The Beautiful Lie

The image called Earthrise was taken from lunar orbit on Christmas Eve 1968. Earth’s swirling blue and white orb, resplendent in an ink-black sky, hovers above the barren, pock-marked surface of its Moon.

I first saw it as a boy of ten. Its message to me remains as fresh and powerful as ever. I think of it as a planetary selfie. With a technological hand guided by one of its species, Earth reached a quarter of a million miles out into space and photographed itself.

To the crusading exceptionalism of the ‘American Century’, this photograph signalled a marvellous new phase of human ascendency. In retrospect, its revolutionary change of perspective more accurately marked an ending. It could be Exhibit A at the inquest into Western civilisation’s eventual demise.

When he launched the moon mission, JFK envisioned American aspirations in the Cold War era as a ‘New Frontier’. Popular culture echoed the idea[1], recycling themes from European settlement of the ‘New World’. The suppurating wounds left by warfare, genocide and slavery remained largely unattended. But the stars had already realigned.

The flags the astronauts planted on the moon, symbols of national rivalry, were rendered obsolete by a family portrait which included every one of us. The men we conceived of as a new kind of conquering hero completed ordinary lives among us facing planetary exhaustion from human excess.

We have never found another habitable world, and no human foot has since stepped on another celestial body. But in those heady years, for affluent, educated humans, wherever they lived on Earth, the promises of modernity seemed tantalisingly close to fruition.

The Good Life

As NASA spacecraft swung towards the moon, a couple who later became dear friends of mine, let’s call them Harold and Meg, raised a family. In a big house in a leafy suburb, they sent their many children to private schools on a single public service income in the arts sector with occasional side projects. They had hobbies, frequent holidays, and no lack of material necessities.

Young people might find this hard to believe. But Harold’s family’s case was not unique. A decade later, as I entered the workforce, a modest home would’ve cost me two years’ salary.

Like today, hardship was prevalent in poorer communities, and luxuries in short supply, but many families I knew were single income, few of them highly educated, often in mundane jobs, and most could afford homes, cars and sometimes holiday houses, boats and caravans.

The Great Transformation

Harold’s life and mine unfolded in a world transformed.

If you’d been born into Australian settler society in 1850, odds are it would have been in a farming community without running water, electricity, or modern medicine, with little or no literacy or numeracy, word of mouth for communication and your feet for transport, an imported way of life largely unchanged in centuries.

If you’d lived until 1950 you would have seen the advent of railways, the telegraph, photography, psychology, the car, aviation, illuminated streets, the telephone, cinema, electricity, paved roads, sewerage, radio, reticulated water, refrigeration, TV, recorded music, vaccination, antiseptics, anaesthetics, antibiotics, universal suffrage, paid leave, the weekend, public health, education and transport, plastics, computers and the atom bomb. Life in developed countries had changed completely.

Curiously, life for Australians nearly a century later is not materially much different. The big change has been the internet, and its insinuation into everybody’s pocket. We buy and throw away a greater quantity and variety of stuff. But it’s basically the same stuff. Otherwise, most of us live very much as our grandparents did. In some ways, we are beginning to resemble 1850 more than 1950.

Modernity Unravelled

Recently I surveyed my contemporaries. With a few notable exceptions, those who are well off owe their thanks to family, real estate and government patronage in the form of jobs, tax concessions, subsidies, and contracts.

Many would say they worked hard, and in some cases that’s true, but it had surprisingly little to do with financial success. Some rode the boom with a steady job and inner-city real estate. Others used inheritance, superannuation or family trusts to accumulate tax-advantaged investments. And those who lacked these opportunities often live precariously now; disproportionately they are women.

Like wealthy squatters in 1850, the ‘winners’ I talk with see nothing particularly wrong with this. Along with the weather, and the indignities of aging, this disparity of outcomes is supposedly ‘just the way it is’. But in fact, even a gentle probe into the condition of either the weather or the elderly will uncover human mischief everywhere. And so it is with ‘the economy’.

Unlike the century of transformation, this one augurs much less of the general prosperity which legitimised capitalism. Instead, it promotes a lottery of birth reminiscent of feudalism. And if material comfort was once reward for industry, today, as in pre-industrial times, it accrues mostly from the appreciating value of stolen Aboriginal land.

Is it right that a nurse or childcare worker cannot adequately feed her children while investors in these sectors get richer sitting on their estates? Should young, highly qualified professionals happily hand their meagre earnings from the gig economy to inheritance landlords? They may be nice people, or maybe not; that’s beside the point.

This isn’t ‘just the way it is’. In Australia, we made it this way, abandoning many of the principles which had previously made ‘the Australian way of life’ so desired. But why?

The Lost Cause of Productivity

At the turn of the millennium, I joined the next technology revolution. My expertise was doing more with less, also known as productivity. This was the engine which had powered the century of transformation. And now we had computers and the internet to turbocharge it.

What I didn’t understand was that I was trying to solve an obsolete problem. We didn’t need to do more. Doing less would’ve been much better. We needed more carefree children, meaningful vocations and quality time with family and friends, not more disposable products and carbon pollution. But that wouldn’t make shareholders richer. And many firms I consulted to had lost interest anyway because another opportunity had emerged.

Artificial Intelligence, the Internet of Things, Big Data and robotics offered to free us from ignorance, scarcity and drudgery[2]. Instead, we got a plethora of low wage, insecure, unrewarding jobs and the portable dispenser of dopamine, diversions and misdirected antagonisms we call the ‘smart phone’.

What went wrong?

The Technology Cycle

Shortly after I left my last corporate job, I had a conversation with a former Chief of Staff for one of our state premiers. He observed that most countries are kleptocracies. However they appear, behind closed doors racketeers are pillaging the nation’s assets.

I said I was glad I don’t live in such a country. “What makes you think that?” he asked.

Like the industrial revolutions before it, the dawn of the digital age overwhelmingly favoured the rich and powerful. These weren’t ‘giant leap[s] for mankind’ from the outset. During the First Industrial Revolution American plantations ran on slave labour; the British mills they supplied used child labour; and all of it was legal and prolonged by obliging governments.

The railroad magnate Jay Gould, having lied, cheated and bribed his way to riches through America’s back rooms, claimed almost plausibly he could thwart reform by hiring half his victims to kill the other half.

It took a long and bitter struggle to curb these excesses and achieve the general prosperity which Harold and I enjoyed. But it was not to last.

The information revolution tipped the scales again and welcomed back the robber barons. Soon a combine harvester of enhanced financial instruments was chewing through the world’s economies, capturing yields from productivity and buying influence over decision-makers. Jobs left for sweat shops and profits for tax havens. It turned out the technologies which could strip costs from supply chains could also read the popular mind, discredit truth tellers, and inflame the anxieties which divert public policy and drive overconsumption.

Like their predecessors, the champions of the new gilded age needed a bulwark of supporters. Not all or even many of us; just an electorally influential minority, some garnering lucrative careers and investment returns, others wooed by complicit media[3]and disingenuous politicians with hungry campaign coffers[4].

Decades later, Australia’s food, housing, energy, resources, transport, construction, finance and entertainment sectors are dominated by an informal consortium of corporate rent-seekers[5]. Consultancy firms run government departments[6]; education faculties and science agencies are stacked with corporate insiders[7]; our watchdogs are worryingly toothless[8]; and the media act like a cheer squad[9].

There is little sign of the great reformist movements which democratised the century of transformation. But while the ‘winners’ feel reasonably secure in their overpriced homes, their children and grandchildren must now compete with money launderers and tax dodgers for theirs[10]. And what else will they trade for the health and age care now on the menu for circling predators?

How secure is anyone if their society gets eaten alive from inside?

Systemic Risk

Historian Joseph Tainter worked out that as a society develops at scale it solves problems by adding institutional layers[11]. The trouble is these functions are unproductive. If they become too burdensome for the productive base, the society will collapse.

This ‘band-aid’ method has another inherent vulnerability. According to Dave Snowden, who has made a career out of understanding it, there's a critical difference between situations which are complex and those which are complicated[12].

Systems in nature are typically complex; they exist in a state of constant flux and in response to stressors they flex and adapt. Many human organisational contexts are similarly unpredictable, especially at scale and in times of change. But our institutions are often purposed to the conditions of normalcy and stasis which modern humans prefer. These are properties of complicated systems, the kind we find in advanced machinery. Faced with complexity, this rigidity is counterproductive; under duress it demands reinforcement, and this draws yet more resources away from production. Instead of eliminating dysfunction, we add to the burden of treating its symptoms.

And if you want to amplify these vulnerabilities, subject them to distant, volatile, unaccountable forces, such as foreign governments, global markets, and multinational corporations, and divert local efforts to the preferences of swing voters, donors and lobbyists. This has been the trend in Australia since the information revolution.

Problems languish, public trust wanes and the productive base withers.

And there’s yet another risk.

The Energy Equation

The more a system groans under its own weight, the more energy is sucked into it. And that energy is becoming more costly.

Analysts like Nicole Foss have been warning for many years that neither renewables nor nuclear fission can achieve the energy return on investment (EROI) of early fossil fuels on which these systems were built[13]. But nor can fossil fuels anymore. Climate change or not, super cheap energy is over.

The alternative to managed degrowth is catastrophic degrowth, not a ‘Green New Deal’. That’s not the brainchild of scientists or energy experts, but of fund managers seeking untapped markets and politicians wanting talking points. Without epochal, structural, economic reform, it’s just an alternative brand of snake oil to former PM Morrison's ‘gas-fired recovery’.

For every ‘winner’ sitting on unearned wealth, there’s now an aspirant servicing crippling debt with a ‘bullshit job’. And this combined weight is crushing the productive economy. We may debase ourselves to fossil fuel companies, or build a lot of wind and solar farms, but neither will bring back the golden age.

GDP and employment, our beloved measures of success, tell us nothing about this. The nostalgic sunset of ‘relaxed and comfortable’ Australia obscures the fact that almost no one here is solving major problems anymore. Our standing in international comparisons is plummeting. We weren’t prepared for devastating bushfires, and subsequent incremental improvements are largely thanks to public generosity[14]. Faced with a pandemic, we squandered our natural advantages, and put additional strain on our underfunded health systems. On climate change mitigation we became a pariah state.

For decades, complicated applications of costly resources have been devoted to the two objectives which matter most to the orchestrators of this hijacked Monopoly game: making themselves richer and keeping their lackies in office.

And believe it or not, there’s still a way to make our situation worse.

The Decline of Empire

John Glubb, who studied the rise and fall of empires, identified developmental phases in a cycle covering on average ten generations[15]. Glubb believed that an empire declines when greed spawned by affluence undermines the values of service and sacrifice which built and sustained it.

Glubb’s British Empire was absorbed into the North Atlantic supersystem which formed one pole of the Cold War. As a new shift in geopolitical mass saw Europe enmeshed with Russian energy and China strengthening ties across the world, that system reasserted a declining hegemony from the Anglosphere. Brexit was one dramatic result; great power rivalry in Ukraine another; Aukus is a footnote, but one with consequences for Australia.

The portents of the terminal phase Glubb called the “Age of Decadence”[16] – cynicism, pessimism and frivolity – are now evident across the Anglosphere, but especially in the neoliberal bastions of the Murdoch dynasty – Australia, and the countries which host our largest foreign investors, the US and the UK.

The last thing we should be doing is fixing our destiny to failing states outside our region.

And now an even bigger wave towers above us all.

The Beautiful Lie

Change is neither possible nor impossible; it’s simply unavoidable; and in our time it will be far-reaching, at the scale of the century of transformation.

Australian public life, now mostly a show put on by an establishment under siege, is crammed with aging buzzwords such as ‘growth’, ‘jobs’ and ‘the economy’. In the corrupted parlance of the Age of Decadence, these are polemical whips for goading disenchanted serfs toward the last desperate goal of threatened regimes: the hoarding of loot.

This isn’t a goal which nature shares with us. And while we are at odds with nature we are effectively lobbying for our own extinction.

During the ‘goldilocks’ Holocene Epoch we allowed ourselves to be lured to a land apart where different rules apply; where nature is our warehouse and our playground, and our bodies, minds, and relationships are vehicles for self-fulfilment. And for a time, especially in places like Australia, it seemed that a kind of utopia might be within reach.

But this centring of the individual human organism and its predilections had dire consequences. It destabilised the planetary systems which had made Earth so liveable. And it undermined the collective agency which might otherwise have corrected our course. We stumbled into a fossil tarpit. Now we are trapped, like hapless dinosaurs in the path of an asteroid.

We were in thrall to an illusion. Earth isn’t a place where anyone lives happily ever after. Earth is a place where everyone dies. Nature doesn’t care a jot about an organism’s personal preferences. But it does reward species for ecosystem compatibility.

Wise people have always understood this. And cultures guided by wise people, left to their own devices, have tended to endure. Our obduracy now risks ending life for all of us at once, including our remnant wisdom cultures, and many other species with us.

Ice and permafrost are melting, weather events are magnifying and multiplying, and centres of settlement and agriculture are at grave risk.

We are witnessing a confluence of multiple cycles. Like a tsunami meeting a king tide during a tropical storm, elite capture of our politics, economies, science and technology, diminishing cheap energy, disintegration in the Anglosphere and the end of the Holocene are hitting us all at once. It's the kind of train wreck which terminated past civilisations.

The Australia we know won’t recover from this. Choosing better leaders and disinfecting our politics can make the demise of the old paradigm gentler but not prevent it. More band-aids won’t work. And the establishment will resist change. It’s like a patient who keeps smoking after amputation.

That patient isn’t going to survive. We need to make other arrangements. The longer we sit tight and hope for the best, the worse the consequences will be and eventually it will be too late. We aren’t helpless. The reason there are still people on Earth is that previous collapsing regimes weren’t the only game in town.

We have more choices than most of us realise. Business as usual isn’t one of them. But that’s a topic for another essay.

The Bigger Picture

On February 14, 1990, two decades after Earthrise, Earth took another selfie, this time using the Voyager 1 space probe as it left our solar system 6 billion kilometres from home. In this image, Earth occupies only a fraction of a pixel.

The photo came to be known as Pale Blue Dot, after a book of the same name by astronomer and author Carl Sagan, who invited us to reflect on its significance.

“Look again at that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar," every "supreme leader," every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there--on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.”

Bon Voyage

In the decade it had taken for a spacecraft to traverse our solar system, the world had been turned upside down again.

Just as the “arc of the moral universe”, as Dr King described it, appeared to be liberating oppressed men and women from captivity to a gendered, racialised hierarchy, a spreading infestation of small, black, insect-like microprocessors had unlocked new potential for dominion and exploitation. And the cosmic revelation of our humble interdependency was eclipsed by another fever dream of fast bucks.

Voyager 1 and its sibling Voyager 2 are travelling now in interstellar space. Their messages take almost a day to reach us at the speed of light. But they’ll soon run out of power. And no one really knows how much longer even the handful of scientists who care will be here to listen for them.

Even if we pull back from imminent self-destruction, the Voyagers will likely survive us[17], roaming in unfathomable solitude long after our planet is extinguished by our sun, slowly abraded by aeons of cosmic dust, still bearing golden LP records of the Sounds of Earth, the tireless emissaries of our better angels.

And if one of them should encounter sentient life, will it tell of the birth of humanity’s brightest epoch, or merely a brief flash of wonder which sent a message to the stars before its light was snuffed out?

Fortunately, that’s not the choice we each need to make. Our actual choices are much simpler. But those are the implications.

[1]Swanson, G. E. (2020) “Space, the final frontier”: Star Trek and the national space rhetoric of Eisenhower, Kennedy, and NASA, The Space Review, April 20.

[2]Brynjolfsson, E. and McAfee A. (2016) The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies, USA, W. W. Norton & Co.

[3]Evershed, N. (2020) Australia's newspaper ownership is among the most concentrated in the world, The Guardian, Nov 14.

[4]Edwards, L. (2018) The truth about political donations: there is so much we don’t know, The Conversation, Feb 2

[5]Parliament of Australia (2022) Report on the implications of common ownership and capital concentration in Australia, Mar 2022 (ISBN: 978-1-76092-366-2). Canberra. Commonwealth of Australia.

[6]Morton, R. (2021) How private management consultants took over the public service, The Saturday Paper, Oct 9-15

[7]Keane, S (2020) Undue Influence: oil and gas giants infiltrate Australia’s Bureau of Meteorology, MichaelWest.com, Dec 7.

[8] Kavame Eroglu, Zehra G. and Powell, K.E., Role and Effectiveness of ASIC Compared with the SEC: Shedding Light on Regulation and Enforcement in the United States and Australia (2020). 31 Journal of Banking and Finance Law and Practice 71 (2020).

[9]Parliament of Australia (2021) Media diversity in Australia, Dec 2021 (ISBN: 978-1-76093-312-8). Canberra. Commonwealth of Australia.

[10] Long, S. (2021) Going, Going, Gone: Australia’s property price frenzy, Four Corners, Nov 1.

[11] Tainter, J. A. (1988) The Collapse of Complex Societies, UK, Cambridge University Press.

[12]Snowden, D. (2020) Cynefin - Weaving Sense-Making into the Fabric of Our World, Singapore, Cognitive Edge Pte Ltd.

[13] Foss, N. (2017) The Automatic Earth Primer Guide 2017, The Automatic Earth, May 18.

[14]Yun, J. (2021) $51 million: Where Celeste Barber's bushfire money is going, yahoo!finance, Jan 18.

[15]Glubb, J. B. (1978) The Fate of Empires and Search for Survival, UK, William Blackwood and Sons, Ltd.

[16]Nicoletto, L (2020) John Glubb and Avoiding the Fate of Empires, Quillette, Sep 30.

[17]Bartels, M. (2021) Scientists' predictions for the long-term future of the Voyager Golden Records will blow your mind, Space.com, Feb 23.