When conversations turn to the future of the economy, they often revolve around new technologies, policy reforms or greener markets. But what if the deeper challenge isn’t simply changing the economy?
What if it’s changing the worldview that created it?
In a thought-provoking conversation on Voices of the New Economy, Professor Yin Paradies invites us to step back from contemporary debates and ask a far more fundamental question: what if many of the crises we face today are symptoms of a much older story—one that began thousands of years ago with the rise of hierarchy, cities, patriarchy and separation from the living world?
Questioning Modernity
For many people, modernity refers to the Enlightenment, industrialisation or scientific progress. Paradies uses the term much more broadly.
He traces the roots of modernity back roughly 12,000 years to the beginning of the Holocene, when human societies gradually shifted towards permanent settlements, intensive agriculture, hierarchical social structures and increasingly centralised systems of power. Alongside these material changes came new ways of thinking—greater emphasis on control, order, categorisation, ownership and domination.
From this perspective, many of today’s institutions are not isolated problems. Universities, markets, bureaucracies and nation states are all expressions of the same underlying worldview.
The ecological crisis, loneliness, inequality and social fragmentation are not separate issues waiting for separate solutions. They emerge from a civilisation built upon assumptions that increasingly place humans outside, rather than within, the living world.
Learning From Indigenous Ways of Being
Rather than searching for entirely new ideas, Paradies argues that humanity already possesses a vast inheritance of wisdom.
For more than 95 per cent of our existence as a species, humans lived in small-scale societies organised around reciprocity, kinship and intimate relationships with place. These Indigenous ways of knowing have not disappeared—they continue to exist in Indigenous communities around the world and offer insights into living differently.
This is not about romanticising the past or suggesting we can simply return to pre-industrial life.
Instead, it is about recovering patterns of relationship that modern societies have largely forgotten: sharing meals, caring for Country, learning through observation, building trust within communities, embracing emotion and recognising our interdependence with all forms of life.
For Paradies, this process is less about acquiring new information than cultivating new ways of perceiving the world.
Becoming “Of” a Place
One of the most powerful ideas explored in the conversation is the distinction between living somewhere and being of a place.
Many of us know where we live, but relatively few know the names of the birds outside our window, the seasonal rhythms of local ecosystems or the stories embedded within the landscapes we inhabit.
Paradies suggests that becoming “of” a place happens through multiple forms of connection. It involves our physical relationship with the land—growing food, understanding local species and becoming literally made from the place we inhabit. It also includes ancestral connection, recognising the histories that have shaped us, and spiritual connection through attentive relationships with Country.
These relationships cannot be developed overnight.
They emerge through time, practice and curiosity.
Decolonising Knowledge
As both an Indigenous scholar and a long-standing academic, Paradies offers an unusually candid reflection on universities themselves.
Rather than seeing academia as the primary engine of change, he argues that universities are deeply embedded within the structures of modernity they often seek to critique. While valuable work certainly happens within academic institutions, he suggests that truly transformative knowledge cannot be confined to lecture theatres or journal articles.
Knowledge, in many Indigenous traditions, is relational rather than abstract.
It is learned through participation, observation and practice. Children learn alongside Elders. Stories carry ecological knowledge across generations. Ceremonies preserve cultural memory. Learning happens through living rather than through detached instruction.
This perspective challenges modern assumptions about expertise, reminding us that wisdom often develops through relationships with people and place as much as through formal education.
Beyond Reform
Perhaps the most provocative aspect of Paradies’ vision is his argument that many of our existing institutions cannot simply be reformed into something better.
Drawing on the idea of “hospicing modernity,” he suggests that rather than investing all our energy in repairing systems designed around fundamentally different values, we should also be nurturing the emergence of alternatives.
That might mean rebuilding local communities, reviving cultural traditions, creating opportunities for intergenerational learning or deepening our relationship with the places we call home.
These are not merely personal lifestyle choices.
They represent different ways of organising society itself.
A Different Future May Begin With an Older Story
The search for a new economy often focuses on innovative policies, technologies and financial models.
Professor Yin Paradies reminds us that the deepest transformation may begin somewhere else entirely.
Before changing institutions, we may need to change our relationships—with one another, with Country, with our ancestors and with ourselves.
Perhaps the future is not waiting to be invented.
Perhaps parts of it have been here all along, quietly preserved in Indigenous knowledge systems that continue to offer guidance for living well within the limits of the Earth.
Sometimes moving forward requires remembering what we have forgotten.
