It's All Connected!

We're supposed to pick a lane: be a tree-hugging greenie or a staunch public housing activist. Be a men's mental health advocate or feminist campaigner. But never both, or all.

When my video about the housing crisis went super-mega-crazy-viral and I suddenly amassed hundreds of thousands of followers, it was probably inevitable that people would be confused as I returned to my usual programming: making content about all the things I care about. Gender equity. Climate justice. Mental health. Equality. The list goes on.

And sure enough, the comments rolled in:

"Stick to the housing crisis, mate."

We're supposed to pick a lane: be a tree-hugging greenie or a staunch public housing activist. Be a men's mental health advocate or feminist campaigner. But never both, or all, as though striving for a happy and healthy society on a fair and habitable planet is a divisive endeavour.

No thanks.

We're deliberately taught to silo our struggles because separated movements can't build the coalitions that would actually threaten the system. The overarching system of harm that extracts, violates, and destroys for the benefit of the few to the detriment of the many.

Sexual violence. Environmental destruction. Rapidly growing inequality. They all stem from the same fundamental belief: that some people have the right to take what they want from others without permission or reciprocity. Capitalism, colonialism, patriarchy – these aren't separate systems, they're components of the same exploitative machine operating on identical logic: take what you can, when you can, from whoever can't stop you.

But this logic is a betrayal of our basic humanity. For most of history, our survival wasn't secured through domination; it was through cooperation. We thrived by working together. No society was ever perfect, but the ones that hoarded power in the hands of the few always collapsed. And today, that power isn't held by emperors or kings – it's hoarded by CEOs and corporate boards.

The cruel irony is that corporations understand collectivism perfectly well. They use economies of scale to gain leverage – consolidating capital and buying in bulk. They've mastered collective power for private gain. But we can do the same for the public good. As citizens, as taxpayers, as local community members, we can pool our resources too.

That's the whole point of public services. When we collectivise – our money, our labour, our trust – we can provide life's essentials more efficiently, more affordably, and more fairly than any profit-driven market ever could. It's why (when properly funded) Medicare works. It's why (when properly funded) public education works. It's why we can vaccinate entire populations or negotiate cheaper medicines. We use our shared power to look after each other.

But neoliberalism flipped that logic on its head. Since the 1980s, we've been told that collectivism was the problem and individualism is the solution. Only they didn't quite sell it to us like that. They said that the government is the problem and corporations are the solution. An easy trick, since the government is synonymous with politicians, and most of us don't like most of them.

That language shift was a deliberate sleight of hand. People hear "government-owned" and think "politician-owned," but it was OUR property – paid for with our taxes, run for our benefit. Alas, a wave of privatisation sold competition as a stand-in for care. So public services were gutted, sold off, or left to wither.

And while many Australians still flex on socials about how our healthcare system is better than America's, we ignore the slow decay happening under our noses. We let the public housing system collapse. What was once 26% of housing stock is now just 2.8%. Imagine if we applied that same reduction to our hospitals and schools. Neoliberalism taught us to see value only in dollars returned, not lives improved. It reframed collective care as inefficiency, and private profit as progress.

But when profit is the priority, empathy always becomes a casualty. And a decrease in empathy increases casualties.

This erosion of collective care doesn't just affect our services – it fundamentally changes how we relate to each other and the world. There's a direct line between people's failure to practice consent in human relationships and how we treat the earth. The same mindset that disregards someone's bodily autonomy plunders the earth, exploits animals, and treats nature as something to be consumed rather than respected. For both rape culture and environmental destruction, the underlying attitude is identical: taking what you want without regard for the impact. It teaches us to treat bodies, relationships, and ecosystems as things to be used, extracted, and discarded.

This all takes a toll on us. Sexual violence ruins lives. Climate anxiety affects millions of young people who can see their future being destroyed. Housing stress can cause depression and have serious physical health impacts. Yet we're told these are individual problems requiring individual solutions. Prevention is less profitable, so we treat the symptoms, not the cause.

But when we remember that collective action uses the same economies of scale that corporations do, we start seeing potential everywhere. In a culture that feeds us cynicism and tells us to stay in our lanes, seeing these connections becomes an act of rebellion. This is why I jump between topics in my content – because unaffordable housing, gender pay gaps, and climate change are all part of the same system of harm that places profit above people and treats empathy as a weakness to be exploited.

The housing crisis, the climate crisis, the mental health crisis – all can be much more easily summed up as the Disconnection Crisis. We've been isolated from each other, from the land, from our own humanity. When we're atomised and fighting separate battles, we can't see the bigger picture or build the solidarity needed for real change. When we're told our problems are individual rather than systemic, we can't organise collective solutions.

But disconnection is a choice, not a natural law. First Nations communities around the world show us what reciprocal relationships actually look like – where we belong to the land rather than own it, where we're responsible to each other and to future generations, where taking is balanced with giving back. They've maintained these connections for tens of thousands of years, even through centuries of genocide.

Disconnection is the system's greatest weapon. That means our greatest weapon is reconnection. Like I said, it's all connected. That's both the problem and our opportunity.

---

This piece was originally written for the Dymocks blog to coincide with the release of my book, Better Things Are Possible.