Daniel Görtz

“Radically new spiritual movements are cropping up, notably the “atheist” practice of Syntheism. And musicians are creating stranger and stranger electrical sounds and rhythms, mixing them with strained voices, as if to underscore just how mysterious, yet peculiarly familiar, it all seems. And fashionable, tattooed young female DJ s play that music on the dance floor, and we dance under flashing lights into the darkness and get high and drunk and make out, as the reality we thought we knew is being torn down and we plunge into the sublime
and the unknown. And far out into the desert, under the clear skies of that luminous, open blackness lit by perfect
stars, we find each other in an intimate, loving embrace. Without the slightest effort we converse for hours and all
of reality melts away as we let go of our inner shields and. become one. In that timeless moment of forgiving embrace
we lose ourselves and find ourselves, both at once.”
― 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 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

“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