What If We Played Our Part, Instead Of Playing To Win?
Words by Professor Ariella Helfgott. Illustration by Stavroula Adameitis.
Read the beige version on our Substack.
SA Futures Agency are partnering with the Wyatt Trust on a rare and ambitious piece of work: a set of scenarios that look 140 years into South Australia’s future. Almost no one works at that horizon, and it opens possibilities the usual time horizons cannot reach.
We are at the beginning of a period of profound social, economic, political and environmental disruption. This work confronts the brutal realities of our past and present and asks genuinely: What could life here be like on the other side of all of it? Can we imagine economies that truly serve people and the planet? What would it take for everyone to flourish?
We held the first workshop in May. Over the coming months we pull on many of the threads surfacing, as we work towards the development of a full set of scenarios exploring what is possible. This is the first.
Let’s start with Epstein.
Because the Epstein reference is precise. It names what we are trying to move away from: a world where power concentrates, secrecy enables predation, prestige launders abuse, and incentives reward the ruthless accumulation of leverage over people. That is not an anomaly. It is the extractive logic of the current system at its most visible.
Epstein did not invent that logic by himself. He learned it, excelled in it, was rewarded by it. Existing cultures handed it to him ready-made: that power is for accumulating, that people can be assets, that the right connections insulate you from consequences. Some of the world’s bestselling books about money and success of the last thirty years are essentially manuals for this logic: find the asset, extract the value, let the costs fall on someone else, dressed up as wisdom.
Epstein is a story of exceptional evil. It is also a story of relatively ordinary incentives.
Once you see that logic, you see it everywhere.
It can be found in captured institutions and corrupt networks on every continent, in every political tradition, at every scale from the community football club to the nation state, the global corporation and beyond. I’ve even witnessed it in my local community garden. Power without accountability tends toward shitty dynamics. While degrees may vary, no single culture has a monopoly on this. It is a human problem, and a design problem.
We can see it in the climate crisis: four decades of externalising the cost of extraction onto the atmosphere, onto ecosystems, onto the people with the least say in the decisions. Floods, fires, bleaching reefs, failing crops, borne most heavily by those who contributed least to causing them.
In housing: shelter converted into an investment asset. A generation priced out of the cities their parents built, not because there is a shortage of buildings, but because the logic made land more valuable as a store of wealth than as a place for people to live.
In geopolitics: every actor accumulating leverage, externalising cost, using other people’s suffering as a card. That is the extractive logic applied at the scale of nations. Power over, not power with. Winning, at others’ expense, in games that are producing a world nobody actually wants to live in.
In democracy itself: when winning becomes the goal rather than governing, opposition becomes something to destroy rather than engage. Policy gets worse because the game no longer rewards doing what is right even if it isn’t popular. It rewards defeating the other side. The public stops trusting any of it. And the vacuum fills with whoever promises to make the fighting stop, even if the price is authoritarianism.
These are not separate crises. They are one crisis expressing itself across multiple domains. The extractive logic running out of new things to take.
The system did not fail. It worked exactly as designed.
This is what winning looks like, when everyone is playing to win their own games.
The extractive logic doesn’t just fail morally. It fails strategically, on its own terms, for the people pursuing it. This is a harder argument to dismiss than a moral one. And right now, moral arguments seem to be losing.
It also reframes the choice in front of you. Playing to win might look like the safe default in the dominant culture, and choosing a different path might seem like the gamble, but playing to win is itself a bet, a bet that the extractive world keeps running and that you and yours stay in the winning seats. The honest comparison is not safe against risky. It is two bets, and the only question worth asking is which one you would rather be holding if it turns out you were wrong.
Consider what each actually produces.
Aged Care
Walk into any aged care facility in South Australia, including the good ones. Notice who is doing the caring. Notice how many residents each worker is responsible for. Notice whether there is time to sit with someone who is frightened, or whether there is only time to complete the task and move to the next room.
This is not a failure of the people working there. Most of them are doing something close to heroic on wages that barely cover rent. The system was designed to minimise cost, not maximise dignity. Everyone who made serious money from that logic, and everyone who simply benefited from it, will end up in that room too. And pay a fortune to be there.
Your wealth will get you the nicer building. It won’t get you back the workforce that left, or the culture that left with it. The person who has time to know your name, notice when something is wrong, sit with you when you’re scared, that person only exists if the whole system is built to make them possible.
The system that will receive you at the end was built by the same logic you benefited from.
The Street
Consider what happens when everyone on a suburban block does the individually rational thing. You want the most from your block, so you put up the largest home the envelope allows, pour concrete for the driveway, the double garage and the low-maintenance yard, and seal ninety per cent of the block. So does the family two doors down. So does the developer who just bought the corner lot.
Adelaide’s canopy is already thin, about 17 per cent, well short of the 30 per cent that international guidance treats as a healthy minimum. Adelaide is losing roughly 75,000 trees a year, the bulk of it on private land as blocks are subdivided and built out, even as councils keep planting the streets and reserves they control. Over the past decade far more of Adelaide’s suburbs lost residential canopy than gained it, the hardest-hit shedding well over a tenth. The damage happens in backyards, one development at a time.
Here is the part of the calculation everyone leaves out. A tree on the verge adds close to $17,000 to a Perth house. In Sydney, the right one in the right spot adds about $30,000. People pay to live near trees, for the shade, the cooler air, the street you can stand to walk down in February. So when everyone strips their block for the last dollar, they kill the thing that made the suburb worth wanting. The canopy goes, the street bakes hotter every summer, and the asset you were maximising is worth less because of it. You lose the money and the shade both, and you do it to yourself.
And the money is the least of it. Heat is already Australia’s deadliest natural hazard, killing more Australians than bushfires, floods and storms combined, usually quietly, indoors. Research on Adelaide has tallied the healthcare costs of heat-attributable hospital admissions for renal disease, cardiovascular disease, mental illness and diabetes. And the hotspots, the streets that turn most dangerous in a heatwave, map closely onto the suburbs that have lost the most trees.
Then there is what the heat does inside. A thirteen-year study of nearly a million assault incidents across New South Wales found that domestic violence was more sensitive to heat than any other category of violent crime: when it is extremely hot, non-domestic assaults actually fall as people retreat indoors, but domestic violence rises.
None of the people who cleared their blocks chose that outcome. It emerged from decisions that were each individually defensible and collectively disastrous. And the cost did not disappear. It moved, into emergency departments, ambulance callouts, police responses, electricity bills, and the bodies of people who had the least say in the planning of the neighbourhood around them.
You cannot air-condition your way out of this entire cascade.
The Gulf
Then there is the gulf. The beaches, the fishing, the sailing, the seafood, the simple fact of driving twenty minutes and standing in front of something vast and alive. That is not just an amenity. It is who Adelaide thinks it is.
So it cut deeper than economics when the gulf began to die. The bloom that came in March 2025 killed more than four hundred marine species across South Australian waters, fish, rays, sharks, dolphins, the leafy sea dragons found nowhere else on earth, one of the worst marine die-offs the country has recorded. By the winter of 2026 the worst seems to have passed. The beaches are mostly clear again, the dead no longer washing up by the tonne the way they did last summer. But the gulf is not the same gulf, the scientists are still counting what was lost, and nothing that caused it has gone away.
It did not come from nowhere, and its causes were not only local. The trigger was a marine heatwave that held the water about two and a half degrees above normal for the better part of a year, and warm, still water is what these algae wait for. They were fed by nutrients washed down in the 2022 River Murray flood, itself swollen by rain a hotter atmosphere makes fiercer, and lifted from the seabed by an unusual upwelling, and the gulf’s shallow, slow-flushing water let the whole thing linger. Not one bad decision. A system tipping.
The choices that warmed the water were made everywhere, by everyone, each one sensible from where the maker stood. And the bloom that came of them did not check anyone’s net worth before it closed the beach. It put the same cough in every chest along the coast, gutted the fishers and the tourist towns, and killed a gulf no fortune can restock to order. The ocean does not care who won.
The costs did not disappear. They gathered for a generation and then came due all at once. Take the gain, post the bill downstream. It is the oldest move in the game.
No One Wins On Their Own
All of these examples point to the same idea, the one systems thinkers call enlightened self-interest. Not everyone sacrificing for the common good. Everyone recognising that, soon enough, no part of a system can flourish in a failing system. That their own capacity to adapt and thrive depends on the adaptive capacity of the whole. That a world complex enough to sustain your flourishing requires you to sustain its complexity in return.
When enough people grasp that their own self-interest depends on the flourishing of others, a different paradigm opens: mutually assured flourishing. Playing our part rather than playing to win in an extractive game that is quietly destroying the conditions that make winning worth anything, or worse, reducing it to a game of survival.
Myth 1: You have to play along
The first workshop in the 140-year scenario process turned out to be diagnostic. Trying to imagine the whole range of futures the next 140 years might hold, and above all an economy that does not keep producing the same inequality, we kept running up against a set of deeply embedded myths, the kind so woven into how we see things that they quietly block our ability to picture anything different. Naming them is half the work, because a myth you cannot see is one you cannot decide to leave. The first one is this: that you have to play along.
It is not an official policy, it is a feeling. The sense that you have no real choice but to go along with things. That the group you are in will look after you, as long as you do not break ranks. That stepping outside the club is naive, or risky, or pointless.
We have all felt it. The meeting where you did not say the thing you knew was true but it would have involved disagreeing with someone with power or challenging a norm. The joke you laughed at. The decision you went quiet on because speaking up felt like it would cost you. And we have all felt the small inward flinch that comes with it, the part of us that knew it was not right. That flinch is not weakness, sometimes it is the most honest thing in the room.
We learned it in the schoolyard: the in-group and the out-group, who is in the circle and who is not, how the rules bend depending on where you stand. The social psychologist Henri Tajfel showed in the 1970s that people will favour their own group even when the groups are completely arbitrary, split by a coin toss or a preference for one painting over another. The pull is that automatic, and that old. The only question is whether the systems around us amplify it or hold it in check.
When power operates like a club, protecting its own, rewarding loyalty over merit, making decisions in rooms most people will never enter, it amplifies that pull to its worst. Inside the room it breeds groupthink, the club stops hearing the truth, filters out the feedback that would tell it something is wrong, and the capable people drift away because the game no longer rewards what they are good at. Outside the room it breeds the withdrawal Robert Putnam spent decades documenting: people stop trusting, stop participating, stop believing it makes any difference. And none of it stays still. Going along is how the good things leak away, one small acquiescence at a time. The warmth goes. The trust goes. The sense that your participation matters goes. You win the room and lose the city, and you do not notice the city going until it is gone, because each step felt too small to be the one that mattered.
Here is what that feeling hides. Going along looks like the safe move, and it is not. Each time you go along because you think you must, you are casting a vote, for the culture those dynamics breed and the future that grows from it. The research is blunt: you cannot build a healthy culture on an in-group and an out-group. The moment some are in and some are out, trust thins, fairness curdles, the good people leave, and the whole thing underperforms, even for the ones who thought they were safely inside. The Wyatt scenarios say the same at the scale of a society. The other way, staying in honest relationship even when it exposes you, is not reckless. It is the safe one, because trust and belonging are the only things that hold when things get hard. And it is what almost everyone wants: somewhere warm, worth belonging to, that their kids might even want to stay in. That cannot be built by a club. It is built in how people treat each other when no one is watching.
Going along with it feels like staying out of the game. It is the game. It is the move that keeps the rigged version running.
Mutually assured destruction is not built by villains. It is built by ordinary people who felt they had no choice but to go along.
And mutually assured flourishing is built the same way, by ordinary people, one decision at a time, who chose to play their part instead of playing to win.
Old Games, New Games
The old game is visibly breaking down. The 10F Consortium calls this the shift from one game to many games. But most of the replacement games being assembled right now are the same extractive logic in new costumes: new technologies, new geopolitical arrangements, new financial instruments, same grammar. And the world just minted its first trillionaire. The question worth asking in the face of all this is: where are the genuine windows to instantiate a different logic entirely?
There are more of them than you think. And most of them are already running.
You already know the obvious ones, though you may be surprised to learn that the numbers are better than the silence around them suggests. Worker and community cooperatives have built lending of their own when the banks would not, structured so the lender can never take more than the borrower creates. Community land trusts, where a nonprofit owns the land and sells only the house at a restricted, permanently affordable price, now number around 225 in the United States alone, hold tens of thousands of homes off the speculative market, and see their owners default roughly ten times less often than conventional buyers.
And whole regions have turned real money back into their own economies through the unglamorous act of getting public institutions to buy local: Preston in England moved about £75 million back into the city and £200 million across its county within a few years, lifting the local share of anchor-institution spending from around 5 per cent to nearly 20, while local unemployment more than halved.
Governments have begun measuring what actually matters, with Wales legislating a duty to future generations in 2015 and New Zealand building a Wellbeing Budget in 2019, though a later government shelved it, a reminder that these gains do not defend themselves. And the OECD has now catalogued around 300 citizens’ assemblies across more than 30 countries, ordinary people chosen by lottery and given real information and real time, which in Ireland broke decades of deadlock on same-sex marriage and abortion and produced recommendations that then carried at referendum.
And even the ceiling has edged back onto the table. A modest annual tax on the very largest fortunes, an idea waved away as naive a decade ago, was commissioned for the G20 and passed in France’s lower house in 2025. It is contested, with the United States and Germany among the resisters, and it is far from won. But the unthinkable has become merely difficult, which is how these things always begin.
The seeds are here in South Australia too, growing without fanfare, sometimes dismissed by the systems they are trying to replace. Compassion Revolution has spent close to a decade showing that compassion is not soft, it is the structural force that makes workplaces more productive and more human. DemocracyCo puts randomly chosen members of the public in a room with hard questions and real time, and the process itself repairs the trust that adversarial politics tears apart. Flinders University’s New Venture Institute grows enterprises built to solve problems rather than only extract rent.
The state has even begun writing the floor into the budget itself: sixteen community batteries that hand power bills about a quarter lower to some ten and a half thousand low-income households, and free public education from 2027 that lifts more than eight thousand dollars a child off the cost of raising a family. Small against the scale of the problem, but real, and pointed the right way.
And the oldest living cultures on earth have never stopped practising the regenerative logic: reciprocal relationship with country, and governance built on responsibility to people not yet born.
And it matters that these run right across the usual divides of government, private sector and community. Some are market ventures, some are government programs, some grew out of community, and that mix is the point. So much of our politics is a fight over which of the three to trust and which to blame: the market is the problem, no, the government is, no, we have lost community. Each camp is responding to something real, and each is wrong about the cure, because the three are not rivals. They are organs of one body. Markets without community become extraction machines. Government without markets goes rigid and captured. Community without a floor turns inward and guards its own. Remove any one and the others sicken. They are all, in the end, made of people, and the question is never which sector to cheer and which to boo. It is whether each is honest, accountable and playing its part, or whether it has been captured and turned to extraction. That is the only line that counts, and it runs through all three.
Three things separate them from the old logic under a new name. They change who owns what and who decides, not just the words on the website. They win on the extractive logic’s own terms, with lower foreclosures, faster local growth, better health, which means they are not sacrifices for the common good but proof that the generative logic is the more intelligent strategy. And they build infrastructure rather than make arguments. You do not need everyone to agree. You need enough people building the alternative for switching to become the obvious choice, and the tipping point is lower than you think, which is perhaps part of why there is so much concerted effort in the opposite direction from those who are afraid of loss and want to protect theirs.
And yet, shown all of this, the mind still reaches for a reason it could never really work here. That reflex has a name…
Myth 2: It has to be this way
Even in a room of unusually diverse, capable and committed people, many of them already building the alternatives we just walked through, we found the same thing: set out to imagine something new, and the mind projects the present forward, the same shape of economy, the same welfare model, the same rules about who owns land, the same quiet assumption that some people will always be left behind. It is the only game most of us have ever seen played, so it stops looking like a game with rules someone wrote and starts to look like the weather, simply how things are.
That is the second myth, and the quietest, because we almost never argue it. It has another face that shows up the moment anyone pictures something different, in two words: be realistic. Somewhere along the way realistic came to mean abandon hope, as though wanting it otherwise were childish. Between them the two keep us still. One face stops us seeing that it is a choice. The other shames us out of believing the choice is real.
But over 140 years almost none of it is fixed. The rules we treat as weather are recent, local, and authored. Economic security for everyone could be built in. So could deeper exploitation. Both are on the table, and nothing guarantees the better one.
And right now, less than ever is fixed, because the ground is moving under everything at once, and a system that is moving can be steered in a way a settled one cannot. The arrangement now cracking was never working for most of us, so the task is not to save it or mourn it. It is to decide what gets built in its place, and to decide quickly, because a moment like this does not stay open.
And the thing cracking is not the future arriving, it is the past failing, a logic that only ever worked while there was somewhere else to dump the cost, now that the atmosphere is full and the gulf is dying and the trust is spent.
The old logic has lost its grip but nothing has replaced it yet, and whatever fills that gap will harden into the next normal. That is why now is the moment. We are in the short interval where the shape of the future is still soft.
Left alone, it sets the wrong way. The default, here and everywhere, is more concentration: rent compounds, capital gathers, advantage hardens into inheritance. You can watch it run, the gap widening year on year while a house, a carer, a steady job drift further out of reach. Disruption does not change that direction by itself. It only opens a window in which something else could be steered into place, and an open window closes. Do nothing and it closes back over concentration, set harder than before.
The forces that will decide which way it sets are already here, and each one can be pointed two ways. Pointed at concentration, they hoard the future in fewer hands. Pointed at the foundations, they widen the room everyone has to move. Artificial intelligence is sold as the master capability, though the honest evidence so far shows less a flood of people replaced than a shortage of people who can use the tools, even as the power bills already land on ordinary households. Energy is the same fork with the bill arriving early, after the disruption around the Strait of Hormuz cut global oil supply sharply through early 2026. Climate is the fork we can see from the gulf. And underneath it all the care system strains, the population ages, wealth concentrates, trust thins, and the most dangerous force of all gathers: the quiet belief that none of it can change.
The sharpest version of the question is one the economic historian Adam Tooze referenced in a recent article: are we the horses, about to be made obsolete by a faster machine the way the engine retired the workhorse? The image is not his, it reaches him from a 2023 paper by the historian Matthew Lowenstein by way of Niall Ferguson, but Tooze is the one insisting this is the question the moment cannot wave away, even as he notes that AI has become the central engine of capital accumulation, concentrating wealth to a historic degree. Horses did not own the engines that replaced them, and could not vote, organise or tax. We can. When machines replaced muscle before, people did not vanish like the horse; over a hard century they clawed back a share of what the machines produced. So if these systems really do make a great deal with very little human labour, that is not scarcity, it is abundance with the people left out, and whether it ends in catastrophe or in the most affordable floor in history turns entirely on who owns the machines and what the rest of us can still claim. It was never a question about technology. It is the old question of rent, in the newest possible costume.
These pressures are independent, yet they are arriving at once, and together they mean the old logic is running out of room. A settled system absorbs a challenge and closes over it; a system cracking in several places can be moved. That is the real ground for hope, not a promise that we win, but the plain fact that for the first time in a generation the system can be shifted at all. None of this is over. But buildable is not built. The window will not hold itself open, and it does not choose what comes through it. Unless we act, deliberately and for the long term, to build the foundations that let people and institutions play their part, the gap fills with more of the same, set harder, and the next chance sits further away than this one. The window is open now. Now is not forever.
Myth 3: The Game Is Fair
The third myth is the deepest of all, the one that lets the whole arrangement feel ok: that where people end up is mostly what they earned. Work hard, make good choices, and you rise. Struggle, and somewhere you must have fallen short. It is a powerful story because it holds a grain of truth. Effort is real, choices matter. But it cannot carry the weight we put on it. Control for income and people on low incomes save at the same rate as everyone else, so it is not a failure of thrift or work ethic. One person owns a home that earns more in a year than they do; another pays that same gain to a landlord and falls further behind for identical work. One family hands down a deposit and a clear run; another hands down debt and a standing start. Wages barely move while the assets race away, so the gap widens year after year, not because some people stopped trying, but because the system rewards owning over working and inheritance over effort, whether or not anyone intends it. Poverty in a country this rich is not earned, it is produced, and so, mostly, is wealth.
Which means the things that actually end it are structural, not sentimental. Not charity. Not a budgeting app. Assets placed in people’s hands early enough to matter. Work guaranteed as a right rather than rationed as a privilege. A floor nobody falls through, and, the part polite company avoids, a ceiling that stops a few from hoarding the room everyone else needs to live.
And we should be plain about the money. A society as rich as this one already produces far more than enough to put a decent floor under everyone. The barrier has never been the size of the pie. It is how it is cut. This is not a shortage, it is a setting, and the proof is that other wealthy places no richer than us have all but designed it out. A child born in Finland or Denmark is not born into our rates of deep poverty, not because those countries earn more than we do, but because they decided their floor was not optional. Same wealth, different setting, different result.
There is a beautiful body of work showing that when you rebuild systems around relationship and around growing people’s real capabilities, rather than processing their deficits, people climb out of hardship in ways that managing them never achieved. Relationship is not soft. It is the most underused resource we have.
But here is the trap, relationship without a shift in power and assets is not generosity, it is offloading. A system that refuses to change can use the language of community and care to dump its costs onto the people already carrying the most, and in this country that means, over and over, single mothers and First Nations women doing unpaid work to hold together what the system broke. Care that is praised and never paid is just extraction wearing a softer face. Love without power is only sentiment, and power without love is only force. The generative logic holds only when both move together, relationship arriving with the redistribution. Who is recognised, who is paid, who owns, and who decides, all at once. Any one of them without the others is the con.
Look back at the gulf, the trees, the aged care home, the water. They are not four sad stories. They are the foundation the whole economy stands on, the things that make everything else possible, treated for decades as a cost to be minimised rather than the ground beneath our feet. Every system draws a line around whose interests count, and the extractive logic draws it tight: it prices what it can take and ignores what holds it all up, the estuary, the next generation, the household with no one to lobby for it. Then the foundation cracks, and it cracks first under the people with the least.
Myth 4: Take Away The Prize And No One Builds
Cap accumulation, the argument goes, redistribute too well, and you kill the engine: no venture capital, no risk-taking, no innovation, less freedom. The fear is worth taking seriously, and it holds a grain of truth, because incentive and the freedom to create do matter. But look at where the engine actually sits. The riskiest, most foundational innovations, the ones private capital backs only once they are safe, were overwhelmingly funded by the public, not by private fortunes. The technologies that make a smartphone smart, the internet, GPS, the touchscreen, voice recognition, came out of public research, and venture capital arrived only after the state had taken the early risk.
And the societies that redistribute most heavily are not short of entrepreneurs. Sweden, Finland and Denmark sit near the top of the world's innovation rankings, because a solid floor lets far more people take the risk: start the thing, leave the bad job, retrain, create, knowing failure will not mean ruin. Which is the quiet answer to the trillionaire. We are told a fortune that size is the price of progress, but the countries that refuse to mint them out-invent the ones that do. You do not need a titan to get the innovation. You need enough security, spread wide enough, that far many more people can chance it. Security is not the anchor that stops you sailing. It is the ballast that lets you raise the sail.
Some of the very wealthy do leave, or restructure, to keep accumulating. Sweden's own history proves it: the founders of IKEA, Tetra Pak and H&M all emigrated. But look at what actually leaves and what stays. What leaves is mostly the private fortune and its tax address, the part whose whole project was to hold more, while the companies keep designing, employing and exporting, and the country stays one of the most innovative and equal on earth. And the ones whose instinct is to flee somewhere they can hoard more were never the ones holding the place together. If the price of a fairer settlement is that a few of them take their fortunes elsewhere, that is not a loss to grieve, because the people and firms who stay are the ones rooted here and in relationship, who spend locally, employ their neighbours and keep the value circulating instead of siphoning it off. That is who our economy mostly is in South Australia, ninety-eight in every hundred businesses are small or medium, embedded and place-based, the bakery and the engineering shop and the family farm, not looking for the cheapest jurisdiction to park money and going nowhere. So the real question was never how to keep every accumulator. You cannot, and chasing them is a race to the bottom you always lose. You cannot win the race to be the cheapest place to hoard. You can win, hands down, the race to be the best place to be in relationship.
The point was never to stop the flow of reward and capital. A clock keeps time because its escapement releases the spring in small, steady beats, not by holding the spring still, and not by letting it fly loose all at once. Wealth metered out in steady flows keeps an economy alive. Hoarded and dumped, it breaks it. Keep the spring. Fix the escapement.
Why We Slip Back Into The Game
It would be easy to leave the resistance out there, in the people winning and determined to keep winning. That is a half-truth, and this work does not survive on half-truths. The harder part is that the resistance is also in us, including those of us who agree with every word so far. We nod, and then the next morning we go back to the old game, because it is easier, because we are tired, and because the new way asks us to move first while everyone else waits.
The most honest version of it is this. Faced with a rigged game we cannot single-handedly fix, most of us do the loving, rational thing: we try to make sure our own people land on the winning side of it. The good school, the deposit slipped to the kids, the connection that opens the door, the seat saved inside the club. None of it feels like greed. It feels like care. But every one of those choices is a quiet vote for the game to keep running, because it is safer to get your child a good place in the rigged version than to gamble on a fairer one that does not exist yet. That is how the system reproduces itself, not through villains, but through millions of people loving their own and hedging their bets. The same instinct that protects your child entrenches the world your child inherits.
And letting go of it feels like loss, even when it is a gain. Stepping out of playing to win feels like giving something up, the status, the certainty, the familiar squeeze, even when the squeeze was costing you your health and your time and your people. The grief is real. What waits on the other side is not less life. It is more.
So we will not pretend that naming this makes it easy. We will default. We will hedge for our own. We will feel the loss before we feel the gain, and we will need each other to move at all, because nobody steps out of a game everyone else is still playing alone. How a whole society shifts a game like this, against that much pull, is one of the hardest questions there is, and not one with a single answer. It is exactly what the scenarios ahead are for: not one path but many, traced across many possible futures, so we can tell the truth about how hard it is and still see which moves open the way and which close it, instead of letting either false hope or quiet despair pull us back.
What We Are Learning About How Change Happens
Here is the part we did not expect to be hopeful. When you sit with how rigged the table is, the obvious conclusion is how nigh impossible it will be to shift the dynamic. But the more we have looked at how large changes come about, the more encouraging, and the stranger, the picture gets, because most of what we assumed turns out to be wrong in a useful direction. We are still learning this, and almost none of it works the way intuition says it should.
Take the thing that feels most fixed, how divided we have become. The easy story is that people are simply tribal now, sorted into camps, and nothing can be done. The evidence points somewhere else. Intolerance is not a fixed trait. It behaves more like a predisposition multiplied by threat: under fear and scarcity people pull into their groups and harden against outsiders, and under conditions that feel safe the same people are barely distinguishable from anyone else. Which means the division we are living through is not simply who we are. It is partly what insecurity is doing to us. And that rewires the whole problem, because the extractive system is not only taking the money. You can watch it concentrate in real time: a world with it’s first trillionaire while the nurse who keeps a hospital running cannot afford a house in the city she serves. That distance is the loop made visible, and made personal. The pile at one end and the fear at the other are the same machine, and the fear is the clever part, because it turns us against each other and keeps us too divided to do anything about the pile. It sets us at each other’s throats by design, not by accident.
That sounds bleak until you turn it over. If the tribalism runs downstream of the insecurity, then the floor we keep returning to is not only an economic repair. It is one of the most powerful tools we have for bringing the heat down. A guaranteed floor under everyone is social glue. It does the quiet work of making people feel secure enough to stop reading their neighbour as a threat. We did not set out expecting economic security and social trust to be the same project. They appear to be.
Then there is the matter of numbers, where the finding surprised us. You would think you need a majority to move a society. You do not. In careful experiments, once a committed minority reaches somewhere near a quarter of a group, the shared norm flips, often abruptly, and the rest follow. We are watching this run right now, pointed the wrong way. The booing of Welcomes, the slow normalising of cruelty, is a committed minority working exactly this mechanism on purpose, changing what feels normal one event at a time.
The uncomfortable lesson is that norms do not hold themselves and do not drift toward decency on their own. If the only organised, committed people are the ones pushing exclusion, they win by default, because they are the only ones doing the work. The encouraging half of the same fact is that a committed minority for the better norms can move it back, and it does not have to be most of us.
But this is where we had to give up an instinct. The reflex is to broadcast, to run the big campaign and reach everyone a little. That is not how these shifts travel. They move more like a contagion that needs repeated, trusted contact, neighbour to neighbour, until a local patch tips and then jumps to the next. A street, a club, a town where enough people visibly change is worth more than a billboard a million people glimpse once. You do not move a society by reaching everyone thinly. You move it by getting a few places all the way across the line.
And on the tribes themselves, the surprise is the largest. The obvious move is to ask people to be less tribal, to rise above their group and embrace difference. It tends to fail, and often backfires, because being told your identity is the problem feels like an attack, and attacked people dig in. What works is closer to the opposite. You let people keep their belonging, you give them a larger thing to also belong to, and you hand them a job that can only be done together. When researchers tried to mend a bitter split between two groups of boys, simply mixing them did nothing, and sometimes made it worse. What healed it was a broken water pipe that both groups needed and neither could fix alone. The shared task did what the conversation could not. The lesson for this state is oddly practical: the way to bring people together is not another plea to get along, it is a real shared problem, the gulf, the heat, a house our kids can afford, that we can only solve together, and it lets a farmer and a conservationist find they are working the same problem from two ends, each still themselves, both now part of something larger, and discover they need each other.
Even then there is a catch, and it is an honest one. Most people will move if they see others moving, and stay put if they think they would be moving alone. Nobody wants to be the only one who changed. So a surprising amount of the work is not persuasion at all. It is making the willingness visible, letting people see how many others are ready, so that no one has to go first by themselves. A great deal of what looks like disagreement is really just everyone waiting on everyone else.
And the deepest thing we have learned, we learned in our own rooms. It comes back to that same limit, the one we keep running into: people who want the better world still cannot quite picture it, and you cannot argue anyone into a future they cannot see. So you stop arguing. You let them stand inside it for a moment, feel what it would be like to live there, and the picture does what the argument could not. That, in the end, is what scenarios are for, and what this whole body of work is for.
The hardest link is power. We do not have a convincing account of why those holding the rent would loosen their grip, and history says concentrated interests usually hold on. The tools that shift attitudes are real but modest, and they can harden hearts as easily as open them. And we do not know whether the better cycle can be started before the worse one, the heating, the machines, the drift toward strongmen, closes the window. We are not selling certainty. We are saying there are real, tested pathways to creating coherent bubbles of better, and the floor is the one that does the most at once.
What ties all of it together, we are coming to think, is one word: belonging. Faction and fear and cruelty are mostly what rush in when belonging is scarce and conditional, something you have to earn and can lose. Make it abundant instead, a real economic stake for everyone, a genuine say in the decisions, and recognition that does not ask anyone to stop being themselves, and the ground the cruelty grows in begins to dry out. The oldest cultures on this continent have understood belonging this way for longer than anywhere on Earth, as relationship and obligation to each other and to Country, and that understanding is theirs to teach, not ours to borrow. It is a whole conversation of its own, and one of the next ones we will have. For now it is enough to notice that the floor, the larger we, and the shared task are not three ideas. They are one idea, seen from three sides.
From A Game You Play To A Living World You Belong To
This piece started at a table, with a rigged game and a club that wins. But a living place is not a game, and the people in it are not players to be beaten. A living thing grows, cycles, repairs itself, learns, and makes more life. It wastes nothing and it depletes no one. Not because it is gentle, but because everything in it is held in relationship, and nothing is allowed to take without giving back.
That is the shift the title is asking for. Playing to win is what you do in a game. Playing your part is what you do in a living thing you belong to and want to see flourish. One leaves the future to be carved up. The other keeps it open, and growing, for everyone in it.
There is a quiet mechanism hidden in that word, part. You cannot reach flourishing by aiming straight at it, any more than a bee makes a meadow by trying to. The bee tends its own small work, and the orchard, the season, the whole valley follow from the side. Playing your part works the same way. You tend the thing in front of you, in right relationship, and the flourishing arrives off to the side, for you and for everyone, precisely because no one was only trying to win it.
This Is The First Of These Conversations
This is the work we have just started, with one of the oldest institutions in our state.
The Wyatt Trust has worked toward a South Australia where everyone can thrive since 1886. That is 140 years. So we are asking a 140-year question with them, in a body of work we are calling Branching Futures. Not what the next budget holds. What life here could become across the next 140 years, including a South Australia where economic security reaches everyone and no one is locked out. We are doing it with our eyes open, including Wyatt’s own truth-telling about the colonial wealth the Trust was founded on, because no honest long view can pretend the past is not part of the system the present is trying to change.
A 140-year question is, in the end, a question about a single number. Economists call it the discount rate: how much less you count something simply because it lands later, or lands on someone else, rather than on you now. The whole long argument over climate, from Stern to Nordhaus, came down to that one dial. Turn it high and next quarter is everything, and a cost that falls on the gulf, or on a child not yet born, or on the family across town, is almost free. Turn it down and the future, and the people in it, become nearly as real as you are. The generative logic puts a lower discount rate on the world. Every extractive move in this article, the cleared block, the discharged effluent, the stripped asset, is the same move underneath, charging the future and other people for a benefit taken today. To ask what South Australia could be in 140 years is simply to refuse that, to turn the dial down on purpose.
A 140-year endowment is what finance calls patient capital, money freed from the demand for a fast return. That is not a footnote to the argument, it is the argument in institutional form, and the question is how much of the rest of the economy could learn to wait alongside it.
This is only the first thread. The scenarios are still being built, with a wide ecosystem of collaborators and the people who carry the lived experience of all of it, and we release them in October. Between now and then we will take the threads that arise from the processes underway as they evolve and produce a series of pieces like this one.
You already know the crux of this article from your own life. You have sat at the table where the club plays to win, and at the one where people build something together across every line that was supposed to divide them. Both are real. Both live in almost everyone.
So, as we all play our part, which future are you rehearsing now?
The answer is not fixed. It is a choice. And it compounds.