“People are hurt and afraid at a subtle psychological level—and are therefore self-absorbed, incapable of taking on larger perspectives and incapable of acting upon the very real long-term risks that threatening our global civilization. We must, at all cost, make the world population much, much happier in the deepest sense of the word.”
Source: The Listening Society: A Metamodern Guide to Politics, Book One
“Let’s return to the main argument. People are hurting as hell. It matters. We should do something to make them happier, if we can.”
Source: The Listening Society: A Metamodern Guide to Politics, Book One
“We can and should create a happy society,
simply because we care. Unfortunately, I have found, this is not obvious to many professors of psychology, theologians, philosophers, economists and the like. Pond scum.”
Source: The Listening Society: A Metamodern Guide to Politics, Book One
“At the micro-sociological level, most humans are doing better than ever. Yet there is so much confusion, suffering
and bitter resentment. How many beautiful, privileged people have I not heard whisper to me, late at night, that if
it were up to them, they would never have been born; that they are angry with the world; that they were let down;
that they live with guilt and self-doubt; that their friends and families are hypocrites? These are signs of the
alienation suffered by modern human beings.”
Source: The Listening Society: A Metamodern Guide to Politics, Book One
“Polarization (and Trumpism) is in itself a kind of political crisis. But all of this would be fine in the long run,
if the stakes weren’t so high and the time frames so narrow. As a world-system, we really don’t have the time
for Trumpism and the like. Global warming and the rapid changes pertaining to the internet age won’t wait. We are
entering a time of unprecedented transformation and we are in dire need of politics that are progressive—in the
sense that they anticipate and productively respond to the upcoming multidimensional crisis—revolution.”
Source: The Listening Society: A Metamodern Guide to Politics, Book One
“In plain English, you need to wrestle the doubts and accusations that it’s all just bullshit. And, needless to say, the majority of the work of the triple-H population is undeniably so. The reason that it’s so valuable to society is just that some of it isn’t bullshit and even a small percentage of genuine innovations of software, culture or lifestyle can have a huge impact. Still, you never quite know if you are the bullshitter or the hero, or if you are being sold utter bullshit.”
Source: The Listening Society: A Metamodern Guide to Politics, Book One
“Paradoxism is not just another linguistic term or a literature device, but perhaps it is the definition of our post-postmodernism and metamodernism.”
“Sociology suffers from a certain problem: any social knowledge it produces gets fed back into the system, which is thereby changed. This means that sociology is always describing the social field the way it was before sociology described it.”
Source: Metamodernism: The Future of Theory
“Metamodernism is a sensibility motivated primarily by a need
to safeguard the individual’s interior, subjectivebfelt experience
against the potential degradations of postmodern ironic relativism and modernist reductionism; and, also from the ontological inertia of pre-modern tradition. It is expressed through
and is an influence upon cultural artifacts found in areas such
as the visual arts, television, film, music, literature, design and
even philosophy, religion, and politics. As an episteme, metamodernism is periodized historically, beginning around or a
little before 2000, and also can be conceived of independent of
chronology.”
Source: Say Hello to Metamodernism!: Understanding Today's Culture of Ironesty, Felt Experience, and Empathic Reflexivity
“NATIONALISM is another form of EXTREMISM”