Any successful coach will tell you that the most successful sports careers are the product of a team effort. Even in individual sports like golf or tennis, elite players acknowledge the contribution of their team, many of whom operate anonymously moulding their champion for optimal performance.

In this context, it’s fair to ask why there is a considerable cohort within our communities that believe that collective, global effort is not the best pathway to resolving some of the biggest economic, climatic, environmental and health challenges humans have ever faced.

Conspiracies abound. The United Nations (UN) and its agencies, the World Health Organisation (WHO), World Economic Forum (WEF), International Monetary Fund (IMF), World Trade Organisation (WTO) and others are the focus for these. A key conspiracy theory is one about the ‘Great Reset’ of the global economy, a WEF-led move that seeks to strip us of our sovereign rights, rob us of our lands and control our lives through global directives, for which the 2019-20 COVID lockdowns and vaccinations are the prime exhibit.

The notion that we can head for the hills armed to the teeth to bunker down and ride out the coming armageddon wrought by evil globalists is deranged, but there is an alarming number buying into the idea even if not all are hiding out in the wilds of Alaska.

It is a movement, a cult-like belief set and behaviours that are permeating our political narrative. Even mainstream citizens are sitting somewhere on the spectrum of buying into the distrust, suspicion and fear of government and the world order. Governments and major political parties are out to get us.

There are multiple factors driving this. People feel they are losing or have lost control of their lives. The cost of living is ballooning, The idea that anyone can achieve anything they want to seems out of reach. There are major conflicts in Europe, the Middle East, and Africa. Catastrophic climatic events - from fire to flood - are killing, maiming, dislocating and dispossessing people. Our media channels are flooding our senses with doom.

Refugees and immigration are the personification of these cataclysmic events. These are the people that step out of the television and social media streams and onto our beaches. They are an uncomfortable reflection of our inability to manage human interactions with each other and with their environment. They are symbolic of loss of control over our nation and of our destiny.

Democracy is losing support among citizens who no longer believe it works for them. There is a log jam of issues in political deadlock, our politicians in the death spiral of interminable election cycles and a volatile electorate looking for certainty that is impossible to deliver.

The lessons of our most successful sports people and high achievers across all areas of human endeavour are being swept away as communities and nations retreat to ever-smaller worlds. The retreat is being driven by a false narrative that suggests if we shrink away from collective responsibility, our challenges reduce and become manageable. At its extreme, this distills to a sense that individualism, protecting my rights and everything I believe in, hanging onto all that I own, is my pathway to control of my future.

Some problems will be insoluble and may even be accentuated if individualism becomes the doctrine by which we all live and if we believe collectivism and working for the common good is akin to communism, the label applied to anything that advocates greater economic equality and fairness.

There are numerous differences between collectivism and communism. The former is a mindset, not a mandate. Collectivism does not deny the value of individualism and the protection of rights, even privileges. It merely recognises that the ‘team first’ approach where we all recognise and pull in the direction of equality, fairness and the common good, will achieve much more in tackling the massive issues that transcend our individual, community and even national boundaries.

If we do not, our individual capacity and desire for greater control of our lives will ultimately be capped by a never-ending sequence of conflict, catastrophy, the demise of social cohesion and our health and wellbeing.

The pursuit of commercial and personal wealth and the conspicuous consumption on which it feeds is often reflected in costs to others. At its core are exploitation of the world’s resources and people. Humans continue to extract more from the Earth’s finite resources at a rate of growth that must eventually lead to a tipping point and breakdown. The fact that we have to act globally to stamp our modern slavery confirms that it still underpins an unacceptable proportion of profit and wealth.

Resolving this requires a collaboration and agreement by communities and nations on courses of action and new success metrics that do not place economic growth as our sole measure. Rather than push half-baked conspiracies about our multi-lateral global institutions, we should ensure they are governed and empowered as centres of consensus and collaboration., acknowledging that this is not what they are now.

We need to dispense with the neoliberal influence that has driven the IMF to force reprioritisation of social spending and imposed massive debts on emerging economies, exacerbated by unfavourable terms of trade with the West. This has destabilised government and governance and impoverished nations and their people. It has been the contemporary face of western colonialism. Our global financial institutions, backed by Western governments and finance, should be engineering solutions for fair sharing of wealth and wellbeing.

Colonialism was the state-sponsored enabler of wealth creation through exploitation. Contemporary communist regimes are a construct of extending power, influence and wealth through social, economic and military imperialism. China and Russia are nonetheless stepping into vacuums across the Middle East, Africa, Asia and the Pacific created by Western failure to ensure shares wealth fairly in return for access to resources and labour. This is not the collectivism that delivers equity and fairness. It is sheer opportunism built on the distrust and resentment of the West’s colonial past.

The strength and hope of Western democracies is the framework for freedoms they bestow on their citizens. Their current dysfunction and division is driven by perceptions, often real, of disenfranchisement, the failure of neoliberalism to equitably deliver the trickle-down benefits of free markets.

Individualism must be allowed to flourish, but not through the unfair and unsustainable exploitation of resources and people. The future prosperity of societies will be built on enabling individual creativity, entrepreneurism and energy rewarded, not solely by financial gain, but in the knowledge that a rising tide lifts all boats.

Unfortunately, this is not the face of the current individualist-nationalist push supported by misinformation, disinformation and conspiracy. At its worst, the core of its false narrative and prophecy is anarchic, calling for diminished government and regulation, even dismantlement of the checks and balances that curb our most base instincts. It is a inversion of the neoliberalism that has lined the pockets of elites - a claw back of eroded wealth, rights and self-determination by its victims.

But the path to a rebalance requires the institutions of government, regulation and, yes, empowered international institutions as centres of collective planning and action on poverty, climate, health and environment. Dilution or even elimination of these will only make a dystopia of environmental collapse, wars over resources (including food, water and habitable land) and associated declining health and prosperity even more certain.

Photo: Mathias Reding on Unsplash