I will always rate Brazil high on my list of great places that I am enormously glad I visited. It was long ago – just a few years before Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher upended the austerity box – and admittedly during their annual Carnival season.
Macumba drums thrummed night and day and local food was cooked in the streets – a rich pageant of colourful flamboyance, cultural mixture and style.
As young travellers by yacht, we had as little money as any and since that meant taking buses, we would be bombarded with questions about our yacht, Pendragon, moored in a backwater and then counted down boisterously to the right stop before the bus drove off in a riot of goodwill.
By then we had left apartheid South Africa behind us, grim in spite of its abounding Yuletide hospitality. Salvador formed a colourful contrast with it’s careless freedom on a coast where the Atlantic was seguing into the tropics and Bahia’s graceful saveiros (traditional fishing boats) set vast, moth-eaten sails in the tiny, perfect breezes and water-born trucks moved logs, people and produce around the huge bay in which the city sat in baroque stateliness under a brilliant sun.
Ashore were markets with head-high piles of limes essential for cachaca rum punch and the streets were redolent with the aromas of black bean feijoada and dende oil and the Moorish spices of street food served by shyly beautiful women in ice-white and elaborately embroidered aprons.
It was the quintessential optimism of the Age of Aquarius years of Hair and Tom Robbins and Simon and Garfunkel – a new and excitingly homogeneous world population. Half of the population of Brazil at that time was under 25.
Sun-bleached and brown as nuts, we partied our way into the mountains to a carnival in a village renowned for its pottery, the bus driver keeping time to his passengers singing with enthusiastic swerves of the steering wheel and groups drumming on the roof.
The world had only a few more years before those US and UK heads of government ushered in austerity and debt and a growing polarisation that infected the entire globe – so vastly different from the ideals of 1945 when the United Nations was founded in determined optimism.
New forces have emerged since, and new challenges have arisen. If international organisations seem ineffective, it is because their structure no longer reflects the current reality, and 2025 risks going down in history as the year when the international order built since 1945 collapses, Brazilian president Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva wrote in a Guardian commentary last month.
We need to be staying together. With the world in crisis, putting up walls won’t help us, he said. The law of the strongest threatens the multinational trading system and while the 2008 financial crisis exposed the failure of neoliberal globalisation, the world remained locked in the austerity playbook.
Dr Luke Kemp at the Centre for the Study of Existential Risk at the University of Cambridge warns of the same paradigm shifts and the lessons in his just-published and epic analysis of 5000 years of civilisation. He argues that a global collapse is coming unless inequality is vanquished.
People are fundamentally egalitarian, he says, but are led to collapses by enriched, status-obsessed elites.
However, while past collapses often improved the lives of ordinary citizens, today’s global civilisation is deeply interconnected and unequal and could lead to the worst societal collapse yet.
He says the threat is from leaders who are “walking versions of the dark triad” – narcissism, psychopathy and Machiavellianism – in a world menaced by the climate crisis, nuclear weapons, artificial intelligence and what the Harvard Gazette refers to as “killer robots.”
“History is best told as a story of organised crime,” Kemp says. “It is one group creating a monopoly on resources through the use of violence over a certain territory and population.”
How can a global collapse be avoided? “Don’t be a dick” is one of the eminent Dr Kemp’s solutions, along with a determination to vanquish inequality. His first step was to ditch the word civilisation, which he argues is really propaganda by rulers. “When you look at the near east … where the first kingdoms and empires arose, you don’t see civilised conduct, you see war, patriarchy and human sacrifice.”
Egalitarian and mobile hunter-gatherer societies had shared tools and culture widely and survived for hundreds of thousands of years. “Instead, we started to resemble the hierarchies of chimpanzees and the harems of gorillas.”
What do we do in the face of this radical and hopefully transformative reframing of history?
On the island here, we face local government elections in 10 weeks after a hubris over the last half dozen years where the former bloom of festivals, beach races, anniversaries, council and board interactions and the use of public halls and open spaces have been whittled away by grinding costs and walls of specious paperwork.
With the wealthy so reluctant to share and the poorer shorn of resources or opportunity to support each other, we need to be pretty intentional and intelligent about feeding each other, and not ourselves, with the metaphorical long spoons.
• Liz Waters
© Waiheke Gulf News Ltd 2025
