HANZI FREINACHT
Nordic Ideology: A Guide to Metamodern Politics, Book Two
Copyright Metamoderna ApS, 2019
All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof
may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever
without the express written permission of the publisher
except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
First Edition, 2019
ISBN 978-87-999739-3-4
Metamoderna ApS | www.metamoderna.org
Heres one for Jonas,
And one for Jimmy
And for all the kind, intelligent
And sensitive people
Who bow down
And break down
Under the existential pressures
Of modern life
And one for Tom,
This mischievous man
Who was the first reader of this book
And passed away shortly after
Contents
Introduction:
BLAZING NEW PATHS
Let it first of all be said that the previous book, The Listening Society , wasnt all that good or important.
The previous book basically hammers home one point: that development is real and that it matters. It stays mostly within the realm of psychology. There are a few innovations, true, but they arent that big.
The present volume is different. Fewer people will like it, no doubt, as its not as light-weight. This is a much heavier, more original and, in my opinion, a more significant piece of work. Essentially, the first book was only the introduction to this one, which contains about three times more in terms of theoretical content and innovation. It presents you with an actual to-do plan to save the world. Without this plan, were still just playing around.
This is where it gets real. Welcome.
Ah, back in the Alps. Its a sunny winters day. Clear skies. Open horizons. Majestic mountains. Swathes of pine trees burdened with a thick layer of slowly melting snow, naked cliffs in glistening black and white, rising above misty valleys. Its quiet here.
Only the buzzing flies keep me company in this chalet of sixteen beds, five bathrooms, and one jacuzzi. Ive just spent half an hour chasing a veritable army of them out the windows. Many more remain. They want to see the sun, but the moment they make their way out, they freeze to death. I watched a few of them land in the soft snow; it takes about ten seconds before their last spasm.
I dont know if its preferable to a forty-eight-hour life of beating against a window until you dry up and roll overand eventually have your body swallowed by the vacuum cleaner. I just sentenced a good fifty of them to death. I cant say I regret it.
Still, I wonder what it would be like to be one of them. They have about 10,000 neurons each. Apparently, this wooden house has parts where maggots thrive and eggs can be safely laid. But once the flies have won their wings and confidently lift off to explore the world, they find a barren landscape of wood and glass, with no scrap to eat, no water to quench their thirst, no cow dung to relish in. During the summer, there are cows grazing about, their bells chiming and echoing until sunset, fields of dung aplenty. But now there is only a hopeless struggle against the window, an invisible barrier granting no solace.
From a human perspective, the relentless efforts of these creatures appear futile. Their way of understanding the worldjust go for the lightseems much too simpleminded. Quite clearly, their intuition betrays them.
But are we so different from our distant house fly kin? Evolutionarily, we parted ways about half a billion years ago. For certain, we have taken divergent paths. Vertebrates like ourselves develop a second mouth during early embryonic stages, whereas the first mouth becomes our anus. These little bastards, banging their heads against the window, still eat through their anuses. They live short lives and multiply quickly, dying en masse to let some lucky few pass on their genes lots of genes. We, on the contrary, live long lives and invest huge energy into our rather few offspring for many years. Some of us even love them.
But like the flies, we are born into a world of greater circumstances beyond our control. Some of us are born on hot, humid summer days, with plenty of space to buzz around and cows to bother; to live the lives we were, in some sense, meant to live. Others are born to a merciless struggle spent beating our heads against invisible barriers.
Had I been born elsewhere, I could have been a drug-addicted child soldier in Sierra Leone, a sweatshop worker in Bangladesh, or brainwashed in a North Korean labor camp on the Russian taiga. Talk about barren landscapes for human growth and flourishing.
Breaking the Limits
Nature is a cruel mistress. On one hand she graciously endows us allmice and men, and yes, even flieswith unlimited potential to flourish; on the other, she sooner or later throws us against an impenetrable glass barrier. We always hit limits such as lacking resources, harsh climatic conditions, hostile life forms, or diseases, to either stump our growth or kill us off.
No one ever reaches their full potential. But nature isnt being unfair; on the contrary, its life that is utterly unreasonable in its aspirations. To life, to the primordial impulse of the will, the world is simply not enough; the moment it wins the world, it seeks to conquer another.
Take a pair of flies, for instance; without any natural barriers, one mating couple could grow into a swarm exceeding the mass of the Earth in less than a year. A simple house fly may appear a humble creature; but dont be fooled: If given the chance, itll consume the world and everyone in it. Lord of the flies.
Humans are no less unreasonable; just closer to conquering the world. Human crops now account for more than a third of the Earths non-marine biomass, 83% of the terrestrial biosphere is under direct human control, and we and our domesticated animals now make up 97% of all land mammals. Insects may be more numerous, but the biomass of all humans has been estimated to be slightly larger than the combined biomass of all 12,649 species of ants. Quite impressive when you think about it. I couldnt find any estimates for how we compare to flies, but a recent investigation has shown that in certain parts of the world we have killed off around 75% of all winged insects in the last 30 years. At this rate well beat the flies pretty soon.
Victory at last. If perhaps a lonely one.
However, the explosive growth from a few million to soon-to-be eight billion humans in the course of a mere 10,000 years is not the most extraordinary fact about our species. Whats even more extraordinary is that were not about to reach 80 billion.
Were often led to believe that the Earth is severely overpopulated, but overconsumed is a more accurate description. Theoretically, we could easily sustain a much larger number of human bodies with the currently available resources and technologies. We have plenty of possibilities to go forth and be fruitful and populate the Earth as God told us in the Bible. But somehow this godly command wasnt enough for the human race. We wanted something more. We wanted to become gods ourselves. Gods of electricity and economic growth. Gods of information.
Evolution truly is a strange beast. The moment natural selection finally had produced a species capable of overcoming most of the natural barriers inhibiting its biological expansion from subsuming the entire biosphere, a new evolutionary principle enters the stage and takes the lead role: symbolic evolution.
