The Listening Society

The "other" ERE. Societal aspects of the ERE philosophy. Emergent change-making, scale-effects,...
7Wannabe5
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The Listening Society

Post by 7Wannabe5 »

I just finished "The Listening Society: A Metamodern Guide to Politics" by Hanzi Freinacht, and immediately added it to my "Books I am going to try to make everybody else read" list. If you are interested in concepts such as Wheaton Levels or Spiral Dynamics, if you are concerned about the world of the future, or if you just derive masochistic pleasure from the humiliation of being forced to acknowledge your limited perspective on life, you will enjoy this book too.

The main question addressed in the book is how should society develop beyond the post-modern critique of the modern. Freinacht suggests that the focus should turn to promoting the emotional and psychological development of human "dividuals." A "dividual" not being the modern stage individual or the post-modern social construct, but rather the individual within her social construct. Thus, only societies that have achieved a reasonable level of post-modern development will be able to offer this level of service to citizens of any level of "dividual" development. So, Freinacht often refers to the model of the Scandinavian countries as offering glimmer of where we all may be heading in the future (given that we aren't headed straight down the tubes.)

The book is also a guide to recognizing your own level of development by several different measures. Freinacht is not a huge promoter of the "woo", so he renders some rather mushy human qualities such as "wisdom" into more objectively useful forms. I don't want to spoil the fun of reading this book, and figuring out or contemplating your own levels of development, so I won't go into more detail about his model.

The metamodern tone is described as irony mixed with sincerity and this is also the tone adopted by Freinacht. I found the book to be both provocative and inspiring. A few illustrative bits:
Unintelligent people don't like theory. They don't understand that the word theory just means "seeing", and that without it you miss out on seeing vital aspects of reality. Don't be like that. Theoreticians built this world; the rest of y'all just live in it.
But most conflicts are avoided in everyday life because we tend to keep most everyday institutions related to shallow aspects of life. It is much easier to create and maintain social settings and institutions that revolve around lower depth: It takes considerably less sensitivity and skill to set up a manual labor team, a movie night, or a game of golf, than it does to set up a successful psychotherapeutic treatment, a genuine talk about the meaning of life, or a truly sublime shared spiritual experience.
What is lacking in our day and age is the ability for people to manage complex problems that require patience, knowledge, oversight, creativity, mutual trust and friendly co-operation across sectors, scientific disciplines, cultures and subcultures. In a phrase: the management of complexity. Or, with a term we shall get back to, we require a greater collective intelligence.

AnalyticalEngine
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Re: The Listening Society

Post by AnalyticalEngine »

Thanks for the recommendation. I just finished reading a bunch of the postmodern philosophers, a bunch of Baudrillard and Debord, so digging into metamodernism is next on my philosophical journey. I'll give this a read.

7Wannabe5
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Re: The Listening Society

Post by 7Wannabe5 »

@AnalyticalEngine:

I'd be very interested in your impressions. I actually came upon the book by way of this recent metamodern take on metacrisis on The Stoa, which I also loved. I felt compelled to pull up a list of metamodern films to binge watch after viewing this presentation.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bvb7ztqQzcs


After reading the book, I also watched this related metamodern deep dive on sexuality piece on The Stoa, which I think might be of interest to readers of Deida and practitioners of polyamory. I was super amused (yet nodding in agreement) by the part where he very seriously talks about the release of the "holy slut" perhaps being necessary prerequisite for successful practice of polyamory.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=181JimM3PNQ

The metamodern is roughly equivalent to Level Yellow in spiral dynamics or very roughly equivalent to Level 7 in ERE Wheaton Levels. The metamodern level of development is the level of development where one becomes aware/concerned with levels of development, so the extended examination of the making of theories of development offered in "The Listening Society" is rather revelatory in relationship to problems such as humans seeing themselves as being at more than one level of development at the same time. For instance, a person can happily function in a post-modern setting and display many of the "symptoms" of post-modern development without having the cognitive ability to comprehend post-modern philosophy.

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Re: The Listening Society

Post by guitarplayer »

I'll try to read it too.

AnalyticalEngine
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Re: The Listening Society

Post by AnalyticalEngine »

Interesting stuff. I just watched the first Stoa link, and it reminds me a lot of Debord's writing style. Guy Debord was author of The Society of the Spectacle and founder of the Situationist International. His stuff can be hard to get into because the Situations were an art movement who believed they could disrupt "Spectacular society" through aesthetics.

The Situationists were a really interesting movement with some useful lessons for ERE. This documentary is a good introduction on them: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ncH0-q9OXco

Anyway, my impressions of the Stoa link. Postmodern philosophy can best be thought of as these things:

1. A trauma reaction to WWII. That is to say, pre-WWII, people found meaning in life through things like nationalism, rationality, economic development, democracy etc. All those modern values you saw after the fall of monarchies that were meant to save humanity from the innate evils of the human experience. Marxism is a great example of the zeitgeist of modernism because Marx often wrote about how the collapse of capitalism was going to save humanity from class inequality.

Then WWII happened, which was so profoundly horrible that it shattered any spiritual or moral claims that modern values had. If rationalism, capitalism, democracy, secularism etc could lead to the worst slaughter in human history, what did that leave you? How could you claim any moral basis for your actions? The world is simply a war of all against all for power. There is no meaning, no salvation. A lot of postmodern thinkers try to grapple with this problem.

In our contemporary time, you can extend this "apocalyptic mood" to climate change.

2. Consumer culture, media, and the breakdown of reality. Baudrillard has this notion of hyperreality, which is when the world is so full of simulacra (copies that have replaced originals) that you can no longer tell 'reality' from fantasy. If we live in artificially constructed cities, consume media 24/7, and eat processed food, we cannot distinguish fact from fiction. Baudrillard writes:
Disneyland exists in order to hide that it is the "real" country, all of "real" America that is Disneyland (a bit like prisons are there to hide that it is the social in its entirety, in its banal omnipresence, that is carceral). Disneyland is presented as imaginary in order to make us believe that the rest is real, whereas all of Los Angeles and the America that surrounds it are no longer real, but belong to the hyperreal order and to the order of simulation. It is no longer a question of a false representation of reality (ideology) but of concealing the fact that the real is no longer real, and thus of saving the reality principle.
3. You cannot escape hyperreality because humans never, in fact, lived in reality. Humanity has only ever been able to view the world through concepts, and thus when those concepts get hijacked by postmodernity, the map replaces the territory. Baudrillard writes again:
Today abstraction is no longer that of the map, the double, the mirror, or the concept. Simulation is no longer that of a territory, a referential being, or a substance. It is the generation by models of a real without origin or reality: a hyperreal.
Hyperreality is distinctly different than Plato's Cave because unlike the cave, you cannot escape hyperreality because you cannot escape the fact that you, as a human, can only live in a world of concepts and not a world of reality. This is what guy in the Stoa video means when he refers to the fact the world is getting more weird. As we are trapped in the map of hyperreality, as the map replaces the territory and then a map replaces the map, we become trapped in increasingly bizarre simulacra. We become disoriented, dizzy, unable to find meaning in gods or science, man or society, and become increasingly distressed.

----

Metamodernism is an attempt to go beyond postmodernism and find a way to move forward despite the paralyzing relativity of hyperreality. As a philosophical branch, it's still pretty young, but I think a lot of ERE principles are very useful from a metamodern perspective.

7Wannabe5
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Re: The Listening Society

Post by 7Wannabe5 »

@AnalyticalEngine:

Thank you for your lucid synopsis of post-modern philosophy. I haven't read Debord. Have added to my list. I think my INFP sister might be a Situationist.

One slight problem I have with the description of the metamodern tone as being both ironic and sincere is that I don't quite see how post-modern literature is lacking in sincerity. For instance, Kurt Vonnegut's post-WW2 trauma expressed in "Slaughterhouse-Five" seems quite sincere. Maybe the metamodern tone is different because it is ironic, sincere AND purposeful. Like, the post-modernists started asking the right questions, or at least ironicly WTF-ing, and metamodernity is integrating forward towards something like unto answers.
In our contemporary time, you can extend this "apocalyptic mood" to climate change.
And the hyper-reality which includes what I read this morning about some climate scientists deciding to go on strike, because nobody gives a fuck.
Hyperreality is distinctly different than Plato's Cave because unlike the cave, you cannot escape hyperreality because you cannot escape the fact that you, as a human, can only live in a world of concepts and not a world of reality.
I am lacking the cognitive development to respond to this myself, so...

From "The Listening Society":
...metamodernism oscillates "ontologically", ...the metamodernist artists adopt a new view of reality itself. In this view you are both a modern believer in science and progress, and a skeptical, ironic critic of your own naive belief."
...Basically, metamodernism is keeping the postmodern suspicion of progress and "grand narratives" (science, socialism, etc.) but bringing in the modern hope and sense of direction through the backdoor, as vaguely suggested open potentials.
I think a lot of ERE principles are very useful from a metamodern perspective.
Me too. (ha!)

AnalyticalEngine
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Re: The Listening Society

Post by AnalyticalEngine »

So when you get into the irony of Slaughterhouse-Five, that's more irony is the literary sense than in the common usage of the term. In contemporary vernacular, "irony" means you pretend to do something you wouldn't do otherwise as a sort of joke or to make a statement. Ie, "I like to watch romantic comedies ironically" means you don't actually enjoy the movies but you do enjoy making fun of them.

Slaughterhouse-Five uses literary irony in the sense that you are supposed to take the opposite lesson from what the characters do. For example, both Billy Pilgrim and the tralfamadorians know the future but make no attempt to stop things they could have easily stopped. Billy Pilgrim doesn't try to stop his own (imagined/dissociated) death, and the tralfamadorians don't try to stop the end of the universe. Thus the book is ironic because the real moral of the story is that you shouldn't be like Billy Pilgrim. The book never outright says "WWII was horrible and Billy has been traumatized to the point of being unable to function," but uses literary irony to show that the war destroyed Billy's life.

Thus something can be ironic (presenting the opposite message intentionally) while also sincere (because the author wants you to take away the correct message by viewing how the opposite message is harmful).

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Re: The Listening Society

Post by jacob »

@7 - Have you read part 2 yet? It's about Nordic societies, so obviously I have some opinions. Should I break my 5 month "buy nothing beyond general maintenance" streak to join this conversation?

7Wannabe5
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Re: The Listening Society

Post by 7Wannabe5 »

@jacob:

I haven’t read part 2 yet, but he touches on it in part 1. I am lacking the cognitive capacity to predict whether you will like this book, but since I can verify that at least it is not “more of the same”, I will suggest that you should throw down for a copy and join the conversation. I would be very interested in your take on it.

7Wannabe5
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Re: The Listening Society

Post by 7Wannabe5 »

AnalyticalEngine wrote: In contemporary vernacular, "irony" means you pretend to do something you wouldn't do otherwise as a sort of joke or to make a statement. Ie, "I like to watch romantic comedies ironically" means you don't actually enjoy the movies but you do enjoy making fun of them.
Gotcha. I was thinking more in terms of literary usage. Freinacht makes the suggestion that hipsters, hippies, and hackers are most likely to be the foreguard of the metamodern. I have noticed that when my millenial hipster children and their friends get married, their weddings do seem to be a mix of irony and sincerity. As in, our love is true, but we are just kind of having farcical fun with this institution, and all the bride's people will have ribbons braided in their beautiful long hair and all the groom's people will wear vests. I have even wondered whether they sometimes just do it in order to get money from the old people. But, I think really it's more like their take on capitalism; it's a known dysfunctional, but the other options available are even suckier.

Another point I wanted to touch on was how post-modern philosophies such as you discussed above somehow morphed into trends like political correctness. Pierre Bourdieu, who coined the notion of "cultural capital", also wrote a book entitled "Masculine Domination." I am going to take great liberties and paraphrase wildly, but it goes something like if we look at a primitive tribe and observe rigid gender differentiated practices such as only men can hit the tree with a stick and only women can bend down and pick up the fruit, might/must it not be the case that the "field" of our own society is permeated with similar distortions? Of course it is. That's why gender-bending was so often a meant to be startling apple-cart upsetting feature of post-modern expression. When the cultural landscape is bent, or folded, more options are made available within the same shared space, and new rules or practices for sharing the space will have to be invented.

The notion of cultural capital is very important to Freinacht's model, because he suggests that in metamodern mode it will take precedence over financial capital. This strikes me as very true, because when I read Bourdieu on cultural capital a number of years ago, it helped me realize why my lifestyle was pretty darn good even though I didn't have very much financial capital and spent very little money. IOW, I think it speaks very much to how one could simultaneously argue that the poverty level in the U.S. should be set even higher than $12,000 while still striving to live very well on less than that amount oneself. You recognize or "realize" your advantages.

AnalyticalEngine
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Re: The Listening Society

Post by AnalyticalEngine »

I have noticed that when my millenial hipster children and their friends get married, their weddings do seem to be a mix of irony and sincerity...But, I think really it's more like their take on capitalism; it's a known dysfunctional, but the other options available are even suckier.
I have quite a few zoomer friends who are like this, and I agree this is their mindset. I think it comes from knowing the old institutions have problems but not knowing any alternative. So you go through the old rituals while mocking them, being both sincere and ironic. I suppose going back to Baudrillard, any ritual or cultural institution is inherently a simulacra. One cannot escape hyperreality because cultural institutions rely on concepts, and the map is not the territory. But what is different is we realize this now whereas humans in other societies never realized the hyperreality of their society. So coping with the fact that you must live only in the map and the map has become a simulacra is a metamodern skill requiring both the sincerity to live your life (not dissociate through the experience) and the irony to realize the map is not the territory.
Another point I wanted to touch on was how post-modern philosophies such as you discussed above somehow morphed into trends like political correctness.
There are two authors I want to discuss here. One is, of course, Judith Butler, one of the founding thinkers of queer theory. The other is Hans-Georg Moeller, who wrote a contemporary book called "You and Your Profile: Identity After Authenticity." (He also has a YouTube channel where he discusses his theories called Carefree Wanderings. This video on the topic is worth watching: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-QMHOsfjHq0)

Anyway, political correctness is essentially a mix of queer theory and the profilicity model of identity that Moeller proposes. It started with Butler's notion that gender is a performance (Gender Trouble, 1990). You can think of gender itself as a sort of simulacrum that starts with biological sex but has additional expectations tacked onto it by culture. To be a "woman" isn't simply to be born with certain sex organs. You're expected to fulfill the female social role of wearing certain clothing, behaving a certain way, have certain sexual tastes (heterosexual), etc. Thus the cultural concept of woman becomes detached from the physical reality (the map is not the territory) and gender becomes a performance.

But the problem with something being a performance is that you need an audience to validate it. This is where Moeller enters the picture. Moeller proposes three forms of identity: sincerity (sincerely believing in your social role), authenticity (authentically being your individual self), and profilicity (create a profile or image of yourself that requires validation by your average peer)

A lot of political correctness/the current culture wars, therefore, come from Butler's notion that gender is a performance (simulacra'd over the physical reality of sex) mixed with profilicity (your identity must be validated by the average peer). This is why there's so much contention when someone rejects another person's declared gender. Once you've detached something into a fourth level simulacrum (ie, "my pronouns are xie/xem"), the existence of that social role needs to be validated. Hence, political correctness. "You are seen therefore you exist."

Of course, the problem here is that gender was never "real." "xie/xem" pronouns aren't any more "real" than "women cannot hit a tree with a stick." Which means the entire thing is a debate over what forms of identity are culturally valid without any underlying basis in "reality." Hence why the political correctness culture wars can get so nasty. But if you frame them in terms of needing a simulacrum identity validated in order for that identity to even exist, it makes a lot more sense.

(The key to realize is, of course, it's not only queer identities that are simulacra. Even straight/'normie'/gender conforming identities are simulacra too; they've just been socially validated over millennia in less profilific conditions. You cannot escape hyperreality.)

7Wannabe5
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Re: The Listening Society

Post by 7Wannabe5 »

@AnalyticalEngine:

I'm quite familiar with queer theory because my youngest Gen-X hipster sister was a queer community documentary film-maker back in the early 90s while Gen-Jones me was wallowing in post-partum pudge and consoling myself by reading "Fat is a Feminist Issue" :lol: The bridesmaids at my wedding wore embroidered nightgowns, played guitars, and took me to a "Take Back the Night" anti-campus rape rally for my bachelorette party. My early edition hipster ex-husband wore a skirt in public in 1988 and is still prettier than me.

The Moeller video on "profilicity" was fascinating. His model strikes me as quite accurate. I could almost pinpoint the year (2006?)when my own personal identity hit crossroads of "sincerity", "authenticity", and "profilicity." His theory could also go some way towards explaining the development of echo chambers within the web. I added his title to my list.

However, I would note that there is another significant component of identity which is development of mature perspective beyond any means or "technology" of validation by other, whether family/community, soulmate, or the "general peer" composite of hits on your profile. We can learn to differentiate our emotional states and preferences from those of other(s) and practice self-validation towards greater intimacy. Self-validation might seem most coherent with "authenticity", because it is still about bringing the true which is internal out, but just moving past the need for the validation of "soulmate" or "beloved", but I think it could also apply to "sincerity" and "profilicity." I mean, there is obviously something less than mature about desperately seeking "likes."

https://www.justiceschanfarber.com/inti ... alidation/

If identity is just a performance then self-validation is akin to becoming your own appreciative audience, which is not all that different from simply enjoying yourself as very good company.

BTW: Book slut that I am, I have now started reading the next book in the series, "Nordic Ideology." Here Freinacht (who is a composite identity) seems to indicate another path beyond simple validation seeking "profilicity."
Hanzi Freinacht wrote:But one thing remains the same: the transpersonal stance. I am not an individual. I am much larger than that... As such, I don't think of myself as an individual author, reaching out to you, a separate-entity- a single atom of a rational reader. Rather, we are both part of the same process of knowledge creation, and I sometimes need to speak past you, to other readers, and sometimes I need to push a few of your buttons. Likewise, you need to cut and paste me, and animate me, in creative and novel manners. You can cut me up and put pieces of me into places I couldn't dream of. The reader, not the writer, has the power.

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Re: The Listening Society

Post by AnalyticalEngine »

However, I would note that there is another significant component of identity which is development of mature perspective beyond any means or "technology" of validation by other, whether family/community, soulmate, or the "general peer" composite of hits on your profile. We can learn to differentiate our emotional states and preferences from those of other(s) and practice self-validation towards greater intimacy. Self-validation might seem most coherent with "authenticity", because it is still about bringing the true which is internal out, but just moving past the need for the validation of "soulmate" or "beloved", but I think it could also apply to "sincerity" and "profilicity." I mean, there is obviously something less than mature about desperately seeking "likes."
This is an aspect of identity that I've been trying to build a framework around as my next understanding in philosophy. I suppose we could call it a metamodern understanding of identity? Because of course, identity as a performance has limitations. For one, if gender is only a performance, then you're also effectively saying men can't wear skits because wearing a skirt is exclusive to the female performance. In that respect, I think Butler's work is somewhat self-negating, and yet she is also correct in saying gender is a performance because our collective understanding of gender does require its performative aspects.

Moeller's model is inherently about identity as a social technology, which means his model inherently requires an expression of identity to others. Sincerity is akin to Kegan3, Authenticity to Kegan4, but both of these require either performing identity as others see you (sincerity/Kegan3) or performing identity as you see yourself (authenticity/Kegan4). And yet, both these require an audience. Profilicity doesn't align with Kegan5 but instead represents a sort of hijacking of Kegan3 by simulacra/hyperreality.

And yet, does it make sense to turn identity entirely inward, to become entirely disconnected with the outside world? This is something you can experience via meditation/ego death/psychedelics/dissociation, and speaking from my personal psychonautic experiences in those states, I don't feel like that's the answer either. You can dissociate yourself into experiencing no identity (ego death), identity as another being (projection), or having multiple identities (plurality), and yet, these altered consciousnesses are either pathological or seen merely as temporary spiritual experiences to enhance insight in your sober/reality consciousness state.

The answer here seems to be what Hanzi Freinacht said in your quote or Kegan5. That is, understanding how your identity is shaped by others, yourself, and the world, and then meaningfully engaging in connection with those domains. Or, to go back to Aristotle, being a true agent requires conforming yourself to reality then acting upon reality. I suppose we're all models of identity all at once, both the noun and the verb.

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Re: The Listening Society

Post by jacob »

7Wannabe5 wrote:
Fri Mar 04, 2022 7:10 am
The notion of cultural capital is very important to Freinacht's model, because he suggests that in metamodern mode it will take precedence over financial capital. This strikes me as very true, because when I read Bourdieu on cultural capital a number of years ago, it helped me realize why my lifestyle was pretty darn good even though I didn't have very much financial capital and spent very little money. IOW, I think it speaks very much to how one could simultaneously argue that the poverty level in the U.S. should be set even higher than $12,000 while still striving to live very well on less than that amount oneself. You recognize or "realize" your advantages.
I hesitate to comment under the pain of tl;dr and not having read the book yet, but I did read this https://metamoderna.org/what-is-the-mhc/ ... and thus have some comments.

I do that that those who ARE in metamodern mode, things like cultural capital can take hold over financial capital or employment capital. Where, for example, people get invited not because of rank or wealth but simply because one has interesting things to say. Also see G1 at https://web.archive.org/web/20151006183 ... n-the-u-s/

On the other hand, complex metamodern systems also have a way of conforming their manifestation to increasingly simpler and more traditional systems the further they diffuse into the unwashed masses. E.g. the internet increasingly resembles cable TV with a few centralized providers, constant advertising, idiotic content, ... Crypto which the metamodernist hail as some kind of transaction based on a reputation will likely also get centralized and put under blue or orange structures.

I think the ERE system can be filed somewhere between the systematic, (the meta-systematic), and the paradigmatic depending on whether one considers ERE as a construction manual, a hedged approach to systemic collapse, or the possibility of living completely differently than most everybody else. Similarly to the above, once translated out, many people were more interested in "formal plans" described by spreadsheets and tax conversions; even more just wanted a quick and simple guide with a few tips.

However, on the gripping hand one also notes that communication becomes increasingly longer the more complex it gets. This is a huge problem, I think, because it makes it difficult to communicate. Using our standard human word channels, the "new information content" is converging towards zero as we go deeper and deeper---making a complex point in a general conversation often requires several minutes of setting up the argument, but that is not how conversation works.
As such it often feels futile to try to aim higher and higher: There will be fewer and fewer who understand. I think this is in part why metamodernism or post-postmodernism on the net seems to be comprised of single voices here and there and everywhere. There are no lines between them.

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Re: The Listening Society

Post by jacob »

Side-note: Creating a structure or skeleton for complexity is a lot easier than putting the meat and the rest of the organs on it. For example, we can draw Bateson (cybernetic systems) and Kegan (social systems) to an infinite level ... but we struggle to talk about it for lack of words at Kegan5 and I've yet to see Kegan6 mentioned anywhere.

This comes down to the general embodiment problem: translating theory into practice. There are three points of the spear; trifork. Developing theory. Translating theory to practice. Practicing it.

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Re: The Listening Society

Post by 7Wannabe5 »

@AnalyticalEngine:

Well, Freinacht straightforwardly rejects Butler's work and puts her in the category of those who promote "game denial." He explains that there are many zero-sum games in life such as sexual competition and immigration and therefore, theories that suggest that these can be wished or deconstructed away are harmful to the humans who are encouraged to place themselves at a disadvantage when participating in these games.

Our discussion has been largely towards describing the level of development known as post-modernism, and it should be noted that Freinacht's model of metamodernity is based on the recognition of the short-comings of post-modernity as well as all the previous levels such as modernity and traditional society. However, the metamodern level is also the level at which self-aware integration of previous levels becomes best practice. So, for instance, rejection of "game denial" puts the metamodernist to some extent in the same camp with classical conservatives.
The answer here seems to be what Hanzi Freinacht said in your quote or Kegan5. That is, understanding how your identity is shaped by others, yourself, and the world, and then meaningfully engaging in connection with those domains. Or, to go back to Aristotle, being a true agent requires conforming yourself to reality then acting upon reality. I suppose we're all models of identity all at once, both the noun and the verb.
Yes, I think this is it, or as E.M. Forster put it "Only connect!"

@jacob:

The yet to be published book "Outcompeting Capitalism" is the 4th in the series on metamodern philosophy by Hanzi Freinacht. He only touches on it in "The Listening Society", so, like you, I assumed he must mean something like what happens between G2 and G1 in the Church model. Obviously, the human who would most want to invite Hanzi Freinacht to a dinner party would be somebody who has for some time been on the verge of becoming disenchanted with the post-modern perspective. There are many rogue exceptions to the rule, such as my L to E track multi-millionaire friend, but the majority of the most affluent 10% of people in modern society have adopted or at least encountered much of the post-modern agenda, so the metamodern simply is what is next for them. As Freinacht puts it, the attractors that will form the future are already out there, but our interaction with them also hastens their development. Everybody has a stake in knowing what the future will be like, so possession of cultural capital is somewhat akin to possession of insider information.
As such it often feels futile to try to aim higher and higher: There will be fewer and fewer who understand. I think this is in part why metamodernism or post-postmodernism on the net seems to be comprised of single voices here and there and everywhere. There are no lines between them.
This is why metamodernity is the only game in town at present, even for those very few humans who have even greater cognitive or emotional depth development (geniuses and gurus.) There simply aren't enough humans to even begin to form a community at even higher levels. But, for example, I can mention an interest in permaculture while interviewing for a job with somebody 25 years younger than me and develop some rapport, or I can use the language of systems science when writing a paper for an IT class and get a better grade. The metamodern vocabulary and perspective has a clear advantage over the modern or postmodern, because it is more true, more kind, and more practical.

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Re: The Listening Society

Post by guitarplayer »

From https://metamoderna.org/what-is-the-mhc/ (italics mine)
This is the first book in a series on metamodern thought, a work of popular philosophy that investigates the nature of psychological development and its political implications. What you will read below is from the chapter on cognitive development; a chapter that introduces the reader to the Model of Hierarchical complexity and the creator of this theory Michael Commons.

Commons first formulated the theory after having taken a year off from work to study mathematics, where the language of abstract algebra helped him to describe the formal relationships between the different stages.
This is like my three formal academic interests converging (not like for the first time, but here there is also a good forum to discuss).

I am going to make an implementation intention: when I finish the two books I am reading now, I am going to read this book.

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Slevin
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Re: The Listening Society

Post by Slevin »

Political metamodernism is built around one central insight. The king’s road to a good future society is personal development and psychological growth. And humans develop much better if you fulfill their innermost psychological needs.

So we’re looking for a “deeper” society; a civilization more socially apt, emotionally intelligent and existentially mature. There are three different parts of political metamodernism:

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

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

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

So these three things taken together are what I call political metamodernism. This book focuses mainly on the listening society, and explains how we as humans develop and grow psychologically.
This might be posted on the website or something already,
But just wanted to post the premise up here a bit in the authors’ own words to expand on 7wb5’s larger description above.

Also side note: other XNTPs on this forum talking about cool philosophy books that don’t exist at the local library is bad for my wallet. I’m the definitive sucker for post-postmodern philosophical texts to add to my idea frameworks.

7Wannabe5
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Re: The Listening Society

Post by 7Wannabe5 »

guitarplayer wrote:This is like my three formal academic interests converging (not like for the first time, but here there is also a good forum to discuss).
The first book is more about psychological development and the second book is more about political development. There isn't much math, but Freinacht does highly promote Commons' model of cognitive development. He also semi-slaughters the Kegan model and the Spiral Dynamics model.
slevin wrote:Also side note: other XNTPs on this forum talking about cool philosophy books that don’t exist at the local library is bad for my wallet. I’m the definitive sucker for post-postmodern philosophical texts to add to my idea frameworks.
Sorry :lol: . I've been indulging myself a bit lately in my edutainment spending due to my semi-invalid-recluse status. That said, one of the reviewers wrote "most interesting thing since 'Anti-Fragility'" and I had the same thought.

guitarplayer
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Re: The Listening Society

Post by guitarplayer »

Hanzi wrote: We need directions, but these directions must necessarily be of an abstract, open-ended nature. We don’t need cookbooks; we need general ideas on how to create good cookbooks, so to speak. We need stories about stories. Meta-narratives.
@jacob he’s writing about your book.

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