Years ago, I was camped in the hills west of Sydney — what you do when rent is a luxury, and the bush is free. Every afternoon, like clockwork, around five, the backpackers arrived looking for somewhere to bed down. A bonfire would be lit, because that’s what young people do. They sat in a loose circle, wrapped in fragrant smoke, wine bottles scattered like punctuation, talking about the world as if it were theirs to fix.
As an older man, you don’t enter the circle. You sit back on a tree stump and listen.
The first thing you notice is language. Everyone speaks excellent English; only the accents betray where they’re from. The second thing is gender — or rather, the near absence of it. The old signals are muted. There’s no obvious peacocking, no ritualised flirtation, though the young men still carry that ancient swagger that predates civilisation itself. Some things are older than progress.
What they talk about is the future: the planet, climate, politics, the feeling — unstated but shared — that they belong to something larger than any one country. A global youth culture, already formed, already assumed.
I’d seen hints of it before. A Western journalist in Iran, filming a death-metal band rehearsing in a soundproofed basement to avoid the morality police. Another report from Lebanon: the lead guitarist of a rock band, explaining that young people in the Middle East want in—not as imitators, but as participants. A thirteen-year-old Yemeni boy was asked what he and his friends wanted. He didn’t hesitate. “The same as you have,” he said. “Freedom and democracy.”
Sitting by that fire, included by default as the token old bloke, it was apparent this wasn’t an anecdote but a pattern. These young people were already world citizens. That fact alone will reshape diplomacy, leadership, and even how the planet is managed. We will see international statespersons emerge not as abstractions but as inevitabilities.
I can’t recall who said it — only that he was French — but he nailed it when asked the difference between patriotism and nationalism. “Patriotism,” he said, “is loving your country. Nationalism is hating everyone else.” The young French woman opposite me, downing her fifth glass of wine, certainly loved France. She didn’t hate Burundi.
The obstacles are predictable. Extremists, either too stupid or too invested to see that this was inevitable once technology collapsed distance. Living forever in sealed geographic compartments, by race, was never sustainable. I once said to an Aboriginal elder in the outback that the moment someone figured out how to sail upwind, sixty-four thousand years of isolation were over. As two grandfathers, we agreed that the only question that mattered was what we wanted for our grandchildren. And the answer was clear: Indigenous youth must take their place at the table — not as symbols, not as museum pieces, but as full participants in whatever comes next.
What troubled me that night was who wasn’t there. Around that fire, there wasn’t a single young person of colour. There’s a danger that some groups will be welcomed first as curiosities —even pampered pets—tolerated, displayed—only to be quietly left behind once the party moves on.
The resistance to this emerging civilisation comes from fear: fear of losing control, fear of diluted identity, fear of the future itself. It comes dressed as the far right, as religious extremism, as nationalist revival. Putin’s Russia. Xi’s China. Modi’s India. Trump’s America. Different costumes, same impulse: to freeze history and pretend entropy can be negotiated with.
But sitting there in the Australian bush, listening to young people who already belonged to one another, I knew the truth. This movement isn’t political in the usual sense. It’s closer to an evolutionary step. You don’t vote against it. You don’t stop it. You either adapt — or you fossilise.