COLLAPSE OR TRANSFORMATION?

THE TRUST DEFICIT

We’ve all been brought up on a constant diet of media entertainment shaped by conspiracy theories of the Deep State, corrupt politicians, wealth scams and national security fears, and the glorification of shallow fame and gilded wealth. Social media offers us many rabbit holes down which we can go in search of the ‘real truth’ in search of ‘our tribe’.

The British TV series ‘Capture’ is but one attempt to explore the trust deficit zeitgeist in a political landscape dominated by conspiracy theories and national security fears, creating our ‘hall of mirrors.’

It’s no wonder there is a ‘trust deficit’ impacting the political landscape.

DELUSION

Quoting the recent Salvation Army report on poverty in Australia at length, Pauline Hanson, the leader of the One Nation surge, spelt out the failure of past neo liberal economics to deliver to working Australians over the last few decades.

Unlike Pauline, the Liberal Party, via Angus Taylor and Tim Wilson doesn’t yet seem to realise that this recipe has lost all credibility. Despite Tony’s reputation as the greatest political campaigner who ever lived, they seemed destined to political oblivion.

The international rules-based order, by which Australia prospered under pax Americana has collapsed under the weight of American exceptionalism as interpreted by President Trump and Project 25.

The vaunted liberalism of Western democracy has been exposed as a sham of the modernity/coloniality complex.

The heroism of the Jewish people as survivors of Auschwitz has been tarnished forever by Israel’s descent into its own campaign of genocide, torture and racialised apartheid in the Middle East. They have become the real cause of today’s antisemitism wave.

EXTRACTION – COLLAPSE

Regional Australia’s farming communities might bemoan their ageing towns, but profit-driven extractive capitalism’s reliance on continual economic growth and hyper-consumerism has exhausted the world’s natural ecosystems, on which they rely.

It turns out that the great productivity gains of industrial agriculture—clear-felled land clearing, deep tilling of soils, mono-cropping, chemical weed killers and massive amounts of chemical fertilisers have been progressively destroying our soils, producing food of ever decreasing nutritional value.

They have been destroying the hyphae work of fungi networks, which form critical partnerships with 70% of plant life to provide nutrients and water in exchange for the carbon produced by the plants, and help to regulate the climate by drawing carbon into soils.

Similarly, the application of hormones and antibiotics to farm animal production have been corrupting our bodies, and causing a future health crisis in the development of antibiotic-resistant strains of infections. We pump more and more money into our human health systems and research to cure diseases, while, at the same time, in the name of productivity-profit, we continue to corrupt the food systems that fuel our bodies, and the information systems that fuel our mind-states.

Through algorithmic capitalism—first social media and now AI, extractive capitalism is now targeting the vulnerabilities of the human psyche as the final frontier for extraction, while dreaming of mining Mars. Gina Rinehart wants Australia to give trillionaire Elon Musk some of our islands to launch his rockets in pursuit of these ambitions.

AI Data Centres are the new ogres marching across our landscapes, with their interminable thirst for water and energy to fuel our narcissism.

HOWEVER, WHILE

• The news media is preoccupied by movements in the stock market, President Trump’s late-night tweets and spectacles, the rise and rise of populist grievance politics, the war games of politics
• Gina Rinehart’s new political antics seek to create Bulldozer Pauline
• The next generation have defaulted to Tik Tok to get their news through entertainment.
• The ‘losers’ in our two-speed economy of increasing wealth inequality are looking for their folk heroes to ‘smash the status quo’

Other stories are being written in the shadows.

Science gave us a world of facts, but didn’t move our emotions. As the deep ecologist John Seed explains, thought alone is sterile. Everyone knows about the facts of climate change and ecological destruction, yet the destruction continues. As the populists know, it is emotion and feelings that move us in our post-truth world.

Understanding the terrain of emotion is the landscape we are being drawn to reclaim, as we once again look for glimmers of wisdom in our world.

CLEVER OR WISE?

The techno-scientific paradigm of Western industrial civilisation abandoned the idea of wisdom as a domain of knowledge worth developing. Instead, we opted for cleverness.

We forgot that old saying, ‘too clever for their own good’ as we plunged ahead in our headlong thrust to control and exploit nature’s design codes in the name of economic growth, productivity, and efficiency—to deliver us the promised ‘good life’, a world of material pleasures and satisfactions and of individual freedom to pursue our wants and desires, devoid of reciprocal obligations.

ECOLOGICAL SYSTEMS THINKING

Rachel Carson’s book ‘Silent Spring (1962) began the slow process of waking us up to the pollution cost of our celebrated advanced western civilisation in its use of chemicals—in pesticides, fertilisers, plastics and food production. Slowly this gave birth to the new science of ecology, to systems thinking rather than the reductive atomistic thinking that is the hallmark of modern industrial civilisation.

To understand that reciprocal relationship is the keystone to life on Earth, while destructive relationship is death—in marriage, in friendship, in business, in politics, in nature. Eventually there is a price to pay

It turns out that survival was never of the fittest, but of the most fitting, in this systems dance of reciprocal relationality across all types of eco-systems—biological, terrestrial, social, informational, political… 

FROM SUSTAINABILITY TO REGENERATION

Ernesto van Peborgh is busy promoting his BFF (bioregional financing facilities) as a new bioregional system working at the intersection of ecology, finance, and governance to respond to the reality that living systems, not quarterly returns, are the ultimate source of all economic value.

He’s convinced that his BFF, using next generation agentic AI will give us the tools to reveal the deeper architecture of systems that can perceive complex environments, synthesise signals across scales, learn from feedback, and support decision-making in ways that no human committee or institutional protocol can match.

That this  represents something genuinely new in the history of coordination technology, able to give us the capacity to perceive, synthesize, and make legible the complexity that human institutions have always struggled to hold.

BUT I ASK: WHO PAYS THE PIPER? WHO OWNS THE AI ALGORITHMS? IS IT THE ELON MUSKS OF THE WORLD? IF SO, WHAT ARE THE RESULTS?

Peborgh insists that, combined with understanding anchored in the underground work of Arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi, Agentic AI will give us a powerful metaphor to grow the ontological shift in our thinking that is slowly taking root through the concept of regenerative living: including regenerative farming, regenerative governance and financial governance systems. To give us the capacity to perceive, synthesise, and make legible the complexity that human institutions have always struggled to hold.

BUT WE ALWAYS COME BACK TO WHO IS ‘US’?  WHAT ARE OUR DRIVERS? HAVE ‘WE’ MASTERED THE ‘DEMONS’ THAT BROUGHT US TO THE CURRENT BRINK?

BEING ‘CLEVER’ HAS NEVER BEEN ENOUGH.

RELATIONALITY IS TALKING BACK

The gender wars continue. First the women rebelled. Then the reality of homosexuality – same sex attraction demanded its day of reckoning and time in the sun – as actors, artists, then business people, politicians and finally sportspeople ‘came out’ as gay/queer. Now the lens has shifted to the transgender community. That small section of society whose physical bodies and emotional psyches don’t align, or those who simply refuse to be gender-identified at all.

Amazing how the free speech lobby and factions of privileged western feminism seems so obsessed by controlling gender identity!

My 14 year old granddaughter tells me that more than half the students in her high school class are neurodivergent. She’s deeply interested in psychology – in what makes people tick? In what drives her own thoughts and behaviour – she’s deeply introspective. She already distinguishes between friendship talk of joking insults to therapy talk when someone needs you to be careful. That you ask your friends to let you know how they feel, and not expect you to guess because signals can be hard to read. She considers whether she is ADHD because her thoughts jump around so much. She carries a small sketch book with her, everywhere. I suggest that, just as with the images she creates, maybe she can jot down her thoughts in short paragraphs – not everything at once. She is a keen reader.

At her school, her best friends are all exploring gender identity. Three girls are identifying as boys and living this out in new names; some with parental support, many with parental hostility. When I ask her why, she says she thinks it’s just a way of exploring the psychology of life. She takes it all in her stride, happy to be a girl. Her other girlfriend thinks she might be bisexual. They are all aware that their future looks difficult—the AI threat to job prospects, talk of war,  climate change and economic and relationship insecurity, already visible in their personal lives, makes the idea of ever having children seem ridiculous. They talk of all living together in a share house as their future.

Maybe gender identity is a strangely safe terrain in which to go exploring in a world that looks and feels so very precarious. Already at 14 years they are busy mapping their future world as they navigate this world we have bequeathed them.

At her age, some 66 years ago, I was completely oblivious to all these questions in my high school in regional Queensland. I have never even heard of the word ‘psychology’. My high school didn’t even have a library. For me, such complex thinking about the world all came so much later.

BUT FIRST IT WAS WOMEN WHO SHOOK THE TREE

Feminist writers, to name just a few, such as Simone de Beauvoir (the Second Sex), Betty Friedan (Feminine Mystique), Doris Lessing (Golden Notebook), Mary Daly (Church and the Second Sex), Goria Steinem (Women and Power), Germaine Greer (The Female Eunuch), Ann Summers (Damned Whores and God’s Police) spoke back to patriarchy, to its rampant abuse of this fundamental law of reciprocity in relationship.

The feminist revolution spread across the world, taking on new ethno-religious challenges in US Black culture, among women in the Third World, among Muslim women where such feminist struggles against patriarchy were embedded in large struggles against First World extractive capitalism and the history of colonial oppression. The Taliban is the latest violent frontier of this struggle.

Sometimes there is a short time line and there is the illusion of a win, but eventually there is payday. Sometimes it’s intergenerational. Sometimes the time frame is very long indeed.

The Ancient Ones always talked of seven generations. Modern politics talks of less than one – a mere three or four years. Modern media operates on seconds: one tweet chasing another in the scramble for viral reproduction to ‘flood the zone’.

NOW IT IS MEN WHO ARE TALKING BACK—TO PATRIARCHY

In the face of the rise and rise of the manosphere, and its embrace by the obscenely wealthy and powerful Tech Lords of the US, who seduce us with their promise of social networking, convenience and AI intimacy to manage our loneliness, men like my Danish Australian friend Mik Aidt of Geelong’s ‘Force for Life, are trying to redefine the nature of masculine identity and belonging in the modern world.

He asks, in his new writing, who is this new Man of Earth? Can we men move from the imagery of the brute domination celebrated in the UFC competition celebrating Trump’s birthday on the White House lawn, from basking in the glow of Elon Musk’s trillionaire status of economic domination, to something else?  What might it look and feel like to be a man in the transformation to an Ecological Age? What role might we men play in its architecture of renewal?

THE VOICES OF THE ANCIENT ONES ARE ALSO TALKING BACK

First Nations scholars of cultures vanquished under the weight of techno-scientific conquest are finding ways to talk back to industrial civilisation from their ancient wisdom traditions. They are reminding us of the importance of wisdom in our leaders—that capacity to see all sides of the story, to deeply feel empathy and compassion for all of life, the preciousness of discernment and patience.

The dangers of greed, anger, jealousy, envy and prejudice. The fundamental role of reciprocal responsibility in sustaining the relationships that provide the living fabric of social and biological life. The dangers of fragile egoic narcissism.

CIRCULARITY

Sinead Singh of Indigenous business consultancy First Nation Start Up reminds us that through initiatives such as the Indigenous Procurement Policy, which aims to give disadvantaged Indigenous communities access to opportunity, its rationale has to be tweaked to acknowledge the importance of a cultural circular economy approach, not just the economic circularity that is the focus of much of the Circular Economy approach. That not everything is measured by the amount of money that we have in our hands at the end of the day. Instead, wealth is measured in “our health, our social wellbeing, the wisdom of our Elders, how they’re treated, how our communities look after our children.”

WISDOM

What struck me most in my journey into the world of Tibetan Buddhism was its emphasis on the idea of wisdom. Even more startling was this idea that a capacity for wisdom awareness and compassion was inherent within everyone one of us. All we had to do was peel back the habits of mind and their embodiments that prevented it shining forth.  That it was not so much about gaining new knowledge, as unlearning old habits. Not about gaining, but letting go. That the much-vaunted idea of meditation was simply a method for undertaking this seemingly simple, but so counter-intuitive a journey.

To meditate is to make a complete break with how we normally operate, for it is a state free of all cares and concerns, in which there is no competition, no desire to possess or grasp at anything, no intense and anxious struggle, and no hunger to achieve: an ambitionless state where there is neither acceptance nor rejection, neither hope nor fear, a state in which we slowly begin to release all those emotions and concepts that have imprisoned us—into a state of natural simplicity (‘Tibetan Book of Living and Dying’, 1992:58)

As anyone who has ever attempted to meditate has discovered. This seemingly simple task is so counter-intuitive to the modern mind, that it may requires days of effort to even be able to sit still, and simply breathe. That to rest the mind’s innate simple awareness, free of it being endlessly grabbed by flickering thoughts, body sensations and arising feelings can prove difficult indeed. And yet here, in this simple act lies the ground of our capacity for wisdom, with all its qualities of an all-encompassing discernment, compassion, patience, and understanding.

A quality, which when we meet it in a living human being, brings tears of joy and relief to our eyes. A hope. A recognition, that I too might develop such qualities.

It was this that led me, as a non-Indigenous Australian, to wonder how this might manifest in the role of Elders in Aboriginal culture, in the veneration in which they are held by their community. It took me to the Aboriginal songman Tjilpi Bob Randall, a Yankunytjatjara man of Central Australia whom I met at an Aboriginal cultural camp, run by Tranby College, so many years ago. He never claimed to be an Elder but he told me that you didn’t become an Elder by becoming old. You became an Elder by the qualities others recognised in you, which you developed over your life in service to the community and its deepest and most sacred stories. Whether this was men’s business or women’s business.

And today we see this played out across numerous and different Aboriginal communities as they grapple with the long, difficult and complex tail of my Anglo-Irish people’s colonial conquest and subjugation of theirs, in the name of Christian civilisation. In this struggle many Aboriginal and Torres Strait Island have made Christianity their own. As shown in the history of the Bark Petitions (Nåku Dhåruk by Clare Wright, 2026), the church has been both destroyer and betrayer, friend and supporter—alert to the inherent spirituality of Indigenous cultures, but often blinded by cultural hubris and a poverty of intellectual reach and deeper wisdom.

What is this wisdom of the Elders that so many now seek, a wisdom that seems elusive to the modern mind because it is grounded in service to life, in all its interwoven multiplicity?

Not something gained from a weekend workshop. A road trip to Uluru or the Gama Festival. Another degree from a university. It is wisdom shrouded in humility, not fame. Secret business. Intuitive sacred awareness-knowing. Buried under the hubris of institutional religions and political power struggles.

It is a wisdom that understands the nature of the keystone of life on earth—the deep and intricate patterns of reciprocal relationality that we see so visibly in the underground work of Arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi.

Which is celebrated so viscerally in the complex and frequently humorous tales of the Creation Ancestors, such as the tale of the flight of the Seven Sisters from a rampaging male across the Australian landscape/night sky, which was celebrated in that monumental exhibition, Songlines: Tracking the Seven Sisters, which has travelled the world. Soon to be on show at the National Museum of China. Now I wonder what lessons it enshrines about the danger and nature of the energies of testosterone in our midst?

A wisdom that is celebrated in the mysticism of the Dakini, the Great Disruptor, the feminine principle in Tibetan Buddhist iconography and mythic ways of expressing elusive, illusive and allusive truths that reveal themselves in a dynamic wisdom awareness that defies easy articulation.

A wisdom that called to me throughout my life in all sorts of ways and circumstances, from an intellectually impoverished Queensland childhood to a marriage to a Trobriand Islander of PNG, and through a classic midlife crisis of failed relationships and health scares to find a spiritual teacher who could help me ‘let go’ and find myself. To trust. And from this space of a new kind of awareness and sensibility, to engage with the the big issues of my/our times as they shape the world we are bequeathing to our next generations.

A story I have tried to tell in my memoir, Call of the Dakini, 2021, available on amazon.com.au