Navigating Collective Emptiness: Aftermath of the Referendum
The Emptiness Within and Its Tremendous Potential
Over the last couple of days I’ve been listening to podcasts of Nora Bateson and Esther Perel And I’ve listened in relation to the questions I’ve been pondering personally and collectively to see what leans it can bring to bear on the emptiness that follows the referendum, because we cannot help asking the question, If not ‘Yes’ does that mean more of the same. If not here then where does the shift in Australian consciousness begin and if not out there in society does it mean that it must begin within? One of my favourite jokes comes to mind, ”What’s the difference between a jokn and a rhetorical question? … What’s the difference between a joke and a rhetorical question?…”
Ahh, there’s that empiness again.
Relationship Building: Beyond Policies and Politics
But within that empy space there’s an enormous buzzing of something trying to happen. The aftermath of the ‘No’ vote has left the ‘Yes’ campaigner and voters in collective trauma. A small part of us that had invested so much energy in generating new life, for some a large part, is in shock, arrested by shock. For some it will be to much and they will drift away and look for ways to survive the break identity visited upon them, others will come out of the shockened quickened, looking for th eplace to begin whatever comes next. What is felt most deeply by both is the need for self care and self development to go beyond and if possible live a larger life than the one before the referendum defeat. That self care and self development is about building and rebuilding relationationships. For the things we thought a “Yes” vote would instigate in fact do not happen by a government policy, or even a n article in the constitution, but by the quality of the relationship between those moved to vote “yes“ and those moved to vote “no”. We know that referendums in Australia only succeed if they have bipartisan support. In this context, we should see bipartisanship not so much as a temporary political alliance but as an identity relationship. It requires the Prime Minister and the Leader of the Opposition to be together in this undertaking. Rather than relationship building we saw more than a whiff of cancel culture that has such a grip on Australia’s throat.
Embracing Change and Vulnerability
So where do we begin? While there is the temptation to jump quickly to action first there must be self care, and honestly and with integrity allow ourselves to be changed by what has just happened. What terror has the shock of failing in the referendum unearthed? Allowing ourselves to touch that terror will bring us to a sense of our powerlessness, and with the sense of powerlessness the vulnerability of our collective masculinity will be exposed. ’No’ voters will become ever more defensive and resistant to change. It is not the proposition that is being put forward that is so threatening, but the change itself and how that alone threatens the current power equilibrium. The show of conservative force has to be absorbed, perhaps redirected not resisted. Resisting it head on will only make it grow stronger. It must be redirected through another route, and the only other route is through building relationships.
So what does this look like in terms of where we begin and where we go from here? Well, we know what not to do, we know not to try to convince “no” voters they were wrong. In fact they will for a time enjoy an increase in their power and influence for a time as we see now a move against acknowledging country. That trend is still heating up. The only way out of this situation is to grow out of it. So we need to develop those relationships and systems tht help us grow, and grow together. It means to grow our experience of being storng and manly in society for noth men and women. The polarity enforced especially on men but also on women on how men can be needs to grow.
Growing Together: Reimagining Masculinity and Power Dynamics
Trump America and those political players that would emulate his methods in Australia demonstrate the bleakness of the polarity of masculine identity. His is a extreme example, in both power and fragility. But its polar opposite is equally untenable, a kind of meek, power relinquishing, empathy, that still leaves all the heavy lifting to women.
In the subjugation of First Nations People by colonial invaders, them men are suppressed first, disrupting their power is central to the success of their enterprise. Women are seen to have their usefulness, whether powerful or not. If women’s power gets out of hand it can always be dealt with by violence until it is suppressed. Masculine power cannot be suppressed by violence, violence only increases it until it is extinguished, though it capacity for springing up from the ashes has to be continually guarded against. We may have though that the frontier wars were over. It turns out that they have merely moved to another level. It turns out that the australian electorate does not trust the pathway from voice to makarrata to treaty. At some deeper level they feel too vulnerable.
Unveiling Vulnerability: First Nations People and Their Struggles
And it is this sense of vulnerability that we need to counter. Only a small minority would not like to see quality of life improved for first nations people. But that vulnerability is an issue altogether on another level and will continue to be a stumbling block. There is a double bind here. Australians want first nations people to have a better quality of life and to become more empowered to determine their own future. But in giving them more power, they are concerned that that power may be used to disrupt our current way of life because they desire changes that are incompatible with the status quo, that unresolved questions of dispossession and dislocation, and accountability for the atrocities in the frontier wars may need to be accounted for.
If makarrata comes first, is then followed by treaty, the question of voice will become a administrative one. In the question of constitutional recognition, had a treaty been in place, the 1967 referendum would not have been necessary. The fact that human right had to be suspended for the NT Intervention to take place really tells the story. On a personal level to build capacity for connection and relationship, perhaps the same sequence applies, story telling, empowered empathetic communication, creativity.
The question of where shall we begin is really, here, within, together.
Models vs. Ecological Thinking
Tears & Education
This morning I listened to Nora Bateson recount an anecdote in which her father, the esteemed social scientist and anthropologist Gregory Bateson would cry as her put her on the bus to school. He was worried that she would be ruined by school education. The reason this didn’t happen she said, because she was able to hold his tears.
The ‘no’ result in the referendum is a catastrophe for what it might have been for indigenous and non-indigenous people in Australia. Now that path is closed at least for a generation and other approaches must be sought. When taken as feedback rather than rebuttal or refusal, we get a measure of where the Australian electorate is at at this present moment. We can make all kinds of stories of what it means depending on your point of view. Many of these stories are not real or true otherwise how could we accommodate such diverse views from commentators.
Reconciliation and Beyond
What we can say is that Reconciliation has been dealt a blow, perhaps that’s a good thing or maybe a bad thing, maybe both. To my eyes, Makarrata is more ‘authentic’ than Reconciliation, the coming together after a struggle, Australia was, before the struggle. It would seem that perhaps the Australia electorate doesn’t believe there was ever a struggle. It indicates that Australia’s previous course, was on a “hiding to nowhere” and if so, would continue on that trajectory regardless of referenda outcome. Instead we are with the vast emptiness of ‘what now’ that could well be our making.
Models vs. Ecological Thinking
To put it in evolutionary terms, natural selection happens incrementally, evolution does not. Whole system changes follow calamitous events, chaotic randomness reforms and regenerates entrenched systems, knowing that in the biological world there is no such thing as complete randomness and everything is connected. New linkages and relationships are formed and developed ways previously prohibited. Our test now is whether we are able to hold the emptiness of not knowing long enough for new growth to emerge, or do we slide with the tide of rebuff into an abyss of unresolved Groundhog Day, and leave it for others who follow to re-green our world. Of course it’s not really a choice, it’s just that emptiness is so hard to hold on to. Is it possible?
A number of communities I am related to, have now abandoned Reconciliation or had already done so. I believe Reconciliation to be a well intentioned movement but with roots deeply embedded in the problem, not in the ‘solution’. Communities impulse now is to look beyond, to the United Nations Declaration on the Rights For Indigenous Peoples which is yet to be ratified by the Australian Government. Of the two, a Voice to parliament or ratifying the charter, the former easier. The latter however has the advantage, the necessary advantage, of not being embedded in colonial world view. Reconciliation as it stands, is a colonial construct. Its trajectory is towards assimilation whilst holding a special place for Australia's deep history, like remembrance for the fallen at Gallipoli, only not so much. This is a far cry from the rights of indigenous people that are declared in the UN charter, which in the Australian context is of twin complementary, interdependent moieties moving together. One can hear the beating of shields at the very suggestion.
Ecological Thinking
The Batesons propose ecological thinking that is contrary to developing logical models for the future and enacting them step by step. Such models are anti evolutionary. I love models and modelling. As a young boy, I’d spend my pocket money on models of Spitfires and Hurricanes and whatever else was available from the Pittsworth Newsagent. On many a Saturday morning I’d spend a shilling or perhaps 1/6 there on after piano lessons. That modelling over the years has grown to a preferred way of thinking, conceptional modelling of large systems. But I see now that the model is a replica of the thing not a precursor. The process is essentially anti-ecological, antievolutionary. Objectively it creates the opposite result to that intended.
There was a time during my high school education that the topic of evolution entered our fundamentalist household. There was no effort whatever to consider how this new information would encourage us to learn and grow and reinterpret the world view of our forebears. Our minds were closed to new revelation. Even a knowledge of the history of our own history was discouraged, except of course though approved sources. I followed Eve in her quest for meaning. The path left the garden and found a vantage point from which it could be observed from the outside thereby creating an interiority unknown previously. Adam on the other hand, a follower rather than an adventurer, consoled his perceived loss by labouring in the fields eyes to the furrow.
Over the ages the furrow has transmogrified into something far more sparkly and may paradoxically be preferred over relationship to planetary consciousness.
What might going forward look like?
Evolution happens at the edges of things, the margins, where cross fertilisation can happen with something other than itself, at the horizon of unknowing. Jettison the big plans for the future before they take hold and entangle you. Rather be attentive to this moment, what is here and now and discover what is its yearning. What is this moment trying to give birth to? What is here at hand, the resources available, both material but especially the human resources, the conscious ones. Check for the colonial masquerade, it will be everywhere at first because it is everywhere and I say that not as a judgement by as a statement of where we come from. Allow the path to emerge from what is and resist the urge to build a model of what might be knowing that my minds eye is only one of many, simultaneously multifaceted and eye to eye. The moment doesn’t say; ‘look at me’ but ‘look into my eyes’.
Still holding her father’s tears, Nora Bateson explores the difference between the "Situation Room" approaches, driven by immediate problem-solving, and the holistic perspective of the "Meadow," which emphasises ongoing mutual learning, adaptability and context.
Scottish Proverb and Alternate Truths
Im reminded of a favourite saying of a once coworker who in his grinning Scottish brogue would defeatedly say, “Everything in our favour is against us.” The humour, over the years given way to alternate truth, a truth moderated by the consciousness of the utterer, whether it be a self fulfilling prophesy lead by the bleak narrowness of logic into a double bind cul-de-sac, or an emergent opportunity calling by an evolutionary trajectory.
