First of all, everyone seems to be fine with two-stage models. This may sound strange, but is very obviously the case if you take a moment to listen closely. Most people don’t think of themselves as stage theorists when they suggest or employ models with only two stages. But, truth be told, every time you come up with some version of the idea that “the old way of doing things is mechanical, hierarchical, and bureaucratic, but now there’s this new way of doing things that’s organic, egalitarian, and creative” (this is a very common one these days, perhaps even the dominant model), you have inadvertently created a stage model, and a model that’s normatively hierarchical with the later stage considered at least somehow “better” and more advanced than the former, and it’s a model in which people are thought to need to grow out of, or wake up from, the mechanistic view and “realize” the ecological/organic/mycelial one.

People are doing two-stage models all the time—and no one is complaining: The notion that we’ve gone from the age of the nation state to that of a global world order. No one bats an eye. That we’ve transitioned from an industrial economy to an information economy. That we’ve gone from monarchy to liberal democracy. Conventional wisdom. Or we can go on to two-stage models that are widely accepted in academia if not by the public at large: That we have gone from mechanic to organic solidarity (in Durkheim’s classical sociology). That we’ve gone from “mode 1” to “mode 2” knowledge production (a thing that became big in the sociology of science in the 1990s). That after patriarchy comes a society emancipated through feminist critique. That after colonialism comes a postcolonial heritage. And so on.

It’s an interesting thing to note, isn’t it? People are dire opponents of stage theories, but they still subscribe to and even propose two-stage theories—just as long as they can hide that it’s actually a stage theory. So, beneath the surface, people are actually not opponents of stage theory. Scratch and the resistance dissolves in your grip.

Three stages is a bit more controversial, though. The privilege to create three stage models seems to be reserved for established geniuses. Jürgen Habermas, for example, who’s widely considered one of the world’s greatest social theorists, uses a three-stage model to describe the transition from traditional to modern society. Marx and Engels claimed, in the part of their theory people tend to talk about, that we’ve gone from feudalism, to capitalism, and soon communism. And then of course there’s Hegel’s famous dialectics, popularized as the “thesis–antithesis–synthesis” model—a three-stage model. (Nevermind that Fichte actually came up with that one, it’s mostly associated with Hegel.)

But more than three stages—heresy! You lose all credibility and are condemned to wander the desert together with all those obscene adult development charlatans and wacky new age folks.

However, this doesn’t mean that conventional academics are entirely unfair in their dismissal of one of the most popular of stage models: Spiral Dynamics. In fact, I would go as far as to claim that Spiral Dynamics in many ways, despite its intuitive elegance, has prevented and to some extent hurt the mainstream adaptation of stage theories—and rightly so!

The Awkward Uncle

It is by yet an ironic twist of fate that one of the best models of human and societal development has been invented and proposed by some of the least intelligent and intellectually honest people in the field.

The Spiral Dynamics model of Don Beck and Chris Cowan, which builds upon the work of the late psychologist Clare Graves, postulates that people develop through a clear, recognizable sequence of value memes (or “vMemes”), which largely determine the overall pattern of their values, logics, personalities, and behaviors.

For some strange reason that eludes me, the originators of this model managed to catch a simple but elegant pattern in the psychological and societal development of humans, and described it with a precision and clarity that I have yet to see elsewhere: Even as great sociologists like Jürgen Habermas and Günter Dux make attempts at similar theories, they all fall short. For instance, when Habermas formulates his theory of “communicative action” he considers Kohlberg’s stages of moral development, but fails to see how the different value memes must, by necessity, be limited in their ability to communicate with one another and find common grounds on a “rational” basis—how difficult it is, for instance, to reconcile a traditional Christian with a postmodern queer-feminist perspective. The same weakness is apparent in his later work on deliberative democracy (and even in the theories of his critic, Iris Marion Young) . How could Spiral Dynamics teach us things that the greatest of sociologists cannot? ‘Tis a tale of weeds and roses.

Strange as it may be, this model struck gold. It just needs to be seriously revised, and some parts of it scrapped. But first, let’s begin by clarifying what our awkward uncle, Spiral Dynamics, got wrong.

Why “Spiral Dynamics” Doesn’t Work

The Spiral Dynamics model squeezes all development into one single framework simply referred to as “the stages of development”—not taking into account exactly what kind of development we’re talking about, or acknowledging that there can be several dimensions of development.

These, supposedly universal, stages are presented as vividly described color codes (often depicted as a colorful spiral that looks like a popsicle) often written with CAPITAL LETTERS (not sure why):

• PURPLE (tribal folk people),

• RED (gang members),

• BLUE (traditionally religious people),

• ORANGE (modern mainstream people),

• GREEN (postmodern people),

• YELLOW (metamodern people) and

• TURQUOISE (new-agey “holistic” or “integral” people).

This crude and ahistoric formulation of stages causes a lot of problems. Besides some awkward mistakes, an apparent lack of basic education on behalf of its creators, and poor taste (all three of which are, after all, forgivable), the model really cannot answer rather simple questions. For instance, who is at a higher value meme, a contemporary fourteen-year-old with modern schooling, or a medieval genius like Thomas of Aquinas? Or, who is highest stage, a high complexity person like Michael Common, the creator of the Model of Hierarchical Complexity, or an extraordinarily deep and wise person like Eckhart Tolle, a spiritual teacher and self-help author? (The secret answer to this question is of course that both score really high in two different dimensions of development.)

But still: Once you see the value memes in Spiral Dynamics it’s certainly hard to look away. There really is something about people being Christian and Muslim traditionalists (BLUE), or scientifically- and business minded mainstream people (ORANGE), or post-1968 hippies or radical environmentalist ultra-liberal feminists who love animal rights (GREEN). At least in the world I’ve grown up in, this makes a whole lot of sense.

And there really does seem to be a developmental sequence to this thing: A few hundred years ago, most people were BLUE or below, then people in the richest countries started becoming ORANGE (starting with the Enlightenment and the American and French revolutions), and when that had gone on for a while, you had a surge of GREEN people across the most economically developed parts of the Western world.

For all its weaknesses, the Spiral Dynamics model catches something vital. Its main insight is far from self-evident; indeed it has been entirely missed by almost all of social science.

Yet, the model suffers from a number of crucial issues that mandates us to scrap it in favor of something better:

First of all, it looks like a giant popsicle, uses primary colors like a kid’s crayon set to name the stages and ALL CAPS LETTERS (a bit aggressive, innit?). Seriously, being this aesthetically challenged makes you certain of eternal damnation in the halls of science and philosophy and dooms the model to never in a thousand years be taken seriously by any respectable academic or person with decent taste. Just look at this:

(Makes you wonder how many calories one of these bad boys contain?)

Yet, aesthetics can be forgiven, after all, but the next two issues cannot.

Second: The model isn’t properly anchored in the academic reference system and only makes anecdotally use of historiographical and sociological knowledge. This, of course, disqualifies the model from entering the academic discussion.

And third: Spiral Dynamics doesn’t properly separate psychological development from socio-cultural development, plus it smashes all aspects of psychological development together. This leads to the aforementioned problems in which it ranks a contemporary modern school kid above the greatest scholastic thinkers, and where it cannot differentiate between people of high cognitive complexity and people of great spiritual depth. I have addressed this problem in my book The Listening Society within which I present and elaborate the four dimensions of psychological development: Complexity, Depth, Code, and State.

Accordingly, Spiral Dynamics tries to do too many things at once and ends up failing at doing any of them properly.

Regarding the socio-cultural stages, I would argue that it needs an entirely separate model based on proper historical references and the established theoretical frameworks within sociology and historiography. (Yes, this is where the Axial Age thesis enters the picture, but hold on, however, before we move on, allow me to first—only impressionistically, simplifying to the degree that it’s downright incorrect—introduce the six metamemes).

The Metamemes

The metameme model, and the definition of the stages in particular, are significantly more well-anchored in today’s academic conventions than you may have been led to believe. The six metamemes in sequential order are as follows:

1. Animist: Hunter gatherers.

2. Faustian: Early agrarian civilization.

3. Post-faustian: Axial Age moral religions and philosophies.

4. Modern: Industrial and capitalist civilization.

5. Post-modern: Postcolonial, queer, and environmental critique of modern society.

6. Metamodern: The new emerging metameme based on the cultural logic of the Internet.

Now, let me point out that what I am doing here is a lot less controversial or far-fetched than it may first appear.

My point of departure is the century-old academic discussion on modernity (stage 4), which, since the late 1970s, has been accompanied by “the postmodern” (stage 5), i.e. the idea that something comes after modernity, something inherently different from our classical notions of modern life, and that it has begun to challenge and gradually replace it. Taken together, this already well-established framework is in fact a three-stage model since the whole idea of modernity implies a decisive break with the past; that modernity is something new and vastly different from anything that has existed since the beginnings of civilization. The pre-modern → modern → postmodern model is thus not something I just pulled out of my hat, but remains a rather conventional framework that is commonly used among the bulk of scholars and social theorists today. The idea that there are such things as modernity and postmodernity (and something that came before) of course has its opponents. But most scholars know it well, and even if they don’t use it themselves, they generally don’t protest its use by others.

The “pre-modern” category may fulfill its purpose just fine when you want to describe the present or near-past, which is what most social theorists are concerned with. But every historian ought to agree that, for the student of cultural history writ large, it simply doesn’t work to lump the entirety of human history prior to the past couple of centuries into a single juggernaut category. There’s a substantial difference between the pyramid-building civilizations and free-roaming paleolithic hunter gatherers that preceded them by tens of thousands of years, which at least merits the creation of two separate categories or stages. This should hardly be a controversial claim within neither historiography, nor archeology, nor sociology. In fact, the classification of human societies and historical eras into one of the three categories: 1) pre-agrarian, 2) agrarian, and 3) modern industrial, is so conventional that it’s almost embarrassing to explicitly mention it. And then we have all the smart social theorists eagerly engaged in the discussion about what comes after modernity, including if or how we’ve already made such a decisive break from classical enlightenment modernity. Some talk about postmodernity, others about “late modernity”, some use the term “hypermodernity”, but no matter the preferred term, we’re talking about a stage (or whichever term scholars prefer to use: phase, epoch, and so on) following the modern one.

One big part of the problem is that most social theorists aren’t historians, and most historians aren’t social theorists. The job of social theorists is, most often, to analyze and describe contemporary society. As such, they’re mostly preoccupied with modernity and postmodernity while the pre-modern stages remain largely ignored. Historians, on the other hand, are generally not too interested in social theory, or, for obvious reasons, contemporary society, so they tend to be unaware of or uninterested in the idea of the postmodern.

Depending on which country is being discussed, or which school of thought is applied, you have a veritable jungle out there of different time periods, eras, epochs, and so on. For the most part, however, all of these don’t help much to understand and explain history and the world. They merely function as chronological categories, rarely as qualitative ones. I’ll get back to this part about chronological versus qualitative categories in history, but very briefly: “The Middle Ages” is a chronological category, i.e. it’s a certain period of time (circa 500 to 1400–1500 CE), Modernity on the other hand is more of a qualitative one (it denotes certain forms of culture, as we discuss in this book). Chronological categories aren’t very useful for understanding the world. We must have qualitative categories to do so—and modernity, postmodernity, and, as I’ll elaborate shortly, “axiality” are such well-established categories that have found widespread use and recognition in academia.

It’s also worth mentioning that pre-agrarian times remain largely neglected by most historians. After all, their job is to analyze written sources, and as such, everything before the agrarian era—what historians rather impertinently dismiss as “prehistory”—is largely beyond their field of expertise. “Prehistory” then, has become the domain of archaeologists, but for the most part they’re too busy digging treasures up to care about what their more theoretically minded colleagues in other departments are up to.

So here’s the model most historians, sociologists, and anthropologists would agree on if they were talking with each other:

1. Prehistory, hunter gatherers, “Stone Age”

2. Premodern, traditional, agrarian civilization

3. Modern, industrial civilization

4. Postmodern, late modern, hyper modern etc.

My point is that even if most historians and social theorists are too busy with all kinds of other stuff than to “obsess” about stages, the established discourse within the social sciences actually already implies a four-stage model. Fortunately, however, most of them remain blissfully unaware about the heresy they’re guilty of! Many of them could literally risk their careers if they expressed the stage model that everyone is already taking for granted. Stage theories are instruments of oppression, right?

So, what have I done to get to six stages? Well, I’ve simply divided the so-called “pre-modern”, “traditional”, (or whatever scholars want to call the way of life between the agricultural and industrial revolutions) category into two separate stages. The reason ought to be fairly obvious: This category is just waaay too broad. The differences between the early pyramid-building slave societies, and the much later cathedral-building ones with their moral religions and literate traditions, are simply too numerous and deep-going to adequately fit both kinds of societies within the same category.

To me, the contrast between the former (faustian, pyramid-building) and the latter (posfaustian cathedral-building) always seemed like one of a magnitude similar to that between modernity and postmodernity.

But there is more to it. The two stages even have a similar dynamic between them as the Modern and Postmodern metamemes: Postmodern looks and feels a lot like Modern, still relying on some kind of late-stage industrialism, but there are profound shifts in culture and values that take place. Correspondingly, the world religions like Buddhism, Islam, or Christianity seem to reorder still-agrarian societies according to values that, among other things, question slavery, war, inequality, and the arbitrary use of power. As such, I chose to add the -post prefix to the latter of the two stages, Faustian and Postfaustian together constituting “pre-modernity”.

To truly notice the difference between Faustian and Postfaustian cultures, just compare the Babylonian ritual where the high priestess literally has sex with the king on a table in front of everyone (this was to celebrate the advent of spring)—compare that with the celibate life of Christian or Buddhist monks. Indeed, it’s difficult to imagine more different cultural expressions: going from slam-bang elite orgies on the table as “sacred marriage”, to chastity and contemplation of moral universality. Of course, Catholic priests do get their action too, but it’s always a very clandestine affair.

So, all I did was say that we can’t lump all of “pre-modern” into one big basket. And I split it into two, which I call Faustian and Postfaustian:

As such, I merely added one additional stage to the existing sociological and historical framework, and then began exploring what the next stage following postmodernity might look like? (The box above with the question mark in it).

It’s not a huge jump, just another step following from what is already established. But it’s the final piece of a puzzle that opened up a whole new understanding of history, society, and cultural development. It revealed a pattern, a pattern that has been hidden in plain sight, namely that societal development has a certain rhythm; that the peculiar dichotomy between modernity and postmodernity isn’t something entirely novel, but simply echoes a pattern that has occurred before. History is linear, sure, with one thing leading to next, but it’s also cyclical, with certain patterns that repeat. Linear and cyclical, both at the same time, like a fractal—or, like a spiral. (Hmm, maybe that awkward uncle wasn’t that awkward after all.

In any case, one of those fractal patterns, of course, contains what has been referred to as the Axial Age. Ladies and gentlemen, and esteemed non-binaries, please allow this article’s guest of honor to enter the stage:

The Axial Age Thesis

The Axial Age is a thesis introduced by the German-Swiss psychiatrist and philosopher Karl Jaspers (1883–1969) to designate the period during which the great universal moral religions, wisdom tradition, and philosophies emerged. This thesis revolves around the core observation that several of the world’s major religious, philosophical, and ethical traditions emerged independently yet simultaneously during the middle of the 1st millennium BCE. The term “Axial Age” was first coined in a 1946 lecture in Genève and later became the key concept in The Origin and Goal of History from 1949. The observation that the Greek philosophers, the Hebrew prophets, The Buddha, and Confucius were more or less contemporaries is, however, much older than Jasper’s thesis and goes back to the French Enlightenment thinker Abraham Hyacinthe (take a breath, there’s more) Anquetil-Duperron (1731–1805). Others, such as Max Weber, also mentioned this historical time as a turning point in which a new sort of “salvation” religion supplanted the older so-called “magical” religions, but it is generally Max Weber’s brother Alfred who is credited with having inspired Jaspers to come up with the idea of an Axial Age.

Now, Jaspers wasn’t a historian, and only less than a tenth of The Origin and Goal of History is dedicated to the historical overview—the “origin”—the rest is about Jaspers’ philosophy: the universal “goal” of history. His Axial Age thesis is therefore to be considered more of an attempt at a broader philosophical effort to mediate between relativistic historicism and abstract universalism in the ideological vacuum of postwar Germany than an accurate historiographical account of the intellectual and religious developments of the 1st millennium BCE.

However, Jasper’s original work does not reflect the current state of Axial Age research which has evolved markedly since the renowned Polish-Israeli sociologist and writer Shmuel Eisenstadt (1923–2010) renewed the topic in the 1970s and -80s, and especially since the American sociologist Robert Bellah (1927–2013), internationally known for his work related to the sociology of religion, resumed his interest in the Axial Age (which at the time had been dormant since the 1960s when he wrote a short paper on the topic), culminating in an academic conference in 2008 that produced an anthology containing contributions from a number of high profiling scholars, including Eisenstadt, Hans Joas, Jan Assmann, Björn Wittrock, Johann P. Arnasson, and others. In 2011 Bellah published his magnum opus, a 700-page tour de force exploring the evolutionary aspects of religion titled Religion in Human Evolution: From the Paleolithic to the Axial Age in which he explores each of the axial civilizations (except Iran) in impressive detail. In addition, Jürgen Habermas, whose preoccupation with Jaspers and the Axial Age goes back to his youth, has addressed the Axial Age thesis continuously in his work since the 1970s, including The Theory of Communicative Action (1981) and his recent work, the 1700-pages-long history book on philosophy in which Jaspers, Eisenstadt and Bellah are prominently featured. Consequently, the term that initially began its life in a relatively obscure and esoteric philosophy book in post-war Germany has now more or less become the default academic term in sociology, philosophy, and theology to denote the transformational phase in religion and culture that occurred in the 1st millennium BCE and beyond. Not bad for a crusty old kraut.

I have written a paper on the subject, a comprehensive introduction to the Axial Age thesis, titled “The Axial Turn: A Critical Assessment of the Axial Age Thesis and the Historiographical Qualities of Axiality” (I know, sounds pretty wanky) that you can read here.

The main result of this investigation is the identification of the following six qualities of The Axial Age, or more accurately, of the non-temporal category of “axiality” (similar to modernity):

1. Writing and Textual Canonization

2. Transcendence

3. Second-order Thinking

4. Disenchantment and Disembedding

5. The “Individual”

6. Religion as Soteriology

These six qualities form the core of what I have described as the Postfaustian Metememe. And all of these qualities are derived from the decade-old academic discussion on axiality and the Axial Age, which thereby anchors this “missing” stage of development in the academic reference system.

However, although the Axial Age thesis has been established as a valid thesis within academia, it still to this day remains a rather obscure and relatively esoteric topic among scholars. Historians are not the only ones to have resisted or ignored the axial thesis. Most sociologists have not been eager to adopt it either. Despite having rid itself of the most esoteric aspects of Jaspers’ original thesis, along with his eurocentrism, and despite the high-quality research that has been produced during the last couple of decades, the field of Axial Age research—if we can even talk about such a thing—is still limited to a very small number of scholars. And why is that? Well, the reason may be as simple as the fact that grande histoire is not in vogue—and has not been since Jean-François Lyotard in 1979 defined our new postmodern condition as “incredulity towards all metanarratives”. The grand narrative of modernity, that rationality and science eventually would produce a perfect utopia, did not survive the post-war period’s critical assessments of the social and environmental consequences of modern civilization. The subsequent collapse of socialism, and its corresponding grand narrative of dialectical materialism, put the final nail in the coffin and discredited any such attempts at grand, overarching narratives thereafter. Accordingly, petite histoire has been the dominant doctrine within the historiographical sciences at least since the end of the Cold War.

This doesn’t mean that grande histoire or metanarratives have been entirely absent during the last decades, but it has mainly been a prominent phenomenon in popular non-fiction. Yuval Harari and David Graeber might have sold a lot of books, but that is (luckily) not sufficient to change the mind of serious scholars. And while Robert Bellah and David Christian (a historian who wrote a massive book, Maps of Time: An Introduction to Big History, about the history of the world beginning with the Big Bang) may have gotten the respect of the academic community—having demonstrated impressive rigor and scholarly craftmanship—it would be a hard stretch to claim that their accomplishments have been trendsetting.

Yet, it’s not that the Axial Age thesis runs completely counter to the dominant intellectual currents of the past four decades. It’s arguably more an issue of aiming slightly outside the outer limits of the target ring of contemporary academia: The axial discourse is “trans-cultural”, rather than “multi-cultural”; and it’s “pre-colonial”, rather than “post-colonial”—hence, the Axial Age strays just outside the margins of what has been academically kosher in the humanities since the end of the Cold War. This liminal condition of being close, but not quite there, can explain why the axial thesis has kept resurfacing, but never becoming firmly established, nor entirely dismissed or discredited either.

This may also explain why I ran into considerable, uhm, “friction”, to phrase it mildly, in order to get the abovementioned paper approved at the historical department at Lund University in Sweden. When I finally, after a prolonged struggle, succeeded at getting the paper through the system (after all, it upheld all academic standards and requirements) the reviewer revealed their postmodern intellectual bias, by proposing—in writing on the final verdict—that the thesis probably would have been better if it had made use of—hold on—Judith Butler (the “mother” of queer feminism) and Edward Said (the “father” of postcolonialism)—despite neither of them having ever written anything about or even, to my knowledge, mentioned the Axial Age, and despite never having been referenced in the Axial Age debate either.

That the reviewer couldn’t help themselves from mentioning these postmodern heroes, despite their questionable relevance to the topic, is of course a telling sign of the prevailing postmodern bias within academia. They argued that it would have been better if I had made use of more contemporary theory to reflect the current state of historiography—but Edward Said has been dead since 2003 and Judith Butler still remains best known for her books Gender Trouble and Bodies That Matter which came out in 1990 and 1993 respectively. The Axial Age thesis, on the other hand, has experienced a revival after 2005 and was extensively addressed by the (at the time) still living Jürgen Habermas in his mastodont work Auch eine Geschichte der Philosophie published in two volumes in 2019 and 2022.

Well, well, as I’ve said so many times: Valuememes can’t be friends—and the Axial Age thesis, being transcultural and pre-colonial and defined by crusty old white dudes, doesn’t fit into the prevailing postmodern ideology and thus elicits strong allergic reactions that sadly prevents its wider recognition. But this doesn’t change the fact that I’ve come to believe that the Axial Age thesis, as it has reemerged since the beginning of the 21st century, is a valid and extraordinary insightful academic discussion that illuminates and clarifies what should be considered a separate premodern stage of development in the same way we’ve come to consider modernity and postmodernity two separate stages or modes of socio-cultural development.

With the Axial Age thesis and the associated discussion on so-called axiality (a qualitative rather than temporal category in a similar vein to that of modernity), we no longer need to refer to the “BLUE vMeme” or other pseudoscientific notions. We can simply refer to the numerous highly acclaimed scholars from all around the world who have participated in and made vital contributions to the Axial Age thesis and thereby rendered a previously obscure and esoteric term into a valid academic sub-field within the social sciences. Accordingly, the Axial Age is the missing piece to the puzzle that enables us to go beyond the implicitly established four-stage model. And with an established notion of five stages, I’d argue that the road becomes wide open for an exploration of a sixth stage, a stage of socio-cultural development beyond the postmodern.

If you’re interested in learning more about metamodernism and the philosophy of Hanzi Freinacht, the Metamodern Academy with Emil Ejner Friis is offering an online introduction course in November 2026 here, and if you’re interested in a more comprehensive experience, you can join the new Updated Master Class here.

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Hanzi Freinacht is a political philosopher, historian, and sociologist, author of ‘The Listening Society’, ‘Nordic Ideology’ and ’12 Commandments’. Much of his time is spent alone in the Swiss Alps. You can follow Hanzi on Facebook, Twitter, and Medium, and you can speed up the process of new metamodern content reaching the world by making a donation to Hanzi here.

Artists created this world. The rest of us are just living in it, trying to catch up.

Here’s the thing: The seed of every new idea, of every foundational memetic construct, was initially spawned in the mind of an artist. Artists always arrive first. Philosophers second. And entrepreneurs come in third. Not only can this universal pattern be observed in the data provided by the history of cultural evolution, it’s also, as I’ll explain in the following, a logical necessity.

By now, the attentive and well-informed reader has probably figured out that I’m referring to the five-step model of metamemetic development from my unreleased book The 6 Hidden Patterns. You can read about the model in the free introduction chapter on the Metamoderna site here, and if you’re interested in learning more you can sign up for the updated master class in metamodernism here.

Here’s a breakdown of the model: the Five-step Sequence of Metamemetic Development:

1. Art

2. Philosophy

3. Entrepreneurship

4. Politics

5. Morality

Briefly, the model states that art always comes first, or more specifically, that the first manifestations of a new stage of socio-cultural development (the metamemes) always occur within the arts (or what corresponds with artistic expression within the particular time and context, bearing in mind that our contemporary conception of “art” is largely a modern and to some extent Western construct).

Only, once there has already been some artistic souls expressing the new emerging sensibilities (in whatever medium available and conducive to the task) is it possible for philosophers and other thinkers to begin formulating the so-called “code” of the new stage of socio-cultural development. A culture without works of art expressing the new emerging stage (metameme) will not produce any corresponding philosophy. It just won’t happen. And without the philosophers, the rest of us simply won’t obtain the necessary code to transform society to a new stage of development.

—

Let’s bring all of this into context: Historically speaking there wouldn’t have been a Scientific Revolution without the Renaissance. Without the new humanism of 14th century Italy, in which artists and poets began moving away from religious motifs in favor of human potentials, reason, civic virtue, and the value of a worldly education in the humanities, it’s unlikely that the following centuries would have experienced the birth of modern philosophy and a revolution in scientific reasoning.

The Renaissance was above all a revolution of the arts. Despite the importance that the rediscovery of Aristoteles (via the Arabs and exile Byzantines) had on Renaissance thinking, and despite Leonardo da Vinci’s tinkering with modern, rational ideas and technical innovations, it wasn’t until Descartes and the subsequent Scientific Revolution of the 17th century that we encounter a transformation of thought that can be described as thoroughly modern. What was modern about the Renaissance was the way in which artists and poets broke with the past to express something entirely novel, something that went beyond the religious paradigm that everything had been seeped in until then.

Despite coming close, neither Aristoteles, the Arabs, or Leonardo da Vinci ever expressed something like the scientific method—a cornerstone of the Modern metameme. Key concepts such as “induction” and “deduction” were ever only formally expressed following the end of the Renaissance. However, although Renaissance artists didn’t have a formal language to articulate such sensibilities, they did in fact implicitly express these two central ideas of modernity in the groundbreaking Renaissance innovations within the visual arts: “Deduction”, in the form of mathematically correct perspective, or single point perspective, invented in Northern Italy—and “induction” in the form of the natural lighting oil paintings techniques pioneered by the Flemish masters:

(from the Updated Master Class in Metamodernism)

And if you take a close look at the Van Eyck painting to the right, you’ll see another inherently modern innovation peeking out: the individual:

Prior to the Renaissance, artists were considered mere craftsmen like any other, and their individuality (as well as any other non-noble’s) was largely irrelevant. As a consequence, painters and sculptors usually didn’t sign their work. This of course changed with the rise of modernity, and the seed of this development began among the artists of the Renaissance who broke out of the confines of humble craftsmanship to become something more elevated: the artist, the prodigy soul with something unique to offer the world that neither kings nor popes could ever compete with.

In a way, we can speak of a certain “trickle-down” effect—from the “memetically endowed”, such as artists and philosophers, to the less memetically privileged, commoners and nobles alike. Trickle-down economics is, as should be well-established by now, a scam—but trickle-down memetics, on the other hand, is solidly backed by sociological and historical fact. Thus, it’s no coincidence that elites have always surrounded themselves with artists and philosophers, supporting them financially and promoting their work; not only to reap the greater status that goes along with showing off such endeavors, but also to be the first to nip at the source of those sweet, sweet cutting-edge memes before everyone else. Adopting and integrating the latest manifestations of a new metameme will, over time and on average, grant you wealth and influence. And that power can best be obtained from being as close as possible to the source from where it all originates: art.

So, following the innovations of the artist and philosophers there will be cunning “entrepreneurs” (in the broader connotation of the word) picking up the new sensibilities and applying them in the practical and social world. And as the various technical and social innovations begin transforming society and the economy, they eventually start to reshape politics, and finally a new moral attitude takes root in the general populace. This process can take centuries.

The 500-year history of modernity offers a good illustration of this five-step sequence of development:

1. Art: The Renaissance, 1400s in Northern Italy and Flanders.

2. Philosophy: Scientific Revolution, 1500-1600s in North Western Europe.

3. Entrepreneurship: Industrial Revolution, 1700s - 1800s in Great Britain.

4. Politics: Civil rights and modern bureaucracy, 1800s – 1900s in North Western Europe and North America.

5. Morality: arguably only after 1945 with human rights, alternatively after the cultural revolution in 1968. Globally, primarily in wealthy urban and other privileged regions in the world. Large parts of the industrial world still subscribe to premodern morality, especially in the Bible Belt of the US and parts of Eastern and Southern Europe.

However, please keep in mind that the pattern of this sequence of development also applies to the postmodern as well as the premodern metamemes.

Postmodernism didn’t start with the post-structural debate in the 1960s and 1970s. In fact, it can be traced all the way back to the late 19th century. Just take a look at Van Gogh: Here we have a decisive break with the modern project dedicated to manufacturing objective, naturalistic representations of the world as accurately as possible. What would later evolve into 20th century abstract art began in the late 19th century. Hence, the abstract art of Picasso may be hanging on the walls of so-called “modern art” museums, but that kind of art isn’t modern, technically speaking, it’s postmodern. Modern art is more like the photorealistic stuff someone like Rembrandt would paint. Makes sense now you think about, right? Objectively accurate representations of the world, with mathematically correctly deduced perspective and photo-realistically induced lightning—that’s very, very modern. A rejection of traditional aesthetic standards, a negligence of craftsmanship, collapsing perspectives, and a thorough deconstruction of forms and colors—now, that’s so, so postmodern indeed.

A good example of the way in which Picasso is postmodern can be demonstrated by his blatant deconstruction of Diego Velazquez’ Las Meninas. Just take a look at these two images:

I’d argue it’s pretty obvious, so I’ll allow you, my dear reader, to determine on your own which one is modern and which one is postmodern. (Also, check out the dog!)

—

Back to the main argument: Art always comes first—and this also applies to the premodern metamemes. If we consider the sentiments of the Axial Age, the revolution of thought that occurred during the middle of the first millennium BCE, (and which later paved the way for the Postfaustian (or traditional or religious) metameme, which flourished in the following two millennia during what in the West is referred to as the Medieval period) we can already find many of the elements that came to shape this period (and thus the great moral religions of today) in the literature of the ancient world, for instance in the Sumerian epic Gilgamesh. Just listen to this:

“Gilgamesh, where are you roaming? You will never find the eternal life that you seek. When the gods created mankind, they also created death, and they held back eternal life for themselves alone. Humans are born, they live, then they die, this is the order that the gods have decreed.”

The Epic of Gilgamesh is believed to have originated and evolved in the period from 2100 to 1200 BCE. The story introduces Gilgamesh, king of Uruk. Gilgamesh, two-thirds god and one-third man, who’s oppressing his people and cries out to the gods for help. The story revolves around Gilgamesh’s friendship with the wild man Enkidu. After they defeat monsters and anger the gods, Enkidu dies, prompting Gilgamesh to fear death and embark on a quest for immortality. After facing many trials, Gilgamesh fails to achieve immortality, learning from Utnapishtim that it isn’t meant for mortals. He eventually returns to Uruk, accepting his fate. His journey ultimately leads him to accept that true immortality is found in one’s legacy and the lasting works they leave behind, like the impressive walls he built around his city.

Although the story takes place in a fully faustian or pre-axial setting that revolves around the accomplishments of a great warrior king and doesn’t refer to any transcendental realms (perhaps the most central axial idea), the postfaustian elements are quite clear: first of all it tackles the issue that all the power in the world doesn’t grant you immortality, and secondly it points towards a legacy that goes beyond the immediate gains that power brings; that the warrior king has a higher purpose than his own, namely to build and to serve an order that persists after his death. These themes are thoroughly postfaustian and would later become emblematic of the philosophies and wisdom traditions of the Axial Age (c. 800 - 200 BCE).

So how about the even earlier Faustian metameme, which emerged following the Agricultural Revolution and flourished with the great pyramid-building civilizations; who’s the Picasso, da Vinci, or Gilgamesh of the Faustian metameme? The artistic manifestation of a new emerging stage of socio-cultural development that predates all others? Here’s a suggestion:

In 1995 a group of archaeologists at Göbekli Tepe in Türkiye discovered the ruins of a huge monumental complex consisting of several large buildings and 6-meter-tall erected pillars. The most extraordinary thing about this site was not its size however, nor that it had been hidden for so long—what was so astounding was its age. The oldest parts of the complex are estimated to have been built during the 10^th millennium BCE. That is, prior to the transition to agriculture in the region. This means that the enormous stone structures had been built by hunter-gatherers.

The conventional view among scholars is that temples and other large monumental buildings only appear many centuries after the transition to agriculture and the appearance of the first small villages. But the findings at Göbekli Tepe put this view on its head. For some strange reason, 10 000 years ago a group of hunter-gatherers decided to build a temple first, and only after that did they begin to farm and settle down in villages. Somehow a foraging society managed to move and erect up to 50 ton heavy rocks—and apparently, for no particular practical reason whatsoever. No traces of domesticated plants or animals have been found. None of the buildings have been used for food storage, or even been suitable for that purpose. And no one seems to have been living in the buildings either. There are remains of richly decorated artworks in the form of carefully, and for the time quite skillfully, crafted ornaments. This suggests that the purpose must have been artistic, or even religious—between which there was little to no difference in those times.

The rock carvings at Göbekli Tepe consist mostly of various animals and show relatively few humans, just like in the artworks of the animistic era. But the kinds of animals and the way they and the humans are depicted is a considerable departure from what we usually find among foragers. First of all there are no depictions of hunting raids, and the wild game hunter-gatherers usually depended on such as deer is largely ignored. Instead, there’s a great emphasis on predators, such as lions, foxes, and raptors, along with other dangerous animals like scorpions, snakes, and spiders. Vultures are also prominently featured. Most of the animals are male, depicted with erect penises, just like the few humans. But humans are sometimes depicted without heads (but still with erect penises), and there’re lots of disembodied human skulls that predators play around with. One of the most frequently occurring images is that of raptors taking human heads. If I didn’t know better, it could easily be mistaken for the cover art of a heavy metal album.

Regarding the imagery, it’s worth mentioning that throughout the entire Paleolithic period, as far as we know, no one ever cared to draw a spider or a scorpion, for instance. Instead, artists mostly preoccupied themselves with depicting their preferred sources of protein, such as bison, horses, aurochs, and deer, and what we must assume to be their favorite activity, namely hunting. We have no reason to believe that the people at Göbekli Tepe had begun to eat spiders, or that lions had started to play an important role in their everyday lives (besides from the occasional encounter).

So what exactly had begun to change in people’s minds since they all of a sudden began to express themselves in such a radically different way? Well, the depictions of formidable and dangerous animals, rather than wild game, suggest that something related to the perceived power of these creatures had begun to play a role in people’s imagination. That humans, rather than animals, are depicted as prey may be an indication that the faustian theme of a powerful being dominating other human beings had begun to surface. It’s no coincidence that lions and eagles are often figured in the emblems of medieval kings. Kings and warriors have often identified with predators. And somewhere between the transition from the Animist to the Faustian metameme, the act of predation began shifting away from a way of getting food towards a way of enacting dominance over other human beings.

Even if the features of Göbekli Tepe are not as clear-cut faustian as the god kings and mythological beasts found in the subsequent civilizations of ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia, the emphasis on powerful and dangerous creatures from the animal kingdom is remarkably different from the animistic artworks merely depicting wild game and hunting raids.

We can only guess what they sought to gain from these magnificent beasts. But a qualified one would be that it revolved around a quest for power; and not only the power attributed to these beasts, but more importantly the newly obtained power from gathering large groups of people and coordinating their labor. We don’t know the exact path leading up to the day someone finally decided to build these large structures, but contrary to the Agricultural Revolution it cannot have been a coincidence. Some powerful and charismatic hunter-gatherer must have developed a faustian mindset before anything of this kind could have been realized; a mindset that made it possible to exert authority over large numbers of people and their labor.

And from that day, art has been unmistakably connected to power, and power to art. Power is derived from having the best narrative at your disposal, and the most powerful means to convey compelling stories is of course art.

Art is power. Art gives you a competitive edge.

—

As illustrated in the previous paragraphs, the five-step sequence—Art -> Philosophy -> Entrepreneurship -> Politics -> Morality—is a universal pattern that has occurred at every stage of metamemetic development throughout history.

There’s a logical and self-evident reason why cultural evolution always progresses along this sequence: First of all, it only takes one gifted soul to envision an entirely novel work of art. Artists tend to be highly sensitive individuals with a well-developed imagination. Accordingly they can sense into the unrealized potentials of the universe, imagine things that are yet to emerge, and then manifest their visions aesthetically—entirely without any formalized language or pre-existing conceptions to guide them (which, by the way, is the philosophers’ job). Artistic innovation tends to happen as a spontaneous “lightning strike” in a single individual. It can’t be forced. And it can’t be will-powered into existence. It’s an emergent phenomenon that simply cannot be planned. But because it only takes one individual, artists will always be first. Philosophy, on the other hand, is (contrary to popular belief) not an individual endeavor. For text to become philosophy, it needs to go through a drawn-out peer-review process (whether modern academic standard or otherwise). For an idea to become philosophy, it needs to be subjected to intersubjective verification/falsification. Hence, philosophy is a communal effort, with layers of revisions and additions, forth and back, painstakingly slow, and that makes it destined to emerge later than art.

Artists can just express themselves however they want and without adhering to any rules—philosophers, on the other hand, need to engage in an intersubjective verification process with their peers in order to produce philosophy. Entrepreneurship takes even longer, due to the many practical and social implications involved, such as assembling a team of agents who are competent and motivated enough to actually carry out the risky endeavor of creating something new.

And then there’s politics and morality, which only manifest themselves in accordance with a new metameme once a great many stakeholders and later at least a solid majority of the population are onboard.

Here’s a breakdown of the five-step sequence and the corresponding quantitative social logic of each step:

1. Art: Individual

2. Philosophy: Peers

3. Entrepreneurship: Team

4. Politics: Stakeholders

5. Morality: Everyone (or at least a solid majority)

As you can see, there’s a logical reason why art always comes first—and why morality, or more accurately the formation of a new norm system—sadly, always emerges last. Alas, it explains so clearly why European imperialism and the Holocaust came after the Enlightenment; why we’re still struggling with that pesky and inconvenient idea that all (wo)men are created equal.

—

Let’s bring this one home, dear reader, and answer the golden question why all of this is relevant to you and how you can gain a competitive edge from the wisdom that art always comes first.

So, as a matter of fact, it just happens to be that the overarching metamemetic pattern from cultural evolution that I’ve labored to describe in this article can also be applied to the way in which organizations evolve over time. This is something that Robert Kelley Ayala and Emil Ejner Friis have been successfully teaching in their widely applauded leadership program. Below is a screenshot from the course:

Without going into too much detail, what I want to emphasize here is that at every phase transition of an organization’s development (the first columns to the left), you start anew as an “artist”. “Art” is a useful approximation to describe what is going on at this sub-step since the role of the artist is to imagine things that are yet to exist. Every transition to a new and higher stage begins with a foundational innovation or set of innovations and a new vision for what the organization should become. The initial purpose of this novel revelation is to “update” the “code” of the organization, so to speak; that is, to reinvent or come up with a new vision for what kind of entity the organization should be, what it should do, and how. In this broader sense of the term, you initiate every transition to a new frequency as an “artist”.

And finally, such innovative breakthroughs typically occur within the mind of an “Individual”, an exceptionally well-endowed individual to be more precise. Very few individuals have the capacity to initiate a transition to a new stage, it takes an unusually gifted soul who is cunning enough and sufficiently in tune with what the world needs and what the organization can deliver. But, it only takes one single person. It does not need a large group of people seeped in the new stage’s form of thinking, only one person who is sufficiently ahead of their time and with the right skills to express the unrealized potentials of a new and higher stage and how it should be applied to the organization in question

This makes art extraordinarily powerful. It’s therefore no coincidence that elites tend to obsess about art, always curious about what the avantgarde is up to. Marinating yourself in art makes it more likely that you’ll innovate. It gives you a competitive edge. Accordingly, it’s recommended that you spend time in art museums, check out new cultural events, and that you look at new trends in popular culture, whether that’s music, tv-series and so on.

Sadly, I feel that the metamodern and especially integral and post-integral spaces are lacking in this department. There’s plenty of cutting edge theory, deep spiritual practices, but when it comes to aesthetics, something seems to be lacking.

Consequently, I’ll urge our little community to take art seriously, to start developing our aesthetic sensibilities, so that we can take things to the next stage and become increasingly relevant as a force of change in today’s culture.

This is an invitation. To be struck by lightning.

If you’re interested in learning more about metamodernism and the philosophy of Hanzi Freinacht, the Metamodern Academy with Emil Ejner Friis is offering an online introduction course in November 2026 here, and if you’re interested in a more comprehensive experience, you can join the new Updated Master Class here.

—

Hanzi Freinacht is a political philosopher, historian, and sociologist, author of ‘The Listening Society’, ‘Nordic Ideology’ and ’12 Commandments’. Much of his time is spent alone in the Swiss Alps. You can follow Hanzi on Facebook, Twitter, and Medium, and you can speed up the process of new metamodern content reaching the world by making a donation to Hanzi here.

Metamodernism? The philosophy and culture emerging at the dawn of the singularity in which hackers, hippies, and hipsters meet and co-create. Stakes rise, potentials abound, but so do risks and pitfalls of this new cultural and economic landscape. Metamodernism marries critical thinking and ethical commitment to inner work and adult development, offering a framework for seeing what’s going on: for surviving, contributing, and maybe even thriving in worlds being born.

Wonder what the hype is all about, but not in the mood for slogging through dense bricks full of highbrow parlance? Then this course is for you.

In a compact and to-the-point fashion, Emil Ejner Friis (aka. Hanzi Freinacht) presents the basic concepts you need to know to take part in this wide and complex movement. This course is for anyone interested in getting a comprehensive introduction to metamodernism. You will finish the course understanding the relevance of stage theory, know how to distinguish metamodernism from postmodernism and integral theory, and how to apply the metamodern way of thinking to your life.

The metamodern sensibility is one of sincere irony, of very serious playfulness—necessary to stay sane at the crossroads of fact and fiction. In that spirit, you are invited.

HOW IT WORKS

The course runs for two hours every Sunday, beginning November 1st at 6pm GMT (10am Pacific, 1pm Eastern, 19:00 Central European, 23:30 India), and ending November 22nd. If you miss the live sessions, you can always watch the recordings. And to those who’re interested, there will be hang-out sessions at the end of each class.

The masterclass offers great opportunities for networking and co-creating projects with the other participants.

(If you’re interested in continuing your metamodern studies, or if you’re already familiar with the basics and want to learn some of the more advanced stuff, the Updated Master Class in Metamodernism begins once the introduction course ends November 29th. You can check out the masterclass here.)

You can access the ticket platform here.

PROGRAM:

Week 1: What Metamodernism Is, and What It’s Not

• A brief overview of the field of metamodernism and the use of the term.

• The Six Different “Metamodernisms”, and why it’s important to know the difference

• The Difference Between Postmodernism and Metamodernism (and why most people can’t tell them apart)

• The Difference Between Metamodernism and Integral Theory (and why you should care)

Week 2: Stage Theories

• Development, why it’s real (and how it’s real) and why it’s important

• A very brief introduction to: Jean Piaget, Spiral Dynamics, Ken Wilber, Robert Kegan, Michael Common’s Model of Hierarchical complexity

• How stage theories drive people crazy and actually make them evil

• A better use of stage theories, and how not to be a jerk around them

• Why everyone’s a closet stage theorist (often without knowing it)

Week 3: Hanzi Freinacht’s The Listening Society & Nordic Ideology

• Too long didn’t read? No problem, we got you covered.

• Hipsters, Hackers, Hippies, and the Metamodern Aristocracy

• The four dimensions of psychological developments and how it adds up to the effective value meme

• The six forms of metamodern politics

• How order, freedom, and equality evolve

Week 4: Is the World Becoming Metamodern?

• How a metamodern understanding can help you predict the future

• What art can tell us about the future

• Who are the people that will shape the future?

• Personality test: Are you metamodern?

• Q&A and final discussion

PRICING:

• Standard: €150

• Student or unemployed: €75

• Global South: €40

• Mecenat: €200 (+€50 donation)

You can access the ticket platform here.

YOUR FACILITATOR:

Emil Ejner Friis (b. 1981) is a historian and futurist, a theory artist and a teacher of metamodernism. He is also a co-founder of Metamoderna and one of the writers behind Hanzi Freinacht. He has spent the past fifteen years trying to figure out how to create a listening society, a kinder and more evolved society that deeply cares for the happiness and emotional needs of every citizen.

He has tried and failed at creating a metamodern political party, he has tried and failed at leading an army of children to revolt against the untold indignities of everyday life in late-stage capitalism, and he has just plainly failed at ever getting a normal bourgeois life by being drawn to all kinds of adventures to try and save the world from itself.

He just moved to a remote tropical island where he spends his days swimming with dolphins and hanging out with bohemian artists, drinking wine and fiercely arguing about poetry, gazing at the sunset while weeping in the face of tragedy and bliss.

When he’s not writing and theorizing, he’s conspiring with other metamodernly inclined hackers, hipsters, and hippies to outcompete modern society. He lives at the crossroads of fact and fiction, and to pay the rent he sells words, all the best words.

Emil is a skilled and experienced speaker with a reputation of being entertaining and good at making complex ideas easier to digest.

In this post, I celebrate the kinship between the political-philosophical metamodernists and the cultural-critical movement closer to aesthetics, architecture, and film. I know I can speak not only for myself when saying that metamodern political activists like myself really appreciate you guys and your work, both the artists/designers described as metamodern and the academics who described the trend (rats in the cellar, you know who you are ☺). The good part is, in an intellectual and cultural context, you don’t even have to like me back. I can still use your ideas, your taste and your sensibilities to change society for the better.

Dutch Renaissance

Apparently, these words by cultural theorists Timotheus Vermeulen and Robin van der Akker, appearing in a 2010 paper in Journal of Aesthetics and Culture, hit a chord:

“Ontologically, metamodernism oscillates between the modern and the postmodern. It oscillates between a modern enthusiasm and a postmodern irony, between hope and melancholy, between naïveté and knowingness, empathy and apathy, unity and plurality, totality and fragmentation, purity and ambiguity.”

I believe this quote constitutes the core of what might be called a little Dutch Renaissance in its own right. These two authors, while concerned primarily with academic trend spotting in art and culture, must have known that they were on to something of wider applicability. The blog started by them (with the same name as their paper, Notes on Metamodernism) touches upon politics and philosophy as well.

What then is reborn, as the word renaissance would suggest? Quite simply the modern qualities lacking in postmodernity: enthusiasm, hope, unity, totality, purity. While we all know that these things taken by themselves create all the evil hotchpotches of modern times—Stalinism, fascism, the New Age, market-oriented neoliberalism, state socialism—now has come the time when we are sufficiently saturated with postmodern irony and critique to let them in again, through the back door.

I don’t think people today, academics in particular, nearly enough appreciate how postmodern we have become. Nobody calls themself postmodernist. But everybody is. Everybody is suspicious of progress, of grand narratives, or utopias, or even of bold claims or encompassing theories. The Simpsons set the agenda, and South Park set the norm. Climate change may be the only exception—still a locus of hope and despair, rather than ironic detachment.

Now we can hurry up to hope and progress, just to hurry back to criticism and deconstruction of the same. Oscillating. We can create little utopias, small syntheses and try to build a more globally sensitive and ecologically concerned culture. We can allow ourselves that spark, because we today have more means to criticize it, to know it’s never all that, never a final answer. We can even allow ourselves to recognize the depths glimpsed in spiritual experience and meditation, because we know that not even in faith and devotion are we safe. We know that we’re not “the good guys”, not on “the right side”, but that we are always bound to be both good and bad. Society can be deep and meaningful, even sublime, but that is precisely what makes it such a risky business.

It’s more than that. We recognize that we need that spark in order to meet the challenges and live up to the possibilities ahead. But oscillation back and forth at the speed of sound is hard work. So we need a good psychological and social foundation to build upon. Many people may not be ready.

If people are not ready, then so be it. Metamodernism should work through art and culture to create the setting for people who feel inclined to oscillate.

Trends Versus Stages, Or Both

Metamodernism can be contrasted to Wilberian Integralism in that it does not necessarily view itself as a new (higher) stage of cultural or personal development. Rather, it sees itself as working with postmodernism, being between modernism and postmodernism, and beyond postmodern historically.

While you can see metamodernism as a time period, a series of trends that simply came after postmodernism, I would still suggest a little stage theory can come in handy. I would suggest that metamodernism can indeed be viewed as a higher stage than postmodernism. But don’t worry, I’ll oscillate right back.

Anyone who prefers metamodernism to postmodernism must have some kind of argument for why. If you retort with a “I simply prefer it because of its symbolic value in a structural trend I am under the influence of” you have in fact given a postmodern, relativist answer, and you are stuck where you started. Another option is to claim that it is inherently better. That would be a moralistic, essentialist answer. Let’s not go there. A third option is to respond: “Because it includes postmodernism, but transcends it, allowing me more freedom of thought and action”.

If you prefer the third response, you have indeed implicitly crafted a simple stage theory, comparable to the stage transition in the Model of Hierarchical Complexity. If something includes and transcends something else (but not vice versa), this is to claim it is of higher stage.

I suggest that metamodernism should be seen both as a trend and a stage transition. It is both after and beyond (or above). But now oscillating back from progress to skepticism, we must ask the question, in which ways and in what contexts is a higher stage better? I have already suggested that metamodernism is more psychologically demanding. And it is certainly more demanding in terms of craftsmanship, just consider the works of the metamodern artists. I would also argue it is more difficult to grasp, in some ways even with greater risks of elitism—or with being misunderstood. The most dangerous way of misunderstanding metamodernism is to cling to its modernist parts and forget the postmodern ones.

Macro, Macro Man

This can be further developed if we view metamodernism as part of a greater global trend. It is possible to argue that this macro pattern is one the evolution of human thought in many fields: complexity science, adult development, posthumanism, integralism, post-constructivism and much more.

The fun part is that these kinds of analyses are now open for us. It’s okay to have a hypothesis of where society is going, where we should be going, about changes in epochs and the development of nature and culture.

Even if metamodernism as an idea is sprung from concern with minute details and understanding the uniqueness of art, it opens the door to more macro understandings. It gives us a language to frame our bold, naïve hypotheses, and still remain relatively unattached to and critical of them.

Participant Description, Analytic Creation

Metamodernism is both descriptive and prescriptive. It both says something about what seems to be going on out there, and adds something about what should be going on. Again, this surely complicates things, because it means that anything (or anyone) we like happens to become metamodern, only to lose that same glow when it falls out of favor. It’s a recipe for self-deceit, hypocrisy and confusion.

And yet, for people who no longer want to live postmodern ironic lives, it seems to be the way forward. That’s why authenticity becomes important. No, not the authenticity of yesteryear, of the artwork, the artist, the innermost touchy-feely feelings. Man, I could have stolen all the stuff for this blog entry without blinking.

The authenticity is one of critical observation. To be merciless on ourselves and one another. And, even more pertinent: that critical observation creates new discursive space for dreams, hopes and bolder theories. We are getting rid of shame, and we must build social settings where even shame isn’t shameful anymore. We have to show ourselves how stupid and limited we are, so that we can truly blossom.

When we describe reality, we also create it. Metamodernism, then, is a movement to help us more authentically describe reality, to tell the story of what we really think and feel. In this description not only the actual is included, but also the potential. Ideally, this makes the self-organization of society more intelligent, reflexive and creative.

The Sheer, Unapologetic Power Of Cool

And metamodern art and culture, then, hold a certain quality that makes them politically powerful: they are cool. This coolness stems for the ability to be both ironic and sincere at the same time. To nudge on notions like sublimity and depth and complexity, but without putting it vulgarly in your face (like New Age).

Metamodern music, softly alluding to the vastness and mystery of reality, the transhuman and superhuman potentials of man—but putting it in a silly pop song and getting drunk to it. Metamodern painting, design, politics; they speak the same language.

This coolness means that people are drawn to it and seek to identify with it for more primal reasons. It is, again, one of the main dangers of metamodernism. Coolness is seductive. But it should be held unapologetically, because it is our chief means to affect, change and transform deep aspects of our culture and politics.

Metamodern poetry is more powerful, all said and done, than all the guns in Houston.

If you’re interested in learning more about metamodernism and the philosophy of Hanzi Freinacht, the Metamodern Academy with Emil Ejner Friis is offering an online introduction course in November 2026 here, and if you’re interested in a more comprehensive experience, you can join the new Updated Master Class here.

—

Hanzi Freinacht is a political philosopher, historian, and sociologist, author of ‘The Listening Society’, ‘Nordic Ideology’ and ’12 Commandments’. Much of his time is spent alone in the Swiss Alps. You can follow Hanzi on Facebook, Twitter, and Medium, and you can speed up the process of new metamodern content reaching the world by making a donation to Hanzi here.

Chaos is a ladder.

Do you have the courage to climb it?

If you want to make sense of our turbulent times, and if you seek to monetize the madness, this course might be for you. If you’re smart enough.

This masterclass is the ultimate metamodern experience, possibly in the entire universe. It’s the culmination of more than a decade and a half worth of groundbreaking theory and action in which your honorable (but slightly indecent) host and teacher Emil Ejner Friis will deliver an overwhelming cascade of fact and fiction—in the most dazzling manner imaginable. No AI-slop, all too human, guaranteed.

Metamodernism is the overarching sense-making map that bridges the rational optimism of modernism with the critical perspectives of postmodernism and the nourishing enchantment of the premodern. In a world of empirical pessimism, a solid dose of theoretical optimism, delivered with an astounding sense of sincere irony, might just be what you need to make it to the next stage. Or at least make you a more captivating human being at any dinner conversation.

This course features both completely new material and tried-and-tested fan favourites; from the Hanzi Freinacht books as well as unpublished writings. Some of the content is updated and refined versions of what has previously been developed in collaboration with Daniel Görtz (for the previous Advanced Masterclass), and Robert Kelley Ayala (The Simple 30-Step Leadership Program). All of this has received widespread acclaim over the years and we look forward to presenting all the new theories and ideas that have been developed in the meantime.

You can access the ticket platform here.

Since the course contains material that former students might already be familiar with, those who’ve participated in our previous courses are eligible for a whopping 50% discount. If you send an email to emil@metamoderna.org we’ll send you a discount code. You’re also eligible for a 50% discount if you get a friend to join with you. But only if they behave.

HOW IT WORKS

The course runs for two hours every Sunday, beginning November 29th at 6pm GMT (1pm Eastern, 10am Pacific, 19:00 Central European, 23:30 India), and ending February 21st with an uninhibited amount of confetti and fireworks. If you miss the live sessions, you can always watch the recordings. And to those who’re interested, there will be hang-out sessions at the end of each class.

It is recommended that you are somewhat familiar with metamodernism beforehand (for instance, having read Hanzi Freinacht’s books or participated in the Introduction Course which will take place the previous four Sundays of November 2026) and that you commit significant time, concentration, and effort in order to benefit from the course.

The course includes new and hitherto unpublished content—and includes thorough sneak-peeks on coming Hanzi books. The course material (articles, etc.) for each session is sent out weekly.

Additionally, the masterclass offers great opportunities for networking and co-creating projects with the other participants.

You can access the ticket platform here.

PROGRAM:

We will start where the Introduction Course ended.

Week 1: The state of contemporary metamodernism and where we’re going (or not going)

• Why integral and political metamodernism failed so spectacularly

• What’s the deal with all those meta-nazis and neo-regressives?

• What are the political pressure points for real change in today’s world?

Week 2: An Introduction to The 6 Hidden Patterns

• Everything you need to know about the “metamemes” and their intricate relation to psychological, societal, and organizational development

• Why these metameme patterns have stayed “hidden” for so long

• Why art always comes first (and why ethics, sadly, always comes last)

Week 3: An Introduction to The 30 Steps of Transformative Leadership

• Why stage theories are unusable: They’re too true to be good!

• How psychological, societal, and organizational development all follow the same patterns of growth and stagnation

• How you can use the hidden patterns to transform your organization and unlock new paths of development and growth

Week 4: The Animist Metameme and the Wonder Frequency

• How raindance conquered the world

• How animism gave humanity a competitive edge that wiped out the Neanderthals and the Woolly Mammoth (and how you can get some of dat edge, too)

• How to reintegrate the Indigenous in a healthy, non-colonial way

Week 5: The Faustian Metameme and the Power Frequency

• The importance of listening to Heavy Metal

• The subtle joy of praising Satan in daily life

• How to avoid Balder’s trap

Week 6: The Postfaustian Metameme and the Oneness Frequency

• How the Roman Empire collapsed while the Roman Church survived (and what that can teach us about our current civilization)

• Why the Axial Age thesis is the missing piece to the puzzle that makes Spiral Dynamics obsolete (and thereby makes you less of a freak in academia)

• Why integralists keep falling back into this frequency (and why that makes them impotent and largely irrelevant in today’s world)

Week 7: The Modern Metameme and the Reason Frequency

• How memes, all the world’s best memes, enabled the rise of the west (and why being a white hardworking protestant had nothing to do with it)

• Why it’s inevitable that modern society collapses (any why it’s probably for the better)

• Are squares actually happy?

Week 8: The Postmodern Metameme and the Critique Frequency

• DON’T SKIP THIS STAGE! (trust me, it’s worse than skipping leg day)

• Why you need more good pomo, and why that makes you more metamodern

• Why postmodernism is the last actual stage of development

Week 9: The Metamodern Metameme and the Integration Frequency

• From the Enlightenment to The Enshittenment

• Bad news: The Listening Society has been cancelled

• Good news: The Meaning Crisis has also been cancelled

Week 10: Outcompeting Capitalism and the New Class Analysis

• The impending triumph of cultural capital (and why artists are so crucial for a metamodern transition)

• Why you’ll need to watch more films and go to more museums and concerts to beat capitalism

• Test: Will you be a winner or loser in the post-capitalist economy of the future?

Week 11: The End of History and the Last Stage

• Why metamodernism isn’t really a stage, but the cultural equivalent of the singularity

• However, first we need to go through a Postmodern Dark Age

• And why all of this is going to be much more fun than it sounds

Week 12: Where the Attractors are Pulling Us

• A brief introduction to Attractors and how they can help you predict the future

• How to stay sane in a world on the brink of madness

• Kill your guru, find your meta-team, and all the tea in London will be yours

PRICING:

• Standard: €500

• Student or unemployed: €250

• Global South: €125

• Marriage Proposals: FREE

• Mecenat: €600 (+€100 donation)

You can access the ticket platform here.

YOUR FACILITATOR:

Emil Ejner Friis (b. 1981) is a historian and futurist, a theory artist and a teacher of metamodernism. He is also a co-founder of Metamoderna and one of the writers behind Hanzi Freinacht. He has spent the past fifteen years trying to figure out how to create a listening society, a kinder and more evolved society that deeply cares for the happiness and emotional needs of every citizen.

He has tried and failed at creating a metamodern political party, he has tried and failed at leading an army of children to revolt against the untold indignities of everyday life in late-stage capitalism, and he has just plainly failed at ever getting a normal bourgeois life by being drawn to all kinds of adventures to try and save the world from itself.

He just moved to a remote tropical island where he spends his days swimming with dolphins and hanging out with bohemian artists, drinking wine and fiercely arguing about poetry, gazing at the sunset while weeping in the face of tragedy and bliss.

When he’s not writing and theorizing, he’s conspiring with other metamodernly inclined hackers, hipsters, and hippies to outcompete modern society. He lives at the crossroads of fact and fiction, and to pay the rent he sells words, all the best words.

Emil is a skilled and experienced speaker with a reputation of being entertaining and good at making complex ideas easier to digest.

There is no return from this historic moment: Jeffrey Epstein’s real name is Chernobyl. As they say: The West is history. The countdown has started. What the explosion at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant was to the USSR of the eighties, the Epstein files are to the USA of today.

The reactor explosion in April 1986 was an epistemological and moral catastrophe. The Soviet state had built its legitimacy upon a promise of scientific mastery and government competence. Then suddenly the world witnessed Soviet officials lying through their teeth while radioactive ash drifted across Europe. As reality itself stopped obeying the propaganda, the system’s epistemic and moral bankruptcy was evident for everyone to behold.

However, Chernobyl did not singlehandedly destroy the USSR: a deeply flawed economic system, lack of basic freedom rights, government corruption, and a bankrupting arms race with the West were some of the underlying structural weaknesses that made the system unsustainable. But Chernobyl was the catalyst that pushed the system over the edge and brought it to a point of no return that not even Gorbachev’s reforms could turn around. After Chernobyl, fewer people believed the performance. The gap between official narrative and lived reality became impossible to ignore. Cynicism metastasized. The Soviet citizen learned what Václav Havel had already understood: the system survived only insofar as people participated in the ritual of pretending.

And now America approaches its own Chernobyl moment. Or rather, the explosion already happened, we’re just waiting for the ensuing radiation of the Epstein affair to erode whatever walls are currently keeping things from falling apart.

Now, if it had only been a group of wicked right-wing businessmen, the scandal wouldn’t have been so severe. But the problem is that everyone, from European royalty, over Democratic ex-presidents, to Leftist intellectuals like Noam Chomsky, and even fucking Stephen Hawking, strapped to a wheelchair, were on that rape island. David Copperfield also somehow magically appeared at Epstein’s parties. It’s elite folks across the board, not just some obscene subsection of the billionaire class.

And then there’s of course Donald Trump, the president of the United States who promised to release the Epstein files as part of his election campaign. I probably don’t need to spill any ink on how that’s going. I just want to mention that the only time I remember Trump expressing any sort of genuine empathy, is when he talked about all those “good people” who got into trouble over this thing, not least his friend Bill Clinton—whose wife he allegedly wanted to put into prison (which probably could’ve given the man a little more freedom to have fun with Trump and the boys, who knows).

The Epstein affair should of course be seen in the broader view of similar cases such as Hugh Heffner & Bill Cosby’s systematic rape of young, drugged women at the Playboy Mansion; Michael Jackson’s sexual abuse of children at his Neverland compound; and of course the convicted sex offender Harvey Weinstein who sparked the MeToo campaign.

The Epstein case is thus the culmination of more than a decade of sexual abuse scandals involving elite persons, which taken together carries an implicit underlying message to the public: Women’s bodies are disposable commodities for the elite. Win the game, and you become the one who fucks the losers. Your daughters belong to me, suckers—and there’s not a goddamn thing you can do about it.

It exposes an American dream that came true, for the few, and turned out to become a nightmare for the many. It wasn’t really about getting that big house, the nice car, and maybe a boat. I mean, there’s only so much pleasure you can get from planting your upper-class butt on your yacht’s hand-made Italian leather seats while eating a marginally better sandwich than average Joe. Even if you add the subtle joy of being first in line on a red carpet, that reward is hardly worth decades of hard work in the corporate world, is it? What’s worth it? Ask Freud. And what’s better than a big boat so that the bitches can’t get away once you’re out in the open seas: “Here, snort a line of coke, it’ll be over soon darling.”

(What I’m referring to here is of course the institutionalized sexual predation that takes place in and around the yacht industry. Young charming good-looking men known as “fixers” invite beautiful women to attend parties on yachts under the impression that the guy is romantically interested or can offer the woman a modeling or acting career—only to leave once they’ve delivered the “packet” to a boat full of rich old geezers and lots of coke and other drugs to make whatever needs to go down, go down.)

Anyway. No wonder they killed that party pooper Stanley Kubrick.

On a systemic level, the first American republic is terminal: The economy only works for an increasingly smaller section of the population, while systematic gerrymandering, voter suppression, and interference with free, independent and fact-based journalism has reduced the US to a so-called “flawed democracy” according to the international ranking of the Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU) Democracy Index, just ahead of Botswana.

The impressive growth of the American economy, especially compared to Europe, is actually a testament to the relative irrelevance of its economic system. Life expectancy is lower in the US, just like happiness, health, and overall life satisfaction. Most of the growth goes to the top. The economy grows, but crime and violence are magnitudes higher than in other developed countries, while opioid deaths are soaring and millions work multiple jobs while unable to afford healthcare or housing. Compare that with all those countries with far lower GDP that have happier and healthier populations, lower crime and violence, and relatively more stable political systems.

The failure of the US increasingly suggests that GDP isn’t measuring what really matters. “Stagnant” and “broke woke” Europeans are looking across the Atlantic towards their wealthy cousins, while shaking their heads in disbelief—and onto European shores a growing number of Americans are washing up, seemingly leaving the Titanic before its final hours. There are now more Americans moving to Europe than the other way around, and 1 in 5 is considering leaving the country.

The Soviet Union suffered from stagnation despite vast industrial output statistics. America suffers from instability and a crisis of legitimacy despite its relative abundance and solid growth numbers. Two mirror images of dysfunction.

We like to believe that Soviet communism collapsed because US capitalism proved far superior; and certainly, if we look at the outcome of the Cold War, there’s no denying that the West came out on top because their societal model was more efficient and stable than its Soviet counterpart. But we tend to forget that communism actually worked, until it didn’t; after all, it managed to industrialize a poor agricultural economy within a decade, outperform Nazi Germany during the Second World War, launch the world’s first space program, and feed and comfortably house its growing population in the postwar period. Am I saying that we should reconsider this form of communism? Absolutely not. Instead, my claim is that US capitalism merely had a 30-40 year longer “expiry date” than Soviet communism. The form of late-stage consumer capitalism that the US has subscribed to for the past almost 50 years or so worked splendidly—until it didn’t.

And in recent years, mental health, especially among young people, has nosedived partly because of toxic and exploitative social media algorithms. Add AI into the mix, with resulting mass-layoffs and eradication of entry level jobs, plus an impossible housing situation, and you end up with the most screwed-over generation in recorded history.

There are now reports coming out that Gen-Z employees are deliberately sabotaging AI initiatives at work. And in educational institutions, students use AI to complete assignments they do not believe matter, while teachers use AI to grade papers they barely read. Add to it the well-known phenomenon of “empty work”, so-called “bullshit jobs”, and the way workers quietly sabotage meaningless corporate workflows—and entire sectors become ritualistic theater.

The old Soviet joke that “The government pretended to pay us and we pretended to work” is now 40 years later echoing across corporate life throughout the West in similar refusals to participate in the system’s disempowering and undignified theatrics that only serves the upper class.

If you need a music break, here’s an optional carefully curated interlude before venturing on to the next part:

That was the black pill. Here comes—not the red, nor the blue—but the purple, metamodern pill:

Please grab a big glass of water. This is a big pill. Bad even. But it’s brief so that you can kick back and watch the half-time show at the end.

The first American republic is dead. Whatever’s left is rapidly being destroyed by the Trump administration. However, the ashes left from this cataclysm are full of nutrients from which a new republic can rise—like the Phoenix bird—if the American people, that is, chooses a different path than the current.

A second American republic would require a new constitution, a new representational electoral system, wide-reaching financial and corporate regulations, serious measures to curb corruption, massive wealth redistribution, a vast expansion of basic welfare services like healthcare and education, and so on, and so forth. There’s obviously no chance that the boomer generation is going to accept any of this. But they’re dead soon. So bye bye, dinosaurs.

If we look at the political observations of Gen-Z (born between 1997-2012), there’s a drastic change in attitudes favoring a shift towards becoming a normal country more similar to other advanced economies. They’re in many ways post-ideological and politically pragmatic: They just don’t romanticize capitalism since it’s not working for them, and they don’t fear “socialism” since they’re too young to remember what it was like during the Cold War. Contrary to caricatures, Gen-Z is not radical in any ideological sense. Rather, they simply want a society that functions: affordable housing, healthcare, time to live, less bullshit. And beneath these modest practical demands lies something deeper: a hunger for sincerity after decades of postmodern cynicism. This is why metamodernism emerges now.

Plus, did you know that 50% of all newborns are now of minority background? So good luck with that white Christian nationalism.

This also means that the new institutional reforms of a second republic needs a corresponding cultural reimagining. A new iteration of “We The People” thus prompts a discussion about what kind of “We” is desirable, who exactly it is that “The People” are referring to, and what the terms of agreement are to be and who they are to apply to in this new social contract.

And this is where Bad Bunny enters the picture:

The Bad Bunny Super Bowl performance is arguably the most significant cultural event this year, or perhaps even of the last decade. It also has some interesting both-and elements that emphasizes its relevance to the discussion on metamodernism:

• First of all, as a Puerto Rican, Bad Bunny is both US-American, and not US-American. He’s both an outsider in the American context, and a local guy who just proudly represents his home country as any other good patriot (remember, the Puerto Ricans didn’t come to America, America came to Puerto Rico—and is still there).

• Both a statement of fierce defiance, but also an invitation—an open invitation to a party that everyone can be part of, if they like (and who wouldn’t!?)

• And it’s not any kind of party invitation, it’s a heartfelt invitation to co-create a new America: A colorful path towards a reconstruction that is desperately needed following a decades-long vacuum of postmodern deconstruction and relativism (which of course has accelerated since the inauguration of Trump).

• Both a counter attack, and a show of loving embrace.

• Plus, it’s clearly both sincere, and ironic.

• And it’s not multicultural, but rather transcultural—much like many parts of Latin America, and that’s arguably a promising alternative following the collapse of American multiculturalism in the general discourse.

• Oh, and it’s both straight (pleasantly catering to the male gaze, and probably a few lesbians, plus promoting the value of traditional heterosexual marriage), and it’s a little queer (subtle and not in your face).

• And Bad Bunny expresses a powerful assertive masculinity, but without the toxicity and pathetic incel vibes of today’s self-declared “alpha males”.

• And, before I forget, it even got something for old people, you know, folks over 35 who fondly remember Ricky Martin from back in the days.

Bad Bunny embodies an emerging post-Anglo American identity that the old republic never fully knew how to integrate. For centuries the US defined “Americanism” through an uneasy mixture of Anglo-Protestant norms, frontier mythology, whiteness, industrial capitalism, and constitutional patriotism. Immigrants could join—but only through assimilation into the dominant symbolic framework. That framework has only been halfheartedly renegotiated with a dash of politically correct multiculturalism since the late eighties, but it never truly penetrated the core narrative of America. This worked for a while, but now the story has become increasingly obsolete and is in dire need of an update.

Demographically, culturally, linguistically, and psychologically, the America of the future increasingly resembles the broader Americas. As mentioned, nearly half of younger Americans already belong to minority groups and Spanish increasingly functions as a parallel civic and cultural language. Cultural influences now flow northward from Latin America as much as southward from Hollywood.

And Bad Bunny stands precisely at this crossroads.

His art communicates both defiance and belonging. His performances carry the energy of people refusing invisibility while simultaneously redefining what America itself can become. There is joy, but also a tragic historical memory: Colonialism, migration, race, class, empire. Bad Bunny’s performance is a celebration against the backdrop of precarity.

Importantly, Bad Bunny doesn’t really represent a conventional form of multiculturalism, and definitely not in the exhausted liberal language of corporate diversity seminars. He presents a transculturalism that sensorially and rhythmically seduces us through style, sexuality, irony, vulnerability, and collective emotional energy.

This matters because societies are ultimately held together by shared emotional realities. And in this brave new reality of ours, neither the traditional American mythology of the anglophone “melting pot”, nor the multicultural tendency towards identity fragmentation, seem to adequately cater to the creation of this shared experience.

What is needed is something closer to “creolization”. A cultural identity that’s comfortable with mixture, with synthesis, or more accurately, a metamodern “proto-synthesis”: Never complete, always in flux, and open to constant reinterpretation and renegotiation.

The USSR failed because it could no longer metabolize reality. America risks failing because it can no longer agree on reality at all. Yet there remains an opening.

A Second Republic could emerge through a constitutional redesign, demographic transformation, cultural hybridization, and gradual institutional evolution. Such a republic would probably look less like a 1950s suburban America and more like a strange synthesis of the Nordic welfare state, Latin American cultural vitality, and a digital network society with a post-industrial ecological consciousness. Or what do I know. After all, it’s up to future American generations to decide what they want to create.

The Soviet Union couldn’t survive Chernobyl because its system had lost its adaptive flexibility. America still possesses immense creative capacity—but only if it abandons the fantasy that the old order and its dated identities can simply be restored. So by expanding the definition of “Americaness” to include people originating south of the Rio Grande, America has a chance to redefine itself and thereby remain a shining and sexy example for the world to follow. I guarantee that the soundtrack is going to be amazing and the food will be irresistible.

Oh, and do you know which ethnicity, or “race” as it’s commonly referred to in the US, is the fastest growing in America?

It’s “mixed race”—just like in the rest of the Americas. So the cycle has come full circle: from modern nation state melting pot, over postmodern compartmentalized multiculturalism, and back again to a reimagined transcultural creole identity that in metamodern terms defines what it means to be American again.

Bad Bunny’s America is the future of the US—unless of course, the country chooses an authoritarian and chauvinistic style of government like that of post-soviet Russia and thus embarks on a path towards terminal decline.

Which party do you choose?

I wish I’d been to this one (but I’m sure there are many more to come if we want to):

If the link is broken, you can view Bad Bunny’s halftime show on YouTube here.

If you’re interested in learning more about metamodernism and the philosophy of Hanzi Freinacht, the Metamodern Academy with Emil Ejner Friis is offering an online introduction course in November 2026 here, and if you’re interested in a more comprehensive experience, you can join the new Updated Master Class here.

—

Hanzi Freinacht is a political philosopher, historian, and sociologist, author of ‘The Listening Society’, ‘Nordic Ideology’ and ’12 Commandments’. Much of his time is spent alone in the Swiss Alps. You can follow Hanzi on Facebook, Twitter, and Medium, and you can speed up the process of new metamodern content reaching the world by making a donation to Hanzi here.

Never in the history of human civilization has there been such an abundance of books, programs, and gurus for leaders to learn from—and never has there been such an acute lack of real leadership. Not because leaders lack competence, but because their visions are unfinished.

In an age where AI and social media amplify trivialities and most of our institutions optimize for short-term gains, half-formed visions tend to be devoured by louder, more simple-minded narratives that fail to capture the manifold complexity—and dazzling beauty—of the world we live in.

We are not suffering from a lack of talent or good intentions. We are suffering from a crisis of vision—and those who excel at creating compelling visions are the ones who attract trust, rise above the rest, and succeed in shaping the future.

Across history, the visions that turn out to stand the test of time all follow the same predictable developmental arc: awakening, myth-making, system-building, game mastery, ethical reckoning, and finally, integration. The leaders who endure—and who are entrusted with real responsibility—are those whose visions ably undergo all of these transformational phases. Most projects collapse well before the end of this cycle, however: too naive to handle power, too cynical to inspire loyalty, or too fragile to withstand scrutiny. We have reverse-engineered these hidden patterns into 6 overarching transformations split into a total of 30 practical steps (simpler and more intuitive than it sounds). Not as ideology, not as dogma, but as an easy-to-follow map that you can apply to your own leadership.

To be at the forefront of today’s transformation, the language of yesterday’s management gurus no longer suffices. In order to prosper in the confusion of our increasingly fact-resistant times, we need to relearn the craft of forming compelling and credible visions ourselves. To ride the currents of change, you need to master the hidden patterns of transformation.

Sign up for the course here

This course is for you if you sense what could be built. You see the cracks in the current order and you know that something needs to be done before it’s too late.

Over eight weeks, drawing from world history, culture, philosophy, management theory, and psychology, we guide you through the full maturation of your vision—from intuition to articulation to implementation to refinement. Not only will you leave with better ideas, you will also have crafted a vision that commands respect, aligns collaborators, attracts resources, generates more value than it consumes, and gives you strategic clarity in moments of uncertainty. In turn, we will all benefit from seeing and understanding your vision—because our collective visions are greater when more of us contribute thoughtfully and artfully to them.

To mend the shards of our fractured world, mastery over pattern is as essential as mastery over self.

Welcome, fellow co-creator, we look forward to seeing your vision unleashed.

A Personal Vision Project (not just theory)

This course is not only about understanding visionary leadership. It is about crafting a compelling vision. Your vision.

Throughout the course, each participant will develop a personal vision project—a coherent, fully formed vision you can actually lead from. This is not a branding exercise or an abstract manifesto. It is a living map: grounded in history, informed by the hidden patterns of transformation we study, and oriented towards a future that is both ambitious and responsible.

Participants in the lecture-based module work through this project in a structured, self-guided way, with prompts, frameworks, and reflection exercises designed to help clarify what they see, what they value, and what kind of transformation they are truly called to lead.

Participants in the small-group modules receive active facilitation and peer support. Your vision is refined in dialogue, stress-tested through collective intelligence, and strengthened through resonance with others who are doing similar work.

By the end of the course, participants don’t just understand vision. You leave with one—clear enough to guide decisions, specific enough to earn trust, and alive enough to evolve as the world changes.

Course Arc

Rather than focusing on personality types or “stages,” the course centers on six universal transformations—the transitions between ways of being that show up again and again in history, organizations, and individual lives:

• Awakening: When attention loosens and possibility enters

• Loss of Innocence: When ideals meet resistance and consequence

• Coming of Age: When power learns responsibility and belonging

• Enlightenment: When reason and abstraction reshape the world, the workplace, or just the self

• Epiphany: When even our best explanations break down

• Phoenix Rising: When meaning is reassembled after withering critique and fragmentation

The throughline is integration: what must be released, what must be healed, and what must be carried forward.

Week 1: The Seven Universal Frequencies

Trust, vision, and vibes

• The 6 hidden patterns of development that apply to world history, personal growth, and organizational development

• Why getting the vibe right is more important than competence, talent, and experience in order to build trust

• Why art, music, film, and literature are the fastest way to learn tomorrow’s leadership skills

Week 2: Awakening

Seeing things that don’t exist yet

• Why you need to be an artist—well aware that not all art is good art

• Why connecting with your inner child is crucial for starting a successful business (or other organization)

• How early humans got a competitive advantage from perceiving the world as animated with spirit (and why that still matters)

Week 3: Loss of Innocence

Putting people to work

• Why you must learn to love treating other people as means, and why other people secretly want to be used by you

• And why you need to learn the games of power before you can go beyond them

• How early civilization offered a Faustian deal that cannot be denied by political correctness

Week 4: Coming of Age

Developing an identity

• Why McDonald’s will outlive Google and Facebook by a thousand years (and why the big tech companies are the exact wrong models to have for your vision)

• Why creating a franchise starts by unleashing your inner righteous rebel onto the world

• Why even strongmen eventually bend the knee to the universal ideas of the Axial Age

Week 5: Enlightenment

Scrutinizing your value proposition

• Why harsh reality is a dreamer’s best friend

• Don’t call in McKinsey until you’ve cleaned your own house

• How Western Civilization came to rule the modern world – and why its downfall is both immanent and a good thing

Week 6: Epiphany

The Great Unmasking: “What am I doing with my life?”

• Recognizing you’ve got it wrong – without burning everything down to the ground

• Why DEI is vital, but harmful if you do it too early

• Our current collapse, and how to build islands of sanity amid a coming (mini-)Dark Age

Week 7: Phoenix Rising

After deconstruction, reconstruction must follow

• Just accept it: you’re a giant hypocrite. (And that’s OK—we all are.)

• Creating the most mediocre utopia or the most perfect fleeting moment

• Why the future is metamodern – but only if we choose it

Week 8: Game Change

Where do we go from here?

• Regard your complete vision, destined to be both legendary and forgotten

• Why the game can only be changed by those who both master it and reject it at the same time

• How to keep the map alive as the world continues to change (and how to stay sane in a world that’s gone bat-$hit crazy)

Participation Details

Course Format

This course is offered in two formats:

Sunday Lecture Track (Self-Guided Vision Project)

• Weekly live lectures (with recordings)

• Structured prompts and frameworks for the personal vision project

• Independent reflection and integration

Tuesday Small-Group Track (Facilitated Vision Project)

• Everything in the Lecture Track

• Weekly facilitated small-group sessions

• Peer dialogue, feedback, and support

• Active guidance in developing and refining your vision

Dates

• Start date: Sunday, March 29, 2026 (for lecture track)

• Duration: 8 weeks

• Live sessions: Sunday lectures, 1pm Eastern Time (NYC) for 90 minutes; Tuesday small groups, 7am Eastern Time (NYC) and 2pm Eastern Time (NYC) for two hours

• Recordings: Sunday recordings available to all participants; Tuesday sessions not recorded

Small group track limited at 8 participants per cohort.

Investment

• Lecture Track only: €600 (early bird: €450)

• Small-Group Track: €2200 (early bird: €1700)

A limited number of places are available in the small-group track to preserve depth, trust, and quality of facilitation.

Recordings of the lectures will be made available for personal viewing. Small group sessions will not be recorded.

If you want to figure out if this course is for you, you’re welcome to schedule a call with Emil by sending an email with a short presentation of yourself to this address: emil@metamoderna.org

Sign up for the course here

Your Facilitators

Emil Ejner Friis (b. 1981) is a historian and futurist, a theory artist and a teacher of metamodernism. He is also a co-founder of Metamoderna and one of the writers behind Hanzi Freinacht. He has spent the past fifteen years trying to figure out how to create a listening society, a kinder and more evolved society that deeply cares for the happiness and emotional needs of every citizen.

He has tried and failed at creating a metamodern political party, he has tried and failed at leading an army of children to revolt against the untold indignities of everyday life in late-stage capitalism, and he has just plainly failed at ever getting a normal bourgeois life by being drawn to all kinds of adventures to try and save the world instead.

He just moved to a remote tropical island where he spends his days swimming with dolphins and hanging out with bohemian artists, drinking wine and fiercely arguing about poetry, gazing at the sunset while weeping in the face of tragedy and bliss.

When he’s not writing and theorizing, he’s conspiring with other metamodernly inclined hackers, hipsters, and hippies to outcompete modern society. He lives at the crossroads of fact and fiction, and to pay the rent he sells words, all the best words.

Emil is a skilled and experienced speaker with a reputation of being entertaining and good at making complex ideas easier to digest.

Robert Kelley Ayala (b. 1978) is a developmental leadership strategist and organizational consultant. Over more than two decades, his career has spanned management consulting, venture capital, startup operations, product marketing, and executive development. He has worked with dozens of founders, CEOs, C-suite executives, and senior leaders across organizations ranging from early-stage startups to companies with more than 2,000 employees, primarily in the technology sector.

Robert’s work focuses on helping leaders clarify and mature their vision under real-world conditions. He has supported executive teams navigating growth, cultural strain, and strategic inflection points—particularly in fast-moving and incentive-heavy environments. His approach is developmental and structurally grounded: helping leaders identify the trade-offs they are making, stress-test their assumptions, align teams around coherent direction, and build organizations capable of generating durable value rather than short-term wins.

He holds a B.S. in Economics and Mathematics from Duke University, an MBA from HEC Paris, and an MSc in Organizational Psychology from Birkbeck, University of London. An American who has lived in Europe since the first Obama administration, Robert brings both quantitative rigor and cross-cultural perspective to his work. Outside of advising leaders and building frameworks, he spends an inordinate amount of time thinking about music, cats, and whether this might finally be the year the Philadelphia Phillies bring home another World Series championship.

I regret to inform you that the metamodern retreat in Vermont at Sky Meadow Retreat August 28 - August 31, that I recently invited you to has been cancelled.

This decision has nothing to do with the wonderful team at Sky Meadow Retreat, including Brendan Graham Dempsey, who have been incredibly welcoming and professional. I deeply appreciate their support.

The cancellation is solely due to my misunderstanding of U.S. visa regulations. I recently discovered that engaging in a commercial event in the United States would require a costly and very time-consuming bureaucratic process for both me and my American partners. Given the rather limited financial scope of the retreat I have realized that proceeding just is not worth it.

That said, I am still going to the United States this fall, but only as a guest speaker at a number of events that I will not receive any monetary compensation for. So stay tuned if you want to meet me later this year.

Sorry for the mess. I hope you understand.

Kind Regards,

Emil Ejner Friis

Fascism is stupid man’s socialism. We shouldn’t forget that Mussolini was a socialist before he became a fascist, and it’s hard to ignore that national-socialism, or nazism, has “socialism” in its very name. Similarly, today, we see a form of stupid man’s metamodernism advocated by what I call the neo-reactionaries. It’s a failed attempt to adopt metamodernism, the most cutting-edge progressive ideology of our time (like socialism a century ago), by refusing to expand your circle of solidarity, falling for simple narratives, and allowing yourself to be guided by anger and belittlements.

You find these people in and around the metamodern community, integral circles, the so-called liminal space and so on. Every person is unique, but if we simplify, these folks can essentially be divided into two groups: a) those who’ve previously subscribed to progressive ideas but have gradually regressed back to more faustian values, and b) those who never truly belonged in metamodern circles to begin with but stuck around solely for the emotional candy bar of being able to tell themselves that they’re high stage.

Now, in the latter case it’s obvious that the person’s fascistoid tendencies led them to metamodernism in the first place; wanting to be the Übermensch, a superior breed of man, better than all the rest—metamodernism can certainly deliver the goods. But in the first case, it’s often the curious phenomena of the metamemetic wormhole at play.

Let me explain:

Every metameme, or more specifically value meme, has a wormhole leading back four stages if you don’t adequately transcend and include the former. We’ve all seen so many of our dear pomo (postmodernist) friends regressing back to animism when they fail to integrate modernity and Enlightenment values.

Now, we similarly see all these good but essentially lost souls who never get over their allergies towards pomo and “woke” (or suddenly develop new ones when they reach an age where they can’t follow what the kids of the day are up to) and only use metamodernism to put forth anti-woke sentiments, who end up regressing all the way back to faustian values—and faustian values in a modern society, that’s literally the definition of fascism. And with those fascist tendencies, enter Trump & Co.

So, if you ever wondered: political metamodernism is per definition a progressive movement. That doesn’t mean that conservatism is bad, or that it can’t be prudent to go back to some of the old ways every now and then, but you simply aren’t gravitating towards the metamodern value meme if all you do with it is bashing postmodernism and complaining about wokeness.

There’s a silver lining to everything and a broken clock is right twice a day and all that, but if you see the new Trump administration as a step forward for humanity, chances are very slim that you’re actually metamodern. Or put differently, you’re just as metamodern as Mussolini is socialist.

How to Build Your Own Wormhole to Fascism (And Why You Might Already Be Doing It)

It starts with a belittlement. Maybe several. Maybe one too many moments of being dismissed, of feeling small, of watching your supposed intellectual inferiors win the social game while you sit there with your unappreciated genius and an empty inbox. Maybe you’ve spent years cultivating your high-stage mind, nurturing the delicate orchids of second-tier thinking, only to find yourself ridiculed, rejected, or—worse—ignored.

This is the psychological mechanism that leads the once-progressive mind to regress, to reach desperately for the comforting iron grip of Faustian values.

At its core, fascism is not built by strong men—it is built by insecure men (and the occasional insecure woman). Those who wanted to be Übermenschen, but, when confronted with a world that wouldn’t give them their rightful place at the top, opted for the next best thing: a politics of resentment, a community of collective grievance, a romanticization of the past where their value was self-evident.

And let’s be clear: Socialism that does not expand its circle of solidarity will, sooner or later, become national socialism.

It’s a simple formula: If you believe in collective upliftment, but only for those you deem worthy—your people, your nation, your ingroup—you will inevitably arrive at a system that says, “These are the good ones, and those are the ones who must be excluded, contained, or punished.” Fascism is just socialism with a fence around it and a gun in the guard tower.

Now, let’s return to our dear, fallen metamodernists—the ones who started out playing with complex developmental theories and ended up spewing Twitter threads about the decline of Western civilization.

It happens like this:

1) Metamodernism introduces the wormhole.

Every value-meme has its regressions. If you do not fully integrate postmodernism, its critique of power, and its messy, ambiguous, empathy-driven ethos, then your rejection of “wokeness” becomes your fast-track ticket to reactionary politics. The leap from “I just want to have nuanced discussions” to “Maybe liberal democracy is a mistake” is shorter than you think.

2) You get tired of losing.

Metamodernism attracts people who value complexity. But complexity is not always rewarded. The world is still, unfortunately, a game of dominance, charisma, and attention. When you’ve spent years developing nuanced perspectives only to be outperformed by some loudmouthed influencer with a meme account, resentment grows. And resentment seeks simple, powerful narratives.

3) The Faustian values call your name.

Faustian values—achievement, willpower, strength, hierarchy—are seductive. They tell you that you don’t need to integrate postmodernism, that you don’t need to understand the kids and their ever-evolving pronouns, that you were right all along. They whisper that society is just too weak, too decadent, too unwilling to reward the strong.

4) You reframe your regression as enlightenment.

Here’s where it gets dangerous: Because you were once progressive, because you engaged in complex discussions, you convince yourself that your return to traditionalism, hierarchy, and power-worship is not a regression, but a transcendence. You tell yourself that you see the bigger picture, that you’ve evolved past naive idealism. You even begin to feel pity for your old, soft-hearted comrades who still believe in things like equality and empathy.

And so, here we are: Once-metamodern intellectuals now regurgitating reactionary talking points, once-progressive minds now calling for an “orderly” and “hierarchical” society, pretending that their return to simple narratives is a sign of maturity rather than a failure of growth.

The antidote? Expansion. Always expand. Your circle of solidarity, your cognitive complexity, your emotional depth. The moment you contract, the moment you build walls instead of bridges, the moment you choose resentment over integration—that’s the moment you start sliding backward, no matter how sophisticated your excuses.

Metamodernism is per definition progressive. If your version of it leads you back to glorifying the strong over the weak, hierarchy over inclusion, and resentment over creativity, then, my friend, you are not metamodern—you are just another Faustian soul, bargaining away your depth for the fleeting comfort of dominance.

Fascism Is The Cata­combs of The Modern Ideo­logical Metropolis

Between the position of "postmodern" social justice and "metamodern" multiperspectival developmentalism—between the pomo irony and memo ironic sincerity—between the pomo antithesis and the memo "protosynthesis"... there is a dark, wide gap, an abyss.

This is, unsurprisingly, the abyss of the neo-reactionaries: anti-pomos, (anti-feminist) masculinists, neo-nationalists, Petersonians, meta-right, the integral alt-right, the authoritarian right integralists (almost entirely made up of the waste of the largely failed integral movement, almost only older men, spending very much time on social media), neo-conservatives, meta-nazis, anti-environmentalists, anti-sociologists (who want to turn the world into a forced therapy session of icky workshops, because it's "all about the individual")...

These are all pathological positions, all failing the developmental transition from pomo to metamodern. They are people who do understand the faults and pathologies of pomo, but who fail to integrate the pomo insights, ethics and critiques.

The neo-reactionaries, from the relatively innocuous ones like Jordan Peterson and the Intellectual Dark Web (perhaps not *so* intellectual, after all), to the rising nationalist and proto-fascist sentiments around the world (US, Russia, China, Brazil, India, Europe...) all share one trait: they all lack a solution and a vision of the next stage of society.

Hanzi Freinacht wrote the following description of fascism in Nordic Ideology. Even if you’ve already read it I can strongly recommend a second readthrough:

“Fascism is the cata­combs of the modern ideo­logical metropolis: It constitutes a vast network of secret and forgotten under­ground tunn­els connecting all of the poli­tical ideolog­ies. I guess you can say the same about all the ideologies to some extent—they all inter­connect—but fascism remains the most denied and least under­stood.

The poli­tical metamodernist must learn to travel these dark tunnels with­out becom­ing a creature of the night. You drain the sewers, clean them up, put in proper lighting, make sure the pipes work—you get the picture. As such, political metamodernism is both the ideology that is the closest to fascism and the one most in opposition to it. The catacombs are there, whe­ther we like it or not. The political metamodernist travels them and cleans them up; the liberal innocent denies their existence and sleep­walks in their dirt.

There is, naturally, something exquisitely demonic about fascism. This demonic aspect can be understood in terms of relations between “meta­memes”: Fascist and nazi thinkers used early postmodern insights (like the mass psychology of Gustave Le Bon and ideas about image control in the media, some pretty advanced psycho­anal­ytical 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).

That’s the essential truth; fascism is so profoundly evil because it is dem­onic in this primary archetypal sense. A demon is a fallen angel, some­thing profound and beautiful in the service of something base and shallow. Developmental imbalance. And every time you have such glaring dev­elopmental imbalances, you can know for sure the hell patrol is com­ing.

Political metamodernism can only be true to its cause and polit­ically effect­ive if it faces this great demon of modernity—fascism—and asks him for his central truth, for his gem (yes, demons have gems, they love ‘em).

‘So, okay then, dear mister get-kids-to-murder-and-torture-innocent-people-in-secret-death-camps, what’s your secret? What could you possi­bly tell me? What do you have that I, the enlightened and democratic modern mind, lack and secretly desire?’

The green little devil smirks slyly and replies:

‘One word, one word. There is a longing inside of you; one that I live out more fully than you, one that you deny, but still haunts the outer rims of your mind as it beckons to the innermost core of your soul. And on the hour of your death, it will grant me victory over you. The word is heroism.’

Yes, everyday life under modernity’s democracy and capitalism denies and suppresses an impulse shared by all of us: the drive for great­ness, for superiority, for con­quering death, for ascendance. A small part of us knows that we want more, that this life—and our role in it—is too petty, too drab, too trivial, too self-serving, too spiritually impoverished. We know we were meant, in some sense, to take the hero’s journey, but we got caught up in mortgages and deadlines, and we tell ourselves that’s all we ever really wanted.

We hide this side from one another, from ourselves. It embarrasses us immensely. We find ways to subtly and gleefully dismiss the deepest striv­ings of others as boyish, immature, puerile, distasteful, deluded. We deep­ly resent the glimmering greatness of one another because it reminds us of the subtle lies we live by. And instead we reenact these longings in movies, in books, in music, in fantasies and historic personae. If someone around us wishes to go down the highway of heroes, we use all the strategies we can to ridicule their effort:

‘Hah! They would have themselves be a movie char­acter, a Rambo! They lack humility. But I am mature—I really am—and I will never be a hero. Ever. I don’t even want to; only if fate forced my hand—which I by the way have a feeling might happen anytime soon—would I ever put on display the inner virtues that are uniquely my own! Until then, here’s to keeping an honest job and watching TV. With some bloody dignity.’

But when we utter these words to ourselves, we find our inner voices ring­ing strangely hollow. The green little devil’s whisper lingers on: We want to be heroes; we know that we really are heroes, and we want to fight the good struggle, and win. We want to conquer mort­ality. We want to be unleashed as creators beyond our social roles and masks, beyond the trivi­al confines of everyday life. We want to sacrifice ourselves, as Gilga­mesh, for the sake of unity so that we may live forever.”

So I would define political metamodernism as the successful integration of postmodernism into a developmental pathway for people and society. It points us towards a real, concrete updating of our institutions: local, national, transnational and global.

The neo-reactionaries are where the 21st century forces corresponding to 20th century Nazism will grow from: a sick, murderous force—all due to a developmental imbalance, to a disembodied and inauthentic attempt to transcend postmodern values without properly including them.

I guess the conclusion is obvious: integrate pomo. Don't fall into the abyss. Most of all, don't mistake them for metamodernists; they are our twisted little sister.

For the next ten years or so, twisted sister is probably going to run the world stage, until her edginess reveals its lack of imagination and political impotence. The times aren't yet ripe for political metamodernism. Today's 15-25 year olds will likely be stamped with this sickness, watching Peterson clips hysterically and going on about Judeo-Christian identity and even Julius Evola.

Ironically sincere metamodernists must make the best of these brief dark ages of the global psyche. We must begin to prepare the ground for institutional shifts into deeper democracy, sustainability, transnationalism, expansions of human rights, free information and sharing economies. That's why we must begin to act now, even if our day is in another 10-15 years.

How to Bring a Fallen Metamodernist Back from the Abyss (And Why Opposing Trump Is the Path to Glory)

So, your metamodern friend—or maybe you yourself—has taken the wormhole straight into the Faustian abyss and become a neo-reactionary in the process. One moment, they were speaking in reverent tones about the dialectics of progress and discussing developmental models, and the next, they’re sharing Elon Musk memes about the dangers of “wokeism”, ranting about how "liberal democracy is unsustainable," and posting aesthetic montages of Roman statues as a cure for the “degeneracy of the West.”

Tragic, but not irredeemable.

The good news? Neo-reactionaries can be reintegrated. They can once again become a force for progress rather than regression. But—and this is a big but—you cannot reason them back with logic alone. If logic was enough, they wouldn't have fallen in the first place. This is a psychological and existential problem, not just an intellectual one.

So how do we bring the fallen metamodernist back? How do we steer them away from this pathetic regression? Here’s the game plan:

1. Understand Why They Fell in the First Place

You cannot save someone if you don’t understand their wounds. And make no mistake—these people are wounded. Somewhere along the way, they felt belittled, outpaced, alienated, or betrayed by their progressive peers. Maybe they were too slow to keep up with ever-changing social norms and felt punished for it. Maybe they felt like they were doing all the intellectual heavy lifting while the “low-stage masses” were rewarded with status and success. Maybe they were simply lonely, and the reactionary crowd gave them a sense of belonging.

Then comes the Faustian bargain: reject progressivism, side with those who claim to be strong, and bask in the illusion of power. Enter Trump. Enter Musk. Enter the reactionary underworld.

Their fall into reaction was not a “rational” choice—it was a response to existential pain. They wanted to be understood, seen, and valued. But when the progressive community failed to meet them where they were, the Faustian bargain began to look really attractive.

2. Give Them a Way to Feel Strong Again—Without Reactionary Politics

Trump’s appeal isn’t about policy—it’s about aesthetic dominance. He looks like he’s winning. He makes his followers feel like they are winning.

And that’s why you can’t just argue them back into progressivism—you have to offer a better path to strength.

Instead of calling them out for their regression, call them up to something greater:

- “You clearly value power and strength—so why are you hitching yourself to a man who spends his days whining about voter fraud and lashing out on trans people on social media?”

- “If you really believe in high agency, why align yourself with the ultimate victim-complex politician? Trump never takes responsibility for anything. That’s not power—that’s cowardice.”

- “You’ve got leadership potential, and I respect that. But real leaders build, they don’t just complain. What’s your plan for building something meaningful?”

Make it clear: If they really value strength, they must transcend these weak men, not idolize them.

3. Reignite Their Love for Complexity

One of the ironies of the fallen metamodernist is that they claim to love complexity, but their turn to reactionary politics is always a collapse into simplistic narratives. They go from “nuanced critique of progressive politics” to “progressivism is the death of the West.” From “postmodernism has flaws” to “postmodernism is pure nihilism and must be destroyed.” From “Trump is a response to systemic failures” to “Trump is an accelerationist hero.”

This is lazy thinking.

If you want to pull them back, you need to reawaken their intellectual curiosity:

- Introduce them to progressive thinkers who don’t fit the standard mold. Show them the complexity of Cornel West, the brutal honesty of Adolph Reed, the depth of Donna Haraway.

- Challenge them: “Okay, you say modernity has failed. You say postmodernity is nihilistic. Fine. So what’s the next step? Are you really going to tell me it’s Trump?”

Make it clear: If they are really metamodern, they cannot be reactionaries.

4. Rebuild Their Connection to the Future

Reactionaries obsess over the past. Roman statues, Renaissance paintings, the aesthetics of old power. They look backward because they are afraid of the future.

And that is their weakness.

If you want to bring them back, you have to reconnect them with the future:

- “If Trump and Musk represent power, then why do they constantly brag about their accomplishments, and why do they obsess about pushing down people to assert their dominance. Do you really want to bet on these guys?”

- “You think civilization is in decline? Then build something new. Show me a vision of the future that is better than Trump’s cheap nostalgia and Musk’s childish 1950s sci-fi utopia”

- “If you want to be strong, then forge the world of tomorrow—not retreat into yesterday’s illusions.”

Bring them into discussions about the future of governance, technology, spirituality, and culture. Show them that metamodern progressivism is not just about critiquing the past—it’s about engineering the next iteration of human civilization.The future belongs to those who build. Reactionaries don’t build—they lament.

The only true path to power is in forging what comes next.

5. Offer Belonging—Without Coddling

Trump offers his followers a home. That’s why they stay. Progressives, on the other hand, often gatekeep and purity-test their own allies out of existence.

If we want to reintegrate the fallen metamodernist, we have to offer community without dogma. A space where they can process their frustrations without falling into regressive nonsense.

But at the same time, we do not coddle them. We challenge them. We remind them that they are not victims, not foot soldiers, not side characters in someone else’s grand narrative—they are builders of the next world.

And if they truly want strength, they will not find it by following men who are too weak to take responsibility for their own failures.

Final Thought: Real Power Means Moving Forward

Not everyone will come back. Some will be too deep in the reactionary mindset. But those who can be saved must know this:

The only true path to glory is in surpassing the old.

Trump and Musk are not your champions. They are obstacles. They are what must be left behind.

So will you rise? Or will you stay shackled to the weak men of yesterday?

The choice is yours.

— Big Thunder Wabanaki, Algonquin

The following is a short and slightly edited extract from the second chapter from Hanzi Freinacht’s unpublished book ‘The 6 Hidden Patterns of History: A Metamodern Guide to World History’. The book is not coming out anytime soon, but a webinar on the topic of metamodern history and the six metamemes will be held this autumn, four weekends in a row November 2–25. More details about the course can be found here.

The introduction chapter can be accessed here. And the first chapter here.

Hanzi Freinacht: Across the tremendous range of human experiments that tens of thousands of years of animist cultures engendered, with a variety we can today only begin to comprehend, as evidenced by, amongst many other examples, the sheer hotpot of human cultural forms that is gathered only on Papua New Guinea (the favorite part of the world of so many anthropologists) — can one even speak meaningfully of such a thing as “the animist mind”? It’s a fair question, an important one.

Is the animist mind an entity that we could at least sketch the outline of and learn from, give its proper due, and even integrate into the farther reaches of modernity — without falling prey to wishful caricature, inappropriate cultural appropriation, and/or commercialization?

I believe and certainly hope we can; on the one hand it appears arrogant for us to claim access to a “general animism” when all animist cultures are precisely so localized and particular; on the other hand, it appears defeatist and as an insult to our joint and universal human experience to assume that the insights and connection to nature of animism are forever lost to all of the later metamemes. Again, the key difference between a “modern” and “metamodern” historiography, is that the latter takes all of the metamemes not as merely “objects of study” (“why are all these people so non-rational?” and so on), but as serious expressions of cultural life relevant and important to the development of one’s own culture, of one’s very sense of self. So I feel that we have to try, however provisionally. Otherwise, we are excluding this element of culture that is still inherent to all of us, still repressed and marginalized. I’m not interested in animism as a curiosity, but rather for what it can teach me, or teach us — for how it can help mend modernity itself.

With that in mind, let me try to take a kind of middle position on the issue of the “inherent spiritual experience” of animist life. More than one anthropologist has a soft spot for the mystical, the occult, the spiritual — at least since its overlap with Western counterculture in the 1960s and -70s. This is deeply reflected in the discipline’s way of perceiving and ethnographically participating in indigenous and particularly animist societies. Famous examples can be found in quotes like this one, by the wonderfully weird German researcher, Hans Peter Duerr, in Dreamtime (German original from 1978):

“The ‘dream place’ is everywhere and nowhere, just like the ‘dreamtime’ is always and never. You might say that the term ‘dream place’ does not refer to any particular place and the way to get to it is to get nowhere.”

Duerr argued that Western (Modern) science fails to take animist spirituality, or the occult in other pre-modern societies, anywhere near as seriously as they deserve: that there is real knowledge there, real explorations of the farther reaches of reality — not just whimsical or childish experience to be “explained” by a superior intellect — i.e. forms of knowing that “objectivity” is ill-suited to capture and comprehend. Dreamtime is about the borders of subjective experience, while the science we know today always stays firmly within the narrow confines of waking consciousness and its conceptual frameworks of self and reality. Animist spirituality, with its ready access to trance through rituals, to communion with nature, to shamanic intervention, and sometimes hallucinogenic drugs and practices, can and does break through boundaries unimaginable by the average doctor or engineer. And they may do so massively, and much more often than the rare glimpses of spiritual experience allotted to us in modern life — depending of course on the specifics of the animist culture.

In a similar vein, archeologists David Lewis-Williams and David Pearce have argued, in their 2005 book Inside the Neolithic Mind, that if you examine sites of Neolithic art in Europe and the Middle East, you see signs of altered states of consciousness pretty much everywhere.

Q: Well, at least it’s open to such interpretations.

HF: Yes, you’re right.

Indigenous mythologies speak a similar language: one that sounds decidedly psychedelic. Altered states, induced through shamanism, ritual, dance trance, and/or hallucinogenics, seem to have played a pivotal role in the evolution of the mind itself, of culture itself. Animist societies are arguably themselves psychedelically driven to a significant — and competent, and mature — degree that later societies are not. There may be deep wells of knowledge available to these societies that elude us today.

At the same time, this line of argument — taking on a more equal footing with the Animist metameme than did classical anthropology, viewing them as cultures that have knowledge that we lack — may also need to be tempered, to be balanced, in order to avoid unrealistic expectations upon animist life. We especially need to steer clear of a certain uncannily growing undercurrent of Western coveting of animist spirituality, with its consumerist, almost vampyric, Ayahuasca-tourism and so on. The high regard in which our hippie friends all hold Animist culture is not necessarily harmless: it arguably invites destructive forms of appropriation. Let me be clear to the point of sarcasm: rich, beautiful, hyper-feminine, sexy and athletic, “embodied” Burning Man ladies skillfully dancing by a virgin lake in the jungle, spreading their Goddess worship via YouTube, have nothing on the direct cultural expression of wrinkled faces of a simple and rhythmic clapping and singing taking place in the Kalahari desert. The !Kung people are not putting on a show; there is no connection in their rituals to Bali’s global elite party scene and Instagram. Such Western reenactments of animist spirituality certainly miss the mark, however universally human longings for connection that such reenactments may be stemming from.

So, from the other side of the argument, we may trace the classical sociological claim made by Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann, in their 1966 book, The Social Construction of Reality, that human life always returns to that mundane social construction that is “everyday life”. There is, indeed, no reason to believe anything is different in Animist cultures. Yes, they access spiritual states more readily; yes, their everyday life is less alienating and “stuck in the head”; yes, their holistic cosmologies are less weird to the human mind and thus facilitate a smoother sense of connection to the world… But no, the average member of animist societies does not consistently walk around in dreamtime, transfixed by elevated spiritual states during much of their waking lives. Let us be realistic about it: The animist mind is spiritually affluent, but its life does not entirely play out in the Garden of Eden.

It should further be qualified that while, yes, animist societies do tend to be spiritually richer than modern ones, the types of spirituality that emerge in hunter-gatherer societies do not correspond to the mind-transforming practices pertaining to the Postfaustian traditions, i.e. the mysticisms of the great religions. In small Animist societies with limited divisions of labor, there are no specialized monks or nuns, supported via larger communities of food donors, who refine practices of mind purification over centuries and millennia, through tens of thousands of intense practice hours per person, under the strictures of severe discipline and extremely incentivizing belief structures about the cosmic significance of their work. That stuff comes along primarily with the Axial Age (as we shall return to). In today’s neurological research into the brain states of spiritual experience, it is particularly the Tibetan Buddhist hermit Dzogchen practitioners that stand out. It is these people, uniquely, that can all but blow up the brain scanning equipment of modern researchers with strong, persistent Gamma waves (the fastest brainwaves, associated with peaceful bliss and compassion). But it is interesting to note that the Tibetan tradition — arguably the world’s most radical and tremendous in terms of measurable spiritual development — is one that has integrated many distinctly shamanic elements into its unique interpretation of Buddhism. So something can certainly be said in favor of the profound potential value to be found in integrating the animist mind within the frameworks of later metamemes. This is what the aim should be for our present situation.

Simply stated, I do believe in the animist mind as a useful category, from which true and relevant insight can be gleaned. It is something to rediscover, to revisit and critically reconstruct in the context of today’s larger societies, even if it is far from the only form of spiritual and cultural reconstruction necessary for metamodern cultures to thrive.

Q: What about magic? It’s not just spiritual experience, community building, and the embodiment of the natural world as non-verbal knowledge that constitute the animist mind: it is a deep relationship to magic, speaking to the world around us.

HF: Absolutely. Magical thinking is inherent to the Animist metameme. Here’s what I make of it.

Causality, as a form of reasoning to predict and interact with the world, is always under development. There isn’t one form of “rational mind” and one form that is magical. We’re all magicians, of different kinds, to different degrees. Causality is, viewed in this larger historical context, just another form of magic.

What the modern mind sees as “that’s just magic”, is the animist mind’s real reasoning. A big part of that has to do with the lack of differentiation into conceptual categories. In ethnomedicine, the study of medical practices of indigenous societies, there are many examples of how you can affect the healing processes of the mind and body by using the right words and objects (snake’s teeth and so forth). In the animist mind, language has not been separated out as something “exterior to” the world of objects. Objects have not been separated from subjects. So the world at large appears as something that can be talked to, as something in which each phenomenon has its own deep “essence”, and that such essences can be affected by conversation with the spiritual realm. You cannot “see” causes and effects, you have to infer them. Likewise, the animist mind infers the presence of spirits.

It’s here that spiritual states, in which one feels no separate self, and where “dreamtime” is experienced, play a special role: When the animist mind feels most connected to the world, this mind can enter into relationships with spirits that are believed to affect the course of real events. The name of one object sounds, linguistically speaking, like the name of something else, and by using that object and speaking the right words, you can affect the essence of another, seemingly related object or occurrence or phenomenon. It’s a form of causality, a form of reasoning — but one that meshes well with spiritual experience. And to a certain extent, such magic can do its magic, and truly work — through processes we would today perhaps describe as Placebo effects and the like.

Animist culture, through its very access to magic, was so superior to earlier forms of Archaic culture that it could spread across the planet over a comparatively short period of time: Animist cultures took hold on all continents and other species of homo were outcompeted. It is with this in mind that I named this chapter: Raindance did actually conquer the world. It’s not just cute; it’s that powerful. It is a form of reasoning that, in many ways, works. But note, again, that by inferring the presence of spirits, the animist mind has already removed some of the “essence” inherent to the phenomena themselves, and started to reason about invisible causal forces: it is, relatively speaking, a kind of secularization, of seeing wider causal patterns. Every metameme constitutes this kind of de-essentialization of the experienced reality from which it springs.

All of this does not mean that magical thinking of this kind is unproblematic in today’s world; it needs to be critically revisited and integrated with the realities today to serve us well. But that’s another story.

Q: Alright, so let’s talk more about the animist way of thinking.

In the past, it was common for scholars to subscribe to the, in my opinion, misled idea that indigenous people are somehow operating within a prelogical mentality and that they’re not fully capable of conscious, critical thinking. This mode of “primitive” thinking has, traditionally, been contrasted with the “rational” thinking of supposedly enlightened Westerners. Fortunately, this colonial way of thinking has largely been abandoned within academia.

And then “you guys” come along.

It’s not that I don’t acknowledge at least some of the findings within the field of adult development, or that I’m blind to the obvious fact that human beings can, under the right conditions, continue to develop cognitively throughout their adult lives. What I find really hard to believe is that entire cultures, that is, functional human societies that manage to survive in nature, were to function on a level of cognitive complexity akin to that of a child.

If we look at how indigenous people reason, and how they intelligently solve tricky problems — and how they over and over again have tricked westerners, I find that there’s little reason to conclude that they should be living in some kind of prelogical dreamworld.

HF: First of all there’s no one saying that animist societies don’t give birth to highly intelligent people, or that they aren’t able to have well-reasoned and rational conversations about how to solve problems. Cognitive complexity is, like intelligence, a highly hereditary property, and high-complexity individuals can be found in all societies (but in advanced ones they’re more likely to spend their days conducting high-complexity tasks defined within a stronger division of labor).

Secondly, since MHC Stage 8 Primary is the minimum requirement to properly understand animism, and since this is the first stage to enable simple logical deduction, I’m therefore not claiming that animist cultures operate according to a prelogical mode of thinking but rather the opposite.

Indigenous number systems can elucidate this point of “logical, yes, but not as abstracted” somewhat: while studies in so called ethnomathematics do tend to complicate the picture far beyond the proverbial “they could only count to one, two, many!”, it’s also true that larger number systems only emerged in larger societies, none of which were animist. We’re considering Mayans, India, China, Babylonia, and so on.

Now, whether animist cultures operate according to a rational mode of thought is a matter of how we choose to define the term “rational”. If we’re equating rational with MHC stage 11 formal, the ability to solve problems with one unknown using algebra, logic and empiricism, which is the minimum requirement to properly understand modernity, then this wouldn’t be the dominant mode of thinking in animist societies (but there would of course always be individuals capable at operating on this level of cognitive complexity). But if you simply equate rational with the capacity to critically evaluate evidence and make decisions based on experience and rough cost-benefit analysis, then animist societies, and their adult members, would certainly qualify. It should further be noted that human skills and faculties always develop in response to life conditions, and so the people who live most self-sufficiently in the natural world will also tend to be the most developed in terms of practical capacities. Throw a bunch of STEM Phds into the wild, cut them off from civilization, and see what happens — The Lord of the Flies probably doesn’t even begin to describe it. That also goes for animist cosmology: it’s more “rational”, in a deeper sense of the word, than mechanics and existentialism, because it imbues life in the wild with order, community, and meaning, while empowering and undergirding the practices that enable not only survival but thriving. It also doesn’t turn dogs and other animals into weird machines with no soul (looking at you, Descartes).

Given that animist culture is closest to how our minds and emotions spontaneously function (you don’t need to force feed it to people with twelve years of schooling for it to take hold), many (but not all) animist cultures are also more rational in the sense that they resonate more effortlessly with how human hearts and minds function, which means less cognitive dissonance, less alienation, and less decay of the mind and of social relations. Animism supports lifestyles for which we as a species, biologically speaking, are actually well-adapted (whereas pulling plows or maneuvering office life, tackling bureaucracy and digital security, not so much). Animism is rational because it tends to generate, for lack of a better term, relatively healthy expressions of the human condition.

All of this holds true until modernity comes along: When subsumed by the larger systems around them, animists tend to suffer from depression and other mental disorders to a degree comparable to other groups of equal status or vulnerability within these larger systems. As David Graeber and David Wengrow love to remind us, colonial history is full of people who were given the chance to live in both animist and modern cultures, and given the choice after having really tried both, most people will willingly escape from civilization and “go native” (as happens to the anthropologists themselves, every now and then). A slower and more rhythmic pace of life, less plotting and politicizing, less top-down control, more human contact, ongoing and non-repetitive movement of the body, fresh air and direct contact with plants and soil, lack of diseases derived from domesticated animals; it all adds up to make animist ways of life preferable.

The main project that “rationality” has to wrestle with under modernity is actually to one way or another reverse-engineer our way back to life conditions that approach the impossible ideals already present in many of the animist cultures. I’m not romanticizing here: hunter-gatherer life is not the Garden of Eden, the norms that regulate sharing and equality can be rather repressive and so on. But overall, yes, we have every reason to creatively reconstruct many elements of animist culture and integrate it. While leaving remaining animists alone, not least as indigenous land rights tend to mesh perfectly with environmental protection and bioregion preservation. I guess what I am saying is that “the savage” isn’t necessarily “noble”, but they are probably rational.

In response to this line of reasoning, modern observers have sometimes, almost gleefully, noted just how willingly indigenous peoples, animists included, have abandoned their ways of life to settle into the relative comforts of modernity, with handouts and modern jobs, once contact is established. But the fact that the rationality intrinsic to animist cultures can be thwarted by what are arguably slippery slopes of temptation, addiction, and quicker rewards hardly proves that members of animist cultures “given a choice” would make such choices. It is rather comparable to the way so many of us can slide into addictions of drugs or addictive digital apps, not least if we had no premonition where this leads us. And these “collective choices” of animist cultures do after all show up under circumstances where the trauma of contact is already a fact (you get hit by multiple epidemics, are pressured into a subjugated position, and have your cosmological beliefs undermined) as well as the active manipulation by members of modern societies who for different reasons may “need to manage” the indigenous populations.

Q: Alright got it: prelogical, no; rational, depends. Sometimes animist ways of life are “more rational”, I agree. But what about the notion that animists were supposed to live in some kind of dreamworld?

HF: Well, don’t we all?

I mean, the way in which modern people believe that there’s some kind of divine objective vantage point out there from where the true state of the world can be obtained. That’s a cute little dreamworld, don’t you think? Or, what about the way in which the postmodern folks believe that the world is inhabited by vicious spirits like the patriarchy, gender norms, and capitalism — that simply need to be deconstructed, or with another word, “exorcized”, in order to clean the world of their malicious presence. That’s a dreamworld at least in my book.

Or how about the fact that essentially, we only have access to the hallucinations that our nervous system and senses conjure up to represent the world around us, never the world in itself. Dreams, in a broad definition of the word, is all we’ll ever know.

Q: Get to the point.

HF: Alright. I assume you’re referring to the way some imagine indigenous people to be living in a haze of make-believe with no connection to the real world because of their spiritual beliefs and colorful mythologies. That’s obviously mistaken. It would be the same as assuming that modern Westerners went about their daily lives with nothing but Newtonian equations, Ricardian economic models, and legal textbooks to guide their behavior.

The cosmology of a culture is one thing. The practical day-to-day behavior of individuals is another. The first certainly affects the other, but the world would be a really weird place if people had to rely exclusively on the symbolic artifacts of their culture.

As such, people might live in a culture that’s full of sentient mountains, invisible daddies in the sky, or divine numbers with universal revelations, but that doesn’t mean that they can’t reason.

HF: In a way, the Animist metameme is the home we never left. It is, as I mentioned earlier, the only metameme we’re evolutionarily adapted to. We’ve had millions of years to adapt to a life of hunting and gathering, and then we’ve had around 50 000 years to develop a spiritual and cultural superstructure (I actually don’t like using the term “purification generator” for this one) to refine, enrich, and enhance this way of life. Animism is thus our first culture, a way of thinking and being that’s intuitive to our minds if we’re not taught otherwise, or not “corrupted” by civilization. Children, for example, will on their own develop ideas about an animated world and usually ascribe intentions and wills to inanimate objects. The thing is, our minds are simply wired for an animist worldview, and our bodies are adapted to the hunter gatherer way of life.

Consequently, one of the goals of metamodernism must be to find ways to reincorporate many of the social and cultural qualities of animism in order to increase our physical and emotional well-being, and to give us a greater sense of wholeness.

There’s a lot we can learn from indigenous cultures, and I’m not just talking about their knowledge about which plants have healing properties, and which ones can make you high. Indigenous societies have social design solutions that are, in terms of resource footprint, extraordinarily efficient. Indigenous societies can generate happy and healthy human beings with a fraction of the resources compared to modern industrialized societies. In a world that’s on a crash course towards a future where material resources will become scarcer and life will be even more chaotic and precarious than before, learning to make due with less, and still feel happy and resilient, will be vital if we are to survive as a species.

Nature preservation is another field where indigenous wisdom can help us, well, save the world basically. Indigenous cultures often have an abundance of vital knowledge about the ecosystems they inhabit and how to live in a sustainable balance with the land. This is of course something we should learn from. But extracting knowledge from indigenous people to help do something modern people remain notoriously lousy at can only take us that far. What I’m advocating is that we reinforce indigenous land rights so that the people who truly master the craft of nature preservation can function as custodians of the lands. It would probably be more efficient to have people with a deep connection to the land, rather than some faceless government organization, tend the health of the lands not used for agriculture. In addition, once people have a strong legal claim to a certain area, and the necessary protection to remain there, and have lived there for a longer time, they will also be much harder to get rid off in case the political winds change in favor of someone wanting to go full Bolsonaro on mother nature.

That more and more people are opening their eyes to indigenous wisdom is no mystery. As the multidimensional crisis of our modern civilization worsens, it will become increasingly evident that some of the keys to solving our problems are to be found within indigenous cultures.

Q: Alright Hanzi, nice try. I see you’re trying to give the Animist metameme as much cred as possible so as to prevent a shitstorm when the book comes out, well knowing that indigenous wisdom currently is the hottest hot and that people would come after you and kick your ass if you were to say that indigenous cultures were uncivilized or under-developed.

But at the end of the day, that’s still what you’re saying, right? I mean, the Animist metameme is, according to your model, on a lower stage of development, and the Modern one is on a higher stage. Sure, I get it, you’re no fan of modernity, you want for us to evolve to the metamodern stage, but that still implies that development is good and that indigenous cultures ought to evolve.

What’s your reply to that?

HF: First of all, and I reckon I’ll have to repeat this again and again, the metamemes model is not a normative model. A modern society is not necessarily better than an animist one, or a postfaustian one for that matter. It all depends. Modern societies can, as we all know, be severely pathologic. But so can animist ones. And there ought to be no doubt that certain modern societies manage to generate a lot of healthy and happy citizens and that everyone else would have a lot to learn from these, just like we evidently have a lot to learn from indigenous cultures, the great world religions, and so on.

Try to think of it in terms of complexity and maturity. The later metamemes are on a higher level of complexity. I think there can be no doubt that our modern global civilization is much more complex than a band of hunter gatherers. Yet, the later metamemes are also more immature. Our modern civilization has only been around for about 200 years, it’s super complex, but also super immature. Compare that with the aboriginal culture in Australia. They have been around for 40 000 years. Their way of life is relatively simple, but the wisdom that has accumulated over four millennia of surviving in the harsh environment of Australia is nothing short of astounding.

The reason for the apparent paradox that so-called “primitive” societies can offer us supposedly “advanced” moderns so much wisdom, is derived from the fact that our modern industrialized civilization is so young, barely an adolescent, while many of the indigenous cultures out there are aging sages with all the wisdom that comes with old age. But remember, there was a time when the aboriginals of Australia and the natives of North America were just as ignorant and reckless as us. They too caused mass extinctions and exhausted their natural environments. The reason that we today find such a refined awareness about the balance of nature among indigenous people is probably not because they concluded through deduction that nature would have certain breaking points. No, that’s not how humans usually work. Nature is a hard and unforgiving mistress, and through tens of thousand years there have inevitably been numerous cataclysms and collapses to grow wiser from.

Similarly, indigenous cultures have had tens of thousands of years to adapt and refine their social systems to the life of hunting and gathering. We, on the other hand, have only had a few generations to adapt to industrialization, and now even that’s over in many parts of the world and we have to adapt our social systems, gender roles, way of parenting, work life, and so on, to an entirely new digitized life style. It’s no wonder that we’re a bit lost.

So, my reply is that yes, the Animist metameme is a less complex metameme than the Modern one. But, that doesn’t make it better or worse, yet given the time it’s been around it certainly makes it considerably wiser than the later ones. As such, I’m not just paying lip service to all those hippies who think we should learn from indigenous cultures, I sincerely believe that there’s profound wisdom to be found that we won’t find anywhere else. Plus, the beauties lost from all metamemes are to be rediscovered if we want to reach a higher synthesis in a metamodern future.

If you wish to read the full chapter it can be accessed free of charge on the Metamoderna page here.

Best wishes,

Emil Ejner Friis

A webinar on the topic of metamodern history and the six metamemes will be held this autumn, four weekends in a row November 2–25. More details about the course can be found here.

Hanzi Freinacht is a political philosopher, historian, and sociologist, author of ‘The Listening Society’, ‘Nordic Ideology’ and ’12 Commandments’. Much of his time is spent alone in the Swiss Alps. You can follow Hanzi on Facebook, Twitter, Medium and the Metamoderna website, and you can speed up the process of new metamodern content reaching the world by making a donation to Hanzi here.

But can culture evolve? The stages of cultural development have been approached many times but never been comprehensively, coherently, and convincingly captured.

The failures of developmental social theory have left authors like David Graeber and David Wengrow able to claim that stages of evolution of society do not meaningfully exist at all – that the very notion is a delusion of Western bias.

Until now.

The critics of the idea of evolution could not be more wrong. What has been lacking is only a sufficiently deep, abstract understanding of the great patterns of patterns, of the patterns that connect. This is what is captured by the notion of metamemes: the focus of this course. It’s the DNA of history.

It’s not Stone Age, Bronze Age, and Iron Age. It’s not from bands to tribes to chiefdoms to states.

Hanzi Freinacht – this time mostly in the guise of Emil – presents a redefined theory of historical evolution, one that at a surface level may look similar to well-known models like Spiral Dynamics, but that at a closer look has become something entirely different, and one that meshes with the specific skills and knowledge of a trained historian.

The metamemes follow an inherent  and elegant logic, and this logic is unearthed in a manner that reveals how all of the leading thinkers have been groping the elephant from different angles.

This course invites you to a behind-the-scenes look at Hanzi Freinacht’s redefinition of all hitherto prevalent models of cultural development. And once you see the models, all of history looks differently.

History as you know it, is history.

Tickets can be purchased here.

Sessions take place on Saturdays and Sundays in November, 19:00-21:00 CET. All sessions will be recorded and made available shortly thereafter. Here’s the program:

Weekend One: The 6 Hidden Patterns of History (and why they’ve been so difficult to spot)

The metamemes have been missed by all the world’s leading thinkers. Why? There is an explanation, and once you see it, it becomes readily apparent not only how the past has developed, but also how the seeds of the future look from today’s perspective.

Saturday November 2:

• What is a metameme?

• How the “skewed” development of the metamemes makes them so hard to identify (but impossible to unsee once you’ve learned how to spot them)

• Why art always comes first (and why ethics, sadly, always comes last)

Sunday November 3:

• The hidden rhythm of history

• Why some stages of development are “hard” and others are “soft”

• Why postmodernism cannot beat capitalism (despite wanting it so badly)

Weekend Two: Where are we headed? Empirical pessimism, theoretical optimism

In the second weekend we’ll look at the future and Emil will show you where the attractors seem to be taking us. These sessions aren’t for the faint of heart, so brace thyself. You’ll get a sweeping overview of the wild torrents we’re going through and hopefully get a better idea about where to position yourself so as to make it through these crazy times that are coming.

Saturday November 9:

• How to “outcompete” capitalism

• The new emerging class structure in late modernity and beyond (and where you fit in)

Sunday November 10:

• Why metamodernism might be the last stage of development before the singularity

• Why we’re approaching a “postmodern dark age”, not a listening society

Weekend Three: History Freestyle with Emil

During the third weekend it’s time to jam. Hanzi’s got a massive unpublished material on history and socio-cultural development that Emil can present. Participants can send in proposals to historical and societal topics they would like him to talk about. No woo-woo stuff though, Emil is tired of that.

Saturday November 16 & Sunday November 17: You decide!

Want to hear a metamodern perspective on the French Revolution? You got it. Want to understand the rise, and fall, of patriarchy? No problem. Globalization and colonization? Would love to. The Axial Age and the rise of universal moral religions and philosophies? Unless you want to hold hands and meditate, certainly, Emil can deliver a razor sharp analysis to expand your consciousness on that one, too. And he can even talk for countless hours about how kick-ass our animist ancestors were, and what we can learn from the present ones without things going off rails woo-woo.

Bonus sessions with Johan Ranefors and Daniel Görtz

Finally, after the main course you are welcome to participate in a couple of bonus sessions with Johan Ranefors and Daniel Görtz. Johan is a meta-theorist associated with the Archdisciplinary Research Center (ARC) who has further developed Michael Commons Model of Hierarchical Complexity, and Daniel is Emil’s long-term partner in crime and the “other half” of Hanzi.

Saturday November 23: Johan Ranefors (a rare species of computer science-based metatheorist)

• How the hidden rhythm of the metamemes fits with the Model of Hierarchical Complexity

• How the Model of Hierarchical Complexity can help us make sense of socio-cultural evolution

Sunday November 24: Daniel Görtz

• Epistemic corruption and why we can’t move on before we’ve seized the means of communication

• Why transnationalizing the internet platform monopolies is a historical attractor point (and why Bezos and Zuckerberg don’t stand a chance in the long run)

Note that this course is the first and only place in which Johan’s metatheory is presented thus far (and this is almost true of Daniel’s presentation as well).

Pricing

Low income: € 220

Standard: € 270

Tickets can be purchased here.

Hanzi Freinacht’s book The 6 Hidden Patterns of History is not coming out any time soon. Fortunately, the theoretical framework is locked and ready and Emil Ejner Friis has been presenting the theories behind the book in the Metamodern Master Class to great applause. The course is going to focus entirely on The 6 Hidden Patterns and Hanzi’s perspectives on history and socio-cultural development.

If you’re curious about how human culture has evolved from the Stone Age to the present, how various historical topics can be interpreted from a metamodern perspective, and what the next stage of development might entail, then this course is for you.

Tickets can be purchased here: https://dandelion.events/e/6-hidden-patterns

Sessions take place on Saturdays and Sundays in November, 19:00-21:00 CET. Here’s the program:

Weekend One: The 6 Hidden Patterns of History (and why they’ve been so difficult to spot)

In the first weekend we’ll deep dive into the past. Emil will show you an elegant model on historical development that will give you a better understanding of the past, and you will be taught how to use the theoretical framework behind the 6 hidden patterns of history to make better sense of the present.

Saturday November 2:

• What is a metameme?

• How the “skewed” development of the metamemes makes them so hard to identify (but impossible to unsee once you’ve learned how to spot them)

• Why art always comes first (and why ethics, sadly, always comes last)

Sunday November 3:

• The hidden rhythm of history

• Why some stages of development are “hard” and others are “soft”

• Why postmodernism cannot beat capitalism (despite wanting it so badly)

Weekend Two: Where are we headed? Empirical pessimism, theoretical optimism

In the second weekend we’ll look at the future and Emil will show you where the attractors seem to be taking us. These sessions aren’t for the faint of heart, so brace thyself. You’ll get a sweeping overview of the wild torrents we’re going through and hopefully get a better idea about where to position yourself so as to make it through these crazy times that are coming.

Saturday November 9:

• How to “outcompete” capitalism

• The new emerging class structure in late modernity and beyond (and where you fit in)

Sunday November 10:

• Why metamodernism might be the last stage of development before the singularity

• Why we’re approaching a “postmodern dark age”, not a listening society

Weekend Three: History Freestyle with Emil

During the third weekend it’s time to jam. Hanzi’s got a massive unpublished material on history and socio-cultural development that Emil can present. Participants can send in proposals to historical and societal topics they would like him to talk about. No woo-woo stuff though, Emil is tired of that.

Saturday November 16 & Sunday November 17: You decide!

Want to hear a metamodern perspective on the French Revolution? You got it. Want to understand the rise, and fall, of patriarchy? No problem. Globalization and colonization? Would love to. The Axial Age and the rise of universal moral religions and philosophies? Unless you want to hold hands and meditate, certainly, Emil can deliver a razor sharp analysis to expand your consciousness on that one, too. And he can even talk for countless hours about how kick-ass our animist ancestors were, and what we can learn from the present ones without things going off rails woo-woo.

Bonus sessions with Johan Ranefors and Daniel Görtz

Finally, after the main course you are welcome to participate in a couple of bonus sessions with Johan Ranefors and Daniel Görtz. Johan is a meta-theorist associated with the Archdisciplinary Research Center (ARC) who has further developed Michael Commons Model of Hierarchical Complexity, and Daniel is Emil’s long-term partner in crime and the “other half” of Hanzi.

Saturday November 23: Johan Ranefors

• How the hidden rhythm of the metamemes fits with the Model of Hierarchical Complexity

• How the Model of Hierarchical Complexity can help us make sense of socio-cultural evolution

Sunday November 24: Daniel Görtz

• Epistemic corruption and why we can’t move on before we’ve seized the means of communication

• Why transnationalizing the internet platform monopolies is a historical attractor point (and why Bezos and Zuckerberg don’t stand a chance in the long run)

Pricing:

Low income: 1650 DKK (c. 220€)

Standard: 2000 DKK (c. €270)

Abundant: 2500 DKK (c. €335)

Tickets can be purchased here: https://dandelion.events/e/6-hidden-patterns

Your host

Emil Ejner Friis (b. 1981) is a theory artist and a teacher of metamodernism, he is a co-founder of Metamoderna and one of the writers behind Hanzi Freinacht. He has spent the last ten years trying to figure out how to create a listening society, a kinder and more developed society that deeply cares for the happiness and emotional needs of every citizen.

He has tried and failed at creating a metamodern political party, he has tried and failed at creating a metamodern IT company, and he has just plainly failed at ever finishing his not-so-metamodern university studies by being drawn to all kinds of adventures to try and save the world instead. Until recently he was living on a remote tropical island where he was swimming with dogs every day. He just moved back to his old university town Lund to pursue an academic career. We'll see how long that lasts.

When he’s not writing and theorizing, he’s conspiring with other metamodernly inclined hackers, hipsters, and hippies to outcompete modern society. To pay the rent he sells words, all the best words.

Emil is a skilled and experienced speaker with a reputation of being entertaining and good at making complex ideas easier to digest.

More about The 6 Hidden Patterns

If you're interested in getting to know more about the 6 hidden patterns you  can read the first couple of chapters of Hanzi Freinacht's unpublished book here:

The 6 Hidden Patterns of History: Introduction

The 6 Hidden Patterns of History: Chapter 1, A Brief Introduction to the Metamemes Model

—Theodor Adorno

The following is a short extract from the first chapter in Hanzi Freinacht’s unpublished book ‘The 6 Hidden Patterns of History: A Metamodern Guide to World History’. The book is not coming out anytime soon, but a webinar on the topic of world history and the six metamemes will be held this autumn, four weekends in a row November 2–25. More details about the course can be found here.

Hanzi Freinacht: Let’s begin this chapter with a blurry “jpeg” image of the six metamemes, the six hidden patterns of world history. 

Before we go on, I’d implore you to get a bucket and to keep it within reach. I expect especially postmodernly minded readers to react with strong contempt and violent allergy towards what follows. If this is you—if you find your fingers clutching spasmodically and a dark brooding voice inside you spells the word “linear”—just know your reaction is normal and an expected part of the process.

But do come back after you’re done vomiting—it gets more interesting, I promise. It’s a bit like Mother Ayahuasca, really: It takes a bit of throwing up to reach a breakthrough.

Here we go:

• The Animistic metameme: Beginning with the “revolution of the upper Paleolithic” around 50 000 years ago. Characterized by animistic beliefs, totemism, shamanism, and ancestor cults that bind together larger bands of hunter-gatherers. This is also the metameme that gives rise to the first early art works.

• The Faustian metameme: From the beginning of the agricultural revolution 12 000 years ago, blossoming with the great agrarian civilizations from around 4000 BCE. Characterized by notions of power gods, monumental architecture, and increased social stratification with privileged rulers on top with considerable means of organized violence. This is the metameme where we see the rise of powerful individuals.

• The Postfaustian metameme: Beginning shortly before the axial age c. 800 BCE, in some aspects as early as 2000 BCE, but to its fullest extent only to blossom after 500 CE with the consolidation of the great moral religions such as Christianity, Islam and Buddhism. Characterized by transcendental ideas of salvation, literary traditions on ethics, and social critique. This is the metameme that gives rise to the so-called “righteous rebels”.

• The Modern metameme: Beginning around 1500 CE, but in some aspects found in its proto-variant as early as 500 BCE. Blossoming only in the 19^th and 20^th century. Still the most prevailing metameme today. Characterized by rationalistic and scientific thought, notions of progress and material growth, and emancipation from arbitrary religious and political control.

• The Postmodern metameme: Only to emerge in the 20^th century, though some aspects appeared in the late 18^th century. Yet to fully blossom. Characterized by a critique of rationalistic thought, established power relations and a greater concern with environmental and social issues.

• The Metamodern metameme: Emerging as we speak.

Q: No, I’m fine. Really. Thank you for this introduction. Disgusting as it was.

…But it is linear—you really cannot deny that. I’m not saying this as a judgment, just a description. It’s a mainstream, Western, linear view of history. That has its place, perhaps, but it is of course not the only kind of history, nor necessarily the most relevant one in our day and age.

So your world history is for just seeing the basics from a Western mainstream perspective, as a linear progression, and then people can challenge it and nuance it, correct?

HF: No, it’s not linear, it’s not mainstream, and it’s not the Western standard (“Whig history”) model.

“Linear” means, by definition, that the more you add of something, the more of the same you get. Like following a line. Add more sugar, it gets sweeter. Add more salt, it gets saltier. Within certain ranges, these are linear equations.

Now, add more spirit worlds and rain dances… and you get high-rise pyramids, elaborate temple cities, and trade networks upholding armies allied with scribes who keep track of taxes and the number of captured slaves. To call that a linear equation is to take a very creative view on mathematics.

Add more of warrior god pantheon worship and bloody triumph of mass honor killings, and you get… Jesus. And the Buddha. And saints taking over from heroic warriors as the highest ideal of human accomplishment. And a universal order manifesting in literal wonders of beauty (cathedrals, mosques, and so on) that tower over every human settlement in honor of the divine, of universal brotherhood. Sure, linear.

And add some more of that, and you get… businessmen? Yes, lots of snazzy, shrewd capitalists turning everything under the sun into profit machines, with science itself serving as the strongest reinforcer for this to occur, until the entire world is swallowed up and ecosystems are destroyed. Some line we’re drawing. It’s a little curly, though, don’t you think? Like a spiral, even?

And add more of that, and you get… a whole blinking army of vegan feminists, intellectuals, and environmental activists who love diversity? And a virtual flood of obsessions with the minutiae of language use and its implications for social justice and power relations? Whoa. That would be postmodernism.

No, it’s not linear. The whole point of the model is that each stage is a qualitative shift, breaking the apparent “line” of the former metameme and taking a fundamentally different direction.

And it’s not the Western mainstream story, either. Because the Western mainstream would not admit that the postmodern minorities that emerge to critique it are absolutely right that the modern project is both tragic, doomed, and not a simple form of progress. And it would not admit that Animism was perhaps the best way for humans to live, nor that Postfaustian religions were in many ways a greater achievement than modern science, Modern Western mainstream historiography could even have problems admitting that colonialism was fundamentally a crime against humanity—and that global and big history must be released from the shackles of Western-centric parochialism, thereby honoring indigenous traditions as well as balancing the six, not one, mutually independent birthplaces of civilization: China, Indus River Valley, South America, Mesoamerica, Egypt, and Mesopotamia (where “Western civilization” is nothing more than a grandchild of the last two).

Postmodern historiography does see and admit these things. It does challenge the Western mainstream and its thinly disguised roots in 19th century colonialism, nationalism, and male-centrism. And my point is: Metamodern historiography entirely agrees, and seeks to proceed in this endeavor! We just want to do it better and more holistically, producing more useful theories for actually reducing the suffering of the world.

But the problem in our days, if you ask me, is that the postmodern mind cannot tell the difference between Modern historiography (yes, linear, Western, mainstream, apologetic for colonialism, blind to issues of gender and environment, reproductive of arbitrary power relations, and so on) and a Metamodern historiography, as the one in this book.

Understanding the metamemes, as the hidden patterns of history, is not the Modern mainstream history. It’s an expression of a Metamodern view of history, and as such it goes beyond Postmodern critiques of everything that moves (or everything that moves in what looks like a line).

Q: Nice. Sure, call me a postmodernist if that makes you feel safer in your Western-centric little ivory tower. I’m happy to be one if that means I fight against the long tradition of ranking peoples and cultures and epochs according to an unjust and cruel hierarchy of “evolution”. Folks like you are many, people like me are few and far between. The world needs a few of us as well.

And do tell me again that you have a more “evolved” perspective. It just proves my point: You are part of the same old, same old, white guy stuck in a square, wanting to box the world neatly into more rigid square boxes, to control it, and put yourself on top. Also in a box. I’d say it’s cute if I weren’t so utterly disgusted, given the profoundly murderous history of this very tendency. You’re even trying to appropriate the resistance of others and make it a part of your box-theory-of-boxing-everything-that-is-alive-and-organic-and-wobbly. You don’t like wobbly, I get it. You can’t handle it. It’s hard to control. I feel for you. It must be difficult to live so afraid of uncertainty, to be so much in need of controlling everything.

However, however. I do see what you mean about “linear”, I’ll give you that. That’s not exactly what I meant with linear, though. The fact still remains that you literally lined up the metamemes in a progression: I can flip back to the page, take a pencil, and draw a damned line between your stages or metamemes on the paper! But the sequence isn’t as simple as you say. You don’t claim that Animism grows out of Modernity, for instance. For my part, I can think of many ways in which it might, and it has—say, in the German Wandervogel or Lebensreform movements at the last turn of the century. People react against modernity and start seeing the spirits in nature, in their own people, reconnecting to the organic and simple, to the animal side of human life.

HF: Well, uhm. About me calling you a “pomo” (postmodernist)... Let me respond to that first and then get back to the main thread.

Please do note that you’re calling me an inheritor of positively genocidal tendencies and charging me with moral responsibility for those things. And then you’re calling me a box-man and all that, and going after my race and gender, framing me not for what I say but for external attributes I really cannot do anything about. At least you should ask yourself why you get to frame me and my argument but if I do the same to you, only in a less unfair manner (framing your position, not your skin color), I’m suddenly the pinnacle of evil? If you don’t like having your position framed as pomo, why then do you insist on framing my position, and also my person?

I guess I sometimes do call you “a pomo”, at least in regard to how vehemently you resist stage theories—or the good ones, not the poor ones. The difference is, though, that’s an assessment not of you as a person or collective category, but of the content of your argumentation. And not only that—it’s a fairly positive assessment. I thereby say that you hold almost all of the values that I also hold and cherish. It’s only that I have a different view on how to defend and manifest those values.

Q: Yada, yada. Hurt white men… Heroes of the whole world, who nobody in the world ever asked for. So sensitive. So fragile. Can’t take two seconds of critique. So used to being the talker.

HF: Sure. I don’t think we’re getting anywhere on that one. Back to the actual discussion, then.

I’m not saying that nothing Animist can ever come from modernity. I’m not. Indeed, this kind of emergence (earlier metamemes from later ones) is an important theme throughout this book. All of the metamemes always coexist as generative potentials.

What I am saying is that they must first emerge sequentially. There’s just no way for a band of twelve people in the desert foraging for roots to invent Newtonian physics and then to critique its implications on how it makes for a mechanistic cosmology and thus an alienating and anti-ecological worldview with a Cartesian ghost left echoing in the machine, feeling lonely. It just doesn’t happen. You don’t get Modernity and Postmodernity directly from Animism. You don’t. If that’s “too linear” for you, you’re just being dogmatic, sorry.

If I may deconstruct your position for a bit, you seem a bit stuck on the dogma, the underlying supposition, that lines are bad. But reality is more complex than that. Lines are sometimes good, sometimes bad. Lines do exist, also in living systems, even in mycelia. Sometimes lines describe the relationships between things accurately. The dance of the universe follows many geometric shapes, some of which happen to be lines.

Again, I said you’d really need a bucket, and I did promise you more interesting nuance if you could only finish vomiting. It’s normal. I understand. Just pull your hair back. Here’s some tissue.

But just to really get the line-allergy issue under control, let’s do it like this. When I wrote the summary blurry jpeg image paragraph, I had little choice but to line the things up on the paper, indeed forming a line in a superficial sense. That’s a limitation of communicating in this format, on a two-dimensional surface, in text. A more accurate way of describing the progression of metamemes is that they branch off from one another in one tree, where each new branch is smaller and younger than the last. Like this:

I wish to credit my good friend Joe Lightfoot for being the one to come up with the idea of presenting the stages as a tree. For the rest of eternity, the official name for this model will thus be known as The Lightfoot Tree™.

The Lightfoot Tree™ illustrates the proportions of the stretches of time within which humans have lived in and expressed the different metamemes. In today’s world, modernity looks like the biggest one on the surface (because there’s just so much of it across the planet), but all of the oldest and in that sense most trial-and-error evolved cultures that jive with their direct environment are animist. Modernity is only about five centuries old. The oldest Animist cultures, say, the San people in the Kalahari desert, are literally close to a hundred times older. That’s the trunk of human experience. That’s the cultural and psychological homestead of humanity.

(And this model mirrors, by the way, the bifurcation diagram in chaos theory. It’s a bit more technical, and way ahead of where we are in the discussion, but I have added a discussion of the connection between metamemes and the bifurcation diagram in the appendix to this book. I recommend reading it, after having finished the book.)

Q: That’s… pretty gender-typical ‘splaining. But in keeping with my value of being a good listener (something white men with big ideas like yourself aren’t exactly known for), I’ll humor you. I know you’re trying to talk me into something, but hey, I’m confident I can resist so I may as well hear you out, even if I more or less already know what you’re going to say. Because I’ve already thought of this discussion and come farther than you have.

Okay, so let’s say you have these metamemes branching off organically from one another, where Animism is the biggest and oldest root, with tens of thousands of years of lived history. At least it’s better than a staircase of human history leading up to George H. W. Bush and the fall of the Berlin Wall. Modernity is just one of many ways that humans live and express themselves, fine. And Western societies are just one set of expressions, in turn, of modernity. There is so much human richness that arose long before anything one might call “modernity” ever appeared. And there do come beautiful and interesting things after and beyond it—sure, we can call that postmodern, if we want. A more critical and nuanced mind can notice that, for instance, an Amazon tribe’s shamanic practice can be wiser and more embodied than anything modern life ever cooked up in its soulless office landscapes.

But since you’ve added a stage after the Postmodern metameme, I can’t stop wondering if it wouldn’t be possible to add a stage before the Animistic one? (Again, I don’t buy the idea of stages, or branches or however you’d like sneakily to rebrand it, but I’ll play along to see how your thinking makes sense internally, regardless of my wider perspective. I’m just interested in the social phenomenon of people thinking like you do. I’ve always been like that, interested in people, even the bad ones and the vulnerabilities that drive them.)

HF: Ah, I’m happy we can speak on friendlier terms, even if just as a truce. It’s all I ask for. And yes, by the way, modernity is only one of many human expressions, and Western modernity is only a subcategory of that. Exactly correct, dear Q. And this whole “Western modernity” has been blown out of proportion in terms of its influence on the world, with partly disastrous consequences. We completely agree!

It’s just that to balance this out and bring about a global order that actually honors and integrates the multiplicity of human experience, we need to first admit that there is such a thing as modernity—the Modern metameme—and that it’s not the same as simply “being Western”. We need to understand what it actually is. And we need to not implicitly hold Western societies to a higher standard than other cultures, because that’s treating one thin sliver of human expression as the adult and all the others as the children. Western guilt vis-à-vis the rest of the world has an unfortunate way of smuggling Western supremacy in through the back door.

But, yes, whether there’s a stage before the Animistic one is a really good question. It’s almost as if I was telling you what to ask.

If it wasn’t for the fact that my publisher had already marketed this book as “The 6 Hidden Patterns”, we might as well change the title to “The 7 Hidden Patterns of History”. The Animistic metameme obviously didn’t appear out of nowhere, but emerged from a more rudimentary stage of development.

This more rudimentary stage doesn’t contain any of the Animistic metameme’s typical features such as spirit beliefs, mythological narratives, and works of art. I have refrained from dedicating a chapter to it since there really wouldn’t be much to say, and since most of it would be based on speculation anyway. The main way in which this—let’s call it the Archaic—metameme, differs from an “animal” condition to use a clumsy term, is in its technological features. It includes spoken language, domestication of fire, and tool use. These are the innovations that initially made humans, or more specifically hominids (since there were several subspecies of humans at this level of development), so different from other animals.

But, tellingly, the Archaic metameme left little to nothing in the way of art.

It had been around for over 300 000 years, maybe even more than a million (a group of archaeologists just unearthed the remains of what they believe is a one million years old campfire), since “the dawn of homo sapiens as a species”. It clearly encompassed other species of homo: homo habilis, homo erectus, Neanderthals, and Cro-Magnon. If we study the period of about 70 000 years ago, there were at least six different human species on earth.

It’s old. It’s Archaic. Hundreds of millennia of ongoing human life, and no art. That very fact should make us pause. It’s on the very edge between biological and cultural evolution, which is also why it encompasses different species of hominids.

Here’s the watershed moment where a cultural evolution began to decide the fate of biological evolution. That’s something we're entirely used to in the anthropocene, where mustard plants have become everything from spinach to cabbage to cauliflower, and wolves speciate into 360 species of dogs—biological realities that match cultural evolution (from herding to handbags and Hollywood showoff, in the case of shepherd dogs and chihuahuas). But 70 000 years ago, it was rare for culture to determine the fate of biological evolution—Archaic was shared across species of the genus “homo”, but when Animism took root, certain groups started to kick some serious butt and drove the others to a combination of extinction and biological assimilation. Culture had slowly started eating the biosphere already back then. 

The Archaic metameme entails the beginnings of “culture” that accumulates learning in a way that makes culture come alive as its very own form of evolution. It is thus not only the first metameme, but also the first “hard” metameme. It established the foundational material conditions, or the “coordination engine” if we are to use my terminology, of the first human societies; a way of life that on a fundamental level remained the same until the agrarian age. But in between, with the emergence of animism, a new cultural superstructure was created on top of this hunter-gatherer coordination engine. But, in spite of all the cultural advances that animism brought about, the “hard” material conditions remained the same: people had to hunt and gather to get food, they depended on open fires for cooking and keeping warm, and they used language to coordinate life in small groups of wandering bands.

Q: Whoa, wait a second, “hard” metameme? “Coordination engine”? What do you mean? You can’t keep making up new words without explaining what you’re talking about.

HF: Oh sorry, I haven’t explained that yet. Take a deep breath and let me elaborate.

Q: You don’t need to tell me how to breathe, but go on.

If you wish to read the full chapter it can be accessed free of charge on the Metamoderna page here.

Best wishes,

Emil Ejner Friis

A webinar on the topic of world history and the six metamemes will be held this autumn, four weekends in a row November 2–25. More details about the course can be found here.

Hanzi Freinacht is a political philosopher, historian, and sociologist, author of ‘The Listening Society’, ‘Nordic Ideology’ and ’12 Commandments’. Much of his time is spent alone in the Swiss Alps. You can follow Hanzi on Facebook, Twitter, Medium and the Metamoderna website, and you can speed up the process of new metamodern content reaching the world by making a donation to Hanzi here.

The following is a short extract from the introduction chapter in Hanzi Freinacht’s unpublished book ‘The 6 Hidden Patterns of History: A Metamodern Guide to World History’. The full chapter can be accessed here. The book is not coming out anytime soon, but a webinar on the topic of world history and the six metamemes will be held this autumn, four weekends in a row November 2–25. More details about the course can be found here.

Q: Okay Hanzi, let’s get right at it. You claim to have discovered these patterns that explain much of world history—“metamemes” you call them.

But when I look at your theory it seems like just another wildly speculative “stage model”, where one stage of society builds upon another—and civilization “rises” to new heights. This is denigrating the richness of history, reducing human experience, flattening cultures past and present. Cultural history is much more than that.

Over and over again, history has taught us that, in the end, every such grandiose metanarrative comes crashing down under the weight of its own incongruities. How can you be sure that your model eventually won’t go down like all the rest?

HF: Hopefully, my model will go down some day. It will be obsolete, proven incorrect. If not, it would indicate that humanity had ceased improving upon her models of reality, and that would be bad news. I sincerely hope that all the errors I’ve made will be discovered, and that my model will be replaced by better ones. For now, however, I’m convinced this model is one of the best currently available metanarratives about world history.

But alright, I sense you don’t like the very act of creating what I call “metanarratives”, or any versions of grand histories. So let me stay a moment on that topic.

A metanarrative is “a narrative about narratives”; it’s a wider story that connects the different stories around you. These can be the stories of nations, of dynasties, of civilizations, the stories of technological progress, the stories of oppression and liberation, the stories of genders, of humans and the environment, and so forth. A metanarrative is a way of organizing and interconnecting the different accounts of the world and how it works, and—in the case of history—what actually happened. There are many stories about world history, but how do these fit together, if at all? A metanarrative shows how the different ways we have been taught to “listen to the melodies of history” form a larger whole, one that is not just a jumble of contradictions.

Metanarratives are a bit like world maps; they don’t show a lot of detail and are rather inaccurate when you zoom in, but they are still indispensable when we need an overview on a global scale. It’s alright if you don’t like my world map. But let me ask you, once you’ve seen and understood the one presented in this book: do you have a better one? Implicitly and unconsciously held maps are maps nonetheless.

But, sure, there are reasons to be suspicious of metanarratives, to be incredulous of “grand histories”.

One reason that many people are “against metanarratives” is that they feel these come with a risk of being totalizing: i.e. when you try to understand how things fit together, you also tend to squeeze everything into one and the same framework, ignoring the subtleties and details of each unique and surprising part of history, and as such metanarratives can even be used as instruments of control or the legitimization of unjust power. You force your intellect upon the richness of reality, as it were. Think Marxism and its story of how history evolves (from “primitive communism”, to slave society, to feudalism, to capitalism, to communism). Consider how it has been used as a blatant instrument of oppression. Or why not stop to consider how Western mainstream history of “increasing freedom” (so-called Whig history) still to this day serves colonial and supremacist purposes against indigenous populations, the Global South, or even against the environment and “nature itself” (that last term I use only with caution). Totalizing visions can be dangerous, even evil. Granted and agreed.

But, if you think it’s better to not use a map at all since it’s certain to have inaccuracies and one day will become obsolete, go ahead, navigate the world’s oceans without one, burn all the maps you like. For my part, if I was a 17th century sailor, I’d still prefer the crude maps of the time, sea dragons and mermaids and all, over sailing out blindly or waiting around for the GPS to be invented.

Q: Sure, if you were a 17th century sailor. But let’s bring this closer to home: If I was a respected scholar, I certainly wouldn’t risk my academic credibility by making up such far-fetched lofty “theories about everything”.

HF: Of course you wouldn’t, dear Q for Questioner. It’s much safer to merely critique, isn’t it? But there’s a word for that: cowardice. Or two words: intellectual cowardice.

People are so afraid of being told they’re wrong or that they’ve made a mistake that they’ll rather spend their entire careers making microscopic additions to existing theories—or stay on the safe side of the fence and make a career out of tackling anyone who dares saying something novel, substantial, or, Zeus forbid, comprehensive.

In my opinion that’s not only gutless and boring; it’s also as dangerous as the misuse of large perspectives, since it discourages people from taking on the important task of connecting the dots. In our days, metanarratives have gone terribly out of fashion. At the very same time, people have reported epidemic levels of confusion and loss of meaning. Maybe that’s not entirely a coincidence?

Meanwhile, humanity is facing planetary-level issues of ecology, climate, security, and technology—which are all interconnected and can arguably only be resolved together. Or at least each of the issues interacts with the others. Responding to one inevitably leads to dealing with another. But we’re disallowing ourselves from asking how the problems interconnect, because that would mean we’re doing “grand histories”, right? Well, maybe it’s time we try on some new ways to tell the big stories. Metanarratives can save lives. They can save civilizations. Or, said differently, lack of metanarratives can kill off civilizations. And take ecospheres with them. It’s happened before that civilizations drive off a cliff because their people failed to see the bigger picture they were part of. It can happen again. Actually, it is happening again.

If you want to ignore the need to gain clarity in today’s world facing multiple interconnected crises, I’ll buy you a drink and we’re done. Go stick your head in the postmodern sands of relativism. Sure, you can be the noble rebel who exposes the great Hanzi Freinacht as a dilettante and a fraud. As long as you let me say what I have to say, it’s on the house.

***

Anyhow. The thing is, whether we like the idea of metanarratives or not, we all carry around some version of a crude and incomplete world map, or “universe map”, anyway. We just do it implicitly, even unconsciously.

That is, we all have some overarching narrative about “how the world works”. And every now and then we’re in situations where we need to use our implicit homegrown maps. So why not bring them out in the open, make the maps explicit, so that we together can improve upon them, and—who knows—maybe even turn those mermaids into anatomically correct sea lions.  

Metanarratives are urgently needed since the existential problems we’re facing as a civilization can only be properly viewed from the grandest and most long-term perspective possible. We’re not looking for the biggest story just to feel important (even if it would be unwise to try to suppress the all-too-human drive for existential significance). It’s very obviously the case that events across the planet affect one another, that they are, again, interconnected. To change events means to see how they connect, how they emerge together. This requires us to somehow use and relate to “the story that connects all the different stories”.

Q: And you, Hanzi Freinacht, mean to tell us how “all things interconnect”?

HF: Maybe not how “all things interconnect”, but I am certainly outlining a model for seeing many interconnections that we would clearly otherwise miss. 

So who do I think I am to even be allowed the pursuit of such a noble goal?

Well, who is anyone to take up such a task? What authority could we possibly defer to? I guess we’ll just have to make do with limited, wounded, mediocre people who pretend to be great philosophers, and then scrutinize their work.

Anybody really has the right to take a shot at it, don’t you think? Or should we just abstain from any discussion about the overall development of global civilization? What kind of humility would that be—one that silences perhaps the most important discussion we can have?

If you wish to read the full chapter it can be accessed free of charge on the Metamoderna page here.

Best wishes,

Emil Ejner Friis

A webinar on the topic of world history and the six metamemes will be held this autumn, four weekends in a row November 2–25. More details about the course can be found here.

Hanzi Freinacht is a political philosopher, historian, and sociologist, author of ‘The Listening Society’, ‘Nordic Ideology’ and ’12 Commandments’. Much of his time is spent alone in the Swiss Alps. You can follow Hanzi on Facebook, Twitter, Medium and the Metamoderna website, and you can speed up the process of new metamodern content reaching the world by making a donation to Hanzi here.

TIME:

Mon 10th June — Fri 14th June 2024, 7:00pm — 9:30pm CET

TICKET PRICE:

Standard: £180

Budget: £150

Dear you,

Metamodernism? The philosophy and culture emerging at the social singularity where hackers, hippies, and hipsters meet and co-create. Stakes rise, potentials abound, but so do risks and pitfalls of this new cultural and economic landscape. Metamodernism marries critical thinking and ethical commitment to inner work and adult development, offering a framework for seeing what’s going on: for surviving, contributing, and maybe even thriving in worlds being born.

Are you still wondering what the hype is all about, but not in the mood for slogging through dense bricks full of highbrow parlance? But do you feel that the 4-week Masterclass in Metamodernism course is too advanced? Then this week-long introduction course to metamodernism might be the right thing for you.

In a compact and to-the-point fashion, Daniel and Emil present the basic concepts you need to know to take part in this wide and complex movement. This course is for anyone interested in getting a comprehensive introduction to metamodernism. You will finish the course understanding the relevance of stage theory, know how to distinguish metamodernism from postmodernism and integral theory, and how to apply the metamodern way of thinking to your life.

The metamodern sensibility is one of sincere irony, of very serious playfulness – necessary to stay sane at the crossroads of fact and fiction. In that spirit, we invite you.

Schedule:

• Monday: What Metamodernism Is, and What It’s Not

  • The Six Different “Metamodernisms”, and why it’s important to know the difference

  • The Difference Between Postmodernism and Metamodernism (and why most people can’t tell them apart)

  • The Difference Between Metamodernism and Integral Theory (and why you should care)

• Tuesday: Stage Theories

  • Development, why it’s real (and how it’s real) and why it’s important

  • Why we should use stage theories, and why they aren’t evil

  • A very brief introduction to: Jean Piaget, Spiral Dynamics, Ken Wilber, Robert Kegan, Michael Common’s Model of Hierarchical complexity

  • How stage theories drive people crazy and actually make them evil

  • A better use of stage theories, and how not to be a jerk around them

  • Why everyone’s a closet stage theorist (often without knowing it)

• Wednesday: Hanzi Freinacht’s The Listening Society

  • Too long didn’t read? No problem, we got you covered.

  • Hipsters, Hackers, Hippies, and the Metamodern Aristocracy

  • The four dimensions of psychological developments and how it adds up to the effective value meme

• Thursday: Hanzi Freinacht’s Nordic Ideology

  • Too long didn’t read? No problem, once again we got you covered

  • The six forms of metamodern politics

  • How order, freedom, and equality evolve

• Friday: Are You Metamodern?

  • How to spot metamodernism, and where to look

  • And more importantly, how to spot a metamodernist and where to find them

  • The tricky task of telling postmodernism and metamodernism apart

  • What the metamodern mind can do that the postmodern cannot

  • The things most people misunderstand about metamodernism

  • How to not be like most people

We look forward to sharing the metamodern code with you, to contribute to your cultural capital, and to engage in the playfulness that our world so seriously needs.

Tickets can be purchased here: https://dandelion.events/e/a-dramatic-introduction-to-metamodernism

Your hosts:

Daniel Görtz (b. 1983) has a Ph.D. in Sociology and has previously taught at the University of Lund in Sweden (social psychology, research methodology, criminology). During his conventional career, he was a police ethnographer who rode police cars all through the night and discussed matters of work, life, and racial profiling with open-hearted officers. Since those days, Daniel has moved into a chalet (with a Jacuzzi) in the Alps to write and philosophize alone, been part of the Berlin metamodernist scene, and worked as an in-house tech philosopher.

He remains a renegade scholar who lives and breathes ideas, research, teaching, and learning at the hinterlands of our times.

Emil Ejner Friis (b. 1981) is a theory artist and a teacher of metamodernism, he is a co-founder of Metamoderna and one of the writers behind Hanzi Freinacht. He has spent the last ten years trying to figure out how to create a listening society, a kinder and more developed society that deeply cares for the happiness and emotional needs of every citizen.

He has tried and failed at creating a metamodern political party, he has tried and failed at creating a metamodern IT company, and he has just plainly failed at ever finishing his not-so-metamodern university studies by being drawn to all kinds of adventures to try and save the world instead. For the past year, he’s been living on a remote tropical island where he has been swimming with dogs.

When he’s not writing and theorizing, he’s conspiring with other metamodernly inclined hackers, hipsters, and hippies to outcompete modern society. To pay the rent he sells words, all the best words.

Emil is a skilled and experienced speaker with a reputation of being entertaining and good at making complex ideas easier to digest.

Last year’s Metamodern Masterclass was a great pleasure to design and organize. My own expectations were easily surpassed. All tickets sold out, reviews were positive, students learned advanced metamodern theory, teachers developed their skills and perspectives, and new networks were formed, new alliances forged, new horizons explored. The crowd gathered was a delightfully balanced representation of the Hacker, Hippies, Hipsters, and Hermatics, as the theories themselves would predict.

This year’s course will be held in July 1st – 26th. If you want 2024 to be the summer of new perspectives, of metamodernism, by all means read on and find out more about the course content and how to sign up.

This masterclass will be an intense experience. It is by far the most advanced offered thus far, corresponding to a university graduate-level course. The masterclass is specifically designed for those wanting to ground their lives and livelihoods in metamodern theory, practice, values, and networks.

If you want to acquire the deepest understanding about metamodernism available, and then use that as a grounding for your life (professionally, personally, politically) this is the course for you. It won’t be easy, but it is doable, and it is – we believe – what the world needs more people to dare to try.

HOW IT WORKS

The course runs for 2½h/day of presentations and workshops (19:00 – 21:30 CEST), plus (optional) daily course work of about 1h: (reading, reflection, preparation, application, etc.), Monday-Friday for three weeks. If you miss the live sessions, you can watch recordings. To those who are interested, there will be hangout sessions at the end of each class.

It is recommended that you are familiar with metamodernism beforehand (for instance, having read Hanzi Freinacht’s books) and that you commit significant time, concentration, and effort in order to benefit from the course.

The course chiefly includes new and hitherto unpublished content and discussions – and includes thorough sneak-peeks on coming Hanzi books. The course material (articles, etc.) for each day is sent out weekly during the course. This is included in the masterclass.

After the 3-week masterclass itself, there is a 1-week PRACTICE WORKSHOP. Here we will work together to get every participant into the “game of life” faced by metamodern-inclined people who wish to make it in the world, to succeed, to contribute, to find their tribes, and to manage their roles within mainstream society.

The masterclass is followed up with one personal call with the tutors, wherein feedback is offered for the further development of learning, perspective, and possible next steps. This is instead of a formal examination: you create something within your own field and the tutors offer feedback from the perspective of what has been discussed during the course.

Additionally, the masterclass offers great opportunities for networking and co-creating projects with the other participants.

We warmly look forward to taking this journey with you. May we together bring the metamodern network to life in the real world, in your life, and beyond.

MASTERCLASS schedule:

WEEK 1: FULLER UNDERSTANDING OF METAMODERNISM (FROM THE UPCOMING HANZI FREINACHT BOOKS)

• Monday: The Six Metamemes and The General Principle of “Skewed” Development

• Tuesday: The Hidden Rhythm of History (and how to make world history your dance floor)

• Wednesday: The Golden “Art-Always-Comes-First” Principle

• Thursday: Outcompeting Capitalism

• Friday: The New Class Analysis (and where you fit in)

WEEK 2: DEEP DIVES

• Monday: How to Recognize Metamodern Culture in Daily Life

• Tuesday: The Both-Ands of Metamodernism

• Wednesday: -=[ participatory symposium ]=-

• Thursday: The Destruction of Postmodernism by AI

• Friday: The Depth Psychology of Aesthetics

WEEK 3: NEW HORIZONS

• Monday: Attractor Points, Non-Linear Development, and the Secret Art of Seeing Around Corners

• Tuesday: The Foundations of Metamodern Economics

• Wednesday: The Core Principles of Metamodern Ethics and Justice

• Thursday: Epistemic Corruption and Sensemaking

• Friday: The Listening Society and How to Get There (before it’s too late)

— END OF COURSE —

PRACTICE WORKSHOP: LIVING AND THRIVING AS A METAMODERNIST

• Monday: Don’ts and Dos in Metamodern Life

• Tuesday: Five Metamodern Career Paths (and how to pursue them)

• Wednesday: Beating the New Enemy: Postmodern Sklavenmoral

• Thursday: Staying Sane in a World on the Brink of Madness

• Friday: Kill your Guru, Find your Meta-team

Pricing

The pricing is set to correspond to the lower end of what a university masters course of similar length would cost.

Abundant: £950
Standard: £900
Low income: £800 (limited to 10 places)

If you have questions and/or if you want to hear more about the course before you commit you are welcome to send an email to emil@metamoderna.org (with a short presentation of yourself) and schedule a video call with Daniel or Emil.

Tickets can be purchased here: https://dandelion.events/e/the-metamodern-academy

Your hosts

Daniel Görtz (b. 1983) has a Ph.D. in Sociology and has previously taught at the University of Lund in Sweden (social psychology, research methodology, criminology). During his conventional career, he was a police ethnographer who rode police cars all through the night and discussed matters of work, life, and racial profiling with open-hearted officers. Since those days, Daniel has moved into a chalet (with a Jacuzzi) in the Alps to write and philosophize alone, been part of the Berlin metamodernist scene, and worked as an in-house tech philosopher.

He remains a renegade scholar who lives and breathes ideas, research, teaching, and learning at the hinterlands of our times.

Emil Ejner Friis (b. 1981) is a theory artist and a teacher of metamodernism, he is a co-founder of Metamoderna and one of the writers behind Hanzi Freinacht. He has spent the last ten years trying to figure out how to create a listening society, a kinder and more developed society that deeply cares for the happiness and emotional needs of every citizen.

He has tried and failed at creating a metamodern political party, he has tried and failed at creating a metamodern IT company, and he has just plainly failed at ever finishing his not-so-metamodern university studies by being drawn to all kinds of adventures to try and save the world instead. For the past year, he’s been living on a remote tropical island where he has been swimming with dogs.

When he’s not writing and theorizing, he’s conspiring with other metamodernly inclined hackers, hipsters, and hippies to outcompete modern society. To pay the rent he sells words, all the best words.

Emil is a skilled and experienced speaker with a reputation of being entertaining and good at making complex ideas easier to digest.

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