THE NEW DRIVER IN THE SEAT

Many years ago, now it seems, I was invited by my friend Rhonda Galbally to join her in Melbourne to help establish the Commission for the Future, to which she had been appointed as its inaugural Director. Under the chairmanship of cultural broadcaster, Phillip Adams, the Commission was an initiative of Barry Jones, Australia’s quirky Minister for Science in the Hawke Government. He recognised that technological innovation was fast becoming the driving force of economic and political change across the Western world.

How could the rest of the world imitate the lessons of Silicon Valley’s fruitful relationship with the university sector in California, and compete with the growing power of US economic globalisation? Today’s AI scramble is still grappling with this question.

We have become transfixed by how to capture the fruits of innovation arising from new developments in science and their application into technologies that impact all sectors of society and the economy? And, similarly, how to regulate to contain their possible negative consequences?

My friend, Mik Aidt sent me a copy of Jeremy Lent’s ‘Eco Civilization: Making a World that Works for All (2026) for my birthday. Himself also from California, Lent as founder and host of the Deep Transformation Network, applies this same lens of innovation to a very different question.

He asks, how can we transition from the unintended consequences of competitive extraction (of the Earth’s resources, of human labour, of nature’s bounty, of human creativity) under Adam Smith’s invisible hand of the Market, to a new idea of reciprocal causality (the inimitable ecological laws of Nature), to allow our transformation to an eco-civilisation?

CAPTURING INNOVATION

When considering the politics of activism against the dominant forces of destructive, extractive capitalism, straight from the playbook of Innovation Theory, he argues:

Rather than prioritising broad-brush campaigns, it’s more important to nurture innovative practices in close-knit groups, which are likely to be on the periphery of mainstream networks.  Communities of change makers must be incubated from corrosion by established norms, allowing them to create resilient pockets of legitimacy. And it’s crucial to encourage strong relationships of trust and shared values among members at the grassroots level, whose ideas are frequently the most effective.  Once these ideas become well-established among groups of Innovators and Early Adopters, then more widespread campaigns can hope to encourage the uptake of an Early Majority (p.341).

Thus, rather than Schumpeter’s prescription of ‘creative destruction’ among competing innovators to speed up the pace of change to ever more heights, he argues for the identification and networking of ‘islands of coherence’—grassroot movements and community initiatives motivated by shared values, laying down pathways towards a life-enhancing future, which is built on the power of reciprocal causality.

RECIPROCAL CAUSALITY

Similar to an idea I advanced in my recent blog, ‘Transformation to Elusive Wisdom’, that reciprocal relationality is the keystone of life, Lent gives this a causal function. He argues that reciprocal causality arises when the system as a whole and the activities of its separate parts coexist in a balanced dynamic equilibrium. Under an umbrella of a shared vision of meaning and purpose, each component part within ‘islands of coherence’ pursues its own path, integrating with other elements to create the system as a whole, while the holistic identity of the system coheres the activities of each part. Such a vision echoes the ideas of self-organisation that are observed in the dissipative structures of all complex systems.

They also touch on the insights of Ilya Prigogine (Order Out of Chaos, 1984) that such complex systems, when subjected to turbulence can certainly collapse (the law of entropy). But they can also escape to a higher order of complexity (the law of evolution).

HOLISTIC IDENTITY OF ECO-CIVILISATION

Lent seeks to weave a web of coherence under the idea of a civilisation based on ecological logic. But let us first unpack this very idea of ‘civilisation’ as it resonates in our human minds.  We find several meanings in the dictionary:

• the stage of human social and cultural development and organization that is considered most advanced, eg:the Victorians equated the railways with progress and civilization.
• the process by which a society or place reaches an advanced stage of social and cultural development and organisation.
• the society, culture, and way of life of a particular area, eg: the great books of Western civilisation, eg the early civilisations of Mesopotamia and Egypt.
• the comfort and convenience of modern life, regarded as available only in towns and cities, eg, in the UK nowhere is very far from civilisation.

As we can see, this idea of ‘civilisation’ is loaded with the assumptions of the transforming power of technology, urbanisation, conquest and political power. The split between metropolitan and rural; city and region that bedevils modern politics. The assumptions of racialised cultural superiority—whether that be ‘White’ Europe, the US, China, India or Russia.

Whereas by comparison, ‘ecology’ draws its resonance from the rules of the natural world. Of intricate and interwoven/entangled networks of competitive collaboration, the yin and yang of life that informs the Daoist vision of life. The world of indigeneity whereby humans regard themselves as participants in the wider natural world, rather than lords over it. Where death is ‘sorry business’—something to be mourned with sadness, tears and ritual and the great circularity of life and renewal. Not something to be overcome and denied through scientific conquest.

Can these two ideas be brought together?

In pursuit of this possibility, Lent takes us through various fields of human endeavour: Economics, Monetary and Financial sectors, Industry, Agriculture, Taxing Wealth, Infrastructure, Governance, Technology, Law, Global Governance, the Living Earth, Culture and Community—from the First Horizon of today’s world, to Second Horizon developments that show emergent possibilities, to the Third Horizon where such an Eco-Civilisation might unfold.

THE SOUL’S ABANDONMENT

In a previous blog post I ask: What is the ancient 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?

I ask whether what we are seeing in ASIO chief Mike Burgess 2026 Annual Threat Assessment that: “Social media is amplifying and accelerating grievance narratives, eroding trust in institutions, promoting discord and inflammatory rhetoric, exacerbating polarisation and creating a permissive environment for violence”, is a response to the sense of our souls’ abandonment by the language and sensibility of the techno-scientific managerialism of the all-encompassing nature of the modern world.

Our attention mined and manipulated by invisible algorithms. Our yearning for companionship and understanding caught in the crossfires of culture warfare—whether the battlefield is gender, sex attraction, ethnicity or religion—as we battle the sheer exhaustion of modern living.

The requirement that we battle utility service providers’ offerings to ensure we get the best deal. It is not brand loyalty that is rewarded, but the competitive bid to attract the new customer. So, we must endlessly play this game. Become new customers. To battle our children’s love affair with social media and all the dangers that lurk there in a world of AI manipulation, grooming, revenge porn, emotional manipulation, we must battle the tech lords who seek our children’s addiction.

In her new Quarterly Essay, The God we Made – The Threat and Promise of Artificial Intelligence, musician and writer Anna Goldsworthy ponders the theological implications of AI as a mirroring of our humanity.

As the reviewer, Niusha Shafiabady of the Australian Catholic University notes: “her most persuasive insight is that AI is not alien to us. It has learnt from the huge archive of human writings: the useful parts, but also the evasions, fantasies, cruelties and consolations.” 

Goldsworthy’s essay, shows through the experiences of her own children that AI is not arriving in some distant future. It is already changing how young people argue, learn, joke, imagine and worry.

Perhaps most importantly Goldsworthy draws attention to the nature of the creative and truly intellectual life. That our pleasure lies not in the finished product, but the process of creation, frequently arduous, challenging the very fibre of our being.

Speaking for herself as a musician she says a pianist does not only want the sound of the piano; she wants the struggle, the touch, the memory of practice, the physical relationship with the instrument.

I think of myself as a writer striving to weave a plethora of ideas together, as I seek to bear witness to the world around me, both its terrors and its beauty. The intellectual pleasure lies in the research down many pathways, the random meeting of new writers and the thoughts they provoke. I have no desire for AI to do this instead of me, and furnish me with its finished and polished set of paragraphs, from which I must edit the ‘slop’ and ‘hallucinations’.

It reminds me of conversations I have with my academic friend, Alexie, who struggles that most of his students merely want to focus on their exam results, their focus on job prospects, not the intellectual delight of the world that has grabbed his imagination and holds him in its grip.

THE WORLD OF SOUL FEELINGS

While Buddhism denies the existence of ‘atman’, the idea of the Higher Self as an entity, it embraces the idea of primordial inner wisdom. So many thousands of years ago, Prince Gautama of Nepal went on his journey to discover the nature of human suffering, including his own, even secluded in a world of princely pleasures. From his state of awakening, whereby he became known as Buddha, he advised us in his teachings on the Truth of Suffering, that suffering must be known.

That Suffering has many faces. The suffering of the body’s pains and illnesses. The suffering of the death of loves ones and ourselves. The anxieties in the face of unexpected change. The desire that things might be otherwise. The suffering of betrayal. The suffering of loneliness. The existential angst of a human life—from the smallest of dissatisfactions to the tragedy of psychosis in our human mind. For we humans are creatures of the mind, not just of the body. Beyond ‘enough’ in our material consumptions, our yearnings are of the mind and soul, the world of feelings.

All the great myths of human cultures speak to this terrain through their worlds of gods and demons, which were mapped by Joseph Campbell in his monumental comparative history of mythology revealed in books, podcasts and film. The gods and demons of the human psyche mapped by Freud and Jung and all who followed them.

Including that most mercurial of thinkers, the Nigerian philosopher-therapist, Bayo Akomolafe of the Academy of Therapy Wisdom who ponders this legacy in his ‘The Cracks in Therapolis’. A gathering at the edges of care, where the language of healing begins to falter… and something else starts to speak.

He notes: “The discipline of psychology drifted closest to my ambitious intellectual and spiritual pursuits. It wasn’t a perfect vehicle: I would have very much preferred my main preoccupations to be the larger theological questions about suffering and meaning and purpose and mystery, while mastering the skillsets necessary for a cognitive neuropsychologist.’

He explains that he began the journey in search of a conversation with his father’s ghost, with the irreverence of death and the shock an early loss can pose to the tender insides of a teenage son learning his way in the world. Only to find that in a world of diagnoses and prescriptive categorisation, with every good intention and an apparatus of citations, it changed who I was permitted to have the conversation with. It took the ghost of my father off my shoulder and set him down on an intake form.

It took the wintry hole and named it, so that it could be coded, so that it could be billed, so that it could be…you know, managed. It took the weather and called it a disorder of cognition, and then it offered me, with real tenderness, the tools to clear the sky.

THE DEEPER DIVE

What the Buddha discovered, and which the Ancient Ones have always known, is that while dreams of an Eco Civilisation might give us the form for a way out of the many tangible and cognitive forms of late capitalism’s structures of violence to our souls, it also requires a deeper dive into the territory of the soul, well beyond the ‘wounded child’ and ‘mindfulness apps’ of modern psychology.

Lent calls for Eco-Civilisation’s unfolding through its key principles of collaboration, solidarity, respect for the inherent dignity of others, and reverence for the intrinsic value of life.

But the soul yearns for a territory that does not reveal itself in the techno-scientific economics of the Third Horizon of Lent’s Eco Civilisation. This is a territory that is more elusive.

The territory of wisdom awareness that lies mysteriously within all of us. A territory always protected by its mythic guardians, who come in many forms—from both the egoic heroic narcissism of science’s promethean quest, but also the earnest good intentions of the prosaic social reformer. A protection wrought by the rules of secrecy and humility that resist all forms of commodification, intellectualisation and categorisation.

As the great Buddhist teacher Dilgo Khyentse Rinpoche, to whom I presented this koala bear back in 1990, advised the American Tibetan Buddhist scholar, Janet Gyatso, the ‘secret autobiographies’ of great Tibetan practitioners are written in the words of the inner realm of spiritual experience, the domain of the dakinis, the feminine principle of dynamic awareness.

He advised her that they are elusive, allusive, illusive, but not non-existent: secret but not unknowable—a way of knowing well beyond the dominant scientific materialism of Western culture (Apparitions of the Self: The Secret Autobiographies of a Tibetan Visionary, 1998).

It is this way of knowing for which the soul yearns.