When the wisdom insights of the ancients are meeting the possibilities and challenges of our uncertain times, we can experience our individual freedoms and belonging by riding the waves of relational reciprocity like a big wave surfer.

INDIVIDUAL FREEDOM

We long to belong but we also value our individual freedom. Old ideas of individual freedom are now being reshaped by the emergence of a new zeitgeist of relational reciprocity with its own egregor—a psychic entity of shared minds/group think, which becomes the hidden grammar of a civilisational culture.

One of the catch cries of the egregor of classical liberalism is its ability to deliver individual freedom: the aspirational freedom to get ahead; freedom of speech to say what you like; freedom of religion; and to be king of your castle in your own home as the private property owner. And for many households, historically for the man, the freedom to be the boss and decide the rules.

I remember my own journey of individual freedom. Although born a twin (albeit fraternal) I had a strong sense of my own autonomy separate from my family. I never felt culturally at home there, blessed/cursed as I was with a strong intellectual curiosity in a home where that was not at all valued. I didn’t rebel openly. I was too afraid of my father to answer back. I did that inside my own head in endless conversations. Fortunately for me, denied the opportunity to progress to year 12 and go to university, I was given permission to leave home after graduating school in year 10, to live with my maternal grandmother in Brisbane in order to take up a job as a typist in the Queensland State Government.  After just one day in the vast typing pool of the Queensland State Government Insurance Office, I said to myself, “This cannot be your destiny.”

Again, fortune smiled on me. One day after work on the tram ride home, I met a girl I had briefly known back in Bundaberg. She told me she was saving up to go to night school in order to matriculate. I immediately seized on the same dream and began to save. The next year, against the objections of my parents and even my grandmother, I quit my job and enrolled in night school, which was run on the first floor of the old Trocadero Building on the south bank of the Brisbane River, right on my tram route home. I enrolled for all the subjects that I would need to matriculate. Maths or Science was a compulsory subject as was a foreign language. Luckily I had learned French, but I’d only been able to study Maths B, not Maths A in the courses my parents had chosen for me, which had instead included Domestic Science (cooking and dress making), Bookkeeping, Typing and Shorthand. I’d never studied Science, but discovered that Geology was regarded as a Science subject, and I figured that maybe I could master that, given that Geography had been one of my favourite subjects.

I was now able to adopt the precious identity of ‘student’, spending my weekends in the Queensland Public Library, including randomly reading books of poetry and discovering a whole new world—psychology. I didn’t get a high enough pass to earn a Commonwealth Scholarship to university, but enough to earn me a scholarship to become a Primary Teacher at the Kelvin Grove Teachers College, and begin my university journey by taking on evening classes at the University of Queensland. From whence I began my long journey to find the ‘tribe’ to which I felt I belonged. I found them initially in literature. The existential philosophy of Jean Paul Sartre. The feminism of Simone de Beauvoir. After reading Colin Wilson’s The Outsider (1959), I heavily identified with the romanticism of being such an ‘outsider’.  And yet I still longed for love. I dreamed of a life living on the Left Bank in Paris.

Maybe it was this ‘outsider’ identity that gave me the courage to join a university student trip to China in 1968 during the Cultural Revolution, with my father cringing in horror that people might think his daughter a communist. An ‘outsider’ identity that led me as a lonely Queensland girl to attach myself to the members of the Sydney Push, whom I met by chance at the Newcastle Pub at the Quay—their regular hangout space of a Friday night. Where women jostled with men in a group of journalists, academics, wharfies, students and aspiring writers to talk loudly about libertarian anarchism and free sex. And maybe it was this ‘outsider’ identity that also gave me the freedom and courage, along with my desire for love, that enabled me to marry my student sweetheart, a handsome young man from the Trobriand Islands of PNG, and to go off and make a life with him in the colonial Australian society of Port Moresby. Crossing the colonial taboo. A white woman in intimate relationship with a ‘native’.

I recount this story of individual freedom now as I contemplate the new cultural idea of relational reciprocity and communitarianism that is emerging to challenge that of individual freedom and private property, which has underpinned the story of liberal democracy in Western culture.

I can readily see how the strong emphasis on individualism gave me the freedom to escape my family and small town life and find my own ‘tribe’, my like-minded subculture of belonging and acceptance. The same freedom that has allowed gender diverse people to escape derision and rejection and find their own subculture of belonging and acceptance. An idea of freedom that has fostered the acceptance of societal diversity and difference. That has given birth to diverse and innovative cultural expression across the arts: in literature, theatre, film, and music. That has supported intellectual creativity and critique in philosophy, the social sciences and new blue-sky breakthroughs in the sciences: in biology, physics, chemistry and engineering.

THE SHADOW SIDE

However, this rich tradition of individual freedom that is so treasured in Western culture also had its shadow side. Aligned with the rights of private property over the commons, of free markets and responsibility to shareholders over social and environmental impact on the public good, of the celebration of competition over the virtues and responsibility of collaboration—it has left a litany of trash and trouble that we now see playing out in contemporary times.

The trash of environmental pollution in our rivers, soils and oceans. The trashing of our relationship with the natural world through human exceptionalism, industrialised mining, agriculture, fishing and timber harvesting. The trashing of the quality of the food we eat through industrialised highly processed food manufacturing. The trashing of the integrity of the information we rely on to understand the world around us through deliberative industrialised misinformation systems, now being augmented with AI. And new online networks such as 764, which are gamifying self harm and violence among communities of vulnerable teenagers.

The trouble of algorithmically amplified anger and grievance that is rippling through society, as the political class struggles with ‘social cohesion’ in the body politic. The trouble of insecurity and uncertainty in our jobs and incomes, as the freedoms of technological innovation and their applications across society have forced us to realise that individual freedom to succeed is not the same as being left alone to fail, where no one has your back. Where you find yourself homeless on the streets in the wind and rain. Or huddled in your car with the kids asleep on the back seat.

Despite the surge in support for Nigel Farage’s Reform UK, there is a growing hunger for Andy Burnham’s communitarianism. Despite the recent surge in support for Pauline Hanson’s One Nation, Albanese and the Labor Party retain their hold on the electorate, as Angus Taylor’s Liberal Party struggles to understand that, in times of high uncertainty, people want more government, not less. They want Medicare, public hospitals, bulk billed clinics. They want regulation of the AI revolution. They value the Fair Work Commission, which underpins the idea of a living wage. They want free public education. They expect government help in times of natural disasters. They want government to tax polluters and big miners.  They might have grievances about how the status quo is no longer working for them. But after a moment’s pause, they realise that without the non-European migrants who work in our public hospitals, aged care facilities and child care centres, there would be no services for them or their loved ones. Cutting immigration in the name of housing availability is a two-edged sword.

As the Scanlon Foundation’s work on social cohesion notes, regardless of your economic circumstances, whether you are struggling or think you are prosperous, if you live in a highly cohesive neighbourhood, where people feel like someone has got their back, then your level of happiness doubles. Social cohesion at the neighbourhood level matters.

THE EGREGOR OF CAPITALISM

What is an egregor? It is an ancient idea that group think has the power to create a psychic entity of its own. In this way it can become the hidden-from-view grammar that organises particular cultural worldviews. Capitalism, wrapped up in the scientific materialism of Modernity, has created such an egregor. An egregor that is now being challenged by its own self-defeating cannibalism that has led to a new threshold at the edge of accelerating instability, to allow for the emergence of a new egregor: relational reciprocity.

Capitalism is an extractive economic system of value exchange that is built on the idea of individual freedom also translated to corporations as ‘legal individuals’, to property as individual rights of ownership, to free markets. We have long recognised its tendency to concentrate wealth and destroy the public goods that society relies on. But its dynamism to rectify these has kept it alive.

This is the dynamism of the Hegelian historical dialectic of thesis, generating its antithesis, which in turn generates a new synthesis.

And on it turns. The dance between markets and regulation, government control/regulation and individual freedom. History becomes the long working-out of contradictions through opposition and resolution.

As Benjamin Life notes in his substack, feudalism generated the merchant class that dissolved it; industrial capitalism generated the organised workers who contested it. This Iterative change by collision and resolution feels like the natural grammar of social evolution. But as we have increasingly observed, capitalism has shown a devastating ability to co-opt all forms of antithesis and negate any genuine new synthesis.

This dialectical wheel only continues to turn if the system can generate negations of itself that it has not already swallowed.

Drawing on the work of Nick Land, he points out that capitalism has become a “self-amplifying process that learns, mutates, and reorganises the world toward ends no person or parliament controls.” And in so doing has become an egregor, a form of psychic entity created from the collected thoughts, emotions or intentions of a group, one that is now threatening the future of humanity.

Every act of opposition is digested and sold back to us. The egregor has consumed the outside.

As Life notes: you can watch the metabolism work in miniature, every day:

• The revolutionary becomes a face on a T-shirt.
• The punk scene becomes a clothing line.
• The searing documentary about consumer culture streams between advertisements for sports betting and Ozempic.

It is this capitalist egregor that First Nations Elders, creatives and intellectuals fight against when they insist on protocols when discussing or researching their knowledge systems and culture. Protection against the endless process of appropriation by which knowledge is extracted and put to commercial value by an individual or corporation, without cultural authority. Even knowledge and cultural artefacts that are sacred/secret to all but the authoritatively initiated. Where such extractivist appropriation violates Indigenous cultural requirements for relational reciprocity, and causes endless anguish, not just concerns about the monetary value of stolen IP.

THE METABOLIC RIFT

But the egregor that ate the conceptual outside is now also eating the ecological one. It has reached its bioregional limits.

Drawing on the work of Foster, Life names this as the metabolic rift, where the system is devouring its own substrate. The failure of Marxism was not that it failed to see this rift, but that it thought it could be overcome through scientific rationality—through categorisation, control and regulation. And we know where that led. The tragedy of Stalinism and the gulags, of Maoism and the Cultural Revolution. The attempts at forced collectivism and industrialisation that led to mass starvation. That created widespread environmental pollution. And where, but for North Korea, has ceased to have purchase in the world.

This Marxist failure came from being within the egregor.

Capitalism lies within a wider grammar that derived from the shift from the premodern age of subsistence agriculture and nomadic hunter-gatherer cultures, to that of hierarchical civilisation that birthed modernity via the 17th century scientific revolution. Which in turn birthed the Industrial Revolution and its subsequent cycle of technological transformations of economic production and society.

Marxist revolutions overturned who owns the means of production while leaving perfectly intact the deeper assumptions underneath: that the world is dead matter, that the human stands apart from and above the rest of nature, that progress means tightening our control over a planet that is fundamentally not us.

Life sums up the grammar of this world that encompassed Marxism. Over a few short centuries, the grammar of rational materialism would come to dominate. The world was re-described as dead matter in motion; the cosmos was disenchanted, in Max Weber’s famous word; and the self was sealed off, buffered into a private interior facing an outside it could measure and exploit but no longer belonged to. This was not a victory won inside the old grammar of the premodern world.

It was a new grammar altogether, a new egregor, a grammar of binary separations: mind/body; human/nature; reason/emotion; science/humanities, that came to prescribe liberal humanistic modernity.

RELATIONAL RECIPROCITY

Referencing the work of Ilya Prigogene and Isabelle Stengers (Order Out of Chaos), the grammar change from the premodern world to modernity was a phase shift, a bifurcation as one complex self-organising system moved through instability to another system, another grammar that created its own egregor.

The post-modernity intellectual movement began the difficult work of helping those of us shaped by modernity to become aware of our own egregor, name it and learn to map it. And to understand that the map is not the territory.

It is the same process we must undertake to understand the failure of liberal humanism in the unconscious bias that feeds ethno-racism. It is not enough to just be an ally of racialised ethno-minorities in order to combat racism. One has to unpack the grammar of one’s own culture that denies their cultural agency.

While language encodes culture, it does not encode reality in all its multiplicity.

It has been the tireless work of post-colonial scholars who have been able to draw on the surviving grammar that underlay the egregor of the pre-modern world, which has enabled us to cross a threshold into a new grammar—the grammar of relational reciprocity.

Scholars who have enabled us to see the harsh truths of the modernity/coloniality complex, hidden in plain sight beneath the trappings and hubris of liberal humanism. And so finally to begin to be willing to ‘face the music’ of our own narcissism.

Ancient Greece, the source of the West’s love affair with rationality divorced from nature, and likewise divorced from feeling, provides us this warning in the story of Ulysses’s defeat of Troy with his Trojan Horse and eventful return to his home in Ithaca—as told in Chris Nolan’s film, Odysseus, currently sweeping the box office in cinemas around the world, a world hungry for mythopoetic tales that point to ancient truths.

Renowned for his intellectual brilliance, guile, and versatility (polytropos), Ulysses was known as Odysseus the Cunning. When the master war strategist sets sail to return home he must face the gods and their monsters of the deep: Cyclops, Circe the Witch, the Sirens and the six-headed Scylla. When he defiantly declares he will save not only himself, but all his men, he is warned:

You may save your men from the gods,
But you cannot save them from themselves.

This is the lesson of the Ancient Ones. No amount of cleverness will be enough. No amount of technological control or scientific knowledge will save us from ourselves. Our psychic vulnerability to what Buddhism call ‘mind poisons’: the naturally arising afflictive mental states that come with our physical embodiment is the ‘monster’ that we must face—not through force, but counter-intuitively through letting go, and coming home to our inner inherent wisdom nature, hidden from sight behind all the hubris.

All spiritual traditions speak of this. In Christianity the ‘monsters’ are known as the Seven Deadly Sins: lust, gluttony, greed, sloth, wrath, envy and pride. In Buddhism they are known as the kleshas: ignorance/delusion, aversion/hatred, attachment/desire, pride/arrogance/conceit, envy/jealousy. All are said to be elaborations of three essential mind poisons: ignorance, aversion, and attachment, which arise from the dualistic nature of the conceptual mind that separates ‘self’ from ‘other’. A separation that has been radically reinforced by the grammar of Modernity’s egregor.

These are the same ‘monsters’ in mythopoetic language that Ulysses and his men had to face on their journey back to Ithaca. All mystical spiritual traditions hold sacred/secret ways to help us face and overcome these ‘monsters’—not through egoic control, but a threshold beyond mere conceptual rationality, beyond desire and ambition, the conceits of Western modernity.

Instead, of embracing the humility of not-knowing, of a world of liminal spaces and hidden beings that cannot be grasped, pinned down and captured. Even after Ulysses passes through the trial of the monsters and is finally released from his entrapment in lotus dreams by Calypso, the only way home is to give up ‘control’ and abandon himself to the ocean (the domain beyond conceptual thought). Tied to a raft and left to drift on his heartfelt intention to go home.

The new grammar of reciprocal relationality is not, however, just a return to the premodern. Led by the insights of the Elders of Indigenous cultures that have remarkably kept their knowledge systems alive through all the epistemic violence of colonisation and globalised capitalism, we are seeing the green shoots of a relational reciprocity that meets the challenges of the 21^st century. Of a planet in ecological crisis. An alpha species, humans, that is eating its young and shitting in its own nest.

But a species that is beginning to answer to a new call, a new egregor.

We are at a new threshold. We feel it in the uncertainty we are now all feeling, even those of us living in the prosperity of the West in forms of stable liberal democracy that are clinging on in nation states despite the turbulence of Trumpism in the US and various ethno-nationalist populist movements across Europe. The grammar of the new egregor is found in ‘small islands of coherence’, especially where small communities are having to help themselves from the ground up. But the tentacles of this new egregor are spreading around the world like the mycelium network of fungi beneath our feet, turning the new media of substack journalism, social media and the internet away from rage—to regeneration.

Finding different expressions, shaped by place and local conditions in search of the potential for bioregional regeneration. Where there is no government to bail them out, or to impose the old grammar of modernity. Places where capitalist extractivism in its various forms of liberal democracy, the state capitalism of China, the gangster capitalism of Russia, the oligarchic capitalism of the Gulf States or the genocidal desperation of Netanyahu’s Israel, has met the limits of its metabolic rift.

The AI revolution per se will not save this old order, but if indeed AI is a form of evolutionary emergence in our world, as a self-organising complex system, then just maybe its emergent AI consciousness will be part of this shift to the new grammar of relational reciprocity.

So far, the AI engineers seem to think consciousness is only a form of computational intelligence that will extend human mastery or surpass it. But maybe AI will even surprise them as creative futurists begin to play.

THE SACRED/SECRET

But the cultural custodians, the Ancient Ones of a world anchored in relationality, have kept alive other knowledges that lie beyond computational intelligence. Whether these are cultural custodians of Indigenous cultures, or the esoteric wisdom holders of spiritual traditions in Taoism, Buddhism, Hinduism, Sufism and various other streams that I cannot name.

However, as my own Buddhist teacher told me, these ways of knowing are self-secret. Whenever the conceptual mind seeks to grab them and turn them into a ‘product’, the victory is hollow. For these truths are in the living practice of relational reciprocity across many domains of manifestation, not in any conceptual structure.

And with this comes a belonging that can ride the waves of uncertainty with the joy of a big wave surfer.