Coming back to this, the genius of Asia was to take the factories we sponsored there, to free ourselves of…

Coming back to this, the genius of Asia was to take the factories we sponsored there, to free ourselves of doing any thinking or work, and use them to restore Asia at the centre of the world. Where it had been for much of human history. /1 https://t.co/w9cffwF76i

Even more gloriously (they laugh at us), Asia also now contains the dominant numbers of working-age adults. The people we’ve been importing as slave labour under the cover of ‘labour hire’ schemes. That flow will dry up as Asia continues its ascendancy. /2

While we in the West have desperately old populations, wallowing in old fantasies of empire, accumulating ‘the sights’ in perpetual tourism we can’t actually afford, still stuck in our old imperial ways of accumulation. That’s all our travel obsession is. /3

Instead of now travelling the world to accumulate sugar and spices and slaves, we now accumulate sights. We don’t even recognise where this urge we have to be continuously travelling comes from. Our societies are now in decay, aged care homes with no staff. /4

Paul Keating tried to alert us to this, to make us embrace Asia. He was followed by 3 decades of conservatives who sold fantasies of the old British empire, saluting flags and running continuous culture wars that are only desperate imaginings of glories long gone. /5

Now as Asia provides everything we use and even our workers, building the new world without us (and laughing at us), all we’re left with is get-rich-quick schemes like capital gains on housing and cryptocurrency. The old colonial settler culture. A quick buck. /6

Building nothing, sterile (birth rates in terminal free fall), celebrating ‘child-free’ cruises in glorious ignorance of the sterility of our entire culture that can’t even reproduce itself, let alone take over the world. /end