… there are some laws which cannot be circumvented by powerful men, and the consequences of those laws are coming for us all.
Western liberalism and the harsh reality of climate change
By Yuki Lindley | 15 November 2025, 11:00am
Capitalism’s unrestrained access to political influence, land and labour is starting to cannibalise the very consumer market it requires to exist, writes Yuki Lindley.
WITH OUR SOCIAL MEDIA feeds flooded with images of death and destruction — whether from the live-streamed genocide in Gaza or the urgent warnings from scientists about ecological collapse and the crossing of planetary tipping points — it is becoming more apparent to those who have long been shielded from the true costs of Western “civilisation” that all is not well with Western liberalism.
This harsh reality has never been hidden from the global majority; those whose ancestors were colonised, enslaved and subjected to genocide by the brutal march of modernity, liberalism and global capitalism.
However, with a cult-like leader in the Oval Office who openly embraces fascism, the facade of Western exceptionalism is beginning to crumble. Now that the capitalist class has over-exploited the lands and people of countries in the periphery (poorer, often formerly colonised nations), the driving force of exploitation is coming from the core (those in wealthy, industrialised nations).
Capitalism has historically relied on the exploitation of formally colonised nations at the periphery – international laws and economic systems designed by powerful colonial states entrench poverty, in order to maintain a supply of cheap labour, and raw materials to sustain the prosperity of those in the core.
However, with ecological collapse unable to be contained within national borders, and the exhaustion of the natural resources in the periphery, those dynamics are starting to be felt in the core. With increasing austerity measures, labour precarity, the privatisation of public services and the destruction of our planetary home, the exploitation upon which capitalism was built, is boomeranging back upon ordinary people living in wealthy nations, no longer seeing an endless curve of prosperity for their futures.
Western liberalism emerged to provide political and philosophical justifications for the newly emerging social order that capitalism was creating. Enlightenment thinkers like John Locke, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Thomas Hobbes, and Jeremy Bentham helped shape the ideological framework within which capitalism could expand, unrestrained to colonise new lands and people in its search for cheap labour, and endless expanses of lands from which to extract wealth.
Through a narrative of individual freedom, private ownership of property, reason and a drive for endless progress and economic productivity, enlightenment thinkers heralded in the age of Western liberalism, which was then spread throughout the world through a brutal regime of colonisation. When Spanish colonisers stole vast quantities of Andean and Mesoamerican gold and silver from the Americas, this enormous wealth circulated throughout European financial centres to fund banking and credit systems, which allowed for the rapid expansion of a global market system, giving rise to early financial capitalism.
Enlightenment thinkers seeking to escape the dark ages of religious dogmatism determined that rationality was the highest form of human evolution, and conveniently saw in themselves – the wealthy, educated Western European man – the pinnacle of this process, the modern man. This of course entailed that everyone else fell somewhere behind them in the scale of human evolution, not just women of course (who were too emotional to be rational), but all the other races, who were unfortunately falling behind in evolutionary terms, thus, the burden fell upon the white man to go forth and civilise them, such that they could be brought into the modern age of reason.
Known as the white man’s burden, this civilising mission spread white terror and genocide across the globe, with historians estimating that at its peak, Western European powers (and their settler colonies) dominated around 85 per cent of the world’s territory, representing the consolidation of the Western, global, capitalist order. The fact that large numbers of these evolutionarily backwards people would die out was seen as natural, and if they were helped along in their extinguishment by the well-oiled machinery of genocidal colonial practices, well, that was just helping nature along in a process of ensuring the survival of the fittest (which also meant the whitest).
Thus, Western colonisation spread liberalism throughout the globe, ushering in a new dawn of globalised capitalism, which developed along racialised lines. New global structures were developed by powerful, colonial states, to entrench their advantage through economic and international legal systems, often at the expense of formerly colonised nations, which were left reeling from the trauma, and destruction of their societies, peoples and lands. Of course, these legal frameworks were always applied unevenly, with powerful nations largely ignoring their own rules when it conflicted with their economic or political interests.
As Henry Reynolds points out, the British colonisation of Australia was illegal under international law as it existed in the late 18th century. It was clear that the lands were inhabited, thus, it could not lawfully be claimed as terra nullius (a land without people), and as such, sovereignty could only be acquired through treaty or a declaration of war, neither of which the British chose to do.
Paradoxically, during this time of colonial terrorism throughout the globe, there was a flourishing of a human rights-based discourse in Western Europe, which proudly proclaimed that all men were equal and born with inalienable rights. Of course, in reality, only a minority of the population (Western European men) could be recognised as being a man, and thus, with rights worthy of protection. This transparent hypocrisy within the Western cannon, was apparent to all those existing at the margins, unable to be recognised as part of mankind; however, the powerful and articulate critiques of the colonised, were rendered unintelligible to many in the West, because they could not see them as equally human, and thus these critiques were sidelined, allowing the hubris of Western liberalism to march on.
Now that actually-existing-capitalism (as opposed to the economic theory), with its unrestrained access to political influence, indigenous lands, and slave labour, has passed its zenith, it is starting to cannibalise the very things it requires to exist; a stable planetary system, the unpaid social labour of care giving, and a politically stable, market of consumers. A frightening new era of techo-facists is heralding in the dusk of a dying empire, long past its peak of economic prosperity and dominance, left clinging desperately to its military might as its last remaining source of power.
Corporate power, having long embedded itself into our public institutions, has discarded any facade of separation and is brazenly stepping forward to reveal itself as the true ruler of liberal democracies. The techno-facists in the White House have little regard for those they deem superfluous to capitalism; they believe that through digital mass-surveillance, their control over the flows of information (through platform monopolisation), and their control over state security apparatuses to suppress dissent, they will be able to usher in a new dawn of AI-powered efficiency and progress.
Of course, there is nothing new about these worldviews — they are the product of Western liberalism and its foundational disregard for certain lives, in the brutal quest for progress and profit.
Gaza is where the mask of Western liberalism has fallen to reveal its true face — one which has never been hidden to the global majority. Western liberalism was built upon the genocides of many of the world’s truly democratic, anti-authoritarian civilisations, showing one face to those it deems human, and another to those whose lives it deems ungrievable.
The true face of Western liberalism, if we’re forced to contend with its material history, is one of racialised and gendered domination, which saw the lands and bodies of Indigenous peoples as merely a resource from which to extract endless wealth, and rendered the unpaid labour of women invisible.
It believed in rational modern man’s ability to understand the natural world, in order to dominate it; a hubris the natural world is on track to deliver a crushing blow to. The West has long seen itself as above the laws it has helped create, but there are older laws, those of the land, well understood by Indigenous peoples, which care not for the demands of Western exceptionalism; for there are some laws which cannot be circumvented by powerful men, and the consequences of those laws are coming for us all.
Yuki Lindley is a student of philosophy of race, colonisation and Indigenous sovereignty.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Australia License
Source: https://independentaustralia.net/politics/politics-display/western-liberalism-and-the-harsh-reality-of-climate-change,20380
So what do they do? Instead of having the guts to admit they got everything wrong, they try to keep hope alive by promoting fantasies of impending climate breakdown.
The only places where ecological breakdown is happening are the kind of vicious totalitarian tyrannies whose governmental systems these climate thinkers appear to prefer – but almost never want to experience first hand for themselves.