Old Assumptions Gone

As Trump 2.0 continues to tear up the post WWII world order, in favour of a new era of naked imperialism, we are forced to revise our taken-for-granted assumptions about how the world’s political systems of power and economics work.

And as climate change continues to drive extreme weather events, we are being forced to consider that forces bigger than human ambition and their technological genius, are at play. To realise:

—That our understanding of reality is fatally flawed.

—That we humans, the ace predators of Planet Earth, are not actually masters of the universe, made in the image of ‘God’.

—That the promethean dream of continued Progress and Prosperity is a fatal delusion, including the idea that new frontiers remain: the colonisation of Mars and other planets, or the evolution into transhumanism across the silicon and carbon divide—where we merge with our AI.

Instead, we are headed for systemic collapse—across multiple, intersecting systems: political, environmental, governmental, health, cultural and social.

In our collective pursuit of wealth via private profit maximisation and technological efficiency, we forgot the fundamental rules of complex systems that prescribe life on planet Earth. Resilience requires diversity, while capitalist profit maximisation and political ambition seeks monopoly.

A New Approach

In the face of such systems collapse, many suggest that we need to:

• Invest in robust social networks—locally, regionally and internationally
• Build systems of deliberative, participatory, decision making, but see this as a process of opening, not a looking for closure—to let go of solutionism, the idea that there is a ‘fix’ for everything
• Re-think our economic systems to include circularity, new business ownership models, resilient supply chains, community control over basic resources such as food, water and shelter
• Beginning at the local level, build a new politics, a new story of meaning and purpose that builds a bridge between the insights of science, ancient wisdom and Indigenous knowledges anchored in bioregional sustainability
• Recognise that, according to the rules of quantum reality, this story can spread like a mycelium network, an underground cultural movement that is growing beneath all the noise of the dominant political story of the battle between the survival of old style political democracies and the emerging authoritarian techno-feudalism of Trump 2.0 and its allied imperial ambitions, located in ethno-nationalism—across the US, Russia, China, India and Israel.

The Power of Story

I recently went along to see the film, ‘A Complete Unknown’ about the life of the singer-songwriter Bob Dylan.  His lyrics captured the spirit of the 1960’s cultural revolution that led to major cultural changes in the West, and increasingly across the world, including into the communist controlled states of the Soviet Union. It brought back memories of my youth. When he sang his lyric, ‘The Times They Are a Changin’, my generation had erupted in recognition. It inspired and warmed our spirit, our courage to go for change.

It reminded me of the power of story. We are narrative creatures who since time immemorial have made sense of our world through the stories we tell about meaning, purpose and reality. We have told these stories in mythopoetic language such as the Greek myths that survive in the English language: psyche, narcissist, eros, etc, along with the great myths of Indian, Chinese and Arab cultures. And closer to home, among the songlines of Australia’s Indigenous Aboriginal peoples that celebrate the continuous living presence of their creation ancestors in the land itself, as a living, breathing, presence.

The Technocratic Neoliberal Story

Despite the salutary lesson of the Promethean legend, somehow, through the central idea of Progress and Prosperity, as the Age of Reason and our investment in scientific objectivity overtook the Christian Bible as the driving force of Western culture, the story of Liberal Democracy got lost in managerialism.

Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan kicked this off with the story of neoliberalism, focused on the liberating power of free markets to deliver the dream of Progress and Prosperity. Famously declaring it was now all about the Economy. The idea of freedom (liberty) was fatally linked to private property: individuals and corporations. The overarching idea of Society, the ‘Commons’ was dead and buried.

Although the 2008 Great Financial Crash saw neoliberalism as the cruel hustle by the financial sector for what it was, neoliberalism retains a curious hold over the Western economic ‘priesthood’ and their daily prognostications in our media.

As a result, a great chasm has opened up with the masses, who are now ripe for emotional manipulation.

Despite the devastation of neoliberalism and what its failed trickle-down promise has wrought on ‘ordinary people’ in the West—as wealth inequality skyrocketed, people got older and sicker, the food got increasingly unhealthy, and extreme weather events belied the hope that climate change was a liberal hoax—the technocratic elite still cling to their managerial ways of objective ‘facts’ and figures’.

Reality, they keep declaring, is only that which can be measured and pinned down under the objectivist gaze of science. Meanwhile, Christian evangelism took off with its ‘talking in tongues’ and Christian rock music, aligned with the prosperity doctrine that God favours the rich and powerful. A basically schizophrenic culture has taken hold, where religious sensibility is almost entirely divorced from technocratic economics.

In this dream of Progress and Prosperity, there is always a fix and God is on ‘our’ side. The role of science and technology is to deliver the fix. And so, in Australia we got the Robot Debt Scheme, the promise to deliver ‘efficiency’ in eliminating fraud via ‘objective’ computer data analysis. Look what happened!

The trouble with this approach is that it not only feels increasingly heartless, it also feels like a technocratic trick. It’s devoid of any ability to emotionally connect with the lived experience of most people.

Increasingly we feel abandoned by the so-called experts on their high salaries, quoting macroeconomic statistics, trying to tell us how things have to be.

Following the impact of the GFC on the poor, with the onset of the global pandemic this sense of abandonment and distrust went into overdrive. Enter the power of conspiracy stories and their amplification through social media.

Is Trump the Alter-ego of Mao Zedong?

Along came Trump 2.0 with his MAGA story, promising he could create a new world order that would magic away the impact of neoliberalism.  He would drain the swamp of elite ‘experts’ and replace them with ‘loyalist’ experts who would deliver on his promises.

This new Trump-Elon Musk story has echoes of Mao Zedong’s Cultural Revolution 1966 – 1978, designed to ‘drain the swamp’ of any creeping influence of capitalism from the West, or old style Chinese aristocratic Confucianism from China’s imperial past. The call was to replace them with devoted Maoists, worshipping at the altar of Mao as the ‘Emperor’ of Communist China, blessed with the ‘mandate of heaven’. Trump is now claiming this mandate. Same script.

It’s personal for me. I was on a student university trip visiting China in 1968 – right in the middle of this Cultural Revolution. I saw it up close—the heady fanaticism, the vengeance. Any romantic ideas I had about China under Mao, as an answer to the ruthless side of Western capitalism, was quickly stripped away. It was most sobering.

Where Trump has his MAGA base wearing the MAGA red cap, Mao had his Red Guards wearing caps with a Mao badge and brandishing the Little Red Book of his quotes. Watch this space. Will we soon have the MAGA Red Book of Trumpian quotes, pulled together by his loyalists to guide the masses—‘flooding the zone’ via social media platforms?

Harnessing the Base

But this MAGA story is the great con, the big hustle, taking the distortions regularly used by consumerist advertising to a whole new level. As a reality TV performer, Trump understands how to manipulate the ‘viewer’. We live in the age of the Influencer. And Trump is the Influencer par excellence.

He is perfectly primed for this new iteration of cognitive capitalism, using algorithmic harvesting of our emotional hopes and fears into a new story about friends and enemies; leveraging the widely held story that US citizens are fed about their national exceptionalism—held in God’s favour as the Land of the Free, the ‘greatest country on earth.’

Where Mao harnessed the power of youth, a reversal of the power of young people in the West’s cultural revolution of the 1960s around liberty and humanitarian values, Trump is harnessing the power of the ‘base’ — the disgruntled masses of failed middle class dreams.

The New Enemies

Led by Tech Oligarch-in-Chief, Elon Musk, and his team of young techies, the MAGA story has taken the chainsaw of DOGE through the traitors—US civil servants, the ‘swamp’ of the ‘deep state’ that has been secretly oppressing the masses in the name of diversity and inclusion programs. And taken a chainsaw to the immigrants, the illegal aliens who still thought of the US as the ‘land of the free’ welcoming the huddled masses under the Statue of Liberty.

Who can ever forget the image of Elon Musk dancing on the stage with the chainsaw handed to him by Argentine President, Javier Milei, the new political darling of CPAC (Conservative Political Action Conference) with its branches all over the world, including Australia.

Their increasing tendency to make nazi style salutes—echoes of the European flirtation with fascism in Mussolini’s Italy and Hitler’s Germany—continue to gather a following around ideas of ‘white’ ethno-nationalism. This is no accident.

The Jews (enemies of Christianity) are no longer the problem. For most (but not all on the far right) the Jews now have honorary membership of ‘white nationalism’ given the way their religous Israel has taken its own version of the chainsaw to the Palestinians. Those people of Jewish faith still committed to social justice have been left marooned in a rising tide of antisemitism as the aftermath.

The enemy is now the real non-whites: Arabs, Africans and Indigenous people.

China and Russia aren’t ‘white’, nor is India, but they seem to have signed up to the new transactional order of ‘might is right’ so they are sort of in the camp of the MAGA story. At least for now.

As India under Narendra Modi joins the movement with MIGA, the enemy are now those of the Muslim faith living in India. And while China focuses on the Muslim Uyghurs, and Israel gets the nod from President Trump to wipe out the Palestinians from both Gaza and the West Bank, can we be surprised that there is a creeping dread amongst those of the Muslim faith? The sort of dread that drives the savage emotional reaction that the Iraq war created in ISIS. What is one person’s terrorist is another person’s revolutionary – AKA the American War of Independence from the British all those years ago.

Naked Transactionalism

With Trump’s naked transactional approach to foreign aid and the NATO alliance, demanding 50 percent of Ukraine’s mineral wealth in perpetuity in payment for US military aid against Russia, the UK and European nations must accept that the old order of the West, under US leadership and military protection, is now dead.  US aid, whether in the form of military weapons or economic aid, is now nakedly the sort of protection racket that we associate with gangsters.

The United Nations—progressively weakened by the refusal of members of its Security Council to be bound by UN Resolutions in pursuit of agreed principles of universal human rights and the sovereign independence of nation state members—is now fatally weakened to the point of irrelevance in the shaping of the new world order. When the US withdraws its financial support, it too will go under the chainsaw.

The Power of Values and Hope

My generation, the Baby Boomers of the 1960s and 1970s were full of hope that we COULD change the world in pursuit of the humanitarian values that led to the establishment of the United Nations. We believed in its declaration of universal human rights, and its recognition of the sovereignty of independent nation states against external armed aggression. The new Post WWII consensus.

Despite the ensuing terror of the Cold War between Russia and the US and the threat of a nuclear war of mutual destruction, we were driven by our emotional investment in a new set of values:

• Values that saw us campaign against the involvement of the US and its allies like Australia in the Vietnam civil war, as they sought their independence from France, including the indiscriminate use of chemical weapons such as Agent Orange on the civilian population.
• Values that saw us campaign against US CIA involvement against the socialist Allende Government in Chile, leading to the illegal arrest of thousands of young Chileans like us.
• Values that saw us campaign against racism: the freedom rides in the US against racial segregation of African Americans, echoed in Australia when university students joined Charlie Perkins to expose racist exclusion against Indigenous Aboriginal people in Australia, and the associated racist ‘White Australia Policy’. The 1967 recognition that Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people were citizens, to be counted in the census. The campaign against apartheid in South Africa.
• Values that led us to question the lifestyles of our parents’ generation and explore alternative lifestyles in communal living.
• Values that led us to question censorship laws that controlled our access to groundbreaking cultural expression in the arts. Which drove an explosion in the power and influence of the arts—in music, cinema, the visual arts and creative writing to explore new and provocative ideas and forms of expression.
• Values that led women to question the rules of masculine exceptionalism that denied women equal rights in law and economic independence. Which led to the transformative impact of feminism on assumptions of intrinsic male authority that are still being felt today, as men struggle to adjust in their sense of identity, gender relationships, political power structures and economic security.
• Values that saw my generation reject the spiritual monopoly of Christianity and explore insights from the spiritual traditions of Asia—Buddhism, Taoism, Vedic Yoga, and Deep Ecology ideas of nature as having spiritual presence in its own right that align with many Indigenous cultures
• Values that questioned the marginalisation of people on the basis of their sexuality and gender identity that birthed the LGBQT+ movement that saw the decriminalisation of homosexuality and acceptance of the reality of gender dysphoria.

Shadow Stories

What’s happened to this value-set that drove my generation, who recognised themselves in Bob Dylan’s powerful lyrics that rejected the old world order of ‘white’ supremacy, patriarchy and the primacy of the nuclear family?

To understand that we have to consider two frequently unacknowledged shadow stories.

1. Modernity/Coloniality

Western liberal democracy, despite its espousal of universal human rights, rests on an historical bedrock of colonialism—the exploitation of non-Western countries through the imposition of colonial rule, or the direct expropriation of their lands through colonial settlement as in the Americas, Australia, New Zealand and parts Africa. Despite most colonies gaining sovereign independence after WWII, they continued to be subject to economic exploitation via the transnational corporations of the West, aided and abetted by their governments.

Although universal human rights were espoused, ethnic discrimination and marginalisation continued to exist, particularly towards the Indigenous peoples impacted by European colonial settlement. Whose cultures embodied values about the human-nature relationship that contradicted the human exceptionalism ideas of Western culture, for whom ‘nature’ is seen as a resource for human benefit: leisure, tourism, mining, agriculture, fisheries.

2. Triumph of Technocratic Managerialism

Western liberal democracies, as the cultural powerhouse of cultural modernity, also rest on the bedrock of a belief in progress and prosperity through scientific and technological change. Despite how this mentality played out in the Nazi extermination camps during WWII, liberal democracies have witnessed the continued development of a technocratic elite of experts, and a belief in the power of ‘facts’ and ‘evidence’ to underpin any understanding of reality.

This has elevated economists as the new ‘priesthood’ of modernity, whereby the state of the economy became the driving force of society. Increasingly this technocratic elite speaks in a language that feels ‘heartless’, that no longer resonates in the lived experience of most people, creating a sense of widespread alienated distrust in government, media and business.

We watch Trump 2.0, and his alliance with the rightwing libertarian goals of the Tech Bros Oligarchs of Silicon Valley, make a full, frontal assault on the humanitarian values that drove our confidence in the possibility of shaping a better world.

We are left wondering where/when the next Bob Dylan will come along to sing a new call to action? A song that will take us beyond the Progress and Prosperity story of Modernity and all its hubris. A song that will sing us towards a new identity, one of kinship with Planet Earth and all her Earthlings, not just humans.

In Search of the New Story

Who are the singer-songwriters who will begin to articulate a new story away from the systemic collapse that is bearing down on us? Where is the new Bob Dylan among the many musicians among us, who can articulate this new story?

As I watched Bob Dylan’s story, I could see how he clung to being the ‘complete unknown’, and sought escape from fame, knowing his poetry came from being an outsider. Where are our new ‘outsiders’?

What’s the new story of hope for the young of today, in the face of the systemic collapse of all of our taken-for-granted assumptions about the world order, as we watch a new world order of Imperialism take shape—driven by geo-political competition between the military and economic might of the US, China and Russia?

Beyond Modernity

There is no tech-fix to this collapse. Philosopher-poets like Bayo Akomolafe say we have to ‘stay in the trouble’. We have to escape the ‘stranglehold of the familiar’ to allow the imperceptible to blossom. To do this we have to let go of our assumptions of expertise. We have to unlearn, as much as learn.

We have to avoid the modern tendency to pick and choose ideas from different cultures at whim. To avoid what Tyson Yunkaporta calls the ‘wrong story’ of Enlightenment 2.0, as we seek to extract ideas from Indigenous knowledge systems as an add-on to our often unconscious assumptions of  ‘white’ privilege. The underlying extractivist logic of our modern culture must be replaced by a deeper sense of reciprocity.

In the words of Laura McBride, when launching the Australian Museum’s Burra Learning Space, which weaves western science with Indigenous knowledge, we need to pay attention to a First Nations value – a moral or ethical lesson written in Dharawal language: “give as much as you receive” and “Listen to all the voices of Country – especially those different to your own.”

And we are having to craft this new story in the face of what Daniel Pinchbeck is calling ‘Cognitive Capitalism’— whereby we are outsourcing our subjectivity into digital apps controlled by the Tech Oligarchs, allowing them to colonise and, in a sense, cannibalise our inner selves: our capacity for affective relationships, our spatial navigation skills, our critical thinking skills. These are the primary resources for the new markets.

We are now having to protect our psyches in the face of AI enabled disinformation political campaigns; daily assault by criminal scams to steal our identities, money and property; and the narcissistic allure of the world of digital Influencers, that we can still ‘have it all’—beauty, fame, wealth. Just with a little digital manipulation.

Finding the New Story

This is the story I have been working on for the past month as I make my way through the chaos of Trump 2.0, let loose upon the world, and as Australia braces for a national election where all the MAGA tricks will be employed to manipulate our emotions and sense of anxiety and grievance, as so many of us grapple daily with the ‘cost of living’ crisis.

While at the same time we notice that inflation and the cost-of-living crisis have barely touched the walls of those able to travel overseas on holidays in record numbers. Particularly the well-insulated retirees with their high superannuation accounts, and wealth accumulation through capital gains on their fully paid-up homes, not to mention property investments. Where intergenerational wealth inequality is now becoming entrenched, making a mockery of the ‘fair go’ ethos of Australia’s commitment to egalitarianism.

If we don’t want the young sucked into an Australian version of the MAGA story, we must come up with a new story that is grounded in the reality of a looming systemic collapse, and the failure of technocratic managerialism to deliver a story of hope that feels real, rather than the old fantasy of Progress and Prosperity through consumer-driven economic growth, which dominates the news cycle.

Inner Wisdom

I’ve gone back to some of the fundamental insights of my long journey in the Dzogchen knowledge tradition of Tibetan Buddhism. That we do not find refuge, looking for certainty and a solid sense of safety in external things: ethnic identity, religion, jobs, home ownership, fame, success, or wealth.

Instead, we come home to ourselves to discover an inner sense of embodied wellbeing, which is free of all such hopes and fears. Aboriginal Australians call this the practice of dadirri: inner deep listening and quiet still awareness. In the Buddhist tradition we call it calm abiding, not merely the mindfulness aspect that has been mainstreamed into Western psychology. Rather it is the inner experience of a pure awareness that is free of a sense of ‘self’ as a fixed identity, once we break free of the grip of thoughts and emotions playing on the screen of our minds.

Through such wisdom practice, we are not seeking to sharpen our intelligence. We are seeking to deepen our access to our inner, primordial wisdom that is free of conceptual grasping, yet which is highly cognisant. This journey is profoundly counter-intuitive for the tertiary educated, so invested in their different knowledge specialisations.

But only this will allow us to deal with the challenges posed by ‘cognitive capitalism’, the algorithmic manipulation of our emotions and thoughts, as we use various forms of media to understand the world around us, and connect up with friends. Where AI will profoundly ‘fuck’ with our minds and our ability to detect what is ‘real’.

Kinship with the Natural World

We must draw on the Indigenous understanding that we are intrinsically part of nature—not over nature, but within it, of it. This takes us further than the Buddhist understanding of interdependence, to a spiritual recognition of the natural world as replete with spiritual agency. This involves a profound shift in modern Western thinking. Not just nature conservation and sustainability practices, but a deeper spiritual sense of reciprocity, of kinship. Of being able to read Country as a text, with a combination of ecological knowledge and spiritual story that nourishes our inner psyche with a sense of warmth and friendship.

Australia’s First Nations peoples have used their profound connection to Country, at multiple levels of relationship as described in books like Song Spirals by the Gay’Wu Group of Women of East Arnhem Land, to survive the cultural and economic devastation of ‘white’ colonial settlement. And in recent years, as ‘the warrior scholars of post colonialism,’ to reclaim and proclaim the extraordinary value of their knowledge systems to address the looming systemic collapse of Modernity.

We non-Indigenous people must draw on our own traditions of Gaia psychology to find our own stories and practices of connection, as we build a bridge between the insights of science—both ecological sciences and our increasing understanding of the quantum nature of reality, with insights from Indigenous knowledges—to reframe our thinking away from the primacy of objectivist rationality that underpins technocratic managerialism.

We have to recover what Andreas Weber in his book, Matter and Desire, an erotic ecology, calls a bio-poetic sensibility, which seeks to overcome the radical separation between mind and matter that underpins modernism. In this we also can draw on insights about the quantum nature of reality from Karen O’Brien’s book, You Matter More Than You Think: Quantum Social Change for a Thriving World.

The Courage to Bear Witness

From this space we can bear witness to the forces of systemic collapse that are coming with the end of all the assumptions that have underpinned our modern worldview and the idea of the West as a values-driven culturally progressive political force.

Plotting the Pathway Forward in a Quantum World

We can return to the ideas that can give us hope to plot a new pathway:

• Invest in robust social networks—locally, regionally and internationally
• Build systems of deliberative, participatory, decision making, but see this as a process of opening, not a looking for closure—let go of solutionism, the idea that there is a ‘fix’ for everything
• Re-think our economic systems to include circularity, new business ownership models, resilient supply chains, community control over basic resources such as food, water and shelter
• Beginning at the local level, build a new politics, a new story of meaning and purpose that builds a bridge between the insights of science, ancient wisdom and Indigenous knowledges anchored in bioregional sustainability.

Recognising that, according to the rules of quantum reality, this story can spread like a mycelium network, an underground cultural movement that is growing beneath all the noise of the dominant political story.