As we ponder the rise and rise of authoritarianism, resurgent ethnic nationalism and reactive misogyny across the world—from the Taliban in Afghanistan to the US under Trump 2.0—we are forced to consider the nature of ourselves as the human species, the ace-predators on Planet Earth.

The Illusion of Rationality

To consider that the Western liberal idea of ‘rational man’ driven by reason (as the basis of economic theory) and secular humanism (as the basis of liberal democracy), is an illusion. Culturally we have championed individual freedom, but we are also social animals with a strong herd instinct, who seek security and comfort in the togetherness of group (tribal) identity.

So we must consider that the search for this tribal identity can unleash dark and terrible forces.

History is replete with evidence of our tribal savagery, and its concomitant religious justifications, despite the claim by various religions to represent a higher moral order, in the name of God as a supreme authority. Witness the Christian crusaders onslaught on Jerusalem, the Catholic Inquisition on heresy, the cultural genocide visited upon Indigenous peoples in the Americas and the Pacific (including Australia), the Hindu-Muslim wars in the birth of India and Pakistan, the Nazi holocaust on the Jews, the ISIS attempt to impose an Islamic Caliphate across the Middle East, and the recent horror of Israel’s vengeance being visited upon their Palestinian neighbours in the name of Judaism.

The problem isn’t just Hitler, Netanyahu, Putin, Donald Trump or Elon Musk, or any other wannabe authoritarian dictator strutting the stage of nationalism, religion, the corporation, or the family home. Nor is it just Jordan Peterson or Andrew Tate, advocating misogyny and assertive masculinity, capturing the rising angst of young men unable to make sense of a world being reshaped by the feminist push for gender equality in terms of freedoms, rights and wealth.

We face an online world that is awash with sadistic hatred. A recent report by UK’s National Crime Agency has reported that teenage boys are joining online gangs where they share sadistic and misogynistic material that fuels crimes including fraud, violence and child sexual abuse. With a six-fold increase between 2022 and 2024, AI uptake is expected to significantly increase the rate of offending. This accords with observations that many of the MAGA crowd are avid followers of President Trump because of his cruelty and vindictiveness, not despite it—just as long as that cruelty is directed at the ‘enemy-other’, whatever form it takes.

Biology and Psyche

We have to turn our attention closer to home, inwards to understanding the competing forces that drive us, complex creatures that we are. Almost alone among Earth’s creatures our sex drive has cut free from procreation. We are always ‘on’. Who can ever forget the ribald story of the Seven Sisters songline, with the image of the man with a giant penis chasing the seven sisters across the sky. So powerful is the libido drive in us that we constantly seek to supplement it with chemical additives, even into old age.

We are captive to desire in its many forms, even when sublimated into work, power and wealth as the history of Western civilisation so readily attests.

In the light of the reality of a sizeable LGBQT+ population, gender essentialism may be illusory. But at a primal level, we are shaped by different hormonal impulses. In order to procreate, men must ‘get it up’, while women must grow life forms within our bodies and give birth to them, even though it might kill us; our hormones priming us for the challenge of enduring relationship, both within our bodies for nine months gestation, and after the birth of a child for many years of dependency.

Each of these hormonal patterns have their psychological, social and political expressions.

For men, historically it has been fear of impotence and defeat. For women it has been infertility and abandonment.

Following on from the Greeks and anchored in Cartesian philosophy, Modernity’s radical separation of mind and body positioned men in the domain of ‘celestial mind’, and women in the domain of ‘earthly body’ by virtue of our enmeshment in menstruation and giving birth. Enlightenment’s central claim is its advancement of thought and knowledge, aimed at liberating human beings (man) from fear and installing them as masters—over nature, over women, over the uncivilised, and especially over their own subjectivity through the scientific quest for objectivity. Thus, for women (anchored in their bodies), the right to claim the Enlightenment inheritance of thought and knowledge has taken years of activism, and now faces a vicious backlash.

Our primal human fear of impermanence and death, combined with Modernity’s promise of rational control, has fed our search for certainty in a world that is intrinsically dynamic and interconnected—beyond our control and inherently unknowable in its entirety. Constantly undermining our rational control is the wilfulness of our unruly libido and its ability to subvert the ‘rationality of the intellect.’ One way or another, emotion gets the better of us.

Sin, Ignorance and Wisdom

Despite our love affair with rationality, we remain all too susceptible to the ‘seven deadly sins’ (pride, greed, wrath, envy, lust, gluttony and sloth). And in this age of disinformation and conspiracy thinking, we have also seen the weaponisation of of ignorance and its manifestation as prejudice.

Although we have massively expanded our knowledge base, including its application into transformative technologies, there has been almost no focus on the idea of wisdom, a capacity for wholistic insight and resulting behaviour. Modernity has no tradition of the Wise Elder. Instead we have the Aged, spending their wealth on ocean cruises or warehoused away in nursing homes.

With a fully functioning digital brain now ready to launch, as an increasingly prevalent arbitrator of our information needs, AI marks a new phase in the history of the relationship between knowledge, technology and social organisation. Alan Kohler predicts that even before this digital brain takes AI to a new level, automation and robotics are producing a revolution that will mean all manufacturing and almost all professions can be fully automated.

The struggle for wisdom in an age of information overload and AI synthesis of knowledge masquerading as insight brings into stark relief the significance of our modern abandonment of wisdom, in favour of mere knowledge.

Will the idea of wisdom regain its place in the human imagination as we grapple with the redundancy of our labour and our proven incapacity to translate our knowledge into the practice of living sustainably (in its many meanings) on our Planet Earth?

Christianity and Salvation

In the theistic Christian religion, the dominant cultural force in the formation of modern Australia, our susceptibility to the seven deadly sins is sourced to the idea of ‘original sin’. This is based on the idea of an expulsion from immortality/innocence (the Garden of Eden) for the ‘sin’ of eating from the tree of life/knowledge (of good and evil), when the serpent tempted Eve to eat from its forbidden fruit, which she shared with Adam. Thus, setting up archetypal woman as ‘the evil temptress’ by virtue of her sexuality, and the resultant gender culture wars. ‘She made me do it.’

One of Christianity’s founding fathers, Thomas Aquinas, claims this expulsion led to the ‘four faults’ of a human birth: lack of sanctifying grace and original justice; libido’s ability to sabotage the intellect; physical frailty and death; and ‘darkened intellect and ignorance’, which we might interpret as susceptibility to confusion and prejudice. The solution is religious faith, enabling salvation through God’s grace and mercy through the mediating power of his human manifestation, God the son, Jesus, Christ the Saviour, who died on the cross on our human behalf.

Buddhism and Wisdom

In the non-theistic Buddhist tradition, which has shaped my own thinking, our human susceptibility to the seven deadly sins is sourced to the inherent ‘Three Mind Poisons’ that come with human embodiment, operating at a cellular level—aversion, desire and ignorance. They, in turn, are the source of the afflictive emotions of human suffering (pride, greed, anger, envy and prejudice).

However, rather than being expelled from the ‘Garden of Eden’ of primordial innocence, to live as sinners, the Buddhist tradition asserts we can access our primordial wisdom as the inherent ‘nature of mind’, also called ‘buddha nature’, within our ordinary human birth and in our very lifetime. But this wisdom is not posed as spiritual ecstasy, but a knowing sanity, free of any ambition to be this, or that.

The solution is training the mind through various forms of meditative mind training to discover a dimension of mind that is not just thoughts and emotions, but is pure awareness itself. This enables us to directly know, experientially (not via objectivised reasoning) the nature of reality as the indivisible union of emptiness and appearance, both mental and physical—arising through interdependence—the complex patterns of cause and effect that govern all life on Earth. Patterns we now recognise through the sciences of ecology, complexity and quantum physics; creating a world of impermanence and flow.

Resting one’s awareness in this realisation enables one to deal with life’s uncertainty and impermanence with confidence and resilience. It is the source of timeless courage and inner freedom, the very qualities we recognise in those we deem to call wise.

Although the Buddhist methods of mindfulness meditation have been widely mainstreamed into modern psychology, as a way of managing negative emotions and thoughts, this has not included the Buddhist emphasis on wisdom awareness.  But only this enables us to gain an understanding of mind’s cognitive capacity beyond thoughts and emotions, which necessarily involve a subtle form of conceptual fixation (grasping), whether positive or negative.

This was the great insight that Prince Siddhartha discovered through his meditation under the Bodhi tree some 2,500 years ago, leading him to be declared Buddha, the Awakened One. In the Mahayana tradition, this realisation is not restricted to the historic figure of Prince Siddhartha, but is available to all. It is primordially present, not created by the intellect.

• Profound and tranquil, free from complexity
• Uncompounded luminous clarity
• Beyond the mind of conceptual ideas
• …It is merely the immaculate naturally looking at itself.

(Nyoshul Khenpo Rinpoche, ‘Rest in Natural Great Peace’, Rigpa 1989)

Facing Ourselves and Our Delusions

The problem is us—ordinary people, members of the human species, the ace predators of 21^st century life on Planet Earth.

Despite our liberal protestations and UN Sustainability Goals, we have watched our predatory technology-enabled capacity continuously expand to facilitate ecological overshoot in our consumption of resources; dangerous global warming impacting the viability of our habitats; increase our capacity for militarised destruction; and our manipulation of the human mind and its psychic vulnerabilities.

In Europe, Governments are urging people to create 72 hour emergency kits of food and supplies in the event of catastrophic weather events, pandemics, cyber attacks or military invasions.

What is going on? What is at work in this seemingly compulsive drive towards the extinction of our own species, and many fellow Earthlings? 

Here in Australia, we are in the throes of a national election, against the looming shadow of Trump 2.0 and trade tariffs as ‘weapons of war’. While the political contest is framed as ‘the cost of living crisis’, behind this is a deeper, unnamed existential angst that the whole modern dream of continued prosperity and a techno-fix for everything, including mortality, is all falling apart. How can political commentators talk with a straight face (ABC Q&A 24 March 2025) about the need to increase our ‘standard of living’ as the measure of ‘progress’, when the level of consumption is already mindlessly wasteful and polluting? And where the problem is clearly distribution, not production. What can they mean about the need to ‘increase productivity’ as more stuff for less human labour?

So—if AI is the next big productivity booster, replacing human ingenuity + lifestyle demands with 24/7 ‘obedient’ AI, what then?

As one commentator wisely observed, when asked whether we needed to make Australia Great Again, as advocated by Gina Rinehart and the Institute of Public Affairs (which she largely funds), MAGA is about power and exponential wealth.  Australians do not hunger for nation state power or even exponential personal wealth, but for a ‘great lifestyle’—enough income to own your own home, holiday at the beach, give the kids an education, access the doctor when you need one via subsidised medical services, and enjoy Australia’s increasingly rich multicultural offerings in food and entertainment. When given a choice between earning more and more income, and enjoying a lifestyle that allows for relaxation, most choose lifestyle.

It’s not Australian kids in the swat coaching halls, which we see in Korea, India and China, and replicated in migrant communities in Australia. The desperate aim to excel at all costs. Instead it’s about lifestyle balance, both for our kids at school, and ourselves at work.

That’s why we have 4 weeks annual leave entitlement, weekend and overtime penalty rates for wages, and a minimum wage that’s meant to keep you above the poverty line—compared to what prevails in the US, the world’s richest country: 2 weeks annual leave, limited capacity to afford expensive and privatised medical treatment, and wages well below the poverty line. It’s what has fed into Trump 2.0.

And yet…we’ve seen this ‘great lifestyle’ slipping away as the wealth divide has grown and saturation advertising has continued to feed our DESIRE button—in clothing, cars, house size and fixtures, physical appearance, and travel—in search of more, better, best. Taxation has allowed the home to become a financialised asset. C suite incomes have spiralled way above the average income, justified on the basis of international competition for talent, and the financial sector has become an arm of the gambling industry—through investment speculation, the equity market and other speculative financial products.

We are only now slowly coming to realise that we have not only been ‘feeding the beast’ of our insatiable capacity for greed, sloth. lust and anger, but that we are now using algorithmic data harvesting to ramp it up in the so-called attention economy of cognitive capitalism. Further, we are facing Earth’s call for some humility. That surviving Indigenous knowledge systems, such as those of Aboriginal Australians, hold deeper answers that were hidden to our prideful modern hubris. That the Earth is a living, breathing presence, not an objectified material resource waiting for our extractivist plunder. And that in so acting, we have been slowly, then with accelerating speed, shifting into a form of insanity, a cancerous mutation in a larger whole. 

Having trashed much of nature through pollution, land clearing and global warming, the latest resource for exploitation is our human minds—our desires, fears, and expectations.

It is up to us whether we remain victims of this human vulnerability to delusion, pride, greed, sloth and vengeance, or we turn our minds towards the path of wisdom.

It is not unchartered territory. The path was laid down many thousands of years ago, and is retained in the living wisdom traditions still surviving among us. It is the path towards an Enlivenment Worldview.

Life is not a problem to be solved, but a mystery to be lived