Narratives

We humans are not a mathematic species who think in numbers. We make sense of the world through the stories we construct about how the world around us ‘works’ and we folk of the modern-scientific world use numbers (measurable facts) to anchor our stories into some semblance of certainties about the nature of our reality. But we have come to learn that it’s possible to use statistics in many fraudulent ways in a world of fake news, memes and self-perpetuating bubbles of algorithmic reality.

Politics is fundamentally moral. It is a contest between different values, between opposing views of what is right. These views are underpinned by two contrasting models for how the nation should function as a ‘family’, with the government seen as ‘the parent’.

In this framing we are asked, do we frame our worldview according to the Strict Father story (patriarchal/conservative) or the Nurturing Parent story (liberal humanism/progressive)? I was brought up in a household cleaving to the Strict Father model, rebelled against it, and took on the Nuturing Parent model for myself ‘in the world’, and as a parent to my own children.

But what is the new story by which we should frame our worldview in the face of the Great Collapse—of Western cultural hegemony and environmental overshoot in a world that is being radically changed by climate change, along with the whole looming AI saga?

I confess to my new neighbour that I am a bit of a political tragic. I don’t doom scroll or watch Sky After Dark, but I do regularly watch the ABC’s Background Briefing and Sunday’s Insiders to keep track of the political debate. I read the Guardian, the Conversation, the Saturday Paper, and track various substack newsletters.

My new neighbour is a soldier. Been deployed in various theatres of war, but is surprisingly warm, gentle, kind and wry. While he, like many, despairs that “they” are all “liars”, I despair that both the politicians and their media analysts are all barking up the wrong tree.

That their frameworks for trying to get a handle on things—on the underlying currents that have us in their grip as we variously ‘rage against the night’, are just digging us deeper into the mire. Whether they/we are what we label progressives or reactionaries, we long for integrity and authenticity, but are so easily seduced.

Hanson is seen as authentic because she is overtly, rather than covertly, racist. Trump is authentic because he is overtly vulgar and greedy, who is not afraid to throw his weight around. No pretence there.

False Consciousness

How do we explain how our ideas about our situation are not aligned with the structural reality of our situation? How do we explain the power of ideology so that we ‘dig our own graves’? To answer this question, we need to consider the idea of ‘false consciousness’, to explain how we can unknowingly participate in our own oppression, even in the destruction of the very conditions that make human life on Earth possible into the future.

To understand false consciousness, we have to turn to the role of culture as mediated via various forms of media, our education system, and powerful vested interests, which establish the cultural norms and values of our society—enacted through our family upbringing, religious teachings, the state-sanctioned education system, the rules and regulations of our society—the entire institutional apparatus of our society. A recent report, ‘Respect at University’ by the Australian Human Rights Commission into the university sector highlights the extent of this problem.

The idea that we can live unknowingly in a state of ‘false consciousness’ was first elaborated by Marxists who were trying to understand why the oppressed working classes (proletariat) did not focus their rage on their oppressors, but instead engaged in struggles with one another in their competition for jobs. What today we call ‘lateral violence’. Only heightened when that competition is aligned with ethnicity and ‘nationalist identity’.

Complicity

As law-abiding citizens we can become complicit in our own oppression. As law-breakers we can experience the full force of the oppression. As rebels who challenge the system, we comprise the factions of civil society who create  the social change enabled by the very idea of democracy ruling on behalf of ‘we the people’.

Or we can become alienated outliers.

The other side of the coin of false consciousness is complicity—complicity not only in the collapse of the liberal-humanist rules-based world order, but in the collapse of the continued sustainability of the entire world ecosystems to support continued human life at the standard we have come to expect.

The Italian Marxist theorist Antonio Gramsci showed in his Prison Notebooks, how false consciousness is a tool of ideological control. He coined the term cultural hegemony to explain the process under capitalism whereby the ruling classes create particular norms, values, and prejudice, amounting to a culture in which their continued dominance is considered both commonsensical and beneficial. These ideas have since been taken up to explain oppression based on sexual orientation, gender, race and ethnicity in feminist and post-colonial scholarship.

Upward Mobility and the Fair Go

One of the most potent tools used by the ruling classes/powerful elites of modern capitalist societies is the possibility of upward social mobility with its presumption of rational agency that is core to mainstream economics. This is the idea of individual rational self-interest (homo economicus) popularised by John Stuart Mill in the development of classical economic theory. This belief claims upward mobility is possible for everyone, regardless of the circumstances they were born under, as long as they choose to dedicate themselves to their education, their training—to working hard for their employers or becoming successful entrepreneurs creating new businesses. It is exemplified in the idea of ‘the American Dream’, with its mirrored ideas in Australia’s ‘Fair Go’.

BUT—this belief in the possibility of social mobility and the Fair Go has now collapsed.

The Political Collapse

It began with the hollowing out of the middle class, as manufacturing shifted to lower-waged Asian countries, followed by key aspects of the services sector: software engineering, data entry, call centres, financial services.

It accelerated after governments bailed out the banks (too big to fail) following the GFC (Great Financial Crash 2008) caused by the hedge fund activities of private investment banks and over leveraged mortgage housing finance. While working people lost their assets and savings, the investor asset class made yet more money as the stock market continued its merry way.

The impact of the COVID global epidemic was the final straw. It exposed the dangers of relying on global supply chains across all sectors of the economy, in search of market efficiency and productivity, and marked a turn towards the idea of protecting sovereign capability. Along came Trump 2.0 and his new regime of tariffs against the assumptions of free trade, which underpins the global economy. There is a new panic around national sovereignty in the age of global capitalism, particularly platform capitalism dominated by a US that the rest of the world no longer trusts.

The Ecological Collapse

Climate change bringing intensifying fires, floods and drought has brought the ecological collapse home to many of us. Globally, humanity now consumes resources equivalent to 1.7 Earths each year³, and has altered more than 75% of the planet’s ice-free land surface. Wild mammals have been reduced to just 4% of total mammalian biomass, the other 96% being humans and the animals we raise to feed ourselves. Net Primary Production, the annual capture of solar energy by photosynthesis that powers nearly all life, has already declined by roughly 10% due to human appropriation.

Each of these figures represents a breach of the planet’s biophysical boundaries, shrinking the ecological space in which complex life can thrive. (Adrian Lambert, ‘A Grand Unified Theory of Doom’, 2025)

The Populist Revolt

In First World societies like Australia, the current political struggle is around the ‘cost of living’ and ‘declining living standards’ for all but those in the asset-wealth class.

Although not framed in the context of the idea of ‘false consciousness’, all across the US, Europe, UK and now Australia, we are witnessing a surge of political support for a rightist populism of rage against the liberal economic order. Primarily this is a revolt by those who subscribe to the ‘strict father’ model of social order.

Those who subscribe to the ‘nurturing parent’ model of liberal humanism still cling to the viability of the socially liberal democratic order finding a reformist pathway through the collapse.

Strict Father Values

Strict father morality is built around some key assumptions, which we see form part of the newly minted Taylor-Hume Liberals’ pitch to voters, in their contest with One Nation:

• There will always be winners and losers.
• Children are born pleasure-seeking and without a sense of right and have to be made good. This is done through punishment and reward
• Good children will work hard and become prosperous – a core idea of the Protestant ‘prosperity doctrine’
• As such it is immoral to give things to people that they haven’t earned (dole bludgers) because it discourages moral behaviour (enterprise and obedience).
• Being good and worthy of respect is about following authority, following self-interest and becoming self-reliant. The ‘tough love’ of the Strict Father.

In Australia recent polls suggest a surge in support for One Nation, once a small fringe group of disaffected, older voters living in rural and regional areas, most with low levels of post-secondary education. Amongst this cohort we would expect to find those whose values-set subscribes to the ‘strict father’ model of social order. But a whole new demographic cohort have joined this surge.

The Gen x Dilemma

Pollster Kos Samaras says his research reveals the rusted on One Nation supporters are now being joined by increasing numbers of Gen X (45 to 60 yrs) born between 1965 and 1980, who are looking for someone to blame for their increasing sense of economic precarity and loss of cultural security.

“They’ve got teenage kids or young adult kids, and they’ve got aging parents who in the majority are probably sitting on the pension because they’re not wealthy individuals, and they’ve got a massive mortgage themselves or they’re renting and they’ve got their own health problems and they’re living in regions where services are not crash hot.”

Culture, Values and Immigration

Enduring Racism

White racial and cultural superiority was a feature of European colonialism. Australia’s Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people were not granted citizenship until 1967, and their prior ownership of the land and its waterways was not recognised until the Marbo V Queensland High Court decision of 1992. They continue to be culturally marginalised in modern Australia, which clings to ‘white’ cultural superiority, despite our multiculturalism and acknowledgement that our cultural foundations rest with the world’s longest living culture – that of Australia’s First Nations people.

Further, despite Australia being an ‘immigrant nation’, each new wave of migrants has experienced the brunt of racist derision and exclusion—from the One Pound Poms, to the Wogs of Italy and Greece, to the Slant Eyes of China and SE Asia, and the Towel Heads of the Middle East.

Therefore, it is not surprising that anti-immigration feelings are being politicised in the context of the ‘cost of living’ crisis, along with proposals to tighten the ‘values-test’, so that only people ‘like us’ get to come and live in Australia. Kos Samaras also suggests:

“Drivers of anti-immigration and culture wars are: identity, loss of agency, loss of agency because of those urban elites, loss of agency because of those migrants. And there’s racism there. It’s always there. But I would argue that it’s the economics, fragility and abandonment that’s actually driving a lot of this.”

Abandonment

Samaras’s idea of the importance of ‘abandonment’ is interesting. It’s a powerful psychological driver of angst, grievance and vulnerability in our lives. It speaks to individual childhood trauma, failed marriages, but also historical tropes in the very colonial settlement of Australia – ‘sent to the colonies’, but clinging to the Mother Country.

The fear of abandonment hones in on the failed promise of liberal humanism—that treasured Australian ideal of the ‘fair go’, and of the neo-liberal economic assumption that when the wealthy get wealthier, all will benefit as it trickles down through the economy.

The idea that a ‘man is king of his castle’—the sanctity of family and home ownership in a patriarchal world has been undermined by the now out-of-reach access to home ownership for all but those with access to the ‘bank of mum and dad’—the growing intergenerational transfer and entrenchment of the wealth divide.

Feminism and Misogyny

Along with this has been the rise and rise of ‘women’s rights’ to access the ‘fair go’, a logical consequence of liberal humanism. The resulting women’s rights to property ownership, no-fault divorce, single parent pensions, tertiary education, equal pay, and an academic re-evaluation of history and culture challenging the hegemony of the ‘male gaze’, have all undermined assumptions about male authority (agency) and masculine identity.

The misogynist backlash (manosphere, Incels, male-dominated domestic homicides and violence) all speak to a sense of masculine ‘abandonment’. Along with the avenging ‘Mother’ in the person of Pauline Hanson, there to protect her ‘Sons’. The avenging Mother archetype is the necessary partner of the Strict Father. It is why women also sign up to the tilt to patriarchal populism.

Complicity

Many of us, especially those who have subscribed to the nurturing parent model of society, have enjoyed the material benefits of industrial civilisation and the liberating ideas of modernity—that we could be free from the constraints of tradition and strive for creative self-actualisation, while all the time fighting for the liberal ideals of justice and equality for all.

Collapse

We now struggle with a sense of confusion and complicity, as we witness the gathering collapse. It is occurring across multiple domains: political, economic, social, psychological, and environmental. It is intersecting with ideas of national, racial, gender and ethnic identity, religious and spirituality, values and norms, belief in the idea of progress and trust in science and technology.

But old certainties have gone. The weird world of quantum physics haunts us and beckons us to let go of certainties and embrace a world of dynamic uncertainty and wondrous mystery. This defies the promise of science that it could deliver us control over all of nature.

The Modernity/Coloniality Framing

Although we might have welcomed former colonies finding their independence from their colonial masters, fought against entrenched ideas of racial prejudice, and celebrated the growing independence of women from the assumptions of patriarchy, we failed to fully appreciate the structural nature of the modernity/coloniality complex from which we benefited. This is the western civilisational legacy on which the US seeks to build its new Trumpian empire.

That our treasured ‘standard of living’ has come at the expense of others—not just the class struggles of industrial society, of workers versus the ruling class of propertied wealth and their cultural influence that still bedevils us today.

But more importantly at the expense of the ‘racialised other’—the struggling poor who man the unregulated factories, which produce the cheap manufactured goods that provide our high ‘standard of living’. Those picking through our exported industrial waste for precious scraps of recyclable materials, at great cost to their health.

In direct contradiction of our commitment to the ideas of justice and equality for all.

We have been living in the state of false consciousness that perniciously characterises liberal humanism and the international rules-based order.

Stanner’s ‘Great Australian Silence’, which blanketed our understanding of our colonial settlement of Australia, was part of a greater blanket of silence. This was thrown over our complicity in the arrogant hegemony of the Western Civilisational inheritance. The failure of liberal humanism to acknowledge the modernity/coloniality complex that has been intrinsic to the globalisation of the world economy.

We are brought back to Gramsci’s reflections from prison that any ‘ruling class’, whether that be the power elites within our own culture and nation state, or the hegemony of Western civilisational thought over other cultures, rules through the intersection of popular and high culture, through intellectual and civil society (soft power), and not just through coercion (hard power). Its monopoly over the means of force: the law, police, and the military is but the outer and most visible form of its power.

At Play in Australian Politics Today

We are now watching false consciousness and our complicity play out in the contestation of ideas Australia’s political sphere. The politicised response to Israel’s genocidal campaign against the Palestinians of Gaza and the West Bank in the light of the Bondi mass shooting, killing 15 Australians of Jewish religious identity. The conflation of criticism of Israel as a nation state with hatred towards all Jews of religious faith. Talk of the value of social cohesion as a weapon of multicultural inclusion, or as a weapon of ethno-cultural exclusion.

Talk of social order as a weapon to withdraw the rights to civil protest against injustice, or an even-handed attempt to curtail hate speech and promotion of communal violence.

We are also watching false consciousness and our complicity play out in the environmental sphere. Intensive industrialised farming of salmon, pigs, chickens and cattle. The contestation over the transition to renewable solar and wind energy over coal, gas and nuclear in the context of land use, tax and government subsidies. The contestation over regulation and ‘red tape’ to embed environmental and cultural heritage protections and health and safety concerns, against profit maximisation and the economic growth/productivity imperative. The contest over free speech, media and the looming disruptive impact of AI.

The Legacy

As Lambert concludes in his ‘Grand Unified Theory of Doom’:

Modernity has privileged a narrow, reductionist frame: knowledge is constructed, detached, quantifiable, and dominated by economic metrics. This has produced immense technical power, but also a profound blindness to the relational and ecological dimensions of reality.

Our cultural narratives of human exceptionalism, perpetual progress, and control over nature are disintegrating in the face of biophysical reality. This disorientation leaves many unable to respond coherently to collapse. We cling to false hopes of salvation through technology or policy reform, echoing the Judaic-Christian belief in salvation through the Messiah.

Without a shift in how we perceive and value the world, any technical or political “solution” will remain trapped in the same paradigm that created overshoot. How we think shapes how we act. Without epistemic renewal, technical and political interventions will remain trapped in the logic of overshoot.