They are not building a civilisation. They are running a concession stand at the edge of a cliff, arguing over the price of peanuts while the ground crumbles beneath them.
This is not a metaphor. It is the operating principle of our time.
Look around. The evidence is in the flicker of your lights and the drop of your wifi – the cascading failure of basic infrastructure, met with a theatrical shrug. It is in the quiet, accepted tragedy that people died during a telecommunications outage, their lives reduced to a temporary public relations problem.
This failure of foresight and fundamental duty is not confined to the power grid. It is the very air we breathe, the society we inhabit. Observe the pattern, right across the spectrum:
- On Climate Change: We are offered magical thinking and faith in future technology while the planet burns. The ultimate long-term threat is met with the shortest of short-term political calculations.
- On Social Fabric: We see a deliberate erosion of the safety net – housing insecurity, food insecurity, children in poverty – all while the machinery of revenue collection, fines, and punitive measures grinds on with ruthless efficiency. The state is increasingly adept at taking, and abdicating its role in providing.
- On “Security”: We embark on grandiose, multi-generational military spending programs like AUKUS, a fortress mentality projected outward, while the domestic foundations of national strength – healthy, educated, and secure citizens – are left to rot. We are building a battleship while the crew is starving.
- On Morality: We witness a genocide in Gaza and a government that, through word and deed – from allowing the export of weapons components to offering diplomatic cover – becomes complicit. The same leaders who provide photo-ops at food banks, celebrating the “kindness” of multinational corporations that profit from the very inequality that creates the need for charity, have normalised a profound moral bankruptcy.
This is the “new normal”: a world where we are expected to accept the unacceptable. Where locking up children for so-called ‘adult’ offences is just another line in a budget, while the real, adult failures of leadership go unpunished.
The system is not failing. It is functioning exactly as designed – to preserve itself and the flows of power and profit, even at the cost of its own people and its own future. The billing continues. The performances of governance continue. But the project of building a just, resilient, and moral society has been abandoned.
The most damning part is that we are no longer surprised. We have been conditioned to expect the concession stand to run out of peanuts, for the cliff to erode further, and for the bill for this monumental inaction to be paid in lives, stability, and a habitable planet.
To be unsurprised is to be complicit. It is time to be outraged again. It is time to demand more than peanuts from the edge of the abyss.
Keep Independent Journalism Alive – Support The AIMN
Dear Reader,
Since 2013, The Australian Independent Media Network has been a fearless voice for truth, giving public interest journalists a platform to hold power to account. From expert analysis on national and global events to uncovering issues that matter to you, we’re here because of your support.
Running an independent site isn’t cheap, and rising costs mean we need you now more than ever. Your donation – big or small – keeps our servers humming, our writers digging, and our stories free for all.
Join our community of truth-seekers. Donate via PayPal or credit card via the button below, or bank transfer [BSB: 062500; A/c no: 10495969] and help us keep shining a light.
With gratitude, The AIMN Team
Yeah. That’s all true. But, who are “THEY”? It looks as if “THEY” are the people that we elect to lead us in government, and we admire, to lead us in the media, and to sell us products very cheaply.
Ralph Nader had the great idea, many decades ago, to have a ‘consumer-led’ social change. He himself lived very modestly. It could have worked.
But alas, people wanted the cheap “good ” life- so now we buy from Amazon, knowing that they treat their workers like shit.
And we buy the obsession with our “safety”, so we’re happy to be led by “strong, tough” ultra-competitive men, rather than by more intelligent thoughtful men, and by -heaven-forfend – women.
So those rather stupid tough guys are making decisions for us in the interests of greedy and aggressive men, not in the interests of everyone.
There are millions of decent, kind, people out there, wanting something better. But alas, we choose leaders who will keep us “safe” and “comfortable”. Until there’s a magical zeitgeist about leading a simpler life, with clear thinking, and talking compassionately with foreigners, we’re on a path to destruction.
As an example – for clear thinking – the latest horror of mass murder of Jews must be condemned as an atrocity. At the same time, we should continue to condemn the Zionist horror of genocide, and not let those perpetrators shut us up.
I’m afraid that its really us who are “THEY”, choosing our comforts and ‘protection’ provided by greedy, ambitious, aggressive and rather stupid men.
There is a way out of the stalemate, however we have to wake up.
Or mother nature will do that for you, she already is.
And yes, we need reminding of how shitty Government has become in this country
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2025/dec/15/centrelink-employment-provider-services-payment-suspensions
Noel Wauchope, a relevant and pertinent question.
The “they” is us, the people who elect those who do what we allow them to do, what we see everyday and say to ourselves that we don’t have the power to change it.
We are many and those other “they” are few, we have the power if we choose to acknowledge it and then use it.
We have been conditioned into submission, it is what those who take the power from us and use it for their own enrichment and aggrandisement want us to do, and we have obliged, as long as we get a little bit for ourselves and as long as those who don’t have enough don’t impinge upon our little lives.
While ever we put those who are tasked to govern in our name on pedestals, as long as those who are super wealthy are seen as successful and not avaricious beyond all need or even want, as long as we heroise people who throw, kick and hit balls in stadia, stadia that we pay for and then pay for again to go and cheer them on, as long as we accept that a certain number of people will be beyond poverty stricken, out of work, poorly educated and unhoused, the “they” to which you refer, is always and only “the people”.
Society only makes huge changes only when the people finally wake up and acknowledge and use the power that they have, that they have always had but which they have given to others in the belief that those others will use the power we have handed them in a way that benefits all of us.
We never blame ourselves for the situations in which we find ourselves, there is always someone else to whom we can point a finger.