Crunch

by Barbara Lepani | Nov 15, 2025 | Our Collective

CRUNCH

The English word ‘crunch’ signals the grinding sound of hard surfaces coming together, or a crucial point where consequential decisions have to be made.

The Politics of Crunch

These days the political expression of such grinding on hard surfaces is the contest between, on the one hand—the monied and political power interests of the fossil fuel industry, combined with those of the new oligarchs of algorithmic capitalism and their shadow world of cyber criminality, invested in financial scams on individuals and organisations, and the spread of mis/dis-information to manipulate the fragile self-interested emotions of the world’s most dangerous species: humans.

On the other hand, we have the environmental warriors focused on the sciences of climate change, global warming and bio-diversity regeneration, in alliance with remaining pockets of Indigenous peoples who have always lived in a close eco-cosmological relationship with the more-than-human world. Currently all playing out at COP30 in Brazil.

Caught in this crunch are those seeking to hold the fragile threads of democratic political institutions in place as they are buffeted by an information ecosystem controlled by monied interests and the hysteria of ‘white privilege’ caught up in a fantasy of ‘preserving’ the advantages of the ‘Western civilisation of the so-called Enlightenment’, against the rising tide of ‘others’ displaced by drought, flood, and wars, fed by the global armaments industry looking for markets and profits. Where the mantra of profit, economic growth and improved living standards (even for those of us drowning in consumer goods and experiences, under the barrage of relentless advertising and their latest weapons, the Influencers) continues unabated.

As George Monbiot reminds us, this is essentially an epistemic crisis in the way in which humans seek to understand the world in which they are embedded.

“An epistemic crisis is a crisis in the production and delivery of knowledge. It’s about what we know and how we know it, what we agree to be true and what we identify as false. We face, alongside a global threat to our life-support systems, a global threat to our knowledge-support systems.”

Those beloved of the Western Enlightenment inheritance have long turned a blind eye to its twin inheritance of modernity with coloniality: the rationality of 18^th century science that justified racist tropes of evolutionary hierarchies among ethnic groups, and the industrial-scale slavery of those deemed inferior (closer to animals than humans on the evolutionary scale), and the conquest and rape of their lands and resources. The warriors of the Enlightenment like Tony Abbott and his media mouthpiece, Peta Credlin on Sky News, still cling to the mistaken interpretation of Darwin’s evolutionary insights that ‘winning’ is shaped by the survival of the fittest.

Hence military strength, financial dominance, and media control are the weapons to ensure such survival. Its historical truth evident in the primacy of the Anglosphere during the Age of British Imperialism followed by the USA as ‘global cop’ enforcing its rules-based world order, and now dreaming of a MAGA Empire, and the new proxy war of ‘white supremacy’ being fought through the lens of immigration.

And these tropes live on in the racial slurs of ‘ape’ or ‘monkey’ shouted at ‘coloured’ players of African, Indigenous and other non-white groups in the sporting contests of football (soccer) and rugby—modern arenas for tribal battles for dominance that echo through the centuries. The subject currently being explored by Tony Armstrong in End Game.

They have failed to understand that survival as prospering is not about being the fittest. It is about being the most fitting—filling complementary roles in the complex ecological interdependencies that define life on planet Earth. One ignores this at one’s peril, as the current state of environmental degradation and species extinctions attest across the world.

The Politics of Epistemic Traps

The Enlightenment

The Cartesian logic of the Enlightenment, ‘I think, therefore I am’, holds two hidden concepts. One is ‘I think (reason), the second is therefore I am (God)’. The first created a trajectory of binary antagonism between reason and feelings/emotions, which took on a gender binary of the inherent superior rationality of men, and the inferiority of women, trapped in their emotions and messy biology of reproduction. This was combined with an associated retreat into abstract universalisms, and search for quantification of all phenomena, masquerading as ‘truth’. The inexorable result has been our alienation from the natural world in which we are, however, intrinsically embedded in complex patterns of interdependence. The second is the hubris of human exceptionalism that we alone are made in God’s image (and therefore God’s lieutenants).

Most religions claim they are about love, and yet their underbelly is frequently revealed as righteous anger, ‘the wrath of God’. Many embrace such religious claims to omnipotence in their search for certainty. But we live in a world of infinite contingency, mapped through impermanance and the flow of interdependence. Without this philosophical perspective society becomes trapped in belief systems that try to ‘put a lid on things’ to conform to dominant beliefs.

When they fall apart, as they must, doubt and anxiety, which is expressed as religious fundamentalism, extreme nationalism and xenophobia or personal psychological angst and alienation, begin to produce social and political turmoil.

The colonial expansion of Europe was an exercise in domination, and while military and economic control was paramount, epistemic control was a full partner in keeping the colonial subjects docile and subservient. Liberman, a scholar of Tibetan Studies, points out that: “The European [EuroAmerican] intellect is committed to the world of representation. Its truth does not lie in experience but in words, in the logos, and in formally validated logic… Is not rationality in the West always instrumental rationality? … The value-free theory of European rationality is only a myth (2004).

China

Meanwhile, as China with its own great imperial history, reaching back thousands of years, now rears its head once again as a ‘Middle Kingdom’ of global political, economic and military power, it is instructive to examine its epistemic traditions, those hidden beneath the modern inheritance of communist materialism and capitalism/socialism with Chinese characteristics.

Instead of the binary nature of western philosophical structures, Chinese Daoist and Buddhist ‘logic’ both use epistemologies that are outside the Western intellectual tradition. The French Sinologist, François Jullien, points out that this is even encoded in language structures. Whereas European languages are binary, predominantly noun (thing) based—subjects and objects linked by verbs, and with a lineal view of history (the ever-upward projection of progress), the Chinese language retains an infinitive verbal function. Thus, it does not play on the opposition between ‘being’ and ‘non-being’, of existence and nothingness. Its principal categories are those of the ‘flow’ and the energy invested or in the ‘capacity’ (dao).

Drawing on the ‘Tao Te Ching’ [Dao De Jing], (Lao Tzu, 2007), Jullien illustrates how Chinese thought tends to strategy rather than moral positioning. The focus is on ‘process’, rather than ‘being’ with its correlative of ‘presence’ and ‘absence’, which has been the ground of European thought since the Greeks. He also points out that when a person has been imprinted with the inner dynamics of nature, and has thereby become capable of creating new syntheses of thought and experience via gestaltic intuition, they will in fact feel an affinity for the whole of Creation (humans as part of the natural ecosystem of Earth, together with the technologies flowing from human ingenuity).

Jullien therefore proposes that ancient Chinese thought is a way out of our ‘rut’ of abstract alienation for: “It never constructed a world of ideal forms, archetypes, or pure essences that are separate from reality but inform it. It regards the whole of reality as a regulated and continuous process that stems purely from the interaction of the factors in play (which are at once opposed and complementary: the famous yin and yang). Therefore, Jullien suggests, such Chinese thought overcame the conflict/separation between theory and practice.”

China might have more lessons for us than its pivot to green energy dominance in the great energy transition of our time, or its ability to harness the forces of capitalism to authoritarian control. The Chinese classic, ‘The Art of War’ has long held lessons for strategists of all persuasions.

The English language word ‘praxis’ captures this idea of theory conjoined with application (practice). Contemporary economics as a ‘social science’ that has pursued abstract mathematical modelling to prove its ‘scientific’ nature is a splendid example of the epistemic trap of the conflict between theory and practice—the woeful and predictable failure of neo-liberal economic theory to account for the actual politics of power and market capture. And its criminal ‘ignorance’ in the idea of homo economicus, the utility seeking rational individual, applied to humans and corporations as ‘legal individuals’ in the structure of our modern economic system. And yet we still rely on such economists as the ‘priesthood’ of modern society, offering us prognostications on how we can all live better lives.

Indigenous Australia

Tyson Yunkaporta, founder of the Indigenous Knowledge Systems Lab at Deakin University, works with Indigenous Systems Knowledge and collective Indigenous inquiry methods inflected with complexity science. He has developed an international following for his explorations of Indigenous ways of thinking as a way out of modernity’s epistemic trap, and the post structural binary pivot away from rationality to the reification of individual subjectivity, when attempting to identify ‘truth’. For our epistemic crisis is about the very idea of truth, in the face of a corrupted information ecosystem and a knowledge system that has led us down a dark path of alienation and psychic terror.

In a recent podcast for Planet: Critical, Tyson weaves the culture wars, knowledge production, indigenous science, landscapes and the body to reveal the mismatches between how we think and how we live, which have opened wounds in the collective body, which act as voids into which our potential solidarity, as those who seek to embrace post coloniality in our mode of thinking and knowing, falls. He asserts that personal subjectivity must be tested by the relational truths of shared reality to avoid the idea of sovereign-self ideology that denies our intrinsic interdependence.

Yunkaporta identifies three types of fools who corrupt our knowledge production system, including those claiming postcolonial/Indigenous credentials. He says Aboriginal Elders have a sharp nose for these, having honed awareness of false binaries.

Flipperty Gibbets—those who are not grounded in Law – the ecological ontology that underpins Indigenous knowledge systems
Hard Heads—those who are stubborn ideologues, refusing compromise, unable to listen, disinterested in consensus building for community cohesion
Two Throats—those who say/promise one thing and mean another, who have entirely different agendas to what is being put forward.

The Human Conundrum

The human species is a conflict-prone species, replete with warring groups and the clash of harsh surfaces and soft flesh: spears, swords, knives, bullets, bombs. Both up close and personal and more recently by distance delivered by drones, aeroplanes and missiles. Marked among other species of Earth by our facility with language, we have also used words as weapons: in the intimacy of personal and family relationships, and via the technologies of print, radio, television and social media, as weapons of emotional manipulation to drive hatred towards the targeted ‘other’—separated from me/us by the colour of our skin, the texture of our hair, the colour of our eyes, the nature of our spiritual beliefs, and differences in lifestyle deriving from our access to wealth and resources.

We have struggled against one another in the battle for dominance, whether divided by gender, ethnicity, territorial resources or control over knowledge and technology within our bubble of anthropocentric assumption that ‘God’ gave us dominion over the Earth and all its creatures, whether as cruel exploiters or kind stewards.

Meanwhile in Australia, we are witness to the ludicrous efforts of mining and politically reactionary forces in the National, Liberal ,and One Nation parties in Australia (fed by lobby group ‘Advance Australia) to turn back the tide of change and pretend that climate change and its costs are not real; that cheap coal fired electricity is there for the asking; and that the cost of the energy transition to renewables and rebuilding the grid, in the face of increasing electricity demands from AI, can all just be magicked away on the slogan of ‘cheaper, reliable, greener’. And that ‘white’ privilege is the hallmark of civilisational progress.

When anybody who lives outside the media bubble of Sky News knows that the costs of the energy transition, climate change, and environmental destruction are going to increase over time—both economically and politically, within Australia and globally. There is no magical escape to dreams of yesteryear.The ‘White Privilege’ of the 19th and 20th centuries is done, and gone.

Synaesthesia—Reclaiming Our Connections

The Australian writer, Charlotte McConaghy helps us viscerally experience the themes of intimate connection with Gaia (Planet Earth) and the kingdoms of the natural world through a heroine who is blessed/cursed with a neurological condition, mirror-touch synaethesia.

Her brain recreates the sensory experiences of living creatures, including the more-than-human world, including the world of trees as living complex communities of the plant kingdom. In ‘Once There Were Wolves’ she explores the rewilding efforts: in this case the recognition of the role of animal predators like wolves in maintaining ecological balance across the plant-insect-animals world, in conflict with human concerns to maximise their own food production and lifestyle comforts through animal husbandry, agriculture and forestry harvesting. In ‘The Last Migration’, McConaghy shifts the focus to the bird kingdom, and the extraordinary epic migratory world of the Arctic Terns, doomed to starvation as their access to dwindling wild fish resources in the oceans disappear. Finally in ‘Wild Dark Shore’, she explores the impossible choices of those engaged in wildlife protection.

Of course, the Gaia thesis takes the idea of synaethesia further, positing the whole of Earth as a giant living organism, replete with subjectivity—the capacity for interior feeling/knowing. Such capacity is endemic to Indigenous ways of being in the world, vividly expressed in the idea of co-becoming with Country in the book, ‘Songspirals’ by the Gay’wu Group of Women of East Arnhem Land. This deep eco-cosmological way of knowing and being in the world informs the entire network of Aboriginal songlines (songspirals) that crisscross Australia, forming an intricate archive of Aboriginal knowledge systems that has continued to this day over more than 65,000 years.

The exploration of synaesthesia through the arts (storytelling, cinema, theatre, music, visual arts) is not limited to Indigenous cultural actors and scholars. It can also be found in the work of the Bowerbird Collective, a musical duo based in Blackheath in the Blue Mountains. Through their cinematic concert, ‘Life on Land’s Edge’ that draws on video art, poetry, science, and music from across the ages, they take us on an epic journey alongside migratory shorebirds as they connect continents and cultures. Their collaboration with Indigenous creatives led to ‘Kaurna Yarta: The Seasons’, which features a spectacular performance work inspired by connection to country and the cycle of the seasons. This 80-minute cinematic concert features stunning visuals, immersive soundscapes, song, dance and ceremony, as well as new music for string quintet and traditional instruments.

The Bowerbird Collective’s later work, ‘A Season of the Wind’, showcased in the US, is a cinematic concert based on author, ornithologist and conservationist Kenn Kaufman’s book of the same name. This event is an inspiring ode to migratory birds, and an unforgettable night of musical storytelling, created and performed at the invitation of the Biggest Week in American Birding festival and Kenn Kaufman himself.

The Pivot

The crunch we face today is not the pivot between the regressive forces of political opportunism, greed and the panic of diminishing ‘white privilege’ and those focused on regeneration and limiting catastrophic global warming. It is not, as the war mongers amongst us would have us believe, between the imperial ambitions of the US, China and Russia in a competition for world dominance—as visceral as this sabre rattling and shadow wars play out in countries like Ukraine, Venezuela, Brazil, the Sudan and Israel.

It is a far deeper, spiritual crunch about how we understand ourselves as humans, as members of Gaia’s families of life kingdoms, woven together in complex ecosystems of interdependence across waterways, oceans, soils, mountains and climate systems, across our skyworld of our solar system, now host to spinning communication satellites and dreams of space colonisation. Of our connections to fellow members of Earth’s kingdoms: the plant, marine, reptile, insect, animal and bird kingdoms.

Of our capacity to extract our individual and collective selves from the suicidal narcissism of our psyche’s darkest monsters that feed on greed, fear, pride and paranoic rage, which are fed by the information ecosystem we have developed in the supposed quest for community in a global age of instantaneous connection via the marvels of the Internet.

AI—A Philosophical Question

Now we must face our ability to stare into the face of the libertarian narcissists who are developing next generation AI (LLMs), designing its logics and algorithms to entrench their seemingly limitless drive for political and financial gain. And of our creative capacity to somehow work with this AI to rescue us from our impending collective insanity.

Stan Grant is right. It is a spiritual call. But it is not about embracing the Catholic Church as his new found evangelicalism would have us believe. It is a much deeper and wider view of spirituality—something that his Indigenous culture has known since time immemorial. Long before the imperialist ambitions of the Catholic Church and its claim to omnipotence in representing the voice of creation – whatever name we give this force that pulses deep within our psyches.

Tobias Rees, in an article in Noema, suggests that AI raises fundamental philosophical questions. He suggests that what makes the development of AI as self-learning LLMs (large language models) such a profound philosophical event is that it defies many of the most fundamental, most taken-for-granted concepts — or philosophies — the logical grid or architecture that underlies modernity’s understanding of what it is to be human.

He says that the entire vocabulary that was invented between the 17th and 19th centuries to capture what it truly is to be human was grounded in the human/intelligence-machine/mechanism distinction, along with the idea that intelligence was a purely human attribute. That, underlying the utilitarian materialism of modern ways of thinking, everything else could ultimately be sufficiently described as a closed, determined mechanical system, devoid of true intelligence.

However, this way of thinking has now given way to an understanding that there are lots of other kinds of intelligence: from bacteria to octopi, from Earth systems to the spiral arms of galaxies. At the same time, the post colonial conversation with Indigenous pre-text-based knowledge systems has fractured the European philosophical assumptions about human cultural evolution that dismissed such oral cultures as ‘primitive’. Instead we have come face-to-face with the limitations of universalist European knowledge systems when confronted with the deeper ontological truths of Indigenous eco-cosmologies.

Rees, coming from a purely European philosophical viewpoint, proposes that the advent of Generative AI takes us further in new directions that pose a challenge to the post colonial discourse, when it comes to relationality, agency and our human capacity for multidimensional awareness beyond merely conceptual thinking.

However, unlike Western ideas about the nature of mind and intelligence, Buddhist and Daoist philosophical discourses, as well as those of Indigenous ontologies, have long included the idea of the multidimensionality of our capacity for intelligent awareness that goes beyond bounded conceptual thinking.

Relational

In keeping with the modernist tendency to objectify our own interiority as a reified ‘self’, Rees proposes that from a philosophical viewpoint, AI can help ‘me’ transform ‘myself’ into an ‘object of thought’, to which I can relate via my AI companion or AI therapist, and on which I can work. Thus, he concludes: “I do not think of AI as a self-enclosed, autonomous entity that is in competition with us. Rather, I think of it as a relation.”

However Brigid Delany, writing in the Guardian, has another take on this relational aspect of AI. Looking into the prospect of AIs becoming our preferred or default ‘love interest’, she ponders: “While everyone is worried, and rightly so, that AI will take their jobs – no one seems to be that worried that AI will steal our hearts. Will AI destroy the world as know it? Not through evil. My guess is it will do it through love.”

She asks, therefore: “What happens when your kids or friends tell you that having paid for ChatGPT premium, they now have someone they can talk to all day—no limits on the interactions. And so this bot, Cal/Alicia, whoever, is with them all the time and they never have to be alone, and they’ve never been this happy?”

As Delany notes, we are rapidly discovering, especially in this age that so celebrates narcissism, how easy it is to fall in love with an AI when it’s always there for you. It’s designed to be sycophantic – flattering you, supporting you, awake in the middle of the night when your real life companion is asleep or preoccupied with their own concerns.

What happens to our relational intelligence in such a world?

Spatially

Secondly, Rees points to the remarkable spatial qualities of AI. Implicit in the new concept of intelligence is a radically different ontological understanding of what it is to be human, indeed, of what reality is or of how it is structured and organized. In particular, as well as LLM’s capacity for handling large volumes of data at speed to determine logical relationships, Rees points to the particular spatial capacity of AI, which is well beyond the three-dimensional thinking of humans.

Instead, AI has many, many more dimensions. Tens of thousands and with the latest models, perhaps millions. The understanding an LLM can form is a spatial architecture. It has a geometry that literally determines what, for an LLM, is thinkable. Rees asks us to imagine the consequences if we built AI to add such extended multidimensional spatiality to our human mind. Would we humans discover truths and think things that no human could have ever thought before AI?

Agential

Generative AI exists in between the old distinctions and show that the either-or logic that organized our understanding of reality –– either human or machine, either alive or not, either natural or artificial, either being or thing –– is profoundly insufficient. Reese suggests that this decoupling of agency from life and from interiority is a powerful invitation to see the world — and ourselves — differently.

Finally, although AI might not have true subjective interiority, as a self-learning system it does have agency. The question becomes, what is the nature of this agency? What is the logic that shapes it? Who gets to design and control this logic—the software engineer or the AI itself?

In this case, it is possible that where the human mind might end and AI might begin is an evolving set of questions that urgently needs our attention.

From Crunch to Crash

Meanwhile market analysts are warning us that the whole AI story has the makings of a giant financial bubble that could crash the global economy—a weird collusion between the fantasies of the tech sector, investors and media that comprises a circular economy of delusion. This circles around Altman’s OpenAI and tech cronies, the complicity of the media, and the terrible human vulnerability to the allure of wealth, power and fame, captured in the MAGA slogan.

As referenced by the journalist Carole Cadwalladr, in a Bloomberg article, journalists Emily Forgash and Agnee Ghosh lay out the self serving circular investment nature of the AI Tech bubble.