Australia and much of the world are on the cusp of profound change. What happens next is up to us | Julianne Schultz

60 years ago this week, Donald Horne published a little book with a snappy title that captured the zeitgeist.

Seizing the invisible force that defines the spirit of an era has long been the holy grail for anyone with anything to sell, from books to soap powder to hamburgers to ideas to political parties. This task is now made easier by leveraging the digital data output of social media.

But Horne’s “The Lucky Country” sold 18,000 copies in nine days, thanks in part to a successful advertising campaign that would make an old-fashioned publicist jealous: its own episode of “Four Corners,” tantalizing excerpts from the five-month-old Australian Albert Tucker’s arresting image of a weathered man looking back on the cover of the Australian Book Review and enough nagging reviews to spark debate.

At the time, almost half of the 11 million Australians were under 21. The book gave them and their parents permission to be critical.

Horne explained that while Australia had the third-highest per capita income in the world, there was “no universally accepted public sense of the future”. The imagination of “the men at the top…seems exhausted by the country’s achievements.”

Does this sound familiar?

Apart from advocating closer ties with Asia – a pragmatic response to Britain’s decision to trade with Europe rather than the remnants of the empire – Horne offered no prescriptions.

But within three decades, the complacent country he described found new ways to achieve its own happiness. The economy was deregulated, indigenous peoples were recognized (so to speak), legal ties with Britain were severed, discrimination was banned, multiculturalism replaced assimilation, and Australia proudly took its place in the region.

Some things remained – most notably the commitment to fairness. “Fair goes is not just for oneself,” Horne wrote, “but for outsiders too…Australians love a fighter.” Unless, as he noted, they were Aboriginal.

Does this sound familiar?

Near the end of his life, Horne described the trick of his trade in Dying: A Memoir. “People are influenced by what they read when it relates to something that is already on their mind, when it reinforces their attitude. Or perhaps if it makes what they were vaguely thinking more coherent, so they do it now knowledge what they believe.”

Techniques for identifying zeitgeist have been refined over decades, but most now seem outdated. Surveys, surveys, focus groups and media monitoring have replaced the old-fashioned method of debating and listening – what Henry Parkes, the father of the Federation, called “earworm”.

The most adept zeitgeist hunters have now figured out how to exploit the data that comes from the pervasive surveillance we all tolerate. No longer content to recognize the invisible mind, they are even more ambitious and determined to use data as a key to the subconscious and upend time-honored values ​​and customs.

This is new. Means of persuasion can include entertainment, half-truths and lies, spectacle, and threats. It gets into your head; It is not propaganda as we once knew it.

The global pattern is now visible. Social media-backed campaigns have upended the established order in one country after another, opening the door to autocracy.

The playbook is clear. First, destroy the prevailing consensus. Then do it again and enjoy an unexpected victory.

Brexit was an early example. British leaders had used their imperial skills to become one of the EU’s biggest beneficiaries. Still, a narrow majority of Britons voted to leave the multilateral organization that helped London emerge as a European financial center, propped up the poorest regions and sustained economic growth.

It has shrunk since then.

For more than a century, America’s melting pot spirit was symbolized by the Statue of Liberty and the sacred text: “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, the wretched refuse of your teeming shore.” This year, nearly 77 million voted to detain and deport 11.7 million illegal immigrants.

The costs and logistics are staggering, but slamming the door will not only keep out the “huddled masses yearning to breathe free,” but also the brilliant people who have driven American innovation.

Last year almost nine and a half million Australians voted to deny First Peoples a vote, with many mistakenly believing this was “not fair”.

Of course, there was never a fair settlement for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples, but this shift in national ethos was more insidious. It required the majority to tacitly accept One Nation’s spirit of fairness – It’s not fair that they get something I don’t have – an idea once so abhorrent that Pauline Hanson was expelled from the Liberal Party for expressing it.

Now it has normalized and is already shaping the next election.

In one country after another, the very foundation of identity has been called into question.

If 2024 ushers in an era of less inequality and technocratic cruelty, those of us repulsed by the Trump campaign will be eating humble pie.

But if it is the beginning of a period of autocracy and new methods of transformative advocacy already modeled by community independents, we must re-express the best of humanity; Signing online petitions will not be enough.

In 1964, Australia and much of the world stood on the threshold of profound change. It was, as we can now see, a crucial year. 2024 promises to be different.

We were warned.