What it Means to Be Human — IJKLMNOP

At the Global Meeting on Equinox on 22 March 2025, we will continue the discussion about What it means to be human and what kind of bildung we need. This time the theme will be: Relating; how can we do it better? How can we relate better to each other, to nature, to ourselves, to our past, the generations before us, and to the 8 billion people living on the planet at this very moment? And not least: How can we relate to coming generations? We are defining a substantial portion of their life conditions through our actions, our choices, and — perhaps most importantly of all — the choices that we do not make because we do not meet the challenges of our time.

As a backbone for our discussions, we have chosen eight topics that we need to take into consideration as we move on as a species and try to relate:

· Indigenous peoples and cultures
· Justice
· Knowledge
· Life experience
· Mental models
· Nutrition
· Openendedness
· Peoplehood

As you can see, we are building up a Human Alphabet. At the Global Meeting on Equinox on September 21, 2024, we started with ABCDEFGH and What it Means to Be Human. You can find the article about those eight themes here: https://medium.com/bildung/abcdefgh-and-what-it-means-to-be-human-b292ff10856d. That article also includes concrete suggestions for how to address some of the challenges we are facing, not least how we can cooperate better. In fact, the overall theme for the Global Meeting on Equinox, September 21, 2024, was Cooperation: How can we do it better?

To cooperate better, we need to relate better, and we need bildung that serves this purpose. So that is what we are up to discuss at the next event. We hope you will find the topics important and intriguing, and that you will join our global online discussion about them on March 22, 2025.

You can sign up for free here: https://us06web.zoom.us/meeting/register/OV6en6dJQfOaf5DZ2UskRw#/registration

Indigenous peoples and cultures

Indigenous peoples around the globe are among the most marginalized and vulnerable; they also possess some of the oldest and most important knowledge about the ecosystems on our planet and about what it means to be human. We need to relate and align indigenous and other cultures with each other so that we can better live in harmony with nature and with ourselves.

For somebody living in the most high-tech cities of the 21st century, indigenous peoples and their knowledge may seem irrelevant. “Why would I need to relate to somebody who still lives in the stone age?” you might ask, smart phone in one hand, coffee to-go in the other. Well, because you and everybody else on this planet were born as a stone-age baby. Your emotional needs, your social needs, your spiritual needs, your behavioral patterns, your very essence of being human, are the same as they were for humans 300,000 years ago. And some peoples have been kind enough to keep alive the most intimate relationship with nature so that both they and nature can thrive. Those of us who live in cities have lost that relationship. And many of us are not doing very well. We’re glued to our phones, and many are suffering from a mental health crisis. We have forgotten who we truly are, but indigenous peoples have not. We city dwellers have a lot to learn so we can relate to ourselves again.

Besides this relationship to ourselves and what it means to be human, there is the indigenous relationship to nature, which is not a relationship of extracting resources, but a relationship of intimacy and regeneration. Regeneration is necessary if we are not going to ruin the only habitable planet that we have, and indigenous peoples know things about flora, fauna, humans, and their spiritual connections that we as a species cannot afford to lose. So-called ‘modern’ people lack bildung if they cannot see this, so what should we do about it?

Nature is fierce, but it is also caring. Here a small pride of lions and some cubs learning not to annoy dad: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v0J9aHMOb2k.

Justice

Justice is a deep-seeded human need, we share a sense of fairness with many animal species, and rule by law is the foundation of any society of city-size or larger. Without responsibility, power is corruption; without legislation, justice will be corrupted; and without justice, peace is oppression.

Particularly for women, minorities, and indigenous peoples, legal recognition and justice are the first and most crucial steps toward equality and freedom. We need to promote not only rule by law (that there is legislation at all) but rule of law: that the same rules apply to everybody, nobody is above the law, and there can be no retroactive legislation. That is how we can achieve justice, fairness, and responsibility; with rule of law, many other benefits can follow, such as peace, opportunities for everybody, and freedom. Rule of law and justice are required if we are going to have the necessary freedom that allows us to relate honestly to each other. In a society based on rule of law and justice, we can let down our guards when we meet other people, and we can generally relate to them in emotional honesty.

This is also the case in global relations. Multilateralism, globalization, climate, and even war have and will demand the strengthening of justice and settlement systems; we need new legal structures for the 21st century. We must develop global systems of responsibility. The earth is a “commons,” and justice requires a set of rules that allows us to avoid the commons becoming a “tragedy.” We need global fairness. Capitalism has become a steep pyramid where a few own the most, and the distance between top and bottom seems to expand exponentially. Likewise, global relations where money speak louder than justice are not just. Together, they are unfair, and they are a continuation of the errors and inequities of colonialism. Global relations must address fairness, so that what is fair thus becomes a global question.

On paper, many people will probably agree to the above, but actually promoting it, voting for politicians who promote it, and accepting that fairness and justice must be global will require levels of bildung that no country seems to be providing today. Most countries don’t even provide educational systems that promote the kind of bildung that would allow the development of fairness and justice for all of its own inhabitants.

This video with capuchin monkeys shows how infuriating unfairness is: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=meiU6TxysCg and why a lack of fairness and justice leads to violence and war.

Knowledge

Knowledge has become a currency of its own. Bildung ought to be the educational goal so we can also appreciate the many kinds of knowledge and promote all of them.

Nations that lead in Biotech, Information technologies, Nanotechnology, and Cognitive technologies (BINC technologies), including AI, have a massive advantage over others and are showing a willingness to weaponize their knowledge advantage. AI, the ultimate generator of Knowledge as well as biased misinformation and complete nonsense, is a competitive space where the contesting powers are currently entering a “duel to the death” of all humanity in their quest for dominance.

Before we hand over the fate of humanity to algorithms that we will never be able to fully understand, we need to salvage human knowledge and use it wisely. This human knowledge exists in many forms, and we need all of them, but we also need to be able to distinguish among them:

Indigenous knowledge has gradually emerged over millennia, nobody knows who came up with it or when, and most often it has been embedded in songs and stories so that it can be recalled and applied whenever necessary. As a species, we cannot afford to lose the indigenous knowledge that is still around: we need it to restore the biotopes that are about to collapse; we probably won’t survive without this deep and ancient form of knowledge.

Traditional knowledge emerged from the big, imperial civilizations of the bronze age and iron age, and most of it is known as myths and religion today. For existential and cultural reasons and for aesthetic and moral meaning-making, we need this heritage. To relate to each other and to communicate at a deeper and poetic level about the things in life that really matter, we need the traditional knowledge and its concepts, realizations, and vocabulary. The knowledge embedded in the traditions is not factual in any modern sense, but it deals poetically with how we relate to each other, to nature, to culture, to morality and justice, and to the universe.

Modern knowledge is produced through the scientific method of hypothesis, testing, and peer reviews. We cannot solve our problems without good science. Science is not as much a series of answers as it is a method, and it is the best method for creating objective knowledge about the world, i.e. fact-based knowledge that works for anybody irrespectively of their background, culture, personal emotions, history, identity, etc. Scientific knowledge is a special category of knowledge that is capable of answering a special kind of questions — while it has no answers for some of our most important questions, such as existential, spiritual, and moral questions. This is not a flaw in science; on the contrary, it is a strength. Fundamentally, the difference between science and religion or other traditional knowledge is that religion and tradition tend to take a religious or traditional truth and then do whatever they can to keep confirming it; science takes a hypothesis and does whatever it can to prove that it is wrong, and when that keeps failing, there is new scientific knowledge. Science is crucial for our understanding of how the world works, including humans and our cultures, and for solving the polycrisis, i.e. the problems we have created for ourselves.

Postmodern knowledge is deconstruction of the way things appear. We need this to throw light on the unlit places of the other kinds of knowledge, but it cannot be the basis of a society. We cannot relate through deconstruction; we self-deconstruct and fall apart if we try to do so. We fall apart as a society, and we fall apart as individuals and families if we cannot relate to each other deeply, honestly, and without deconstruction of the relationship.

All these kinds of knowledge are essential if we are going to thrive. As these forms of human knowledge face artificial “knowledge” we need to learn how to relate to our own knowledge in such ways that we stay in control of our own fate and do not hand it over to algorithms. Which means that we need more and better bildung.

Some indigenous knowledge in relation to some modern: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wN6qPJm1hmg

Some traditional knowledge in relation to some modern: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2s3kQSZ_Qxk
here is the song itself: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YD6fvzGIBfQ

Some modern knowledge: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BZoKfap4g4w

Deconstruction of some postmodern deconstruction: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WID6w4_gtwo

Life Experience

Life experience cannot be replaced by knowledge coming from others or from literature. Life itself is the great school of existence, and the most valuable life experience often comes from mistakes. We therefore need to make more mistakes early in life when the consequences are not too big, so we can take that learning with us into adulthood when mistakes may have much bigger consequences unless we know how to think and handle them. We cannot survive without life experience, and we need room to get some of it! We need to relate to one another in such ways that there is room for messing up and learning from it.

“Mom, can I have that apple?”
“It’s not an apple, it’s an onion.”
“No, it’s an apple!”
“OK, if you insist, eat it…” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4L9Stzf6ZLc

Poor kid (not least because that video is very likely to be online for as long as the internet exists), but what a bildung moment!

Mental Models

Mental models hold this alphabet together. They also hold us together: us and our fears, hopes, and aspirations that embed our humanity. Mental models allow us to navigate the world and to relate to each other through symbols, rituals, and language. Over time, our mental models have become fractured by the binary underpinnings of the past and the present. We cannot relate what was with what is and what ought to come.

Now we, without thought, guardrails or conscience, are in the process of outsourcing our collective mental models and our collective imaginaries to AI; machine intelligence. And machine idiocy, for that matter; the other AI: Artificial Idiocy. Previously, we outsourced our manual labor, first to animals, then to machines. Now we are outsourcing our mental models, our meaning-making. This is the big outsourcing. It will fundamentally change, not just the world around us and how we manipulate the outer world, but our inner world as we are manipulated by our own invention.

Our collective Mental Models were yet to mature as a species. Simultaneously, the common institutions broke down. The hegemony of race, superiority of cultures, the sense of entitlement of a few — these are mental models that keep us from maintaining and creating the institutions we need. The very future of humanity rests on our mental models and how we make sense of the world. Mental models are at the heart of and the common thread to what humanity is about, and we have let them ossify. Everything emanates from or is affected by the mental models of the individual or the collective. We need to see them, analyze them, and relate to them so we can know ourselves and figure out what we need to do to relate to each other and to the planet in deeply meaningful ways that allow all of us to thrive. Doing so would promote bildung, but it would certainly also require bildung.

Breaking down a mental model; first words, then a crowbar: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hNK8FCFpmm4

Nutrition

Nutrition is defining for human development, both at the individual and the collective level. Childhood malnutrition affects all aspects of life, including the ability to learn, and highly processed foods and high levels of sugar and fat cause all kinds of health problems. An unforgivable fact about humanity in our time is that almost a billion people are still suffering from hunger while another billion are obese, and yet another 1.5 billion people are overweight: https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/obesity-and-overweight.

There is something fundamentally wrong with the way that we deal with food in the most technologically complex societies. Many people have never fully learned how to cook, they may not even have developed a sense of “a meal,” the most fundamental of human gatherings: sitting around food that is supposed to be shared and eating together. Beginning and ending the meal together. Talking to each other while you eat. The equivalent of the indigenous gathering around the campfire — waiting together and perhaps munching on some berries and veggies as the meat brought home by the hunters is roasting over the embers. Meals are more than food and food is more than mere physical nutrition. It is also food heritage, food tradition, community, and nourishment of the soul.

Instead of home-cooked, healthy meals in healthy amounts, people around the globe are becoming increasingly overweight. In the most affluent countries, it is particularly the poorest who suffer the most from obesity. Our relationship with food is increasingly a broken one unless we make an effort to redefine it and relate differently to what we eat, why we eat, and how we eat. We need food bildung.

There is actually a tv-show called Worst Cooks in America: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7OtcbaakdOM

Openendedness

Openendedness is generally not something we sit easily with as humans: we want predictable outcomes. We want to feel secure. So, since the dawn of humanity we have looked to the stars, to the patterns in birds’ flying, and to the intestines or smoke from sacrificed animals to predict the future. Today, in the modern world, we set KPIs, Key Performance Indicators, on everything from factory output and national budgets to individual human behavior. In between there have been at least 300,000 years of humans fretting the unforeseeable, of consulting soothsayers and consultancy companies, and yet we are about to burn down the planet.

We need to turn our attention around and not base our choices and actions so much on the goals we want, but on the quality and ethics of our actions, the broader vision that is worth pursuing, and the capabilities and resources at hand that will allow us to move in that direction. We need to do so, knowing that unforeseen things will happen, and even better ideas will emerge in the process. We need to have an idea about where we would like to go, but we also need to let the outcome be open, embrace openendedness, and allow ourselves to learn and think in the process. It requires bildung to have this inner robustness and existential compass that allows us to embrace openendedness and to relate to the process more than to any goal.

Ironically, one of the places where open-endedness is pursued is in the development of AI. Instead of letting humans unfold in as many ways as possible, we are being coerced into uniformity, while the creators of artificial intelligence are trying to make it creative.

Paolo Freire about curiosity: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aFWjnkFypFA

Kenneth Stanley about open-endedness and AI: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OLi0eIdyQU4

Peoplehood

Peoplehood is the way we are connected through a language, a culture, a shared history, and a sense of a collective fate. We all rely on at least one people, culture and language for our meaning-making and mental models. We cannot make sense of the world without a shared language and a culture that allows us to connect with other people: to grow up and be socialized into a larger group than just the small group of our closest relatives. In parts of Africa, this is captured by the concept of Ubuntu: I am because we are.

Joining a people is hard, leaving a people is even harder, because you have to leave behind a substantial part of yourself: your language, your mental models, and your meaning-making. Without your people, you will never be able to entirely express yourself, because between languages and cultures, there are always concepts and sentiments missing, no matter how good a translation somebody may come up with.

The concept of peoplehood has caused some of the worst atrocities in human history. From Nazi Germany to the genocide in Rwanda and elsewhere. What is often called nationalism is an othering that we all carry the potential for within us: the need for a “Them” in order for “Us” to know who We are.

By using the word ‘nationalism’ as a bad thing, unfortunately, a lot of people hear it as if they are not allowed to love their country. We should love our country — or at least not hate it or care nothing about it. We can only have functioning countries and rule of law within them if the people living in them care about the country as a whole and perhaps even love it. We could thus refer to the toxic version of national Us versus Them as national chauvinism instead of nationalism. That would make it clear why defining your own people and nation based on the hatred of other peoples and nations is toxic and degrading to everybody. Celebrating your people and its cultural heritage ought to be joyful, not only to your people, but also to other peoples.

To have a meaningful life and to be able to express ourselves in meaningful ways, we need to relate to the culture, language, and heritage that allow us to make sense of the world at all; we need bildung.

Here Belarusians are protesting against their regime’s oppression by singing together in a shopping mall in 2022: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KdXSqaCalHg.

A Maori Haka in the Aotearoa Parliament: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8m9negKqZLo.

Looking forward to seeing you online

We hope that you have an opinion about what you just read and that you would like to join us on March 22 online and discuss it. If so, please check out the program and sign up here: https://us06web.zoom.us/meeting/register/OV6en6dJQfOaf5DZ2UskRw#/registration

What it Means to Be Human — IJKLMNOP was originally published in Bildung on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Even before his inauguration, Trump has shaken up international politics. Incompetence almost seems to be a qualification for most of his picks of cabinet members and leaders of some of the most crucial institutions in American society. His treatment of NATO allies must make Putin lick his lips. And though democracies have seen corrupt leaders before — perhaps there may even have been criminals elected president previously — no democracy has had a convicted felon president with his own currency, a craving for retribution against his political adversaries, and an insatiable desire for flattery and money. Trump 2.0 represents a toxic combination who’s like the world has never seen before.

What the world has seen before is a democracy collapsing into fascism, and though Trump himself would probably not identify as a fascist, his First Buddy Elon Musk would probably not identify as a fascist, his cabinet picks would probably not identify as fascists, and his voters certainly would not identify as fascists, we need to look into the history of authoritarian rule in Europe to be able to grasp what is going in on in the US and what we risk is about to happen.

I do not claim, of course, to have any ability to predict the future, but I see troubling patterns in what has already happened, and given the state of history education in the world, I find it appropriate to share what I see. It is my hope that I am completely wrong. Utterly and completely wrong! But if I am right, what I present here is crucial to understand if the world is going to navigate safely around a Trump presidency 2.0.

We need to start with the voters and what got Trump elected the second time. People generally do not vote for fascists, they vote for something that feels familiar. They vote for order, comfort, and predictability; they vote for the past. Which is entirely understandable, but in a rapidly changing world with new technologies revamping old structures, the solutions of the past are not going to deliver order, comfort and predictability. Instead, the person who promises the past is very quickly going to be up against reality, and incapable of grasping reality and having mainly the means of the past in their toolbox, they are going to fail and then they are going to turn authoritarian and start applying violence; they are going to turn fascist.

This is going to be a long read, but it is important to understand the underlying emotional, cultural, psychological, and social mechanisms of violent authoritarianism and fascism if we are going to be able to address it and avoid its most extreme forms. Western liberals have failed the most vulnerable Westerners since the fall of the Berlin Wall, and now the least fortunate in Western societies are not having it anymore. If anything, I hope that liberals will consider how their own privileges, rhetoric, and choices have contributed to the second election of Donald J. Trump.

The path to fascism

Two of the major classics on the drivers and psychology behind fascism are The Mass Psychology of Fascism from 1933 by Wilhelm Reich and The Escape from Freedom from 1941 by Erich Fromm. Whereas I cannot remember a single word from Reich’s book, Fromm’s has stayed with me, and I return to it again and again.

Fromm was born in Frankfurt in 1900 and was a German Jew who escaped Nazi Germany and settled in the US in 1934. He was also a sociologist, social psychologist, and psychoanalyst, and he had a deep understanding of German culture.

In Escape from Freedom, Fromm explores two authoritarian takeovers of German society: Luther’s Reformation and Hitler’s rise to power. If you’re a Protestant Christian and find the comparison offensive, please read Fromm’s book.

The recurring pattern that Fromm explores is how technological and economic development affects the middle class and makes them want to escape from their new predicament. There are two options: join the new economy and the new freedoms that come with it or insist on the old ways and the old power structures, and as it becomes increasingly impossible to maintain the old ways as technologies and economy change, use increasing oppression and violence to maintain the past. Freedom versus oppression and violence. According to Fromm, many then choose the past, the oppression, and the violence, and in the process, they develop an authoritarian mindset that allows them not just to tolerate but love the oppression and violence, because it makes them feel that they are serving a higher purpose and thereby they feel like they are in some kind of control.

Fromm explores this development through two historical examples: First the transition from Catholic Middle Ages through the Renaissance to the Reformation and then the development leading up to Hitler’s power grab in 1933. In both cases there was a middleclass who was thriving in the existing economic model and with the existing available technologies. Then new technologies and a new economic system disrupted their livelihood, they lost their foothold in society, anxiety kicked in, and they would do anything to go back to the pre-anxiety days and feel safe again. When a bully then showed up and both promised them a return to the past and invented a scapegoat on whom they could blame their misery, they thought they had found redemption and accepted the promise. Instead of having the necessary knowledge, skills, and courage to grasp the novel opportunities that came with the new situation and choosing new degrees of freedom, they found hope in the promise of the past. However, the promise did not deliver. Because technology and economy did not go back, it moved on and made times even harder on the former middle class. As they plunged into poverty, the bully changed the narrative and made suffering and hardship noble. People learned to face austerity and hard times as something that would refine them and make things better, and they embraced obedience and violence as means of “doing what is necessary.” They developed an authoritarian mindset.

The Reformation transition to authoritarianism

Gutenberg invented the printing press with movable type in the 1440s, and along with it came capitalism, colonialism, and early industrialization, which pulled the rug from under the feet of the guild-based artisans. With this new sense of insecurity came the fear of anything uncontrollable, including women, their knowledge, and their sexuality, and that led to the witch hunts, including the witch hunt manual Malleus Maleficarum, Hammer of Witches, in 1486. Enter Luther and his 95 theses in 1517 calling out the hypocrisy and corruption of the Pope and the Catholic Church — and thus the beginning of the Reformation, which led to his translation of the Bible into German in 1534 so people could read it themselves.

One would think that individual access to reading the Bible might create some sort of open curiosity and more freedom, but instead came an authoritarian, legalistic return to The Old Testament. Including an assumption on Luther’s part that Jews would love his new version of Christianity. The Jews being perfectly happy with Judaism, though, rejected Luther’s new religion, upon which Luther turned fervently antisemitic.

As Renaissance, technology, economy, early industrialization, and societal havoc kept unfolding and the middle class of artisans who used to thrive lost their foothold they found solace in Luther’s faith-based idealization of even more austerity. Luther could promise his followers nothing beyond even harder times, more austerity, and salvation by faith alone. If there was no way to return to the past, at least suffering could become noble and a path to eternal bliss. Particularly if the evil forces of Satan could simultaneously be expelled from society by persecuting women and Jews. Men were accused of witchcraft too, but they were a minority; in the Salem witch trials in 1692, 4 out of 5 were women. What was most often a common denominator among the persecuted, though, was that they were on the fringes of society and vulnerable, easy targets. Rich people did not get burned.

The new religion not only appealed to the middle class, but it also appealed to rulers across Europe, particularly the further they were from Rome. By turning Protestant, rulers would gain political autonomy from the Vatican; the individual ruler would be head of both state and church in his realm. In 1618, the political conflicts between the Pope and Protestant kings led to the Thirty Years War, which cost between 4.5 and 8 million lives and ended in 1648 in the Peace of Westphalia.

Luther’s Reformation thus not only led to a new kind of culture that was fueled by the desire to return to the past, it also intensified the witch hunts and burning people, particularly poor people, mostly women, alive at the stake, continuation of Christian hatred against Jews keeping them in ghettos, and a devastating war across Europe.

After the war, Europe was exhausted, and the cultural, political, and religious landscape across the continent had fundamentally changed. Instead of the Pope and his cardinals being the rulers, kings and other autocratic leaders were free to reign over their land and their people as they pleased, or as much as their local aristocracy — and to some extent local bishops — allowed. Europe had gained “collective religious freedom,” each monarch decided what should be the religion of his subjects, and he had absolute power over them. He kept this power through his military, which took on a whole new form in the aftermath of the Thirty-Year War, and he could imprison and kill people more or less on a whim.

This European sprawl of Catholic versus Protestant states and individual rulers who competed among each other over land, resources, and power laid the foundation for secular and new economic and technological developments in Europe. This included the invention of the steam engine, more industrialization, further colonization, and an increasingly wealthy upper middle class. Capitalism created a bourgeoisie, who did not fit into the feudal political structure that only counted the absolute ruler and three estates: 1st Estate: clergy, 2nd Estate: aristocracy, 3rd Estate: everybody else from beggars and subsistence peasants to farmers, artisans, and wealthy capitalists.

The Weimar transition to Nazism

The steam engine not only allowed capitalists to earn more money, but it also created a proletariat of workers and a new kind of middle class of civil servants, skilled workers, overseers, operators, administrators, and successful businessmen, storeowners, artisans who became employers, and company owners. In addition, the French Revolution of 1789 and other revolutions across the European continent and violent struggles for workers’ rights during the 1800s, led to a new kind of middle-layer of society in Europe. With it came the political ideologies that have shaped our political landscape: Socialism, Conservatism, and Liberalism. The feudal order broke down, but societies were still rather religious and militaristic, particularly Prussia. Class and national identity, belonging, and solidarity increasingly replaced the sense of estates of the feudal society. Among the workers, this led to the Socialist International, where workers identified with other workers across borders. Among capitalists and landowners, and the petit-bourgeois middle class who wished they were part of the new affluent bourgeoisie, it led to identifying with their people and culture, and thus with their country and nation state. The 1800s political riots in Europe were not just a class warfare, it was a fight over whether borders between classes should define society or borders between countries should define society. Eventually, Europe settled on borders between countries with members of different classes all counting as citizens within the same borders. Popular national chauvinism became a thing.

In 1913, Henry Ford introduced the conveyor belt in his factories, and the workers were increasingly reduced to cogwheels in a big machinery. It also meant that artisan and small-scale industry were once again challenged by new technology, and part of the middle-class lost their economic foothold. Simultaneously, women fought for suffrage and equal rights, and millions of men saw their status and power in society challenged.

In 1914, old political power structures could no longer hold, and WW1 erupted. In 1919, it ended in an armistice that dismantled the German Empire and turned Germany into the Weimar Republic.

In the 1920s, the situation in Germany was horrible, not least due to inflation. Millions of people wanted to go back to the world they used to know: A time when they were doing well economically, the German Empire enjoyed the respect of other states, men were the authority at home and provided for their family, and the emperor was the collective father figure of the Empire.

Enter Adolph Hitler who promised them the past.

After WW2, where political opponents, Jews, and sexual minorities had been sent to concentration camps, and women had been reduced to breeding- and cooking-people, European politics shifted from military aggression to market dominance. Politicians and generals alike realized that the path to peace and prosperity would go through economic development; particularly one general saw it: George C. Marshall, who came up with the idea for massive American investments in Europe and wherever else governments would accept The Marshall Plan.

Commerce and capitalism became the new ruling principles.

Authoritarian appeal today

When the Soviet Union collapsed, mainly due to a failed economic system, politicians and other decision makers in the West wrongly assumed that capitalism and democracy are — if not the same thing — at least so closely related that if we commercialized the entire planet, democracy and peace would ensue.

That turned out to be wrong.

Instead, we have technological development disrupting both economic and political structures, globalization that has pulled the rug out from under the feet of huge proportions of the Western middle class. We also have a changing climate and a mass extinction of species that desperately need to be addressed immediately and systemically. On top of that, we have a talking and writing class of fortunate college- and university-degree people who have completely missed how much misery their own privileges have caused others. Here David Brooks writes about it in the Atlantic: How the Ivy League Broke America: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2024/12/meritocracy-college-admissions-social-economic-segregation/680392/.

And then there are the richest 1% who, according to Oxfam, own 43% of all global financial assets, and since 2020, the world’s five richest men have doubled their wealth, while almost five billion people have seen their wealth decrease. The world’s richest 1% also emit as much carbon pollution as the poorest two thirds. Due to globalization, extreme wealth among the very few, and legal as well as illegal migration, there is not only a huge wealth gap between North and South and between states, but also within states: https://www.oxfamamerica.org/explore/stories/how-are-billionaire-and-corporate-power-intensifying-global-inequality/. What used to be a secure middle-class life can quickly plummet and leave people on the street doing opioids.

Today, we see the political Right fight to take away women’s abortion rights and, eventually, other liberties regarding their reproductive health as outlined in the Project 2025 document. On the political Left, wokeness looks increasingly like a brainworm that eats both reason and reality, and they are trying to erase the concept of woman altogether and hand it over to men who identify as Trans. The political Right has explicit racism that speaks to the biggest losers among the white middle class and there is antisemitism boiling under the surface. The political Left is not only supporting a free Palestine (which they should) but has a strange blindness regarding Hamas’ atrocities against women, gays, and Jews. Bill Maher nails the hypocrisy here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uRzv0HgatRc.

As a result, the oldest, strongest, proudest, and most loud-mouthed democracy in the modern world is on the path towards becoming an authoritarian, fascist Trump Land in the hands of tech nerds who care more about the happiness of robots in the future on other planets than they do about the only habitable planet we have and the 8 billion people who already live here. This may seem like quite the claim, but three things are particularly troubling:

The people currently (January, 2025) nominated by Trump as members of his cabinet are some of the least qualified people ever considered for governing the US.

Equally troubling is the expected obedience to Trump, The Great Leader: “Whoever he nominates and appoints, you better pass them through the Senate. That is your job. You say “yes sir,” and you get it done.” https://x.com/CalltoActivism/status/1859451934467412279 and https://x.com/RpsAgainstTrump/status/1856778496376504770.

Also nominated is Elon Musk, who is supposed to run a Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) together with Republican entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy: https://www.npr.org/2024/11/12/g-s1-33972/trump-elon-musk-vivek-ramaswamy-doge-government-efficiency-deep-state. Whether Musk is qualified for that, time will show. 2024 December’s budget negotiations have shown how deep his influence already is — with nobody ever voting for him, and Trump not even president yet. Among the speculations are that Musk may very well be in it to just benefit his own business (which, ironically, is very much built on government funding) and his investments in China: https://x.com/RepMcGovern/status/1870529619981713413; and if you are not on X: https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1870529608488984968.html

Musk’s worldview

What is even more troubling, though, is that along with other tech bros Musk has joined the belief that the happiness of billions of people in the future is worth more than the happiness of the 8 billion people alive today. From a purely mathematical point of view, that may be a valid viewpoint. But from a normal-sensitive-human-being perspective, the happiness of existing people weighs heavier than the happiness of people whose existence is purely speculative. Not least because the “people” occupying the predicted future may not even be humans, they may just be digital avatars, AIs, brought forth by software on other planets. You and your children, in other words, thus matter less than code in space in, say, the year 24048.

I’m not just making this up: There is a new worldview that is shared by Musk and other extremely influential tech people (oh, well, mainly tech men, I guess). It combines Transhumanism, Extropianism, Singularitarianism, Cosmism, Rationalism, Effective Altruism, and Longtermism, and therefore it has achieved the very clunky acronym TESCREAL. The acronym was invented by Timnit Gebru and Émile P. Torres who has written this very enlightening article about it: https://www.truthdig.com/articles/the-acronym-behind-our-wildest-ai-dreams-and-nightmares/.

To sum it up, TESCREAL is a belief in a brighter future where humans and technology have merged (Transhumanism), which will allow us to live forever (Extropianism), not least because artificial superintelligence will have surpassed our own intelligence and this will be wonderful (Singularitarianism), because it will allow us to colonize the entire universe (Cosmism). Not only is this wonderful, it is also the only rational development for humanity (Rationalism) and it is morally superior if we care about as many people as possible using our resources most efficiently (Effective Altruism), which we will be able to do, if the 8 billion people alive today accept a bit of suffering now in order to increase the happiness of billions of billions of people in the future (Longtermism). Here from Torres’ article:

Understanding transhumanism is important not just because of its role in TESCREALism, but because of its ubiquity in Silicon Valley. Tech titans are pouring huge sums of money into realizing the transhumanist project and see AGI as playing an integral part in catalyzing this process. Take Elon Musk’s company Neuralink. Its mission is to merge “your brain with AI,” and in doing so to “jump-start the next stage of human evolution.” (…)

Last year [i.e. 2022], Elon Musk retweeted a paper by [Nick] Bostrom, one of the founding documents of longtermism, with the line: “Likely the most important paper ever written.” After [William] MacAskill published a book on longtermism last summer, Musk described it as “a close match for my philosophy.” Longtermism is the backdrop to Musk’s claims that “we have a duty to maintain the light of consciousness, to make sure it continues into the future,” and that “what matters … is “maximizing cumulative civilizational net happiness over time.” (…)

Five years after DeepMind was formed, Musk and [Sam] Altman then joined forces with other Silicon Valley elite, such as Peter Thiel, to start OpenAI. (…)

Bostrom argues that if there’s a mere 1% chance of 10⁵² digital lifetimes existing in the future, then “the expected value of reducing existential risk by a mere one billionth of one billionth of one percentage point is worth a hundred billion times as much as a billion human lives.” In other words, if you mitigate existential risk by this minuscule amount, then you’ve done the moral equivalent of saving billions and billions of existing human lives. (…)

Together, these ideologies have given rise to a normative worldview — essentially, a “religion” for atheists — built around a deeply impoverished utopianism crafted almost entirely by affluent white men at elite universities and in Silicon Valley, who now want to impose this vision on the rest of humanity — and they’re succeeding.

In this worldview, humans are basically not-yet-realized digital code.

Who are the fascists now?

So, are Trump and Musk and their colleagues fascists?

In any ideological sense of the word: No.

Are half of the American voters?

No.

There are neo-nazis walking the streets of Columbia, Ohio: https://edition.cnn.com/2024/11/18/us/columbus-ohio-neo-nazi-march-hnk/index.html and they probably have likeminded friends across the US, but overall, No. There is no reason to believe that the general Trump voter is a fascist. But there is a real risk that the US, in a few years, will be indistinguishable from fascism. I hope I am wrong.

There is a lot of violence in the US, and there is an authoritarian streak that runs through what used to be the Republican Party, i.e. the people who support and voted for Trump. There is the longing for a Father Figure who punishes the “bad” “children” who do not behave. Tucker Carlson said it explicitly during a Trump rally:

“There has to be a point at which dad comes home! Yeah, that’s right! Dad comes home! And he’s pissed! Dad is pissed! (…) he is very disappointed in their behavior, and he is gonna have to let them know: Get to your room, right now! And think about what you did. And when dad gets home, you know what he says? “You’ve been a bad girl! You’ve been a bad little girl, and you’re getting a vigorous spanking right now!” (…) it is said in the spirit of justice, which is the purest and best thing there is.”

Watch it here: https://x.com/AccountableGOP/status/1849222312119202092; the cheers are telling.

Musk has a violent and authoritarian streak too. He seems sympathetic to the idea that only physically strong alpha-males should be allowed to vote: https://www.newsweek.com/elon-musk-shares-controversial-theory-democracy-1947873 he also tweets about “The Hammer of Justice:” https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1856809119115522499. Usually, a judge marks a verdict with a hammer, so Musk might have that in mind, but normally, one would refer to “rule of law” rather than “the hammer of justice,” so the vibe from the world’s richest man is more towards a sledge hammer: https://eu.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/elections/2024/11/14/elon-musk-matt-gaetz/76289055007/. It also resonates with that book title: Hammer of Witches. His latest stunt is to interfere with politics in Europe in favor of the far Right.

Trump seems to believe that some really intense violence would end crime: https://people.com/donald-trump-evokes-purge-one-violent-day-solve-crime-8720495 and that the entire legal system is corrupt and justice needs to be restored: https://rumble.com/v2i2u8s-trump-statement-agenda-47-restoring-justice-in-america.html. What methods he would use for that can only be pure speculation at this point, but his flirtation with firing squad imagery should worry everybody: https://x.com/RpsAgainstTrump/status/1852211077947240872. Not that he may actually intend to have firing squads aiming at the heads of his political opponents, but some of his armed followers might.

The bottom line: ideologically, Trump and his followers are not fascists, but in effect, the Trump leadership may turn out indistinguishable from fascism. Not least because Musk has already warned the American people that crashing the economy and enjoying some hardships will be necessary: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politics/elon-musk-economy-trump-hardship-b2637850.html.

The meaning-making and worldview behind Trump is authoritarian and sympathetic to violence, and there is a desire to control women and women’s bodies. Plus: One of the US Generals serving under Trump during his first term says that Trump is “fascist to the core:” https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2024/10/12/mark-milley-donald-trump-fascist/

How violent will a second Trump presidency be?

Nobody knows.

Nobody knew in 1933 how violent European fascism in the 1930s and until 1945 would be. Nobody imagined that the authoritarian and militaristic mindset of the 1800s would do its utmost to stay in control, oppress women, minorities, and anybody disagreeing with the regime, and apply the latest industrialization technologies to mass-murder humans in concentration camps.

Nobody knew in 1924 how violent communism under Stalin until 1953 would be. Nobody imagined that the authoritarian and militaristic mindset of czarist Russia would do its utmost to stay in control, oppress women, minorities, and anybody disagreeing with the regime, and mass-murder humans in concentration camps.

Today, I assume that nobody imagines that an authoritarian, libertarian, and capitalistic mindset of the 1900s will do its utmost to stay in control and apply the latest digitization technologies to mass-murder humans, whether it is in concentration camps or elsewhere.

But if that turns out to be the case, the surveillance methods to find anybody who has ever posted on social media https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/internet/facial-recognition-s-dirty-little-secret-millions-online-photos-scraped-n981921 with the help of surveillance cameras in the streets https://www.comparitech.com/blog/vpn-privacy/us-surveillance-camera-statistics/ are already in place. Programming robots with facial recognition and swarm intelligence to go out and find people won’t be that hard: https://www.entrepreneur.com/science-technology/the-worlds-first-robot-police-officer-just-debuted-in-dubai/294725 / https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2023/04/nypd-robocops-hulking-400-lb-robots-will-start-patrolling-new-york-city/. They may even look friendly https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AWDQnkV2wh4 and carry firearms — here an example from China: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3m3iUHplvQE. It would be almost weird if Musk did not see a commercial opportunity in selling his AI and robots to the US government, wouldn’t it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WqZsXkB9vxI? They might also use drones: https://www.firstpost.com/explainers/why-elon-musk-wants-us-to-do-away-with-manned-fighter-jets-13838608.html

What kinds of protests are Musk and Trump going to meet from the American people if they do start rounding up illegal immigrants? What are they going to do to the protesters? To what extent are Trump and his friends reveling in fantasies about rounding up political opponents? Judges and other figures of authority who have the wrong opinions?

If Trump’s own words are anything to go by, yes, the US can be heading towards a very violent future. If you don’t think that could happen, think twice, and read this text again. No sane person in the Weimar Republic in 1925 ever expected Auschwitz. Trump and his team are already not playing by the rules: https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2024/11/19/trump-transition-fbi-state-gsa/

That does not mean that this is what people voted for. It also does not mean that this is what Musk and colleagues have signed up for. But if history is anything to go by, when they realize that their plans are not working, when they realize that they cannot take institutions apart and still run a country of 337-ish million people, the safest bet is that they are going to apply violence. And the more it is not working, the more violence they are going to apply. This is what has happened in every country where people have not been allowed to disagree with the leader.

There is legislation that regulates how the American president can apply force by police, National Guard, and the military towards the American people. My best guess is that there is no legislation preventing an American president and a tech bro from sending armed robots with swarm intelligence into the streets if the tech bro happens to have them in store.

What to do?

The US is falling apart, also at the emotional level, citizen to citizen: https://x.com/DefiantLs/status/1859744341461442661. Which is where the real danger lies. People need to talk to each other, particularly those with whom they disagree, so they can disagree politically but agree on principles and ethics. So that they can serve and protect the constitution professionally as well as in civil society, and so that they can stand up peacefully against violence.

The question is, though: How many in the existing institutions of governance speak up and will speak up against Trump and his picks of incompetent acolytes? How many Republican politicians and conservative judges realize up front in what direction the US is heading? And how many of them choose to remain committed to their oath to the American Constitution rather than to suck up to Trump?

While I have been working on this text, Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell has kept the Senate in session so that Trump could not use a recess to bypass the Senate and announce his cabinet without a Senate vetting: https://time.com/7177280/donald-trump-cabinet-mitch-mcconnell/. How soon and on what terms he will fall into rank and file, time will show.

What everybody can do is not to obey the authoritarians in advance: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w3nJYpx9K5w (my apologies for not sending this to Mark Zuckerberg and Jeff Bezos in due time).

And get organized peacefully. The sooner the better! Get people together and commit yourselves to the principles of rule of law and democracy. Give each other moral support. Build up cultural resilience. Discuss where your ethical boundaries are and how you would react if you were asked to commit actions that are against your conscience. Study the legislation and the constitution and make sure you figure out in advance what the rules are and how you can keep them in the most ethical way possible. Learn from the Polish Solidarity movement in the 1980s: Insist on the constitution.

Nobody can predict the future. I have no idea how a Trump administration will behave in the coming years. Maybe he is just in it for the money and will let the US take care of itself. Maybe it is just all about greed and that’s it. Maybe his crypto currency, $Trump, which was launched and announced just a couple of days before his inauguration is not about being able to take massive bribes from business leaders and foreign countries. Maybe it will remain a so-called “shit coin” that cannot at some point be exchanged for US dollars or any other currency in the real economy. I don’t know.

Nobody can tell what Trump is up to, but as Dr. Phil is famous for saying: The best predictor of future behavior is past behavior: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d22VLf_gBe8. On the other hand, here Phil explains why Trump is not a bully: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BtfMoZ9s8Sc&t=260s, and then there is Trump and his past behavior: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mdLfkhxIH5Q. So maybe Dr. Phil is wrong, and we cannot use past behavior to predict future behavior. I don’t know.

But at least, now you know why people would vote for a fascist future they probably do not want: They are being told that they can return to the past; they are told they can go back to when they last felt secure.

Unfortunately, the most privileged people in the US completely missed this and still haven’t understood what is happening. If they want to have the slightest chance of steering the US away from the Trump direction, it is time for a reality check and some deep and painful self-reflection among the elites across not just the US but all Western countries.

Racism has become a word that in the West tends to cover several kinds of hostility towards people who are “other,” i.e. hostility towards individuals or groups of people that are somehow different from ourselves. This broadening of the concept ‘racism’ creates a muddled debate about immigration, racism, xenophobia, cultural and religious minorities, and what it means to be a people and a nation, because very often what is called racism has very little to do with race. Instead, it is about cultural clashes. Cultural clashes can tear a society apart, so we need to prevent them, and the best method to do that is education. But not just any education, and it cannot just be force-feeding people all the politically correct answers. So, I would like to suggest that our vocabulary becomes more precise, that we start using the word xenophobia as the overarching umbrella word for dislike of others and see racism as a sub-category, and that we have a much deeper discussion about how we co-exist as citizens with different backgrounds. Migration is here to stay, but so is the need for societal cohesion.

Man is a social animal and part of that is to belong to groups and to identify with them and take some degree of responsibility for them. As societies become bigger and more diverse and we meet strangers, we spontaneously try to figure out if this is a person or a group of people we can trust. As ugly as it may sound, we could not survive if we were not given to prejudice. We need to have some kind of pre-conception of whom to trust and whom not to trust; our safety might depend on it.

It is quite natural that we tend to feel more secure around people who look and behave like the people we grew up around and who look like us. Very likely, we share the same norms, and we feel that we can decode the intentions behind what these people say and do. It feels safe. The more people look and behave differently from us, the harder it becomes for us to decode them. It feels less safe. We should not be ashamed of spontaneously reacting like this, but we should be able to self-monitor and reflect and think “Am I showing reasonable caution regarding this stranger or am I being racist or prejudice in an unreasonable way?” In a split second. If we realize that it’s just our head that is filled with racism or prejudice, then we need to be able to compensate for the initial feeling of caution with good manners so we can get to know the stranger. This would be the rational approach. But self-preservation is a survival instinct honed in the human being over thousands of years of evolution so it is really hard to do. Upon contact with a stranger, a new environment or circumstance, the first impulse is the assessment of the threat level. Chances are, by the way, that the other person is just as prejudice against us as we are against them, so we both have to contain ourselves, initiate an interaction, and figure out who the other is.

At the individual level, the first opening towards a stranger is typically a greeting ritual. In the West, in the form of a handshake, from India to Nepal with a namaste slight bow with your palms together in front of you, further east there is just the bow. In parts of the Muslim world, you touch your heart as you greet people, among Māoris, you rub noses — and there are more traditions than that. Each of those greeting traditions has a symbolic meaning that shows the other that you can adhere to shared norms and that you come in peace: The handshake shows that you are not holding a weapon, the namaste bow that you bow to the divine in the other person, further east, the bow is to recognize somebody’s status, touching your heart means you recognize the sacrality of the other, and rubbing noses that you share breath. The problem arises, of course, when people of different traditions need to meet and greet each other: If the stranger refuses the greeting ritual of our group, our people, can he or she be trusted?

Three degrees of xenophobia

I would like to introduce three degrees of xenophobia: racism, culturalism, and educationism, so we can become better at meeting strangers and dealing with ourselves when we meet strangers. At the individual level: Are my fears reasonable or unreasonable in the personal meeting with a foreigner? At the societal level: How are we dealing with immigrants and with ourselves as a collective?

When Europe colonized the rest of the planet, racism was not prominent at first. Rather, first the Catholic church and later also the Protestants saw in the peoples around the world heathens who needed Christ and salvation. And if they refused the “gracious” offer, they were often tortured and killed in brutal ways. Or kept as slaves. As slavery became organized, particularly with the triangular transatlantic trade, racism became an explicit phenomenon, and in Europe in the 1800s, racism became a pseudoscience that tried to group people from around the globe into different races according to skin color and head shapes. Often the differences that were associated with a darker color of skin related to such traits as intelligence and sexual propensity, which was particularly the case regarding sub-Saharan Africans. This had a very clear purpose: to prove that non-Europeans were lesser humans (if humans at all) than the Europeans, and that Europeans were therefore supposed to rule over them and entitled to enslaving them. The more Europeans could convince themselves that particularly Africans were closer to animals than to humans, the more they could justify their treatment or maltreatment of them. This is the original understanding of the word racism and what the word ought to refer to: the conviction that humans belong to different biological races, and that this difference makes a difference.

Racism in this sense makes no sense, there is only one kind of humans. Skin color vary, but it is only skin deep, so to speak.

Yet, racism like this is still around. People still judge other people based on the color of their skin, and consciously or subconsciously, many people, perhaps most of us, ascribe others certain qualities or lack thereof based on their physical appearance. The progress that human civilization has made in this area is that we are qualifying racism as illegal. It is no longer politically accepted to keep people of different color apart through apartheid measures, such as different public spaces, and verbal racism and racial slurs are not culturally accepted. There are still cultural biases and racism, but most societies have done what they can at the legal level to abolish it.

Culturalism is not about physical appearance but, as the word suggests, about culture, cultural norms, and religion. Shared cultural norms such as religion, morality, views on equality between the sexes, attitudes between generations, respect for authorities, etc. allow us to avoid a lot of conflicts within society. If we all expect that girls and boys, women and men should have the same opportunities in life, we don’t get into family conflicts about whether daughters should have as much education and individual freedoms as sons, and if they should be allowed to have sex before marriage too. If we all expect the opposite, conflicts are reduced as well.

Culture matters, and when we live in a diverse society where we do not share cultural norms and/or religion, there will be cultural apprehensions and conflicts.

Educationism has mostly been addressed as a challenge within modern society, when, say, people from a working class background become the first in their family to attend university, and they realize that the other university students come from academic families and have different norms and knowledge. There is also a general tendency towards holding people in higher esteem, the more formal education they have.

I would like to suggest that a lot of xenophobia in the West today has a strong educationistic element. I would also like to suggest that this educationism is more subconscious than racism and culturalism, if for no other reason than we never bring education up as a topic. Racism is often mentioned, and cultural differences are discussed, but we hardly ever openly address the education gap between the richest and the poorest countries. We thereby shy away from addressing the average education gap that is very often there between Westerners and immigrants to the West. So, what might be the reason why the education gap is not discussed in the open, and why educationism may be more subconscious than culturalism and racism?

What to do about racism, culturalism, and educationism

The natures of the three isms, the problem they each represent, and what can be done about them are different. For all three, education is the answer, but they are different kinds of education, and who needs the education differs too. This is probably best illustrated as a matrix:

We can do something about all three isms, but the problems, the assumptions, and the solutions are different among them.

Racism and the racists

Judging people based on the color of their skin is nonsense and appalling. Yet, many people do it. Probably because it makes them feel better about themselves: there is a “them” and an “us,” and we are inherently superior to them. This is not just a white phenomenon, brown people do it too, and it tends to be assumed that a darker skin tone than one’s own entails inferiority. The Middle East is rife with this kind of racism, and it is widespread among immigrant groups in the West.

Since there is no connection between skin color and personal abilities, skin color is not the problem, and the person with more melanin and darker skin is not the problem either; the problem is the racist. For some people who are at the bottom of their society, the color of their skin may be the only thing that distinguishes them from other people at the bottom of society, and they reach for the one thing they can grab onto that will give them a sliver of self-respect and status. This does not make it right, but it may explain a lot and make it possible to understand and address. For people higher up in society, such as politicians, influencers, and religious leaders, racism may be a way of staying in power by creating that “we” that the people at the bottom are longing after so badly.

To educate racists one cannot shove non-racism, non-bias, and all “the right opinions” down their throat. It typically involves blame, nobody likes this, and racists are humans too.

For the racist people at the bottom of society who are the most vulnerable, the best approach is probably to embrace them and understand them and their situation, to let them experience that their assumptions are false, and to give them access to education and work that gives them a sense of accomplishment and identity that is focused on something else. They have made race a part of their identity, and the educational task is to replace their need for racism with an alternative that is meaningful to them and about something else, and that gives them status. In this respect, cultural capital and some culture to be proud of is probably a better way to go than just to focus on upgrading professional skills, though that may be useful too. Adherence to a soccer team and racism are in some cases intertwined in Europe, but they need not be. Being a team supporter and becoming, say, a volunteer in a club that is related to one’s favorite team, would be a fruitful alternative to defining oneself based on skin color. It would add accomplishment and being part of a team to one’s identity; there might even be people of darker skin color volunteering in the same club. Getting over racism is thus a question about bildung: Do people have rich life experiences and cultural experiences that allow them to find common ground with people who look different from themselves without feeling threatened by it? The task is to add something to people’s lives that gives them a sense of self and self-worth with a non-skin-color-based identity. It could be to start a choir or create a community project, particularly if different people collaborate and accomplish something together while they chitchat and get to know each other. It feels good and there is no blame involved.

For people in power, singing and volunteering would be equally useful, but it is less likely that they would join. With them, it might make sense to attack their racism head-on, but not by telling them facts, they would probably be immune to that, but rather by asking for their own facts and sources. Some will bring up the Bell Curve and quote the numbers that show lower average intelligence in some countries than others, and then they will connect that to skin color. Some interesting facts are 1: countries of the same predominant color of skin vary in average intelligence, 2: average intelligence by country https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/average-iq-by-country rather closely matches access to quality education https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/education-index-by-country; the major exception is China. Finding out if the racist can explain the connection would probably be very educational.

Culturalism and the culturalists

Judging people based on culture and cultural norms seems to be a basic human trait that has evolved over thousands of years, and it allows us to judge whether we can trust strangers or not. Historically, tribes and larger groups of people have created myths, habits, and religions that have managed to keep them together while distancing them from neighboring tribes and cultures, and this has strengthened internal cohesion and social peace. In sociological terms, growing this increasing cultural difference between groups is called schismogenesis: schism means cleft in Greek and genesis means creation. The more different we find other groups, whether it is clothing, beliefs, eating habits, or greeting rituals, the more we can keep our own group together, and so we keep our guards up and hesitate before we allow ourselves to trust strangers. There is nothing wrong with this, it is actually a good thing, because through history, it has kept increasingly large societies together and kept internal peace. Where it becomes a bad thing is in a world of international collaboration, trade, and migration if keeping one’s guards up becomes an obstacle to peaceful interaction. If initial caution becomes racism or cultural chauvinism and prejudice that lead to conflicts and oppression.

In pluralistic societies with a great diversity of subcultures, we therefore either need to agree upon one shared culture or get to know more about the other subcultures and about culture and cultural norms in general, or all of the above. That is how we can keep social peace in a pluralistic society.

Agreeing on one shared culture does not mean that all members of minority cultures need to give up their own culture or religion; a person can subscribe to more than one culture. As an individual, one can be bicultural, tricultural, or more, and one can practice a different religion than the majority and still participate in most secular aspects of the culture of others and of society as a whole.

The 21st century provides all of us with more interaction with people from different cultures than ever before, and for the most part, that gives many benefits. But it also creates a lot of friction and conflicts when we cannot distinguish between which cultural differences that deeply matter, such as equality or inequality between the sexes, and which differences that allow us to get new experiences that enrich our life, such as tasing new foods, experiencing religious holiday celebrations from a different religion, or questioning our own moral values and cultural assumptions.

The keyword regarding culturalism is tolerance: We do not have to agree with other people’s culture or practice it, but we need to be able to tolerate that other people live in ways that are different from ours, as long as it does not affect other people’s lives or become a source of fundamental conflict in society. Tolerance needs to be mutual, and cultural exploration and education in pluralistic societies therefore cannot just be “us” educating “them.” It needs to be all of us exploring what our own culture and others’ culture are about so that on the one hand, we do not feel threatened by the little things that don’t really make that much of a difference, and on the other hand, we can speak clearly about the things that do matter and stay focused on that.

Do handshakes and namastes matter? On the surface of it, no. It does not matter how people greet each other, what matters is that people greet each other in the same way. If one does not use the common form of greeting in a particular place, one tells one’s surroundings there that one does not play by the same cultural norms as them. If this happened by mistake because one did not know better and one starts using the customary greeting ritual, no problem. If one insists that one does not want to use the customary greeting ritual, it either requires a good explanation (shaking hands while suffering from scabies is a really bad idea, and anybody would accept that explanation; an immunodeficiency would be a fully acceptable explanation for not rubbing noses with Māoris), or one positions oneself as somebody who does not want to be trusted. Which one should absolutely be entitled to do.

Educationism and the educationists

Judging people based on formal education may or may not be relevant. If we judge people morally, there is no relevance; longer formal education does not equal higher moral standards. If we judge people professionally or with regards to immigration, formal education is generally relevant; formal education plays a big role in how one is going to handle any given job and one’s ability support oneself in a new country.

What’s interesting is if we subconsciously judge people when formal education is not relevant. Do we subconsciously value complexity of knowledge in a way we are not used to addressing explicitly? Do we have intuitions about longer formal education that makes us trust people more, the better educated they are? And if so: Why? Do we think more formal education equals better understanding of the world in general and therefore better decision making? Do people make better decisions in general with more formal education? Or does formal education signify higher intelligence, and we think more intelligent people are better to be around?

With regards to immigration, it makes sense if educationism is triggered and one is an educationist. In economically and technologically complex societies such as the West where complex skills are generally required if you are going to make a decent living in a legal way, it is reasonable that undereducated immigrants raise concerns. The first concern is: How are they going to make a living if they speak and read the language poorly, are illiterate or close to illiterate, and if they have false expectations about the country, the culture, and its norms where they just arrived? And if they have false expectations and are undereducated, how are they going to acquire the knowledge of various kinds that will allow them to support themselves? Whether the country is a welfare state or a society without a social safety net, large groups of people who cannot understand the society they are in, who cannot communicate well, and who cannot make a living will create problems one way or the other.

The solution to a lack of formal education is simple: educate people. The question is what kind of education is needed, how much, and who is going to pay for it? And what about the non-formal education, life experience, cultural capital, open-mindedness, tolerance, the ability to pick up social norms and find new friends, contribute to one’s local community, and blend in?

Separating racism, culturalism, and educationism

If we could separate racism, culturalism, and educationalism as we deal with immigration and globalization, we could have a more meaningful and productive debate about what to do when people migrate and how to respect, tolerate, and understand each other. We would be able to discuss what is the real problem, who needs more education, what to do about culture and bildung, how we are going to organize it, and who is going to pay for it?

Racism, culturalism, and educationism may, of course, very often be blended into the same situation: The Syrian medical doctor arriving in Europe may be assumed to be without any useful education and thus end up being a cabdriver. If he does get a job at a hospital, he and his colleagues may misunderstand each other due to cultural differences and different social norms, and patients may be racist and won’t let him touch them.

For us to solve this kind of complex prejudice and xenophobia it would probably be very helpful if we could separate educationism, culturalism, and the actual racism in our minds and in our language when we encounter people from other parts of the world and need to make migration work. At least we need to understand that they are different, and that if we call all of it racism, reasonable apprehension towards strangers and foreigners cannot be discussed in a meaningful way.

Few people are proud of being racists, most people do not see themselves as racist and do not want to be blamed for being racist. Yet, all of us hold prejudice once it has been planted in us, and some of it is prejudice against skin color. We can move or grow beyond this prejudice, but it will still whisper in our ears from time to time. It’s like bicycling: once you know it, it stays with you. And just like you can refrain from bicycling and not use the skill for years and then, the moment you get on a bike, the skill is still there, the same goes for racism. Once the prejudice has been planted, it is impossible to root it out. Even if you realize how awful and stupid racism is and you get beyond it and never refer to it, the prejudice can be triggered, and you suddenly have a thought you do not want to have. But exactly because you do not want to have that thought, you are not a racist. You are a conscious and conscientious human being who does not want to be a racist, but your past is still stuck in your brain, and you will just have to live with that.

So, calling all kinds of xenophobia racism is not a good idea. We need be able to discuss culture, religion, and education and differences in culture, religion, and education, and we cannot have that conversation if having cultural disagreements, including religious disagreements, and pointing out lack of education labels people as racists. People are different in so many respects, and we need to be able to acknowledge and talk about that in civilized ways.

Namaste.

Something truly remarkable is happening in the US: Republicans are realizing that the democratic system itself is more important than political differences within the system, and they are deciding to vote for Democratic Vice President Harris. I don’t know if there has ever been a similar situation in history. In France, the center and the left recently united to coordinate their candidates so the far right would not win, but nobody voted against their normal political affiliation. In this article I am going to explore the deeper political and cultural structures in this development, and I am also going to address the need for rethinking education as we move forward. The US is the oldest modern democracy emerging from the Enlightenment and the democracy with the biggest global economic, technological, and environmental influence. It would be a disaster not just for Americans but for humanity if the next US government were not democratic and did not focus on climate change, global collaboration, equality, human rights, long term consequences of AI, and solving other global challenges. As a species, we are facing a polycrisis, and there is no way we can face up to this if the US is not playing an active part in solving our global problems.

Since the dawn of modern democracy, we have been trained to view politics as a struggle between left and right. In effect, there was never just two political ideologies: socialism and capitalism or liberals and conservatives, there were three ideologies: liberalism, socialism, and conservatism. Whenever the three have been balanced in politics, nations have thrived; when one has monopolized politics, nations have failed. We need the balance, which happens in the political middle. Staying there and maintaining a democratic system requires not just political wisdom from the system, but also a different approach to education than what most countries provide today. Luckily, there are plenty of examples of ‘democratic education’ that works, and the same education would also be what we need to address the polycrisis.

Political wisdom versus deterioration of democracy

In the aftermath of WW2, the United States had the wisdom to realize that Europe might welcome the Soviet Union and fall into authoritarianism, unless Europeans in general experienced economic growth, progress, and hope. The United States also had the wisdom and willingness to pay for democracy in Europe, hence, the Marshall Plan.

Today, we have economic growth across the West, but it is not taxed and distributed in such a way that the middle-class, which is the backbone of any stable democracy, feels economically secure. Particularly the lower middle-class, unskilled laborers, young people, and people in the gig-economy are under constant stress. Part of the reason is digitization and the transition to a green economy, which is disrupting jobs and making a lot of professional training useless.

Add to this the economic and cultural globalization where privileged people with academic degrees and good jobs have looked down on nationalism and the nation state. They have ignored that the nation provides most Westerners with a substantial part of their identity and that it is where people can make themselves understood in the one language they speak. Love of country and fear that immigration will change society and cultural norms has been dismissed as backward or racist by globalizers.

As a result, millions of Westerners are now voting for politicians who are promising them the past. Because in the past, they felt economically secure, the nation seemed homogenous, and the world made sense.

We cannot go back, though. We need to move forward. But to do that and to keep democracy and freedom in the process, the future that we are moving towards needs to work for all of us. Everybody needs to be able to see themselves thriving in that future.

What is politics all about?

What are we actually negotiating politically and voting about in the modern nation state democracy? Overall, two things: our relationship to other countries, i.e. foreign policy, military, and migration, and our relationship to each other inside the country. In the industrialized nation state, our relationship to each other includes, besides democracy, capitalism with capitalist owners of the means of production and workers who are rewarded for their work with money. Before the steam engine, this was not the case. Most people lived on farms and rarely even needed money. In the industrialized society, everybody needs money. So, in the modern, industrialized, democratic nation state we are mainly negotiating how to distribute the money we create. Our political-economic system is setting us op for a certain kind of political content. About 200 years ago, that led to three political ideologies:

The bourgeoisie and capitalists who invested in the colonies and the engines wanted political freedom and liberty to pursue their happiness, hence they were against the old feudal system and were liberal.

When the workers first organized, they wanted to take over the means of production from the capitalists through revolution, but eventually they mainly wanted livable wages and protection by the state against the worst sides of the capitalists, and they became socialists.

The landowners and the clergy, i.e. the people who had benefitted the most from the feudal system, liked to conserve what served them, and they became conservatives.

Democracy as we know it and the Democratic Pie

To understand politics in the West, instead of seeing the political landscape as an axis between the Left (workers) against the Right (capitalists), we need to add an axis with two other extremes: Absolute Order at the top and Anarchy / Chaos at the bottom. With these two axes, Order-Chaos and Left-Right, we can enter liberalism, socialism, and conservatism as three slices of the same Democratic Pie called liberal democracy:

The illustration also shows how all three ideologies have a non-democratic version outside the Democratic Pie where compromises do not work: libertarianism, communism, and fascism. Liberalism, socialism, and conservatism, respectively, tend to drift out into their extreme if one of them has the political majority for too long.

The three ideologies mix, so there are six major ideological profiles: liberal, social-liberal, socialist, social-conservative, conservative, and conservative-liberalist (the latter would more likely be called moderate, though):

The meaning of the word ‘liberal’ has drifted in two slightly different directions among the anglophones and other Westerners, so on the European continent (I am writing from Denmark), we would probably define most American liberals as social-liberal. In most European countries, we have the ideological nuances distributed among several political parties (in Denmark, currently 11 parties in Parliament). In the US, the ideological diversity has generally been within two parties, the Democratic Party and the Republican Party.

Yet, on both continents, we have defined politics in binary terms: Democrats versus Republicans in the US, and Left versus Right in Europe, and they are roughly covering the Democratic Pie as follows:

Underneath these different names, though, our understanding of the open society, democracy, politics, government, individual freedom, human rights, community, family, what it means to be a nation, etc. are pretty much the same. Because the West is a product of Gutenberg’s printing press, capitalism, Europeans colonizing the world, modern science, the steam engine, democracy, and the three core ideologies that emerged during the Enlightenment and industrialization: liberalism, socialism, and conservatism. And as long as we maintain their balance, our nations thrive.

When nations don’t thrive

So, what happens when society and the ideologies are not balanced anymore? When people no longer feel that the political system works for them?

People lose faith in the balanced middle and vote their nations outside the Democratic Pie. Here illustrated as darkness and extremist slogans surrounding the Democratic Pie; notice that all six ideologies can become intolerant and extremist and insist on absolute power:

But why would anybody want to leave the “Democratic Pie” and move out into extremism and darkness?

Because staying inside the Democratic Pie is hard work and can be very annoying. Everybody needs to compromise. Which can be painful, because each of the ideologies is about moral values and a sense of fairness and justice. And morality and our sense of fairness and justice are emotions that go back to our monkey ancestors, they are the deep structures in our meaning-making (if you don’t believe me, try this 3-minute video). So having to compromise can hurt. When we cannot handle that pain, the darkness with its absolutism may seem attractive.

The foundation of democracy

Inside the Democratic Pie, we can disagree and discuss peacefully; outside it, we cannot, and the foundation of any democracy is a populace who can stay inside the Pie.

To be able to see your political adversaries as moral human beings, not enemies or fundamentally bad people, to handle compromise, to in fact be tolerant (not just yell tolerant slogans aggressively at others), and to take responsibility for the wellbeing of the country as a whole, including the people you dislike, does not come naturally to us. It must be cultivated. Which must have been what Benjamin Franklin had in mind when he was asked: “Well, Doctor, what have we got, a republic or a monarchy?” and he replied: “A republic, if you can keep it.”

When we explore the origin of our current school systems, one realizes that there used to be an awareness about the need for democratic cultivation. The German philosopher Friedrich Schiller wrote about Bildung, John Dewey and Eduard Lindeman wrote explicitly about education for democracy, and others did too.

What is bildung?

After the French Revolution, Schiller and other European intellectuals struggled to grasp why it turned into such a bloodbath. The American Revolution had led to political freedom, why had that not happened in France? Why could the French not handle political freedom? Schiller came up with an explanation:

There are three kinds of people, he wrote: 1: Emotional people. The people who are in the throes of their emotions; they are not free to overrule their emotions, and therefore they themselves are not free and cannot handle political freedom. 2: Rational people. The people who have internalized the norms or rationale of society and are self-monitoring and governing themselves according to the expectations of others. They are not free either, because they just do what everybody else expects or tells them to do. 3: Free people. The people who have internalized the norms of society and who have reconnected with their emotions. Sometimes they must choose between what their emotions say and what everybody else says, and thereby they are free: They can make autonomous, conscious, and conscientious choices. According to Schiller, 1 and 2 are bound by necessity and cannot handle political freedom, so they ran amok and created the bloodbath; 3 are liberated from necessity and can handle political freedom. There were just not enough of them to stop the violence.

Schiller called the process as well as the result Bildung, which in English is best translated as formation or cultivation. The ‘formation/cultivation philosophy’ in the Anglophone culture is not as extensive as the bildung philosophy in German and Scandinavian culture, but it is there.

When we started creating modern universities and colleges in the West 200 years ago, bildung was an integral part of what university and college should be about. But this was just for the bourgeoisie, of course. For everybody else, in most places, public schools, i.e. primary schools, became knowledge transfer factories that were mainly there to instill basic knowledge, nationalism, and obedience in future workers.

Among the thinkers in the US who realized that bildung, formation, or democratic cultivation was necessary for everybody if they were to become citizens who could keep a democracy, were John Dewey and Eduard Lindeman in the early 20th century.

Here Dewey in How We Think, 1910: The prime necessity for scientific thought is that the thinker be freed from the tyranny of sense stimuli and habit, and this emancipation is also the necessary condition of progress.

Lindeman, The Meaning of Adult Education, 1926: No human being can safely be trusted with power until he has learned how to exercise power over himself. We are slowly coming to see that all “power-grabbers” and dictators who reach out for unusual power are in reality compensating for inner deficiencies of their personalities.

We are born as emotional beings in the throes of our instincts and emotions, and it is only through socialization, cultivation, and education, and through learning to play by other people’s rules that we can acquire the bildung that allows us to thrive and be tolerable among others. According to Schiller, this happens through aesthetics that can affect, inspire, lift, and mold our emotions. According to another German philosopher, Johann Gottlieb Fichte, bildung happens though pushbacks: When we face surprises, discomforts, offenses, and art and literature that move or shock us, that is when we grow and find out who we truly are, and that is how we become free people.

To maintain societal stability, political freedom, and democracy, we all need bildung, formation, cultivation. We must be able to contain our emotions, to be team players on behalf of society, and to have the moral backbone to find our own voice and speak our own mind, even when it may be unpopular — and not least: We must be able to tolerate that others do the same. Only free people can do this, and it requires education that promotes it. It also requires updated education that enables people to provide for themselves when technologies and the economy change, and that allows them to grasp what is going on and how the political system works.

We spent the past 200+ years in the West building our nation states and making them increasingly inclusive and democratic. We also educated towards a national identity and a sense of peoplehood so that we could care enough about our country to be active and loyal citizens. For millions of people, being a good, moral person means loving your country and your people and caring about them. For some of them being a good, moral person also means conforming to the majority, while, for others, it means speaking up to the majority when it is not behaving morally.

A moral divide

What we are currently seeing across the West is a moral divide along a fault line defined by loyalty towards peoplehood and nation. The nation state itself is under pressure from globalization, digitization, migration, and climate change. Since these issues are hard to grasp, it is easier to focus on what we already know: that which gives us our culture, language, and a substantial part of our identity, and to feel the fear when we think we may lose it.

When we don’t educate in ways that deal with this, we are failing ourselves and democracy. Particularly when the various elites in politics, commerce, tech, finance, or academia forget that not everybody has the resources and opportunities that they themselves have, and when they therefore lose interest in good public schools for everybody. If, on top of that, the elites start badmouthing the biggest cultural and legal entity that allows the majority of the population to have political influence, i.e. the nation state, and they start using nationalism as a curse word, the people with the most influence are eroding the foundation under the system within which they are elites.

When people feel ignored or downright bullied by the people in power (“basket of deplorables,” right?), why should they feel at home in and be loyal to the system that seems to be stacked against them? Why should they trust what goes on inside the Democratic Pie? If they are also professionally undereducated relative to the skills needed in the economy created by the privileged people and they fear losing their livelihood, why should they be interested in maintaining the current system?

Escape from freedom

The German Jewish psychologist and philosopher Erich Fromm wrote the book Escape from Freedom in 1941. In it, he explores what happens when an existing economy and society are in a transition: As the economic fabric changes, societal and moral structures break down, the culture and its symbols can no longer express what is going on, people can no longer apply their knowledge, and they suffer from what Fromm calls moral aloneness: To feel completely alone and isolated leads to mental disintegration just as physical starvation leads to death. (…) This lack of relatedness to values, symbols, patterns, we may call moral aloneness and state that moral aloneness is as intolerable as the physical aloneness, or rather that physical aloneness becomes unbearable only if it implies also moral aloneness. (…)

According to Fromm, to avoid this horrible feeling, people develop an authoritarian character and fall for authoritarian leaders. He uses two historical examples: First the invention of the printing press, which led to Luther’s Reformation. Second, the collapse of the German economy in the 1920s and Hitler’s rise to power.

This historical development is easy to relate to the current extreme right, which looks more and more like potential fascism, but how could it explain leftwing absolutism, intolerance, extremism, cancel culture, and violent attacks on, say, people who say that there are only two sexes and that one cannot change sex? One explanation could be that a generation of young people have grown up with postmodern deconstruction of the collective moral value systems and of the nation state. They simply never had a shared sense of society, culture, and belonging, because nobody gave it to them. Nobody showed them a society that stood for something good, true, and beautiful. A society with values to live up to and worth caring about. Instead, they got political correctness and were told that their subjective emotions were the truth. To compensate for the lack of a collective culture and the aesthetic and symbolic world that comes with culture, and instead of growing due to the offenses and pushbacks that come with other people having culture, young people turned to their own body and subjective feelings for answers, identity, and truth. No wonder if they find the Democratic Pie a very uncomfortable place: People there have offensive viewpoints! It feels a lot better to be angry among likeminded people and to silence others by yelling slogans about tolerance.

Fromm did not use Schiller’s terms emotional people, rational people, and free people, but essentially Fromm explained the escape from freedom as rational people becoming emotional people instead of becoming free people. When the internalized norms do not deliver the expected results, rational people can either become free people who accept the conflict between the norms and their emotions and they can start making autonomous, individual, conscious choices, or they can be dependent on conformity and unite around the emotions they share: anxiety, fear, anger, and a longing for the past. They then get a sense of relief when a political bully promises them a bygone era, and they numb their anxiety and feel powerful when they get to use violence.

It seems that many of today’s voters on the extreme right used to subscribe to the Democratic Pie but are drifting out into the darkness. The voters on the extreme left, on the other hand, may never have joined the Democratic Pie in the first place. They grew up in an ultra-individualizing, norm-deconstructing culture that may never have given them a full sense of society and what it means to be a citizen in a democracy. One of the reasons being that they came of age in an educational system that mainly saw them as a future workforce, not as humans and future citizens with moral, emotional, aesthetic, social, and creative needs. We have starved their souls and now they are left with anger and are unable to handle pushbacks and compromises.

Saving the Pie and avoiding the darkness

Freedom and democracy are created and upheld from inside the Democratic Pie. By free people and rational people. Free people understand and appreciate the rules and norms of society, but they also have autonomy and can choose freely between their own emotions and the norms of society whenever there is a conflict. Rational people play by the rules and uphold the rules and the norms, and as long as they feel comfortable inside the democratic system, they play along. Both free people and rational people are team players. The emotional people cannot take one for the team, i.e. the democratic system, and cannot maintain democracy.

So, two questions arise when the rules and norms of society lose their connecting power because of technological and other development. First: How much discomfort can the rational people tolerate inside the Democratic Pie, before they start drifting out into the darkness and try to go back? Second: How many people realize that they cannot go back and need to move forward into a new territory where they need to be free people who can contribute to creating new rules and norms that serve the new circumstances?

Right now, Republicans inside the US Democratic Pie are struggling with the choice between party loyalty and loyalty towards the American Constitution and the principles of rule of law and democracy: Voting Trump or Harris? Social media and US mainstream media are currently showing Republicans who are choosing Constitution, freedom, and democracy over darkness, and announce that they will vote Harris to save their country. They choose not to go back but insist on moving forward.

Here is a clip from CNN with the Republican mayor of Mesa, Arizona, John Giles, who will vote for Harris, and one can tell how hard this is for him: https://x.com/AccountableGOP/status/1818292738737004807; the X profile sharing the clip is Republican Voters Against Trump https://x.com/AccountableGOP.

Republicans Against Trump https://x.com/RpsAgainstTrump is sharing similar messages, here former Georgia Republican Lt. Gov. Geoff Duncan: https://x.com/RpsAgainstTrump/status/1816498257331118227.

Ordinary former Trump voters are speaking up in a campaign too:
https://x.com/AccountableGOP/status/1818051375357649195
https://x.com/AccountableGOP/status/1817605945477738584

And here is a former Republican vice president: https://x.com/AccountableGOP/status/1816881169662873781

Republican Liz Cheney has said it for a while: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1TMs7_Npmvk

Vice President Harris is stating that they are not going back: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/cB74U_PdwBM

The current situation is not easy. It is already a powerful pushback for a lot of people, and whatever happens, it will change the United States forever. One way or the other. If Trump is elected, the US will very soon find itself in a darkness that is very unlikely to include democracy and rule of law. If Harris is elected, Republicans and Democrats have a once-in-a-lifetime chance of looking forward together and deal with the root causes of the current mess in America. Whether they manage to fully grasp the opportunity, time will show.

Hopefully, they will decide to zoom out and take a systems view on their country and prioritize education and bildung. Not just for the people who have lost the most over the past decades and who find hope when they hear Donald Trump promise them the past, but just as much education and bildung for the various elites who have so blatantly missed what happened to the least fortunate in their own society.

Writing from Europe and fearing for the future of democracy in general because no country is educating and promoting bildung sufficiently for the 21st century, I hope that we will all look ourselves in the mirror and ask ourselves: Do I want to be inside the Democratic Pie or out in the darkness? And if I want to be inside, do I prefer that the rest of my country is in there too, or do I want to contribute to pushing others out into the darkness?

I know what my answer is. You decide yours. And what you want to do with it.

By Lene Rachel Andersen, Denmark, and Folarin Gbadebo-Smith, Nigeria.

This article is a list of topics and considerations for the discussions at the online Global Meeting on Equinox on September 21, 2024, in the Global Bildung Network. Our overall theme in 2024 is What it means to be human: how we cooperate, how we can rethink the human experience, what it means now, and what it will mean in a society that allows everybody to thrive. We hope you find the topics important and intriguing, and that you will join our global online discussion about them. You can sign up for free here: https://us06web.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZcpcu2rrzosGN0iCZ0rlYiodMXMHr1wiLVi#/registration.

As we face seismic changes to life on the planet and therefore radical changes to what it means to be human, we need a global conversation about this subject that is open to everybody and open-ended. Among the radical changes are artificial intelligence, immense power concentration and power control due to new technologies, and global changes to the climate, flora, and fauna. There is also still immense inequality, racism, and oppression. Therefore, we need to rethink how we organize societies, structure local and global economies, and educate. Very importantly, we need to create a regenerative model for production and consumption that allows all humans and the planet to survive and thrive. We need a new collective ethos. Capitalism has solved one set of problems, but it has created other kinds of problems, and it has dissolved the social fabric that used to hold us.

Among the things we need to consider and rethink in the next model are the ABCDEFGH: the fundamental alphabet, the building blocks that can turn what it means to be human upside down, for better or for worse:

· Artificial intelligence: Never before have we faced artificial interpretation and potential for decision making that is beyond human comprehension and based on more data than humans can even grasp. Some of the data is from surveillance with facial recognition, and never before has there been private or government ownership over such data and technology.

· Biotech: With the ability to not only redesign existing life forms but also to create artificial life and implement artificial intelligence into living, neural networks, what it means to be human changes fundamentally. So does our relationship to the rest of nature, our abilities to completely mess up nature’s self-organizing complex systems, and our already unique place in the evolution of all life. With the tools for manipulation of the genome and greater control over life as we know it, whether by governments or commercial interests, humanity enters an entirely different realm of capability and responsibility.

· Circularity: Contrary to the development of artificial intelligence and biotech, which pursue a development towards constant, exponentially increasing complexity, nature and human life are, at their very foundation, circular. The evolution of life itself, of the human species, of our cultures, and of our meaning-making happens in iterations upon iterations with slight variations from time to time. New phenomena in nature and culture are co-evolutionary: they emerge in context and are themselves context. This is an aspect of evolution that exponential technological development does not possess, and therefore new technologies often disrupt circular systems.

· Demographics: The population explosion happens in the poorest parts of the world with the least access to education, and where the consequences of climate change and global inequality are already felt the most. This naturally leads to migration and is a cocktail bound for human suffering and portends a global disaster.

· Education: We are facing a number of educational problems: According to the UN, by 2030, the world will be 44 million schoolteachers short, and in many places, teachers’ education is already not sufficient, most education is focused on knowledge transfer and teaching to tests rather than comprehension and educating for life. Worst of all: education is mostly seen as an expense, not as an investment. To the small extent that education is seen as an investment, it is as a personal investment in individual happiness and opportunity, not as a societal investment in an informed populace who can contribute to the thriving of a society or a country.

· Finance, Never have so many resources been held by so few. The more global trade becomes, the more the money will trickle up towards the highest existing concentration of capital. Inequality of people , inequality of countries, and unregulated inequality of technology make for a combustible social mix.

· Global dispersion of knowledge: Along with extreme economic inequality, inequality in education and knowledge is just as severe. Thirteen percent of the world’s population is illiterate (the lowest rate ever, though), and about one third is not using the internet. In the richest countries, primary, secondary, and tertiary education is of high quality and free of charge, up to 3% of 64-year-olds hold a Ph.D., up to 100% of people use the internet, and there is state-subsidized access to life-long learning. We need a world where knowledge is treated as a global public good and is freely distributed, and we need to lift from the bottom. We have a world where people can communicate and learn around the globe, which is an opportunity that we have never had before.

· Humanism and Human Rights: Humanism and Human Rights insist that individuals are equal: they have equal value and require equal protection and equal rights. This is a fundamental principle behind rejecting and fighting racism, colonialism, slavery, oppression, and chauvinism of any kind. We cannot cooperate globally unless we recognize that all individuals are humans on the same terms.

These eight building blocks contain challenges that we need to face if we are going to create a thriving planet for ourselves and everything on it. If we want thriving societies and a thriving global economy, they are necessities. The good news is that ABCDEFGH all are within human control. We can take responsibility for them.

This is what we are going to discuss on September 21, 2024, at the Global Meeting on Equinox: What it means to be human when we are facing these challenges and how we can deal with them. As previously mentioned, you can sign up for free here: https://us06web.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZcpcu2rrzosGN0iCZ0rlYiodMXMHr1wiLVi#/registration

What it Means to Be Human

To deal with the ABCDEFGH, the eight major building blocks and challenges, we need to look at the ways we cooperate as humans. Therefore, 11 concrete ideas that can change our structures for cooperation have been brought together below. Some are new, some are old, some of them anybody can start locally with only a bit of drive and initiative. Some of them require major investments up front, and some need new legislation. The 11 ideas are:

1. Neighborocracy.

2. Reclaiming cooperation; challenging the current money system as an instrument of cooperation and introducing the concept of female money.

3. Looking at the economy as a game and designing it based on gamification and game theory

4. Global taxation at the global top and on data.

5. PACT: Production, Accomplishments, Cooperatives, Trade.

6. Polymodern economics.

7. Harmonizing economy with nature.

8. Bildung-/ubuntu-education.

9. Neighborocracy & bildung housing.

10. Bildung for peace.

11. Copyright to your biometrics and the PODs to store it.

Together, the ideas present ways to rethink governance, money, economic development, education, and armed conflict. Combined, they could lead to a redesign of societal structures that will reinforce what already works well but challenge what doesn’t work and causes harm to humans and nature.

When we meet on September 21, 2024, we are not just going to focus on the challenges, we will also discuss how you can take these ideas with you and turn them into action. Through short presentations, we will ensure they are properly introduced, so read on if you feel like it, or show up for the Global Meeting at Equinox with curiosity. Some of the topics include suggested further reading so you can dive deeper into them. Feel free to comment as much as you want, and don’t forget to sign up here: https://us06web.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZcpcu2rrzosGN0iCZ0rlYiodMXMHr1wiLVi#/registration

1: Neighborocracy

Neighborocracy is a system of self-organized neighborhood parliaments, each consisting of up to 30 households, each of which becomes responsible for one thing that is important to the whole neighborhood and for everybody in it to thrive. The meeting formats guarantee that everybody gets heard and that decisions are collective. Each neighborhood and its parliament may join a larger parliament of 30 neighborhood parliaments, which then represents up to 900 households, and which may join other parliaments representing 30 x 900 households. The structure of Neighborocracy thus allows a fractal structure for thousands of neighborhoods to solve collective problems. The local neighborhood parliaments are self-organized, and decision making among parliaments is a constant process of collective issues being addressed and solved in the smallest parliament possible.

At the Global Meeting on Equinox, you will meet Joseph Rathinam who is one of the Neighborocracy leaders in India:

Suggested reading: https://medium.com/bildung/reclaiming-the-commonity-61614f6a3b62

2: Reclaiming Cooperation: Female Money

Humans are social animals. This means organizing to live together, not in the metaverse or other parts of cyberspace, but in real life. Who or what controls and regulates the means of cooperation? Today, it is largely fiat money, bankers, financiers, and governments, and the current dynamic of money is a zero-sum game. It is a binary system of winners and losers: spend your money and it is gone; with your money gone, you are out. But you still have to live. To make money, you need to have skills, which in many places requires money to get, i.e. borrowing and creating debt. Alternatively, one can just borrow money, work in insecure, poorly paid jobs, or end up in slavery. Or your children do. Or maybe you sell your daughter for marriage. As you make and spend money in the system you benefit the system long-term, but you only benefit yourself long-term if you can save up money. If you cannot save up money, you must keep earning and spending or you ‘fall out’ of the system: a death or debt spiral. The way more money is created is through creating debt that needs to be paid back with interest, and due to the way the system is designed, money automatically trickles up towards what has already shown a track record of generating more money. On its own and without restraints, capitalism increases the economic distance between top and bottom, i.e. inequality.

Inspired by the work of Belgian economist Bernard Lietaer, tech innovator Pindar Wong calls the current money ‘male money’ and wants to create community money or ‘female money,’ a kind of money that reproduces depending on how it is used and how value is created. The two kinds of money thus represent Yang and Yin, and the combination of the two could generate money where it is most needed: at the bottom.

This would require a complete rethinking of what money is and how the economy works. This has happened before: Fiat paper money was invented in China; the European Renaissance used it to create capitalism as part of colonialism, and among the technological drivers was Gutenberg’s printing press. Before fiat money and capitalism, both concepts seemed otherworldly, if people could even conceptualize them; now we all use them as if they are the most natural things. In fact, we treat current money, the market, and the economy as natural givens or forces of nature over which we have no control. This is simply wrong: money, the market, and the economy are all human made, and we can do with them whatever we want. We either change them deliberately as new technologies are created, or the new technologies will lead to new economic models that do not serve either humans or the planet. Male and female money, used together, may be regenerative if we design them well and use new technologies to help run them.

Fiat money is failing us. The current situation in which money is created out of thin air, debt is, in principle, infinite, unsustainable, and mainly in the hands of a few countries must be reexamined at its root. Humanity stands on the edge of a financial precipice and though it may look robust from certain corners of the OECD, it is obvious from the perspective of the bottom of the global economy that the current regulatory and management mechanisms simply cannot cope. How can the political economy of fiat money be managed? There are winners and losers in the current game, how can the winners, the uberwealthy, the tech giants, and the multinational corporations who thrive on the concept of “interest”–interests be managed?

The fundamental question is not the money, but how we cooperate, how we create value, and how value creation is rewarded and/or creates value for the worker-and-creator. Can we create a currency that rewards cooperation and actual value creation?

Suggested podcast with Pindar Wong: https://www.jsbarefoot.com/podcasts/2021/3/14/embrace-the-heretic-hong-kongs-pindar-wong and some very interesting articles too.

3: What if the economy were a game?

The economy is a game, but it is poorly designed, nobody can escape it or decide not to play, and it currently produces millions of winners and billions of losers. Most people only play the game out of necessity. We typically consider games something that people play for fun. Why? What is it that makes games fun and the economy a hellscape to at least a quarter of the people on the planet? By looking at the features that make games fun and meaningful, could we learn something that would allow us to design an economy with similar features: a set of principles and rules that would allow everybody to ‘play the game’ and continue playing with a sense of meaning and purpose?

These are some of the features of fun games:

· Easy onboarding and you get starting points or other rewards the moment you join so you can start playing with a sense of accomplishment.

· There are the same rules for everybody.

· The top players cannot rewrite the game;

· The rewards are predictable, there are no random changes to points and badges after you join.

· There are game rewards for new levels of achievement, and they are the same for everybody;

· You can win the game and reach the end point after which you can enjoy your victory — or you start over again. In board games, everybody may decide that you want to play again.

· If you ‘die’ or lose in online games, you can always start over again: there is easy onboarding. and you don’t re-enter and start with a deficit on points!

The economy will never be a pre-designed game that can remain the same forever without changes, of course. It will have to be a system that is under constant modification. That doesn’t mean we can’t learn something from good game design, i.e. gamification, and from how people perceive justice and appreciate cooperation in systems of exchange, i.e. game theory.

4: Global taxation at the global top and on data

Before the invention of the steam engine, the job market that followed it, and the modern nation state, there was no income tax. There was land tax and other taxes that were mainly taxation on property. There were some taxes imposed on farmers and indentured labor by the kings and religious establishment, but income tax as we know it today is based on the workforce of the industrialized nation state. In industrialized countries, national income tax is typically the main source of national tax revenue. People are taxed in the country where they work, which means that nation states mainly tax their own citizens, as income taxation for migrants is generally complicated.

With digital products and artificial intelligence replacing industry production of tangible goods as the main generators of profit, taxation needs to change accordingly. In a world of global, (almost) borderless, digital products, global companies, global markets, and global profits, and where the richest people are the owners of algorithms who also acquire global power, nation states need to regulate and tax that which generates the most global profit, and which takes away political power from legitimate political and democratic powers and institutions. Taxation in a digitized world needs to relate to data where the biggest profits are made.

How to do this is the big question, and nations need to collaborate on this. They also need to collaborate with tech industries to figure out the best ways to do it. The revenue from this taxation should be considered a global revenue that can be distributed to the poorest parts of the global economy as investment in education and infrastructure. Either the states start taxing global tech, or global tech will start the equivalent of taxation and charge countries for access to their digital services, which will basically mean that states have handed over their sovereignty and autonomy to algorithm-owning billionaires.

5: PACT: Payments, Accomplishments, Cooperatives, Trade

PACT is an economic infrastructure that is designed to promote easy onboarding at the bottom of the economy in subsistence economies. PACT stands for Payment for production; rewards for Accomplishments by individuals and villages in a gamified credit system in which the credits can be used to get new tools, and other benefits. It sets up Co-ops, enables viable Trade, and has a built-in education program that also allows people to earn credits by studying.

The idea is very hands-on: a cooperative PACT Umbrella is set up for a country or a region, and under it Local PACT cooperatives are established with up to 200 households. Each of these Local PACTs start out with 7 trained board members who are employed by the PACT Umbrella, they also get a refrigerated truck with a driver who goes to the Local PACT villages and buys produce, which is sold at the nearest market. The individual farmer automatically becomes a member of both the Local PACT and the Umbrella PACT at his or her first sale, and for each sale he/she gets both money in-hand and credits: the money they can spend; the credits will accumulate and work as savings for very specific uses. The credits are personal and cannot be transferred to family members or others, and with the accumulation of credits come access to farming equipment, benefits, and voting rights in the Local and the Umbrella PACT cooperatives. Over the course of 7 years, a Local PACT co-op gradually goes from being run by the trained board members to being taken over by the local members of the PACT with one trained board member being replaced by a local farmer each year. The education that will get members extra credits may be better agricultural techniques or economics and democratic training. Besides selling produce, farmers and villages can earn credits collectively or individually by promoting, say, irrigation, family planning, education for their children etc. For instance, parents could be rewarded with credits for each year their daughter(s) stay in school rather than getting married.

PACT members can track their credits online, and if they do not have a smart phone, a member can use a QR-code on a piece of laminated cardboard that they can show to the truck driver who can then scan it and show them their credits. As each PACT Enclave and its co-op grows in size and strength, it can branch into setting up factories for processed foods and its own stores.

PACT products should be sold under the same brand and marketed professionally from the beginning. Besides the food production and sales, each Local PACT is also part of a recycling system where people are paid and earn credits for collecting glass, soda cans, and plastic, which can then be re-used.

PACT could double as a ‘registration of existence’ system, which would be useful to many poor people around the globe. As production and sales grow, and as more people get better education and accumulate credits, the total credit score of a village or region becomes an indicator of economic robustness and may attract further investments. These accumulated credits might also work as the value base of a crypto currency; rather than “digging out” more crypto coins through an algorithm (like Bitcoin), the value of the PACT crypto will be rooted in the real economy and real value creation.

Suggested reading: https://www.nordicbildung.org/pact/

6: Polymodern Economics

The concept of polymodern economics describes the economy in four different strata:

· Indigenous gift and households economy: no money involved.

· Traditional market and cooperative, artisan, local economy: involves money.

· Modern capitalist, industrialized, national economy: involves money.

· Postmodern digital, continental and global economy: involves new kinds of money.

By distinguishing between, measuring, and facilitating each of the four economic strata differently, local, national, continental, and global economies can be addressed with different measures and taxation.

Explanatory reading: https://lenerachelandersen.medium.com/polymodern-economics-ec4d817b3824

PACT would primarily operate in the traditional market stratum of a polymodern economy, but it will build up capacity to produce for the city markets and supermarkets in the industrialized and global part of the economy.

7: Harmonizing Economy with Nature

In his (not yet published) 2024 paper Harmonise With Nature; Only a change of mindset can reverse cultural habits which counter nature, Dr. Ulrich E. Loening lists 9 fundamental differences between nature and industrialized society / economy and suggests that if we can grasp this and change our mindset accordingly, we can harmonize the economy with nature, and then we can thrive with nature and survive:

The full article: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/380319912_HARMONISE_WITH_NATURE_Only_a_change_of_mindset_can_reverse_cultural_habits_which_counter_nature?channel=doi&linkId=6643ae7b3524304153a751f9&showFulltext=true

This understanding of the economy could harmonize very well with the other approaches to rethinking economics presented above.

8: Bildung & Ubuntu Education

Education must be addressed as more than just the transfer of knowledge. It must address the full potential, meaning-making, and development of each individual person, their personality and agency in their community, culture, country, culture zone, and as a member of humanity and all life on the planet. There are traditions around the globe that promote this. Two of them are Ubuntu in parts of Africa and bildung, particularly as it has been developed in the Nordics.

A video about Ubuntu with Mamphela Ramphele from South Africa at the first global meeting on Equinox in September 2021: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XjqjLJVfGcA

A video about Ubuntu with Folarin Gbadebo-Smith from Nigeria at the global meeting on Equinox, March 2024: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rPGFGWqe1eI

Lene Rachel Andersen’s video about bildung from the same event: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W1Gk5kAsACc and here my article about bildung in Denmark: https://lenerachelandersen.medium.com/the-danish-secret-7e5e38750a01

All three speakers have contributed to the book What it means to be Human: https://www.nordicbildung.org/what-it-means-to-be-human/

9: Neighborocracy & Bildung Housing

The world over, there is a need for cheap, sanitary housing. In Africa, Asia, and Latin America, millions of people live in slums in or around the largest cities. In the US, one million people are homeless, and in major cities in the richest countries affordable housing, particularly for young people, is a problem. We need to invent cheap, sustainable housing with adequate clean water, plumbing, electricity, and sustainable indoor temperature regulation, as well as enable self-governance among the people who live there to maintain both buildings and installations. One option could be mass-produced, stackable, livable structures (i.e. old shipping containers) with installations that either include a self-contained water management system and solar power or that can easily be plugged into local main pipes, sewers, and grids. Traditional cooling technologies from Africa and the Middle East must be incorporated in the design, so that cooling will not require much, if any, electricity.

Taking from Neighborocracy, 30 family units could make up an entity that shares main installations for water management and electricity, and each 30-unit entity could be a bildung community, which would have access to education in maintenance, urban gardening, crafts, bookkeeping, food production, civics etc.

Quality housing is already being mass-produced as stackable units in Sweden: https://www.nytimes.com/2024/06/08/headway/how-an-american-dream-of-housing-became-a-reality-in-sweden.html

10: Bildung for Peace

Autocratic leaders around the globe are more interested in serving themselves and attacking neighboring countries than in creating conditions for the wellbeing of their own people. Good education is no guarantee for a peaceful society — Germany in the 1930s is just one example — but undereducation definitely makes manipulation of the masses, fascism, and other kinds of authoritarianism and totalitarianism easier. Bildung is the currently best-known vaccine against authoritarianism, and the wealthiest countries could probably make a rather cheap long-term investment in global stability and peace if they threatened autocratic leaders with educating their people, particularly the deserters from their armies. Imagine if NATO had threatened Russia with giving any deserting Russian soldier 2 years of education including learning a craft and bildung in a camp facility with indoor plumbing, three nutritious meals per day, and evenings and weekends off for sports and hobby activities. Not only would it make deserting rather appealing, returning to Russia afterwards might inspire some independent thinking.

11: Copyright to Your Biometrics and the PODs to Store it

AI is increasingly closer to being able to create live deepfakes that are so like the original person that differentiating between the two becomes impossible. When this happens — and probably even before then — fakes will infiltrate the mediascape, trust in media will erode, and democracy will be dead. So will business negotiations and other meetings online; only live presence will guarantee that you are not talking to a deepfake avatar.

A substantial, if not by itself sufficient, means to protect us from deepfakes and misuse of digital identity will be to give every citizen copyright to their own face, voice, and all biometrics by default and to make it a basic human right. This would not solve the problem of deepfakes, but at least it could make it very costly to produce deepfakes, because it would not just be a crime, it would be a human rights violation that warrants severe repercussions.

With copyright to your biometrics being a human right, the next question becomes: who should be allowed to store biometric information and where? Tim Berners-Lee, who was one of the inventors of the internet, suggests that we all have an online POD (Personal Online Data) with our most private data: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/10/technology/tim-berners-lee-privacy-internet.html

ABCDEFGH

We are facing major, complex problems as a species, and none of them can be solved with just one solution; they are too complex and too big for that. Instead, we present here eight aspects or challenges that need to be taken into account as we solve those bigger problems: Artificial Intelligence, Biotech, Circularity, Demographics, Education, Finance, the Global need for access to knowledge, and Humanism and Human Rights. We also present here eleven ideas or proposals that may contribute to solving our major problems. None of the proposals are addressing climate change and other systemic threats to our eco-systems directly. Instead, they offer partial solutions that may contribute to sustainable conditions for humans and other life on Earth, including how we organize local, national, and global economies.

Here is how the eleven proposed ideas relate to the eight aspects we need to take into account:

Artificial Intelligence is both a danger and an immense opportunity for humankind. Particularly, bildung/ubuntu education is necessary if people are going to be safe around AI and not be fooled by it or ascribe to it human capabilities and emotions etc. that AI and robots do not have. As Zak Stein writes in What it Means to Be Human, the interaction with AI cannot be allowed to emulate human interaction in such ways that we, but particularly children and the most vulnerable, least-educated adults, are deceived. Bildung and a sense of ubuntu and humanity is also a prerequisite for the developers of AI if they are not going to create unethical AIs. Taxation may be an efficient tool to curb the use of AI, particularly for non-essential uses of AI, because it is very data-intense and taxing data will make AI expensive to use. Polymodern Economics would emphasize and enable that high-tech industries must be handled at the continental and the global level, and an economy that harmonizes with nature would have built-in feedback loops that would favor sustainable tech development. Copyright to our biometrics, including our facial features, would also protect us against appearing in fake videos etc.

Biotech, like AI, is also both a danger and an immense opportunity for humankind. Again, bildung and Ubuntu education are necessary if we are going to have safe biotech. Taxation, polymodern attention to continental and global regulation and collaboration, setting up economic feedback loops that harmonize with nature, and copyright to our biometrics, are other prerequisites for safe development and use of biotech.

Circularity is an aspect of nature that we need to build into our ways of thinking about human interaction with the rest of the planet, with each other, and with culture, tech, and economy. Bildung and ubuntu education would be the obvious, primary measure to change our understandings. Neighborocracy, with its circular method or practice, would also be great practical help, as circularity is built into the neighborocracy structure’s meetings and collaboration in each group. As neighborocracies are circles of discussion and decision-making, their dynamic structure inherently allows for circular iterations to address concrete problems. A polymodern economy, which includes indigenous and traditional economic patterns, would help too. Female money might also be circular, just like a well-designed economy would be if we designed it as a game with easy (re)onboarding. By allowing people who fail in the economy to onboard again easily according to transparent rules, the economy will allow for both failure and new iterations. The macroeconomic structure needs to be designed such that re-entry is financed, but failing and reentering is not favorable to sustaining oneself long-term in the economy.

Demographics are defined by births and deaths, and with education and family planning, birthrates typically go down. Particularly education of women, not just regarding family planning but education in general, allows women to make informed and independent choices about how many children they want, and most women prefer to have fewer children when they have the choice. For women to have this choice, it is important to educate the men too. In other words, education is crucial, particularly bildung / ubuntu education, as well as community, culture, and a sense of economic security. Neighborocracy, female money, a well-designed economy, PACT, and polymodern economics could all therefore benefit demographics. The dynamic structure in neighborocracies allows them to reorganize when demographics change, and the process in the neighborocracies is itself educational. The local collaboration through the neighborocracy can often make decisions that offer the poorest financial help when the community decides to create paid jobs for them.

Education: We need to rethink it so that it contains all eleven proposals plus the necessary knowledge to live sustainably in one’s local environment. We also need to rethink the economy, so that education becomes integral to it. Part of the “game” therefore needs to be financed education so that one does not have to pay separately for being able make a living in a system one cannot live without participating in.

Finance: Money needs to be available at the bottom of the economy, but needs to be invested or available so that it contributes to lifting people out of poverty long-term and sustainably. Finance should therefore consider all eight challenges and all eleven proposals before money is invested; we cannot survive in a pyramid scheme that destroys the planet.

Global dispersion of knowledge: AI can definitely be of help here, but it needs to be done ethically and in ways that do not harvest data from the users and turn them into products. As a species, we need to protect ourselves and every one of us from our own invention so that we do not end up in a manipulative or slave-like relationship with AI. In the book What it Means to Be Human, Steve Joordens and Adam Frost as well as Zak Stein address this. Almost all of the proposed solutions: neighborocracy, female money, a well-designed economy, taxation of data, PACT with education, polymodern economics, creating the right kinds of feedback loops in an economy that mimicks nature, bildung / Ubuntu education, neighborocracy & bildung housing, and bildung for peace can contribute to global dispersion of knowledge.

Humanism and Human Rights: History is replete with examples of slavery and subjugation. Race as presently defined is a floating decimal but ends up in a binary metric: There is white and every shade of brown depending on the quantity of black infused. “Us” and “The Other.” Instead of embracing plurality, the world has trended toward the binary. Consciously or subconsciously, this is a basis on which international policy, aid, and even “global” finance is formulated. It justifies the feeling of relative deprivation in the United States, and it was the justification for major unacknowledged genocides against brown and black people. What the West gives as aid they take away in trade; they play by rules that they themselves made and that give very little room for emerging economies. This is an ongoing corrosion of the concept of what is means to be human from the point of view of a non-white person. It is also the reason why the Human Rights promoted by the UN and the West are met with suspicion outside white culture. Any discussions of what it means to be human without robust discussion of race and prejudice will ring hollow. For many white people this is a sensitive subject because it challenges their existing epistemology and sense of self and accomplishment. The case is similar regarding women and men, sexuality, and, often, ethnic minorities. “Inclusivity” cannot satisfy this node in the human complex. Humanity has to be determined on its own terms, a term that carries all the differences, accents and paradoxes as a given.

With the emergence of Artificial Intelligence and the creation of avatars and robots, seeing all humans as equally human is more crucial than ever. There are already examples of image recognition AIs that mistake black people for non-human, and there are biases and prejudice built into the data based on which AIs are trained. If we do not address racism, misogyny, and other forms of prejudice, we will be technologically enforcing injustices of the past.

There are currently initiatives for giving rights to nature and “human” rights to animals, such as great apes, because they are highly intelligent, sentient beings. Important as granting rights to nature and some animals may be, humans are different and there is a reason we cannot equate the rights humans need and the rights of nature and animals. Other humans can disagree with us and make deliberate choices in ways that offend us, and we all do something that somebody else does not like, and do it in ways that are not possible for animals and nature. The ways of animals and nature are outside human morality; we cannot judge them on human terms. Humans make choices that other humans find immoral, we judge each other all the time. Humanism and Human Rights are there to protect each one of us, particularly the people we do not like and whom we find immoral, offensive, and annoying.

Whether we are talking neighborocracy in small communities or redesigning the economy globally — and everything in between — we need to face our prejudice and learn to see every human individual as having the same value and rights as everybody else. Ubuntu, bildung, and similar philosophies of how the individual becomes their full and true self through their community and culture does not change the fact that it is as individuals we feel pain and suffer, and therefore individuals must have rights and be treated with dignity. We are both individuals and shaped by our community and interaction with others and the world, and there should be no conflict between individual rights and communal belonging. They are two sides of what it means to be human.

Concluding Remarks

All of the above raise new questions, such as:

· How to set up the systems using collaborative game set-ups instead of competitive games? The world will end up brown, not black and white. We need to embrace this fact and develop equitable systems.

· How to set up new ways of working using technologies in the wisest possible ways?

· How to build circularity into the resulting systems so they can keep running and regenerating nature and societies?

· How to take into account the current socio-economic landscapes and the inequalities regarding age and education that exist?

· How to make sure that we promote bildung, i.e. both the transfer of knowledge necessary to understand the 21st century and its technologies sufficiently, and the personal, emotional development that allows people to thrive socially?

· How to promote a gentler more Humane world overall.

The Western exploitation of developing economies must be addressed, not least in the way “aid” is often used by donor countries to benefit their own industries. Likewise, the current Chinese colonization of many areas formerly colonized by Europeans must be addressed, as must the genocides that are committed by non-Westerners. Part of being human is our ability to see “the other” as less human than ourselves and to maim and murder. We need to confront this as a universal part of what it means to be human if we are ever going to stop doing it.

There must be mechanisms in place that keep the majority of value created in one place in that area; when the West industrialized, the tycoons re-invested their profit locally, spent their money locally and hired local staff, and they thus helped grow their local economy. Today, foreign investments often extract value without creating matching local economic development. On top of that, the winner-takes-all mentality is driving a new cold war between the East and the West. This results in a value-destroying global economy where only the military industrial complex wins.

Creating a bildung and Ubuntu world seems like the open-ended enriching — and most likely also the only working — method to get rid of racism, cultural anxiety, misogyny, antisemitism, islamophobia, etc. and to managing migration through inclusive growth.

We need to look at and imagine a world in balance where every human being can develop without another losing out.

Don’t forget to sign up for free here: https://us06web.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZcpcu2rrzosGN0iCZ0rlYiodMXMHr1wiLVi#/registration.

Everybody is welcome on September 21; the program is time-zone friendly: https://www.globalbildung.net/what-it-means-to-be-human-2024-september-21/.

You can read more about us and What it Means to Be Human here: https://www.globalbildung.net/what-it-means-to-be-human/ and in the book by the same name: https://www.nordicbildung.org/what-it-means-to-be-human/

ABCDEFGH and What it Means to Be Human was originally published in Bildung on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

One of the most toxic topics in Western politics is immigration. As a species, not just among Westerners, but globally, we need to figure out how to deal with migration fruitfully, because there is very likely going to be more of it in the years to come, and we need to educate differently and educate more teachers if it is going to go well.

The West attracts people from all over the globe because of its prosperity, the opportunities it offers, freedom, societal stability, and safety from political and other persecution. While the immigrants seek a better future for themselves, aging populations and in many cases declining population numbers — particularly in Europe — also make increased immigration seem necessary for most prosperous countries.

However, many Westerners fear for their country and how it will change when an increasing proportion of the population has not grown up in the country, speaks the language poorly (or not at all), and have different cultural norms. Though racism may absolutely be part of why many Westerners are anti-immigration there are also very reasonable fears, and there are cultural, educational, economical, and ecological challenges that need to be addressed due to migration.

There are not just the fears among people in the receiving countries, though. There are the fears harbored by the migrants themselves and the fears harbored by the countries that have net emigration. It is just that the fears among people in the countries that have net immigration are probably the most toxic.

The fears are not necessarily irrational or unfounded, because migration raises a number of crucial questions: How do we keep functioning countries or nation states in a world of increased migration? How can the indigenous peoples of receiving nations and the immigrants come to understand and appreciate each other? How can they come to share the same sense of belonging in and responsibility towards their shared country so that they all care enough about the country to keep it and everybody in it thriving?

Fear and hope among migrants, asylum seekers, and refugees

When we talk about fear and hope among migrants, we should distinguish between migrants, asylum seekers, and refugees; their situation, their hopes and their fears are generally very different. The refugees and asylum seekers may fear for their life where they are, and safety is the major hope that makes them go to another country. Their fears may include ending up being trafficked, being expelled from the country where they seek refuge, loosing contact with family and friends back home, and, of course, the biggest fear: dying while trying. People who migrate for economic reasons may share some of the same fears if they are illegal immigrants and do not have a work permit where they are going, but they may also be migrants with work visas and good jobs waiting for them; they often go by the title ex-pats.

Once arrived in a new country and a different culture, new fears and hopes may arise. One of my own lightbulb moments regarding this was some 20 years ago when I met a woman from Somalia in my hometown, Copenhagen. She was a refugee, she had acquired refugee status, and she was by then safe and settled, but it had been a horrible and perilous endeavor for her to get to Denmark. She had had to leave behind a newborn baby (years later they were re-united), the journey was dangerous, and when she got to Denmark, it was not at all as she had imagined.

Denmark turned out to be a cold, cold place, both with regards to the weather and the people. When she arrived at the asylum center, she got her own room. For a Dane, that would be a reasonable expectation regarding accommodation, and most Danes would absolutely prefer to get their own bedroom!!! For this woman, it was the first time in her entire life that she had had to go to sleep alone, and it was awful. How could she be alone in a bedroom and not have the comfort of having people around her when going to sleep? And then there were the Danes themselves: cold, always keeping a distance, bland clothing, food with no taste, awful people!

It wasn’t until she had been in Denmark for several months, when the Danish Prince Joachim and his fiancée Alexandra got married in 1995 and Denmark went royal-wedding-crazy with daylong media coverage of the wedding extravaganza that she finally felt a connection to the Danes. Those cold Danes turned out to have a soft spot and a warm heart after all: beautiful dresses, gala uniforms, royal castles, golden carriages, music, dancing, rituals, and young love! The Somalian newcomer sat as if glued to the TV set all day, and afterwards she felt that she could connect to her new country. A door had been opened.

Fears, frustrations, and relief in the countries of origin

It is often resourceful people who migrate and for many poor countries, that is a huge problem: they are losing the people who could have contributed the most to economic growth, and they may be losing the best educated. Whether the migrants have had their education paid by their government or they have paid for it themselves, they are nevertheless contributing to brain drain in the country they leave.

For other poor countries, thousands of people leaving is not seen as a problem: There are no ways they can create enough jobs for young people, they do not have the resources to educate them, and once people have migrated and found work elsewhere, they send home money to their family. It is a much-needed contribution to the local economy. In 2022, it was around USD 800 billion globally that went from the richer countries to poorer countries due to migrant workers. Also in 2022, foreign aid from Development Assistance Committee (DAC) countries of the OECD rose to “an all-time high of USD 211 billion;” i.e. migrant workers sent home almost four times as much money as the rich OECD countries paid in foreign aid.

Fears, hopes, and realities of receiving countries

The fears, hopes, and realities of people in the receiving countries is where things tend to get toxic: citizens of prosperous countries are often hostile towards immigrants from poorer countries. Yet, those prosperous countries cannot remain prosperous without immigrants. At least not as we currently define prosperity: constant economic growth, which requires constant growing consumption and production, which requires more people. Currently, the European population does not reproduce itself in sufficient numbers to keep the economy going, while a country like Nigeria has a young population with few to no prospects. Here just three examples: Denmark, the Netherlands, and Nigeria:

In Denmark, the population is 5.9 million people, the annual population growth is 0,49%, the fertility rate is 1.7 child per woman, the median age is 42, and GDP per capita 2023 was USD 71,400.

In the Netherlands, the population is 17.6 million people, the annual population growth is 0.31%, the fertility rate is 1.6 child per woman, the median age is 42, and GDP per capita 2023 was USD 61,770.

In Nigeria, the population is 224 million people, the annual population growth is 2.41%, the fertility rate is 4.6 child per woman, the median age is 19 years, and GDP per capita 2023 was USD 1,755.

It recently came out that the fertility rate in Denmark is going to be even lower soon: 1.5 child per woman, which means that unless women in Denmark start having more children or immigration increases radically, the population in Denmark by the year 2100 will be around 2.5 million people. In other words: by the end of the century, the population will be half the size of today. Nigeria will probably have 377 million people as early as 2050.

It does not take much imagination to see that this is not sustainable.

Three scenarios

Seen in isolation, fewer people in Europe is not a problem; it would mean more natural and other resources per person and overall lower consumption, which is a good thing. The problem is the economic model and the welfare societies that will collapse if the population keeps aging and declining; ‘underpopulation’ in the north and ‘overpopulation’ in the south will create some immense inequality problems. Europe will have to use immense amounts of violence to keep people from Africa and other parts of the world out. It is a situation that could turn into a true dystopia, eroding basic humanistic principles, and requiring huge investments in military and surveillance to keep borders tight. This is scenario 1.

Scenario 2 is increased immigration in Europe to keep the population and the economy stable.

Scenario 3 is sufficient education and sustainable economic development around the globe, which will lead to better opportunities and subsequently lower birth rates globally, perhaps even as low as in Europe today. This would not only mean fewer people seeking towards the West as migrants and refugees, but also better chances of saving the planet.

Scenario 1 is where we are currently heading. Scenarios 2 and 3 will require immense investment in education right now. As in: ENORMOUS investment in education, beginning today and taking effect tomorrow. And not just education, also bildung, culture, civics, sustainable food production skills, and methods for self-organizing it. On top of that there needs to be heavy investments in sustainable and digital infrastructure.
Scenario 2 and 3 are different in that they have different migration patterns: scenario 2: heavy immigration into Europe and North America; scenario 3, less migration in general. Either way: the need for education and bildung that will allow people to live peacefully, meaningfully, and productively next to one another is gigantic and we can only start the upgrade of our education systems too slowly.

To maintain some level of global stability, scenarios 2 and 3, which currently seem the less likely, are what we need to pursue.

Not enough teachers

However, even if we decided to invest sufficiently in education and to begin today, we are facing a precarious problem: we do not have enough teachers, teachers are quitting, we do not educate enough teachers, and teachers’ education is generally not geared towards handling cultural clashes between ethnic groups — be it in classrooms or in society — and neither is it geared towards educating for the sustainability needs of the 21st century. According to a February 2024 report from the UN, globally, we will be 44 million teachers short by 2030: https://news.un.org/en/story/2024/02/1147067. Which means that if we want to have enough teachers globally by 2030, they should start their teacher’s education no later than next year. The report does not mention adult education at all, which means that the 44 million teachers needed may just be for children. The number ’44 million needed teachers’ may not take into account the millions of adults worldwide who need to upgrade their education, be it because the educational level in many parts of the world is already too low, or because we are all facing new needs for education as the technological development, the global economy, climate change, and the other aspects of the poly-crisis change our circumstances.

If your politicians are not already addressing the teacher shortage, maybe you should start asking them when they will?

Culture, peoplehood, and meaning-making

Around the globe, there is an increased appreciation of and focus on indigenous knowledge and indigenous peoples, not least as we are facing climate change. Indigenous peoples often hold unique knowledge about flora, fauna, and eco-systems that is crucial for our long-term survival and thriving as a species. But there is also an increasing understanding of the significance of culture, community, rootedness, language, place-based meaning-making, and a sense of belonging if we are going to thrive as individuals and societies.

Not just nationalism but also the nation states themselves have a bad reputation in certain circles, particularly among academics and so-called progressives. The reason is obvious: nationalism has been turned into toxic nationalism, national chauvinism, xenophobia, fascism, and Nazism, and this has caused wars, immense suffering, and millions of deaths.

On the other hand, we cannot have thriving societies and democratic countries if people do not identify with their country and care about it. If the country just becomes a venue for everybody’s fight against everybody over resources and various privileges and benefits, then the country falls apart. People tend to care about their country when they love their country, and we tend to love our country when we share narratives, language, culture, habits, rituals, and social norms within the country. When we don’t, we tend to lose trust, commitment, sense of belonging, and willingness to serve the country rather than just serving ourselves.

Which brings us to migration, bildung, and societal resilience: How do we keep functioning countries or nation states in a world of increased migration? How can the indigenous people of receiving nations and the immigrants come to share the same love of country so everybody cares about the country enough that society and everybody in it can thrive? In this regard, Danes, Germans, Lithuanians, Ukrainians, and the British and the Dutch are just as much indigenous peoples as the Maori of Aotearoa New Zealand and the hunter gatherer tribes in the Amazonas rain forest. Our human need for meaning-making through place-based culture and language, our need for making ourselves understood among people who resemble us, and our need for belonging is the same.

With increased migration, we therefore need to address the meaning-making challenges that it produces. We need to address the challenges through culture, bildung, and education. Otherwise, we cannot have stable, peaceful societies. We might be able to uphold some kind of stability and “peace” with increased surveillance and violence, but open societies and democracy with peaceful mutual disagreement and fruitful friction would not be very likely.

We therefore need more teachers, not less, and we need to see education, bildung, culture, language, and meaning-making as a mutual obligation towards each other and ourselves if we want to thrive and live in functioning societies.

A Global and a European conversation

We need a global conversation about this.

We need a conversation about the teacher shortages. In the Global Bildung Network, we initiated one at the Global Bildung Day on September 21, 2022, and you can watch the videos here: https://www.globalbildung.net/gbd2022-september/. But we also need continental conversations about it because the situation is different from continent to continent.

We also need conversations about our collective meaning-making, how we can preserve, renew, and vitalize indigenous cultures around the globe, particularly as we see increased migration. We need to address this globally, and we need to address it culture zone by culture zone, country by country, and people by people too. In the Global Bildung Network, we initiated that conversation at the Global Bildung Day on March 21, 2023, and you can watch the videos from that here: https://www.globalbildung.net/gbd2023-march-21/

In Europe, the European Bildung Network will host a conversation about Bildung, Resilience, and Migration at the European Bildung Day 2024 in Rotterdam, May 7–8: https://www.globalbildung.net/ebd2024/. And we hope we will have a plurality of European voices in the conversation, because the future of our continent depends on it.

Migration, Bildung, Resilience was originally published in Bildung on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Things went so fast, I never got around to writing about our new book What it Means to Be Human and Global Bildung Day, which had the same theme, before the book was published and Global Bildung Day was over. We launched the book on March 21st during Global Bildung Day — and now we’re in April!

But despair not! We will keep What it means to be human as a theme for the rest of 2024 (and probably beyond).

There is something about this very fundamental question that resonates with a lot of people right now: We are facing artificial intelligence that can outsmart us in various ways — then what does it mean to be human? We are facing climate change and fundamental changes of our life conditions on Earth, and we have created the mess ourselves — then what does it mean to be human? For that reason, and a bunch of other reasons, we are facing mass-migration and upheaval in traditional cultures around the globe — then what does it mean to be human?

We need to have this global conversation, and if you would like to join it, there are several things you can do:

1. If you are human: Mark September 21st in your calendar, because that is when we will have Global Bildung Day next time: https://www.globalbildung.net/gbd2024-september-21/

2. If you are interested in bildung and in working with bildung, join our Global Bildung Network here: https://network.globalbildung.net

3. Check out the book What it Means to Be Human here: https://www.nordicbildung.org/what-it-means-to-be-human/

4. Check out the previous Global Bildung Day: https://www.globalbildung.net/gbd2024-march-21/

And if you are in Europe, you can also join us live in Rotterdam on May 7–8 for European Bildung Day: https://www.globalbildung.net/ebd2024/

More to come…

What it Means to Be Human was originally published in Bildung on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

It is January, which means that LearningPlanet Alliance is hosting the LearningPlanet Festival from the 24th to the 27th.

Nordic Bildung will contribute again, this time with a workshop about how setting goals may ruin education. Particularly if they are the wrong goals, but maybe goals in general.

Education in the Nordic countries has been characterized by very open-ended education and almost no tests, yet people in the Nordics seem to be able to both read and write and know about the world.

You can read more about our workshop and sign up free of charge here: https://www.learning-planet.org/event/nordic-bildung-and-pedagogics-better-learning-without-goals/

And you can watch a video about the Nordics and education without goals here:

You’ll find the LearningPlanet Festival Here: https://www.learning-planet.org/event/nordic-bildung-and-pedagogics-better-learning-without-goals/

Nordic Bildung and Pedagogics was originally published in Bildung on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

An Economic Model Based on 300,000 Years of Human Experience; What to Measure for All to Thrive

Paper in progress: updated 2024–01–02, updated 2024–06–23 with an abstract.

Polymodernity could be defined as cultural infrastructure. It describes the cultural evolution of the human species in four cultural codes and integrates them: indigenous, traditional, modern, and postmodern. These four cultural codes very much relate to group sizes, and they represent four different kinds of social interaction, cooperation, economy, moral values, media, and much more. In this article about Polymodern Economics, I have described the economy as a structure of five integrated layers, the first is nature itself, the other four are economic models with different goals, dynamics, rules, measurements, criteria for success, and opportunities for sustainability and thriving. All five layers are present in thriving economies, this article presents a suggestion for a macro-economic model that can deliberately balance them.

Economics is typically divided up into macroeconomics and microeconomics, the former regards states, the latter companies and households. We lack a macro-macroeconomic model for the global economy, and we lack a model that a) delivers healthy relationships among people and between people, planet, and economy, which will allow people, planet, and economy to interact and thrive in mutual balance as one big ecosystem, b) measures economic health in thriving rather than in growth, and c) supports and maintains different levels of economic complexity in enriching and meaningful rather than impoverishing ways. Polymodern Economics is a hypothesis or a model that offers this.

The polymodern economic model is based on the idea of polymodernity[i] and sees the economy as a structure of five integrated layers, of which four are economic models with different goals, dynamics, rules, measurements, criteria for success, and opportunities for sustainability and thriving, here in the order of emergence:

1. Nature,

2. Indigenous gift economy: family and neighbors, moneyless, household and neighborhood size.

3. Traditional market economy: local, cooperative, artisan, matching the town, borough or arrondissement, and smaller cities.

4. Modern capitalist economy: national, industry scale production, big cities and nation size.

5. Postmodern digital economy: bio-, info-, nano-, and cognitive sciences (BINC), continental.

By looking at the economy as four distinctly different economies that are integrated, legislation, human wellbeing, environment, sustainability, food supply, climate change resilience, infrastructure, personal (economic) autonomy, welfare services, global inequality, global development, migration, tourism, and much more may be addressed differently than today and with much better opportunities for individuals and local, private initiatives to contribute to a green and sustainable future.

This article should be read as the first presentation of an overall idea that needs further exploration, not as a final model.

If you would like to work with the hypothesis/model or discuss it — or if you would just prefer a print friendly A4-forman version — please go to https://www.nordicbildung.org/polymodernity/.

Current economic model(s)

Economics as we have come to think of it is a product of colonialism and the steam engine. For merchants to have enough money to send off ships to the “new world” they had to pool their investments. Capitalism was born, which is different from the market economy:[ii]

Market economy: products => money => products
Capitalism: money => products => money

In the market economy, which has existed in many incarnations since the Bronze Age, farmers and artisans produced products that they took to the market to get money, so they could buy other products. In the capitalist economy, investors invest money in extraction of natural resources and/or production of products so that they can make more money.

There were joint investments in Europe in the 1400s and earlier, but the stock company as a commercial model really caught wind (no pun intended) when the merchants who could not afford to equip a ship on their own invented the stock company and the stock exchange. When the steam engine was invented, this finance model was applied to machinery and industrial production too.

Economics as we have come to think of it is based on these inventions, and economics is generally divided into micro-economics and macro-economics. Microeconomics regards households and companies; macroeconomics regards nation states.

The nation states were themselves a result of the middleclass that emerged from capitalism: In medieval European feudal societies there were Kings and three estates: clergy, aristocracy, peasants; 1st, 2nd, and 3rd estates. During the 1400s, from the 3rd estate, emerged wealthy artisans and merchants who gained economic power, particularly during the Renaissance after Gutenberg’s invention of the printing press with movable type and because of colonialism and capitalism. This “middle class” between aristocracy and peasantry did not fit into the feudal order, and during the 1700s they started fighting for political power that matched their economic power. To make a long and complicated story short: By the mid-1800s, this middle class, now known as the bourgeoisie, promoted Liberalism and wanted nation states within which to have political freedom, civil rights, and free trade, while workers promoted Socialism and were fighting for the Socialist International, and traditional landowners were Conservative and tried to maintain the monarchy. Liberalists and conservatives thus both favored a nation state to socialism’s International class-consciousness. Liberalism and Conservatism led to the creation of modern, democratic nation states in Europe, and socialism either became part of the democratic system or promoted the idea of a revolution and a world without nation states. In modern, democratic nation states, we have therefore witnessed over the past some 175 years three major ideologies negotiating political power over the economy: liberalism, socialism, and conservatism.

The result of this development has been, among other things, that we understand macroeconomics in a very particular way in the West: The state is sovereign within its borders and in relationship to other sovereign states, and macroeconomic models guide the states in how to shape economic legislation and taxes etc. The currently favored macroeconomic model across the West is a mixed economy based on capitalism with redistribution of wealth via taxes and social welfare; a combination of the Neoclassical Economic Model, which relies on the market forces, and Keynesian Economics, which focuses on redistribution, leaning towards socialism. In the West, we also tend to understand microeconomics in a very particular way: Households are nuclear families, and companies are stock companies. Other family structures, such as collectives, multigenerational, traditional families, etc. where the number of people sharing, say, a car and other expensive, durable goods which tend to put strain on the environment, are not specified. Other company/organizational structures, such as cooperatives, non-profits, NGOs, and steward ownership companies, which may serve another purpose than just profit, are not specified either.

Behind all economic thinking in the West is the role of competition. The fundamental assumption is that everybody competes over resources, profit, products, services, and social welfare, always; the economy is a zero-sum game. Collaboration and synergies do not figure. Collaboration and synergies are everywhere in the real world, but the economic models do not capture them. In nature, there is both competition and collaboration;[iii] that is how nature stays dynamic and thrives. In cultural systems, among them the economy, collaboration generates synergies too, for instance when accessible for all, good education creates a competent workforce and promotes conscientious citizenry. Current macroeconomics does not capture this. There are several structural differences between how we perceive, understand, and structure the economy and how nature works, differences that make the economy fundamentally unsustainable.

Perhaps the biggest difference between capitalism and nature is that capitalism is based on debt and the accumulation of capital. Nature can only use and cycle resources that are already there, it has nowhere to borrow anything or save up for later. Money is created from debt. Banks can issue credits that are bigger than the reserves they have, which means that there is more capital lend out and circulated than they ever had as deposits. The ‘security’ is the trust in the borrower and the expectations that the debt will be paid back with interest. This is how the economy grows: Somebody borrows money for a business endeavor that will create a revenue that will allow the business to pay back the debt plus a price for borrowing the money: interest. Hence capitalism: money is borrowed and invested to produce goods to make more money. This system demands growth, it cannot settle at a certain ‘size.’

States can borrow and lend out money too, in this system, but they are a very unique kind of borrower: If they do not make enough money via taxes to pay back their loan, they can print more money (which, of course, leads to inflation), and the central bank can define the interest rate at which banks lend money to each other and borrow money from the state (which may also lead to inflation.

The bottom line is that capitalism is basically a pyramid scheme based on credits, including credits on nature. A fact that the neoclassical model conveniently ignores by taking land and natural resources out of the economic equation: In Adam Smith’s classical model, the wealth of nations depended on labor, land, and capital. In the neoclassical model, there is just labor and capital. Both models ignore energy, and they ignore the wear and tear on ecosystems.

Add to this a digital economy, which knows no national boundaries and can, in theory, expand exponentially and dwarf both the real economy and the speculation economies.

The current economic model, therefore, has several flaws: it cannot protect nature, it does not guarantee human wellbeing, economies must keep “growing” not to collapse, “macroeconomics” covers nation size entities, rarely continents; there is no macro-macroeconomic model to grasp the global economy, and it focuses on GDP growth as the main measure of economic success. It is also almost impossible for individuals and individual households to have an impact on the economy and their own wellbeing, except by working and spending more. The system is not set up for a synergy of small changes, and if people do switch to lower or more sustainable consumption, it will not contribute to GDP growth. In fact, if everybody in the West started living sustainably tomorrow by lowering material consumption and buying immaterial services instead (say, massages and concert tickets instead of new stuff), and they switched from imported goods to locally produced goods, the global economy would crash. Not just the economy would fall apart, banks, companies, and societies would too.

To face the problems of the 21st Century, we therefore need an economic model that does the following:

· makes nature thrive,

· makes humans thrive,

· makes the economy thrive,

· deals with the globe and the global economy as a connected and interdependent whole consisting of individuals, households, organizations, nations, states, humanity, and all life on the planet, and the fact that all these need to interact in ways that make them all thrive,

· deals with the relationship between the real economy, the speculation economy, and the digital economy,

· allows everybody to contribute to the necessary changes right away where they are

· promotes human freedom, prosperity, wellbeing, and dignity.

Existing Ways of Looking at Economics Differently

Since the 1980s, economic models that try to compensate for the flaws of the classical and the neoclassical economic models by including natural resources and human wellbeing into the economic equations have emerged. Hazel Henderson developed the ‘Cake Model,’ which has nature as the foundation of the economy, in 1981, and the two currently most prominent models are Doughnut Economics and the Wellbeing Economy.

Henderson’s Cake Model

Henderson sees the economy as layered, like a cake, with nature as the foundation for everything at the bottom.[iv] On that is built the Love Econonmy; all the production of value that is relationship and gift based. Together, the two make up the non-monetized half of the economy. On top of that are three layers: underground economy, public sector, and private sector, i.e. the monetized, other half of the economy, which, contrary to the non-monetized foundation under everything is included in the GDP.

Raworth’s Doughnut Economics

Doughnut Economics[v][vi] defines a space between minimum human needs (social foundation) and maximum strain we can put on nature if nature is going to be able to regenerate itself and remain in balance (ecological ceiling). The model is based on measuring human consumption and thriving and strains on nature and nature’s thriving, and it allows particularly governments, municipalities, and other authorities to plan within planetary boundaries.

Wellbeing Economy

The Wellbeing Economy focuses on human and nature’s wellbeing: “In a Wellbeing Economy, the rules, norms and incentives are set up to deliver quality of life and flourishing for all people, in harmony with our environment, by default.”[vii]

More than an economic model, it is a political vision for society; the economy is just one aspect of society. The Wellbeing Economy measures human wellbeing, an outcome, but not the workings and results of the economy itself. It is as if ‘society’ has been substituted for ‘economy.’

Baked goods, wellbeing, and polymodernity

The Cake Economy, Doughnut Economics, as well as the Wellbeing Economy look for a certain outcome of the economic activity, namely sustainability and thriving for both humans and nature, they include a much broader variety of costs in their model than the classical models do, and investments and policy making are directed towards other goals than economic growth. The economy itself, though, is still understood and structured the way it already is: micro- and macroeconomics within national boundaries, also when the economic activities affect nature and people around the globe.

The Cake Economy, Doughnut Economics, the Wellbeing Economy, and Polymodern Economics are concepts that approach politics and economics in each their way. Together, they ought to be able to supplement each other and create a conceptual, political, and economic synergy that allows global, continental, national, and local economies to transition faster towards a sustainable future.

Polymodern Economics

Polymodernity is about learning from all of human history, taking the best, and combining it in the best possible ways. Polymodern economics is about combining historical economic models deliberately to achieve sustainability, wellbeing, and prosperity in meaningful ways. It has the same goals as the three economic models mentioned above, but economic actors of different sizes and levels of complexity can onboard the polymodern economy more easily, each in their way; it is a model for governance, but it is also a model for activism and individual contribution. Polymodern economics conceptualizes the economy in layers like Henderson does, but the layers are different: the polymodern layers are about group sizes and complexity.

What is polymodernity?

The word polymodernity means ‘many modernities,’ and by modernity is meant a cultural code, a values system, a modus, a way of doing things, a meaning-making structure, and a structure for what is good and bad morality. It comes from French moderne (1400s) and from Latin modo “just now, in a (certain) manner.”[viii]

By polymodernity is meant, very specifically, the four cultural codes prehistoric indigenous, premodern traditional, modern, and postmodern, and the combination of the four into a fifth cultural code that we can aim to create by learning from the past and taking the best from the four first codes and combining it in the most fruitful way.

These are the five codes in bullet points:

Summing up and dividing up 300,000 years of human history around the globe into four cultural codes and claiming that this covers all historical development around the globe in all human cultures in all kinds of natural environments and climate zones is, of course, an oversimplification. Yet, there are some overlapping modes of being across cultures that relate to group sizes and technological development, particularly to communication technology and to the overall complexity of society and its technologies.

Polymodernity is about learning from humanity’s cultural development so we can understand ourselves and make better deliberate choices about the future; we need a way to grasp and navigate history as it unfolded, so we have an idea of the big picture. With the cultural codes, we have a big picture, a map of history that allows us to see more patterns in human behavior and in cultures, and to learn from history. So, take this oversimplification for what it is: a map of history showing us the “continents of time,” but no countries, cities, or towns.

The four historic cultural codes

Towards the end of this article, under the chapter Theoretical Framework, there is a slightly more elaborate exploration of the four cultural codes, but to get to the point and to polymodern economics, here are the four historical codes in headlines:

· The prehistoric, indigenous cultural code began with Homo sapiens sapiens 300,000 y/a and may also be referred to as the Stone Age.

· The premodern, traditional cultural code emerged with the Bronze Age in Mesopotamia, probably around 3800 BCE in ring-walled cities, some of which may have had up to 10,000 inhabitants.

· The modern cultural code began with Gutenberg’s invention of the printing press with movable type in 1440, and it evolved with the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, capitalism, and industrialization.

· The postmodern cultural code has a few starting points, some of them are Nietzsche declaring God dead, Jaques Derrida’s and Roland Barthe’s poststructuralist philosophy in the 1960s, the playful and ironic aesthetics in the 1980s, and the collapse of the Soviet Union around 1991.

Between each two codes, there is generally a moral and cultural conflict: What is good moral behavior in one code is often perceived as amoral or immoral in the neighboring code (e.g. polygamy or questioning religious authority).

Polymodernity is different in that it sees value in all four previous codes; we cannot be human and live meaningful lives without elements from all of them, so polymodernity is about combining heritage from them in the best possible ways.

Polymodernity and sustainability

Particularly regarding sustainability, all four cultural codes provide a different relationship to nature, which may allow us to make sustainable living both more meaningful, better organized, and more effective:

· Indigenous code offers an intimate, spiritual, and emotional relationship with nature. We are nature. There is no boundary between us and nature.

· Traditional code offers a spectator’s view on nature; it also offers a way for big societies to organize themselves culturally distanced from nature and provide food and shelter for tens of thousands of people. It allows us to see nature as an abstraction that is different from culture, it allows us to see the duality ‘humans & culture’ versus nature. This in turn allows us to see nature as an awe-inspiring ‘other’ that we need to obey: we are the small ones, nature is almighty. If we transgress nature’s boundaries, it will kill us.

· Modern code allows us to study nature scientifically and to understand how it works. It allows us to manipulate processes in nature in ways that give us immense power and opportunities.

o At first this understanding was Newtonian and linear and did not grasp the complexity and self-organizing systems properties of nature

o Since the 1980s, mainly thanks to computers and computational power, modern science has increasingly understood, described, and computer simulated nature as self-organizing, dynamic, chaotic, complex, open systems, including their tipping-points and phase transitions, and scientists have developed models for circular and other non-linear systems and their processes and wellbeing.
One could argue that since this understanding emerged in the 1980s and 1990s, it could belong in postmodernity, not least because the concept of hierarchies is replaced by the concept of scale and context. What is a system is relative and defined by context. The reason I keep this understanding in the modern code and as part of its epistemology is that it is based on hard science and it regards natural systems as phenomena on par with, say, gravity and thermodynamics.

· Postmodern code allows us to deconstruct all three attitudes towards nature.

Let me here quote the former British Chief Rabbi, Sir Jonathan Sacks: Science takes things apart to see how they work; religion puts things together to see what they mean. We need to be able to do both, and polymodernity allows us to decide which one is most appropriate in what context.

A Polymodern Economy

The polymodern model of the economy entails structuring and measuring the economy in four different strata, layers, or sub-economic structures and treating them differently while daily life automatically combines and integrates them:

1) Indigenous stratum, micro-local gift-economy; group size: households and neighborhoods
In the following, I am going to refer to this stratum of the economy as the indigenous and households economy.

2) Traditional stratum, local, cooperative artisan market economy; group size: villages, towns, boroughs / arrondissements, and small cities
In the following, I am going to refer to this stratum of the economy as the traditional and town economy.

3) Modern stratum, nation based, industrialized, capitalist economy; group size: big cities, local states, and nation states
In the following, I am going to refer to this stratum of the economy as the modern and national economy.

4) postmodern; group size: continental
- extremely investment heavy bio-, info-, nano-, and cognitive (BINC) sciences and technologies economy
- speculation economy
- digital economy
In the following, I am going to refer to this stratum of the economy as postmodern and continental economy.

5) polymodern, global, integrating all four and
- contributing to and looking at the economy from the four different perspectives: household, town, nation, and continent, plus the global and nature as the foundation.
- allowing for comparing economic complexity around the globe
- promoting a tax, redistribution, and investment monitored and coordinated real economy based on sub-economies 1, 2, 3, and 4.

Each of the first four kinds of economy already exists within the most complex economies such as the American, the Danish, or the Chinese economy, but they are not seen as different strata of the same economy, their individual qualities and potential are not actively promoted, they are not linked to nature, and they are not linked to the global economy or compared to the similar strata globally either. We are also not measuring their unique contributions to the overall economy and wellbeing of society, which means that a: we have an incomplete picture of how healthy and robust the economy really is, b: people are probably not thriving as much as they could, and c: we do not have the optimal economic tools to promote sustainability and regeneration of nature.

The polymodern economy can be portrayed as a cake with layers like Hendersons cake. Nature carries the households, and the households carry the rest of the economy, but once we get to the upper layers in today’s economies, they mutually carry each other, it is just that the traditional town market economy came first, then the modern national capitalist economy, and then the postmodern continental digital economy.

Each of the four strata works in fundamentally different ways: they produce different things in different ways, they have different opportunities for promoting sustainability, they may contribute to social and individual thriving in different ways by allowing people to join and contribute in different ways, they have different onboarding barriers and opportunities and very different social dynamics. To see if any one stratum is thriving, different things need to be measured, and success looks very different in the four strata.

The indigenous, household economic stratum

The indigenous economic stratum is within the household and among households, typically within a 5-minute walking distance, and it supports relationships among individuals, families, and small groups. This is all the unpaid work in the households (typically the work that used to be women’s chores) and favors among neighbors and friends: I help you paint your fence; you babysit my toddler. I help you move; you give me a bottle of wine.

Characteristic for these mutual favors and non-monetary exchanges is that they create robust social networks, trust, and a sense of belonging. Characteristic for them is also, that if money is introduced, the relationship does not strengthen, it may even fall apart. Our brains grew from this kind of network creation among early hominids, and we get deep emotional satisfaction from exchanging these favors and bonding through them; the wine may just cost 10 dollars, and I would never have helped you move for 10 dollars, but the fact that you went out and bought it and gave it to me shows your appreciation and strengthens our relationship. We also maintain culture through shared meals, celebrating holidays, serving holiday foods etc. in the households and we socialize the next generation by playing games and passing on our norms and values. Henderson was absolutely right when she called it the Love Economy.

What is value in this stratum?
From the earliest indigenous hunter-gatherers to the nuclear family or single parent household in today’s most high-tech cities, value in this stratum includes long-term good prospects for the children, sufficient and nutritious food for everybody in the household, time together, economic security, leisure and play, and happy faces. Food on the table, economic stability, intimacy, and happiness. Social status in the town and nation plays a huge role in happiness too, of course, which means that material wealth may dominate what is considered of value in a household. Whenever this is the case, depending on the scale, it tends to harm both the intimacy and emotional wellbeing of the household and nature.

What to produce in this stratum
In the indigenous, household part of the economy, we grow vegetable gardens, produce food and meals, care for children, the sick, and the elderly, we educate, reproduce culture, do repairs of everything from lost shirt buttons to building carports, and we clean, shovel snow, maintain buildings, and much more.

Sustainability perspective
The more production we can do within a 5-minute walk from our dining table, the less transportation we need. In suburbs, towns, and cities, growing vegetable gardens would contribute to biodiversity (especially compared to lawns and pavements), and it would contribute to food security.

Social perspective and thriving
Social interaction and deep relationships are basically what life is about. It makes us happy, and it combats loneliness, anxiety, and depression. The more the household is a work community where all generations play a role for the common wellbeing, the bigger the chances are that everybody feels needed and useful, and the stronger the social ties may grow. Homecooked meals are generally healthier than storebought, so health may improve along with increased production within the household.

Onboarding barriers and opportunities
The vast majority of us are born into a family and remain embedded in it through life — or at least we stay connected. The onboarding barrier is extremely low, in other words, and a good family life and life among close friends are among the best indicators for a long and healthy life.

What to measure
Since monetary transactions are out of the question in this stratum, other kinds of transactions need to be measured to see if the indigenous economy is doing well, whether it is growing or falling apart. My suggestion is regular surveys throughout the population, say, once per month, where, say, 0.1% of the adult population is randomly chosen to fill in an extensive questionnaire — or 1% a shorter questionnaire. To get a good baseline, the first-year surveys may be carried out once per week.

Among the questions could be: How many meals did you cook yesterday? How many people did you speak to yesterday? How many favors did you do or receive yesterday? How many minutes did you spend cleaning yesterday? How many minutes did you spend taking care of children? How much of your food was homemade? How frequently do you take psychopharmaceuticals? How much did you talk to your neighbor(s) yesterday? How many minutes did you spend reading to a child? How man minutes did you spend teaching a child something? Etc.

The surveys need to be anonymous, of course, but the data could be linked to 5,000–10,000 person entities / areas (the traditional towns explored below), which would allow for better government and municipal investments in housing, cityscapes, gardening opportunities, and social interventions in general.

What does polymodern success in the indigenous stratum look like?
Success in the indigenous part of the economy would be high levels of social interaction and care among family members and neighbors, homemade meals prepared from fresh produce, particularly homegrown produce, and low consumption of psychopharmaceuticals and other medication.

The traditional, town economic stratum

This stratum consists of artisans, shops, independent healthcare providers, cultural venues, NGOs, coffee shops, restaurants, and schools and other educational institutions. It would typically be sole proprietaries, limited liability companies, steward ownership, associations, and cooperatives. Among the traditional production entities would also be regenerative farms.

Characteristic for this stratum is that people buy their day-to-day goods and services here, their kids go to school together, and over the years, even complete strangers may become familiar faces. There is chit-chat with local vendors, and they get to know their customers’ personal preferences.

In the polymodern economy, the purpose of the traditional, town stratum is to promote strong, local economies that offer local jobs and business opportunities, and which generate local collaboration, creativity, and diversity, and a sense of identity and belonging. The goal is for people to get engaged locally and through different business and consumer choices to make more sustainable decisions, among other things by reducing transportation and buying produce from regenerative farms as close by as possible. Another goal is to increasingly shift from material consumption to immaterial consumption, such as art, culture, and education.

The ‘traditional town economy’ is the actual town, the borough or arrondissement, or the smaller city. It is an entity big enough to have at least one school, a cultural venue, a post office, and other basic public and health care services such as doctors and dentists, several artisans, grocery stores, shops of various kinds, and one or more houses of prayer. It is big enough that there can be both competition and collaboration among artisans and artists in the same industry, and it is an economic ecosystem within which one could spend all one’s time and not lack anything (except, perhaps, variety).

The traditional town stratum is not an equivalent to but aligned with the idea of the 15-minute city, in which most daily necessities and services, such as work, shopping, education, healthcare, and leisure can be easily reached by a 15-minute walk, bike ride, or public transit ride from any point in the city.

This town sized traditional economy may rather be 15 minutes across, and though it does not have any physical boundaries towards neighboring ‘towns,’ it is conceived as a defined geographical area within which the economy is regarded a separate economy (like a municipality is separate from the neighboring municipalities and their economies, and they are all part of the national economy). These towns do not need to have separate political institutions, but regarding local production, artisans, shops, and cultural venues etc., the towns’ economies are measured separately. They could establish ‘town assemblies’ for local collaboration purposes.

A town contains households from the indigenous economy, companies and other organizations and institutions from the modern capitalist national economy and from the postmodern continental digital economy. It also benefits from the national educational system and all the modern institutions of the state and municipalities, of course. But the town-local economic entities that define this ‘traditional stratum’ are the traditional market economy production entities: single stores, shops, artisans, local music venues, bakeries, microbreweries, repair shops etc. The size of these production entities are typically 1–50 employees, and the ownership is generally sole proprietorship, cooperatives, and small limited liability companies, To ‘qualify’ as a traditional town company with the benefits that come with this, the company needs to be registered as such and meet certain criteria regarding size, local employees, and sales range; to be considered a traditional producer, production entities meeting a certain set of requirements such as 1–50 employees could simply register as ‘traditional,’ and if they grow out of it, they can change their status.

Many production entities matching these criteria mainly serve local customers, i.e. local individuals and households. A polymodern economy would reward this and have built in feedback loops in the economic structure so that they would also predominantly employ locals and trade with other local producers and customers. These feedback loops could involve lower taxes for local employees, and tax deduction for invoicing within, say, a 50 km radius based on postal codes. Particularly for cooperatives: lower taxes depending on the number of local members.

Lower taxes and/or VAT exemption could be offered to production entities producing immaterial products such as education, entertainment, and art, be it individual artists and educators and/or the institutions where they perform / work.

Other feedback loops would be tax deductions for buying produce from regenerative farms. This would mainly be relevant to bakeries and restaurants etc.

What is value in this stratum?
Value in this stratum is customized products, whether it is at the dentist, the hairdresser, the bakery, or when the plumber is called, and, typically, quality is appreciated over quantity.

What to produce in this stratum
In the town stratum any kind of artisan product can be produced: bread, clothes, plumbing, websites, beer, cheese, carpentry, interior decoration, unique furniture, ceramics etc. Independent (i.e. not franchises) local stores and small shops also belong in this stratum: bakeries, flower shops, bookstores, etc. as do services and healthcare such as dentists, doctors, masseurs, physio therapists, hairdressers etc. and artists, educators. Independent cultural and entertainment venues such as clubs, music halls, theaters, libraries, restaurants, and movie theaters thus also register in this stratum as do schools.

Sustainability perspective
The more local production and trade are promoted, the less transportation people and goods will need. By favorizing regenerative agriculture through the taxes, market mechanisms will move consumption towards regeneration. If people did not spend their time commuting, there would be more time available for culture and education, and consumption could me moved from material goods to immaterial goods.

Social perspective and thriving
By favorizing local employment and local production and trade, local social networks will be strengthened, and a traditional ‘village feel’ may emerge where people know their local artisans and shop keepers. If more cooperatives are created locally, people will invest in them, engage in them more as members, become loyal patrons, perhaps even volunteers, and they will start getting to know more people locally. Individuals, companies, and cooperatives may also knowledge share and start collaborating locally.

With local communities strengthened this way, it may also be possible to lower the threshold to employment for people who are normally hard to integrate into the workforce. With more of a local community, it may be easier to know who can, say, sweep floors for an hour per day, and who among the stores need that kind of help. It may also be easier to share, say, a bookkeeper or a cleaning person if 2–3 stores 5–10 minutes apart realize they have the same need for parttime help.

The polymodern economic model is about economic structures, but structures have social consequences, so, without trying to define what the social outcome should be, the idea is to make local word-of-mouth knowledge-sharing as easy as possible. If the system is set up to prioritize local interaction, human nature will get people talking and they will start collaborating and solving local problems.

Onboarding barriers and opportunities
Taxation, legislation, regulations, and business categories will need changes and additions, but the production entities will just carry on as they normally do. They will have to qualify and register as a ‘traditional company’ to get the tax benefits, and there will be some extra reporting for the cooperatives, since their number of members will influence their taxes. There will thus be some extra auditing and monitoring, but at the day-to-day business level, running a traditional production entity will not be fundamentally different from the way it is today. The day-to-day decision making will hopefully change as business decisions will include from and to which postal codes it makes the most sense to buy and sell to reduce transportation and get tax benefits, and where to find regenerative farms or wholesalers who deliver regenerative products.

For the individual, the traditional, town local production entities would offer lower thresholds to the production side of the economy than the modern economy. Companies registered as traditional might even be allowed to ‘employ’ locals on social welfare up to, say, 5 hours per week at reduced or no pay that will not interfere with their social benefits, but which may add tremendously to their thriving and integration into the local social life. Such changes to employment would need support from the unions, of course, which will be easier if there is a separate economic category for the kinds of companies that can employ on different terms.

What to measure
The current economic measurements for the economy can continue. In addition, the following could be registered and measured:

· Whether production entities mainly produce material or immaterial products. Immaterial production should be favored taxwise.

· For producers of material goods, byers’ and seller’s postal codes on invoices should be registered so that auditing and taxation can factor in geographical distance for transactions.

· The number of cooperatives in a local economy, the number of members in the cooperatives, and the distribution of members as an expression of local interconnectedness.

What might also be a useful measure would be the distribution of invoiced business connections: a company invoicing only one or very few customers may be very vulnerable during times of great changes; a company invoicing numerous customers only one time each, may be equally vulnerable but for very different reasons. The distribution of invoiced customers may be used as a measurement of economic robustness and may indicate the health of a local economy.

What does polymodern success in the traditional stratum look like?
Success in the traditional stratum is thriving local communities with a rich cultural life, local production of food, services, entertainment, art, culture, and education. It is local areas and towns with strong local identities and flavors, such that one town may become known for its clothing designers, microbreweries, and vegetarian restaurants, another one for its outdoor activities, ceramics, and furniture design. Local history, an educational institution, or access to certain fruits or fish may spark a cluster of production entities that compete in the same field and thus inspire and push each other to set new standards. Michael Porter has explored this development particularly at the national level in his Cluster Theory,[ix] but it exists at the local, town level as well. Such environments cannot be designed or predetermined, but by building feedback loops into the economy that favors local networking and collaboration, creative people may start moving to places that offer an inspiring environment and potential collaboration for them.

With such a diversification or schismogenesis among towns, tourism may change. To experience something interesting of a high quality, one would not have to travel hundreds of kilometers or fly away for the weekend, one might just need to get on the bicycle for 20 minutes to arrive in another part of the city with aesthetics like nowhere else, excellent restaurants door by door, and a unique music scene.

The modern, industrialized, national economic stratum

Production entities in the modern, industrialized stratum of the economy are the capitalist companies that need massive investments up front to get started: factories and extraction of raw materials where it would make no sense to have the products produced by artisans in the traditional economy. Historically, stakeholders such as investors and employees have been from the same national economy, and they are the main production entities of modern macro-economic theories.

What characterizes the modern, national economy is mass production of homogenous physical goods, from toast bread and pain killers to refrigerators and cars. The purpose of the modern stratum, historically as well as in the polymodern economy, is optimization of productivity, minimizing waste, energy efficiency, and standardization of quality by large-scale manufacturing.

Since land and energy were taken out of the neoclassical model, and nature and ecosystems were never part of it, the modern, national stratum of the economy needs to rethink how they work and what is success.

Included in the modern stratum of the polymodern economy are companies and NGOs with more than, say, 50 employees, and all institutions (courts, hospitals, military etc.) of the modern society. In the following, focus is on the companies that produce material goods.

What is value in this stratum?
This is all about producing more with less, and about creating a profit for the shareholders. Money is turned into products in order to generate more money; money itself is the value here. It is based on this concept of value that the concept of GDP was created: Gross Domestic Product. Transactions that include money are defining the GDP; neither nature, love, nor quality counts, and it is explicitly domestic, i.e. national.

What to produce in this stratum
The modern capitalist production entities are still needed for large-scale production of cement, wires, tires, tiles, pipes, chemicals, etc. and standard goods and foodstuffs like flour, pasta, sugar, canned goods, frozen vegetables, sodas, jam, bread, detergents, soap, furniture, clothing, shoes, pots, pans, cutlery, etc. Low tech goods where quality may vary and design and brands may make a difference, but where there is no big need for R&D and groundbreaking technology. Some medicines and other products such as dishwashers and fridges that were once high-tech products but are now commodities that have been in the market for decades may be included in this stratum as well, but cars that are increasingly R&D, AI, and tech heavy and need electrical charging are drifting towards the digital, continental stratum.

Sustainability perspective
Large-scale production may be more efficient than small-scale, but it may also involve more transportation. So, as with the traditional stratum, feedback loops should be built into this part of the economy, so geographical gravity is rewarded, and long-distance transportation is minimized. Modern industrial production entities can do a lot to make their production more sustainable by promoting circular and regenerative choices, and they may hire a mainly local workforce to minimize commutes, but industry production may also be located away from residential areas and have poor public transportation options because bulk delivery of goods is prioritized. Green tech from the postmodern stratum may have considerable sustainable impact.

Social perspective and thriving
Companies in this stratum may contribute to a thriving workforce by prioritizing indigenous elements in the business culture such as small work groups and communal eating during lunch breaks, and they can make a huge difference with regards to job security, decent work hours, living wages, and distributed, collective, democratic, modern decision making within the organization.

Onboarding barriers and opportunities
The onboarding for the companies themselves into the modern stratum, i.e. the capitalist startup investment is not that different from what it has always been. To a large extent, the opportunities for the modern, capital-demanding industrial production lies in investing in robots and AI to do standardizable work and to use green energy for the robots, and though both may represent a bigger investment up front than hiring people, it is long-term cheaper and likely greener.

Industry work used to be hard and dirty for most of the workforce, now much unskilled labor has been taken over by robots, at least in the West, and much skilled labor is being taken over by AI and robots too. The entry barrier to the modern job market is getting higher and higher, and the jobs that are left are currently getting increasingly stressful. Onboarding into the modern stratum of the economy is becoming more and more demanding. This can be seen as an opportunity for more meaningful jobs in the traditional stratum of the economy, and as a wake-up call for better education, which may also give access to the postmodern economic stratum.

What to measure
Production entities in the modern stratum of the polymodern economy should be measured on the same parameters as the traditional production entities, and on top of that, they should be measured on energy efficiency, CO2 neutrality, impact on the natural environment in general, and the durability of their products. This should be weighed up against their economic success as a score that can be compared across companies within each industry.

What does polymodern success in this stratum look like?
Success for the modern production entity in a polymodern economy is to contribute to a thriving planet and a thriving local environment while making a profit on producing safe, durable, quality products with thriving employees who do not have to commute long hours.

Companies that are town size with regards to numbers of employees, may also think of themselves as a town (fractal mindset) and incorporate town elements in the way they let employees self-organize how to solve their tasks.

The postmodern, BINC, continental economic stratum

Production entities in the postmodern BINC stratum of the polymodern economy are universities and companies with cutting edge R&D departments, and though perhaps funded nationally, they should be working continentally: the talent mass needed for cutting edge research and creativity in any high-tech field is limited, and any one country cannot count on educating and growing the necessary talent mass themselves.

Among the postmodern production entities are the BINC tech startups, though they may only employ a handful of people. Particularly the software companies are by definition fundamentally different from the modern industries since they require no physical transportation, geographical gravity has been eliminated, employees can be anywhere, and the value creation is very often global very early on. They change the economic fabric, since scaling up the number of produced copies is basically without marginal cost, very few people can create enormous value in the market, and, very often, the real product is the company itself. Typically, small startups are bought by larger companies once their software has proven successful, which means that there is a radical monopolization in the postmodern, digital stratum: losers have paid for their own failure, successes are bought up, become part of a hub, and create new multimillionaires and billionaires.

From a global perspective, it is crucial that all continents educate and develop their own talent mass to participate and contribute to the postmodern, digital economic stratum, and that they have universities and companies that can do this.

What is value in this stratum?
We need to find out and to define it, because the technologies are undermining the previous economic model, modern capitalism, and the democratic political system.

The purpose of the postmodern stratum in the polymodern economy must be to make life easier and safer for people and planet, not to concentrate money and power or to increase surveillance and undermine freedom and democracy.

Included in the postmodern stratum of the polymodern economy are all companies in the bio-, info-, nano-, and tech industries (BINC), but particularly the digital production entities are creating an entirely new economy beyond the real economy. The economy in cyber space can, in principle, grow exponentially and dwarf both the traditional and the modern economic strata as well as the rest of the postmodern economic strata, including the speculation economy.

What to produce in this stratum
Production entities in this stratum produce goods that require extremely high levels of technological and academic expertise.

Sustainability perspective
If the so-called Power-to-X turns out to be more than a wet dream among tech fetishists who are not interested in changing their material consumption, the BINC technologies may be able to solve many of the environmental problems. The problem is that nobody can plan for technologies that have not been invented yet. Another problem may be that one company may have monopoly on the new energy source.

Among the challenges produced by the postmodern, digital economic stratum is the energy consumption by servers; the generation of Bitcoin alone uses more energy than Norway.[x]

Social perspective and thriving
The intersection between bio- and nano-sciences was where the extremely fast development of efficient covid vaccines took place, which allowed humanity to end the deadly part of the pandemic within two years. The covid virus is still out there, but thanks to fast intervention and BINC technologies, it quickly mutated to a relatively harmless virus, which has allowed us to resume a normal life.

Digital technologies may make production easier and contribute to lower work hours if we are clever about it, but as long as the market is the driver of the BINC technologies, particularly the information technologies are making millions of people miserable. Social media are designed not just to keep us engaged, but to keep us enraged. Particularly teenage girls are suffering under the social media regime. Furthermore, children are now growing up having their brains “wired” by screens rather than physical, social interaction with other children and adults, and nobody knows what this is going to do to their emotional and cognitive life as they grow older.

Onboarding barriers and opportunities
Onboarding into the production side of the postmodern, BINC, continental stratum is extremely hard and requires years of education.

The opportunities for individuals with access to the education and other resources that allow them to have a career in the BINC part of the economy are immense, for everybody else, the picture is mixed.

What to measure
First of all, nations need to collaborate globally to monitor and stay on top of what BINC technologies are actually doing. We need new institutions that can handle the BINC companies and make sure they benefit humanity and pay their due taxes.

New taxes that may be worth considering are data taxes and market share and monopoly taxes, so that taxes increase with market share. Above a certain revenue, copyright, patent, and immaterial property rights fees would make sense, so that any company above a certain size that wants to keep exclusive copyright, patent rights, and immaterial property rights pay the society that upholds these rights for them.

What does polymodern success in this stratum look like?
The first criterium for polymodern success in the postmodern BINC stratum is that the new technologies do not tear societies apart, ruin civilization, and ruin the planet. Secondarily, that we do not allow them to overrule democracy and human rights, re-feudalize humanity, increase inequality, and keep us all under constant surveillance and manipulation.

On the positive side, new technologies may cure previously uncurable diseases and allow us to feed 10 billion people with nutritious and tasty food while restoring much of the nature we have already ruined.

To allow this kind of success will require an immense upgrade of the educational level among everybody, so that not only political and corporate decision makers can make wiser decision regarding the BINC technologies, but so that also voters in general can grasp what is going on.

What would polymodern economic success look like?

A successful polymodern economy has four economic strata that are all healthy and thriving, and nature is thriving too. Within each stratum, there is co-evolutionary variety and a rich structure of interconnectedness, an interconnectedness that also extends into the other strata.

In and among households, there is frequent social interaction and exchanges of favors and homemade goods.

Individuals and households buy more locally produced food, increasingly have broken things repaired locally rather than by default buying new replacements, and they frequent local cultural, educational, and entertainment venues incl. restaurants rather than spend their money on material consumption. They generally have a short commute to work, they are members of several local cooperatives, and they volunteer locally.

Traditional production entities with any kind of artistic component (i.e. bakers and musicians but not plumbers and electricians) co-evolve and specialize in the local competition, which in turn improves quality and drives the development of clusters and aesthetic schismogenesis away from neighboring towns. In this process, towns will, over time, attract people who share certain lifestyles, values, and ambitions. They will rely on shared sub-contractors and, for instance, students from local trade schools and/or universities. With time, even cities and suburbs with no particular history but with 50,000 or more people may develop enough local flavor and uniqueness that they may become tourist attractions, and cities with 1 million inhabitants may have 5–10 towns within them, each with its unique flavor and cultural scene.

Modern production entities will produce raw materials, commodities, and durable material goods that, in case they are broken, are worth repairing. Repair will typically take place in the traditional stratum where repair shops may flourish.

Both traditional and modern production entities are deliberately contributing to regenerative production.

The postmodern BINC production entities are regulated continentally with due oversight from a new generation of public institutions under democratic control and are deliberately conscious about and held responsible for how they promote human and planetary wellbeing, freedom, human rights, and democracy.

These changes are achieved mainly through new criteria for success, new kinds of measurements throughout the economy in all four strata, new opportunities for education, new content in education, and new feedback loops in the economy, mainly in the form of taxation and tax deductions.

Theoretical framework for the polymodern economy

Behind this suggested polymodern economy are concepts such as the cultural codes, considerations about economic theory, productivity, complexity, healthy self-organizing systems and the relationship among them, human psychology, and harmony with nature.

Cultural Codes

Human history did not unfold in four distinct ‘chunks,’ but the four cultural codes are a way of seeing a bigger picture and some patterns in the way cultural evolution unfolded. The codes are a map, not the historical territory, and they allow us to see how some societal structures evolve over time, and to consider which structures are worth preserving and strengthening, and which perhaps need to go, depending on the context.

The prehistoric, indigenous cultural code began with Homo sapiens sapiens 300,000 y/a and may also be referred to as the Stone Age. As nomadic hunter-gatherers, humans lived in small tribes with rarely more than 150 people in their day-to-day group, and nobody would own more than they could carry around. Hence there was not much social hierarchy, and everybody could talk to everybody else or to the same shaman or wise old woman in case of a problem. There was no or very little power distance.

Stone Age agriculture fully evolved with the onset of the Holocene around 11,600 y/a. As humans settled around horti- and later agriculture, settlements or villages may have grown to some 1,000 or 2,000 people. This would still be relatively small groups where everybody would know who belonged there and who was a stranger, and where everybody could gather simultaneously for collective rituals. Leadership would still be rather democratic, society would still be egalitarian, and ownership of wealth would generally be collective and distributed rather evenly among group members.

Nomadic hunter-gatherers, pastoral nomads, settled hunter-gatherers, and agricultural groups were all animists: Humans saw themselves as part of nature, there was no boundary between humans and all other life, all life had spirit, and so did rocks, the wind, and the water etc. One difference between horti- and agriculturalists and the hunter-gatherers would often be that with agriculture, earth and the soil itself became a goddess; Mother Earth became the central deity. The human connection to the rest of the planet was intimate and spiritual.

The premodern, traditional cultural code emerged with the Bronze Age in Mesopotamia, probably around 3800 BCE in ring-walled cities, some of which may have had up to 10,000 inhabitants. With more people, inequality grew, and power hierarchies emerged. So did work specialization, artisanship, and the market square. Here merchants started jotting down deals and debts on little tablets of wet clay, which could then carry the message once the clay had dried: codified picture writing had begun. Around 3000 BCE, it had evolved into cuneiform, a full-fledged codified writing system that lasted millennia. With work specialization and artisanship came polytheism; each important thing in society got a deity of its own: the sun, the water, the Earth, truth, justice, fertility, love, war, trade, writing, metalwork, wine, etc, Each with its own temple and priesthood. At the top of these societies was a divine or semi-divine Ruler, not unusually presented as the son of a virgin mother and a male deity, Codified writing allowed for written legislation, and many of these rulers we know about today due to the legislation they produced: Divine rules for society. Religion and legislation were one, priests were representatives of both divine and societal power, and to support them there were soldiers. The feudal order or caste system had arrived: The god-king at the top, under him the clergy, then the warrior caste, then the landowners, and at the very bottom: the landless and slaves.

Iron was first introduced for tool making in present day Turkey around 1300 BCE, and around the same time, people further south, in Phoenicia, invented the alphabet. Iron came into use in China around 1100 BCE. What has been called the Axial Age, was the period 800–300 BCE when, in an axis from Greece to China, Greek philosophy, Judaism, Zorastrianism, Hinduism, Buddhism, Taoism, and Confucianism all emerged; the religions have older roots, but during the Axial Age they got their main texts and forms we recognize today. This axis was a climate belt where seeds and livestock could be traded and bred, and the cities along the axis bloomed as a result. The largest cities in China, the Middle East, and Europe grew to 100,000 inhabitants, some even 300,000, and Rome reached 1 million inhabitants around year 1. In these large cities, the individual faced a new kind of autonomy, there was a new kind of expectations around personal responsibility, and what we know as the world religions today were a reply to the confusion of city life: Follow this way of life and you will be good! Societies that came up with good narratives, rituals, public spectacles, viable answers to existential problems, and meaningful methods of prayer survived. During the Iron Age, the feudal structure did not change; politics and religion were still in the hands of the priests.

Part of the premodern, traditional code was to distance culture and humanity from nature and see humans as a unique lifeform ‘outside’ and above nature.

The modern cultural code began with Gutenberg’s invention of the printing press with movable type in 1440. This caused a communication tech revolution that undermined the monopoly on knowledge of the Catholic church, then sparked the Renaissance, colonialism, capitalism, and the Reformation, which resulted in a new political and religious landscape in Europe. After the 70 Years War and the Peace of Westphalia in 1648, the ‘secular rulers,’ i.e. kings and dukes, could now decide to which of the two Christianities they would submit their reign: Catholicism or Protestantism. Europe got ‘collective freedom of religion,’ state by state. Then came Newtonian physics, modern science in general, the invention of the steam engine, industrialization, and a revamping of the feudal society as bourgeoisie and industry workers could not be contained within the feudal structure of fixed estates. Eventually, modern nation states emerged, religion and politics were separated, and the West got individual freedom of religion, political liberties, and liberal democracy. Later came two world wars, the UN, and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. From the 1960s and onwards, the colonies acquired independence.

Part of the modern code was to put humanity in control of nature; with the steam engine followed not just mass production, but also an immense sense of power over the forces of nature.

The postmodern cultural code has a few starting points, some of them are Nietzsche declaring God dead, Jaques Derrida’s and Roland Barthe’s poststructuralist philosophy in the 1960s, the playful and ironic aesthetics in the 1980s, and the collapse of the Soviet Union; ideology and power hierarchy imploded all by themselves. The winners: irony, relativism, and cultural deconstruction. The main structure that was not deconstructed, capitalism, filled the existential void, and ended up defining everything.

Part of the postmodern code was to not see nature at all. Everything was a social construct. Eventually, the two sexes that produced us in the first place were seen as social constructs too; the ‘real’ sex was the gender, which became ‘ascribed’ at birth rather than observed. Sex became subjective truth, which then overruled biological sex, which in turn could be brought in line with the subjective truth via surgery and medication.

Conflicts between the codes
Between any two neighboring codes, there was always a conflict: From the perspective of the old code, the newer code looked as if it had no moral values; the old code could not decipher the morality of the new. From the perspective of the new code, the old one looked ‘primitive’ or outdated, if not downright immoral. This perspective is not a White Western perspective, the old Babylonians regarded the non-city dwellers as primitive too.

After postmodernism
Not mentioned in the polymodern economics but worth knowing about is metamodernism. Metamodernism is a concept that was first conceived by Albert Borgman in 1992 in his essay Crossing the Postmodern Divide where he suggests that metamodernism may be what follows postmodernism.

Later, after the financial crash in 2008, metamodernism was re-invented and explored by two Dutch cultural theorists, Timotheus Vermeulen and Robin van den Akker, as a sentiment among a generation of young people who had grown up on postmodern irony and deconstruction and suddenly faced the harsh realities of economic restraint and a need for structures. The world turned out to have consequences. As a result, a double-sentiment of sincerity and irony, and a need for both structure and deconstruction emerged. Metamodernism has thus blended two previous codes, modernity and postmodernism, and does not see much of a conflict between itself and those two codes. Depending on the metamodern thinker, metamodernism may or may not see what came before modernity, and different thinkers or schools of metamodernism have different views on the premodern traditional and the prehistoric indigenous.

Metamodernism, metamodernity, and polymodernity
What I now call polymodernity I have previously called metamodernity. To avoid confusion and a mix-up between metamodernity as I have suggested it and the metamodernisms that others explore, I decided to change the name metamodernity to polymodernity. Semantically, it is also a better name: meta- means beyond, poly- means several. What I am suggesting is a potential future epoch of several cultural codes or ‘modernities.’

Hypermodernism
In his 1992 essay, Albert Borgman contrasted metamodernism with hypermodernism. Metamodernism was a possible post-postmodern future that would be meaningful and acceptable; hypermodernism would be a future in which capital, tech, constant surveillance, and violence would rule and ruin the planet.

Polymodernity and why we need four codes
The threat of a hypermodern future is not just real, it is the direction in which the world seems to drift, unless we make a deliberate effort to create a humane, meaningful future.

Polymodernity offers a vision for the future that is meaningful because it continues elements from all four historical cultural codes, all four meaning-making structures that have already served generations of humans by allowing them to make sense of the world and to be good, moral people.

Polymodernity is a deliberately multi-layered cultural code that allows a plurality of both codes (how civilizations change over time) and of cultures (how the codes are practiced by different peoples) simultaneously and in the same physical location. Rather than seeing conflicts among the codes, polymodernity allows us to see how each code serves its own purpose in different contexts, and with this openness to plurality a door also opens to seeing how different cultures within the same code may co-exist and enrich each other. One may see codes and cultures as two different ways of cutting the cake: layers versus slices.

France has indigenous roots that grew from its particular flora, fauna, and landscape, it has uniquely French traditions, there is also a modern France, which has contributed uniquely to the political development in the West, and French philosophers trailblazed postmodernism. Something similar can be said about Norway, China, and other countries and, today, all cultures are struggling to get their indigenous, traditional, modern, and postmodern roots and heritage to co-exist.

The same can be seen with even bigger force within religions. Judaism, Christianity, Islam, and most other religions are both products of the traditional, premodern world, and Jews, Christians, and Muslims etc. with a premodern, traditional worldview have tremendous problems accepting that their religion has indigenous roots that are older than the relgion, just as they have problems accepting the modern and postmodern cultural codes. In many cases, traditional Jews, Christians, and Muslims have more in common than premodern and modern Jews have, or premodern and modern Christians and Muslims, respectively. Cultural codes are about morality, and within premodernity, there are shared structures of morality that clash with the moral structures of modernity, and this clash between codes is deeper than the clash between one denomination and the other. Morality, which is what the codes represent, is a basic human need; any one religious denomination is not. Morality is deeply connected to the way our brain works and it is embedded in our most intimate relationships; denomination is varnish.

Recognizing all layers of morality
Polymodernity is about recognizing that all four ways of meaning-making and morality have important qualities. And that neither one of them is enough on its own in the complex world that we have now created. Our inner world and moral meaning-making must match the outer complexity, otherwise we cannot handle the outer world.

Contrary to each previous individual code, polymodernity thus does not require of people that they give up their current morality and maning-making, but it insists on adding something to everybody’s meaning-making. Hopefully, this will be easier for many to accept rather than having to give up one’s current meaning-making and morality.

This raises some other questions, though: When to apply which cultural code? How to avoid an even bigger moral relativism than postmodernity, or a complete mess of conflicting moralities?

Polymodernity and power
A rule of thumb that I think may work regarding when to apply which code as an organizing principle and power structure is group sizes — with very fuzzy boundaries; here illustrated as gaps in the numbers:

· Indigenous code: family and other small groups up to 150 people:

· Traditional code: groups of 500–100,000 people

· Modern code: 500,000+ people

· Postmodern code: a lens through which to deconstruct and take a critical look at all groups and their codes.

Within the family and other small groups where one can see everybody and read their body language, ad-hoc, nonformal negotiation may work as organizing principle and power structure. Within the midsize groups (companies, for instance), shared rituals and top-down leadership may work as organizing principles and power structure. In the nation state size groups, there needs to be rule of law, room for diversity and disagreement, negotiation, and democracy for everybody to thrive as much as possible.

The reason group size is suggested as a rule of thumb is that any group size matched with the wrong organizing principle is a recipe for trouble:

· Indigenous code applied to nation state leadership, i.e. where intimate relationships and ad-hoc negotiations of decisions rule, equals corruption.

· Traditional code applied to either family or nation states equals tyranny.

· Modern code with democracy and written legislation applied within the family would break down intimate relationships.

· Postmodern code can only deconstruct, it cannot build lasting social structures.

The four codes developed because of growing group sizes, and they cannot serve people well as a power structure in the wrong context.

In a polymodern culture, we would be conscious about which codes to apply or take inspiration from in which context, particularly which groups size.

Economy versus politics

Recently, an understanding that the neoclassical economic model cannot deliver sustainability for humans and nature has sparked new models such as Doughnut Economics, Wellbeing Economy, and Earth for All, which is a project by the Club of Rome. All three models are crucial, and I am positive that they can support as well as benefit from the polymodern economic model. However, I only perceive Doughnut Economics them as an economic model, I see the other two as political frameworks and political choices. There is nothing wrong with this, quite the contrary, I just find it slightly misleading and food for thought that we may have become so afraid of calling anything political that a new, political idea needs to be labelled ‘economy.’

Polymodern Economics is about actors in the economy and how they interact. The goals of how much greener or sustainable any particular part of the world should be, I consider political choices, and these political choices may be promoted by adjusting economic levers as described in this model. Polymodern Economics may serve high or low regenerative and sustainability ambitions, but the actual outcome is not set by the model itself, it offers only a structure and a different way of looking at macroeconomics as economics.

What is value and wealth?
A rich life has many qualities, among them material and economic security, but that is only part of life. A rich life consists of intimate and stable relationships, cultural identity, participation / contribution on both the consumption side and the production side in one’s society and economy, and access to thriving nature. How much of each the economy should generate is a political choice, and polymodern economics will allow us to measure and adjust mechanism in the economy that may produce less or more of this multifaceted richness.

The purpose of polymodern economics is to promote rich and meaningful lives, but the measures of the model are not the impact on nature, which what Doughnut Economics does, and/or subjective measures such as well-being. The measures are in the economy and the transactions in the economy itself.

Complexity

Different scientists and mathematicians have defined complexity differently. The definition of complexity behind polymodern economics is two concepts coined by Brian Arthur:[xi] co-evolutionary diversity and structural deepening. Co-evolutionary diversity means that the entities in a system are products of one-another; they brought forth each other. As the entities compete and specialize to find their niche in the system, they become increasingly advanced and specialized, which is what Arthur calls structural deepening.

Co-evolutionary diversity and structural deepening mean that one cannot design an open, self-organizing complex system, but the circumstances for it can be designed so that the entities in it may flourish. Polymodern economics is an attempt at such a design, which will allow individuals, households, and traditional, modern, and postmodern production entities to thrive and contribute to lives as rich as possible. The outcome is not predefined, but the framework promotes and rewards certain trading patterns.

The polymodern economic model does not suggest measuring co-evolutionary diversity and structural deepening per se, but suggests that transactions per capita among individuals, households, and production entities in the traditional, modern, and postmodern strata are an expression of economic complexity. Particularly if there is a normal or scale-free distribution of connections that turn out to represent a robust and fruitful level of complexity, which is a topic that ought to be explored.

Productivity

With robots and AI taking over increasing parts of the production of physical goods, we are about to find ourselves in the peculiar situation that we are no longer necessary for our own survival. Taken to its extreme (economists like that kind of pure scenarios), we could increase productivity to the point where one big super-AI-robot produces everything everybody needs, loads it onto drones, and they fly it out to everybody around the globe, and only one person needs to be employed to switch it on. That would be the ultimate optimization of human productivity.

This is unlikely to happen, of course, but our productivity is increasing so drastically that the entry barriers to the capitalist national economic stratum is becoming increasingly hard. The national stratum is also the part of the economy where we have seen the big productivity increase since the invention of the steam engine; in the current economic models increased productivity equals growth, which equals economic success. Our economic growth, in other words, is making it increasingly hard for people to join the stratum of the economy that has accounted for the majority of past economic growth — and joining the continental BINC stratum, which contributes to 21st century growth, is even harder.

Another problem with making economic growth based on increased productivity the goal of the economy is that we produce so much in the West now (or have outsourced it to overseas producers) that we need to increase our consumption to keep our jobs. This is not sustainable, neither ecologically, nor economically.

By measuring economic transactions and complexity instead of growth, we can create a sustainable measure for economic success. Economic success does not have to involve increased productivity and increased material consumption, we can increase transactions and immaterial consumption and have a thriving economy. We just need to measure something that we are not used to measuring, namely complexity, and using trade connections as a proxy for complexity.

Global Polymodern Economics

This text is written very much from a Western welfare state perspective, which from a global perspective is very much an exception.

However, understanding any economy as a polymodern economy will allow us to compare economies around the globe in more informative ways than GDP, GDP per capita, employment, educational levels, and companies and patents per capita etc. The measurements in all four strata ought to be possible to carry out, at least to some extent, in any relatively developed economy. This will allow us to compare households, towns, nations, and continents and the relationships among/between them around the globe. Suburbia in Brazil and China become comparable to towns in Russia and the US, which become comparable to inner city neighborhoods in France and Australia.

Economic complexity

Any economy may be seen as a network of transactions, and the number of transactions as well as the distribution of transactions may be seen as a measure for complexity in the network. In polymodern economics, it is assumed that a more complex economy is both richer, stronger, and more robust than a lesser complex economy, i.e. with fewer connections.

By looking at the four strata separately, it may be possible to develop a model for a thriving economy based on the complexity in each stratum: What are the optimal relative levels of complexity among the four strata for people to thrive in any given place? It is assumed, for instance, that the extremely high level of complexity in the postmodern continental tech industry stratum in Silicon Valey surrounded by extremely low complexity in the indigenous household stratum among homeless people is the cause of great misery, even though the neoclassical model shows economic growth in the area.

It may also be possible to compare economic complexity among households, among towns, among nations, and among continents, and it may thus be possible to explore globally, how weak (i.e. less complex) economies may best become more complex and thus stronger by focusing on the development in each stratum.

Global Economic Thermodynamics

Oversimplified, the second law of thermodynamics teaches us that if we add water to a kettle, add energy to the water in the form of heat, the heat will rise inside the kettle and so will the pressure, and unless there is an energy exchange with the surroundings through work or an opening in the kettle, at some point the kettle will explode. Alternatively, one could have fortified the kettle and kept fortifying it, or one could have raised the heat and pressure in the surroundings to the same level as inside the kettle. Energy levels in systems and barriers between those systems need to match, or we have exploding systems.

If we keep letting some of the world’s economies grow in complexity while others do not, we either need to keep building the barriers between the economies stronger, or we should expect exploding barriers. This may be very literal in the form of terrorism and war. If we remove the barriers completely, we should expect the systems to fall apart. To have functioning and healthy economic systems there needs to be exchange of energy and economic activity among systems, and we should expect explosions if some systems become significantly more complex than others.

To promote peaceful global development and to lower the number of economic refugees, levelling out complexity inequality is crucial; polymodern economics would allow us to draw economic complexity heatmaps of the world that would clearly show where households, towns, and nations are in the most need of complexification and economic development.

Human Psychology

The reason for the explosions of barriers between unequally complex economies is not the economic activity itself, but the human sense of justice and injustice. When basic necessities are guaranteed, it is not absolute wealth that defines our happiness, but relative wealth. Being poor among other poor people is bad, but being poor and living next door to significantly richer people is unbearable. It creates resentment, frustration, anger, and hate, and it often also leads to violence among the poor.

The worst thing that people can lose is their sense of hope. Given the way polymodern economics looks at economy in four different strata, it ought to be possible to approach economic development from a hope perspective: How can economic development be promoted so that it creates in the fastest possible way a sense of opportunity, results, and hope among the poorest? In countries with low levels of education, the market economy town stratum is most likely the stratum on which to focus. It is probably where deliberately creating easy onboarding into the economy would give the most people new opportunities. Instead of just seeing economic aid and investments in weak economies as aid and investments, we should identify what would increase the number of economic transactions in the traditional town stratum as quickly as possible, which would allow households to earn more money, and the national stratum to grow too. Among the tools may be progressively taxing the rich, which are usually making their money in the national capitalist stratum if not in the BINC continental stratum and paying the poorest individuals for getting education, doing simple jobs in the traditional market town economy, and establishing cooperatives.

Humans are by nature industrious if we can see opportunities. It ought to be the task of economists to provide the structures within which human industriousness can unfold in fruitful and sustainable ways with the local resources available.

Harmonizing the Economy with Nature

With polymodern economics, it becomes possible to see economies as self-organizing complex open dynamic systems with fractal properties, just like nature. By studying biotopes and their internal balances, we can learn what a thriving, long-term sustainable ‘economy’ looks like where energy, work, and resources are in constant flows or transactions, and where there is no debt and value accumulation. Nature does not over-consume its resources, instead, due to co-evolutionary diversity and structural deepening, nature has feedback loops that allow biotopes to be long-term robust, adaptable, and thriving.

Bildung Rose Distribution

To complete the polymodern economy, I suggest that the Bildung Rose[xii] is also used as a tool to assess whether any society is balanced and will be long-term thriving or not.

According to this model, all human societies have the following seven domains: production, technology, aesthetics, (political) power, science, narrative, and ethics. This is brought together in the description of society called the Bildung Rose. It is my claim that for any society to thrive, the seven domains need to be in balance.

An add-on to the polymodern economy might be to register production entities according to the domain(s) in which they have their activities and to thus monitor to what extent towns and nation are balanced regarding those seven domains.

For the past couple of generations, the economic mantra has been investment in what is possible here and now: production and technology. We have reluctantly been willing to pay for and invest in the domains that explore what might be possible: aesthetics, institutions of power, and science. We have gladly let ourselves be entertained by narratives that tell us who we are, but not so much about who we ought to be, and we have neglected ethics. This is not culturally sustainable, it is ruining both humans and nature, and thus, eventually, it will not be economically sustainable either.

Measuring the town, the national, and the continental strata for how much of the economic activity takes place in each of the seven domains may be yet another way to monitor the wellbeing of societies and their economies.

Plug and Play Right Away

Besides being a macro-macroeconomic model that may allow us to handle both household, town, national, continental, and global economies in the same model, the polymodern economic model offers easy onboarding for individuals and households that allows them to make a sustainable difference right away. We have always been able to do that, but here is an economic model that grasps it and promotes it. Polymodern economics offers ‘plug and play right away!’ Change material consumption to immaterial, create local cooperatives, find work close to where you live, talk to your neighbors, get a vegetable garden, exchange some of your carrots for some cake, repair stuff instead of throwing it out, and invite people over for a homecooked meal. Rather than seeing this kind of economic behavior as lowering growth and thus being a bad thing for the economy, it increases complexity and saves the planet.

Notes:

[i] Andersen, Lene Rachel: Polymodernity: Meaning and Hope in a Complex World (Nordic Bildung, 2023)

[ii] I first came across this definition in Debt: The First 5,000 years by David Graeber, though it is not his; he had it from the French historian Fernand Braudel, and he referred to it as C-M-C, Comodity-Money-Comodity, and M-C-M, Money-Comodity-Money.

[iii] https://sciencing.com/examples-synergy-nature-12322176.html

[iv] Henderson, Hazel: Ethical markets: growing the green economy (White River Junction, Vt.: Chelsea Green Publishing Company, 2006.)

[v] Raworth, Kate: Doughnut Economics: Seven Ways to Think Like a 21st-Century Economist (Random House, 2017)

[vi] https://doughnuteconomics.org/

[vii] https://weall.org/

[viii] https://www.etymonline.com/search?q=modern

[ix] Porter, Michael: The Competitive Advantage of Nations, Macmillan Press 1990

[x] https://www.forbes.com/advisor/investing/cryptocurrency/bitcoins-energy-usage-explained/

[xi] I found the reference to Brian Arthur’s definition in The Inginuity Gap by Thomas Homer-Dixon (Alfred A. Knopf, 2000); I have not read Arthur’s original work.

[xii] https://tidsskrift.dk/FECUN/article/view/130247/176001

Have you ever had a really amazing experience, where you cannot put into words what it was that made it so special?

It may have been a dinner party: the food was good, the room was beautiful, everything was just perfect, but it was the people who made the difference. But it was not just that the people were nice, fun, and interesting — it was something that happened between you. It was, for the lack of a better word, the ‘spirit’ of that party that made it so different.

Or it could be a meeting at work, where the energy was all positive, creative, meaningful and fun, and you walked out of it almost flying a bit. Was it something somebody said? Maybe. Was it the topic? Perhaps. But more likely, it was, for the lack of a better word, the ‘spirit’ of that meeting that made the difference. Something happened among the people there that lifted you.

Whatever it was that happened, it happened within the space in-between.

Spirit in this sense is an interesting phenomenon. It is also, I hope, a very common phenomenon. Whenever people get together around something, there will always be an emotional dimension to it, and whereas most work meetings (and too many dinner parties) make no emotional difference, some of them do.

I am not suggesting that there are actual spirits joining the events; that some supernatural consciousness joins the party or the meeting and starts affecting everybody.

What I am saying is that we have a potential as human beings: to get together around a shared topic, task, goal, dream, hope, or meal, and through our words, attention, curiosity, and generosity generate that human spirit. That ‘something’ which would not have been there if we had not contributed to it.

An aspect of this ‘human spirit’ is that it seems to appear and flourish more among strangers than among people with whom we are already close. It needs new input to emerge. Once we stop adding to it, it is gone. It needs living, curious, caring, connecting people to ‘come alive.’

And when ‘it’ comes alive, so do we.

When we run out of strangers, we may help the ‘spirit’ emerge through the arts, beauty, music, or aesthetics. Or, believe it or not, through education.

One would think that Zoom meetings are not the best place for this kind of experience. But we have hosted Global Bildung Day four times now, and as we make our tour around the globe, that human spirit is there, undeniably. In the in-between.

As we sit in front of each our screens around the globe, and as we hear the presentations from Oceania, East Asia, Asia, the Middle East, Africa, Europe, Latin America, and North America, and thus travel around the planet, there is human spirit. Not least because, after the presentations, we go out into breakout rooms and discuss in smaller groups what we have just heard. The Global Bildung Day is a global conversation.

You can join

At the upcoming Global Bildung Day on September 21st, the topic is Education and AI, and we are getting together around this topic because there is something very crucial that we share as humans, but which AI will never have (for the lack of a better word): human spirit. As humans, we need to deal with this. And we need to develop education that inspires and connects us as humans, which is what bildung is very much about.

So, you are hereby invited to the Global Bildung Day: it is free of charge, it is on Zoom, you can see the full program here: https://www.globalbildung.net/gbd2023-september-21/, and you can sign up here: https://www.nordicbildung.org/events/global-bildung-day-2023-september-21/.

The Global Bildung Day is on the Equinox, when the day has the same length everywhere on Earth. As human beings, we share the daylight. We also share poor memory, so to make it easy to remember, Global Bildung Day is on March 21 and September 21, even though the Equinoxes are technically on March 20 and September 22/23.

Looking very much forward to seeing all of you online on Global Bildung Day.

The Human Spirit was originally published in Bildung on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.