Like many other books, this book also exhorts us to be more humane. But it does more than that. It explores the way the machine is put together. Don’t worry, it’s in plain English and the scope is wide – from banks to our need for social inclusion, from wages to early cities that were non-patriarchal. The book explores what feeds into the machine, how it works and – most importantly – whether there’s an off switch. I think there is.

It was never obvious that structuring society around selfishness was going to work. That idea emerged over a century ago from an economic theory. That theory spawned the neoliberal ideology of rugged individualism and selfish competition. It is a perverse caricature of human nature. And it is failing. There was another ideology, that said we should all cooperate, all the time. That one failed miserably too – it was called communism.

People are much more complex and interesting than those caricatures. Sometimes we compete, sometimes we cooperate. It is in the balancing of those tendencies that all the uncertainty, challenge and richness of our lives arise. Taoists figured that out a long time ago: the art of the good life is to balance the Yin with the Yang.

In fact we are highly social – why else would we need language, another core part of our humanity. We have a strong innate tendency to cooperate with those we perceive as part of ‘our’ group. 

Towards strangers we may be more indifferent. That indifference can be turned to caring if we are open and generous, but if we allow ourselves to be driven by fear we will slip into hostility. From such unmanaged fears arise most of the troubles in the world, as is being demonstrated so heartbreakingly as we meet here.

If our society is more divided, more shrill, more fragile and more at risk than it was forty years ago, and I believe it is, that is not an accident. Neoliberalism’s great social engineering experiment has been an economic failure and a social disaster.

If we put aside ideologies and look at the real world, it’s easy enough to see that real markets follow the profit. If it is profitable to skimp on the ‘care’ part of aged care, then that is what will happen. If it is profitable to dump pollution into the landscape or the atmosphere rather than to clean it up, that is what will happen.

The natural world is our life support system. If we trash it, we trash ourselves. If it dies, we die. Our very beings have arisen from the natural, living world. Our bodies developed there. Our ability to perceive the world developed within the endless variety of the natural world. Our brains, our very thoughts arose from being part of the natural world.

However by now most of us are ‘civilised’, citified, urbanised. We live in rectangular boxes and are subjected to harsh artificial noises much of the time. We wonder why we are impatient, angry or depressed, why mental illness is becoming more common, why we feel lonely. Our dysfunctional markets serve us poor food and we get fat and unhealthy.

We are not built for such a life. We are built for living in a small, intimate community immersed in nature, drawing food fresh from nature. We need the endless variety and complexity of nature to keep our brains and beings healthy.

Here in Australia we whitefellas have yet to learn to live properly in this land. We trash the bush and flog the soil, filling it with stimulants and poisons, paving it over. It’s not working. The land is degrading. We are surprised by the great floods and the megafires.

We work desperately to extract, make, use and dump ever more stuff, though it doesn’t make us happy, and our frenetic ‘economic activity’ is fouling the land and the planet. 

On the other hand some things are kept artificially scarce, like jobs, so we have to keep running on the treadmill, which keeps getting faster, by design. We wonder why we don’t have time to smell the eucalyptus after rain.

We have nearly forgotten how to work with the good kind of growth, the kind that creates the abundance of the Earth, if we get out of the way and let it. We can learn to recycle everything, as the living world around us recycles everything.

We, in this vast land, grovel to a great and powerful friend, and it is claimed we are safer that way. However security comes not from a ‘balance of threats’ but from an absence of threats.

We will be less threatened if we are less threatening. That requires us to stop allowing ourselves to be driven by fear. It requires us to choose to act from love. That in turn requires the self-awareness to recognise when our fear is triggered, and the courage to remain open and vulnerable anyway, and to reach out to another human being, who is just like us.

Our options are much more positive than is commonly thought. The earliest cities, it turns out, were egalitarian, not patriarchal hierarchies. We can stop mindless material growth. We know how to raise secure, peaceable children. We can harness money and banks to good works. We can negotiate joint sovereignty between First Australians and settlers. We know how to avoid being driven by fear. We can thrive within a thriving natural world.

The question is not whether we can beg a government to do these things for us. The question is not whether these things are too hard. The question is whether we are willing to hold such a positive vision. If we do, then we will find we can only work towards making it real. When enough of us do that, it will begin to manifest.

We may find things can improve quite rapidly, if we go about it the right way. How, you might wonder, could we persuade the average surly punter to come along? Well, perhaps we could start by offering them a decent and secure income. We could raise the minimum wage, and all wages. The economy would be stimulated (read the book). Battlers’ lives would be easier and they would be less surly. The professional haters would find less fertile ground. People would be more open to taking the next step on the path.