Towards metamodern politics
People influenced by postmodernism see a world in decline represented by the meme of late capitalism, with deforestation, climate change, revived nationalism and oppression of minorities. Once we dreamed China will look more like the West, now it seems that the West might in the near future look more and more like a capitalist techno dystopia. At least, this is the warning of Slavoj Žižek, who thinks that in 200 years we will raise statues of Lee Kuan Yew, the father of Singapore and the meme of capitalism with Asian values.
People influenced by modernism see a world of progress, with mobile banking invented in Kenya ten years ago, with companies that provide affordable solar energy to rural Africans, with electric autonomous cars, hyperloops, underground tunnels and space exploration. They see Steven Pinker explaining how humanity got less violent over time, Hans Rosling explaining how people are getting richer and healthier, with child mortality rates falling rapidly, and with universal primary education within a reach.
And finally, there is a group of people who are influenced by the emerging sensibility of metamodernism and they are very comfortable with embracing both of those views at the same time. How can one be an optimist and a pessimist at the same time and embrace this paradox? The idea is to leave the binary thinking of “either/or” and embrace the “beyond/and” thinking that is able to unite, overcome and transcend simple oppositions and dialectics.
What we need
Antifragility
First, enter the notion of (anti)fragility. You can get more prosperous and fragile at the same time. From this perspective the paradox is resolved by the concept of a trade-off. There could be in certain conditions a trade-off between progress/prosperity and fragility/complexity. If one is more worried about the fragility and existential risks, one can be justified to have a pessimistic outlook on chances of humanity to make it into the 22nd century through a bottleneck of dozens of looming existential risks that are exacerbated by exponential tech and growing rivalry and deterioration of our collective sense-making capacity due to social media and disinformation tech.
Complexity
Second, we need to get serious about complexity science. People go to forest (complex system), cut wood into lumber (simple system) and build houses (complicated system). This process of turning complex systems into simple ones and building complicated ones is visible throughout history and is draining natural resources in the long term. We have built complicated systems for millennia, but we are aware of the complexity science only for circa 40 years. Our economy, minds, society, rainforests and oceans are all complex systems.
Complex systems are able of self-repair and they require volatility and certain mild and non-chronic levels of stress to prosper and become anti-fragile (due to overcompensation — e.g. muscle tissue grows after slight damage due to weightlifting to be ready for a greater weight in the future). Complicated systems (Boeing airplane) on the other hand, are not able of self-repair. If we replace complex systems with complicated ones, we increase fragility.
Therefore, the notions of biomimicry, antifragility, closing all the loops and circular economy are important. Also we need to abandon the paradigm of sustainability as not radical enough and ensure that humanity and our products are ideally net-positive to the nature. Imagine a house that produces more energy than it uses, and its waste serves as an input in a circular economy — as a fertilizer or for manufacturing of products from e.g. recycled plastic and textiles in a local fablab.
Brother-/Sisterhood
Third, we need to reduce the rivalrous dynamics that underlie many of our current existential risks by focusing as much on brother-/sisterhood as we currently do on liberty and equality. We need to optimize around as many important domains as possible at the same time, and don’t allow extreme growth in one domain at the expense of others. We might even need to abandon the notion of optimization and embrace “all-win-win”, “growing the pie for all” and cluster-thinking kind of paradigm.
The famous motto of French Revolution — Liberté, égalité, fraternité can serve us as an illustration of at least three domains that might compete with each other. But we should not go into extremes in one domain at the expense of others.
If modernism was more about liberty and classical liberalism, and postmodernism was more about equality, equity and relativism, then metamodernism needs to embrace the achievements of the other two, but go beyond and yet deeper by addressing the rivalrous dynamics that underlie our history and evolution (Game A), and optimize not just around liberty, equality but also around brotherhood/sisterhood of all people (anti-rivalrous foundations for Game B).
The idea is not to ignore the rivalrous dynamics and conflicts, but to acknowledge them and try to consciously overcome them — not just by optimization, game theory and incentive design. But by adopting and consciously nurturing an anti-rivalrous mindset by increasing our individual sovereignty and collective coherence in many domains (as opposed to just a few like money making).
Not just as one global village, but also address and make visible the problems of dynamics of rivalry locally. We also need to see the opportunities of increasing not just individual sovereignty, but also collective intelligence and coherence. A universally perceived threat of existential risks, such as climate change, is the engine that can unite us and reduce our rivalry.
We need to embrace the courageous attitude of “as if” — act as if a new anti-rivalrous world of abundance is possible, even if the defeat seems almost certain. This “as if” attitude is similar to the dynamics of bootstrapping the desired future, and the mechanism of transcendence.
Our toolkit
Increasing individual sovereignty
We need to increase our capacity in sense-making, choice-making, and actuation
Imagine and agent, such as a person, animal or robot. They need to have a capacity to sense the world around them, to receive and process sensory input and to make sense of it by prioritizing what is relevant.
Then they need to be able to make choices that will increase their individual long-term fitness, wellbeing and happiness, while not creating unintentional negative externalities or harming others.
And finally they need to take an effective action towards these goals and informed choices they made as a result of their sense-making that produced “a map that matches the territory”.
The notion of individual sovereignty in a certain domain can be illustrated by e.g. the ability to juggle. One can be sovereign in juggling, but not sovereign yet in juggling while riding a unicycle. One can temporarily lose their ability to be sovereign in juggling by e.g. being tired, hungry, dehydrated, stressed or sick. One can increase their sovereignty in a certain area by solving these problems, and by getting “into the zone”, finding the right balance between challenging task and skill level, and entering into a flow state — a state of consciousness where high productivity happens.
Increasing collective coherence
From sovereignty, through attunement towards coherence
Imagine highly effective teams on the edges of our civilization. Like elite forces, top athletes in collective sports, startups, F1 pit stop operators and teams of surgeons. Or any other team that manages to focus effectively around a high stake endeavor that requires a certain state of consciousness and levels of collective ability and coordination.
The principle here is emergence — what emerges is more than the sum of the parts. This can be achieved by increased sovereignty of individuals, but what is needed is also their effective discernment of what is needed in the moment, their attunement to each other and this results in the emergence of coherence. This is how a new “super-organism” is created. Jordan Greenhall has a whole series of videos and articles on this topic.
We can be “in the zone” individually, but also collectively and we can use this skill to solve some important, tractable and neglected challenge — like reduction of certain existential risks by planting billions of trees using drones, or by making progress in generational and extreme poverty, AI safety, climate change, bio and nano tech safety, etc. The idea is not to use this power of individual sovereignty and collective coherence only to get into a collective trance at the Burning Man festival, or to rival each other in accumulating vanities or creating unsustainable and complicated systems.
Increasing planetary wellbeing
Effective prioritization, rapid prototyping, and closing all the loops
The notion of prioritization is similar to individual and collective sense-making. This means the ability to clearly see what is important and necessary to do, to get humanity through dozens of bottlenecks, represented by existential risks, into the 22nd century and beyond. I wrote about it in the article on an ideal social innovation.
On an individual and group level of teams or even nations we can adopt several prioritization frameworks represented by e.g. Effective Altruism (Importance-Tractability-Neglectedness Framework) or by other perspectives of network theory (focus on the most connected problem nodes — e.g. energy, sanitation, infrastructure) or by the perspective of Theory of Constrains (what invisible policy, processes, mental models, or visible and physical objects block the global performance of the system? Where is the bottleneck and the weakest chain link?). I wrote about various frameworks for cause prioritization here.
On a global level of the international community we can adopt the frameworks of Sustainable Development Goals, Agenda 2030 and Policy Coherence for Sustainable Development. But, as I wrote before — the paradigm of sustainability is not enough — we need to proactively strive to achieve net-positive results for humanity and the planet.
The notion of rapid prototyping is similar to effective choice-making. The idea comes from Tom Chi and his observation that research is the opposite of development. So in the research phase we need to invest into as many prototypes as possible, as little money as possible, and test them in as short time as possible. So the methodology of rapid prototyping would test new prototypes on weekly basis and create dozens of prototypes before some product or social innovation is scaled. This idea of “invest small amounts into many projects” in the research phase is very similar to, and compatible with, Nassim Taleb’s notion of antifragility and his optionality strategy.
Closing all the loops is somehow similar to the notion of agency, actuation, actuator capacity or simply “getting things done”. It is used as an illustration of circular economy that is necessary to preserve and strengthen complex systems. Circular economy means outputs, such as waste, become inputs of further production (fertilizers, recycled materials, etc.). But in a more abstract level, “closing all the loops” means that one gets feedback for their action and also that justice is upheld. It also means that one has a skin in the game, another notion popularized by Nassim Taleb. It also means that one is able to complete a task or sets of tasks or projects.
The need for “closing all the loops” is well presented by Daniel Schmachtenberger who manages to explain succinctly why we need to reduce rivalry and nurture foundations for anti-rivalrous economics to avoid existential risks. The idea of “Game B” as opposed to the rivalrous Game A, is also elaborated by two brothers, evolutionary biologist Brett Weistein and econo-physicist Eric Weinstein.
Anti-rivalry is the next frontier
My suspicion is that rivalry might be a deeper problem than a problem of scarcity or game theory. So even the economy of abundance might not eliminate it as the causality might be actually reversed — rivalry, and the ancient mechanisms to control rivalry (the production of the sacred that contains violence in both senses of the meaning), might actually produce scarcity, and not vice-versa. Or in the spirit of metamodernism we can do the “beyond/and” move and say, that rivalry and scarcity probably reinforce each other in a positive feedback loop.
This kind of counterintuitive thinking about rivalrous dynamics and ancient mechanisms of scapegoating are presented by Rene Girard and his followers, such as Jean-Pierre Dupuy and others. The mimetic theory of Rene Girard is discussed at an INET economic conference here, and it is somehow similar to the theory of reflexivity of George Soros and it is compatible with a broader notion of complexity science that describes non-linear and emergent phenomena. My friend Tomas Uhnak and I interviewed Jean-Pierre Dupuy on these subjects in 2016.
Rivalry might be a very deep rooted problem. Daniel Schmachtenberger calls rivalrous dynamics “the generator function” of existential risks. It’s possible we might not succeed in reducing or eliminating rivalry. After our efforts, it might come back even stronger, as a “super bug resistant to antibiotics”. But I feel the rivalrous foundations of our current Game A need to be overcome and we need to nurture social innovations in the anti-rivalrous Game B space nevertheless.
We need to do it quickly, cheaply and without negative externalities. So we need to get good at effective prioritization, rapid prototyping and closing all the loops. And we need to adopt the “as if” attitude of persevering despite setbacks and tragedies that might ultimately lead to bootstrapping a better and anti-rivalrous future.
Forrest Landry says: “Love is that which enables choice. Love is always stronger than Fear. Always choose on the basis of Love.”.
Metamodernism needs to be such kind, wise and effective force for good.
