We are witnessing how our human world is speeding up so exponentially that it seems to be burning up, literally and figuratively. As Vanessa de Oliveira has noted (‘Hospicing Modernity’, 2021), beneath all the story of the cost-of-living crisis and precarity of liberal democracy in the Western world, we are in fact witnessing the unravelling/implosion of modernity and its corollary, coloniality. Both have been relentlessly shaped by an extractivist logic that has burned through natural and human resources, and is now burning through human sanity—our capacity to live harmoniously in communities where we can raise our children, and the generations to come.

The ‘art of resistance’ as the world is ‘burning up’ requires us to not only understand the world around us as best we can, but also to understand how our minds and psyches can be manipulated, and to discover our own inner sources of wisdom sanity and playful engagement with the ineffable in life.

What is Going On?

When I returned to Australia in late 2009, after spending three years in an immersive retreat in the south of France studying and practising the meditation methods of the Vajrayana and Dzogchen tradition of Tibetan Buddhism, I found myself wanting to live the truth of these insights in my everyday life.

After all, in my everyday life, I had been working as a sociologist, specialising in science and technological change. How did I bring these worlds together?

Now in 2024, as the world seems to be swirling in intensifying political and environmental chaos that is threatening the taken-for-granted ideals of liberal democracy, resting on the laurels of human technological genius, I ask myself what this means? Behind all the noise of the rise and rise of regressive ethno-nationalism and the manosphere, and the ascendency of a peculiar mix of techno-enthused libertarianism and authoritarian populism, what is going on? What’s causing the crisis of masculinity and the gender wars—from the extremism of the Taliban to schoolboys in our classrooms? Along with the political mobilisation of conservative Christian women against LGBTQ+ people.

For example, on 12 December 2024, a report in The New Daily revealed that while rates for major criminal offences in NSW had decreased significantly over the past decade, domestic violence assaults, sexual assaults and other sexual offences have all trended up, with domestic violence growing 30 per cent and rapes doubling.

What is happening to our human psyches under the onslaught of the now hegemonic individualistic, hyper-consumerist forces of techno-capitalism, as it conquers the last frontier—our human minds and emotions?  The latest neo-liberal application of behavioural economics, via algorithmic data harvesting of our attention as we click and share on our online media, is also said to be literally reducing our cognitive functioning.

The very mental capacities that distinguish us from other species makes us vulnerable. We require an extended period of love, affection and a sense of security to grow into healthy adults, while at the same time developing a confident sense of personal autonomy/agency. The failure to receive this can create serious mental problems, often intergenerationally, affecting our ability to form healthy relationships with others and ourselves.

While they say it takes a village to raise a child, this village needs to be nurturing; not scarred by conflicts and exclusions. The individualised and isolated nuclear family makes us vulnerable to any fault lines. Racial/ethnic marginalisation, identity politics and community violence create long term scars in our human psyche.

As James Bridle, The New Dark Age (2018) has commented, when reflecting on Trumpism 1.0:

“Over the last century, technological acceleration has transformed our planet, our societies, and ourselves, but it has failed to transform our understanding of these things . . . Because we are entangled with them, this understanding cannot be limited to the practicalities of how things work: it must be extended to how things came to be, and how they continue to function in the world in ways that are often invisible and interwoven.” (p.3)

Bridle notes that “the greatest carrier wave of progress for the last few centuries has been the central idea of the Enlightenment itself: that more knowledge – more information – leads to better decisions.” To deal with this, he suggests we need a new literacy.

However, I would argue that when understanding how things came to be, we have to go further than a ‘literacy’. We need to understand the nature of our vulnerability to all forms of mental delusion and suffering.

Coming to Grips with the Vortex

We have to interrogate the cultural foundations that led us here, back into the very way we see and interpret our experience of reality. The West and almost the entire human world (via imperialism and economic globalisation) has become captured by the alluring idea of Progress—the promethean quest to conquer and master the ‘rules of nature’ for human benefit.

Seizing on the mistaken view of evolution as the ‘survival of the fittest’, rather than the ‘survival of the most fitting’ through elaborate networks of collaboration, we have been sucked into a vortex of narcissistic hyper-individualism, playing out in economic systems and politics, and feeding into a mental health crisis of loneliness, alienation, conspiracy thinking, seductions of authoritarianism, and youth radicalisation into ideology-driven acts of terrorism, or just criminal ‘rage’.

Now we face the chaos of Trumpism 2.0, partnered up with Elon Musk and his tech-bros—the faces of the new libertarian masculinity muscling up to save us from the ravages of woke culture. As Topham Guerin, champions of ‘conservative’ political marketing explain, “in the past it was broadcast – we [the public] were the recipients and not the sharers – but now we’re predominantly the sharers. So, it’s not just that we’re having an arousal kind of reaction to the content, and anger being the sort of dominant one these days, it’s that we’ll then share that content.”

Sharing is the main game—spreading the word, fuelling the rage with AI image creation and mis/disinformation. Meanwhile data centres are already consuming 10 percent of the world’s global energy production, and this will only ramp up more with the takeup of AI as it permeates the whole intensification of techno-capitalism.

But discerning ‘truth’ is fraught. Information (data) is not knowledge. As we are all too aware, thanks to the feminist critique of the ‘male gaze’ and the post-colonial critique of modernity, knowledge systems incorporate a culturally determined focus on what information to pay attention to (gather), and how to interpret that information into a system of meaning (knowledge). And, finally, knowledge, in itself, is not the same as wisdom.

As we grapple with the reality of living in a knowledge economy, we recognise that we have spectacularly failed to nurture and develop the ancient idea of wisdom in our cultural custodians—our political, business and civic leaders.

The Wisdom Perspective

The purpose of the Western knowledge system has been the gaining of expertise in a chosen field, largely unmoored from any values framework that talks of wisdom. One of the most striking characteristics of Modernity and its celebration of objective ‘reason’ in the spirit of the European Enlightenment, is the absence of any focus on the nature of wisdom as a domain of human consciousness. While the focus on rationality and empirical objectivity freed us from the passions of the religious dogma of the Middle Ages, its long-term unintended impact has been the objectification of our world into a world of things. The backlash is the current preoccupation with feelings, ‘what I feel is true’, rather than what evidence can be put forward to substantiate your opinion—the subject of Lucinda Holdforth’s article, ‘Feeling our way to Utopia’ in the Griffith Review.

The Western knowledge system’s fields of philosophy and religious studies touch on this idea of wisdom, but there is no systematic exploration of this as a domain of human consciousness, separate from mere intelligence and cognitive and emotional functioning.

Yet over the last 2,500 years, the Buddhist world has been preoccupied with just this question. Where the core focus is the development of our human capacity for wisdom and compassion; the understanding of what blocks this, and how to remove those blockages. Buddhist teachings identify three basic sources: ignorance (dualistic grasping onto a sense of self versus other and failure to recognise our own inherent wisdom nature); desire (lust/greed); and aversion (anger/hatred). These are known as the ‘three mind poisons’.

The Buddhist system identifies that within our human consciousness, although we have the inherent capacity for nondual wisdom and compassion as our birthright in our mind-body system, this is obscured from ordinary dualistic consciousness (the separation between self and other) through our susceptibility to cognitive and emotional confusion—known as afflictive mental states (mental suffering).

Like so many Westerners, it was my experiences of such afflictive states, a state of mental anguish despite my professional successes, which led me to the Buddhist world, via a side excursion into the world of psychotherapy, to understand my suffering self.

Unlike Western neuroscience and psychiatry, with its focus on maladaptive cognitive functioning (brain damage, psychosis, chronic anxiety and depression, etc) or how to maximise cognitive functioning, including the recognition of ‘emotional intelligence’, Buddhist explorations of consciousness identify a domain of consciousness that lies beyond ordinary cognition—that of primordial wisdom (Tib: yeshe, Skt: jnana).

So, while my journey into psychotherapy took me back into the various emotional ‘knots’ of my childhood, using gestalt methods to exorcise my relationship with my parents, it was my Buddhist journey that allowed me to move beyond this to discover an inner strength—a refuge in my own inherent wisdom nature, free from all the discursive murmurings of emotional scars and habits accumulated through my life; a state of non-dual compassionate awareness.

Inner Freedom

It is the experiential recognition of this state of non-dual compassionate awareness, and our ability to rest in that state (the inner refuge), which provides us with the strength/confidence and spaciousness to become free of our habitual sources of mental suffering and patterns of thought.

Buddhism derives its understanding of this domain of consciousness based on the meditative insights of Prince Siddhartha, who called the Earth to Witness that he would not arise from his deep meditation until he understood the causes of the pervasive nature of human mental suffering, which existed even among the wealthy and privileged, and he understood how to eliminate this pervasive suffering.

It is this non-theistic focus on mental suffering that underpins the contemporary links between Western psychology and its applications into psychotherapy and Buddhist practices of mindfulness meditation. And why some regard Buddhist methods as a form of contemplative science.

The ‘Four Noble Truths’ are the teachings Prince Siddhartha gave at Deer Park in Sarnath (Varanasi, India), some 500 years before the birth of Christ, which flow from his meditative insights: the Truth of Suffering, the Causes of Suffering, the Cessation of Suffering, and the Path to Cessation.

These form the basis of the Buddhist worldview across the Hinayana approach of Sri Lanka, Burma, and Thailand; the Mahayana approach of Vietnam, China, Korea and Japan, and the Vajrayana approach of Tibetan Buddhism, which is also practised in China and its diaspora in Taiwan, Singapore and the West.

As a result of his insights (enlightenment), Prince Siddhartha became known as Buddha, the Awakened One. The state of Cessation of Suffering is known as liberation, and requires us not only to refrain from the causes of pervasive suffering, but to be able to rest our minds in what the Dalai Lama calls the ‘clear light mind’, and what other traditions call our inherent Buddha Nature, the experiential state of primordial wisdom.

Buddhism is non-theistic. There is no idea of an external all-powerful ‘god’ (as judge) or ‘his’ prophets (as saviours). Rather, especially in the Mahayana tradition, Buddha is a wisdom teacher, providing a path for all to achieve the same awakening, as he did, in this very lifetime, by working with their own minds. Instead of ‘God’ as judge, there is the law of karma—the workings of cause and effect across multiple levels of interdependence that shape our world. Or in the words of common parlance, ‘we reap what we sow’.

This Buddhist path is often described as one of ego-lessness, or non-self, and which speaks to the fundamental difference with Western culture, with its strong emphasis on the individual self and its rights as the core foundation of civilisation.

However, this Buddhist egolessness is not the nihilism of Western philosophy. Rather it is based on an experiential recognition that the ‘self’ we identify with, seeking to protect and promote, is not a fixed entity. Via investigative meditation, we experientially discover that it (the sense of self) is a fluid process— created moment by moment through our minds and emotions, arising in interdependence with all that is around us.

The Buddhist approach embraces the idea of a vibrant sense of personal agency, but it is one that is free of clinging to habitual patterns and a desperate clinging to socially determined self-identity. Free of afflictive mental states, it is replete with the wisdom of discernment and the warmth of compassionate empathy for all of life, of which one is indivisibly a part.

In this realisation, one is at home with the impermanent nature of life in all its multiplicity. There is no longer the desperate search for certainty through opinions, ideologies, and position in society that feeds our hopes/expectations and fears.

This has radical implications for our understanding of the fault lines of the narcissism of techno-capitalism, a human fault line we can trace back to the Greek myth about the plight of Narcissus who falls in love with his own reflection, only to discover it cannot love him back.

The Path Out of the Vortex

Which brings me back to how we can best respond to the crisis of narcissistic techno-capitalism, with its capacity to data-mine our emotions in order to drive behaviour—be that political or economic, along with selfie-culture and resulting image obsession.

From a Buddhist viewpoint, there is no point in only focusing on political, social and economic structures in order to address this.

We have to return to the source—understanding how we are so easily caught in the vortex of mental suffering, even when we seem to be ‘successful’ in terms of our society’s norms and values.  Especially when these very norms and values have become toxic to our mental and community health.

We have to understand the link between the personal and the political, echoing that famous call of early feminism: THE PERSONAL IS THE POLITICAL.

At the same time as working on changing destructive socio-political structures and processes, we must begin with ourselves: progressively liberating ourselves from our afflictive mental states—our susceptibility to the forces of delusion (maras) such as desire/craving, aggression/hatred, and ignorance/prejudice.

It is these, which feed into narcissism, greed, lust, insecurity, anxiety, gender-based violence and essentialism, ethno/religous-nationalism, conspiracy thinking, jealous competitiveness, and denialism.

Knowledge and expertise are not enough. Our current system celebrates and promotes these very afflictive mental states, which dog our leaders in business, politics, society and our families.

True leadership requires wisdom: freedom from afflictive mental states, which drive behaviour and attitudes.

Without a focus on wisdom, the consequences are calamitous. It is as if we are living through the last hurrah of modernity and all its assumptions and promises of rising prosperity—its technological marvels, sensuous gratification, and individual freedom—even the promise of eternal life and conquest of space. All which feed into the intensifying narcissism of modern culture. Instead of Trumph’s call to ‘dig, dig, dig’ (for oil and gas), we are witnessing ‘burn, burn, burn’ in a hurricane of greed and rage.

Resistance

Resistance to this trajectory is building beneath all the noise of the last hurrah of Modernity and its regressive flourish in misogynistic techno-capitalism, championing the romantic individualistic libertarianism popularised by Ayn Rand and her acolytes.

Small groups all over the world are investing in regenerative thinking and practices, building resilient communities, engaging with Indigenous knowledge systems, exploring insights from ancient wisdom traditions.

Slowly, the tendrils of a new PARADIGM OF RELATIONALITY is emerging in the cracks and crevices of Modernity’s chaotic and violent unravelling.

It is not surprising that one of the voices of this paradigm shift is Bayo Akomolafe through his Emergence Network. Bayo is not only a poet and philosopher; he is also a psychiatrist, steeped in the vagaries and susceptibility of the human mind.

Schooled in the western knowledge system, but deeply embedded in Indigenous Nigerian culture, he is alert to the important role of the Trickster to puncture our hubris and understand the byways of the human mind across cultures.

In his words, as he welcomes us to the ‘Decade of the Fugitive’:

I am quite confident that even as the oceans boil, and the hurricanes beat violently against our once safe shores, and the air sweats with the heat of impending doom, and our fists protest the denial of climate justice, that there is a path to take that has nothing to do with victory or defeat: a place we do not yet know the coordinates to; a question we do not yet know how to ask. The point of the departed arrow is not merely to pierce the bullseye and carry the trophy: the point of the arrow is to sing the wind and remake the world in the brevity of flight.

There are things we must do, sayings we must say, thoughts we must think, that look nothing like the images of success that have so thoroughly possessed our visions of justice. May this new decade be remembered as the decade of the strange path, of the third way, of the broken binary, of the traversal disruption, the kairotic moment, the posthuman movement for emancipation, the gift of disorientation that opened up new places of power, and of slow limbs.