The following is a rough transcript which has not been revised by The Jim Rutt Show or Emil Ejner Friis. Please check with us before using any quotations from this transcript. Thank you.
Jim: Today’s guest is Emil Ejner Friis. Emil’s a thinker, a writer and a teacher of metamodernism. And he’s one of the two folks behind Hanzi Freinacht, as well as being a co-founder of Metamoderna. For the past decade, he’s been wrestling with one big question: How do we build a listening society – in plain terms, a society that actually gives a damn about people’s well-being, not just their economic output. Welcome.
Emil: Thank you, Jim. Pleasure to be here.
Jim: Yeah, looking forward to having a nice little chat. We’ve had Emil’s writing partner, Daniel Görtz on – I went and looked it up – four times over the years.
Emil: Wow, four times already. Okay.
Jim: In those ones he was pretending to be Hanzi Freinacht, the cranky German philosopher who lives on the top of a mountain in Switzerland or something. And of course sometimes he’d break character, it’d be quite humorous. But anyway, for those who want to look up previous instances of these similar ideas: Episode 36, we talked about metamodernism in general; Episode 53, Nordic Ideology, one of the books; Episode 82, building a metamodern future; and Episode 173 about a self-help book kind of modeled on Jordan Peterson’s 12-step program or some fucking thing which had its sort of sincere irony about it and we had a good time chatting about it. Today we’re going to talk more generally without as much structure, but before we do, just for the audience’s sake, because not everybody listens to every episode – I don’t know what else they waste their time on – but not everybody listens to every episode of The Jim Rutt Show. So if you could give us a three-minute introduction to your and Daniel’s branch of… I think the closest label is political metamodernism.
Emil: Yeah. Well, the short answer is that metamodernism is what comes after postmodernism. Right. Of course that requires a longer explanation if you are not familiar with this century-old or like half-century-old discussion on modernity and postmodernity. But basically, we are looking for political answers that go beyond this postmodern vacuum, this woke vacuum that we are in. And we believe that the established progressives, they have failed to include common folks, they have failed to include multiple perspectives.
And also they have failed at actually addressing real stuff that matters. It’s often about, you know, doing language policing and sitting there talking about pronouns for eternities and not really addressing the real struggles of common folks. And what we’re interested in are not only the material challenges of people, but the inner challenges. Because truth be told, yes, a lot of people are having a hard time in Western countries like US or Scandinavia, but where I come from, mostly like 90% of our problems are of a psychosocial nature. People have anxiety, they’re depressed, they feel alienated. It’s not because they have too little money. And I know people are struggling a lot, but in America people are not exactly walking around barefoot. So it’s the inner dimensions and that is what we would like to address.
And that’s what we feel that the established progressives have failed. And that’s basically what our first book, The Listening Society, is about. And in Nordic Ideology, we talk about the six new forms of politics that we would like to introduce. Now that’s discussion. And I think that Daniel, he has already been on the podcast introducing that. But again, we want to move beyond this, what we call woke postmodern vacuum that we are in.
We don’t want to go back to like reactionary conservatism, but we want to include the perspectives of common traditional folks. We want to address their issues. So what we are basically looking for is like a new progressiveness.
Jim: Cool. I will have to insert my usual pushback, which I did with Daniel every time I had him on, which is I personally don’t believe postmodernism was ever actually a civilization. I like to say I never met a postmodern farmer or plumber. And it was, I consider postmodernism a side critique of modernism. And some of the critique was quite useful.
For instance, be skeptical about reified grand narratives. Very good advice. As it turns out, many people have been fooled many times by social grand narratives. On the other hand, later day postmodernism, the postmodern critique that especially came out of progressive universities since maybe the late ’80s is just like crazy horseshit. Reality isn’t real. All perspectives are equal. All woo-woo. The witch doctor is just as good as Johns Hopkins if you have cancer – literally insane stuff. And unfortunately, a lot of young people, a lot of smart young people fell into this, but I don’t believe it ever reached the status of being a civilization. I think we’re still in modernism. We’re in the late, late decadent stages of modernism with postmodernism off to the side as both a helpful critique in some ways and an unhelpful corruption in other ways. But nonetheless, I do agree with you that we’re about to take the next great step into something new.
And metamodernism seems like a pretty reasonable next step. Or as we would say in Game B talk, a good attractor. We think of Game A as the status quo, whatever you want to call it. Late stage, hyper-financialized modernism is as good as any, and we predict that that game is ending soon and it’s going somewhere else. The problem is that many of the obvious alternatives are not good. We’re seeing in triplets here: neo-fascism, the Chinese model – I mean, that’s pure fascism. We have a checklist of any book on fascism, Chinese, every single item on the list. Neo-feudalism, which now people are calling techno-feudalism. If Peter Thiel and friends aren’t up to that, I don’t know what they’re up to. And then of course, we’ve always had the threat of neo-Dark Ages theocracy, and we have that in the United States too now with the emergence of the Christian nationalists. And of course we have the Islamicist challenge in many places in the world. Not to say Islamic, but Islamicist, which is a distinction.
So these are interesting times, liminal times, as many of us talk about. And you did mention that some of this thinking is also in reaction, progressive reaction against nutty postmodernism, wokery, et cetera. But what’s the risk? Tell us, what is the risk if we recoil from bad progressivism and go the other way?
Emil: I would first like to add that when we are talking about postmodernism or metamodernism, we actually talk about like six different things. There’s a difference between the postmodern society that we’re in now and postmodern philosophy. Because if we take Donald Trump, obviously he is not subscribing to woke postmodern values, but he is an expression of a postmodern society – post-truth, relativism. And also the way in which he uses the media, it’s all surface. He’s not a good businessman.
Jim: I often say that Trump is our first postmodern president.
Emil: He is.
Jim: People go, what?
Emil: Because he plays the media game very, very well. Now, when it comes to postmodern philosophy, like the post-structuralists, we have Foucault and Derrida and these are like very advanced thinkers. And of course it’s like a bit of a parody to just say “Oh, it’s just about relativism.” No, these are like very important contributions to philosophy that metamodernism necessarily needs to build on. We don’t have this objective vantage point like the eye of God that the modernist thinks, you know, like the scientific objectivity.
Jim: No, it’s an illusion because it all depends on the subjective observer and so on. So the postmodern philosophers have made very important contributions. Well, you can see we have the postmodern philosophers and then we have a postmodern or late modern society, late capitalistic society that is all about surface, that is all about images that is hyper-real, to use that term. Then we have postmodern social movements. And there’s a difference between the civil rights movement – that’s like a modern movement, hey, like, dude, equal rights, we the people. And then the postmodern variant that looks at, hey, we have all these hidden discourses that even though we nominally live in equal society, in reality it’s not real because we have structural racism and the discourses are creating oppressions and so on.
So we need to be careful about what we’re calling something postmodern, metamodern, what we are talking about. Now, you are absolutely right that postmodernism or the postmodern – we talk about the value meme – it feels more like just a reaction against modernity, but it doesn’t have anything to offer. It’s like an antithesis. And that’s absolutely right, because postmodernism cannot replace modern society. All these righteous rebels out there who are raging against capitalism and racism and so on, they have morality on their side, but they have nothing to replace it with. And it is actually similar to Christianity and all the other Axial Age religions because in the same way that we have these righteous rebels today that are rebelling against capitalistic industrial society, but they have nothing to replace it with, we’re still going to have an industrial capitalistic economy.
It’s just going to be, you know, like vegan hamburgers in recycled bags sold to you by an esteemed minority person. But it’s still going to be like Starbucks and McDonald’s. The wrapping is going to be like a sugar coat around the same thing. We see with the Axial religions that were raging against the oppression and the injustices of agricultural civilization in the middle of the first century BCE. We had all the Jewish prophets, we had the philosophers in Greece, we had Confucius and so on, and later, the Greek philosophy and Hebrew religion would fuse into Christianity. That was the righteous rebels of that age. But they never managed to replace agricultural civilization with a firm monopoly on violence and an agricultural religion.
It was only when the first new hard meme emerged, namely modernity, that they could make away with the old feudal order. Similarly, all these very kind and well-meaning postmodern activists and righteous rebels that we have today, they can rage against the environmental destruction and capitalistic society and so on, and they can make us progress morally, but they cannot replace the foundational engine of society. And it is my claim that we will need to progress to the next stage, namely metamodernism, before we can finally out-compete capitalism.
Jim: Very similar to the Game B hypothesis that we have to literally out-compete late-stage financialized capitalism. We can’t just sit there and wring our handkerchiefs or sit in mud huts and weave hammocks or something. Just not realistic. What do you guys call it? Game denial, I think.
Emil: Right, exactly. And that is so embedded into the postmodern or the woke rebellion. They deny that there are social games. Not everyone can have everything. And if you don’t address the basic fact that we live in a world with limited resources and people have interests and we cannot just all be friends and sit down and share everything equally. Unless you learn what the actual social rules are, you cannot change them.
And then you are just preaching – well, empty preaching. And many of the things like anti-capitalistic critiques, woke critique that we hear – we’ve heard that for a century. And it’s not capable of changing the foundational engine of our society. Because they think that “oh, we just need to do away with capitalism.” But okay, what are the social mechanisms then? What are the changed game rules to coordinate our economic relationships? And there are no real, I would say, substantial answers to that question.
Jim: Yeah. One of the things I like about metamodernism as a system is it emphasizes there’s two parts that have to go together. One is personal change, and then the other is institutional change. And the two have to kind of work like this.
Emil: Exactly.
Jim: If you have people, if you have people that are down here, they can’t jump to institutions up here. It’s just not going to work. But if we can improve our institutions, as we improve our people, we can then improve our institutions in a kind of a spiral dynamic going on.
Emil: Exactly. Because you can have all the best institutions in the world – they’re just not going to work if the majority of the population subscribes to, like, a Viking warrior ethos or something like that. Take Afghanistan, for example. And if people remain solidly gravitating towards modern enlightenment values and are super allergic towards everything post-postmodern, well, we will not be able to move beyond the current regime.
It’s also like, think about it, you know, if your population consisted of zombies, you can have all the best institutions in the world, the best rules and frameworks and so on, but if your population just wants to eat each other’s brains, like, what are you going to do?
Jim: Well, you’re going to have a zombie society.
Emil: Yeah. So we need personal development. We need people to get over their trauma and all their psychological bullshit. People need to know themselves better. But people also need to feel better, because it’s very difficult to do progressive politics if people are just completely stressed out and anxious and full of vengeance. And we can see that with our current leadership in the United States – this is the result of a very traumatized population, and we have some very traumatized people in charge. You know, it’s clear that if we take Trump and Musk, these are little boys who had not the best upbringing.
You know, Musk was bullied as a kid. Trump has always been outside because he’s a bit of a buffoon. And then suddenly these buffoons, they find out that our emotional state resonates with a large part of the population who also feel outside, who also feel they haven’t been listened to, who feel angry. We also know when we feel angry, we get stupid, we regress back, and we just want to have revenge. And therefore we see now, yeah, let’s just kick the Canadians and the Danes. Let’s just get back at all these liberals and Europeans and public and federal employees and everyone.
Jim: Yeah.
Emil: Just like give it to them, you know, and it becomes very, very regressive. And again, it’s because people’s emotional states haven’t been… as a society, we’ve let these people down. Like what the hell happened when suddenly complete societies in Michigan and Ohio just lose their jobs, their livelihood and no one is there for them? They just see their societies dwindle away. It’s heartbreaking to see what has happened in the United States in the last 30 years and it’s like no fucking surprise that people are going to kick back with a vengeance.
Jim: Yeah, absolutely. I mean it’s the implications of late-stage financialized capitalism. And I give the example that, you know, I live pretty close to North Carolina, which used to be a major clothing and textile region, and they made lots and lots of T-shirts there, amongst other things. But when it became 5 cents cheaper to make them in Bangladesh than it was in North Carolina, these large factories were just immediately closed and whole towns were basically thrown into despair for 5 cents. And there is no mechanism to omni considerate – is it worth paying 5 cents more for our T-shirts to keep these towns alive and vibrant?
Because there’s no mechanism in our society to do that. It’s all about money on money return in a very short term, very gamified fashion. And that inner cycle is what is essentially allowing all this to happen. I don’t think there’s any cabal saying, “Oh, let’s fuck over the working man,” but rather there’s a cabal that says let’s let money on money return late-stage financialized capitalism do its thing, whatever it is. And that’s the huge mistake. And to your point about people being pissed off, I live in a community deep in the Appalachian mountains where my electoral precinct voted 83% for Trump.
Emil: Wow.
Jim: In 2020. I haven’t looked at numbers for 2024, probably the same, maybe even higher. And these are good people, these are solid people. And our area, while not super affluent, isn’t really super poor either. We’ve never had any mining or any factories at all. It’s mostly farming and logging and people commute for jobs over in Shenandoah Valley about an hour away. But they are angry. But above all else, they feel grossly disrespected by the coastal blues, as I call them.
Emil: Well, they are, you know, because they’re just a chunk of hillbillies to them.
Jim: Yeah. And I’m one of these oddballs, you know, I spent a lot of time with coastal blues both in person and virtually. And I live deep in the most rural county east of the Mississippi River. 2,200 people in the whole county, more than a thousand square kilometers and 2,200 people.
Emil: Working class Americans have not had anyone to vote for for the last 40 years. It’s just a simple fact.
Jim: The Republicans put up somebody like Mitt Romney, you know, an investment banker and a management consultant.
Emil: What the hell, you have the choice between like two right-wing parties. Like from a European perspective, you have the choice between two right-wing parties that don’t give a damn about working class people. And you know what we see? Like Detroit would never have been allowed in Europe. You don’t see something like Detroit. Yes, when stuff can be produced cheaper in other countries, we shut down the factories, but there’s huge concern like “Okay, what are we going to do now? What are we going to do with…” How are we going to… people like politicians will care. Because we don’t believe in this cowboy capitalism that just doesn’t give a damn about people and politicians. Society will try – okay, how can we transition into higher-end goods? Because maybe we cannot… it’s just cheaper to make T-shirts in Bangladesh. But maybe we could do something else.
Emil: And also we see like with the auto industry – if you take Michigan, Pennsylvania and Ohio, these are perfect places to transition into renewable energies, windmills and solar and much of the advanced high-end stuff that we need to produce. But again you cannot just let the market choose.
Jim: Yeah, because the market doesn’t care.
Emil: It doesn’t care.
Jim: It doesn’t care about human wellbeing at all. All it cares about is replication of itself with a positive return. That’s all it cares about. And we’ve allowed that because Europeans would…
Emil: Never allow something like “now we’re just going to shut down all the factories,” you know. Yes, protectionism is problematic to some degree. But again if we look at especially the French model now – we’ve made fun of them, they have protected their industries. But now we’ve just seen this world – okay, the French were right. They can produce everything. They have protected their industries. They’ve been slightly less efficient than the Germans, than the Japanese, but they just have a full industrial economy and they don’t have a Detroit.
Jim: And the other interesting thing about the French, I just happened to see a report about this today. Unlike the UK in particular, and to some degree the Germans and certainly the Japanese, the French are almost entirely unreliant upon American weaponry for their army. Almost zero. And so Trump being this unreliable ally doesn’t bother the French at all. They got their own nuclear weapons, their own submarines, their own airplanes. You know, it’s smart and they’re a little bit poor.
Emil: Yeah, de Gaulle was right. Like back in the ’50s, when they were building up the NATO alliance, and the Germans and the British and everyone else just said “okay, let’s bandwagon with Uncle Sam.” And de Gaulle was like, “no, we’re gonna do our own thing.” And now, people in Denmark, my home country, they’re pulling their hair because we’ve just bought these F-35 fighter planes.
And like, 10 years ago, there was a choice – should we buy the F-35s or the cheaper Swedish ones? And with the Swedes, if we had bought their fighter planes, we’d get more bang for the buck. But they chose to buy the American ones because these are our allies, our friends, and we would like to be in good standing with them. Now they say, well, if Trump wanted to, he could just turn them off.
Jim: It turned out that’s not probably true.
Emil: The United States could technically just stop the software updates and then they would be rendered…
Jim: And then the spare parts also, within a few weeks, you’d run out of…
Emil: Parts, I don’t know how many exactly. So they’re like, why did we? And also with Starlink now – Elon Musk, he can just turn off the Internet for the Ukrainian army. And then there was a Polish foreign minister who says, “hey, we are actually paying for that.” And Elon Musk’s reply was, “shut up, little man. Then you’re not paying enough.”
Have you any idea how destructive that is? Because are the Europeans just going to roll over? No, of course not. They’re going to look for alternatives. So what we see now is that European armaments, weapon stocks are just going through the roof. Because obviously the Europeans are going to buy European now. Because if madmen in Washington just sabotage their things for them – and of course this is going to harm the United States tremendously. Because yeah, the United States has exported a lot of armaments to the Europeans, and we’ve been happy about it. But what we’re seeing right now is that it’s the death of the Western alliance. It’s gone.
Jim: At least it’s going to fundamentally change. And interestingly, I put out a little mini essay recently where I actually said it is kind of ludicrous that the Europeans can’t defend themselves. At the present time, their only plausible military adversary is Russia – population 143 million, GDP 2 billion less than Spain’s. And their equipment’s been all… And of course, they had this big military reputation.
They can’t even beat Ukraine, who was ranked 22nd in military strength. It would probably be an even fight – Russia against Poland. And why the hell can’t the Europeans just step up and defend themselves? They can easily. And what about nuclear deterrence? Between the UK and France, they have 500 nuclear weapons and they can make plenty more if they wanted to. So there’s plenty of nuclear. No, Russia’s gonna fuck with 500 nukes aimed at their face.
Emil: Yeah, exactly.
Jim: There’s really absolutely no reason that the Europeans should be dependent on the US for all these things.
Emil: And we also see…
Jim: But it will take a while to untangle it. So if I were both Europe and the US, what I would do is negotiate a separation. Not a full separation, a partial separation. Along these lines – 10 years for Europe to gradually transition away from any reliance on US logistics, signaling, GPS, anything else, but keep the alliance. So just like in World War I and World War II, when things went wrong in Europe, America was there to come and bail their asses out. So if somehow some new power arises – it’s not Russia, but suppose Russia merged with China or something – maybe then having this American backstop who would come to your rescue but wouldn’t necessarily have troops in your countries.
It’s probably the right way to be. We’re still allied with each other, but we’re not interwoven the way we are today. No need for it anymore.
Emil: No. Well, in the current moment, the Europeans don’t trust the Americans and they should. You need to keep in mind that your president is threatening my country with war.
Jim: Yep. Take Greenland.
Emil: It is not a joke. The Europeans have, I think that the Europeans have – they have already said goodbye to United. They don’t trust that Trump will bail Europe out if Russia attacks the Baltics or Finland or Poland, something like that. We will need to do it on our own.
That’s also why they have thrown like a trillion, close to a trillion, into defense spending. But the Europeans right now, we have said Europe is of course in shock what has just happened and we need to plug the gaps. But the way we see it is that the United States has been taken over by like fascist Russian-friendly regime and they have switched sides.
Jim: It’s probably not quite 100% true.
Emil: In the middle of a war. And people are at one hand, people are freaking out. On the other, I have never felt such resoluteness. People who have never had a patriotic bone in their body are suddenly becoming patriotic about Europe. When Elon Musk insults a Polish foreign minister, you know, he enraged 40 million people in Poland and he mildly pisses off the rest of Europe. And because we know that Trump and Musk, they don’t respect us, they don’t respect anybody.
Jim: I mean famously Canada, always America’s closest friend, they’re now pissed off and reunified. And in fact, it looked like the Liberal government was going to get voted out in a landslide. But all this Trump stuff has made it a close race again between the Tories and the Liberals. And I have lots of Canadian friends. I used to own property in Canada, been on boards of two companies in Canada, worked for a major Canadian company for many years. Canadians are really nice people, really friendly with the United States. But they’re pissed off too, right?
For good reason. Trump is a non-reliable ally. But anyway, we know “Orange man bad,” right? The Great Cheeto as I like to call him. But let’s talk about something you touched on earlier, which is, and which I touched on, we’ll kind of pull these two together – my nice people here in the mountains of Virginia, 83% for Trump. And part of it’s on solid issues, but a lot of it’s on disrespect and reaction against kind of crazy ideas from the left, not necessarily all that far left. Things like defund the police, open the borders, have biological males playing in girls’ sports leagues.
A long list of “America is the worst country in the history of the world,” right? Okay, let’s go down a long list of messed up stuff in world history. We’re not even close to the top of the list. Call it oikophobia, the hatred of the homeland. These are the things that people react against quite a bit more frankly than the issues. This ludicrous insanity of the woke left. And the problem, the big problem is there is no center in the United States anymore.
At least no viable center – I mean actually I do believe there is a majority who’s in the center. In fact, I was involved with the No Labels movement that attempted to put a third presidential candidate out into the center. But it failed for a bunch of technical reasons and other reasons.
Emil: Okay. Yeah, because I would be very interested in… Because like from a European point of view, I think like many Europeans, it’s kind of like the Americans are so extreme that it’s like this battle between chicks with dicks versus Jesus with guns, you know.
Jim: Exactly, exactly. And it’s true.
Emil: The whole trans thing, you know, which I believe is a minor issue. And of course like people who don’t feel they identify with their gender – okay, they should have the help they need and so on and so forth. But it’s like a minor issue. But that was spun so beautifully by – or so well, by the right. That I actually suspect that that was what won the election because when common people just get whoa – so we have these radical progressives who want to cut off our boys’ wieners? Like no, we’re gonna vote for the other guy.
Jim: Exactly. And you know, as you said, there is a small percentage of people, about one in a thousand, maybe less, who actually do suffer from gender body dysphoria. They really do feel they’re in the wrong gender body. But it’s very rare and those people deserve lots of consideration and lots of respect and everything we can do to support them. But unfortunately there’s become what I call Internet or memetic trans, where a 13-year-old girl decides – she would have been a tomboy two or three years back 20 years ago, but now she’s heard this woke ideology and decided “oh, I need to get my blah blah cut off and I need to be on puberty blockers” and high probability that she’ll either be a lesbian when she grows up or she’ll grow out of it. And that’s what people object to.
Jim: Where particularly, and I described, there’s medical trans on one side, which is a real thing, kind of like Type 1 diabetes. That level of severity. And then we have this Internet trans, which I compare to anorexia in the United States, particularly in upper-middle-class suburbs. Lots of younger women stop eating under social pressure about body image and all this. Some of them die. In fact, a very good friend of mine, a business partner, both of his daughters – well, one of them died and the other was very sick for a long time from anorexia, which is clearly… You go to sub-Saharan Africa, you’re not gonna run into any anorexic teenage girls. It’s a psychological illness of affluence. And this Internet trans is the same thing.
And the fact that the woke left is so insane about it… Think about somebody like J.K. Rowling, the person that wrote the Harry Potter books – very sensible, very kind person on the issue. The woke trans people, they want to literally string her up. And so people do strongly react against that stuff. Or in American higher education, until the Supreme Court recently ruled it out, there was rampant racial discrimination on admittance with large numbers of bonus points given to various favored groups, clearly in violation of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, as well as the spirit of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. 75% of people of every racial group, including a majority of Black people, oppose that. And yet the woke left has been in favor of that forever.
So there’s lots of reasons why 83% of people where I live unfortunately chose to vote for Trump because they feel like not only are their economic interests not being taken care of, but their cultural and value and spiritual ideas have been denigrated and actually positioned as horrifying by the farther left.
Emil: I would actually argue that a lot of the stuff that is bothering people is something you experience in the media and online, but it doesn’t affect your everyday life. It is no secret that the recent elections have been determined by social media. Donald Trump is a social media phenomenon. And also many of the issues that are enraging people because they are getting access to that via social media. Like imagine a world without social media.
The whole trans stuff wouldn’t be visible to people. I remember what it was like before, like 20, 25 years ago. And yes, we had like… okay, some, you learned that some people, they feel that they were born in the wrong body and then okay, they need to have surgery and then we should be nice to them. And it was like a non-issue in a way. Like people are curious – okay, that’s interesting.
But I remember like TV programs, how the trans issue was addressed back in progressive Denmark in the ’90s. And it didn’t enrage people – just like, “Hey, you know, I’m a man, I like to wear dresses, okay?” And the consensus was that of course, if a man likes to wear dresses, he should be allowed to do that because we are like a liberal, free country. But the way that social media has spun the issue and enraged people, and then suddenly people are seeing like blue-haired trans drag queens attacking there… it’s not real.
Jim: Yeah, it’s not real. And I think that something that we really need to address, something that’s destroying our democracy, is these Internet platform monopolies. The algorithms are particularly designed to elicit as strong emotional responses as possible. And anger is one of the strongest emotions. And we are just feeding, feeding into that. And that’s where we get this gigantic battle between like Jesus with guns and chicks with dicks, you know – like, come on, guys. Because that’s like the image you get that Americans are gun nuts and super racist and driving around in big monster trucks, and then you have these progressives that are all about… And just like, it’s not real.
Jim: Well, there’s of course, like anything else, most stereotypes have some truth to them. I’m a gun nut. I proudly confess to owning far more guns than I need. And I would say where I live, every single household has at least one gun and many much more than that. Do not break into any houses around here, people. You will be dead right. And there are lots of big trucks around. So there is some truth to the stereotypes.
Emil: Yes, but social media exaggerates and also…
Jim: Exactly. And I’m going to lay something out here. I’d love to get your reaction as a professional thinker about these things. This is the first time I put this idea out in public. This actually came to me from my very good friend Peter Wang, who we have regular chats about various things. One of the things I’ve been using lately is the phrase “the intersubjective verification of the inter-objective,” meaning how we know from philosophy that we don’t actually perceive reality directly. We have perceptions, we have probes, we have experiments, we have instruments.
And we talk to each other about what we think we know about reality. And that intersubjective, the conversation, the challenges, etc. provide a unified, socially constructed model of reality which is never quite perfect, but it’s always getting better. As long as it’s grounded in the inter-objective – the things that we can both measure independently and come up with fairly similar results. Anyway, Peter made the amazing… We were talking about, well, why isn’t this working in social media and online more broadly?
Not just social media, but in email lists and in sort of crackpot private forums and things of that sort, which is that he intuited that online is the perfect medium for intersubjectivity to grow that’s not grounded in inter-objectivity. Right. So we’re just talking about what everybody else thinks. And I go, whoa, this is one of the biggest ideas I’ve heard in a long while. Think about crazed woke, think about crazed neo-Nazi Christian nationalists. Most of the things they say – were vaccine deniers or flat Earthers or the moon landing was faked, all these QAnon – it’s all ungrounded in reality.
And so in retrospect, of course, but I’d never heard it phrased that way. And it’s really changed how I look at these systems and it’s, you know, yes, it’s the algorithms, yes it’s advertising, yes it’s this and yes it’s that. But I think it’s even deeper than that, that there’s something fundamentally about the online world that is like a petri dish for growing intersubjectivity without inter-objectivity.
Emil: Well, what we are seeing is that it is a complete collapse of the reference system.
Jim: Yeah, I think that’s the same thing.
Emil: Yeah, same idea with postmodernism. We should be critical towards all authorities, and it has correctly criticized this illusion of a perfect observer and all that. But as society becomes more and more critical, as our standards and expectations increase and we become more critical towards all authorities, suddenly the reference shifts. We trust the sciences, we don’t trust our politicians, we don’t trust the media. And then suddenly everything is just – we enter this post-truth where anyone can become an authority. And also on the Internet, any crackpot can go online. In many ways, I compare the Internet to the printing press – amazing invention that enabled the scientific revolution. The Enlightenment would of course not have been possible without the printing press. Amazing invention that we often celebrate. But we shouldn’t forget that the printing press caused 150 years of religious warfare and witch burnings.
And it’s the same we see now with this revolution in our information technology. We’re not ready for it – our institutions are not ready for it. We as human beings, our minds are not ready for it either. What happened is that we go absolutely bonkers. Because our brains cannot handle the information, our institutions cannot manage all this information. What we see now is basically a rerun of what happened in the 1500s and 1600s. And I’m afraid that when we just – we have had these very simple technology, social media that you can share text and pictures and sound with everyone. Well, imagine what’s going to happen when you put AI into the mix. I’m not afraid of Terminators taking over. I’m afraid of these technologies are just going to turn us completely fucking mad.
Jim: They seem to be doing it at an accelerating rate because as you know, I follow the AI industry pretty closely. And about two weeks ago I finally realized I can no longer keep up because we’re here at this place in the elbow where the exponential just gets really, really steep. And at the same time it certainly feels both in the US and you look at Europe as well and around the world that sense-making is just shredding. Right. We’re seeing the AfD as the second biggest party in Germany, that’s not a pretty thing. We’re seeing Le Pen possibly contending for the presidency. In Italy we have a formerly neo-fascist party. They’re not neo-fascists anymore, but they’re pretty far right.
Emil: And I would actually say that, okay, yes, this is serious, this can be dangerous. But I come from a country, we’ve been through this 20 years ago. Yeah, we also had the rise of the far right and they rose to – at their top they were like a quarter of the population. What happened in Denmark was they were integrated into the political system. And then, okay, yes, you don’t like immigrants, it’s fine. Maybe you actually have a point. We’re taking in too many immigrants.
Jim: But let’s sit down and we need to make decisions about hospitals and schools and roads and so on. And what we have seen is that by taking on actual responsibilities, these populists have become kind of toothless. And now they are around 12% of the population. But if we look at a typical Western population, we just have to accept that around 20 to 25% of the population, they subscribe to these far-right populist ideas. But many of the mayors have a point that, you know, well, we don’t like there’s too much immigration and so on and so forth and what we have seen in Denmark. Okay, fair, you have a point. Let’s restrict immigration, but still make it somewhat humane.
And we see the same development in all European countries. You need to think that in Europe we have a multi-party system which is relatively stabilizing. Like if Trump had been in Europe, he would have had a party with 20, 25% of population and then he would need to form an alliance with the traditional conservatives and you know, it wouldn’t be this extreme swing from one extreme to the other.
Jim: Exactly. We’ve talked about that on the show before. That American institutions, Republicans have a whole bunch of forces that essentially force a two-party system and that is not very stable. I say the exact same thing. I’ve estimated that Trump’s support somewhere between 22 and 27%. No more than 27, but it’s enough to dominate the Republican primaries. And with our particular institutional structure, with first past the post voting for the legislature, with the electoral college, etc., with winner take all on a state basis, pretty much guarantees two parties.
So 25% Trumpians is enough to dominate a party. And then they, like every American party, they’re a coalition. There’s far right, there’s religious right, there’s business right, there’s country club right. And there’s people who hate woke. And you add them up and it turns out it’s 51% of the populace.
Emil: But it’s very un-American, isn’t it? Like in America you go into an American store, you have like 50 different boxes of cereals. Americans, they love choice. That’s a European. You just say, wow, you have like, then you have like a billion TV channels. And then you have like two parties to choose from. I think the Americans would be happier if they could have different flavors, if they could have different political parties. And what I see happening now is like the last spasms of this old system. And the silver lining to Trump’s landslide victory, it wasn’t a landslide.
Jim: It was, he won by five points. It wasn’t really a landslide. That’s what he tries to tell people.
Emil: Like he got like two and a half million more votes. Like I think Kamala Harris was 72 and he got… anyway. But what we see happening, that’s a silver lining to this that, all right, first, Trump, he destroyed the… United States has for decades been more akin to an aristocracy than a democracy. And Trump is partly a reaction against that. Again, yes, he’s a billionaire from New York. But being against the elites first, he made away with the old Republican aristocracy.
Emil: And in the last election, I would claim that he has destroyed the old democratic aristocracy. And this is very similar to the Greek tyrants described by Plato. We need to keep in mind that before Athenian democracy, they had a tyrant – kind of a dictator – for 20 years. What this dictator did was that the population, the common folks, were fed up with the old aristocracy. So they ganged up on the aristocracy, on the old elite by allying with a strongman. And then they had a tyranny for 20 years. And then they got tired of him, disposed of him, disposed of his heirs. And then you had this amazing development that we still speak about today – democracy emerged, but it was only because the tyrant had completely annihilated the old elites.
And I see that there’s a similar chance for America here to create a real democracy. Americans should have more choices than just two systems. And of course, we shouldn’t have gerrymandering and voter suppression and all these kinds of things. But I see this as a great chance for renewal of American democracy because Trump is often running the country into the ground. We are at a bifurcation point that could go either way. Maybe like Daniel, he thinks that we’re probably going to have eight years with DeSantis after Trump. It’s a bifurcation point.
We could have a dictatorship for 40 years, but we could also have something new emerging in four years or maybe even two because of the incompetence of the current administration. And I think that could be very interesting for us in the liminal web metamodernist to participate in because I think that we have some unique capacities. The old woke left, I think they have understood that “oh shit, we let down the working class.” The working people, they are simply not resonating. They are pissed off. What can we do? I think they will be open to listen to people who understand multiple perspectives, who understand stages of development to help give birth to a new progressive movement that is more inclusive than the old one.
The old progressive movement that just lost has been with the language policing and political correctness and the holier-than-thou thing – it’s not very inclusive, is it? You just say one wrong word and then you’re out of the club. And I think that the silver lining to this disaster – because it is just a disaster, just look at the stock market now – is that something better can emerge from the rubble.
And this wouldn’t have been possible if we had just had another Democratic president and then business as usual. I’m coming to the United States in the fall. I hope to mobilize people in our circles, mobilize people, organize and just have a talk about what we can do to make sure that this bifurcation point goes in the right direction and we don’t end up with 40 years of dictatorship.
Jim: Yeah, I think that’s probably the best light to put on the situation. We could no doubt find some other ones as well. Now how do people follow what you’re up to? So in case they want to meet up with you when you’re in the United States or sign up for your classes or what have you. Do you have a website?
Emil: Yeah, I’m going to send out a newsletter. We have currently started using Substack. If you just search Mezza Moderna. I’m going to Brendan’s place – Brendan Dempsey Graham in Vermont. We’re gonna have a three-day retreat there.
Emil: Am I even allowed to talk about this? Nick? Nick, where are you? Nick is not answering, but I have some activities out in California and I’m going to the United States in the fall. So if you’re interested in meeting me, just send me a message. I want to connect with as many people as possible and I want to kick this community in the bud to start taking action.
It’s great that, as Brendan said, first you hit the cushion and then you hit the street. But we cannot just sit around in a meditation retreat forever and ponder the meaning crisis. Guys, the meaning crisis has been canceled. If you cannot find meaning when we have a fascist takeover in a world on the brink of World War III, I mean, you’re not going to find meaning anywhere. And then again as you talk about, we have these techno-feudal overlords that are just short-wiring the entire economy and gonna turn us all into serfs. Okay guys, there’s a lot of meaning right there.
There’s a lot of glory as well. You know, this is going to be amazing. It’s going to be so great to take down Musk and Trump. And they’re so incompetent, you know – they don’t know how to run the economy. They are really, really bad at diplomacy and taking them down, imagine the glory and… just…
It’s going to be exciting. So I’m actually really happy, even though after the election, it felt like being punched in the gut. But I’m doing these gratefulness meditations now and just like, okay, you know what? Thank you. I’m feeling pretty good that I know what to do. I feel I have a direction and just, okay, thank you God for giving me my world war – the world war I’ve been looking forward to my entire life.
And, like, who doesn’t like a good fight?
Jim: I love it. All right, we’ll wrap it right there. Emil Ejner Friis. Great conversation. Look forward to chatting with you in the future.
Emil: All right, have a good one, Jim.