and why — which means all worldviews become subject to greater self-scrutiny.”

In a very non-linear way, we will have vindicated Plato’s old adage “until philosophers become kings”:

“There will be no end to the troubles of states, or of humanity itself, till philosophers become kings in this world, or till those we now call kings and rulers really and truly become philosophers, and political power and philosophy thus come into the same hands” (Plato, the Republic, book 5).

Example: Big History in Schools

“as part of nation-building effort, school curriculums came to focus more on the histories of the nation and the state. And as societies democratised, past struggles for political emancipation and victories over authoritarian dictatorships were highlighted in these national narratives so that pupils would become good, democratic citizens. Such nation-state centered narratives still remain dominant in most schools today. But despite its many merits, this kind of history teaching has increasingly begun to be at odds with the interests of our emerging global civilisation. It fails to emphasise the truly global aspects of societal and technological development; it overemphasises the role of states and ethnicities in our present era; and it provides too limited understanding of the interactions between humans and the rest of the biosphere.”

Postmodern approach to history which focuses on divergent themes that were left out is “arguable more in tune with the multicultural societies of today’s post-colonial, global world, but it still suffers from a number of inadequacies: it’s overly preoccupied with details and smaller histories, more concenrned with picking apart established conceptions than creating new ones, and it offers little help to navigate a hypercomplex, ever more technologically advanced and increasingly interconnected global civilisation on the brink of ecological collapse”. It leaves us with “history in pieces”.

“But without any meta-narratives, what we are left with is a fragmented and parochial view of history, too absorbed in details and devoid of any attempts at fitting them together into a greater, coherent worldview, in effect rendering history lessons into a random presentation of “one-damned-things-after-another”, to quote the historian Arnold Toynbee — which makes it different to explain why anyone should bother studying history at all.”

“we must accept the postmodern critique, namely that we will never obtain the truth in any absolute meaning of the term. The quest for truth can only be stated in provisional, playful terms: only a Proto-Synthesis is possible.”

“despite all our modern knowledge and reasoning, we still seem utterly incapable of eradicating the poorly composed myths that each of us spontaneously constructs nevertheless. So why not deliberately create a better myth and have it out in the open so that we can criticise it and improve upon it?”

“If there were a ministry of Theory”, says Hanzi, it should gather expertise within:

1. Weltanschauung (worldviewing);
2. Study of value memes (people tend to stabilise their worldview and values around certain discernable equilibria I call “value memes”, which depend upon both social and psychological factors, which can be studied as large patterns or “metamemes” (modernity, postmodernity, metamodernity));
3. Social constructionism (as described by Peter L. Berger and Thomas Luckmann in 1966);
4. Mythologies and archetypes (Carl G. Jung, Erich Neumann);
5. Narrative analysis;
6. Discourse analysis (based upon the tradition of M. Foucault);
7. Hermeneutics and the hermeneutic circle;
8. Ethnomethodology (invented by Harold Garfinkel);
9. Imaginaries (a concept coined by the Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor);
10. Studies of cultural values (such as the World Values Survey or Hofstede’s studies of the organisational culture in different countries).

“There are already lots of useful methods for studying “theories of reality” prevalent in society; we just need to start doing it at scale, in a more coordinated fashion and link it to the world of politics and democratic governance.”

In the end of the chapter on Politics of Theory, in a characteristically metamodern both/and fashion, Hanzi urges us to be “ironically sincere” when “proto-synthesising” our “meta-narratives”.

“Six form of politics. Six new processes. Now let’s take a look at how all of this fits together”.

The Master Pattern

“When you go ahead to introduce political metamodernism, others will try to pin the failures of any of the micro-movements onto you. Don’t let them distract you… Play strategically to align all these forces with the emergence of a metamodern society”

There are many partly-metamodern micro-movements that emerge in the world already, preparing the ground for holistic political metamodernism:

1. Existential Politics: “ little political parties and civil society groups who seek to radicalise democratic governance. Wikipedia counts 38 of them worldwide… Sweden has three”;
2. Gemeinschaft Politics: “is prevalent among many volunteering-based groups of civil society — and some professionals within public social work — who work to create “meeting places”, “melting pots” for the cultural integration of immigrants, dialogue clubs for common issues, fora for dealing with cultural traumas and so forth”;
3. Democratisation politics: “in rudimentary form exists within a lot of spiritual circles… you have movements like Syntheism, and to some extent the Burning Man Festival community, which seek to explore and co-create new forms of spirituality and existential development”;
4. Emancipation politics: “pirate parties… Silicon valley people who share libertarian ethos” and postmodern critical theorists;
5. Empirical politics: “shows up amongst all those science and “evidence based politics” parties”;
6. Politics of Theory: “you can find it in networks and think tanks which have as their explicit goal to change the metanarrative of society. Metamoderna, Ekskäret Foundation in Sweden (they have a private island where they gather people to talk about the future of society) and Perspectiva in the UK (they, especially the chess Grand Master Jonathan Rowson, write about spirituality and personal development connected to e.g. climate crisis)”

But “each of the six new forms of politics is, taken by themselves, deeply harmful and destructive… We need to develop society across all of these semiotic relations if it is to function at a new and more complex stage”

Let’s consider Politics of Theory, the most complex and profound of the metamodern political processes. It must “be coordinated with the real, embodied communities that exist in society (Gemeinschaft) and be held in check by verifiable factual claims (Empirical), and any attempt to force perspectives down people’s throats must be challenged and counteracted (Emancipation), and it must be reconnected to a transparent democratic process (Democratisation), and whatever narratives and value memes are strengthened through this process must be matched by the inner development of the population (Existential). It needs all five other processes up and running in order to emerge in a functional, healthy way.”

“These are six different forces that, to a significant extent, work against each other! Emancipation politics is out to get Gemeinschaft Politics, and Existential Politics is out to get Empirical Politics and vice versa… The master pattern is not brought to life through one harmonising totalising “plan”, but through a number of processes pushing against each other, refining, challenging and defeating each other.”

1. Existential Politics develops the relationship of me to myself, my subjective inner world, the relationship between 1st person and 1st person. It offers metanoïa.
2. Gemeinschaft Politics develops the relationship between us and us, between people in general, relating to another as a “you”, in 2nd person. It offers metaxy (and also metaphor);
3. Democratisation politics develops the relationship of the single “me” to society, to all other people, empowering my participation and so forth. It offers metastasis (reforming forms, structure of governance);
4. Emancipation politics develops the relation of society to me, of how I have right to be treated or not treated by society as a whole, by all of you. It offers metaplay (being exempt from whatever the stucture that suffocates you and being offered a different set of games to play);
5. Empirical politics puts 3rd person constraints upon what forms of relations can be had between self and society (all the four above relations between 1st and 2nd person); it is thus the relationship between 3rd person reality and the self/society relation. It offers metacognition (applying scientific scrutiny to scrutinise applying scientific scrutiny and so on);
6. Politics of Theory develops the relationship fo self/society to reality as a whole, i.e. to reality in 3rd person. It is thus the relationship of all the first four processes (1st and 2nd person) to a commonly constructed 3rd person view. It offers metaphysics.

Again, how to enkindle these processes in a given society and the world at large? Hanzi deposits two main agents of change: 1. the metamodern aristocracy and 2. the process-oriented party.

“The process oriented party focuses primarily on the political process and on keeping very high standards of behavior. That doesn’t win mass votes and quick landslide elections, but it makes it become the most trusted and respected of all parties — or, seen differently, the least hated by all other positions on the spectrum. It does not maximise quantitative success (number of votes), but becomes part and parcel of the most central nodes of society — respected by public actors, industries and civil society.

“Some of the Green, centrist and leftwing parties will steal your [Democratisation Politics] ideas and find their own twist on them, which is fine.” Same for Gemeinschaft Politics, with its aspects stolen by “social democrats, center-right conservatives or even nationalists who seek to revive obsolete forms of social integration”. Then you introduce Existential Politics only to see it recycled by “Christian democrats or equivalents, making it their hallmark.” But that is fine.

“Other parties will steal not only your policies, but also your co-developmental party structures, and hence their political culture will shift and collective intelligence of governance will increase across the board… There’s an attractor point here; a bunch of interrelated processes that potentially reinforce and resonate with each other in a new way, a way that is different from modern society.

Political metamodernism has the shortest average distance to all other positions. It is closer to socialism than the conservatives, closer to conservatism than the ecologists, closer to ecologism than the libertarians, closer to liberalism than the center and vice versa. It is not the most popular of positions, but it is the least hated. It is thus, in a sense, the opposite of cheap-scoring populism — and yet it can approach and deal with populism more easily than does conventional centrism and liberalism. Populism sounds exciting but is boring in terms of its potentials. Co-developmental politics sounds boring, even goes out of its way to look harmless, but it is truly radical and transformative.”

If the previous academic works on ‘metamodernism’ (Vermeulen, Van der Akker, Gibbons) were apt in pointing out the real shifts in feelings and expectations of the artists, and if some other people who played with the term (Seth Abramson, Luke Turner) were capable of voicing relevant implications, precepts, and ‘rules’ of metamodern worldview, it is only within a framework developed by Hanzi Freinacht that these many different lines are synchronised to make real applied sense. Why? Partly because he finds the language for unclothing the new subtle problems posed by modernity, problems that previously no one dared to recognise as such.

In a certain sense, we all knew that Scandinavian societies were getting something very right in terms of political, cultural, and economic development. But these countries lacked an articulated philosophy that could explain where exactly are they heading to. Their development was unfolding as it is, on a hunch, without a conscious plan or framework. We were told that it had something to do with interpersonal trust and trust in the institutions, cold climate that made warm bodies come closer together, and so on, but that’s a feeble explanation. All of this changed with the appearance of Hanzi Freinacht’s “Listening Society” and works of certain other northern thinkers like Lene Anderson and Tomas Bjorkman (“Nordic Secret”), Jonathan Rowson, Brent Cooper, whose developmental narratives had placed otherwise divergent fragments in their proper context.

Hanzi Freinacht is a broad and deep thinker. Nothing is left out from his books as he uses ‘metamodern’ lenses to address the full spectrum of our impending problems. I think there is a pattern to what he is doing in this book. Rowan Williams once said that the task of life is to encounter the uninvited in such a way as to make it invited. Coming from the most progressive place on Earth, Sweden, Hanzi is paying close attention to where we are going as humanity. He elucidates the directions in which progress takes us as to make them visible, trusted, and… “invited”.

Then he looks at the processes that make this progress happen. What are they precisely? As a society, we have accumulated an instituted political apparatus to handle some of them. But many remain outside the confines of our scrutiny. Hanzi merely points out — look, we are doing it anyway, but without conscious control and directionality. Now it is time to become aware and take responsibility for its unfolding.

In a way, Hanzi takes these awkward and uncanny and controversial themes and says “look — we have to grow up. We have to become adults who are ready to speak seriously and officially about the things that were until now floating on the margins of formal political process, thus poisoning and polarising the discourse, for there were no adults in the room to address them properly.” We have kind of left these processes in the hands of fate, instead of doing what Hanzi is doing. That is to say — if we partake in them whether we want it or not, then why not partake in them in all conscious seriousness? It reminds one of how a parent might bring children together to talk with them about how sexuality works. It is an awkward thing to discuss, granted, but it is worth it.

“The point is that these processes are ongoing in our societies either way, whether or not we have a language to describe them and political frameworks to relate to them. As these processes become consciously recognised and re-organised, we increase our ability to create a free and fair society — a great potential, but no promises made.”

It is a good idea, says Hanzi, “to have ministries of finance, and likewise it is a good idea to have a deliberately crafted politics of democratisation. The existence of these kinds of politics does not in themselves, of course, guarantee good politics within each field. It merely opens a host of potentials.” Hanzi stipulates that order, freedom, equality and norms stabilise around certain attractor points.

“An attractor is a pattern or equilibrium that under certain conditions is very likely to emerge and stabilise within a dynamical system, such as society.”

It strikes many people as intuitively apparent that Freinacht is able to get a comprehensive majority of the so-called attractors right. The questions that are going to be formulated within the framework of metamodern politics are the questions that are akin to these ones:

“is there an attractor that comes after, and goes beyond, modern market-liberal democracy?”

“what structures are most likely to survive and outcompete other structure under the currently emerging historical circumstances?”

Hanzi illuminates and elucidates the prospective political goals of our and future generations. In terms of development — his is a forecast of where it leads further. It is a sort of utopia that just delineates the trends and attractors that already point to a direction unaddressed, unreached, and unavailable within the postmodern ethical grammar. Which is — the personal development of human beings. For Foucault (except late Foucault) what was above the ‘line’ of non-violence and non-subjugation was only a subject to deconstruction because it is so often used as an excuse and reason for violence and subjugation of those who fall below the above mentioned ‘line’. But to truly reach new heights of interpersonal attunement we have to cautiously return to the ‘hierarchies’ and ‘ladders’ of spiritual thinking. It has to be done in a ‘style’ that might be called informed naïveté and pragmatic idealism, etc.

This is the bottom-line — a new set of problems comes within our reach as modernity unfolds. When we say “metamodernity lurks at the horizon” we imply the state of affairs in which these problems are recognised as problems and solved.

Here are these problems:

1. Ecological unsustainability;
2. Excess inequality (which makes the lowest classes suffer even more because their subjugation might seem mundane in comparison to ‘real’ struggle of the proletariat of the past, notwithstanding the fact that today the poor do not have an ‘excuse’ that can account for them being less successful beneficiaries of the market economy in comparison to their well-to-do peers — there are no lords or cast system that drags them down to point a finger to, the only reason they’ve failed is them being less hard-working, less talented — if the poor of the past felt (and were) oppressed, the poor of our time feel irrelevant (which is only true in the confines of market economy, while no one is ‘irrelevant’ where we leave these confines). All this means that they cannot tell a meaningful heroic story inside which their wretched state can be accounted for (as in Marxism), and so they are left to be nothing else than flecks of society; also, need of excess commodities is what endangers ecological unsustainability in the first place);
3. Alienation and stress; (“a pervading sense of estrangement and existential angst — causes people to suffer depression and commit suicide to an unprecedented degree”, “what happens in a society where you already have food, shelter and abundance? People begin to worry that they might be squandering their lives; that they might not be making the best of it; that something is still lacking; that life had become boring and too predictable.”) Something is wrong with our interpersonal relationships or, rather, it is easy to imagine our interpersonal relationships having more quality; easy, because many of us have at least some meaningful relationships based on love. So this is the question — how to promulgate relationships of love in society or, rather, how to work with these convoluted and wretched set of conflicts and rivalries that our relationships are and change them into something that is more like reciprocity, friendship, mentorship/apprenticeship, and love.

What he proposes may seem rather crude, abstract, or intricate to a neophyte:

“we can change the societal barriers and social-psychological landscapes of everyday life” (p. 5)

But we know, we have seen, that these barriers are ripe to be taken down. In the small metamodern circles a new awareness blooms, waiting to be prototyped into society at large. A new way of relating to each other — landscape structured by reciprocity, co-development, co-creation, and co-living. Sounds utopian? Bear with us.

Chapter 1. Relative Utopia.

In this chapter, Freinacht talks about what it is exactly that he is trying to bring about through his work. He talks about our own society as being a relative utopia, one that seems like unreachable paradies to generations before it, but that still suffers from many residual and new emergent problems. Point being — it can be deemed utopia only in comparison to something that existed previously.

Modernity gave us miraculous advances and there is no coming back. Yet it is not altogether futile to talk about what Rene Guenon is talking about, namely, about the manifold ways in which the beauty of premodern society was lost:

“less pollution, more spirituality, a more enchanted sense of the world, less destructive weapons, less mindless consumerism and alienation, more independence in having the skills to produce what you need, more humility, etc.”

There are four types of problems that modernity had left us with:

1. Residual problems (left-overs from before mode modernity);
2. New emergent problems (caused by modernity);
3. Beauties lost (qualities from earlier societies lost under modernity);
4. New heights reached (problems that simply weren’t viable to try to solve before, but now have come within our reach);

Due to my temperament I am most prone to be sensitive about the “beauties lost”. I call this sensitivity the “romantic resistance” — feeling that something crucial and magical is being abandoned during the process of elucidating the eery mysteries of collective or personal unconscious under the light of mindful scrutiny. It is as if a dark room where my sweet fantasies thrived was lit with the blinding rays of anaemic facts. But it has to happen. Otherwise dark and humid places like these rot without proper truth-airing, with its inhabitants suffocating without a chance of adaptation to the changes that time brings. No matter how theurgical, faerie and fancy these enchantments are — they have to be spelled off. To meet the problems that face us one has to meet them on their own territory, under the clear sky of stark truth, not in the basement of our dreams and illusions. Such sacrifices have to be made if we want to bring forth a metamodern society. After all,

“a society can be described as metamodern if, and only if, all the problems of modernity have been more or less resolved.” (p. 38).

Chapter 2. Game Change.

In this chapter, Hanzi threads between the Scylla of denying the truth about the nature of the game and Charybdis of accepting the status-quo as if there is nothing that could be done about it. Between “game denial” and “game acceptance”.

To properly change the dynamics of the games we play we have to accept the hard truths of how they operate and to simultaneously wager that there is room for conscious improvement. With these two demands met, there might be an opportunity to stem the development of the game in a required direction.

“Inner development of people is interlinked with the development of society on the whole. Society’s function fundamentally relies on personal development of its citizens. You can’t just develop society by means of “imposing” a certain political system or changing people’s values. Game change occurs by means of systemic change, psychological development of populations, changes in habits and behaviors, and through cultural development… These fields — system, psychology, behavior, and culture — develop together.”

“Don’t hate the player”, says Hanzi. “Don’t hate the game. Know the game. And play to change it. Because you love the players.”

Chapter 3. History’s direction.

In this chapter Freinacht builds upon the ideas of Michel Foucault and other prominent sociologists and philosophers. Freinacht manages to heal the intellectual allergies of Foucault while staying true to the work that Foucault was trying to accomplish. If Foucault was eager to illuminate the oppressive side of the growing intimacy of control that has begun with the unfolding of the modern societies, Freinacht is willing to take into consideration the other side of the coin — the welfare that was brought along with it.

According to Hanzi, “welfare and control, to a large extent, go hand-in-hand.” He continues by stating that “in Sweden today, this “free” society, the state keeps almost everyone in school for twelve years, gets involved with broken families, brokers toxic marital relations, teaches us about safe sex, sexuality and gender equality, peers into the very cavities of our bodies: the mouth, the vagina, feeling through our breasts for cancerous lumps, recommends us what to eat, funds our smaller newspapers, supports us in getting our lazy buts to the gym, treats our madness — if necessary, force-feeding the non-compliant patient with drugs and liquid nourishment. Is this level of control not approaching what George Orwell imagined in his novel, 1984?”

For Freinacht, “increasing intimacy of control works in tandem with the evolution of a more complex society.”

“Every attempt to create more intimate integration risks becoming a new source of oppression. Whenever people try to relate to each other at a deeper and more intimate level, including larger parts of our authentic emotions and inner selves, to some it may become suffocating and pressuring. New oppression — albeit on a higher, subtler level. When we, for instance, create new playful ways of organizing our corporations, in which everyone is invited to partake more authentically, we also share larger parts of our inner selves and are expected to show up more “fully” and to be more emotionally involved. But some are bound to not quite “feel it” and will necessarily feel pressured and subtly manipulated. When we create greater social engagement and caring, those who are unable to experience the same emotions feel suffocated and that unrealistic expectations are being shoved down their throats.”

Freinacht wilfully addresses the risks that his vision of the future is endowed with:

“New oppression. When we democratise governance and more people get involved in decision-making, many of us feel stuck in endless discussions. When we introduce mindfulness and yoga at work, some will feel they are expected to waste their precious time with meaningless woo-woo. When we make our organisations more personal, some of us feel stuck in more personal issues and conflicts in which our vulnerabilities become all too apparent. When we create greater transparency, some feel more surveillance.”

Yet there is no way around the direction in which our society seems to develop. To make the path that lies ahead of us less uncanny, to elucidate the terra incognita, the metamodern view is proposed.

Its aim is to “support the necessary reintegration of highly dividuated modern people into deeper community — or Gemeinshcaft — but to do so with great sensitivity towards the inescapable risks of new, subtler forms of oppression… Hence, the task is to balance out and support the forces of integration and dividuation. This is what the listening society must be able to do.”

If we consider freedom as something like being able to live authentically, “the increasing intimacy of control is linked to higher personal freedom, though in a difficult and painful manner that easily spirals off into oppression”.

Therefore, “we must relate productively to this dynamic: (in)dividuation at new, higher levels of personal development (leads to) alienation (which leads to) reaction to alienation: integration, reintegration (which leads to) oppression, suffocation (which leads to) resistance, emancipation (which leads to 1.).

Chapter 4. Another kind of freedom (and)
Chapter 5. Freedom’s beyond.

In these chapters Freinacht addresses the subtler constraints of freedom, those that can only be comprehensively addressed in the societies where the more obvious forms of freedom are already intact. It relates to the “new heights reached” that were introduced in Chapter 1 Relative Utopia.

Freinacht gives us these examples:

“All of my life, I have been controlled by shame, never daring to express myself because I felt so ridiculous, and I wanted to live as a homosexual but a sense of shame stopped me, and I wanted to move to another city but I stayed here because I feared to lose the support of my family which would have left me begging for food.”

And another one: “I am profoundly unhappy in my marriage but I have no choice but to stay because my husband would guilt-trip me and I would have nowhere to go.”

Then he goes on to ask if “Any of these examples covered by the definition of freedom as “political rights” or “civil liberties”?… legal rights and liberties may contribute to letting us break out of these little prisons, but they hardly exhaust the picture.”

Freinacht concludes this line of argument by saying that

“If you buy the hypothesis of ever-present negative emotions being avoided through our choices and interactions, you can see that these emotions, and the reasons we may have for feeling them, set the limit for our degrees of freedom. We act, think and even feel within certain constraints derived from the emotional dynamics of the society we live in… People who have their lives controlled by such emotions are simply less free than those who do not.”

Freinacht differentiates between the four such forms of socially-mediated constraints:

1. Fear;
2. Guilt;
3. Shame;
4. Sklavenmoral, the “internalised envy of others” (which relates closely to what Nietzsche called “slave morality” in German).

These are the monsters that lurk in our psyches, ready to limit and impede freedom’s authenticity whenever they feel social situation threats them.

Chapter 6. Dimensions of equality (and)
Chapter 7. Deeper equality.

Hanzi points out that after the basic equality in terms of voting rights, rule of law, etc. are in place, it is time to broaden one’s perspective to include other dimensions of equality: Economic; Social; Physiological; Emotional; Ecological; Informational.

For example,

“Within affluent welfare countries like Sweden, the struggle for material equality is often really the struggle for social equality in disguise. In such societies, it is not that people are actually starving, but rather that lacking economic wealth can negatively affect their status and hinder their inclusion into social events. You even hear nurses, school teachers and police officers say: It’s not that I really need that much money. I just want my paycheck to properly validate my work and effort.”

Hanzi stipulates that equality does not stop at achieving the external facade of “sameness”.

“As with freedom, we can begin to see that the higher goal of societal development is not so much to achieve “perfect equality”, but rather to render the very struggle for equality obsolete.”

Indeed, the struggle for equality goes as deep as to make the concept of equality rudimentary:

“Equality, equivalence and equanimity — there is the progression, from levelling the unfair differences between us, to adopting a more profound sense of value for all, to letting go of our strange human obsession with impossible comparisons, ultimately rendering equality itself obsolete.”

Chapter 8. Evolution of norms.

“In countries such as Nordic ones, which have a considerably high degree of freedom and equality as well as high average effective value memes, you can see the emergence of more “casual” and “sensitive” forms of emotional expression as people increasingly have the luxury of being “self-revealing” and “authentic” about their inner lives and feelings. They need to think less of “saving face” and displaying markers of prestige or honor. In these settings, it is often even taken as a sign of strength and maturity to be judiciously revealing and open about one’s weaknesses, knowledge gaps and insecurities.”

How important these changes are, considering the fact that “purportedly “progressive” systems of norms can easily collapse and revert to “regressive” norms if they are not supported by corresponding value memes in the population — as well as by higher freedom and deeper equality”?

Again, Soviet communism comes to mind; the USSR had a partly progressive ideology but lacked in all other regards (see Appendix B).”

I talked to a young philosopher yesterday. He rejected my arguments that society’s norms and values progress in such a way as to be more inclusive and holistic. He brought up Marquis de Sade, a late 18th-century French nobleman known for his libertine sexuality. “He spent most of his time in prison, writing essays on intricate relations between violence and sexuality”, said a philosopher, “rejected by social structures and community”. Word sadism — the tendency to derive pleasure, especially sexual gratification, from inflicting pain, suffering, or humiliation on others — of course, stems from his surname. My philosopher than concluded that from the point of view and standard of Marquis de Sade, there is no point of talking about societal development towards “inclusion, love, truth, beauty”, because the presumptions and presuppositions of such progress have nothing in common with the values that de Sade might have subscribed to. This means that the perspective from which we view the progress is infinitely malleable due to the divergent interests and deepest moral grounds of different individuals. In other words, postmodernism.

What I answered to him is that there is a very easy way to see how even such a person as de Sade might have benefited from how our society has developed. Take modern Sweden. In it, Marquis would not have had to spend most of his time in jail. His unusual sexual inclinations might have been recognised for what they are — potentially harmless preferences, subtly dangerous, but nothing to be hated for or judged because of.
He would have been given time and space to pursue his strange fetishes in a way that couldn’t harm the wellbeing and impede on freedom of others. He would not have been disrespected and despised in a way that almost any other society — of the temporal past or geographical present — would have despised and butchered him. Maybe then he would have been able to write something less tasteless, something more aesthetically pleasing and socially valuable. Point being: Marquis de Sade would be better off in postmodern Sweden, than in modern France.

So “it is this cultural-psychological development that must be consciously spurred, so as to match the kind of complex world-system that is emerging in the internet age.”

For the sake of the future’s de Sades, let’s make metamodern society real in advance of them being crucified in a million subtle ways before we even know it.