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The Listening Society: A Metamodern Guide to Politics, Book One

Hanzi Freinacht

Top 10 Best Quotes

“We fail to take responsibility, to act productively in the interest of ourselves and others. And in our attempts at a better life, we are often severely limited or thwarted by the immature and socially inept behavior of ourselves and others. There is a great fabric of relations, behaviors and emotions, reverberating with human and animal bliss and suffering, a web of intimate and formal relations, both direct and indirect. Nasty whirlwinds of feedback cycles blow through this great multidimensional web, pulsating with hurt and degradation. My lacking human development blocks your possible human development. My lack of understanding of you, your needs perspectives, hurts you in a million subtle ways. I become a bad lover, a bad colleague, a bad fellow citizen and human being. We are interconnected: You cannot get away from my hurt and wounds. They will follow you all of your life—I will be your daughter’s abusive boyfriend, your belligerent neighbor from hell. And you will never grow wings because there will always be mean bosses, misunderstanding families and envious friends. And you will tell yourself that is how life must be. But it is not how life has to be. Once you begin to be able to see the social-psychological fabric of everyday life, it becomes increasingly apparent that the fabric is relatively easy to change, to develop. Metamodern politics aims to make everyone secure at the deepest psychological level, so that we can live authentically; a byproduct of which is a sense of meaning in life and lasting happiness; a byproduct of which is kindness and an increased ability to cooperate with others; a byproduct of which is deeper freedom and better concrete results in the lives of everyone; a byproduct of which is a society less likely to collapse into a heap of atrocities.”

“Let’s return to the main argument. People are hurting as hell. It matters. We should do something to make them happier, if we can.”

“People are hurt and afraid at a subtle psychological level—and are therefore self-absorbed, incapable of taking on larger perspectives and incapable of acting upon the very real long-term risks that threatening our global civilization. We must, at all cost, make the world population much, much happier in the deepest sense of the word.”

“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.”

“We can and should create a happy society, simply because we care. Unfortunately, I have found, this is not obvious to many professors of psychology, theologians, philosophers, economists and the like. Pond scum.”

“We are witnessing the rise of the digitalized, globalized, transnational, postindustrial society—and its discontents. The nationalist resurgence is only that: the outdated, the outgunned, the outmaneuvered. That does not make the confusion and suffering of the losing side any less real.”

“The society we live in today is just an experiment. Nobody has the answers. Nobody knows where it’s going, or why. We don’t even know where we would like it to go. There’s no grown-up out there, looking out for us. Nobody’s home. It’s just one big, glorious chaos engine; busy, busy spawning all manner of unimaginable creatures, existences, relations, exquisite beauties and excruciating tragedies. When you truly see this, an experimental attitude towards society suddenly seems much less reckless or disrespectful. It is the only appropriate stance.”

“Polarization (and Trumpism) is in itself a kind of political crisis. But all of this would be fine in the long run, if the stakes weren’t so high and the time frames so narrow. As a world-system, we really don’t have the time for Trumpism and the like. Global warming and the rapid changes pertaining to the internet age won’t wait. We are entering a time of unprecedented transformation and we are in dire need of politics that are progressive—in the sense that they anticipate and productively respond to the upcoming multidimensional crisis—revolution.”

“Ours is a world full of self-deceit, my friend. But it is at the same time a world full of sincere truth seeking, scientific progress and curios late night conversations about the nature of reality and existence.”

“It is solemn duty of the philosopher to piss on all that you hold dear and sacred, to show you that your gods are false.”

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Book Keywords:

responsibility, transhumanism, politics, metamodernism, society, future, sufferring, trumpism, humanism, trump

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