Thanks to Nardine Marfurt for our feature image

Counter Culture

What does the term ‘counter culture’ bring to mind for most of us?

A movement that challenges many of the prevailing set of cultural norms and values in our society; a movement spearheaded by artists of all persuasions—painters, poets, filmmakers, writers, of intellectuals and deliberative outsiders, fed by dreams of an alternative and more desirable future.

But today we are faced with the possibility of two counter culture movements:

Nostalgic Populism—challenging the prevailing order by combining a nostalgic tilt to the past and a radical critique of liberalism’s failures for working people, built on grievance and fear of the future, coupled with aggressive oligarchic capitalism.

This so-called New Right populist movement across the West is constructing a new electoral coalition, appealing above all to working-class voters who felt they had lost out, experiencing a relative decline in income, security and social standing. 

Enlivenment Eco-Metaphysics—crafted by an ontological shift that challenges the very basis of the Western Enlightenment: the strange accommodation woven between scientific rationality and religious belief in the doctrines of Christianity, particularly their literal interpretations in conservative Catholicism and Protestant Evangelical faith traditions. This underpins the bewildering schizophrenic nature of modern Western culture.

The Enlivenment Counter Culture challenge is inspired by the eco-metaphysics of Indigenous spiritual traditions that were so vigorously suppressed by Christian missionaries during the migration of European people during the colonial period, establishing the largely Anglosphere nations of the USA, Canada, Australia and New Zealand, and cementing the English language as the global lingua franca for the modern world.

The shift to an enlivenment worldview can be summed up as

From instrumental extractivism = extract-use-throw away

To relational reciprocity = relate-use-reciprocate.

Is the re-weaving of New York  as a ‘cultural capital’ by artists such as Hala Alyan, the celebrated Palestinian American writer and poet who believes stories like hers resonate because audiences are hungry for connection, a part of this new enlivenment counter culture?

“People are quite starving for emotional touch, psychological touch, narrative touch, to be let into other people’s worlds,” she says. “That’s what art is – a conduit for curiosity, right?”

The Legacy of the Sixties Counter Culture

Like many baby boomers today, I am a child of the Sixties Counter Culture, which sought to shrug off the shackles of the 1950s cultural norms of our parents’ generation, in search of the freedom and social justice values that informed the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights.

It also informed the political revolution of the Whitlam Government, which in just a few short years made major changes to Australia’s social, economic and foreign policy stances, including:

• no-fault divorce, and establishment of the Family Court
• land rights for Aboriginal people
• recognition of the Peoples Republic of China
• independence for PNG
• the focus on community development funding to give expression to new forms of support and services outside the church-based charities
• universal health care
• free university
• abolition of the White Australia policy and promotion of the idea of multiculturalism
• withdrawal of troops from the Vietnam war
• equal pay for women and establishing the Office for the Status of Women
• paid maternity leave for women in the public service
• Single Parent benefits payment, mainly focused on the needs of divorced or single women with dependent children.

Baby Boomer Conversations

Recently I sat around the table with fellow Blue Mountains baby boomers, Jenny Day, Brian Hannant and Linda Blagg—all children of the Australian film industry that the Whitlam Government promoted as it sought to advance a proudly Australian form of cultural expression across the arts. We never knew one another back in those days, but we all knew people we had in common in the diverse community of leftist intellectuals and artists who thrived in Sydney as members of the sixties counter-cultural revolution.

We’d all shared the same excitement of the possibility of a new order—the heady combination of creative endeavours and political expression, of new intellectual ideas that could shape our future. We were the first generation of university educated people outside the old ‘ruling class’. We now had the language and confidence to advance new ideas in the cut and thrust of public life.

America, the ‘land of the free’ played an outside role in shaping this counter culture, with echoes across the Anglosphere and then into other language cultures, as feminism, individualism and ideas of racial social justice continued to challenge old assumptions. Anti-Vietnam war protests, anti-racism protests, anti-transnational capitalism protests—all marked this heady embrace of individual freedom combined with universal social justice that celebrated new voices: women, non-whites, young people.

We celebrated this new vision in the protest folk music of Bob Dylan and Joan Baez, the improvised jazz of Miles Davis and others, the beat poets and writers like Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac, the rock music of Elvis Presley and all who followed him, the pop music of the Beatles and all who followed them, and the insights from mind-altering psychedelic drugs.

With the protection of the contraceptive pill, ours was the generation of ‘free love’, Second Wave Feminism’s idea of freeing sexual pleasure from the prison of patriarchal marriage and reclaiming women’s rights to sexual pleasure, escaping the binary choice of the old Australia, which was excoriated in Anne Summers’ book, Damned Whores and God’s Police (1975) and Germaine Greer’s The Female Eunuch (1970).

Subversion

It is a matter of history that many of the ambitions and visions of the Sixties Counter Culture were subsumed by the drug culture of rock and roll, the false gurus of new-age spirituality and the ability of capitalism to subvert all culture into profit-driven consumer products, including our emotional need for connection and relationship, our very idea of our ‘self’ and wellbeing—now the target of social media and AI.

Sexual liberation became sexual exploitation, driven by the extractivist mindset.

Arts and culture became the ‘creative industries’. Universities became corporatised into profit-making knowledge production factories for commerce, under the relentless drive for innovation breakthroughs in science and technology.

Most recently, space and the stars are no longer domains of wonder, but a new frontier for colonisation and technological exploitation. How marvellous claim the techno-enthusiasts! In the spirit of this we even made a woman astronaut the 2026 Australian of the Year!

Ambitions for a reconciliation with Australia’s First Nations with constitutional change to enshrine an advisory Voice to Parliament was defeated under the hubris of only favouring ‘practical changes’ that would address socio-economic inequalities. These are essentially assimilationist policies of colonial times, demanding complete cultural integration into ‘whitefella’ ways and values.

It was a distinct failure of multiculturalism to recognise the profound knowledge basis of Indigenous culture as the oldest living eco-metaphysical culture in the world, which is laid out in the First Knowledges Series published by the Australian National Museum.

The New Counter Cultures

Populist Ethno-Nationalism and Oligarchic Capitalism

The US, via President Trump’s ‘America First’ agenda is shaping a new ethno-nationalist counter culture, aligned with oligarchic capitalism to create a new world order—rejecting the norms of democratic government and multilateral institutions.

It seeks to reassert the nostalgic primacy of ‘white’ Christian ethno-nationalism that is seen to underpin the triumph of Western Civilisation. Challenging the legitimacy of democracy as the preferred political institutional architecture for the modern world, and replacing it with a gang of Oligarchs with a seemingly unquenchable thirst for financial wealth.

Rage, Frustration and Grievance

Reeling under their increasing economic precarity, the cost-of-living crisis, the unspoken terrors of intensifying climate change, and the AI revolution impacting the ambitions and assumptions of working people in the West, the search for solutions has given way to a counter culture of grievance and outrage, turbocharged by new digital media.

A counter culture that rejects democratic norms, the very idea of multiculturalism, and even the legitimacy of elected governments. The idea of sovereign citizens is the ultimate expression of the ideology of competitive individualism: not freedom, but alienation, fear and distrust.

The Digital Media Challenge

As Robert Topinka explains, it is the political Right who have mastered the new way in which political influence and power is now played in the digitally transformed information ecosystem.

The progressive’s political focus on disinformation misreads how digital platforms work: misleading content is everywhere, but the real battleground is over emotion and attention, which is what determines whether information – good or bad – finds an audience. This is why cutting-edge propagandists now focus less on policy messaging and more on massaging vibes.

Ethno-religious nationalism

While ethno-populism is also playing out in Narendra Modi’s India and Xi Jinping’s China, its most disruptive echoes are in the UK and Europe.

It is also now extending its influence into the ‘white’ settler population of the rest of the Americas, and Australia and New Zealand in the Pacific.

Their anti-immigration stance dismisses or ignores their own ruthless colonial dispossession and subjugation of their original (indigenous) populations, undertaken in the name of progress and the cultural superiority of ‘white’ British culture and institutions, and in the case of the Americas, of Spanish and Portuguese culture.

With Israel’s claims to being the cradle of Western Civilisation, this same ethno-nationalism is playing out in Israel, as an ethno-religious nation state through the dispossession and almost genocidal treatment of the Muslim Arab Palestinian people, as it seeks to become the dominant power of the Middle East, in alliance with Trump’s America.

Anti-Immigration

The rise of China as a non-white world power, and reverse migration flows of people from Africa, the Middle East and parts of East Asia seeking economic and political asylum in the US, UK and Western Europe has become the flash point of grievance for the populist counter culture movement.

The ultimate irony is that this migration has been set in train by the extractivist globalised capitalism of the very system created by Western civilisation.

Migration flows will only intensify from the impact of climate change and environmental degradation caused by the intensifying forces of the techno-scientific industrialisation—plastic and chemical pollution of soils and waterways, factory farming and fishing, land clearing and mono-agriculture, and by the debt-driven hyper consumerism of Influencers and mainstream economic growth strategies, which are flooding into all corners of the world via that ubiquitous device of the digital world—the smart phone.

The Enlivenment Counter Culture 

The alternative Enlivenment counter culture and its economic partner in regenerative circularity is a slow burner. Bubbling away beneath all the noise and bluster of mainstream politics, and the frenetic pace of the daily news cycle, which has been driven by the politics of social media outrage and division that marks the populist counter revolution.

This Enlivenment counter revolution is yet to find its popular songsters. There is no ‘Taylor Swift’ of the Enlivenment story. Political elements exist with some rappers, but there is as yet no lyricist like Bob Dylan with his The Times They Are A-Changin that can capture this turn to enlivenment.

Come writers and critics who prophesize with your pen
And keep your eyes wide, the chance won’t come again
And don’t speak too soon for the wheel’s still in spin
And there’s no tellin’ who that it’s namin’
For the loser now will be later to win
‘Cause the times, they are a-changin’

The articulation of the Enlivenment counter culture is not found in mainstream media and social media outrage, even in protest movements, but in the new cultural writings and political journalism of substack, blog posts, webinars, podcasts and YouTube, as alternative fare to outrage.

As more and more investigative and cultural journalists have been sacked due to the collapsing profits of mainstream media outlets, they have migrated to individual substack journalism, which offers both free and paid subscription access; that is free of corporate editing and the intrusion of adverts, the engine of hyper consumerism.

Emergent Mycelium-like Networks

This emergent counter cultural movement uses the metaphor of the mycelium world of fungi to explain the idea of an organic system of tendrils of creative interdependencies and synchronicities that are spreading between communities. Informed by the rising voices of Indigenous intellectuals, they are finding space in the cracks and crevices of the collapsing rule-based world order, in a growing cultural response to the threat of ethno-nationalist populism aligned with oligarchic forms of capitalism.

While there are echoes of the Sixties Counter Culture, what is distinctly different is the emphasis on humility, on allowing for unlearning old habits of thought, of the power of unknowing, allowing for wonder and uncertainty. Letting go of the search for certainty, for closure, for solutions. Rejecting the techno-fix ideology of modernity, the recognition that life has its own cycles and deeper eco-cosmological principles that are not subject to human technological control and manipulation.

Above all it is a shift from an extractivist mentality that winner takes all, to a relationalist mentality and the ethics of reciprocity.

Beyond the Modernity/Coloniality Complex

A leading part of this counter cultural movement has come from a global collective of Indigenous intellectuals and creatives, exploring and revealing the architecture of the modernity/coloniality complex. This same complex is shaping the AI workforce of ghost workers drawn from the coloniality side of the complex: the cheap workforce of Asians and Africans, responsible for AI content moderation—of a relentless fare of violence, pornography and hatred flooding the systems.

This new era of collapse exposes its limitations, and as the world order system seeks to reconfigure itself, the protective façade of liberal humanism, humanitarianism, institutional cooperation and rules-based order, thins or falls away.

And this opens up new opportunities.

Threads of Enlivenment

The idea of enlivenment takes us from the politics of rage, trauma and protest, of what we are fighting against, to reclaiming the possibility of life-affirming legacies for our children in the face of the collapse of the existing world order.

There are several threads to this new counter cultural movement, which we have been exploring in the Enlivenment blog posts, beginning with the very inspiration that led us to call ourselves the Enlivenment Network: a deliberative shift from the rationality of Western enlightenment thinking to the bio-poetics of enlivenment thinking.

In particular we have been inspired by the insights of many Indigenous thinkers, who through their arts/research collective use their website as a “workspace for collaborations around different kinds of artistic, pedagogical, cartographic, and relational experiments that aim to identify and de-activate colonial habits of being, and to gesture towards the possibility of decolonial futures.”

Other elements aligned with this search for decolonial futures include:

• A concern that rising levels of mental-illness and loneliness in many societies is a sign of spiritual unease, of worshipping at the wrong alters, rather than a medical issue to be treated
• Reconnection with the natural world as a kinship relationship between humans and the more-than-human world, in alignment with Indigenous cultures
• Recognising the different forms of intelligence that exist outside the human realm, and thus ending the claims for absolute human exceptionalism, which is intrinsic to the idea that it is only humans who are made in God’s image, and given dominion over all as stated in Genesis v1:26 of the Old Testament, common to Judaism, Christianity and Islam
• Challenging the hegemonic status of scientific rationality, as ‘natural law’, as the only form of valid reasoning in the establishment of the truth about the nature of reality
• Acknowledgement of different wisdom traditions embedded in spiritual teachings outside the Abrahamic ‘religions of the book’ —such as Taoism, Hinduism, Buddhism, Shintoism, and the many different indigenous traditions such as those of Australia’s First Nations peoples, the Indigenous Amero-Indians of the Americas, the Inuit and Saami peoples of the Arctic regions, Pacific Islanders and different tribal groups in Africa. While Christian and Islamic evangelism has penetrated into many of these Indigenous communities, in many cases older wisdom teachings and contrary ways of understanding the nature of reality continue to survive.
• Challenging the focus on economic growth and consumerism as the basis for human social wellbeing, and exploring new economic approaches including non-growth, post-growth and ‘doughnut economic’ theories that focus on living within the Earth’s bioregional boundaries
• A shift towards circularity in industrial and agricultural systems design, which eliminates waste, focuses on the sustainability of materials and built forms, and pays attention to ‘localism’, the idea of bio-regional strategies defined by ecosystems and community identities
• The idea of ‘rewilding’ nature through the reintroduction of predator species to manage biodiversity, and the ‘rewilding’ of humans through programs to teach them how to live sustainably with nature, rather than as masters over nature.

Responses to the AI Revolution

Many of these writers and commentators are also seeking to understand how this counter cultural movement should relate to the AI revolution.

Is it an untrammelled danger to be strictly regulated and suppressed, or a new domain of possibilities?

For example, through his Liminal Institute, Daniel Pinchbeck, who has experimented with shamanism and psychedelic drugs, a characteristic of the sixties counter cultural movement, has run a fee paying seminar series on ‘Mastering the Alchemy of AI Storytelling’, providing: “A hands-on workshop and seminar on creating meaningful AI videos—while exploring the philosophy, ethics, and spiritual dimensions that transform technique into art.” He claims the objective of the Liminal Institute is to understand and navigate the complexities of future technologies.

The Decolonial collective is now busy establishing the Meta Rationality Institute as a way of grappling with the AI Revolution in a post-collapse world order. They are suggesting we need to ‘clear the field’ of old assumptions and explore how the collapse may also “open up a narrow and uncertain possibility of living differently, not through purity or innocence, but through a hard-earned humility and deeper form of maturity.”

In her recent substack post, Helen Loshny suggests that:

One of the most clarifying contributions in Nate Hagens’ recent sobering and penetrating wide-boundary reflection on artificial intelligence, prompted by Dario Amodei’s framing of AI as a civilizational rite of passage, is that AI cannot be understood in isolation. At its core, the conversation turns on separability — the deep, often invisible assumption that humans, technologies, economies, and ecologies are discrete, isolatable entities rather than mutually embedded expressions of a living system.

She concludes that “when intelligence is treated as detachable from energy, bodies, land, and relationship, fear rushes in to fill the gap left by lost context. What appears as an AI problem is often a crisis of embeddedness.”

These are some of the challenges facing the Enlivenment Counter Revolution.