Metamodernism Quotes

“Metamodernism lies between modernism and postmodernism while exerting an enthusiastic irony, a hopeful melancholy, a knowledgeable naiveté, an apathetic empathy, a plural unity, and an ambiguous purity.”
― Roger Spitz, The Definitive Guide to Thriving on Disruption: Volume III - Beta Your Life: Existence in a Disruptive World

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

“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.”
― Hanzi Freinacht, 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.”
― Hanzi Freinacht, 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.”
― Hanzi Freinacht, 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.”
― Hanzi Freinacht, 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.”
― Hanzi Freinacht, 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.”
― Hanzi Freinacht, 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.”
― Rao Umar Javed

“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.”
― Greg Dember, Say Hello to Metamodernism!: Understanding Today's Culture of Ironesty, Felt Experience, and Empathic Reflexivity

“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.”
― Jason Ānanda Josephson Storm, Metamodernism: The Future of Theory