First brought into operation in 1997 – and adopted European Union-wide in 2003 – the Dublin Regulation is a European law that determines which state within the EU (and other signatories) is responsible for assessing asylum seeker applications and how decisions are then accepted within the union. It enables Europe to work as a bloc on asylum, and if refugee status is rejected by one signatory country then no subsequent application can be made to another signatory country.

Upon withdrawing from the EU the United Kingdom also withdrew from the Dublin Regulation. Asylum seekers rejected on the continent can now load up into boats in France and try to make a claim across the English Channel. Which they have in great numbers. If Brexit was about “taking back control” – with the implication that this control was of borders – then it has done the very opposite.

After last week’s English council and Scottish and Welsh parliamentary elections, the main beneficiary of this lack of control is one of the men most responsible for the UK leaving the EU, Nigel Farage. With his Reform Party dramatically increasing their number of local councillors – and winning full control of 14 councils – as well as rising to become the second largest party in Wales, and equal second in Scotland.

The barking politics of outrage was always going to need a new thrill once it had caught the Brexit Bus, so the febrile atmosphere in the UK that Reform has capitalised on is no surprise. But what if Farage was actively seeking to create the very thing he has wanted people to be outraged about?

Farage is not alone in employing such a strategy. Either by design, or unwittingly, almost every major modern political movement seems to be working against their stated intentions. If we stop, take a breath and think a little, it is apparent that the motivations of politics are now geared towards creating problems, not solutions.

We can see this clearly in the creation of new ideological lenses. A doctrine like “anti-racism” has required racism to exist in order to justify its bureaucratic reach. The best way to animate racism is to encourage people to think about themselves primarily as a skin colour. To espouse a view of History that sees humanity as a zero sum competition between ethnic or racial groups. It was always going to lead us to where we are today – with a far more open and overt racism than we’ve had in decades.

From the immense personal power consolidation that proclaims to be “making America great”, to progressive NIMBYism that pretends to be concerned about housing affordability, everywhere you look modern political movements are engaged in a game of subterfuge. Claiming to be something that on closer inspection they are not.

Of course, politics has always been tricky. Politicians have long understood that emotionalism can shift more votes than dry rationalism. Yet previously emotional manipulation was often still grounded in a genuine commitment to a stated outcome. The manipulation was a means, but the cause was still the end result. This has now dissolved.

Our ideal political environment should operate on the assumption that political movements are trying to achieve specific outcomes. Groups organise around an issue, seek to advance that issue through a political party, hope that this party can win elections by persuading the public that this issue (among many) has merit, and then convert these ideas into policy.

But what if the incentives of power are now completely divorced from this process? Due to the need to maintain narrative power, positive outcomes now offer no political reward. Currently, there is a deep psychological lust within the West to be upset – and this is creating a strange new political terrain where solutions are not just unnecessary, they have become a threat to obtaining political power.

The psychology of our broad political cultures illustrates how this is being incentivised.

Progressive politics has always been driven by a desire for a struggle for a cause. At its best it has advocated for significant improvements to our societies and the advancement of opportunity for a broader range of groups within these societies. Yet as these improvements have become normalised the desire for struggle has remained. The instinct within progressive politics is that there’s always a more radical position, and this position is morally superior by default. There’s no recognition of, or contentment with, improvement.

However, as progressive politics has shifted to become a middle and upper class concern, new problems have needed to be manufactured – different from the financial betterment of the working classes – to maintain the struggle. Progressive politics can no longer legitimately claim to be fighting for material improvements, so it has instead turned to post-material ones like identity. It’s a way for middle and upper class people to claim disadvantage, to invent new struggles, and to seek power through narratives of victimhood.

This has created new institutional incentives to sustain grievance rather than resolve it. Resolutions to social problems would dissolve the sense of moral outrage and bureaucratic oversight from which progressive politics now draws its power. The result is a politics that depends on generating new categories of harm, and new classes of experts to staff bureaucracies and administrative bodies that encroach further into social life. These new bureaucracies just happen to advantage those well-educated people with credentials and articulation, and these people shift the focus of the state away from those with genuine material need.

Likewise, conservative politics has certain innate approaches that have been amplified and directed towards problem creating. Conservative parties have a time-tested tactic of ramping up people’s fears in order to position themselves as people’s security. Crime and national security have been the traditional levers – reliable, visceral, easy to pull.

However, modern conservative politics has gone further, expanding the menu of fear to include cultural displacement, demographic change, and a deep suspicion of fellow citizens. The threats now are not the foreign army or the criminal, but the political rival, the expert, the curriculum, the neighbour, and the rule of law. What was once simply a tactic to win elections is now the product itself – to create a permanent political atmosphere of intense anxiety and grievance, not to be resolved but to be sustained.

Yet the bigger shift in our political landscape has not just been the capturing of institutions or the intensification of bullshit, but a politics that has actively sought to create material problems, and especially material problems for those who can least afford them. Which returns us to Farage.

There is no doubt that the UK’s referendum to leave the European Union wouldn’t have occurred without Farage’s agitation. He was the Brexiteer-in-chief, using his persistent advocacy to manufacture internal division within the Conservative Party, which led to David Cameron’s catastrophic miscalculation to try to quell this division via a referendum.

The results of this have now become stark. Brexit has inflicted severe and measurable damage on the UK economy. By 2025, GDP was 6–8% lower than it would otherwise have been, investment had collapsed by up to 18%, and roughly one million jobs had disappeared nationwide. The average citizen was on average £2,000 worse off, trade with the UK’s largest partner is now bogged down in bureaucracy and delays – the very thing Brexit claimed it was fighting. While farming communities lost EU subsidies with no adequate replacement, and the fishing industry – one of Brexit’s most potent symbols – has found itself locked out of the very EU markets it depended on to sell its catch.

The cruelest irony is where this damage landed. The working-class communities of northern England – post-industrial towns like Burnley, Scunthorpe, Grimsby, and Hartlepool – voted overwhelmingly for Leave. But these towns, already stripped of manufacturing, mining, and steel, lost EU structural funds that had been designed for local regeneration, and the collapse of medical professionals moving from Europe to the UK has placed considerable stress on the NHS and social care services within ageing communities.

While proponents of Brexit will claim that what they were advocating for a restoration of sovereignty and a return of cultural dignity, there is no dignity in material decline. The hardship and emotional stress that has emerged has weakened the personal sovereignty of individuals and their ability to navigate the world comfortably. Alongside this, instead of having a pool of labour from culturally similar countries in the EU to draw upon, post-Brexit, businesses in the UK have subsequently sought labour from countries with less cultural affinity. Leading to an intensification of cultural anxiety and far greater social division in the country.

Yet it has been the withdrawal from the Dublin Regulation that has been Farage’s greatest plot. It has created the visual threat that Reform has used to escalate this cultural anxiety. It has also led to an administrative burden that has drained the British state. In 2018, prior to leaving the Dublin Regulation, boats carried just 300 asylum seekers across the English Channel. This exploded to 46,000 people in 2022 after officially leaving the EU and the Regulation, and over 200,000 in total since 2018. As a result, maritime enforcement costs have also increased, including £30 million spent on Royal Navy Channel patrols in 2022–23. Overall asylum-system spending has risen from roughly £600 million annually before the small-boat crossings surged to over £4 billion a year by 2024.

This created a sense of national crisis that Farage has been able to successfully exploit by ramping up people’s fears. Even though, through his advocacy to leave the EU, he is the man disproportionately responsible for creating the situation.

Brexit had produced the opposite of what it claimed it would. But this has been the point. Farage has been the architect of the very sense of national upheaval he is now building his political – and financial – power upon. He has played the game of subterfuge perfectly, and after last week’s elections he has further enhanced this power beyond just influencing events, he has made great strides towards capturing the state.

To confront and remedy this deceptive form of politics a new form of political and media literacy is required – one with a clear focus on outcomes rather than rhetoric, and one that stops taking movements at face value and starts asking who benefits from problems remaining unsolved, and who is actively invested in creating them. This is not an easy shift. In particular it requires the media to overcome their own gullibility and political cheerleading to explain political incentives, highlight real world impacts, and expose charlatans.

And it requires the rest of us to stop seeing snakes as saviours. To be clear-eyed about the intent of modern political movements, but without feeding the very cynicism on which they thrive. Because in a world of entrenched cynicism, it currently looks like the most nakedly cynical bastards are winning.

Human beings are inquisitive creatures by nature. This curiosity has cultivated an adventurous spirit, a desire to venture beyond our immediate surroundings, to observe what others are doing, and to absorb what might prove useful. This is the process of discovery and exchange – how ideas are born, fused together, and refined. It is through this endless cycle of encounter and adaptation that we have both created culture and expanded its possibilities.

The moment two groups of people have made contact throughout history, exchange begins, through language, food, religion, music, technology. This is not a modern phenomenon or a feature of our current instantaneous global reach; it is the history of humanity. At our core, we are relentless borrowers and enhancers of each other’s good ideas, and what we now take for granted as “traditional” is often the product of this process. Italian and Indian cuisine without tomatoes, or Thai food without chillies, would be almost unrecognisable, yet neither tomatoes nor chillies are native to those regions, having instead been woven into their cultures through this process of hybridisation.

Nothing is immune from this process. The language I am typing in now is classified as Germanic, but the majority of its vocabulary is derived from Romance languages. After absorbing French in the early centuries of the second millennium, English then set itself off around the world incorporating whatever it found useful. The great utility of the language – and the boundless pages of its thesaurus – is due its inherent disinterest in purity.

This cultural exchange does not dilute cultures, it is the mechanism by which cultures enhance themselves. Cultures that are frozen and suspicious of change tend to stagnate or fade. Living cultures, however, borrow, absorb and adapt from their neighbours, and allow their neighbours to do likewise. With each emerging richer for the transition. We may have created national borders for the sake of administrative efficiency, but it is the traffic across borders that is the real story of humanity.

Yet this natural and timeworn human process remains politically contentious. There is a great paradox at the heart of humanity: the same beings who are drawn instinctively towards discovery and exchange are equally capable of turning inward, retreating into the insular comfort of an in-group. The idea of cultural purity, of ancient tradition and custom, is emotionally powerful, offering people a sense of grounding and coherence – of an unbroken lineage passed down through generations.

This perspective has always been politically seductive, promising a world made simple, where there is one people, one story, and one uncontested sense of home. Its romance flourishes through nostalgia, imagining nations within a golden age before the contamination of outside influence. This is a past invariably more invented than remembered, yet it is a compelling political tool, and capable of great brutality when aroused to its extremes.

Yet suspicion of cultural exchange is not confined to jackboot nationalism. The romance of cultural purity has become a similarly powerful progressive political idea. It has been used to exceptionalise certain favoured groups, to place them outside of the common human story, and to declare that any act of cultural curiosity extended towards them is not an attempt at understanding and connection, but instead an act of “cultural appropriation”.

The accusation of cultural appropriation draws its force from postcolonial theory – the argument that cultural exchange has rarely been a transaction between equals. When a dominant culture borrows from a less powerful one, it does so on its own terms; extracting a concept or aesthetic while discarding the people, profiting from the utility of the idea while marginalising the source community. Culture, in this view, is not a commons to be freely shared but a form of property that should be guarded from theft.

Those who invoke the idea of cultural appropriation rely on two assumptions: that cultures are distinct and bounded, and that cultural elements belong exclusively to the group that originated them and cannot be hybridised. These are the exact same assumptions as ethnic nationalists, only filtered through the oppressor/oppressed binary to create a sense of sympathy for a less powerful group. This lens offers something seductive: the intoxicating thrill of pointing a finger, and a flattering self-image as the guardian of vulnerable cultures.

It was within this modern political environment of heightened cultural anxiety that Swedish songwriter Sarah Assbring – aka El Perro del Mar – boldly created her album KoKoro. The album’s premise was to continue her intimate and melancholic pop – inspired by lo-fi indie-pop, 60s girl groups, and soul – but to enhance it by constructing an album predominantly using non-Western instruments.

The intent was to create a borderless album, one that belonged to everywhere simultaneously. If pop music is the universal connector of humanity, then, Assbring believed, the creation of it should draw upon humanity’s vast array of musical styles and tools.

Of course, branching out from the traditional instruments used in Western pop is not new. George Harrison introduced the sitar into the Beatles’ music in the 1960s on Norwegian Wood. Not to be outdone, the Rolling Stones used the instrument to great effect on Paint It Black. This helped inspire the development of the electric sitar, a hybrid instrument that could be played more like a guitar. B.J Thomas, Steely Dan, and Led Zeppelin all embraced the instrument as providing a sound and feeling that the guitar couldn’t.

In the 1980s, Peter Gabriel sought to fuse what had become known as “world music” to the then-latest advances in electronic instruments to create a highly distinct pop sound. Then expanding this out of pop into Passion, his soundtrack to the film The Last Temptation of Christ. While Canada’s favourite punchline, The Tea Party, attempted to update Led Zeppelin for the 1990s with an array of different Middle Eastern and Indian instruments to augment their overwrought rock.

Yet what marks KoKoro as distinct is that it was made during an emerging period of intense cultural insularity, with its suspicion towards any kind of cross-cultural artistic expression. This suspicion masked itself through the mantra of “diversity” but in practice has advocated for the very opposite – an ethnic and cultural segregation that worked against humanity’s natural curiosity and desire for exchange. Within this climate, KoKoro was an act of courage; a refusal to let the demand for conformity restrain her creative imagination.

The starting point for Assbring was a visit with her son to a music museum that allows visitors to play instruments from around the world. This sowed the seeds for her to immerse herself in music from East and Southeast Asia, the Indian Subcontinent, the Middle East and East Africa. She then tracked down instruments that provided the sounds she liked – the Chinese guzheng, the Japanese shakuhachi flute, Arabic strings, the hammered dulcimer, and Indian tablas and Ethiopian kebero for rhythm.

Her aim was straightforward: to find a new way to write pop music, one with influences that felt genuinely fresh rather than familiar. Obviously, the structure of her songs, and her style of singing, is in the Western pop tradition, but the aim was to augment this with sounds that could ignite new feelings, and a broader sense of musical purpose.

This is how culture evolves. The artist who encounters an unfamiliar instrument is not simply adding colour to their palette, they are restructuring how they hear, how they feel, and ultimately how they think. The guzheng demands a different approach to melody than the guitar. While the shakuhachi’s historical relationship with Zen Buddhism carries with it a unique sense of calm and space. To utilise these instruments is to allow another culture’s way of feeling the world to pass through you.

Here Assbring is no different to the ancient traveller or trader before her. She was simply drawn to new ways to construct her songs out of the usefulness of discovering additional elements. It is both curiosity and necessity that are the parents of invention. At the time, the tools she already possessed had reached their limit, and so, like any practical explorer, she went looking for better ones.

This translated into the themes for the album’s song, with Assbring wanting to address the condition of the modern human being; the state of the world, its pressures and moral direction. The concept was to create an album with a universal voice, and this required building it from sounds that belonged to no single place.

Lyrically Breadandbutter is her most direct statement of universal solidarity, a push back against the tribalism and division that Assbring saw hardening around her. The song is an insistence on our shared humanity and the blunt realities of our common origins. While Clean Your Window is a confrontation with the insularity, narcissism and conformity of the modern social and political environment.

Our modern retreat into insularity has been a search for comfort, yet the outgrowth of this has been to actually make us less happy. Ging Ging interrogates this directly – its lyric “happiness, whatever it means, it’s not enough” captures the restlessness of a society that has material comfort but remains profoundly dissatisfied. Politics, and its social expressions, have become increasingly fixated on groups and grievances, stoking vulnerability and discontent among subcultural identities and emotionally insecure majorities alike. The result is a complaint-driven worldview that feeds anxiety rather than resolving it.

It is curiosity that offers us the path out of this mire. Curiosity builds our resilience. It opens us up to the world and helps us navigate it with confidence. To understand the world is not solely to locate opportunity within it, but it is also necessary to overcome the darker impulses within humanity that seek to divide and segregate.

What KoKoro exemplifies is a kind of apprenticeship to the world: a willingness to learn from the unfamiliar, and to allow that knowledge to build upon and ultimately transform one's work into something that could not have existed otherwise. Assbring did not raid these traditions for exotic decoration – she was doing what humans have always done, reaching across boundaries in a spirit of curiosity and exchange. This is the mechanism by which music, perhaps more than any other art form, has always evolved.

Each of our cultural traditions is actually a layering of influences accumulated over centuries. Cultures are processes, not possessions, they are not bounded and static, but ever-evolving. No culture's identity is diminished by this acknowledgement. It is simply an honest account of how human creativity has always moved – through contact, collaboration, and exchange.

I propose a moratorium on references to Francis Fukuyama’s The End of History until people have read the book and understood its content. Louise Perry wrote last week that Fukuyama’s thesis claims that we have reached an era where “conflict is impossible”. While former BBC Correspondent, Nick Bryant, has recently launched a Substack called History Never Ended. Barely a week goes by without someone using the book as a lazy analytical trope to contrast its ideas with the turbulent reality of our current period – “Fukuyama said history had ended, but look at everyone getting roused up!”

Fukuyama’s initial essay for The National Interest had contained a much overlooked question mark, while the subsequent expansion of his thesis was titled The End of History and the Last Man, with this additional analysis proving critical to understanding the argument in full.

His thesis began by arguing that the collapse of the Soviet Union did not merely mean a practical victory for the West of the Cold War, but something more philosophically ambitious – that liberal democracy offers the best possible framework for human flourishing. Both of the 20th Century’s ideological challenges to liberal democracy had failed to create a better or coherent alternative, one that could understand humanity’s natural pluralism and produce conditions that advanced the human condition. Fascism’s savage lusts and wanton violence could never provide stability – let alone moral dignity – while the totalitarian restrictions and economic illiteracy of communism failed to grasp humanity’s innate individual agency and desire to associate freely.

Drawing heavily on the work of Georg Hegel – albeit filtered through Hegel’s philosophical interpreter Alexandre Kojève – Fukuyama argued that History should be understood not as simply a sequence of events, but instead as a struggle between competing ideas about how societies should be organised. His thesis wasn’t that liberal democracy was perfect, but instead that there was no serious rival to it that could adequately produce more positive social outcomes.

Fukuyama did not argue that there would not continue to be challenges to liberal democracy. He highlights that liberalism’s universalism is difficult for some to accept. Ethnic nationalism, religious fundamentalism and socialism (amongst others) would create permanent agitations, but these were more reactionary emotions rather than serious structural alternatives. Fukuyama explained that the striving towards liberal democracy by states not possessing it would be messy, potentially incomplete, and often violent. Events would still happen, many of which would be highly consequential.

Yet it was the addition of the concept of “The Last Man” where Fukuyama grappled with what conditions could be like if liberal democracy had no serious competitor. Fukuyama borrowed the concept from Nietzsche as the archetype of a comfortable, self-satisfied modernity. Someone whose horizons have shrunk to simple personal satisfaction – what restaurants to eat at, what film to stream, or what tropical resort to holiday at.

Fukuyama pondered whether such a life was enough to satisfy human beings’ thymos – the part of the soul that desires not merely comfort but recognition, esteem, and the sense of having struggled for something. The concern was not that liberal democracy would be defeated by a credible rival alternative, but instead that it would be hollowed out from within, by producing a populace that was too uninterested, too risk-averse, and too cowardly to defend itself from the agitations of reactionary emotions.

Fukuyama viewed The Last Man with dread. He feared that without a serious ideological challenge, liberal democracy’s comfort and prosperity removes from our existence the great contests, sacrifices, and commitments that historically gave human life its purpose. Without the paths for our thymos to express itself, we would instead resort to discord to try and create a sense of struggle. Not because people are poor or oppressed, but because they are restless.

Which is where we find ourselves today. Far from being wrong about our current political agitations, Fukuyama predicted them. His analysis explicitly identifies the elements of humanity that lead us to struggle, and to struggle against peace and prosperity if that is all we are offered. Which makes the way his thesis is used in most contemporary commentary ironic at best, or deceitful at worst (or, more likely, just plain lazy).

In his 2018 book Identity, Fukuyama expands on how these agitations are now materialising in our current era. The book is framed by three elements of the human soul – alongside thymos’s desire for esteem, there is isothymia: the desire to be recognised as equal, which is central to democracy, and megalothymia: the need to be seen as superior – which threatens it.

What Identity argues is that the frictionless comfort of liberal democracy has not extinguished our megalothymia but has instead inflamed it. Deprived of the grand ideological contests that once gave struggle its meaning, the thymotic impulse has curdled into something smaller and angrier. It has powered the rise of authoritarian nationalism – where strongmen offer not policy but status through the intoxicating sense of belonging to a people whose superiority has been unjustly denied and must now be reclaimed.

It has also led to the fragmentation of identities into competing grievance groups, each asserting its own hierarchy of injury. This has created the rise of identity exceptionalism, where the “authentic inner self” has been elevated above all external obligations. Generating a demand for public validation, where institutions, norms, and fellow citizens bend themselves around the recognition of identities that are expressed as being beyond question or negotiation.

These expressions of megalothymia are often framed as opposites in public debates, but are instead symptoms of the same underlying disorder. The lack of grand ideological struggle has instead turned liberal democratic societies into internal battles for status and power. The Last Man, it turns out, doesn’t last for long.

However, while these reactionary agitations persist – and some have gained enormous power capturing governments and institutions – they are built on hollow foundations rather than establishing serious structural alternatives. The megalothymia that drives them is ultimately self-defeating, prone to the corruption, incoherence, and overreach that comes from movements built on resentment rather than any coherent vision of how complex societies should actually be governed.

As we have seen with the landslide defeat of Fidesz at the recent Hungarian election, there is a weakness to these attempts to create ideological competitors to liberal democracy. The system Viktor Orbán built promised greater pride and prosperity through politically captured institutions, but when material improvements failed to appear the broader attempt to morally restructure the society had nothing left to rest upon. It is likely that MAGA will suffer the same fate.

Governance that relies on the permanent identification of enemies is constitutionally incapable of the patient, unglamorous, and often anonymous work that functional societies actually depend upon. Liberal democracy’s unsatisfying procedures are not its weakness but its load-bearing walls.

Despite the inflamed megalothymia of our era, people still do understand that legal and institutional frameworks that provide neutral rules which apply to all citizens are preferable to those that are driven by identity, belief, or nefarious conmen. This becomes apparent when ideological challengers prove incapable of improving the practical aspects of daily life.

When given the opportunity to struggle for liberal democracy humans can draw upon extraordinary reserves of courage and effort, as we have seen in Ukraine. The complacency of liberal democracies is not replicated by those who have a clear understanding that the alternatives cannot provide anything remotely like its fruits.

Ukraine fights with valour because Russia has made the choice concrete: liberal democracy or corrupt brutality. The stakes may be high for Ukraine, but to consolidated liberal democracies, Russia is merely an irritant, not an ideological competitor – despite attempts to frame it as such by elements in the West hostile to liberalism.

While China possesses the scale and ambition to fill that role, it has so far failed to export a coherent ideological alternative. Its model of authoritarian capitalism is admired by opportunists and strongmen, but it offers no universal claim on human dignity or organising principle that could genuinely rival liberalism’s appeal. Beijing sells efficiency and order, but the interests of the party take precedence over any conception of the good life. Until a credible ideological competitor emerges, liberal democracies will continue to lack the external pressure that forces citizens to reckon with what they actually have.

This is the paradox that Fukuyama identified. When the struggle is existential like in Ukraine our thymos can activate with determination and conviction. Yet when liberal democracy is consolidated, the patient and unglamorous work of proceduralism doesn’t provide the soulcraft that humans crave. Liberalism’s defining commitments to tolerance and pluralism means it cannot offer the romantic moral community or civilisational purpose that authoritarian nationalism peddles, or the thrill of self-righteous grievance that postmodern progressive politics currently presents.

Here lies our eternal vulnerability as a complex emotional species.

It is the nature of public writing for commentators to want a neat binary to frame their analysis, but The End of History simply does not provide that. The misreading of Fukuyama is convenient to create a whipping boy to illustrate the world’s current ills. But his book is not triumphalist as it is often caricatured, and it doesn’t offer any satisfyingly definitive answers. It is a profoundly inquisitive work, and one that generates far more dilemmas to the human condition than solutions.

The Liberal Party in Australia are starting to panic. The success of One Nation at the South Australian state election – securing 22.9% of the vote, mostly at the expense of the Liberals – has been understood as an existential threat to the party. Yet the response has been predictable – to take One Nation’s hostility towards immigration and its culture anxiety and try to dress it up as semi-serious policy.

This has led to the party leader, Angus Taylor, to propose an “Australian Values Migration Plan”, which would prioritise shared values within the country’s immigration programme, not just skills or economic need. This would include stronger screening of migrants for alignment with Australian values, and tougher consequences (including removal) for those who don’t adhere to those values.

Taylor identified Australian values as “freedom, respect, fairness, and equality of opportunity,” including commitment to democracy, the rule of law, and civil liberties. He claimed that migrants from liberal democracies are “more likely to align with Australian values.” This idea argues that political background and institutional familiarity as indicators of compatibility with Australia’s civic framework.

Yet there is a recognisable flaw in this conception. People born in China who migrate to Australia are not coming from a liberal democracy, but they are significantly under-represented in crime statistics relative to their share of the population. While second generation Chinese-Australians are the most upwardly mobile and high-achieving group in the country. How people adjust to liberal democratic societies depends on a range of other factors, it’s not solely about their origin.

Alongside this, Taylor is not really outlining what “Australian values” are if these values are common to other liberal democracies. There’s nothing uniquely Australian in what he stipulated. This may be because it would be incredibly difficult to embody the national traits of a country you’ve never lived in before. But it’s also because the Liberal Party hasn’t really thought through this policy. If it did it would have a little more substance and practical measures. It’s a policy for show, not implementation.

So while I am deeply suspicious of the Liberal Party’s motives – being driven by political panic and cheap politicking, rather than genuine concern for Australia’s social cohesion – I am broadly sympathetic to the idea that there should be a common set of civic understandings and bonds that provide a social glue within a highly multicultural society. Also, to protect Australia’s immigration programme a shared sense of belonging is incredibly important.

Of course, social cohesion is not simply about migrants integrating into a new country, it is a two-way street where there needs to be a friendly and welcoming culture from the native population, with a strong spirit of neighbourliness and empathy for those adjusting to a new environment. There is also a recognition that there are plenty of people who are born in Australia (or New Zealand, as was Australia’s most prominent Neo-Nazi) who don’t conform to these civic values that Taylor identified.

Yet to focus on the issues Taylor has raised, how do you build a civic understanding and commitments within new migrants? Most children of migrants will pick up values and cultural traits at school as part of the everyday interaction with other kids, teachers and the curriculum. While the workplace can also offer a practical environment that can also impart values and cultural traits. Yet work is often fragmented now, with less face-to-face contact. Particularly for the professional classes.

Like most Western countries, over the past decades Australians have drifted away from the community organisations that previously formed the social backbone of the society. This has weakened the civic space that new migrants can connect themselves into (although Indian migration has revitalised Australia’s local cricket clubs).

So there may be the need for a more formal structure to impart this social knowledge.

Since 2022, I’ve been splitting my time between Australia and Sweden, and I’ve become aware of Sweden’s civic orientation classes (Samhällsorientering). Unfortunately, the visa I obtain is a temporary one, so it doesn’t afford me these classes, but I’m actually desperate to get in. Nothing could tickle my fancy more, so I’ve been reading about the programme instead. And I believe there could be a good model for Australia to take inspiration from.

I don’t think I am unique in being someone who would love such classes. There’s a progressive impulse to see such measures as suspicious – as some kind of brainwashing exercise to strip out people’s culture and make them into good little white people. But this is not the case. Most people want to know more about the country they’ve moved to. It is both rational and exciting for them to do so.

Samhällsorientering provides around 100 hours worth of classes for people in their first years of obtaining permanent residency. That is, importantly, before people become citizens.

What Samhällsorientering Teaches:

How the State Works

• Structure of government (parliament, government agencies, municipalities).

• How laws are made and enforced.

Democracy and Values

• Core principles like democracy, equality, and individual rights.

• Gender equality and anti-discrimination norms.

• Freedom of expression, religion, and association.

This part is quite explicit – Sweden isn’t neutral about values here; it’s trying to socialise newcomers into a liberal democratic framework.

Everyday Life in Sweden (Practical and Social Understanding)

• Accessing key services: how to use healthcare, education, childcare, and navigate housing.

• Labour market: the process of how jobs are applied for and obtained.

• Interacting with authorities: dealing with government agencies, understanding processes, and institutional trust.

• Family and legal context: basics of family law, parenting expectations, and children’s rights.

There’s a strong emphasis on the idea that rights and responsibilities go together.

Cultural Norms and Social Expectations

• Communication style: generally direct but non-confrontational, with an emphasis on personal space and respect.

• Workplace culture: informality, low hierarchy, collaboration, and punctuality.

• Gender equality: strong expectations around equal roles in work and parenting.

• Individual autonomy: independence in decision-making.

The overall aim is to reduce social friction by making implicit norms explicit. To help participants understand not just what to do, but why Swedish society functions the way it does.

For this, all these aspects of life in Sweden are also given some historical background. Focusing on the key developments that explain modern Sweden:

• The evolution of democracy and the welfare state.

• Industrialisation and social reform movements.

• Sweden’s shift toward gender equality and secularism.

• The development of modern institutions and public services.

How Samhällsorientering Is Delivered

• Usually in group sessions with discussion-based teaching – albeit guided by fixed content.

• Led by trained “civic communicators,” often with migrant backgrounds themselves.

• Encouraging questions and comparison with participants’ home countries.

The classes are designed to be delivered in the participant’s strongest language to ensure that the information is best comprehended. With the caveat that there are actually “civic communicators” who can speak this language.

None of this is meant to negate people’s culture – unless that culture conflicts severely with Swedish values (like female genital mutilation). Instead these classes are designed to give people the practical knowledge they need to thrive in Swedish society, including an awareness of local norms. Adjusting yourself to different environments is not the same as having your own culture stripped from you. Knowing what is and isn’t appropriate in different countries is actually a very handy life skill.

For Australia, there is an extra and incredibly important element to why civic orientation classes should be considered – our compulsory voting. The ethos behind compulsory voting is that each citizen should have a broad awareness of the country’s affairs, and to see themselves as responsible participants in these affairs.

Australia’s compulsory voting means that the onus is on the government – via the independent Australian Electoral Commission (and state commissions) – to make it as easy as possible to vote. But making it logistically easy to vote is only one element of this. Australia also has a complicated voting system, using preferential voting (ranked choice), and being one of only four countries to do so at a national level (Ireland, Malta and Papua New Guinea being the others). Australia’s Senate voting ballot is additionally complex, giving you two choices on how to cast a ballot (rank six parties, or rank every individual candidate – the latter clearly being the most fun).

Therefore making it easy to vote also requires giving the public the requisite knowledge to fill in a ballot correctly. Here there is a recognisable problem. The Australian Electoral Commission has just published a review of the large number of informal votes at the 2025 federal election – that is, people who didn’t fill out a ballot in a way that can be counted. Of the ten electorates with the highest number of informal votes eight have large percentages of people from migrant backgrounds.

It is perfectly legal to spoil your ballot to register discontent, but the report concluded that 73% of people attempted to vote correctly, but failed to place a number next to each candidate. Indicating a low knowledge of the correct procedure.

Most people will come to Australia from countries that do not have compulsory voting and therefore may have never voted before. Or may have come from countries without elections at all. People who have voted in their countries of origin before would probably just have had to tick a single box, rather than rank every candidate. Therefore, the government has a responsibility to provide people with the knowledge of how the system works so they can fulfil the civic duty that compulsory voting expects.

This, as well as broader civic knowledge, is incredibly important for migrants to be able to fully participate in Australian society. But civic orientation programmes also send an important signal to the native population that the country has an “operating system” which citizens plug themselves into. It can help cool the passions of those who are struggling with cultural anxiety.

I suspect the Australian government understands this all in theory, but the problem is political, rather than one of policy. Australian politicians lack the communication skills to actually explain complex ideas with clarity, and they are – or at least the Labor Party are – petrified of advancing policies that they believe could be misconstrued. Even with their current large majority and the fragmenting of Australian politics that will play to their advantage.

While the Liberal Party are especially terrible at selling such propositions because like all conservative parties they have an obsession with “toughness”, believing it to be a signal of “strong leadership” and “moral clarity”. When instead it just makes them look like pricks. Which is why they’ve just gone and made any discussion around civic values toxic to a large percentage of the population.

The key political lesson of our era is that everything is Nixon-in-China if you want to get something important done – that is, all policy solutions come from persuading your own “base” of the merits of a proposal that they would be instinctively opposed to. Which places the idea of building stronger civic commitments and bonds in the hands of the Labor Party – if they can withstand the inevitable bad faith hysterics from the Greens.

Liberalism is often mischaracterised as a philosophy of pure individual autonomy, but its survival depends on something more demanding: a citizenry that has actually internalised cooperative habits. A free society is not self-sustaining, it requires people who show up, who trust institutions, who feel a strong stake in the national project.

This is the paradox at the heart of much contemporary progressive politics. It speaks the language of community, solidarity, and mutual care, yet is instinctively suspicious of the very mechanisms – like civic orientation programmes, national service, shared public rituals – that might actually cultivate these behaviours. This leaves a political space open for the Liberal Party who think they can build community spirit with fists instead of flowers.

It’s a battle of two idiocies.

Australia has a genuine and pressing case for civic orientation: a highly multicultural society, a compulsory voting system that demands a high degree of literacy, and a weakened community infrastructure that once did the work of bond creating informally.

The policy architecture should not be complicated, as Australia has the ability to understand and adapt civic orientation models like Sweden’s. What is missing is a political party willing to make the argument outside of cheap political calculations. To promote the idea of strong civic bonds with sophistication, kindness and care. As the current government this opportunity belongs to Labor, although it seems unlikely they’ll have the courage to take it.

There are very few things in this world that excite me more than Canadian elections. The Sisyphean burden I carry through this life is to convince people that Canada is actually fascinating. No-one believes me, of course, because Canadians are very good at projecting an image to the world of being mundane and inconsequential. The New Republic once ran a campaign to find the most boring newspaper headline and the winner was “Worthwhile Canadian Initiative”.

However, this perspective is complete bullshit. Canada is a deeply complex and thoroughly weird society, and its domestic politics in particular is so relentlessly intriguing that were I confined to work on just one single issue for the rest of my life I would choose it. One could easily spend a decade or more thinking about the 1993 election alone.

Central to Canadian politics is the country’s permanent revolt against Duverger’s Law – that single member districts using a first-past-the-post voting system will naturally produce a two party system. Unlike their southern neighbours who live in total mental enslavement to Duverger, Canadians are a nation of cats with strong localised allegiances – and some often wacky ideas – which have historically led to a vast array of different political parties.

This has also created an environment where provincial politics bears no resemblance to federal politics, with unique parties that only run provincially, and parties that may have the same – or similar – names having no affiliation or organisational structure between them, either with a federal party or across provinces. The New Democratic Party (NDP) is the only party where their structure is like parties in Australia – with party branches federated under a national party organisation. Although the Alberta and Saskatchewan branches often do whatever they can to distance themselves from the federal leadership.

What makes Canadian politics even more fascinating is that – despite their reputation for being nice – the Canadian voter is one of the most ruthless bastards on the planet. Canada’s national sport is not ice hockey, it is murdering political parties. To Canadians, political parties serve a timebound purpose. When this time is up they are discarded like disposable nappies. Come October, this bloodlust looks set to reveal itself again in Quebec’s election, where after winning a massive majority of 90 seats out of 125 in the legislature in 2022, the Coalition Avenir Québec (CAQ) is currently projected to win precisely zero.1

The only party that has been able to survive this murderous streak has been the federal Liberal Party – being the sole political party that has maintained a continuous parliamentary presence since confederation in 1867. This is because the only bastards on the planet more ruthless than the Canadian voter is the Liberal Party. They are a party whose overwhelming priority is to win and who have developed into a Terminator-like machine that will mould itself to the times to make sure they win.

Understanding the Liberal Party’s current position requires recognising how the party adapts and learns from its mistakes. In the mid-2000s, emboldened by a decade of having no effective opposition, the party tried something radical. It reached down to Harvard University to ask Michael Ignatieff to run for political office – believing that someone with his intellectual weight could make a great prime minister. That Ignatieff hadn’t lived in Canada for 30 years wasn’t considered a significant problem.2

The merger of the Reform and Progressive Conservative parties in 2003 created a viable adversary to the Liberal Party, and under Stephen Harper the new Conservative Party of Canada managed to eke out a pair of short lived minority governments in 2006 and 2008. By this time Ignatieff had ascended to the leadership of the Liberal Party, yet what followed was an unmitigated disaster.

The rough and tumble of politics is a difficult game for intellectuals. Analytical brilliance can struggle against the speed, combativeness and essential emotional intelligence of retail politics. Igantieff was simply no match for Harper’s discipline and drive, and the warm public connection of the NDP’s Jack Layton. He led the party to its worst ever election result in 2011, the only time in Canadian history that the Liberal Party had not been either in government or the official opposition. Ignatieff’s subsequent book “Fire and Ashes” is a fascinating self-portrait of this political hubris.

The lesson the Liberal Party learned from this episode was stark. Not only that politics was no place for professors, but that the smartphone had completely reshaped the landscape of political communication – making it highly visual and performative. This required a striking transition of party leadership, from the Philosopher King to the Instagram King. In 2015, it catapulted them from third-party status to a majority government.

Despite steadily decreasing in popularity, Justin Trudeau managed to hold onto the prime ministership for a decade, albeit with subsequent minority governments. This was mostly due to the structural advantages the Liberal Party has, with the Conservative Party remaining a regional party masquerading as national party, and the NDP having an odd status in regularly being able to win provincial elections, but no-one trusts them to govern federally.

Yet by mid-late 2024, Trudeau had run out of likes, and the party were facing the murderous wrath of the Canadian voter – with polling suggesting that it was heading for a wipeout greater than 2011, potentially reducing it to fourth party status.

Despite Canadian voters’ fondness for knives, political parties in Canada are not as enthusiastic about stabbing prime ministers as their cousins in Australia. However, conditions had changed so dramatically that extraordinary measures were called for. Although rather than the shirts off partyroom brawls of Canberra, Trudeau was politely pushed into resigning.

The necessity of this change was not solely due to Trudeau’s decreasing follower count, but by the return to Donald Trump the White House – this time more emboldened and aggressive. The party needed to find someone who could be far more adept at handling the hostility of its neighbour, and also chart a new national course under dramatically altered international conditions.

In Mark Carney they found a new leader with an intimate understanding of the world’s economy from his previous positions as governors of both the Bank of Canada and Bank of England, and, what revealed itself later as a broader theory about geopolitics and how middle powers like Canada can navigate a more turbulent world.

While Trump has posed a significant threat to Canada, he was a lifeline to the Liberal Party. It would be fair to say alongside seeing Trump as creating a national crisis – ever the opportunists – the Liberal Party have also seen his bloviating and hostility as a golden path to consolidating their own power.

Although the Conservative Party has done well to convince much of populous Ontario that its interests are tied to the interests of the resource-extracting provinces to its west, the party now faces another major structural hurdle in that a significant portion of its supporters are more emotionally bound to Donald Trump than they are to Canada. Current Conservative leader, Pierre Poilievre, has struggled to find the tone and political positions to overcome this reality.

This has allowed the Liberal Party to own patriotism at a time when patriotism has become a national imperative. It worked to transform the party from certain defeat into another government. But the party hasn’t stopped there, this call to patriotism has also allowed the party to exert a new level of dominance of Canada’s political system through cunning and guile.

As long as the Bloc Québécois continues to win a large chunk of seats in the country’s second largest province, it is incredibly difficult to form a majority in the House of Commons. There have only been three majority governments this century (from nine elections). Despite the Liberal Party successfully framing the 2025 election as a national emergency that required a strong government, it still fell three seats short of a majority.

But in a Westminster parliamentary system seats belong to individuals, not parties, and this has presented the Liberals with an opportunity. Rather than seek a majority through calling an early election, the party has simply decided to poach MPs from other parties. Since November, five MPs have crossed the floor to become Liberal Party members – four from the Conservative Party and one from the NDP. Each of these defections have framed their actions as being part of a “mission” to help Canada during a period of national uncertainty. It is expected that more will follow.

However, until by-elections held on Monday the Liberal Party didn’t quite have its majority because three seats had become vacant since the election – and it also loses a seat to create a Speaker. Two Liberal MPs had resigned – Bill Blair to become High Commissioner to the United Kingdom, and Chrystia Freeland to become Special Representative for the Reconstruction of Ukraine and the Warden of the Rhodes Trust (the dispenser of Rhodes Scholarships).

These two seats – Scarborough Southwest and University-Rosedale, both in Ontario – are among the safest Liberal seats in the country, and so Monday’s by-elections were easy wins. This gave the Liberals their majority, but in order to exert further psychological dominance they were hoping for a sweep of all three.

The third seat – Terrebonne in Quebec – was more complex. This seat required a by-election because of an odd administrative error that had led to the annulment of the result from 2025 by the Supreme Court.

Initially at the 2025 election the seat was declared to be won by the Liberal candidate by a single vote from the Bloc Québécois candidate. Yet it was subsequently discovered that Elections Canada had accidentally printed the wrong postcode on the return envelope of a postal vote, and a woman who attempted to vote for the Bloc Québécois had her vote returned to her – and returned too late to resubmit. The Supreme Court therefore had no option but to annul the result.

Given that Terrebonne has been held by the Bloc Québécois since the party’s formation in 1993, a win for the Liberals would be seen as a strong endorsement of the government, and also important to try and shift some people away from separatist sentiment with October’s Quebec election on the horizon and the Parti Québécois currently leading in the polls. The Liberal candidate won by 714 votes.

In his book Big Tent Politics: The Liberal Party’s Long Mastery of Canada’s Public Life the political scientist Kenneth Carty argues that the party’s ideological flexibility, ability to adapt to change, and its “brokerage” style of politics has been the key to its success. The party has positioned itself as a mediator between groups, initially between Anglophones and Francophones, Protestants and Catholics, and working class and economic elites, and then subsequently as the party that could facilitate the integration of Canada’s multicultural communities.

The party may have failed with its brokerage in Alberta and Saskatchewan since the 1950s – where it is factio non grata – but with its bulwarks in Toronto and Montreal it is able to offset these losses. When the Canadian public does push the party into opposition it is doing so in order to ask the party to renew itself, and the party is adept and learning these lessons and adjusting itself accordingly.

There are few parties in the world that have so successfully made their own interests and the national interests to be perceived as one and the same. This makes the Liberal Party an object of intense hatred for those who have been left outside their big tent, but equally in times of national crisis the party are easily able to position themselves as the natural custodians of national unity and sovereignty. They have been able to project themselves a safe pair of hands, while simultaneously having the ruthless cunning to out-manoeuvre and outlast any other party that seeks to challenge them.

In 1588, with the Spanish Armada off the coast of England threatening to overthrow Queen Elizabeth I and restore the country to Catholic rule, the philosopher Thomas Hobbes was born. He later claimed that “fear and I were born as twins”, and the emotion would become the dominant theme of his work. This work would set a baseline problem for the fields of political science and international relations, defining the worst-case logic for how human beings organise themselves and interact with one another.

What guided Hobbes was a belief that human life is shaped by insecurity, suspicion, and the constant anticipation of violence – a condition he describes as a “war of all against all.” His vision was bleak, yet from it he was able to construct a philosophy that he believed could encourage coexistence. When the threat of war against all went apocalyptic with the invention of nuclear weapons, military strategists found in Hobbes a ready-made blueprint – codifying the idea that peace depends not on trust, but on the fear of mutual annihilation.

By the 1980s, as Cold War tensions between the United States and the Soviet Union became more pronounced, the fear of nuclear war radiated throughout the culture. Alongside the daily news, there were the eerie public safety films, anti-nuclear protest movements that filled city squares, and books and cinema that extrapolated this fear out into dire scenarios, all creating an ambient sense of unease.

While fear often works in film, it’s not usually a great theme for pop music. Pop’s primary charm often relies on emotionally appealing feelings like love or nostalgia. Alarm and discomfort don’t get toes tapping or provide emotional highs. Yet this cultural fear also found its way into pop. Frankie Goes To Hollywood’s Two Tribes, Depeche Mode’s Leave In Silence, and Ultravox’s Dancing With Tears In My Eyes all were written in response to nuclear anxiety. While Morrissey claimed, in his usual wry tone, that “If it’s not love, then it’s the bomb that will bring us together” – a very Hobbesian sentiment.

This nuclear dread ascended to the heights of the British charts through a pair of polka-dot clad Glaswegians called Strawberry Switchblade, with their single Since Yesterday. Packaged as an upbeat synth-pop song, lyrically the song is a quiet personal reckoning with impending destruction, as the dawning horror of understanding that the life you took for granted may be eviscerated. In this way, thoughts of yesterday become precious precisely because tomorrow has grown uncertain. Counterintuitively, it is dread that teaches us to appreciate the world, as with it comes the comprehension of what we may lose.

This is bleak, confronting stuff. Nuclear dread became a distinct fear as it was something you couldn’t run from or resolve personally. While other fears may be circumstantial, a nuclear war was omnipresent. Instead of being human scale, nuclear fear presented itself on a scale so disproportionate and all-inclusive that the usual instruments of survival were useless, or absurd. This was the fear of knowing that human annihilation was always technically possible, and always somewhere on someone’s desk.

Here there was a reliance on the responsibility of very few individuals operating under intense political pressure. People whose jobs were to act on orders which had unimaginable consequences. What made this more frightening was that fear doesn’t behave in a tidy manner under pressure. The theories of nuclear deterrence, the supposed restraints of Mutually Assured Destruction, didn’t seem strong enough.

The people tasked with monitoring, or orchestrating, the end of the world were subject to the full range of ordinary human weaknesses — fatigue, groupthink, confirmation bias, personal insecurities and the eagerness to please superiors. As well as a lack of vigilance from years of monitoring something that hasn’t happened. Stanislav Petrov, the Soviet officer who in 1983 correctly judged an incoming missile alert to be a false alarm, is celebrated as a hero, but he actually represents something more unsettling: a reminder that the entire architecture of nuclear weaponry rested on one man’s gut feeling working with systems that could create false information.

Strawberry Switchblade were working with the existential loneliness of such an environment. Where the future offers such devastation, that whatever existed yesterday was undeniably preferable. The invention of nuclear weapons, intensified by the ideological conflict of the Cold War, established more than the ability to destroy the world multiple times over; it informed us that Hobbes’s worst-case logic was our unavoidable permanent condition.

If Since Yesterday represented a political and globe fear, then Trees and Flowers was a far more personalised form of fear. Perhaps an even more devastating song, it maps the interior world of agoraphobia, where there is overwhelming reluctance to be in public spaces, driven by the sense that the world beyond familiar boundaries produces a crippling anxiety.

Stylistically, Trees and Flowers dispenses with the synths and is centred instead on guitar and piano. Yet it is the use of oboe that is its key feature. An instrument not often used in pop, there is a clear inspiration taken from Art Garfunkel’s Bright Eyes, but even one of pop’s saddest hits is outshone by the gorgeous, meandering and melancholic oboe melody on Trees and Flowers.

Such melancholy is the byproduct of agoraphobia’s fears. Sadness weaves its way through a life that can see normalcy outside but cannot participate. What others perceive as ordinary becomes an intense threat, one that compounds anxiety with any attempt to engage with the world as it is.

Agoraphobia is frequently misunderstood as a fear of public spaces, but more precisely it is a fear of the self within these spaces. It is an intense vulnerability of existing in a world without guarantees. A controlled and well-defined space like a home has known boundaries where there can be greater certainty of events. Beyond those boundaries certainty fades. Agoraphobia strips away the faith in our own actions that most of us carry unconsciously.

Søren Kierkegaard understood dread as the inevitable companion of freedom. Anxiety arises because our lives are not predetermined, because each action we take has a degree of uncertainty. For an agoraphobic, this is not an abstract philosophical proposition but a lived, physical reality. Their dread is not over something specific, but is the defining feature of existence.

As he recognised by claiming fear was his twin, Hobbes himself was not a detached analyst of the emotion, but a man who experienced it as a lifelong companion. His political philosophy was an elaborate intellectual attempt to master the personal feelings he could never escape. For Hobbes, to be human is to be perpetually aware of vulnerability, to live in the shadow of what might be done to us in the absence of structure and safety.

What agoraphobia and nuclear dread share, beneath their difference in scale, is the same confrontation with vulnerability. Hobbes understood that humans do not simply fear specific threats, what they fear is unreliability. What Since Yesterday and Trees and Flowers together reveal is this connection between the personal and geopolitical. That trust and confidence are our most valuable currencies, and yet also our most precarious.

Each Indian election is the largest logistical exercise in human history. Yet last week the Indian government began what could be an even more complex task – a census to find the true figures of what is now believed to be the world’s most populous country. This is the first census conducted since 2011, when 1.21 billion people were counted.

The process will take a year to complete, and requires three million census workers to fan out across cities, towns, and villages, as well as trekking into isolated settlements high up in the Himalayas, as well as deserts, forests and remote islands. When the results are finally tallied, they will have major social, economic and political consequences, shaping both the domestic and foreign policy decisions the government takes over the next decades.

Central to this is the government’s plan to use the census data to expand the Lok Sabha – the lower house of parliament – from its current 543 seats to 816. In 2023, a new parliament building was completed for this purpose. This expansion will involve an entire redrawing of electoral boundaries to reflect up-to-date figures on population size and distribution. This will create a dramatic reshaping of what the Indian parliament looks like, and what regional interests are able to exercise power.

This reconfiguration is necessary as the current regional distribution of seats has been frozen using figures from the 1971 census. This has produced large undemocratic discrepancies between India’s states. For example, Tamil Nadu currently has 39 seats in the house with an estimated population of 85 million people, while Bihar has 40 seats with an estimated population of 135 million.

Over the past half a century the wealthier southern states have had far slower population growth – with fertility rates now below the replacement level. While the massive northern states of Uttar Pradesh and Bihar have expanded significantly. Uttar Pradesh currently has 80 seats in the Lok Sabha – 32 more than the next most in Maharashtra – but with an estimated population of 250 million it is still vastly under-represented.

The expansion of the Indian parliament is a necessity not just for fair democratic representation, but for MPs to effectively do their jobs. Currently the Lok Sabha has 107 seats less than the United Kingdom’s House of Commons, despite the UK having the population of the state of Gujarat. An Indian MP represents, on average, a constituency of around 2.5 million people, with some seats being far larger. Getting an audience with your local MP would be rather difficult.

Yet expanding and reorganising the parliament is highly political. With the governing Bharatiya Janata Party’s (BJP) primary supporter base being in the populous Hindi-speaking northern states, there has been arguments that an expansion would favour the party. However, the seats the BJP lost at the last election – forcing the party to form a coalition government – were mostly across the Hindi Belt. So the reality might be more complex.

The greater implications will be felt in the balance of power between the south and north of the country. The five southern states of Tamil Nadu, Kerala, Telangana, Andhra Pradesh and Karnataka are likely to lose their weight in the federal parliament, and given their distinct economic structures this could significantly impact India’s foreign policy decisions.

Cities like Chennai, Bengaluru, and Hyderabad have built thriving export industries in automobiles, electronics, pharmaceuticals, and software — sectors that rely on open trade and deep connections with global supply chains. Southern representatives in Parliament have long been the loudest voices for trade liberalisation and foreign investment. Losing relative power in the Lok Sabha may weaken their effective advocacy at a particularly delicate moment, when India has been positioning itself as a home for global manufacturers looking to be less reliant on China.

The economic contrast with the north is stark. Many northern states remain heavily reliant on smallholder agriculture, where farmers are acutely exposed to global price competition. The politicians who represent them tend to favour agricultural protection, higher tariffs on food imports, and a cautious – if not hostile – approach to trade liberalisation. The sticking point for countries seeking trade agreements with India has always been agriculture, but greater northern weight in the parliament could make this even stickier.

A northward shift in parliamentary influence would also tilt government attention towards domestic welfare transfers and rural development rather than urban-led outward-facing economic statecraft. India’s ability to credibly present itself to the world as a reliable node in global supply chains and an emerging great power with significant technical capabilities depends in part on sustaining a southern-led policy approach.

This means that the data collected by the census is not simply an exercise in determining how many people India has and where they are located. It will guide how the country organises its politics, distributes its resources, and engages with the world. Census data that reconstitutes India’s parliament will provide its northern states with the democratic representation they rightfully deserve, but it will also create stronger interests that may complicate the foreign policy calculations of New Delhi, and those of the governments and investors seeking to do business with it.

Australians had smugly prided themselves on their aversion to populist politics. We thought we were immune to reactionary revolts taking place in America and Europe. We thought our system of compulsory and preferential voting provided us with a bulwark against those hostile to liberal democracy – forcing politics to be about sensible and rational approaches to public policy. Not grievance and ideological fervour.

I had also previously made the case that Australia was a conservative society – in the dispositional sense, not the political sense – and that this made the attraction to chaotic political movements weak. Nothing could be more suspicious to an Australian than someone who rocks the boat.

Yet this looks to be changing. Or, as I will elaborate later, how chaos is understood and responded to may be distinct from our rational assumptions. An election last month in the state of South Australia saw a surge in support for the One Nation party. Sending a shockwave through Australian politics.

For some background for non-Australian readers:

One Nation has been the political vehicle for Pauline Hanson. The party’s official name is actually Pauline Hanson’s One Nation. Hanson was first elected to the federal House of Representatives in 1996 in unique circumstances. She was selected to run in the seat of Oxley in Queensland by the Liberal Party, however after some disparaging comments she made about Indigenous Australians she was disendorsed by the party.

Yet, it was too late to remove this affiliation from the ballot paper. She won the seat, but the Liberal Party leader at the time, John Howard, did not allow her to sit with the party. She initially sat as an independent. In her maiden speech to parliament she claimed that the country was being “swamped by Asians”. Which set the tone for her initial time as an MP – race-baiting as a political platform.

In 1997 she formed One Nation and by the 1998 Queensland state election the party looked to have momentum. The party won 11 seats on 22.6% of the vote. Yet an early federal election later that year saw Hanson lose her seat, and then the party in Queensland began to crumble. By the time of the next election all 11 of them had left the party, choosing to sit as independents, form other parties, or not stand again.

This seemed to be the end of Hanson, and she soon faded from public view. But as is the case with politics in the modern world, things were about to get weird. She was invited by Channel 7 to be a contestant on “Dancing with the Stars” rehabilitating her in the public mind, and by 2016 she was back in the parliament, this time in the Senate. Since then the focus of her rage has been against Muslims, rather than Asians.

Given voting in the Senate in Australia is conducted by proportional representation – with each state being a single constituency – it is much easier to be elected to it than to the House of Representatives. Over the past decade the party has won several seats in the Senate with around 4% to 7% of the vote, depending on the state. But again, keeping these people inside the party has been difficult. Until recently, it has only been Malcolm Roberts – a man who has never heard a deranged conspiracy that he wasn’t enthusiastically convinced by – who has stuck by Hanson.

In final weeks of last year there was a noticeable shift in polling numbers towards One Nation. This led to Hanson pulling off a coup, convincing Barnaby Joyce, the former leader of the National Party – and former deputy prime minister – to defect to One Nation, giving the party a seat in the lower house. Even though Joyce himself is mad as a sack full of cut snakes, his defection gave the party greater credibility in the eyes of supporters of the National Party and the Liberal Party (these two parties exist in a permanent coalition with each other). Polling numbers continued to rise.

The first test of these numbers came at the South Australian state election last month. At the previous state election the party polled 2.6%, and given that the state is one of the most urbanised in the country, with over three quarters of the population living in the Adelaide metropolitan area, it was seen as not being fertile ground for the party.

Australian states function with the same Westminster-style parliamentary systems as the federal parliament, with each state divided into electorates by population. With an independent commission drawing these boundaries, not political parties like the United States. South Australia is the second smallest state by population, and so its House of Assembly has just 47 seats.

The polling numbers leading into the election turned out to be accurate, with the party able to gain 22.9% of the vote. However, due to this share of the vote lacking significant geographical concentration in many single member electorates this only translated to 4 seats. This meant it won one less seat than the Liberal Party, even though it secured 4% more overall votes state-wide.

Although seats are less important than votes here, as this lack of geographical concentration may be more of a problem when thinking about how to counter such political forces. A geographical concentration of votes would allow us to see the support for the party was within certain regions and demographics – and solutions could be devised to address this regional or demographic discontent. A more widespread vote means that discontent has permeated through multiple different regions and demographics. Discontent is in the water.

So what does this say about Australia and our current Age of Discontent throughout the West?

Maybe rather than us Australians being smug about our inability to be drawn in by such politics this is just a case of culture still coming to Australia by ship? We’re not superior after all, we’ve just taken a while to catch up.

What we are catching up to has been an overarching sense that the promise of liberal democracy – rising prosperity, political inclusion, and social stability – has felt hollow in the 21st century. Cynicism has intensified through seemingly purposeless wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, coupled with the Global Financial Crisis which exposed systemic inequalities, showing that markets and governments often protect elites while ordinary citizens bear the costs of economic shocks.

Broad trade liberalisation has created winners in urban, skilled sectors, but as manufacturing has been outsourced to countries like China, regional and outer suburban communities have lost sources of work which provided social structures, pride and dignity. This has been intensified by housing shortages that have burdened people with massive debt, while stagnant wages and inflation has compounded insecurity.

Governments, the media and other cultural institutions have foregrounded progressive identity politics that people see as elite predelictions, disconnected from both the economic priorities of the broader public, and how people have traditionally understood the world. Together all this has fuelled a deep distrust in the political establishment, creating dynamics that have eroded faith in liberal institutions, leaving citizens feeling abandoned by the very systems meant to protect their livelihoods and provide them with an investment and voice in a country’s affairs.

As I wrote in Nations Against States, there is also a strong disconnect between how the state understands how it secures the country and builds prosperity, and how people understand the nation as primarily a cultural entity. All of this creates fertile soil for parties like One Nation to harness grievance and offer simplistic and emotionally satisfying remedies to highly complex problems – with these remedies often based around blunt hatreds and aggressive finger pointing.

As we’ve seen from the rise of Donald Trump in the United States and other turbulent movements in Europe there is a political paradox in our current era – where people who claim to be “conservative” are attracted to a chaotic form of politics. Where people see pyromaniacs as firefighters.

This can seem irrational, but there may be some method to the madness.

Political movements like Trump, One Nation, Reform UK, Alternative für Deutschland and Rassemblement National can be understood as a form of “circuit-breaker” – a deliberate disruption of an existing political, institutional and constitutional order. These movements seek to overload the normal functioning of governance – entrenched political and cultural norms, bureaucratic routines, institutional guardrails. The logic is not just to try and govern differently, but to force a system-wide interruption that creates conditions for a new political and economic framework to emerge.

The economist Albert Hirschman described this as “Exit vs Voice”. In his model, citizens who are dissatisfied with a political system can either try to reform it (voice) or withdraw from participation (exit). There are many people throughout the West now who see the conventional channels for “voice” as futile. Instead they find themselves attracted to political actors who present themselves as the “exit” from the status quo – claiming they can break the system and create something new and better.

The current fracturing of Australian politics has produced a significant “voice” movement as well, via the Community Independents Project, which I wrote about in How To Reclaim Democracy. Interestingly, there is a by-election in the federal seat of Farrar on 9 May, and this looks to be setting up an Exit vs Voice contest between One Nation and the independent candidate – with the traditional large parties being sidelined.

The crisis of liberal democracy and the cognitive overload of the modern media environment has created fertile ground for the “exit” approach. In this context, circuit-breaker politics is seen by those attracted to it not as reckless, but as necessary, where only radical interruption can reset the system and produce meaningful outcomes for those who feel desperate within current conditions.

However, the circuit-breaker strategy carries grave risks. As we are seeing the United States. The consequences of tripping the existing system are unpredictable and highly volatile, and often this can create far worse conditions than those that the circuit-breaker sought to replace.

In the Australian context, the attraction of One Nation looks likely to simply create the conditions that will entrench Labor Party governments across the country. At the South Australian election Labor won 34 of the 47 seats due to One Nation’s surge weakening the Liberal Party. Such results will only aggravate grievance and conspiracy amongst those attracted to One Nation. The system may not overload, but if support holds at 20-25% it will instead create enough spikes that will damage the country’s political and social infrastructure.

Rummaging through a cupboard at his parents house one day David Longstreth came across a cassette case of the Black Flag album Damaged. As often happens with such long-forgotten items, the actual cassette wasn’t inside. But this got him thinking. What if he could recreate the album from memory? And, what if memory was not a facsimile, but an evolving state of reinterpretation? Where in trying to remember something, a whole new formation of it emerges.

Released in 1981, Damaged was one of the defining and most influential albums of American hardcore punk. An album through which much of the subsequent punk and underground scenes defined themselves by. It is a ferocious and claustrophobic record constructed out of a powerful sense of alienation, resentment and frustration. Shaping these emotions into raw, hurtling and abrasive short stabs of energy.

Although mostly written by guitarist Greg Ginn, it is Henry Rollins’s voice that embodies these sentiments and convincingly transmits Damaged into something that sounds like a man who genuinely believes the world has been rigged against him. Institutions and authority are not sources of order but suffocating restraints; the promise of life — respect, dignity, belonging — appears available to others but not to him. Aggrieved desperation is the overarching theme.

The album is one of the most viscerally masculine records ever made. The riffs are fast, jagged, and relentless, the vocals are intense. Everything is turned up to 11 as it externalises an inner chaos – kicking hard against all and sundry. If the frustration on Damaged has a target, that target is existence itself. It is music that wants to smash things, anything, simply for the sake of release.

Yet for all its thrashing, Damaged is also a record of some self-awareness. The band is not simply raging blindly — the album’s power comes from its tension between inarticulate fury and sharp social perception. There’s a wry element to its lyrics. A song like Six Pack is very funny, even as it illustrates self-destructive behaviour.

While we may consider ourselves to currently be in an era of heightened male grievance, Damaged reveals that these emotional wounds inside masculinity are not timebound. The permanence of male grievance is due to an instinct that masculinity must be constantly “proven”, through work, social life, competition, and peer recognition. The loss or denial of these markers are not merely personal disappointments, they are interpreted as a lack of male legitimacy. Grievance then hardens into personal identity, creating spiky, agitated personality traits.

The album is built around a belief that there are social expectations placed on young men that present a path with no viable route. Beneath the aggression of the songs lies a deep insecurity — a fear that the goalposts are always shifting, and that no matter what a man does cannot meet these social expectations.

The narrative that weaves its way through the album is that these expectations themselves are fraudulent. That the whole damn system is designed to produce failure. Anger, then, becomes the only available form of agency — although this is not expressed as a political anger with a coherent direction, but instead a primal howl.

On Rise Above, Longstreth fashions this howl into something more complex. Given his self-imposed concept of working solely from memory, his faulty recollection becomes an opportunity to expand the album’s musical palette. The fast, aggressive, riffs of the original are instead transformed into music more multifaceted and often ornate.

The walls of distortion are replaced by intricate, fingerpicked guitar lines that draw on West African musical traditions – patterns that are constructed to alter and evolve over the course of the song, rather than simply repeating. This is complimented by the use of strings that create dramatic shifts in mood which are highly distinct from the original, replacing its kneejerk feistiness with a broader range of emotions and demeanours.

This is the first of three major stylistic shifts. The second is Longstreth’s own voice – his warbling, lawless, delivery is extreme in ways that is unorthodox for even alternative music – capable of moving from a near-whisper to a throat-tearing scream within a single line. It’s a different form of intensity to that of Rollins, but it makes moments of fury within the songs more dynamic because they often surfaces from music that is otherwise carefully controlled.

It is this careful construction that presents the album’s third stylistic shift and its most striking feature – the complex vocal harmonies of Amber Coffman and Susanna Waiche. These female vocals function as the most radical act of recontextualisation on the record, not only as a counterforce to Longstreth’s voice and the masculine rage of Black Flag’s lyrics, but by introducing an element that is so undeniably gorgeous. The rapid hocketing – where a single melody is split between two voices – underneath the verses of Gimmie Gimmie Gimmie is far outside the scope of punk.1

These sophisticated vocal arrangements are also at odds with the attitude of Damaged. While the lyrics remain more or less the same (or as well as Longstreth can remember them), the musical context around them has been so thoroughly transformed that the meaning they elicit creates a distinct change in what the album expresses about masculinity itself.

It doesn’t mock the frustration at the heart of Damaged, but proposes that the same pain might be carried differently. If the album is to make an argument, it is that masculinity’s instinct to constantly “prove” itself doesn’t need to be a whirlwind of fists and kicks.

Rise Above instead creates a more varied emotional palette. One of highs and lows, of active contemplation as well as frustrated release. On Police Story the contrast between the sparse and tranquil orchestral arrangement, and the abrupt stabs of acoustic guitar and Longstreth’s unhinged vocal delivery, creates this more of a varied setting. The burning hatred of the cops is still there, but it’s more reflective than confrontational.

The overarching sentiment is that beautiful, melancholic, and often unsettling music may be far more impactful than a boot to the face. Whereas Damaged exhausts itself with its own aggression, Rise Above creates a slower form of discontent. It takes the same raw material and creates a broader, more introspective, expression of male frustration. Where Rollins externalises, Longstreth internalises.

This more pensive tone aligns with the nature of the album itself as one constructed by memory. Due to this approach, Longstreth wasn’t working simply with Damaged itself, but the sediment it had left behind – the feelings and impressions of listening to the album as a teenager and then reconstituting these as an adult, with an adult’s wiser cognitive capabilities.

To reconceptualise Damaged like this required Longstreth to filter the album through everything he’d become since he first engaged with it. What emerged is a portrait of two moments simultaneously – the original experience and the expanded reflection of this experience. A document that morphs both nostalgia and frustration into something more mature and prudent.

Due reflection being central to the project, it was apt for Longstreth to rename the album after the one song on Damaged that does exhibit some contemplative maturity – Society's arms of control – rise above, we're gonna rise above.

Beginning in mid-2025, protests under the banner of “March for Australia” erupted across several Australian cities, concerned about immigration and national identity. The demonstrations drew disaffected citizens, nationalist groups, and some overt hate-groups, united by the belief that Australia’s immigration policies were undermining the country’s collective identity. Participants sought to challenge what they saw as a political consensus favouring high rates of immigration and to defend the shared bonds they believed sustained a common national identity.

In their rhetoric the movement presented itself as standing up for Australian sovereignty and cultural continuity. They seized upon concerns about the cost of housing and stagnant wages as a way of framing their grievances as being about more than just cultural anxiety. Yet central to the movement was a belief in defending a particular idea of national identity. The prominent use of the Australian flag – with its lingering Union Jack – was designed to signal a national story rooted in the country’s Anglo-Celtic heritage and civic manners.

The use of the word “for” in the rallies’ branding highlighted a belief that this conception of the nation was under threat and required extraordinary action in order to save. What this movement was seeking to create was an environment where Australia’s population numbers and demographics, as well as its cultural direction, could be debated openly rather than treated as settled policy.

Across much of the Western world, similar anxieties have intensified. Demographic change has unsettled traditional understandings of national identity, leading to an increased cultural threat perception — a sense that familiar social norms, languages and symbols are shifting and what is emerging in their place is something new and less comfortable. In an age of rapid information flows and algorithmic amplification of negativity and fear, these changes can feel existential. The result has been a politics of heightened sensitivity, where social unease can be harnessed and inflamed by political entrepreneurs.

There is a hungry impulse within progressive politics to point fingers and label those involved in such demonstrations as “racists”. This is undoubtedly true for some, but it is also an oversimplification of the psychologies driving such public displays. Scratch the surface of these motivations and you rarely find ideology first. Instead you often find a deep unease with the cognitive overload of the modern world, and a desire to find emotional grounding in the familiarity and the believed serenity of the past.

Humans developed a strong sense of social identity because, for most of our evolutionary history, survival depended on belonging to cooperative groups. Living in small bands, shared identity fostered trust, coordination, and mutual obligation — qualities that made hunting, defending territory, and raising children more successful than acting alone. In a world where people rarely moved far from their direct kin and where political institutions were weak or absent, individuals instinctively sorted the world into familiar categories: friend and stranger, ally and threat.

This psychological inheritance helps explain the pull of nationalism, which scales these instincts up to the level of the modern nation-state. It also explains why, in a highly multicultural society like Australia, many people can feel unsettled by visible social change even when the country remains objectively safe and stable. The threat is not material — it is psychological.

The human brain also prefers tidy maps of the world. It is why we instinctively shift politics into binaries, even though political reality is a far more complex web of intersecting ideas and interests. There is a need for cognitive closure — the desire for firm answers and clear boundaries. Ambiguity is tiring. Cultural difference introduces ambiguity everywhere: in language, behaviour, aesthetics, social expectations, even humour. For some people the response is curiosity; for others it leads to a narrowing of the boundaries of belonging. Stereotypes, after all, are simply crude tools for simplifying complexity.

This sits alongside the permanent cognitive impairment of zero-sum thinking. Here there is a tendency to see the world as a fixed pie, where gains for one group must come at the expense of another. Applied to demographic change, this mindset can turn immigration into a perceived contest for status, resources and cultural space. What might otherwise be understood as social and opportunity expansion is instead experienced as loss — the sense that the arrival and advancement of newcomers diminishes the standing of those already there.

These psychological tendencies converge with the strong premise within cultural nationalism about what holds a nation together. Instead of prosperity, institutions, or opportunity, it places identity at the centre. Here there is a belief that the nation is not simply a political arrangement, but a historic community — bound by shared language, customs, symbols, and inherited memory. Its continuity is therefore seen as fragile. If shared identity is the glue of social trust and belonging, then rapid demographic or social change can appear to be a dilution of this glue. It can feel chaotic and confronting.

From this perspective, the priority becomes preservation. There’s a belief that immigration policy should be dictated by the ability to absorb people into the dominant culture, where the maintenance of cultural norms and civic habits is essential. The underlying instinct is conservative in the literal sense of the word — an attempt to conserve an inherited cultural ecosystem.

Due to this there is an importance placed on narrative control. There’s a view of national stories — the shared myths and historical interpretations through which a country understands itself — as a form of social infrastructure. When those narratives are fragmented or contested, there is concern that the psychological scaffolding of the nation is threatened. Debates over school curricula, public monuments, language use (especially land acknowledgements), and national holidays therefore take on outsized importance. They are seen as disputes over the nation’s operating system.

There is a strong emphasis on the emotional dimension of belonging. The nation is seen as being sustained by a sense of familiarity and mutual recognition, something that cannot be engineered solely through institutions, and definitely not through markets. There is a slower rhythm to the nation that builds trust and understanding. Growth is far less important than continuity; ensuring that there are cultural foundations that each citizen can feel emotionally comfortable with even as change – economic or technological – inevitably occurs.

All these priorities are highly distinct from those of the state.

The central instinct of the state is to maximise the capabilities of the country it governs — to expand the resources through which it can generate prosperity, defend itself, and project influence to shape the global environment. National power rests on material capacity and human capital: economic productivity, technological innovation, military capability and institutional vitality. What the state seeks is scale — a larger labour force, a wider tax base, greater entrepreneurial energy and the capacity to sustain research, industry and security.

While the productive capacities of individuals matter, power in the international system ultimately accumulates in the aggregate. The simplest way to enlarge those capabilities is through people: a larger, more skilled population that deepens the economic base and broadens the foundations of national power. Creating the ability to navigate an increasingly competitive world with independence and confidence.

Due to these calculations, the Australian state’s current anxieties are vastly different to those who claimed to be marching in Australia’s defence. A continent-size landmass with a population of just 27 million people, much of its northern approaches are underpopulated and underdeveloped. It has a rising new authoritarian superpower in its region, as well as other new emerging great powers. Its security remains heavily invested in its partnership with the United States – a country that is now chaotic, unreliable and descending into the madness of authoritarianism.

The Australian Defence Force is thousands of recruits short of its requirements – with these requirements expanding by the day. The country’s diplomatic network is significantly under-resourced, while – Bluey aside – its cultural reach is negligible. Although wealthy and well educated, the country’s economic structure is unusually narrow. Much of its prosperity is concentrated in natural resources, finance and real estate rather than a diverse set of high-complexity industries.

It is here that the Australian state may see its most pressing concern. Its export earnings and public revenues are exposed to global commodity cycles and property market fluctuations, while also highly dependent on an authoritarian adversary in China. Innovation and high-value manufacturing remain underdeveloped, limiting long-term resilience, while its small internal market constrains economies of scale in sectors that require broad domestic demand. Even with trade and investment from abroad, relying on just a few key industries with a small population makes it hard for the economy to grow and stay vibrant.

On top of this lies what is now one of the world’s most pressing challenges — low birth rates. Although Australia’s fertility rate is not as severe as in some other wealthy countries, at 1.42 births per woman it remains well below replacement level. This is driving a rising dependency ratio, with fewer young workers entering the labour force relative to retirees, placing strain on public finances, healthcare, and pensions. At the same time, wealth is increasingly concentrated among older cohorts, while younger Australians face stagnant wages, high housing costs and tax burdens that limit the economy’s capacity for growth and innovation.

In this context Australia’s migration program becomes less a social choice than a structural necessity. The country’s governing capacity, economic structure, defence capabilities and global influence are all constrained by scale. Attracting people — particularly skilled migrants — is one of the few levers available to expand those capabilities. From the perspective of the state, opposition to immigration looks like an advocacy for weakness, vulnerability and decline.

While Australia has its own unique circumstances, broadly speaking this is the position in which most developed countries now find themselves. As birth rates decline, labour is becoming a highly contested resource in the global economy. Countries are increasingly concerned with scarcity — of engineers, nurses, scientists, builders, and younger workers more generally. Governments are now viewing immigration as a strategic tool: essential for maintaining tax bases and essential services, while keeping innovation systems supplied with talent.

This is creating a new form of geopolitical competition, one played out through visas, university pipelines, and recruitment policies. Countries are refining their migration systems to attract globally mobile talent — offering faster residency, flexible work permits, and pathways to citizenship for those who can contribute to the knowledge economy. The logic behind this competition is simple: talent, like capital, flows towards places that offer opportunity, stability, and long-term security. In a world of ageing societies, the countries that thrive will be those that recognise human capital not just as labour, but as one of the defining strategic assets of the 21st century.

However, for those who primarily see the country as a cultural entity this logic is deeply unsettling. The calculus of capability maximisation sits uneasily alongside the emotional impulses of nationalism. Where the state calculates economic vitality and strategic power, nationalism prioritises cultural continuity and social familiarity. The result is a growing tension within many democracies — a tension between the nation and the state.

Although nations like to see themselves as age-old and enduring, nationalism is closely tied to modernity. In Nations and Nationalism, Ernest Gellner argued that the nation is not an ancient force arising naturally from culture, but rather a construct produced by the needs of industrial society and the modern state. This challenges the romantic notion that nations predate politics; in reality, the process often runs the other way: states, elites, and political movements cultivate national identity to embed authority and stabilise populations. Schools, bureaucracies, media, and political parties all play a role in shaping a cohesive “people,” while rituals, symbols, and selective historical narratives provide a sense of cultural continuity.

The psychological impact of this is powerful: people feel anchored to a shared past, even when that past has been selectively constructed. This is not necessarily negative. Gellner saw nationalism as inseparable from the modern era of mass political participation, part of the shift from dynasties and empires to modern nation-states. Nationalism arose at a time when governments needed citizens rather than subjects, when an expanded number of individuals could be expected to have a voice in public affairs, but those voices required an emotional language through which large societies could perceive themselves as a unified collective.

This aligns closely with Benedict Anderson’s analysis. In Imagined Communities, he begins with a deceptively simple claim: nations are imagined. Not imaginary, and not fabricated from nothing, but imagined in the sense that even citizens of the world’s smallest countries will never meet most of their fellow citizens, yet they still see themselves as part of the same collective story. What binds them is not daily interaction, but a shared mental image, a sense of “we.” Nationalism, in this sense, is less a political doctrine than a way of organising the social imagination.

Anderson demonstrated how this imagination became possible through the advancement of mass printing in vernacular languages in the early modern period. Newspapers, pamphlets and novels did more than just distribute information; they synchronised experience. When large numbers of people are reading the morning newspaper simultaneously they are participating in the same narrative of events. Over time this produced a shared temporal awareness – a sense of the nation moving through history together. This shaped the collective consciousness that imagined communities required.

We have now lost this synchronised experience. The fragmentation of media has dissolved this shared information environment into countless personalised streams. What remains is not a single broad narrative, but millions of parallel timelines – some may overlap, but without significant alignment. It is now quite easy to physically live inside one country, but mentally live within another.

Yet the yearning for a form of shared commitment remains. The nation’s positive power is in the human desire for connection and trust – the quiet assurance that citizens share not only institutions and laws, but a common understanding of the world they inhabit together. The nation’s negative power is when people believe that this connection and trust can only come through narrow and superficial markers like skin colour.

Across many Western societies, the common bonds that once anchored national life are showing signs of severe strain. A shared civic identity — built on broadly accepted institutions, narratives, and norms — is being increasingly pulled apart by rival ways of organising belonging. Progressive identity politics is fragmenting national stories into a mosaic of group experiences, elevating difference as the primary lens through which justice and representation are understood. In doing so it is challenging liberal universalist ideals that aim to treat citizens as fundamentally equal participants in a shared civic order.

Yet this has a mirror reaction in the form of majoritarian supremacy, which insists that the cultural identity of the historic majority must remain dominant and shielded from change. Although they present themselves as opposites, they are a dual assault on civic nationalism: one by dissolving the idea of a shared national collective, and the other by narrowing it to be an exclusive club not available to all citizens. The result is a politics where belonging is contested rather than assumed, and where the quiet habits of solidarity that sustain democratic life become harder to maintain.

This contest over the nation and its relationship with the state is creating a new revolutionary period in human affairs. One that we can clearly see in the United States through the presidency of Donald Trump. While Trump himself is little more than a self-serving caudillo, his ascent to the White House can be understood through this tension between the nation and the state. He has been able to harness an intense wave of distrust and discontent with the modern state, and created a profoundly destabilising movement intent on overthrowing the country’s liberal democracy in order to prioritise cultural identity.

Other movements throughout the West offer similar promises. From Brexit and Reform UK, to Rassemblement National, Alternative für Deutschland, and now the polling rise of One Nation in Australia, there is an emotionally powerful belief that liberal democracy as an operating system is no longer serving the interests of the imagined community. The state, therefore, has to be captured and realigned.

In The Age of Revolution, Eric Hobsbawm describes the period between 1789 and 1848 as being shaped by the twin forces of political and industrial upheaval. The French Revolution and the revolutionary movements that followed were driven by deep social and economic changes, including the rise of the bourgeoisie, the spread of Enlightenment ideas, and growing demands for political representation.

These upheavals reflected broader shifts within society, as traditional hierarchies and feudal structures came under pressure from emerging capitalist economies and new social classes. Industrialisation intensified these pressures, with rapid technological change, urbanisation, and expanding markets disrupting established patterns of work and community, creating both new opportunities and a sense of insecurity among those left behind.

Yet, industrialisation didn’t merely unsettle societies — it forged the nation-state as its solution, binding fractured populations together through shared institutions, an increase in common education, and the formation of a shared culture.

Comparable forces of transformation are now reshaping the present with similar magnitude to the Industrial Revolution. The digital revolution and the acceleration of movement across borders are among the defining changes of the early 21st century. Digital networks compress distance, allowing information, ideas, and images to circulate instantly across the world, while migration has created increasingly diverse societies that were previously more culturally homogeneous.

Together these forces are reorganising the structure of everyday life. Work, communication, and political debate now operate in transnational spaces rather than purely national ones, while cities have become crossroads of languages, customs, and global connections. The result is a social environment that is faster, more fluid, and more interconnected than the one that shaped earlier generations. Creating pressures that are now intensifying emotional insecurity, and leading to fissures between the nation and the state.

The synchronised national experience that once emerged from shared media and common reference points has been disrupted, leaving individuals to navigate a far more fragmented information and social environment.

In The Ordeal of Change, Eric Hoffer argued that periods of rapid transformation generate feelings of dislocation and uncertainty, prompting some individuals to enter a heightened state of passion, and cling more tightly to beliefs, identities, or movements that promise stability — even if this promised stability requires attacking existing political structures.

Movements based on narrow identities or cultures can be understood not only as political or economic responses to structural change, but as psychological attempts to impose order and meaning on societies undergoing major transformation. Our current revolutions of connectivity and mobility are not only technological or demographic shifts, but profound reorganisations of social imagination that force nations to renegotiate how collective identity, trust, and political cohesion are sustained.

The danger is not simply that movements that privilege cultural identity over both pluralism and structural necessity will win elections. It is that the contest itself — fought over who belongs, who the nation is really for, and whose story gets told — gradually hollows out the civic foundations on which both the nation and the state depend. As we can see from the United States, an imagined community that can no longer agree on what it is imagining becomes ungovernable.

A state that cannot govern cannot provide its citizens the basics of what they need: security, efficient services, opportunity and prosperity. For the nation to have a positive – future-focused – purpose these elements cannot be dispensed within a heightened state of passion.

To guard against the splintering of the nation-state, the challenge is to find ways to reconcile strategic necessity and civic belonging. To cool the passions of those who experience complexity as chaos. Governments must maintain the capabilities required to sustain prosperity, security, and influence in an increasingly competitive world, yet they cannot do so at the expense of the social trust that allows societies to function. Indeed, social trust should be understood as a central capability of the country itself.

Liberal democracies may increasingly find that preserving an open political order requires investing in institutions that appear, at first glance, somewhat illiberal. Practices such as national service, civic orientation programmes, or stronger expectations of public duty can help cultivate a shared sense of responsibility among citizens who otherwise have no synchronised experiences and a limited imagined sense of common community.

The aim is not to suppress cultural pluralism but to reinforce the civic foundations on which pluralism depends. In a revolutionary era of economic and social change, these mechanisms matter precisely because the conditions that once generated civic cohesion organically — shared institutions, common media, overlapping social worlds — can no longer be taken for granted. Without some structured reinforcement of civic commitment, the modern nation-state risks becoming politically brittle, leaving it vulnerable to radical movements whose narrow understanding of the nation is at dangerous odds with demographic realities.

Berwick Street in London’s Soho district is slightly different now. In my early-20s it had a large number of record stores. It was the place to be on a weekend for a guy like me. While a significant percentage of my meagre income was spent on CDs, Berwick Street was also the place to just be seen flicking through racks. While new releases may come, and you may already know what would be in each section, the point was to be seen flicking through them nonetheless.

Nowadays Berwick Street has undergone an agglomerative shift. The record stores have mostly gone, replaced by tasteful men’s fashion. The kind of stores where you spend a lot of money to look like you made a bit of an effort, but not too much. Essentially Berwick Street has been servicing the same men over the past 20 years. Just in different phases of their lives.

At the end of Berwick Street lies a narrow laneway called Walker’s Court. Here, a different kind of servicing remains. Despite the accessibility of pornography on the internet, live action porn has had a persistent presence. Markets may shift, and men’s interests may change, but men’s interests also never change. And no market is more stable than one that bets on these most base masculine desires.

However, back when I lived in London, at the end of Walker’s Court, heading down towards the theatre district along Shaftesbury Avenue, there was a bookstore. Consistent with the shops around it the store had its “blue” section, but it also stocked a range of other books mostly related to art, music and culture. Music writing had yet to be dispersed by the internet, and alongside the weekly British music press there was a good market for books on bands, styles and scenes – for the men along Berwick Street who needed more in-depth detail than the NME and Melody Maker could provide.

Yet it was the British music press that provided the cultural scaffolding. During its peak the British music press’s job was to create a mythology around bands. It’s why bands who were shit, but had a good story, could still be compelling – good music was often secondary to good music writing. This is why British bands generally had a mystique and allure that couldn’t be matched by bands from elsewhere in the world. It’s also why Britain’s soft power has waned with the decline of the country’s music press. It was the platform on which Anglophilia was built.

As a teenage Anglophile this mystique made moving to London essential. In Australia, culture still came by ship (and maybe still does), and so Au Go Go Records on Little Bourke Street in Melbourne would stock the NME and Melody Maker, but they would be several weeks late. Despite this, reading them felt exciting all the same – but the potential thrill of buying copies of the music press the week they came out made it clear that London was the place I needed to be.

However, by the time I got there Melody Maker was dead. While the NME was still breathing, its trajectory towards becoming an online only publication was inevitable. Despite this, music had yet to transform into the everything everywhere all at once smörgåsbord it is today. Time still mattered to music, and London still felt like it was the place where now was happening.

One weekend, after doing the rounds of record stores, I popped into the bookstore in Walker’s Court. The store had a display of a blue-ish tinged book, with a close-up of a man’s face – too close to see who it actually was, but it was intriguing enough to pick up. A sale price of £5 was also enticing. The book was called 45 by Bill Drummond, and was a series of short stories from Drummond’s life to date. Media quotes on the back claimed that “Stories bristle with brilliantly insane schemes which often go awry…” and “a catalogue of ludicrous exploits and lucrative failures.” It looked like it was worth a read.

Although Scottish, Drummond began his artistic career in Liverpool in a band called Big in Japan. Big in Japan were notable for being a band less than the sum of its parts, having no success themselves, but each of the band’s members going on to find great success away from each other.

Holly Johnson would become singer in Frankie Goes To Hollywood; Budgie would become the drummer in Siouxsie and the Banshees; Ian Broudie would write both one of the most wholesome songs of the 1990s, as well as England’s unofficial national anthem, while David Balfe would initially play keyboards in The Teardrop Explodes, before forming the label Food Records, signed Blur, then became rich by selling the label to EMI. Blur would subsequently write “Country House” about him and his newfound wealth.

Drummond himself would first become the manager of Echo & the Bunnymen, before discovering the sampler, and in conjunction with electronic artist Jimmy Cauty, formed The KLF, who would launch a cultural assault on pop music by deliberately and brazenly seeking to infringe on copyright law. The two would lift fragments of well-known songs, TV themes, and news broadcasts and set them to new beats. The provocation was aimed as much at lawyers as listeners. To reframe pop music not as entertainment, but as a vehicle for confrontation.

The skill behind sampling – particularly from its emergence within hip-hop – was finding new possibilities within an existing hook – reframing and transforming music to create something familiar, yet unique. Taking this approach, the duo’s breakthrough came by fusing Gary Glitter’s “Rock and Roll”, The Sweet’s “Block Buster!”, and the Doctor Who theme, into Doctorin’ The Tardis (temporarily renaming themself The Timelords to fit the song’s theme). The pair subsequently wrote a book called The Manual (How to Have a Number 1 Single the Easy Way) – a step-by-step guide to the creation of a novelty hit.

Yet the pair were working with a vision far broader and more strange than just the creation of novelty songs. From the proceeds of their first number 1, they created an “ambient road trip” film called The White Room. The film traces the journey of Drummond and Cauty from their studio Trancentral in south London through Spain in search of the mysterious “White Room,” a transcendental space where perfect music supposedly exists, and where they would be able create the perfect pop record.

The romanticism of road trips inspired a temporary pivot away from pop into ambient music. The concept of their album Chill Out was that of a drive by night through the Gulf Coast in the United States. Taken as a whole 45 minute piece of music, fragments of sound drift in and out, as the road and wind pass by the vehicle, trains roll in the distance and radio stations scan in and out. It is a work in constant motion – sounds arrive, overlap, and recede, producing the feelings of moving through different environments without stop, mirroring the hypnotic rhythm of long-distance driving. The album is eerie, nostalgic and evocative.

Then came the bang. Anyone with an ear near a commercial radio station in the early-90s would know The KLF, although very few would actually know The KLF. Songs like What Time Is Love? and 3am Eternal may have been catchy dance-pop toe-tappers, but on closer inspection were filled with lyrics that were both highly self-referential and absurdist. As the radio was my closest childhood friend, at the time these were songs simply singable anthems, it was only after going down Drummond’s rabbit hole did what was actually going on start to reveal itself.

Central to The KLF was the idea that mythology was central to music’s power, and rather than a commercial product, music instead should be a surreal experience. The duo also referred to themselves as the Justified Ancients of Mu Mu (The JAMS) – taken from the satirical conspiracy novels The Illuminatus! Trilogy (with this also being a nod to the lost continent of Mu in the Pacific) – creating a world cryptic fantasy and mischief designed to blur the lines between pop music, performance art and absurd imagination (and convincing Tammy Wynette to play along).

At the core of this project was a belief that music loses its power when it becomes too rational. By surrounding their music with stories, hoaxes and rituals, The KLF sought to convey that pop’s appeal came from folklore – where it could be strange, exciting and resistant to neat explanations. An approach that led to both enormous success and wild acts of self-sabotage.

Invited to play 3am Eternal at the British Record Industry (BRIT) Awards in 1992 they instead hired Extreme Noise Terror to butcher the song, culminating in Drummond machine gunning the audience with blanks (before dumping a dead sheep at the awards’ after party). The duo then decided to dissolve The KLF at the height of its success, renamed themselves The K Foundation to establish an art award for “the worst artist of the year” (whose short list was identical to the prestigious Turner Prize but prize money double), and then subsequently took off to the Isle of Jura and burned £1 million.

This was all thrilling stuff. The actions of a highly creative mind which had both the audacity and commitment to pursue whatever wild ideas he could dream up.

It is this creativity and how it intersects with music mythology that drives much of Drummond’s book. Its opening story concerned a journey Drummond and Mark Manning had taken through Finland in the hope of placing an icon of Elvis Presley at the North Pole. Their theory was that the icon would radiate “good vibes” down the Earth’s leylines and bring about world peace.1 What the trip really needed, however, was a soundtrack – as was the concept behind Chill Out, any proper road trip required the radio play a central role.

With Finnish radio itself not sufficiently servicing the job, the pair decided to create a series of fictitious Finnish bands – inhabiting their own localised genres like Lapp-Punk and Arctic Soul – and then hire a group of local musicians to record songs by these imaginary bands. Drummond and Manning then created a Finnish record label, pressed the songs up as 7” records and let them float out into the record stores of the world, to be randomly discovered by those men along Berwick Street flicking through the racks.

Before the internet placed every detail of an artist’s life at our fingertips, mystery was an essential component of music’s appeal. A listener might have known only a few scattered clues – whatever could be gleaned from an album sleeve, a handful of photos, a place of origin – with the rest filled in by imagination. For bands who caught the attention of the British music press, these fragments could be expanded into narratives that made them feel part of larger social dramas rather than simply composers of songs.

One of the key ideas running through the book is that the true art of music lies in the stories surrounding it. It is experienced as moment, memory, and mythology, with tales accumulating and distorting over time. The attraction of a band often lay in what surrounded the music as much as in the music itself – what they were doing when they weren’t playing instruments, and what listeners believed they might be doing. This was the romance of music – the conjecture, fantasy and personal meaning. The enigma of Finnish bands that may or may not actually exist.

From “the classic four lads out against the world” of Echo & the Bunnymen to the “dickhead factor” of Julian Cope of The Teardrop Explodes, Drummond understood that compelling music required a conviction and projection of style – both aesthetic and attitudinal. Pop, in this sense, operated well beyond chord structure and vocal melody. It was an art form that thrived on personality, myth, and the space listeners were free to fill with their own speculation.

Of course, the modern music environment doesn’t mean great music cannot be written, Ditto by NewJeans is a perfect pop song, but the information overload of K-Pop leaves very little to the imagination. It may draw you in emotionally and make you feel connected to group members, but it doesn’t allow you to imagine your own vision of the artist. Given how tightly controlled and directed they are, the “story” around K-Pop groups isn’t very compelling. There are no fuck-ups and losers, no grand conceptual overreach, no antagonism and combativeness, no spicy quotes in the press. The mess of humanity; the things that give art a “lived in” experience, has been stripped out.

Which is what Drummond seeks to convey as music’s real attraction. The book returns to Finland as he finds himself drawn to creating a whole album by his invention of Kristina Bruuk – an Estonian woman, turned Helsinki heroin addict, and the permanent loser of the Finnish music scene. Convinced of her own genius, yet met with little interest in her work, it is her persistence and the rumours that swirl around her that makes her compelling. The type of outsider artist that – were she real – obscurity hounds would obsess over.

Alongside the project itself, what was compelling is how Drummond built this story around the number 14 bus route as he travelled from central Helsinki to the recording studio each day. This was not just the recollection of one of his artistic schemes, but a demonstration of the art of the short story. It is how a writer builds an allure of a place through its topographical details – transport routes, street names, or shops. He makes similar use of this device later in the book with London’s 68 bus route.

While road trips have their place, it is public transport that houses a city’s soul. There is no knowing a city without knowing its public transport, and the first, and most important, task when arriving in a new city is to get yourself on it. Far from being just a mechanism to get from A to B, public transport is how you observe and understand a place – one eye out the window, one eye on the carriage. It’s how you grasp a city’s urban structure, political economy, and the character of its people. For a writer, the most important skill is being a “noticer”, and there is no better place to notice things than on public transport.

Using public transport as a stylistic device was therefore just as important to me as Drummond’s imagination and audacity. It was here that the book provided me with something far greater than just a good read, it gave me a keen sense of purpose. I was going to become a writer. I was going to throw myself headfirst into the world, to have big, bold ideas and follow them towards their canny conclusions. I would become interesting and unique, and I would master the art of the oh-so-clever personal short story.

But it didn’t quite work out that way.

Instead, after much floundering and lack of direction, I ended up in the practical world of foreign policy, where – at least in Australia – the field is approached through the sober reality of what is possible to advance the country’s interests given the realities of hard power and the constraints of current global conditions. This is important work, but it’s not fantastical. There’s no mischief or myth-making, no wit and whimsy, just careful deliberation and measured, diplomatic, tones.

Alongside policy briefs and options papers, one of the central modes of influence in this field is the 800-word opinion piece, or op-ed. Here the objective is to present a clear viewpoint on a current affair, providing evidence and insight. The brevity of the piece means there is a focus on economy, with a tightly structured argument attempting to persuade the reader within a limited space.

This is something I’ve become quite good at, but given my itch to be a little bolder, I have also tried to use these op-eds to be more creative. I’ve sought to perfect the art of the format by finding an inventive theme or concept to frame my arguments, engaging in the slow reveal with knowing clues, to have an elegant rhythm and lyricism that builds towards a clever, biting conclusion. My goal has been to write an 800-word op-ed that can be hung in The Louvre.

However, editors often don’t understand what I’m trying to do, or privilege the “news hook” over my literary devices. This is a particular problem here in Australia where attempting to be original and clever is to invite suspicion. We don’t tolerate big or bold ideas in this country – the purpose of writing is simply to convey information. If you’ve got something interesting to say, or worse, a crafty way of saying it, you best say it elsewhere.

So there has been both an institutional and cultural restraint on my ambition – a field of furrowed brows within a nation that thinks using more than two syllables is an unnecessary effort. Despite this, I’ve got big ideas, a keen eye, and a broad and distinct knowledge-base that can stretch beyond the narrow lanes of commentary into something more imaginative and expansive. The writers who excel at this have a hungry curiosity, an ability to synthesise ideas across fields, and a flair for shaping observation and thought into artful prose.

In order to be such a writer, my starting point has been to go back to my original inspiration. Much like sampling, the idea has been to find a preexisting hook, insert myself into it and build something new and distinct. It’s not theft, it’s admixture and advancement. It is this device of artistic transformation that Drummond uses in his story The Smell of Money Underground, where he repurposes the artwork of Richard Long to create a new narrative and artistic gesture of his own.

Drummond had become interested in Long’s work as it aligned with his interests. Long’s art revolved around long walks through a wilderness, creating a stone circle in a specific locale, and then photographing it. The appeal here is obvious; if the terrain won’t allow for public transport, then foot is your best option, while stone circles carry a pagan mystique – evoking rituals of dance and offering, giving honour to unseen, mystical, forces.

With his recent cash-burning in Scotland, Drummond wanders into the d’Offay Gallery on Dering Street in Mayfair hoping to find a work of Long’s from the Isle of Jura. He has no such luck, but he is shown a work from Iceland called The Smell of Sulfur in the Wind.

Drummond recognises the broad location of the work as when he was 17 he and his sister had hitched a ride on a fishing trawler to Iceland and then attempted to walk across the island from south to north. The pair gave up around Lake Askja, near where Drummond thinks Long had created his stone circle. The symmetry compelled Drummond to purchase the photograph. It was US $20,000. Both the amount, and the currency, surprised him. He bought it anyway.

In November 2020, I travelled to Iceland to help a friend with a court case. The winter was bleak, and the situation bleaker, and this was made more surreal by the restrictions to normal life due to the COVID-19 pandemic. I was meant to be in Iceland for three months, but due to Australia closing its borders – and airlines continuously cancelling flights – I stayed for six. Despite these circumstances, I was enamoured with the place.

The country has an enormous gravitational pull. You feel on the edge of the world, the landscape looks alien, with its black volcanic plains, glacial rivers and jagged cliffs. It’s immense and dramatic. Björk had sought to capture the sound of this landscape on her Homogenic album – with its ominous, distorted beats and sweeping icy strings. This was geology as music, tectonic pressure in your eardrums, it created an attraction to the place long before I set foot inside it.

It is Iceland’s unique geography that has allowed the country to retain its idiosyncrasies, even as its tiny population has connected itself globally. The Huldufólk (hidden people) and Draugar (restless spirits) that permeate the culture create an additional otherworldliness. Unlike English, which in an act of linguistic cowardice dispensed with the letters ð and þ, the Icelandic language maintains its distinct look, transmitting the deep mythology its medieval sagas through its own topographical details like geographical features, place names and shop fronts.2

For Drummond, such folklore and mystery added an extra layer of power to Long’s photograph. There was a certain kinship between his own playful imagination and the whimsy of Iceland. The country also played a central role in his mental map of how things actually work. According to Drummond, the leylines that he and Manning had hoped to transmit “good vibes” down with their icon of Elvis at the North Pole had only three fixed points on Earth they continuously travel through – Iceland, New Guinea, and Matthew Street in Liverpool. It was obvious that Iceland had a magnetism that needed to be hooked into.

Despite this intimate connection, as the story progresses Drummond falls out of love with the photograph. He wonders what the purchase was actually about – the memory of the trek he and his sister took? His esoteric fancy for Iceland? The historic mysteries of stone circles? Or just the luxury of being an art-buying wanker?

So he decides that he will sell the photograph for the original $20,000 he paid for it (despite the fact that its value had risen); return to Iceland with the money in a box, walk across the island until he finds Long’s stone circle, and bury the cash underneath it. He would then photograph the stone circle from the same angle as Long, have it developed and framed, and then place it on his wall where the original lay. He will call it The Smell of Money Underground.

Yet selling art is a difficult business. Most people don’t have $20,000 lying around dedicated to whims, and given Drummond’s plan for the cash, anyone who might would probably be wary of being associated with him and his obtuse schemes. Despite having paid such a price for Long’s work, the d’Offay Gallery had considered Drummond too suspicious a character to interview Long for a magazine feature.

As was the case, Drummond had another layer of metacommentary planned – a book about his attempt to sell the photograph called How To Be An Artist. In the book, Drummond takes off on another road trip, this time straight up the guts of Britain, from Southampton on England’s south coast to Dounreay of Scotland’s north coast. He attaches “For Sale” signs to various structures, and gives a variety of talks to local community centres attempting to explain his relationship to art, why he no longer likes Long’s photograph and why he wants to sell it. The book’s point seems to be for Drummond to embarrass himself for his own pretensions.

Drummond’s talks elicit little but bemusement, and no buyers. So he devises a new plan to get the $20,000. He cuts the artwork into 20,000 pieces and tries to sell them for $1 each. Was this a radical act of artistic vandalism? Or an inspired form of artistic alchemy?

At the time of the book’s release I had a temp job managing the file archive for a law firm in the City and I rushed down to the Waterstones on Leadenhall Street on my lunch break to grab a copy. Most importantly, inside the book were instructions on how to secure a piece of the photo. Which I promptly did.

Depending on how you define it, I don’t really own art. In my flat in Collingwood I have nothing on the walls. I have a plan for framed maps of my favourite places – a big map of Iceland – and prints of metro systems I love, but I’ve never gotten around to buying any of these. I can’t claim to be knowledgeable about art in its conventional sense, I certainly don’t have $20,000 to spend on any. But this was a piece of art I understood. It was turned into words. It was an escalating aggregation of ideas. It was mischievous. And there was just a little piece of physical evidence to hold, which made me at least feel like I was an owner of art.

Until I lost it. After returning to Melbourne I lent the book – with the segment of photo inside – to a pair of friends. I was restless and keen on being elsewhere, so I decided to head to Montreal for a year. I didn’t need the book and the photo segment, I would pick them up when I got back to Melbourne. Except I never did – and as lending works, each year that passes the ability to ask for your stuff back becomes more absurd.

However, the situation is more complicated than just the informal statute of limitations on borrowed books, as the couple that I lent the book to happen to now run Perimeter Books up on High Street Thornbury – an art book store and publishing house. They know the value of the 1/20,000 of Long’s photograph more than most. That slither of photo – and the now out-of-print book – is sitting on a shelf in their house gathering allure and esteem. It’s a little piece of Drummond’s mind, it carries the weight of his catalogue of endeavour and adventure. No-one in their field is going to give that up.

Yet this tiny fragment of a photograph has grown in my mind into something enormous. Its monetary value matters little; the fragment has instead become totemic; it carries a charge of metaphysical power and permission. A leyline of voltage from Drummond’s mind into mine. By reclaiming it I would have the legitimacy to be the writer I wish to be – innovative, ambitious, and culturally savvy. In my possession it would be key: a vessel that contains the sparks of future ideas, a gateway to the expansion of my work, an audience, the interest of literary agents and publishers, and a neat conclusion to this story.

Such a totem of confidence feels essential because half the work of being a writer is convincing others that you have the skill to bring an idea to life — especially when that idea is strange, complex, or not immediately understood. This short story would be tough to pitch. For works like it, what you need is a reputation, a way for editors, literary agents and publishers to have belief in you. What you need is an exhibit of writing that demonstrates a body of knowledge, an inventive ability to synthesise ideas, and a mystique that sets the tone for future work. What you need is a showpiece.

Last week a curious job advert appeared in my inbox. The Victoria state government here in Australia is looking for a Senior Adviser, Policy and Research (anti-racism). The job will be based inside the Policy and Research Branch of the Victorian Equal Opportunity and Human Rights Commission. A commission whose role it is “to help organisations better understand, prevent and respond to racism and race discrimination in a variety of settings.”

This all sounds like good stuff. Discrimination based on race is a scourge that humanity needs to transcend. On a superficial level “anti-racism” sounds like the antidote.

However, this is not the case. Instead the ideas it promotes are fast becoming the accelerant. And the state internalising its assumptions does not bode well for such a highly multicultural society as Victoria.

Anti-racism has emerged as a distinct set of ideas that are in direct challenge to the ideals of liberalism. Central to liberal ideals is that the individual is the primary moral and political unit, and that each person has equal rights and dignity independent of social status, class, race, or religion. Therefore, the law should treat each person as an individual bearer of rights and responsibilities, not as a representative of a collective group identity.

This is not what anti-racism believes. Instead anti-racism sees race as the primary moral and political unit that must be centred in all scenarios. It sees discrimination not as stemming from individual prejudice, but through persistent political or economic structures. It cynically believes that formally neutral rules are an illusion, that analysing society through group categories is essential to identify past injustice, and that organisations and the state should actively work to redress this past injustice through a series of privileges and hindrances (depending on the racial group).

Metaphysically, anti-racism believes that you are born with the historical inheritance of your skin colour, and you are permanently bound to the sins or victim status of it, regardless of what you do in life.

In the Hegelian view of History – that is, what is the world about? – anti-racism sees the world as a zero sum struggle between racial or ethnic groups. It believes that all social and political outcomes are due to this struggle. Here it holds the exact same view of History as white supremacists. Just because anti-racism sees itself working to reverse racial hierarchies this is not a repudiation of the concept of racial hierarchies.

Because anti-racism has now embedded itself within progressive politics (or politics that believes itself to be progressive), it is important to consider the structural conditions that have led to its emergence, how it is capturing states throughout the West, and why it will produce outcomes that are the opposite of what it claims are its intent – and what should be the intent of a body like the Victorian Equal Opportunity and Human Rights Commission.

New ideas don’t institutionalise themselves; they require structural conditions that reward, amplify, and absorb them. To understand why ideologies like anti-racism are increasingly migrating from activist discourse into bureaucratic roles we need to comprehend current structural incentives within Western societies, and for this it is useful to consider the work of Peter Turchin.

Turchin began his career as a zoologist, studying population dynamics in animals; his work sought to understand how complex biological systems rise, fluctuate, and stabilise over time. However, he got bored with animals and turned his attention to studying human history; developing a theory about how societies rise and collapse, and what were the common conditions that lead to collapse.

Turchin’s thesis has been that societies start to fracture and collapse when its elites begin turning on other elites, and, by extension, the prevailing political systems. He has termed this as “elite overproduction” – where competition between über-elites intensifies, and when there are too many garden variety elites to be absorbed by well-paid or high status jobs. The resentments of both these scenarios start eroding societies.

The first cohort is today’s most recognisable problem. Who I’ve called über-elites are those Turchin refers to in their current behaviour as “counter-elites”. These are people of enormous privilege who – counterintuitively – strive to dismantle the systems that have provided them with this privilege in an attempt to exert even greater power.

The obvious modern examples are Donald Trump, Nigel Farage and Elon Musk. Trump has the most powerful and high status job in the world, and Musk is the wealthiest person on the planet. Yet alongside the rapacious competition they see themselves in with other powerful and wealthy people, what they don’t have is the respect of people with class and taste – which is what they actually crave. As a result they are attacking – and now capturing and eroding – political and social institutions as a form of petulant revenge.

The second type of intra-elite competition is more complex, but it is where we find the mechanics of how radical ideas become institutionalised.

Due to the significant increase in education over the past 50-60 years, there is now far greater competition for well-paid and high status jobs, and often not enough to go around. This is creating social turbulence.

Instinctively, I hate this idea, because one should never be suspicious of education and we absolutely should be striving towards having highly educated societies. The idea that we require a subaltern class without knowledge and capabilities is a repulsive one.

Yet, there is a recognisable issue here.

Educated people quite rightly expect that the efforts they’ve made to obtain degrees should come with the reward of jobs and social recognition that reflect these efforts. Yet without enough well-paid and high status jobs there are now strong incentives for individuals to differentiate themselves through more radical ideas as a way of obtaining influence and status within their societies. This is compounded by one of the central psychological pillars of progressive politics – that there is always a more radical position, and this more radical position is morally superior by default.

There’s a recognisable pattern in how these ideas develop and expand. Activists and intellectuals often distinguish themselves within movements and institutions by pushing arguments further, seeking attention, legitimacy, or moral authority. As earlier demands become normalised or partially institutionalised, the baseline shifts, creating incentives to identify new injustices or reinterpret existing ones in broader, more systemic terms.

Group polarisation and moral commitment reinforce this dynamic. Like-minded networks reward stronger signalling of conviction, while moderation risks being framed as complacency or complicity. Gatekeepers emerge to prescribe the “correct” language, periodically redefining language in ways that sustain their authority and weed out heretics. Emotional drivers — outrage, moral certainty, and identity investment — deepen the attachment to more radical positions, so that scrutiny of ideas can come to feel like betrayal rather than good faith debate about which political and social arrangements genuinely improve the human condition.

Due to elite overproduction, the state has felt the need to absorb some of this larger educated cohort and this has led to this process of radicalisation advancing into the bureaucracy. This has expanded the role of the state to be more active in social issues – areas where in liberal societies its role should be limited. This has also aligned with another progressive impulse – that for a society to value something the state has to do it.

This dynamic helps explain why the Victorian government is advertising for a Senior Adviser, Policy and Research (anti-racism). However, roles like this create an internal tension within a liberal democratic state: its constitutional framework and commitment to the rule of law rest on universal principles applied equally to individuals, while parts of the bureaucracy are tasked with advancing perspectives that are sceptical of that universalism. The result is a structural contradiction, in which institutions designed to administer neutral rules now advance ideas that prioritise group-based interpretation.

When a political framework places a strong emphasis on racial identity it encourages people to interpret themselves and others first and foremost through racial categories rather than as individual citizens – or, to judge people by the colour of their skin, and not the content of their character. When this framework dominates the public discourse it atomises society, dissolving the broader national and civic commitments that plural societies need to maintain cooperation.

Those who are already predisposed to grievance politics respond by tightening their attachment to group identity, drawing sharper distinctions between groups, and interpreting all social changes as attacks on their identity group. Such thinking is the primary psychological driver of conspiracies like the great replacement theory. These people thrive on racially essentialist thinking; the idea that racial groups are coherent, fixed, and politically primary.

Progressive politics is currently playing right into their hands, and so we are seeing a far more open and aggressive form of racism within Western countries. This has emerged because of another little quirk in progressive psychology. To progressives, the internal rule that “everyone is allowed to organise themselves politically by racial groups, except white people” makes sense. The West’s historically dominant group should “check its priv” and not exert itself politically the same way as minority groups. But white supremacists don’t play by these internal progressive rules, they see the encouragement of racially-based political organisation and recognise it as an opportunity to do likewise.

This relates to another eternal oversight of progressive politics – the impulse to create bureaucratic structures without considering how they could be used nefariously. Currently in Australia there has been a surge in polling support for the anti-immigration One Nation party. Do we really want a web of bureaucratic structures and data focused on race to be in the hands of a party whose leader has recently said “how can you tell me there are good Muslims?”

There’s a reason why regimes like the Nazis or Apartheid South Africa were obsessed with collecting racial data, and it wasn’t so they knew which important cultural dates to acknowledge. Central to liberalism must be the awareness of not concentrating too much power in the state because you never know who is going to use that power. Although France clearly has its political problems at the moment, its refusal to collect census data on race or religion is a demonstration of the state’s commitment to universalism over identity. Most importantly, this is also to prevent vicious political movements from having a tool at their disposal should they win political power.

Anti-racism is built on a belief that institutions and governments need to actively work to “rectify history”. The problem is that bureaucracies rarely do temporary measures. Max Weber recognised that bureaucratic structures become self-perpetuating, they operate on rules and process, and so can be hard to reform and difficult to dismantle once established. Even if history could be rectified – an absurd notion – these race-focused bureaucratic structures would not wilfully disassemble.

To be concerned about the centring of race in political discourse and bureaucratic structures is not the same as being suspicious of different cultures. Melbourne is one of the most diverse cities in the world and it’s a truly brilliant place to live because of this. Due to my staunch belief that food starts in Kabul and heads east, this is particularly advantageous for me.1

But multiculturalism at a civic level only works if there are a broader set of social commitments that can act as a binding agent. For this, the state needs to embody universalism – meaning the law and its policy frameworks dispenses no favour or discrimination to people based on racial or religious group. Universalism is what allows cultural difference to exist within a shared political framework; it ensures that diversity operates within common rules rather than competing systems of recognition.

When this principle weakens, tensions emerge not only at the level of theory but in the everyday lives of non-majority communities. The ideological assumptions of anti-racism often conflict with how these groups see themselves. Many do not want to be treated as symbolic constituencies rather than individuals with their own views and priorities. They may have left highly hierarchical and group-centric countries precisely because they value the egalitarian and liberal nature of Australia and want to participate fully in it. That aspiration can sit comfortably alongside pride in their cultural heritage. It reflects the complexity of human identity — a complexity that both racists and anti-racists struggle to accommodate.

I hope that my critique here will not be conscripted into the unhinged anti-Victoria narrative that now animates conservative politics in Australia.2 There is no grand conspiracy here, no coordinated descent into illiberalism directed from Spring Street. What we are seeing is something at once more mundane, but potentially more troubling: a government not thinking carefully enough about the ideas it absorbs and the language it legitimises.

The problem is not ideological intent but intellectual complacency — a failure to properly interrogate fashionable concepts before embedding them in policy, a lack of discernment about which voices are influential, and an inattention to the structural incentives that quietly push institutions in illiberal directions. The machinery of self-scrutiny that should discipline government decision-making is faltering. And it is this lack of judgement – especially on issues of race – that has the potential to become incredibly dangerous.

As an undergraduate at La Trobe University in Melbourne I took class with now-Emeritus Professor of Politics, Robert Manne. The class was an overview of the 20th Century through its great essays and books (non-fiction and fiction). It was the best class I’ve ever taken, and has provided me with an enormous direction with my subsequent work.

One of the essays studied in the class was Václav Havel’s The Power of the Powerless – written by the Czech playwright and dissident in 1978 while under secret police surveillance and harassment. The essay has come back into prominence after being used by Canadian prime minister Mark Carney to frame his address to the World Economic Forum in late-January.

As Carney illustrated, the central character of the essay was the greengrocer who places the sign “Workers of the World United” in his shop window. The greengrocer may very well have wanted the workers of the world to unite, but this was not his intent. Instead the sign was placed in the window because he knew not doing so would invite suspicion and a knock on his door. The sign served as a demonstration that the greengrocer was doing what was expected of him and therefore earned the right to be left alone by the authorities.

Havel extrapolated that this was part of the “living inside a lie” that governed communist Czechoslovakia, and other similar totalitarian societies. Living this way involved repeating slogans, performing rituals and obeying expectations to avoid punishment or exclusion. By doing so, individuals help sustain the system’s power, sacrificing truth and dignity in exchange for a fragile sense of safety and normality.

Carney’s argument was that the global community was similarly engaged in the ritual of performance. Mouthing platitudes about the “rules based order” that were designed to placate us as we avoid recognising the world is undergoing a dramatic shift in values. Or a “rupture” as Carney described it. Gone was the architecture of technocratic cooperation – or the attempt to create it – and in its place lay the blunt realities of raw power and rapacious will.

The resonance the speech had was not so much its diagnosis of the global environment, but the satisfaction of acknowledging these conditions. The speech was a relief value. It provided the permission to speak more honestly. With the added respect that Canada, a country which is shackled both geographically and economically to what is now a revisionist superpower, would so conspicuously take their sign down.1

More broadly, the sentiment of Carney’s speech highlighted the exhaustion of our current age. Modern political movements have appetites that are rarely satisfied. They are demanding and conflictual. These movements practice “total politics” – seeing public space as political fields to continuously claim through slogans and symbols. Offering no neutral space for civil society to inhibit and cooperate, and no respite for anyone who might want such a space.

Havel’s essay had already found a present-day resonance prior to Carney’s speech as a critique of modern progressive shibboleths. Land acknowledgements and bio pronouns can be seen as being akin to the greengrocer putting his sign in the shop window. Signals that people are doing what is expected of them, of holding the correct opinions, and therefore have earned the right to be left alone. Whatever sentiment these ideas had originally sought to convey now take a backseat to their social pressures.

These pressures, regardless of their social, political, or international manifestations eat away at our dignity. Dignity begins as a quiet insistence within the individual: the need to live in alignment with what one knows to be true. When that alignment is broken — when we speak words we do not believe or perform rituals emptied of meaning — we feel a subtle, yet profound diminishment. These little cuts compound into a sense that one isn’t able to live in a genuine and honest manner.

As these small acts of self-betrayal accumulate, they harden into social reality. A society organised around pretence teaches its members that truth is dangerous and costly. The façade becomes ambient — no longer imposed solely from above, but maintained by mutual silence and shared cowardice. Havel’s greengrocer reveals how oppression persists without constant violence: people internalise the public game of slogans and reproduce them themselves. In such a world, dignity is not crushed dramatically but slowly drained, replaced by resignation and cynicism.

What happens to individuals under a regime of façade also happens to nations in the international system. States, like people, hunger for dignity — to be recognised as legitimate, coherent, and self-respecting actors — and when they structure their external posture around fictions, that dignity erodes. Havel’s insistence was that dignity is not granted by strength, but by refusing to live within a lie. A nation may continue to function without dignity, but it no longer stands upright in the world.

The “rules based order” was meant to provide dignity to nations. For each country, no matter how small and lacking in power, to be respected within the international system. This was never going to be perfect, powerful countries would always throw their weight around. But the architecture of the system at least allowed smaller countries to turn up at international forums and feel like they had some form of voice and respect.

Carney acknowledging that this attempt at universal respect was now gone may have exposed Canada to having mouthed the slogan, but it also exposed the countries who have been undermining the system – United States, Russia, China. As Havel wrote, were the greengrocer to place a sign in his window that said “I am afraid and therefore unquestioningly obedient” it would be an embarrassment to the greengrocer. However, it would also be an embarrassment to the regime, as it would reveal the truth about their power. One that had nothing to do with the workers of world uniting.

This is why Donald Trump was so quick to dismiss Carney’s speech. His fondness for humiliation was exposed. And exposed by the country that arguably has the most to lose. Far from being embarrassed, Carney – and Canada – had displayed courage. Something that also embarrasses Trump.

Of course, the greater permission to speak freely that Carney has sought to establish doesn’t make this new reality any easier. Carney’s prescriptions are hard work and sober endurance. It won’t be fun. But acknowledging a problem moves us from a state of denial towards acceptance and action. It now gives us a sense of responsibility, which elicits far less anxiety – and far more dignity – than maintaining a façade.

Donald Trump and his administration have clearly signalled their intent to operate without restraint. Trump himself informed the New York Times last week that his power will only be restrained by his “own morality”. Which, given he is a civilly liable sexual abuser, an attempted coup instigator, and a compulsive liar (as the tip of the iceberg) shouldn’t instil the world with confidence.

His deputy chief of staff, and the administration’s prime psychopath, Stephen Miller, expanded on this theme in an interview with CNN’s Jake Tapper by stating bluntly: “We live in a world, in the real world, Jake, that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power. These are the iron laws of the world that have existed since the beginning of time.”

What the administration has articulated, through both its actions and its words, is an explicit worldview. One that is built around their own power and ability to exercise it at will. The constraints of laws, of constitutions, of personal ethics, and the realities of what we see with our own eyes, are all dispensed with. Instead the governing principles are the dark passions of humanity: anger, hatred, resentment, deception, and the urge to dominate. These passions are being exercised through the spectacle of violence. With both the spectacle and the arbitrary nature of it designed to cower people and leave the administration without challenge.

What the Trump administration is engaged in is domestic regime change. Plato’s original concept of “regime” was the ideas, form of government, the constitution of a society, and – most importantly to understand the MAGA movement – the moral character of the citizenry.

In less expansive terms, in modern Western countries the regime is liberal democracy. Governments may be won by different parties, with different platforms and policies, but the constitution – and the ideas it embodies – doesn’t change with election results.

Until Trump’s second term, the regime of the United States had been liberal democracy. Now the country is in regime purgatory. Given the decentralised nature of the country, and its muscle memory, much of the U.S still functions as a liberal democracy, however the office of the presidency is attacking and overthrowing its tenets by the day. Attempting to install a new authoritarian regime. With Trump as its emperor.

To understand the worldview of the administration there is a need to return to the philosophical thought experiments of humanity’s “state of nature”. Or, “the iron laws of the world that have existed since the beginning of time”, as Miller aggressively put it. Were Miller a curious man, he would know that these laws aren’t iron, but both debatable and complex.

Trump is often understood as a Hobbesian creature. A brutish beast mired in vainglory who only understands the world in terms of his own advantage. Without a strong sense of order, Thomas Hobbes believed that these creatures would roam the Earth creating a permanent insecurity and a “war of every man against every man.” For Hobbes these dark impulses were an innate feature of humanity and political structures needed to be devised to restrain them. Rational individuals would therefore relinquish some personal freedom to a powerful sovereign to establish mutual safety.

Unlike Hobbes, John Locke believed that humans had greater moral capabilities. Behaviour was not inherent, but was formed. Character was developed from experience, reflection and guidance. Through positive education and experience, humans could be ethical agents capable of governing themselves through reason. As an extension of this, a character-bound population was necessary to create a virtuous government.

Locke was the most influential philosopher on America’s founding documents and the broader American project. And it is through Locke where we can see Trump’s regime change, in both the direct and expanded Platonic sense. To Locke, virtue lay in one’s own self-command – the ability to govern one’s desires, and to act with long-term rational judgement, not immediate impulse. Restraint and deliberation were the foundations of moral character. Things Trump and his acolytes clearly struggle with.

Which is why it might be Jean-Jacques Rousseau who reveals more about the nature of the Trump administration. Rousseau believed that humans in their state of nature were not motivated by dark impulses, but instead were fundamentally innocent and naturally virtuous. This may not seem Trumpian, but Rousseau thought that the corruption of humanity lay in the social institutions people were subjected to. That the social “chains” we see as civilisation actually restrained humans from being their true, authentic, selves.1

Rousseau himself was a scumbag. He had an extraordinary talent for quarrelling, falling out with many of his contemporary thinkers. He also fathered five children, all of whom he dumped in a foundling hospital in Paris due him considering them a burden on his freedom. In practice, he saw his freedom of action and pursuit of authenticity as his primary interest. Rousseau rationalised his personal failings as moral principles.

The Trump administration’s state of nature takes inspiration from both Hobbes and Rousseau. It believes that humans are guided by dark impulses, but that social and political institutions have no right to restrain these impulses. They believe that the institutions of liberal democracy – and modern social mores – are corrupting, and the only way for humanity to be its authentic self is for it to manifest a dog-eat-dog world. Where they are the biggest and hungriest dogs.

Like Rousseau, the Trump administration is centring their own personal failings as both a set of principles, and as a political project to fundamentally change the country, as well as the global order. The aggression of the administration – and the broader MAGA movement – is driven by modern men’s grim fragility. The status sensitivity, wholesale defensiveness, anxiety about appearing weak, the puffed chests, belligerent rhetoric, and obsession with the most vulgar and clownish masculine stereotypes.

These traits highlight the deep emotional insecurity that is at the core of authoritarianism. Trump’s relentless narcissism is not confidence. He may be shameless, but this disguises his brittle self-esteem. On some level he knows that he is a profoundly ignorant and grotesquely flawed human being. He overcompensates for this with bluster and brutality. Hoping that this will cower into submission those who could expose his flaws. It has worked perfectly on the Republican Party.

Those who lack the personal capabilities to navigate the world with compromise and cooperation, only understand the world of dominance and subordination. Either you are dominating people, or you are being dominated by them. The concepts of character, friendship and trust are beyond their comprehension. It’s also why something like a country’s constitution is so inconceivable to Trump. Constraints on the use of power are for suckers. But constitutions also expose him to legalities that he knows he cannot meet.

At the core of dominance lies a low tolerance for uncertainty. Ambiguity is experienced as threat and complexity as chaos, so the world’s multiplicity provokes fear rather than curiosity. This mindset seeks psychological safety through control: by trying to make the external world rigid and predictable, it compensates for internal emotional disorder. Where self-regulation, adaptability, and persuasion feel out of reach, domination becomes a substitute.

Force becomes appealing because it negates uncertainty quickly. It creates immediate, tangible outcomes, even if those outcomes are destructive or fragile. The logic of the Trump administration is that it can use the power of the White House in a way that can calm their anxiety over uncertainty. The problem is that the world is far more complex than just who has the biggest fist, and what Trump is doing is creating greater uncertainty, not less. Which may then inspire a greater use of force.

The struggle to understand and tolerate complexity is what leads authoritarians to hold a zero sum worldview. In each transaction between people or countries one party must win and the other must lose. There is a deep cynicism towards the possibility of mutual benefit. The notion of cooperation is both naïve and risky. The potential of being the loser inspires preemptive aggression. With this aggression being seen as rational, even virtuous, because it prevents imagined losses.

This zero sum worldview is also central to the authoritarian preoccupation with hierarchies. For the Trump administration the calculation is quite simple – the U.S is the most powerful country therefore all other countries should bow in submission to it. Domestically there is an inability to emotionally cope with the natural pluralism of the U.S, which is why the White House’s fist is also directed inward at American society.

That all people are created equally and endowed with certain inalienable rights is unfathomable to authoritarians. Instead there is the need to create in-groups and out-groups, to rank groups by favour and animosity, and reject wholesale any individual agency outside of group status. Obedience to group status and hierarchical position is expected, and any divergence is met with fierce hostility. Order is only understood as strict compliance with the demands of the apex group. Not through anything as “beta” as cooperation and trust.

Power, and the ability to exercise it, is seen as the only form of legitimacy. The violence that White House is currently radiating is held to be a pure expression of humanity. Deliberation, discussion, negotiation, policy, laws and process are all deemed to be artificial. They are not just impediments to the impatient, but are considered to be impositions on an authentic and effective form of human action. Real men act with force. They don’t draft anything for circulation and input.

The thrill of violence also serves as a bonding mechanism for the in-group. It demonstrates the risk of dissenting from the group, creating mutual assured incrimination to maintain loyalty and build cohesion. Violence also becomes a rite of passage. Being recruited by ICE to be one of the administration’s jackboots is now the highest form of honour for MAGA diehards.

An aggressive demeanour is also an attempt to reverse humiliation. Trump has never gotten over being deemed too uncouth for Manhattan high society. His administration collectively views Europeans as the same cultural elites who they crave acceptance from and then lash out at because they’ll never receive it. Their belligerence is an attempt to demonstrate how weak cultural refinement is in the face of boorish intimidation.2

The suspicion of NATO, the aggression against Denmark, the support for parties like the Alternative Für Deutschland, is all driven by their sense of humiliation and a belief that undermining the liberal democratic architecture of Europe will restore their personal dignity.

Of course, this undermining of liberal democracy in Europe is also designed to build a network of supplicant authoritarian states who will not adhere to the ethical and legal standards of liberal democracy, not create laws that constrain the administration’s friends (like tech companies), and who will know their place in the hierarchy.

Trump is obviously hostile to the restraints of liberal democracy, and will no doubt do whatever he can to prevent this year’s mid-term elections from running smoothly and fairly. However, the broader Trumpian revolution is the attempt to overthrow the country’s moral character. To refashion the country in the administration’s own image – malicious, corrupt, domineering, deceitful, ignorant, myopic, emotionally insecure, erratic and irresponsible.

The Trump administration are acting this way because they imagine that they can. They’re in thrall to the potency of the White House and assert that the purpose of the office is to wield its awesome power. Yet raw power is not as straight-forward as those who hunger for it believe. The intense polarisation of American politics may have protected Trump from his previous coup attempt, but those who unleash barbarity tend to eventually have it swing back towards themselves.

As I’ve picked up some new subscribers and followers over the year – and for anyone else who may have missed an article that would interest them – I thought I’d provide a recap of some of my best writing from 2025. I spent a bit less time physically darting around the world this year compared to last year, but I still managed to be on the move content-wise.

My initial great loves in international affairs were India and Canada. I’ve been dragged away from both countries in recent years, but Donald Trump’s threats to make Canada “the 51st state” offered me an opportunity in January to write about the practical obstacles to this for The Interpreter. Canada hides its light under bushel, but its internal organisation is deeply weird and fascinating and would make the country incredibly difficult for the U.S to annex.

Since I’ve been dividing my time between Australia and Sweden the past few years I’ve also found myself becoming the unofficial welcoming committee for Swedish students studying in Melbourne. This role combined with Australia’s current housing crisis to have me sleeping on the couch as I took in a pair of students struggling to find accommodation. This allowed me to write about housing a foreign policy issue for The Interpreter, and the foreign policy gains to be made when civil society steps up to compensate for government failures.

It was also a lesson in how opening doors opens doors. I gained a new family up in Stockholm, with one of the girls’ family providing a room for me while I was visiting the city, as well as taking me out to their cabin in the woods. While I would regularly meet up with the other girl in Malmö for tea, as she is studying international relations and keen to discuss current affairs and career options.

The first major essay I published this year was on the shift in global archetype. Since the early 1990s we had been living in the world of “Davos Man” – the globally connected, cosmopolitan, technocratic tinkerer. I argued that Davos Man is now being challenged by DARVO Man. Drawing from the work of Jennifer Freyd and her concept of Deny, Attack, Reverse Victim and Offender. This is a set of behavioural patterns she observed studying interpersonal abuse, but which also clearly describes the behaviour of our new major political figures and movements.

As a revolutionary movement, the Trump Administration obviously provides a series of new ideas that require scrutiny. As well as being classic DARVO cases, the administration has also dispensed with the traditional economic ideas of the Republican Party. So I wrote about understanding the relationship between economic change and social change as the driver of the Trump Administration’s fondness for tariffs.

American politics in general is batshit crazy. It seems almost no-one is capable of understanding any issue solely on its own merits. Instead everything is filtered through a hyper-polarised media environment and psychological affliction. Thinking about this I theorised that it has been a little bureaucratic detail like picking a party affiliation when you register to vote that has created these conditions. This is what has what has transformed support for a political party into an identity. It is what enabled these two parties to own people’s souls.

Being very keen on democracy, in the lead-up to the Australian federal election in May I wrote an essay on the Community Independents Project, which I think is the most interesting democratic movement in the world at the moment. I had hoped that an article on how a grassroots political movement – that is a model of political organisation, rather than a party – can gain traction in a Western democracy would be of interest to The Atlantic. But it was deemed too niche.

Which probably says more about the U.S at the moment than the quality of the piece. With the country experiencing major democratic backsliding, but still unwilling to look outside of itself for any ideas or examples that might help arrest this backsliding ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.

Still on Australia, I wrote a piece on the meaning of the Australia idiom “she’ll be right”. The positive things it says about the country, but also the complacency that it breeds. I’ve spent the majority of my adult life trying to get away from Australia, but I think this year I may have started to recognise that there are actually some interesting things about the country. Especially with the national character.

Thinking about this became even more important following the Bondi Shooting in December and how Australia needs to foster greater social cohesion (which is strong, but there is no ceiling). I wrote two pieces for The Diplomat following the shooting – one on having a holistic understanding of social cohesion, and the other on thinking clearly about hate speech laws.

In total, I wrote 48 articles for The Diplomat last year mostly on various aspects of Australian foreign policy and domestic issues. With a few articles on New Zealand and the Pacific Islands as well - given my remit is the publication’s Oceania section.

Arguably the biggest structural issue facing the world right now is the decline in birth rates. It is a phenomenon that will impact almost every facet of domestic and global affairs. There has been much commentary about the reasons for this decline, but one factor I believe is being overlooked is that women now have higher expectations on partnership and fatherhood and men are currently struggling to meet these new social conditions.

So I wrote an essay on the decline in birth rates as a men’s issue. It is an issue of men’s character and responsibility. About how we create social structures that will draw men away from the current negative influences that are preying upon their insecurity, which is creating a chasm between the sexes. And – maybe the most difficult thing – how men can actually come to like women.

When I first started writing on Substack my intention was to write about music. To find a concept within an album and explore it as a philosophical essay. Some examples of this have been the struggle of the Welsh language through Mwng by Super Furry Animals, the Canada-America relationship through Destroyer’s Kaputt, and the idea of courage through The Danielson Famile’s Fetch The Compass Kids.

This approach led me to write this year what I think is my best piece of writing. Luke Haines’s concept album about the Red Army Faction offered a wealth of ideas. About the terrorist group obviously, but also about Haines himself, the culture of British music, and the UK at large. All wrapped up in Georg Hegel’s concept of the struggle for recognition.

I was completely convinced that this essay would send this newsletter stratospheric. There’s a certain genre of middle-aged British man to whom it would tickle every fancy, but, unfortunately, I have no idea how to reach these men’s eyeballs. I could have pitched it to The Quietus – which is where these men now all hang out – but I couldn’t risk an editor not seeing the whole board and taking a knife to it.

The essay didn’t take off. Of course, the irony – or subtext of the piece –is my own struggle for recognition. The penultimate paragraph was a metacommentary about the piece itself as well as being about the album:

Yet a more rational pursuit of risk is to create art that has ambition and vision. To take an idea and explore its possibilities and potential. For it to be daring, clever and insightful. To push the boundaries of imagination, place it in the public realm – within the vulnerability of light – and hope that others will understand and appreciate its purpose.

I jimmy’d up the album’s Wikipedia page to link to the essay, so hopefully one day it will find its way into the corners of the internet where these middle-aged British men congregate.

In October I popped over to Finland to write a couple of articles. I managed to secure meeting with the director of the Arms Control Unit in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and so I wrote a piece for The Interpreter on Finland’s withdrawal from the Ottawa Convention on the banning of landmines. With the wider problem of degradation of global initiatives designed to build a more cooperative world.

From Helsinki I hopped on the train to Turku and then the ferry to Åland, where I had the honour of being able to interview the premier and write a longer piece for The Interpreter on Åland’s unique status as a neutral, demilitarised, and Swedish-speaking autonomous region of Finland. And the complications it faces from this status.

The last major essay I wrote for the year was on the problem of our pervasive sense of emotional insecurity. I took Susan Neiman’s observation that the shift in our view of history from the victor to the victim in the 21st Century has had the unintended consequence of incentivising victimhood. I argued that this has fed the rise in identity as the driver of politics, weakening the confident individual – who is our bulwark against authoritarianism. Rather than encouraging us to learn from the brutality of the 20th Century, this shift in our view of history has created the conditions for the brutes to return.

As I mentioned in my Housekeeping post a couple of weeks ago, unfortunately, the organisation I have worked for in recent years – Asia-Pacific Development, Diplomacy and Defence Dialogue (AP4D) – is coming to a close. So I am looking around for new opportunities.

I’m aware that what I might do next may not provide me with the freedom to write. A couple of jobs I have applied for most definitely will mean ending my association with The Diplomat, and prevent me from other public writing. Which may mean pausing this newsletter, or refocusing it away from current affairs.

Although I fear I may not be hot property on the employment market anyway. My sense in Australia is that government departments tend to see public writing as a threat, rather than a demonstration of knowledge and capabilities. My CV may read like I’m a bit of a troublemaker. We will see when everyone returns to work in Australia and I start receiving rejection emails.

Ideally I would love to generate more income from just roaming the world and writing about what I find, but the structure of the publishing industry nowadays makes this impossible. Unless, of course, those middle-aged British men finally come through for me with their subscriptions.

We are all so profoundly insecure. This is the pervasive sentiment that drives our current political and social movements. The chaotic emotions of MAGA, the obsession with gender – which includes masculinist clowns like Andrew Tate, the way we’ve siloed our media into informational safe spaces, and our attempts to sterilise the past as its realities don’t meet modern standards. It’s in our obsession with political labels, partisan teams, and social identities. We’ve become incredibly uncomfortable with being human, and seemingly incapable of being confident individuals.

These various manifestations of our insecurity have developed from the emotional stress of the pace of change. The economic and social revolutions of the past century, and especially the past 30 years, have unmoored us as people. Despite our ingenuity as a species, our monkey brains are still ill-equipped to handle such rapidly shifting environments. Leaving us anxious and with a heightened threat perception.

However, this anxiety has been compounded by a change in the way we discuss our world. Due to the brutal atrocities of the 20th Century, in its concluding decades we shifted how we viewed history. Rather than seeing history through the lens of the victor, we switched to prioritise the victim. For our own humanity this was essential, but it came with an unintended consequence. Social power now lies with your ability to present yourself as a victim of history.

Rather than seek to overcome our insecurity, we instead celebrate it. Victimology teaches us that insecurity and marginalisation is what we should be striving for. This may commonly be identified in postmodern progressive politics but is also clearly present in figures like Donald Trump who – despite being the president of the United States – is responsible for nothing, and always the victim of others. His return to the White House can be understood as the push and pull of a collective sense of victimhood and the waves of social resentment that has flowed from it.

Our insecurity is driving our retreat into what Søren Kierkegaard recognised as the danger of crowds. A phenomenon that aggravates itself. The more insecure we feel, the greater the need to submit ourselves into various identity and political groups. But the more we do so, the more we feel threatened by other people doing likewise. It is in this environment – where the confident individual is weakened – that “untruth” and authoritarianism thrives.

Insecurity craves political figures to submit to, so provides fertile ground for the reemergence of personality cults – from Trump to Jeremy Corbyn. These are figures who are deemed to be holders of the singular truth and pureness of spirit. Whose word is always gold, and who therefore all authority can safely be delegated to. Figures who can relieve you of the need to think for yourself.

While there has always been a desire within humanity to outsource our brains to others, our current collective insecurity has been inflamed by the peculiar form of narcissism borne from the online age. A paradox that sees the self as the most important entity, but this self must conform to group traits. This has created the cult of identity, which sees personal and group victimhood as a path to political and institutional power.

Alongside its designs on power, identity politics’ belief is that it is striving for authenticity. Yet in reality, it is the opposite. Instead of being authentic, identity is affected and laboured. It is the performance of personality, fabricated for the attention economy and then exported out into the polity.

Genuine authenticity doesn’t constantly think about itself. It is simply the confidence to be. But the confident individual doesn’t exist within a vacuum, there is no authenticity without a recognition of humanity’s social context, with its duties and responsibilities to others. Identity, however, is often anti-social with its rejection of both broader humanity and local culture. It sees self-exertion as its priority.

While identity believes itself to be culture, it is distinct in critical ways. Genuine culture exists within habits, manners and traditions. It is the unconscious inheritance of people within a community. It has no need to advertise itself. It doesn’t require a loudspeaker, overt symbols, or to be continuously affirmed. While nations may have flags, they don’t necessarily need them. Flag-waving is often an expression of the nation as an identity, rather than a culture. The contrived performance of a nation, rather than the subconscious application of its customs.

Nations and communities of confidence and resilience can handle debate and disagreement. They can house a myriad of ideas within a framework of common practices and interests. By contrast, insecure nations and communities – and especially political teams – demand conformity. They see those who don’t fall in line as threats and become aggressive in their attempts to police behaviour.

As insecurity and identity have taken hold throughout the West, we have become people without qualities. To be resilient and adaptable garners us no attention and therefore has no social worth. Neither does having the character to live by integrity and responsibility. This degradation of character has revealed that political norms – and even constitutions – are easily dispensed with by the corrupt and deceitful.

This degradation of character is being exacerbated by the pathologising of the human condition. Where normal, everyday, feelings or behaviours are deemed to be symptoms of a mental disorder. To have a hobby now is to be autistic. To be organised and tidy is OCD, to be disorganised and messy is ADHD. These “mental illnesses” have also become an identity. Repackaged as being “neurodivergent” and included in one’s social media bio.

Pathologising is not only central to victimhood but driven by a desire to have an excuse. We are eschewing personal responsibility and asking others to permanently deem us to be incapable of any adult task. We no longer have the capabilities to navigate the world with confidence. We no longer expect this of ourselves.

Stripping away character and confidence has left us devoid of the public narratives required to encourage positive action in our daily lives and to strive for greatness. As the philosopher Susan Neiman has recognised, the shift in our view of history has not just encouraged victimhood, it has taken away the hero as a central actor in the stories we tell and as an exemplar of human behaviour.

The hero encouraged virtue. The hero’s appeal is different to the appeal of personality cults. His role was to simply be emblematic of positive ambition, demonstrating principled leadership and human excellence. To provide inspiration, not submission. The hero played an especially important role in directing the energy of young men towards positive outlets. Giving young men guidance and purpose, without which their energy can turn chaotic and dangerous.

The problem we face now is that the desire for heroism remains, but without any positive extraordinary efforts within both our history and modern stories this demand is being serviced by people with nefarious ambition, like Trump and Elon Musk. These grotesque men are being valorised because they’re the only men who seem to be demonstrating any ambition, and there is no prominent counter-model to encourage our better angels.

The influence of nefarious ambition is not only degrading our political institutions, but our social infrastructure as well – creating the extensive mistrust that compounds insecurity. The relationship between bullying and victimhood is obviously symbiotic. There are real, genuine, victims who are subject to the brutality of others. But bullies tend to see themselves as victims of social conditions that aren’t servicing their psychological needs. So, as we’ve centred victimhood in our stories, we’ve created fertile soil for bullies to roam.

This practice of victimhood therefore weakens our mutual cooperation. The lines between perceived threats and genuine threats become blurred, and everyone who may be different – whether it be skin colour, religion, or political views – becomes suspicious. The practice of victimhood hasn’t advanced empathy; it has done the very opposite. It has led us to retreat further into insular, insecure, and agitated groups.

As economic and social change are conjoined twins (with the former one foot ahead of the latter), our social institutions – like religion – that could have grounded us through our escalating innovation have also been swept aside. We now lack the forms of organisation that gave us a broad common purpose and thicker social relations.

Despite disputes between religions and denominations periodically turning sectarian and violent, the traditional religions at their best restrained us from descending inward into parochial niche groups, and especially inward into ourselves. They could provide a social binding agent, even in plural societies of multiple faiths.

In this way, their merit was less about the worship of God, and more about asking us to think about others, rather than ourselves. You would turn up to your church, synagogue or mosque and it gave you a genuine, in-person, community. And it – hopefully, depending on the sermon – left you with a series of outward-facing ideas that inspired duty and virtue in your daily behaviour. The traditional religions could be character-building machines.

Although commitment to these religions has waned, our desire for mysticism hasn’t abated. It has instead found new outlets that are far less socially constructive. Our new mystical beliefs like wellness, genderism, and the sovereign citizen movement, are entirely self-centred. They see their primary obligation as being to oneself, and any communal duties and responsibilities are seen as discriminatory threats.

Such self-centred movements have capitalised on the privatisation of “the good”. A shift in collective thinking where maximising personal advantage is deemed life’s primary objective. Creating a social form of neoliberalism – where homo economicus has been joined by homo identicus. While the objective of homo economicus has been to simply maximise income as a worker and gains as consumer, homo identicus seeks to maximise social power by placing demands on societies to be recognised as requiring privileges due to group and/or victim status.

These demands of homo identicus are therefore in direct challenge to the rule of law. They seek to create law not on mutually beneficial principles where everyone is equal before the law, but instead where those of perceived victimhood status are favoured by the law. This has further incentivised victimhood as a path not just to social power, but state power. An incentive that movements like MAGA have also understood as an opportunity to subvert the rule of law through their own narratives of victimhood.

Our pervasive insecurity is now eating away at our institutional and political structures. It is eating away at our pluralism and social cooperation. It is eating away at our ability to derive genuine meaning from our lives, and it is eating away at our ability to be resilient, character-bound, confident individuals. The latter of which is our bulwark against authoritarianism.

Shifting our view of history from the victor to the victim hasn’t led us to learn from the brutal mistakes of the 20^th Century. It has instead created the conditions for the brutes to return.

Newsletter Name Change

Those with a keen eye will have noticed that this newsletter has a new name. Since I launched I have been struggling to find a name I’m comfortable with. Initially called International Blue, I wrote an essay explaining the ideas behind this name. And while I still stand by those ideas, the name never felt right.

Then, A Bridge Adjusting to the Water was a line taken from the Broadcast song I Found The F.

This was meant to represent something of a Daoist idea. With water being a central metaphor in Daoist philosophy. Symbolising flexibility and the ability to adapt to circumstances. But also ideas like strength through softness and being effective without force. These are all good things. Yet the title evoked something more distinct. Instead the concept was my observations above the flowing of humanity.

Clearly this placed me outside – or even above – the flowing of humanity. Although the job of a writer is often to observe from a distance, there’s an arrogance here as well. Of not seeing oneself as a participant.

So instead, I should be jumbled in the common box. The initial idea here is an acknowledgement that there is no set theme to this newsletter. I write what I’m interested in, and I’m interested in everything. While different articles may seem unrelated, they are all jumbled in the common box. This box is the concentric circles that radiate out from ones personal behaviour and character, to the household, community and culture, urban environment, local and domestic politics and their institutions, to foreign policy all the way up to grand international strategy. Each is of critical importance, and each exists within a relationship to the others.

The title is taken from the opening line of the W.H Auden poem Domesday Song. The poem written in 1939 was designed to depict a reckoning moment. An understanding that there was a transition between world orders taking place. This seems apt for today, with our own return of the brutes and the threat to the post-1945 world order – abandoning the common box.

Round the rampant rugged rocks, rude and ragged rascals run.

However, I can’t claim great knowledge of mid-20th Century poets, as my introduction to the poem came through The Underground Lovers song From ‘Jumbled in the Common Box’ which adapts Auden’s poem for its lyrics. The song is also notable for the band’s experimenting with drum ‘n’ bass, which dated the song for a long period, but, as these things tend to do, has become cool again. And popular, with NewJeans utilising the style for their song Super Shy (complete with a dance routine that does not match the lyrics at all).

Some Recent Writing

After this week’s horrific mass shooting in Sydney, I wrote a piece for The Diplomat on the need for Australia to have a holistic understanding of all the forces that undermine social cohesion. This tragedy was driven by the transnational force of Islamic State and the entrenched conspiracies of antisemitism. But there is a broader political landscape that is encouraging people to see themselves primarily as subgroups, rather than Australians. With the postmodernism advanced by progressive politics – and then enthusiastically embraced by MAGA (with its global influence) –having a particularly corrosive social effect.

In October I took a trip to Finland. This was my fifth visit to the country, but the first time I moved outside Helsinki. Although while in Helsinki I managed to secure a meeting with the Director of the Arms Control division in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and subsequently wrote a piece for The Interpreter on Finland’s withdrawal from the Ottawa Convention – the agreement that bans the use, stockpiling, and production anti-personnel landmines.

From Helsinki I jumped on the train to Turku, spent a couple of days working in the library there, and then hopped on the ferry to Åland. This group of islands is an autonomous, demilitarised, neutral, and Swedish-speaking region of Finland. All fascinating stuff. So I thought there was an article in this as well. I reached out to the government in Åland to see if there was anyone I could ask a few questions to – expecting to just have a chat with someone from the bureaucracy – and they responded that the premier would be happy to meet with me. So that was a bit of a coup. Interviewing her enabled me to write a longer piece for The Interpreter on Åland’s unique status, the history of how it gained this status, and the problems the region it currently faces.

Job Ending

Unfortunately, the organisation I have worked for the past four years – Asia-Pacific Development, Diplomacy & Defence Dialogue (AP4D) – is coming to conclusion. Our funders haven’t been able to provide us with the means to continue.

This is deeply disappointing, as it has been the most amazing job. Our mission has been to promote a more integrated approach to Australian foreign policy. For each arm of Australia’s international engagement to understand how it relates to others and how these can be better coordinated for maximum impact. The two overarching concepts we’ve advanced have been using “all tools of statecraft” and a “whole-of-nation” approach to foreign policy.

For a small team we’ve had a significant impact. Both these concepts have been internalised by the government, and our reach within other institutions and the public has also been significant.

So we are very proud of what we have achieved. Personally, I have learned a lot and developed a range of new skills. Including public speaking and presenting skills. My primary objective in life has been just to sit quietly alone with my own thoughts, so being pushed to break this impulse has been positive. I’m a more well-rounded man now.

Next Steps

I haven’t had a chance to think considerably about what I will do next, as I’ve been wrapping up the final bits of work at AP4D and switching hemispheres back to Melbourne from Sweden. I always have lots to write about, and my Google Drive is bursting with half-finished essays. I’m hoping to have some time over the summer here in Australia to clear this backlog. Although, I tend to start two or three essays for every one I complete, so I’m always playing catch-up.

I also have a book to write. I planned out my idea a little while back, but yet to begin writing it. The book will be the intersection of all my loves: Taking music and explaining it through the lens of politics, sociology, philosophy, history and cultural criticism. A bit like my like my essay on Luke Haines’s Baader Meinhof album – which I think is my best piece of writing.

Yet I am also exploring other employment options. Within the realm of foreign policy and other fields. I’m sure something interesting will come along.

Editing Work

In the meantime, I thought I’d also offer my services as an freelance editor. Should the right full-time job not materialise immediately, this would buy me some time and flexibility to work on my book idea and other personal writing. It would also allow me to focus on one of my great loves – being infuriatingly pedantic about language use and its implications.

So, any organisation that needs assistance, please see below!

Within the ornate halls of the Kremlin sits the silverback – grinning ear to ear. A man small in stature, but large in malevolence. The man instills fears, but is also fearful. He knows he is weak, and lets very few people near him as a result, but he has an appetite for chaos and destruction that protects him from challenge. As long as others worry about what he may do next, his dominance is secure.

Across the Atlantic in what is ostensibly the more powerful seat sits the blackback. In his home turf, he’s convinced many that he is the dominant male. But his bluster and shamelessness disguise a man deeply ignorant and out of this depth. His one skill has been sensing opportunity within a broken society, and using its fractures and insecurities to vault himself to its peak.

Despite having the power at his disposal to restrain the silverback, the blackback is instead deferential and submissive. He admires and fancies the silverback, and so offers no challenge. He sees his role as facilitating the silverback’s appetites. No matter how much death and destruction these cravings create. Power lies where men think it lies, and the blackback thinks it lies in Moscow.

Humanity’s hubris was to think that we had transcended this world. The grand feats of human endeavour – from our art and architecture, to scientific advancements and off-world adventures – have been a façade. Behind this, the basest instincts of our primate DNA have persisted. We may think our modern urban environments display our sophistication and civilisation, but the jungle has grown back.

We have once again become slaves to the pathetic dance of male performance. With its puffed up chests and rhetorical bravado, designed to hide its insecurities and anxieties. It’s tiresome and dismal, turbulent and troublesome, but we continue entrusting it with power. For all our great cognitive abilities, we keep thinking security lies within the authority of the “alpha”. The lesson is never learned. We keep falling for the ruse.

This is our own collective emotional vulnerability. Men like Putin and Trump prey upon our lack of confidence. The deep insecurity of our current age has made us more susceptible to obedience, more tribal and herd-like in our behaviour. Making it far easier for power to be concentrated in the hands of those with nefarious ambition.

These men have also thrived as the cancer of post-modernism has eaten away at our civic values, and in particular our empathy. Post-modernism is built on the belief that there are no universal truths or objective reality. Reason and rationality are smokescreens. The only thing that exists is one’s subjective feelings and the power to exert them. It is in this world where those with the most feelings – those with no emotional regulation – prevail.

This is a world of sociopathy.

What has made us human, and separated us from our primate ancestors has been our emotional regulation. Our ability to cool ourselves down, think about consequences, and build greater affinity and compassion amongst ourselves. To be more predictable in our behaviour. To – at our best – value and promote these traits. To give these cooperative traits power.

Yet we’re still impressionable. Men in particular are impressed by force and passion. The gym is the weirdest fucking place on Earth, but men feel bonded to the muscle of other men. It’s the soft power of hard power. And it is what drives the attraction of men like Putin and Trump. And what drives Trump’s attraction to Putin.

So we are now again bound to the animal spirits. To the insecurity of the food chain, and the men who still think they’re in it. With the chest-beating, the strutting and grunting. The shaking of trees for attention. The spitting and hissing. It’s chimp chaos with the nuclear codes. And it’s the grim existence we are rapidly devolving into.

This is part three in my series of op-eds written for the Melbourne broadsheet The Age, which the paper rejects. You can read part 1 Train in Vain and part 2 Character Development.

The series is build around two premises. 1) The Age is deeply fretful about the city’s growth and is hostile to major projects that would facilitate this growth1, and 2) the paper’s opinion page is shit. Devoid of big ideas and full of terrible writing.

I have decided to keep sending them articles that I know go against their editorial line in a futile attempt to have them to take their role seriously. Every serious city needs a serious newspaper where big ideas about the city are discussed.

Given the paper’s obsession with the cost of the SRL, I thought that this piece might have a shot of being published. But their fretfulness can only understand “cancel the project”, not “bring down the costs”.

Here is the piece:

This week Montreal opened the second section of the Réseau express métropolitain, or REM. A rapid transit system that connects the southern suburbs, through the heart of the city to the north. Two branches off the main line – one to the west of the city and another to the airport – will open in 2026 and 2027 respectively. Once fully complete there will be 67 kms of new track and 19 new stations. The total cost of the project is around 10 billion Australian dollars.

I am writing this article from Sweden, where in Stockholm there is a major expansion to the Tunnelbana currently under construction. A whole new line is being added, plus extensions to two other lines. A total of 30 kms of new track and 18 new stations. The cost is just under 9 billion Australian dollars.

In Melbourne, the first stage of the Suburban Rail Loop’s (SRL) will consist of 26 kms of new track and six new stations. The cost shall be at least 30 billion. Triple the cost of these other projects, for considerably less construction.

Canada and Sweden are not low-wage countries. They are not countries that skimp on safety or quality. They are not countries without dense bureaucratic webs and a range of different stakeholders to be placated. Yet they have found a way to navigate this more efficiently and effectively. With a lazer-like focus on outcomes.

Yet it seems no-one in the Victorian government has thought to pick up the phone and ask them how they’ve done it. The SRL CEO, sitting up in Brisbane in his shorts and thongs, hasn’t thought that maybe global best practice is something he should consider?

Aside from the appropriate use of taxpayers’ money, the reason this is a problem is not because the SRL is a bad project. It is because the scale of rail infrastructure Melbourne needs to build is so immense that it is essential projects are delivered in a more cost-effective way.

Melbourne is a good 50 years behind where it needs to be with its rail network. The premier likes to mention that we’ll be the population of London by 2050, but even with the SRL and the new Metro Tunnel we are nowhere near having anything as extensive as the Tube. Even with our current population we are being embarrassed by cities half our size like Stockholm and Copenhagen, with their dense metro systems.

The Andrews/Allan governments have understood the necessity to build. Its first two projects, the Metro Tunnel and the Level Crossing Removal Project have been about problem solving. Allowing more trains to move more often. The SRL is about offering new avenues and reshaping the way we move around the city. But it is not enough.

The cost of the SRL has meant that Metro 2 has been kicked down the road. Metro 2 is essential for the Fishermans Bend precinct to reach its full potential. Without it, the area is a useless plot of land. As the University of Melbourne has recently recognised. The government’s lack of urgency on this project is short-sighted and neglectful. Were we as thrifty as the Canadians or Swedes we could afford both it and the SRL.

Over the past few elections the Victorian public have made a pragmatic calculation. Faced with the choice between a party that builds expensively and inefficiently, and a party that is hostile to building anything at all, they have sensibly chosen the former.

But politics doesn’t have to be this way. It doesn’t have to be a game of simply being for or against something. It can be a contest between doing things and doing things better. The New South Wales Liberal Party has understood this. With that state now having the luxury of two major parties trying to outcompete each other on rail projects.

This week’s change in leadership of the Liberal Party in Victoria offers an opportunity to follow suit. To position themselves as a party that will build, and build with greater efficiency. To be a party that wants to be responsible towards – and think big about – Melbourne’s future. With a promise to implement global best practice in doing so.

We have entered into a new era of urban construction. With major cities around the world understanding that public transit networks are the essential veins that allow their cities to thrive. Melbourne’s decades of rail network neglect has left us playing catch up. Unless we can bring down construction costs, we will continue to miss the train.

Shashi Tharoor can often seem like relic from a previous era of Indian politics. A man of refined manners and affectations, a charming eloquence and a born raconteur. He evokes the cohort of Indian politicians who drove the country’s independence movement – educated in the West’s great cathedrals of learning, and entirely comfortable in their halls of power and cultural milieu. India’s first prime minister post-independence – Jawaharal Nehru – joked that he was “the last English ruler of India”. Throughout his career, Tharoor has been a keen Nehruvian – in both style and substance.

At 22, Tharoor was the then youngest person to receive a PhD from the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University, having already obtained two Masters degrees. He immediately pivoted this into a career at the United Nations, first in the High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR) and then in the Peacekeeping Operations Department. He would eventually seek the job of UN Secretary General, finishing second of seven candidates in 2006, just behind Ban Ki-moon.

From here Tharoor turned his attention to Indian domestic politics. Winning the federal seat of Thiruvananthapuram in Kerala representing the Congress Party in 2009. A seat he has held ever since. Upon his election, he was made Minister of State for External Affairs – which is an assistant minister position in India – in the second government of Manmohan Singh, and given the role of advancing relations with African countries, where his fluency in French served the job well.

I happened to wander by his constituency office when I was in Kerala in 2016. Which is my kind of sight-seeing.

Despite being an MP – and an assistant minister for his first five years in parliament –somehow Tharoor has managed to also be a prolific writer. Barely a year has passed over the last decade and a half without him publishing a book. He is comfortable writing on history, foreign affairs, domestic politics, religion, as well as biographies of major Indian figures. He has published 25 books in total.

Yet these are not just works of non-fiction, as there are four novels among them. Most notably the slyly titled The Great Indian Novel, which is built on an ingenious framework that takes the Mahabharata – the epic poem of Hindu mythology – and resets its themes within the Indian independence movement and first decades of independence. With the major figures of Indian politics at the time taking on the traits of the characters from the Mahabharata.

Tharoor is also a compelling and persuasive speaker. He loves the thrust and parry of an argument, and can make one better than most. Even if his adherence to evidence can sometimes wane, he has honed a style of speaking that draws in an audience and leaves them fascinated by every word.

This all marks Tharoor as one of the world’s most disgusting overachievers. One of these people who has the confidence to turn his attention to whatever he likes, and excel at doing so. Making us all look pathetic by comparison.

Yet for all his achievements, the one job Tharoor actually wants – prime minister of India –is seemingly beyond his grasp. There are two big structural reasons for this.

The first is India’s current domestic political conditions. Although when Tharoor entered parliament, the Congress Party were strong enough to be able to lead a coalition government, this dramatically shifted with the rise of Narendra Modi as the leader of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and the majorities it was able to achieve at the 2014 and 2019 elections – and although short of a majority in 2024, still comfortably the largest party in the Lok Sabha (lower house). Despite improvements in its position at the last election, Congress is still a shell of its former dominant self.

The other structural reason thwarting Tharoor’s ambitions is the internal politics of the Congress Party. The party is the family business of the Gandhi family, and maintaining control of the party is their primary purpose.

Although Nehru himself would have likely found this situation unacceptable, his descendants have made the party their own following his death. His daughter Indira Gandhi was prime minster from 1966-1977, and again from 1980 until her assassination in 1984, her son Rajiv became PM following his mother’s death until 1989 (and was assassinated himself in 1991), and Rajiv’s wife, Sonia, became party leader in 1998.

Although Sonia would lead the party to victory in 2004, the BJP’s hostility towards her Italian heritage led her to step aside for Manmohan Singh to become prime minister. Since the defeat of the Singh government in 2014, Rajiv and Sonia’s son Rahul has either been the official or effective co-leader of the party with his mother – and he is currently serving as leader of the opposition in the parliament. Although, on paper at least, both he and Sonia have relinquished the presidency of the party.

This is the wall Tharoor found himself up against when the Congress Party held an internal election for the party presidency in 2022. The Gandhi family at the time felt that the optics of their party control was detrimental to its electoral fortunes, and decided to (formally, at least) relinquish the presidency. Tharoor sensed his opportunity to gain greater power within the party and use the position to elevate himself as the man who could effectively challenge and defeat Modi.

But, of course, the Gandhis would have seen Tharoor’s personal popular reach and independent ideas as a threat to their own power. And so a loyalist was found in Mallikarjun Kharge, and party members were strong-armed into throwing their support behind him. Kharge won 84% of the vote to Tharoor’s 11%.

Initially Tharoor accepted this with grace. But recently both his disgruntlement and ambition has begun to bubble to the surface. He’s been engaged in considerable, what we call in Australia, “freelancing” – when an MP starts pursuing ideas and positions outside of their party platform. In an attempt to build his power outside of the party.

This has begun by endorsing a number of foreign policy initiatives by the BJP-led government – including Operation Sindoor, which launched missile strikes on Pakistan-based militant groups Jaish-e-Mohammed and Lashkar-e-Taiba following the terrorist attacks in Kashmir. This led to Tharoor being sent by the government on a diplomatic mission to explain India’s actions to the world. With this mission probably being less about Tharoor’s eloquence on foreign media outlets, and more about seeking to wedge Congress on national security issues.

Tharoor has also raised the ire of his party by praising L.K Advani – the former BJP politician who played a central role in the destruction of the Babri Masjid by a Hindu nationalist mob in 1992. Given that the destruction of the mosque and the subsequent building of a Hindu temple on its site is the central story in the BJP’s rise to power, one could see such praise for Advani as the path to making Tharoor acceptable to the BJP. Maybe not as an MP crossing the floor, but potentially for another official role like an ambassador, or even – at a stretch – India’s ceremonial presidency.

While Tharoor’s outreach to the BJP is a mild irritant to Congress, his direct attacks on his party have been infuriating.

Tharoor has recently written critically of “The Emergency” declared by Indira Gandhi from 1975-1977 – where elections were suspended, media and civil liberties were restricted and Gandhi’s political opponents were imprisoned. While Gandhi’s other son, Sanjay, oversaw a mass campaign of vasectomies. The Emergency was unquestionably a dark period of Indian history, but raising it is the third rail of internal Congress Party politics. No MP wanting to have a future in the party would do so.

If this wasn’t a big enough poke in the eye to the Gandhi family, two weeks ago he wrote an article for Project Syndicate titled Indian Politics are a Family Business. Tharoor’s article stated that “dynastic politics pose a grave threat to Indian democracy.” He declared it “problematic when candidates’ main qualification is their surname.” And that members of political families “are often particularly ill-equipped to respond effectively to their constituents’ needs.” And, in a clear dismissal of his own lost election for the party presidency, claimed there was a need for “meaningful internal party elections.”

All this was a hefty grenade hurled over the fence of 10 Janpath – the Gandhi family residence in New Delhi. It is likely that the relationship between Tharoor and the family is now permanently broken.

Yet it has been another recent endeavour by Tharoor that will have raised some eyebrows outside of India. At the start of September, Tharoor began a series called Imperial Receipts – based on his book Inglorious Empire – for the Russian propaganda network, RT. Which was formerly known as Russia Today, but retreated into just RT to disguise its origins in the hope of expanding its influence.

Tharoor is, of course, not wrong to expose the nature of Britain’s colonial project in India. Yet doing so via an outlet of blatant Russian propaganda reeks of a certain cynicism. Not to mention hypocrisy, given Russia’s own brutal imperialism. Both historical and present.

The purpose for RT with such a program is to arouse anti-Western sentiments within India (and beyond), and have these be converted into a suspicion towards the West’s support for Ukraine. To establish a narrative that that the West aren’t just historical colonial brutes, but modern-day ones too. To create the informational conditions that would lead people to believe Russian narratives that it is the actual victim in its invasion of Ukraine.

As India is now courted by the West as an essential partner to balance the power of the People’s Republic of China, and hopefully play a role in countering Russian aggression, Moscow is using programs like this – and people like Tharoor – to try and prevent more cooperative and friendly relations between India and the West.

Tharoor is smart enough to know that the Russians are using him in this way, and smart enough to know Russia’s narrative that he is helping advance is pure bullshit. But his cynical ambition and desperate need for the spotlight is clouding his better judgement. It is unfortunately the case with men like Tharoor that the one capability they lack is the most important one – humility.