The Old Order is Finished

Carney called it out in his Davos speech. The uni-polar Pax American Liberal world order, built on an economic order of extractivist logic and constant growth/expansion, is finished. Trump’s America First, and the rise of neo-nazism across Europe is not the cause but the symptom.

As Middle Powers like Australia, Canada, the UK, Japan and the European nation states, along with other outliers in the Americas and Africa, begin to craft a new multi-polar world order to manage the imperial ambitions of the US, China and Russia, they face the continuing collapse of the values and principles that have underpinned the international liberal order.

The potent but contradictory mix of humanitarian values, individual freedom, scientific materialism, and competitive economic extractivism (productivity) has underpinned the rapid growth in post WWII material living standards.

Not just in the Global North, but also in parts of the Global South as a new assertive business and professional middle class emerged in India, SE Asia, Central and South America and parts of Africa. Their struggles in Iran and Iraq are another story altogether.

But the social compact with working people has been broken.

Liberal democracies rely on citizens having a baseline level of trust in their leaders, courts, and cultural institutions, and a shared belief that we cherish the same collection of values. Obliterate that trust and see what forces you unleash.

The relentless pursuit of the Epstein Files by the disenfranchised, with the smell of conspiracy and cover-up in their nostrils, has exposed the network of Monsters behind the curtains. In Australia, One Nation’s popularity is surging, particularly among Gen x and Millennials, who can’t afford a safe place to call home for themselves or their families. Last night I watched ‘Salvador’ on Netflix—a powerful exploration of neo-nazi inspired violence in Spain in the face of immigration and housing shortages, set against the failed parenting of the liberal era.

Modernity/Coloniality Reframing

In the light of this collapse in trust and confidence, we must reframe the Middle Powers Strategy from merely a pivot away from subservience to the US, but still relying on the old liberal world values and assumptions, to a completely new framing seen through the lens of the modernity/coloniality complex.

Furthermore this reframing must meet the challenge of an increasingly assertive China as it seeks to challenge the US dollar-based international financial order, asserting its moral superiority and stability, stating:

Finance has to remain tethered to the real economy to avoid the consequences of extreme financialisation, and the corruption that comes with it.

Australia’s Challenge

Australia, like Canada, straddles the modernity/coloniality divide. Both countries are home to a sizeable and living Indigenous culture that predates their being colonised and settled by immigrants from Britain and Western Europe, and in later years by immigrants from Asia, the Middle East, Africa and the Pacific. Both are resource-rich countries with strong mining sectors.

Both have embraced multiculturalism as the basis of national social cohesion.

Both countries are actively engaged in seeking reconciliation with colonial settlement practices that dispossessed and caused spiritual, social and economic harm to their Indigenous peoples.

Both are being actively challenged by the voices of Indigenous scholarship from a new generation of university educated Indigenous intellectuals.

Both are also experiencing the disruption of the Trump-inspired populist counter-culture revolution of the new right, biting the ankles of their traditional political conservative forces.

Both seek to manage being caught between a vengeful and imperialist Trump and a more assertive China.

Although Australia is witnessing the collapse of the Liberal-Right Coalition, with a populist surge to the ethno-nationalism of One Nation, this is countered by a large centre left Labor majority in the Lower House, and the ability of a Labor-Greens-Independent vote in the Senate to secure reformist change that might address the growing socio-economic, intergenerational inequality that is feeding the populist surge.

Blind Alleys

However as Zoe Daniels, journalist and former Independent, points out:

While this ongoing political drama series plays out, Australians are struggling to pay their bills, our children are weighed down with mental health issues, they can’t buy homes, our nation is flooding and burning, and long-term structural policy change on things like tax, housing and intergenerational equity remain in the too-hard basket for both major parties.

The ABC Insider’s program (9 Feb 2026) reveals how Australia’s political class and commentariat continue to flounder as they try to read the ‘tea leaves’ of the changing political landscape. They fail to see, as pointed out by Daniels, that whether dressed up as conservative politics or centre-left politics, this liberal order has been brought asunder by its own contradictions.

A completely new lens to the old Left/Right analysis is required.

It’s no longer ‘about the economy stupid’, with the narrow focus on inflation and productivity. About government expenditure versus private spending. About getting the budget back into shape to weather the stormy seas ahead. About what juicy divisiveness can be provoked and harvested to capture eyeballs in the 24 hour news cycle.

No wonder less and less people are tuning into mainstream media. These vapid, soulless abstractions no longer hold our attention.

The Modernity/Coloniality Complex

We are no longer just talking about the industrial-military-technology complex, as if only the dynamics of the Global North matters. Or the new hopeful entrants: China, India and the potential for an Israel-Emirates-Saudi alliance to reshape the Middle East.

A new analytical framework is required.

The modernity/coloniality split now occurs within all nation states. It is no longer a Global North/Global South split.

The technology-productivity imperative seeks ever more extractive profits from within all nation states, not just the Global South—’over there’. These are brought within, on the racialised underclasses of the Global North—whether Indigenous peoples, refugees, asylum seekers, and in the case of the US, the Afro-Hispanic American underclass.

BUT NOW

It is also impacting ‘ethno-whites’ as dreams of working class and middle class prosperity slip out of reach. And we watch with trepidation at how the minds of our children are being colonised by the global techno oligarchs. Facile TikTok memes, Facebook FOMO and bullying, X misogyny and ethno-religious radicalisation. Dreams of productivity for AI data mining are the latest madness of the modernity/coloniality complex.

Data centres are the backbone of the AI industry. These giant computers are what generate the countless dancing cat videos on the internet. And as global demand for AI grows, so too does the size of data centres. Data Centres require a huge and uninterrupted supply of electricity and water to keep them running and cool (The Conversation, 10 Feb 2026).

They represent the next phase of the extractivist rape of the planet’s resources and humanity – but for what?

The Productivity Inheritance

Since mechanisation began to reshape society, via various waves of extractivist industrialisation, new sources of energy and materials from fossil fuels and new methods of labour organisation delivered major productivity benefits.

These saw the material living standards of the Global North increase exponentially, alongside life expectancy, literacy, access to tertiary education and women’s participation in the public sphere.

Women’s participation in the public and economic sphere has delivered productivity benefits but it has raised other challenges for the traditional patriarchal order that are still playing out in male anxiety, resurgent misogyny and populist gender culture wars.

Assumptions about the markers of masculinity and femininity, and the distribution of economic benefits across the life cycle are still contested, as is women’s role in political leadership. But the need for two-income families to fund a viable lifestyle and the cost and burden of child care have often placed an unbearable burden on family life. Hence the ructions.

Digital economic transformation has continued this extractivist productivity, but this time, via algorithmic data harvesting it began to reach deeper. Beyond the labouring body into our minds, emotions and human relationships, and the integrity of our shared information ecosystem, pillorying the role of the Fourth Estate in holding power to account.

The pace of technological innovation and scientific knowledge has continued to accelerate as the new sources of competitive advantage, creating new winners and losers in global competition between nation states. Innovative ‘financial products’ have driven the financialisation of the economy and the profits of the banking sector through the roof. The stock market roars ahead as the investor class smack their lips. But the promised productivity benefit is all smoke and mirrors.

Cautionary Tales

Behind the scenes of American technological triumphalism, China has continued to gain ground in the technology race—engineering marvels, renewable technologies, electronic vehicles, AI.

China’s latest gambit is to seize the US dollar advantage of being the world’s reserve currency, with Xi Jinping offering a sweeping vision (脱实向虚) for building a global financial power organised around socialist principles, promising relief from Wall Street’s greed and financialisation of the economy, which has led to the housing crisis: nations of unimaginable material wealth unable to ‘afford’ a safe and secure place to call home for a significant number of their citizens.

Furthermore, the promised productivity boon from AI is proving more difficult to realise, meanwhile raising even more serious challenges on all fronts: socially, mentally, environmentally and politically. Behind the AI excitement, there are those urging us to realise that embodied, relational human intelligence is very different from the information processing of AI’s large language models, drawn from a narrow group of human languages.

Training AI on a largely homogenised data set means embedding the perspectives, assumptions and biases of a relatively small portion of the world’s population. Human intelligence, by contrast, is defined by diversity. Eight billion people, living in different environments and social systems, contribute to a shared but plural cognitive landscape.

We have all been sucked into the belief that we ‘can have it all’: leisure, convenience, the body beautiful, beguiling gadgets—a tech-fix for every challenge, all on-demand—as the expected living standards of the 21^st century for ordinary folk, not just the elites.  And now we are offered on-demand 24/7 personal AI companions and counsellors. Who needs the emotionally demanding complexity of human relationships?

Meanwhile we face a scourge of mental illness in the form of anxiety, depression, rage and anomie across the world. The norms and values we thought we shared no longer seem to hold.

The Relationality Shift

How can we respond to this crisis through a reframing of the Middle Powers strategy?

As outlined in my analysis of the emerging Enlivenment Counter Culture, the intellectual response to understanding the opportunity for a radical Middle Power strategy, shaped by an understanding of the legacy of the modernity/coloniality complex, requires the sort of shift in thinking that we saw in the 19th century, which shook the world of the West and seeped into the rest of the world through imperial colonisation.

The Modernity Shift

Science replaced religion as the arbiter of truth, and emergent capitalism replaced the old feudal order. The ‘ançien regime’ crashed and burned, its final death knoll from WWI.

First came the revolution of Newtonian mechanistic science; then in the economic writings of Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations, and Karl Marx’s Communist Manifesto; the psychological thinking of Freud and Jung; and later in the further radical scientific breakthroughs of Einstein, Bohm and Neils Bohr.

Smith bequeathed us the fanciful idea of rational ‘homo economicus‘. Marx was a scientific materialist, but he did understand problem of reification. The failing to understand the role of process and interdependency, of seeing everything as reducible, separable ‘things’. Freud mapped the human mind to find a language that revealed its hidden stories and anxieties. Jung mapped the role of the unconscious, the role of mythology in culture and the possibility of a transpersonal consciousness expressed through mythological symbols and metaphors that spoke to a shared human experience. Bohr and Bohm turned reality on its head as we tried to come to grips with the world of quantum mechanics.

The Relationality Shift

No longer confined to purely Western thought, the new relationality shift is grappling with interdependencies and flow, with the essentially relationist nature of life on planet Earth as expressed through the different hierarchies of local and regional ecologies in the natural environment, and how this is mirrored in human social life.

The nature of mind as a domain of human experience defeats the scientific materialism of neuroscience and its focus on the brain, just as it defeats the ambition of AI to replicate and surpass the full spectrum of embodied human intelligence.

This relationality shift draws on alternative knowledge systems to those that shaped Western culture and its hegemonic influence through global imperialism. Ancient wisdom meets ecological sciences in a world of pervasive intelligence at work across the various kingdoms of Earth’s life forms.

The poverty of mainstream Anglo-American culture in exploring these questions is apparent in the media hype about Michael Pollan’s latest book, A World Appears: A Journey Into Consciousness.

By contrast, alternative knowledge systems draw on insights from Indigenous cultures, with their deep and enduring understanding of how to live symbiotically and reciprocally with nature, and therefore of its deep ecological laws and principles, of experiencing themselves in a kinship relationship with all of what the West calls ‘the natural world’. Relationist approaches also draw on ideas embedded in Chinese Taoism with its emphasis on the unity of opposites: yin and yang, and of being ‘in the flow’. Of ideas embedded in Buddhism about the nature of the human mind and the idea of shunyata: the experience of the indivisible union of emptiness and appearance that aligns with modern physics. Of Hinduism with its ideas of ‘god’ or Brahmin as an all-pervasive force within and around everything: the mountains, rivers, your breath, your thoughts. Both Hinduism and Buddhism share the idea of ‘karma’, of cause and effect through all actions of thought, word, and deed, as a basis of both morality and how the world works.

The new relationality shift do not promise a ‘working class revolution’ or echo the promises of nationalist independence that rewrote the old colonial order. This emergent world of relationality thinking is something very different.

There is as yet no well-developed economic theory of relationality that takes account of ecological systems thinking, but many are engaged in both no-growth economic and post-growth economic theories, which along with the theory of ‘doughnut economics’ for living within bio-regional limits, are attempting to find ways of escaping the imperative of constant economic growth. These ideas can also be linked to theories of circular economics, which seeks to redesign the production system to eliminate waste, and regenerate natural systems, therefore preventing pollution of soils and waterways. Pulling all these threads together is still a work in progress.

Solutions

The commentariat are impatient for ‘structural reform’, for more ‘bravery’ from a Labor majority government in the face of an imploded and toothless conservative Opposition in the political sphere. Of a populist revolt that harvests grievance but provides no solutions.

But old solutions no longer work: whether based on Keynesian style public spending and redistribution through the tax system, or neo-liberal economics faith in the free market.

Many argue that we have to give up solutionism altogether as it blinds us to the poverty of our blinkered thinking. As government struggles with a fractious electorate, we need the space to allow new ideas to reshape our thinking and our actions.

Old Left/Right systems of thought were not informed by the ecological limits to extractivism, the imperative that climate change, environmental degradation and biodiversity loss are now demanding be addressed. They do not address issues of spiritual alienation that demand attention outside of mainstream religious posturing and divisiveness.

These are limits not easily addressed by the world’s political system of nation states intent on ‘securing their borders’ against new waves of human refugees as the impact of climate change and militarised ambitions bite.

The dominant tired and lazy intellectual class still talk the language of ‘economic growth’ and ‘productivity’ as if the ecological limits to endless growth are not already upon us. Whether the ecological limits of resource extraction, or the ecological limits of the human psyche as the so-called Attention Economy merges into the Attachment Economy, threatening our collective sanity.

Instead, the relationality shift is calling for more humility. That first of all we must face the considerable challenge of unlearning old habits of thought. Throwing off the shackles of scientific materialism, or its romantic counter fantasies in new-age spirituality and wellbeing—the children of consumerism.

Tackling Consumerism

Nate Hagen suggest we can tackle the consumer imperative by mirroring Maslow’s hierarchy of human needs with assessing our hierarchy of consumption, which can make us dependent on systems that provide us comfort and convenience on-demand, no matter the longer-term consequences. Think food delivery drivers, the ghost workers in AI regulation, the impact of over-tourism, the narcissism of selfie culture.

In their small and regional communities, all over the world, people are quietly experimenting for new ways to live within their bioregional limits. New ways to nurture Earth’s regenerative capacities to address the ravages of the modernity/coloniality complex.

New ways to form kinship relationships with all of the natural world in recognition of the inseparability of the fabric of life.

New ways to nurture our inner resilience and vitality, and those of our loved ones and community. To celebrate kindness and generosity rather than fame and wealth.