I am always concerned when elites give away money or assets that are not theirs. For example, it is one thing if a millionaire decides to give some of their wealth to a group helping the homeless, but it is another thing when a group of politicians decide to give away money and resources that are not theirs.

I was reminded afresh of this nasty pattern not simply by watching the recent news about treaties, but also when looking again at a couple of good books. One was Lasch’s the Revolt of the Elites. It has a lot on which one can reflect, even if it is 30 years old – but two of Lasch’s insights are worthy of note with reference to the ‘giving awayness’ of the current elites.

The first is their self-protective distancing from the ‘others’. They are not acting as stewards of our common good, but as gamers in a lounge room where they do not personally experience any impact of switching directions in radical ways.

As Lasch notes, elites have ‘lost touch with the people’, in contrast to earlier times (in the USA, in his context). The better leaders, according to Lasch, personally reflected on the moral, economic and personal impacts of their decisions for the common good. He claims the new elites are ‘arrogant’ and ‘insecure’, which leads them to develop policies … ‘on behalf of the downtrodden and oppressed … which require sacrifices from the … minorities who share the inner cities with the poor, seldom from the suburban liberals who design and support those policies’.

Similarly, the current ideas of treaties with now distant relatives of people groups who were here before Europeans, will not help the deeply poor and disenfranchised in remote areas of Australia. Indeed, any redistribution of public funds will grow the bureaucratic class (who themselves become elite) while ignoring the deep practical support of those who need it most. The lack of impact of ‘closing the gap’ money has been continuous evidence of this disconnect.

And this occurs because the elite decision-makers are thoroughly non-cognisant of the cultural divide between one system of beliefs – that values universal respect awarded to all individuals, and thus the rule of law, property and wealth accumulation – versus a communitarian set of beliefs where there is no clear personal or legal basis for individual identity and opportunity.

Here is where one of Lasch’s other insights helps us see the blindness inherent in these treaty arrangements – it is the commandeering of the concept of ‘compassion’. He explains that genuine compassion must be based on mutual respect. However, that cannot happen when there are categories of worth inherent in the reasons for a treaty – i.e. that there is an oppressor group and there is an oppressed group, both of which shall be forever classed as such.

Lasch’s explanation of this dynamic is worth quoting in full:

A misplaced compassion degrades both the victims, who are reduced to objects of pity, and their would-be benefactors, who find it easier to pity their fellow citizens than to hold them up to impersonal standards, attainment of which would entitle them to respect … when the ideology of compassion leads to this kind of absurdity, it is time to call it into question. Compassion has become the human face of contempt.

The difficulty of enacting genuine compassionate action is also described well by Warren Mundine in Mundine in Black and White. He explains some of the impact of the communitarianism of the Australian Indigenous. For example, he notes that individuals cannot own land if they live on Native Title or where native land rights has been claimed and won. The individuals in these places cannot therefore own local property on which to develop a business or a family home. Remember, there cannot be equality for all without all individuals each being recognised as their own person. There cannot be family freedom without the concept of individuals voluntarily committing to family groupings.

But that is not achieved in societies who have not been influenced by Judeo-Christianity. Thus claims the second book I recently looked at again – Larry Siedentop’s Inventing the Individual: The origins of Western Liberalism. He started his historical description with the ancient societies wherein there was structural inequality, and he then moved to describing how there came to be the acceptance of universal equality.

In his survey, Siedentop describes how traditional societies (either combined into ‘ancient cities’ or still living more locally as discreet tribes) had two basic forms of identity – that of the public sphere and that of the familial. The family was the smallest unit of identity, and inequality was always built into it. The broader society was defined by the sum of the deities represented by the familial groupings brought into the bigger grouping.

Siedentop explains the subsequent mode of civic life this way: ‘The ancient city was not an association of individuals … thus, as the scale of association increased, the gods of nature or polytheism became more important … gods and groups marched hand in hand.’

And this form of social construction had immense implications for how family groups (and the individuals within them) acted: ‘The ancient citizen saw himself as defending the land of his ancestors, who were also his gods. His ancestors were inseparable from the ground of the city.’ Basically, a group-based immanent spirituality led to a political animism.

Thus, the treaties being designed and enacted in Australia today with such a traditional social structure are a rejection of the universal individual respect found in Western liberalism that was based on Judeo-Christian concepts of the individual. Instead, the treaties give agreement and privilege to an ancient animism that inheres inequality in its social construction.

No treaty can ever satisfy the kind of existential demand that is based on animistic spirituality. That is why we should expect more economic developments to be overturned because of some animist claim, even by a ‘minority’ group of Indigenous people. Remember this decision back in 2024: ‘Environment Minister Tanya Plibersek has cited a mural on a central NSW post office as proof of the existence of the blue-­banded bee dreaming story, one of the central reasons she killed the Blayney goldmine proposal despite evidence from the local land council that the story is not ­Wiradjuri tradition.’ (Paige Taylor in the Australian).

And to be honest, while we should expect and demand that every Australian be given full and equal opportunity for access to Westminster law, reading, writing, and scientific computation, why would the elites want to try?

As Lasch warned, they continue to be divorced from the everyday good work of the ‘everyman’ who provides the productivity to sustain our individual and social needs. That is why their version of compassion turns into a contemptuous act of performative legislation. And as Warren Mundine implored:

No ancient tradition has survived by being frozen in time. [So] the greatest challenge to economic development for Aboriginal people now isn’t a lack of money, assets or opportunities, or discrimination and historical wrongs. It’s a mindset that afflicts many colonised peoples – that participating in the modern economy means turning your back on your culture. That mindset is wrong … we must be able to take the best of what the world has to offer and use it to adapt and grow.

Well said Warren, well said.