The Trajectory of Helplessness

When I first visited the Trobriand Islands of Papua New Guinea in 1971 with my university boyfriend, Charles Lepani, who would later become my husband, I entered a world that was starkly different from my Australian life. I found myself among a group of people who could make their own clothes from readily available materials around them: palm leaves of various types, string, and shells and wood for ornaments. Who could feed themselves from their own gardens and ability to fish in the ocean lagoon. Women who walked casually along carrying large woven baskets full of produce or water vessels on their heads.

Who enjoyed a rich cultural life, full of poetry, drama, song and beauty that was equally available to all. Where children were loved and cared for within a wide supportive circle. Where death was not the ‘enemy’ to be conquered, but was an ever-present part of life, occasioning a rich pattern of mourning rituals and exchange ceremonies that re-wove the patterns of reciprocal connections that held society together. Where the only form of wealth was gained through service to others, eliciting reciprocal obligations. Where deceit and venality led to shame and alienation.

I was devoid of culture. I had no skills that were of any use. I could not speak their language. I did not know how to garden. I did not even have basic first aid skills or equipment. I could not make music. My head was full of theories of sociology, of human rights, of cultural activism in my First World life of material affluence and political freedom. I did not have the physical strength to carry heavy loads on my head. I didn’t know how to fish. I couldn’t make myself understood. I was largely clueless and helpless. I was deeply unfamiliar with the importance of ritual and generosity as the glue of life. I did not know that when someone complemented you on your clothing, custom required you make a gift of it to them. Embarrassments abounded.

The Plight of Modernisation

I remember many years later, when Charles, from whom I was long divorced was reporting on the effectiveness of Australian foreign development aid into Papua New Guinea, now transformed into an independent modern nation state. He told me that he found that the bad news was that the administrative system of bringing the benefits to the village were not working. However, the good news was that these same villages were still vibrant as centres of sustainable subsistence living—their gardens still producing food, the people still able to build their own houses, and ensure fresh water supplies.

But all this would become progressively more precarious as people migrated to towns in search of wealth and the ‘good life’. Where population growth was no longer balanced with ancient methods of birth control, but replaced by modern ideas of health services that no longer functioned. Where wealth could now be accumulated, not through generosity, but through modern business and property investments. Where the missionaries of Christianity had brought new rules of morality and shame about dress, so that now clothing the body required dependence on imported materials. Where conflict over land use now involved mining and forestry harvesting. Where guns had replaced spears. Where the politics of inter-clan rivalry now reached out to managing the great powers: Australia, China, the US, etc, and their hunger for resources to feed their wealth and power.

The Helplessness of the Highly Educated

As we confront the unravelling of Modernity, this helplessness will be our greatest challenge.

The global covid epidemic taught us the dangers of complex global supply chains to deliver food and goods. The professionalisation of almost every aspect of life into narrow specialisations governed by regulations means few of us have the knowledge of how anything really works in its totality. Life in our large cities means the basics of life—food, shelter and water have all been turned into corporatised businesses that require complex administrative systems and an ability to pay for almost everything. The progressive individualisation of society means our community and family connections are fragile and often fraught with conflict.

Our knowledge is not memorised and held in shared rich stories, but fragmented into competing echo chambers, and only available in texts, or more recently in text messages and memes. Or captured in a plethora of fleeting podcasts and YouTube videos via the tendrils of information technologies. Our dependence on sat nav devices means most of us can’t read maps. Soon our dependence on generative AI will mean most of us can’t imaginatively draw information together to formulate ideas without AI support.

Because our way of working and leisure has become increasingly sedentary (computers and screens) our bodies are losing strength and flexibility, haunted by osteoarthritis. Because our food supplies are corrupted by a profit maximising and convenience logic, its nutritional value is decreasing, disguised by chemicals that mimic colour and taste, and load us up with sugar and saturated fats, that are driving obesity.

We are faced with our helplessness at the mercy of a thoroughly technologised social system, should Trumpism accelerate this unravelling of modernity that has been in the winds for some time.

The New Imperialism

There is much discussion of a possible trajectory into a new age of imperialism—a world divided by spheres of influence attached to three centres of political and military power: the US, China and Russia—each also centres of technocratic authoritarianism. In his article in the Conversation, 6 March 2025, Mathew Sussex suggests that Trump has adopted Putin’s playbook where:

“The strong do as they will, and the weak do as they must. It envisages a world cleaved into spheres of influence, with Russia permitted to run rampant over Eastern Europe, the US dominating the Americas and the East Pacific, and China as a hybrid maritime and continental power exerting hegemony in Asia.”

One might ask, whither the Middle East, as Israel adopts the same mantra: the strong do as they will and the weak do as they must? And what of Africa—that vast continent of roiling conflict in the fight over resources and the merciless power of climate change? While the Australian defence community and the business elites muscle up to think about what this means for Australia, a ‘middle power’ adrift in the South Pacific, caught between its trade dependence on China and its military alliance with the US, George Monbiot paints an even darker vision of what Trump and the Tech Oligarchs are planning. He asks:

Has Trump, drunk on power, embraced a megalomanic nihilism with his pal Elon Musk in search of a new frontier on Mars: the destruction of what they do not love, know or understand, applied as viciously to culture and science as it is to the natural world.

Monbiot suggests that this is a rejection of earthly embodiment, with echoes in Christian puritanism, and a love affair with heavenly ‘pure mind’ embodied in technology, across the silicon-carbon divide. “The definitive fantasy of escape: from [the constraints of] decency, care, love and the living planet itself. They can leave it all behind, leap off the vile Earth, and ascend into heaven. . . Where there is no love, there can be only destruction. Smash the planet then transcend it; leave your indelible mark on Earth while reigning triumphant in the heavens: this, I believe, is a deep, unspoken urge that helps explain Trump’s programmes.”

Cultural Resistance to Techno-Nihilism

Indigenous peoples, racially excluded from Modernity’s project of Progress and Prosperity, have shown us seeds of resistance—their enduring spiritual connection to Country as a living, breathing presence, across millennia, including through eras of radical climate change during the last ice age.

The Indigenous Legacy

Through the leadership of figures like the great Yolngu leader, Galarrwuy Yunupingu, and the more recent generation of First Nations scholars and creatives, non-Indigenous Australians are increasingly able to explore and understand the underlying logic of Indigenous knowledge systems. These have supported Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities to survive the 250 years of colonial conquest and settlement by Europeans who imposed their own knowledge and governance systems over them—resulting in land and cultural dispossession, death by introduced diseases and lethal conflict, and high levels of intergenerational criminal incarceration.

A similar system of cultural dispossession and its results are found among the Indigenous peoples of the Americas from the Artic regions and through north, central and south America, whose Indigenous peoples now work collaboratively with those of Australia, New Zealand and other parts of the world, to elucidate and share their own surviving knowledge systems.

Seeds of Resistance in the Belly of the Beast

At the same time, and through cross pollination of ideas, there has been a distinct movement within modern Western cultures to recover their own traditions of eco-spirituality and bio-regional sustainability, along with attempts to develop new systems of economic thinking to re-frame the growth-based techno-consumerism of modern culture. All this ‘woke’ cultural effort in the belly of the beast of techno-neo-liberalism.

This movement has been inspired by the environment movement, spearheaded by Rachel Carson’s 1961 book, ‘Silent Spring’ that brought attention to the problem of industrial pollution of the environment, and by the new science of ecology, which looked at the complex patterns of mutually supportive interconnections in nature. The Gaia Hypothesis, with planet Earth re-imagined as Mother Earth, proposed by James Lovelock and Lynn Margulis in 1972, advocated the idea of the co-evolution of species, rather than the ‘survival of the fittest’.

These ideas took on a spiritual meaning in Deep Ecology, first articulated by Arne Naess in 1973, as an environmental philosophy that promotes the inherent worth of all living beings regardless of their instrumental utility to human needs, and argues that modern human societies should be restructured in accordance with such ideas. The Deep Ecology movement also drew on Feminist critics of the ‘masculinity of mechanistic science’, such Carolyn Merchant, ‘The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology and the Scientific Revolution (1980), and Catholic theologians such as Thomas Berry, whose ‘Dream of the Earth’ (1988), drew on Western philosophy, Asian thought, Native American traditions, as well as contemporary physics and evolutionary biology, positing planetary wellbeing as the measure of human thriving.

Another strand of this development within Western thought is the ‘rewilding’ movement, which extends the idea of managed nature conservation to letting nature take care of itself, enabling natural processes to shape land and sea, repair damaged ecosystems and restore degraded landscapes. This includes the re-introduction of ace-predator animals, such as dingoes, wolves and bears, seen as a threat to human livestock management. Through rewilding, wildlife’s natural rhythms are seen to create wilder, more biodiverse habitats.

The idea of human rewilding has been adopted by people seeking to live a life that is closer to nature, such as is advocated by people such as Gina Chick, the winner of the 2023 Alone Australia competition. She explains “rewilding as the remembering of the wisdom of our hunter gatherer ancestors. Wild things live by internal authority, getting their needs met on the landscape by being deeply connected to the vast web of life that is the nervous system of our living planet.” This approach has an outer and inner aspect. The outer is being able to be at home in the wild, and the inner, to be at peace with the ‘wild’ in our own psychology—undertaken through rites of passage, involving survival wilderness camps, vision quests and solo bush vigils. This sort of thinking draws on Western romanticism (Rousseau) that links nature to the idea of freedom from constraints, implying the ‘inner wild’ is that part of the soul that remains free from oppressive control—whether in the form of social norms or emotional and physical abuse.

Indigenous Elders reject the Western construct of ‘wilderness’ versus landscapes that are ‘settled/cultivated/tamed’, which parallels the idea of ‘savages’ versus ‘civilised’, much loved of ‘white’ colonial attitudes to ‘natives.’ Where humans are regarded as having an intimate kinship relationship with all of the natural world, which is imbued with spiritual presence and agency, there is no such distinction between wilderness and human controlled areas. Indigenous thinking rejects all forms of human exceptionalism over nature and there is often a ritualised intimate connection with various aspects of the non-human world through ‘totems’, the role of ancestral creation beings, and deeper spiritual aspects of songlines as explained by the Guy’wu Group of women of East Arnhem land in their book, ‘Songspirals’ (2021). 

Buddhist thinkers like Thich Nhat Hanh refers to this as ‘inter-being’. This clash of ways of thinking about our human relationship with the more-than-human world of nature and all its creatures becomes evident in our attitudes to bushfires (wildfires).

Indigenous Australians have developed a sophisticated system of ecologically informed fire management of the landscape as a form of co-living with all the inhabitants of an ecosystem for their mutual benefit. ‘White’ systems of fire management involve seeking a balance between enjoyment of national parks and the bush as ‘wilderness’ areas and protection of human settlements and their livestock through bushfire containment and ‘fighting’ bushfires with militarised thinking deploying fighters and aeroplanes and other technology. Whereas the Indigenous approach prevents bushfires from becoming destructive, the ‘white’ approach, particularly when now linked to extreme weather patterns, has resulted in very dangerous and difficult to control fires that destroy large areas of landscape and the creatures who live there and are unable to escape, together with human property and livestock. 

As a result, there is how increasing interest in Indigenous systems of fire management. A further cultural response to techno-nihilism can be found in the regenerative movement, with the concept applied to agriculture, architecture, building design and ways of living, in search of more bio-regional sustainability in food production, water management and the energy performance of buildings in terms of their carbon footprint and consumption of energy resources. When applied to urban design it involves idea of the greening of cities, including drainage systems, roof designs and tree coverage of streets and play areas. This is combined with the encouragement of home food gardening, including on verandas, rooftops and communal plots.

Localism

There are several organisations in the Greater Blue Mountains where I live and work, which are based on these ideas. As an urban settlement within the Greater Blue Mountains World Heritage Area of six national parks, nature conservation has long been a central focus of people living in this area. But on its western flank, it has included a large coal-mine supporting a coal-fired power industry, which is now reaching closure, and which has involved significant tensions in conservation of landscape and waterways. Increasing tourism with transport and urban settlement presents growing challenges.

The Planetary Health Initiative, seeks to support local action to restore the health of our natural systems and support community health, wellbeing, resilience and hope in the face of climate change and increasing natural disasters, in partnership with the university sector. Resilient Blue Mountains is a volunteer based organisation formed by a process of ‘radical collaboration’ by climate change, environment and sustainability groups, which kickstarted after the ‘black summer’ mega fires of 2019-2020. The Edible Garden Trail is a community of permaculture home gardeners, supported by the Blue Mountains Food Co-op, based on the idea that ‘edible gardens can provide beauty as well as healthy food, and that food growers are also saving money, reducing food miles and contributing to a more sustainable planet.’ Farm it Forward was initiated by a local artist to establish a charity that could match residents or public institutions who have unused land with people with skills and passion to grow local fresh food regeneratively, while tackling issues of fresh food accessibility, social isolation, social inclusion, and mental health. They have now developed a hands-on space for action research in the area of Design for Sustainability Transitions at Katoomba High School, with a focus on intergenerational healing.

The Spreading Mycelium-Like Network

These forms of cultural resistance to the neo-liberal economics of profit maximisation at the expense of the natural world and social justice and inclusion, is happening across the Western world—in the UK, Europe, Canada, the US and parts of South America. There are linked projects in parts of the so-called Global South. They are woven together through outpourings of substack newsletters, podcasts, YouTube video clips and conferences, supported by both global and local networks and an emerging group of leading thinkers.

My favourites are Bayo Akomolafe, Karen O’Brien, Andreas Weber, Tyson Yankaporta, the advaya group, among many others, along with my Buddhist teachers who have nurtured my insights over many years. While the ‘new imperialism’ of a techno-nihilistic world order being shaped by a bromance between the authoritarian leaders of the US, Russia and China feels daunting, thinkers such as Karen O’Brien are urging us to consider that we ‘matter more than we think’. Harnessing insights from Quantum science she proposes that we actually live in a quantum reality where small fractals can have ripple effects with major consequences.

For this we need the power of a new story that nurtures our spirits, makes sense of things, and helps us guard our minds in this new era of cognitive capitalism, determined to mine our emotions for commercial and political gain.

However, imperialism, for all its militarised power, is fragile to megalomania, venality and hubris. The Earth has its own agency. The more we align ourselves with the deep spiritual ethos of Gaia, and develop the skills and aptitudes to thrive with her, our patterns of cultural resistance will spread as a powerful mycelium-like network beneath all the noise and colour of the dominant story of our times. There will be suffering.  There already is, but it will come home with increasing force to those of us who previously rode the crest of Modernity’s wave, largely in ignorance of the reality of such suffering that we left in our wake across the ‘global South’, not to mention the slave-like conditions of manufacturing in China, Bangladesh and elsewhere.

It is time for us to practice ‘dadirri’—deep inner listening and quiet still awareness, in communion with Country and all her kin. To take heart from the example of Galarrwuy Yunupingu who led his Yolngu people wisely through the devastation of colonial settlement, finding ways to protect culture and its enduring knowledge system for future generations. And finally to make the ‘white fellas’ listen—well at least many of them.