The Isocracy Network

I give thanks to John Perkins for inviting me to present tonight at the Atheist Society on the topic of "Effective Political Secularism" at this venue, the Melbourne Unitarian Church hall. It is a rather marvellous convergence of interests across the metaphysical spectrum, but I hope, in the course of this evening's presentation, that a sort of unity of interests and understanding between different worldviews can be reached. I will acknowledge in the interests of transparency, that John and I have worked together on secular issues for a number of years. I was the founder of the Victorian Secular Lobby, an incorporated association, in 2011 and president of that association from 2012 to 2022. Over those years, the Victorian Secular Lobby organised religious leaders in favour of marriage equality, our first campaign, the issue of religious education in public schools, the dying with dignity campaign, the campaign against school chaplains in public schools, the suppression of sexual offences by clergy and the disingenuous avoidance of legal responsibility, a campaign against discrimination in religious schools and organisations, campaigns against anti-secular PMs in state elections, and against the automatic provision of charitable tax deductibility for organisations promoting religion, a legal right heavily abused by organisations like the Australian Christian Lobby. In the history of our organisation we were largely successful in our participation in many of these campaigns, albeit not all of them.

Perhaps it will be seen as a little unusual from the outset to be presenting to an atheist society a position that is, effectively, not atheistic. There are, of course, wide varieties of atheism, although perhaps not to the same extent as there are varieties of theism. It would be fair, however, to suggest that atheism represents an absence of belief in deities, or, in the narrow sense, a belief that there are no deities. This definition differs substantially from secularism, the personal, community, and legal separation of civil affairs from legal and political institutions and processes. Whereas atheism engages and debates with theism on the matters of metaphysics, transcendence and immanence, personal or impersonal, or divine intervention, secularism does not. Rather, secularism is a matter of how we as individuals and as a community establish the rules and procedures of religious organisations. Whereas it would seem to be a contradiction to be an atheist theist or a theist atheist (at least in most cases of a transcendent personal god), there is no such contradiction in being a secular theist or a secular atheist. On this point, there is potential unity.

Jürgen Habermas, who died on March 14, 2026, is recognised as one of the most significant social philosophers and political theorists of the second half of th­e twentieth century and beyond. From the early 1960s onwards, he was engaged in a series of public debates in philosophy, where he advocated the importance of communication, reason, and pragmatics. Holding professorships at Heidelberg University and Goethe University Frankfurt, and as a director of the Max Planck Institute in Starnberg, he was a public intellectual known throughout his native Germany as well as in intellectual circles globally. Indeed, in Germany, he was somewhat of a court philosopher, primarily among the Social Democrats but also very influential in the Christian Democratic circles as well, the two main political parties in that country. In philosophy was known for his engagement with positivist philosophy, phenomenologists, pragmatists, and post-structuralists. In political theory, he was known for his debates and incorporation of ideas with system theorists and technocrats, with Marxists and neoliberals, European federalists and nationalists, postmodernists, and religious thinkers.

In 2005, after banning a number of reformist newspapers and candidates and in the wake of the US invasion of Iraq (noting the Shi'a majority in the south and east of that country), the conservative Mahmoud Ahmadinejad won the presidential election. There were threats from the United States and Israel over Iran's civilian nuclear program and its potential for weapons development, all of which strengthened the conservatives, despite the imposition of and ultimately serious effects of sanctions from most Western countries. Voting irregularities resulted in further protests, which would be called the "Iranian Green Movement" (which would become a prohibited organisation), following the 2009 re-election of Ahmadinejad. Further protests would occur in 2011 and 2012.

Waves of protests would start again in 2016 and continue every year until the recent war. In 2016, the Cyrus Great Revolt occurred on the Shah's birthday at the Tomb of Cyrus the Great, with a nationalist and monarchist flavour and opposing theocratic rule. The government's response was to ban Cyrus the Great Day, which was short-lived as the following two years saw the Dey Protests over economic hardship and general opposition to the government. This was also the time that the "Girls of Enghelab" protests were started, seeking the removal of the mandatory hijab law, with especially notable protests following the death of Mahsa Amini in 2022 and 2023. General strikes and further protestes would continue throughout 2018 and 2019, led by truckers, farmers, shopkeepers, and teachers, and would be followed up by strikes by petrochemical workers in 2021, and a series of protests against inflationary rise in basic staples after subsidies were removed on imported wheat; all this during the COVID-19 pandemic, which itself caused 146,837 deaths.

Any serious understanding of Iran must begin with the nationalist, secular, and social democratic government of Mohammad Mosaddegh from 1951-1953. If it seems strange to start a discussion of a contemporary war on events from 75 years ago, but everything flows in an unbroken chain from Mosaddegh's election as Prime Minister, the 1953 Iranian coup d'état backed by United Kingdom (MI6) and the United States (CIA), the re-empowerment of the monarchy and the Consortium Agreement with Western oil companies, the modernisation "White Revolution" of 1963, the Iranian Islamic Revolution of 1979 and subsequent Islamicist Cultural Revolution, the opposition Iranian Green Movement of 2009, and finally the 2025-2026 Iranian protests, the suppression, and the contemporary war.

It has to be recognised that every successive regime following Mosaddegh has been worse than the one previous. The short-lived Mosaddegh government, having already introduced social security and land-value taxation, sought the nationalisation of Iran's oil reserves and an audit of the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company's royalty payments. The British, through M16, sought to overthrow the government and sough the support the United States, through the CIA, with the critical pretext of a highly questionable referendum carried out by the Mosaddegh government. The two agencies co-operated and empowered Raeza Pahlavi, the Shah of Iran, who would then rule Iran as a pro-Western monarch. The Shah, initially opposed to the coup and supporting oil nationalisation, was both threatened and awed by the power and reach of the Western imperial powers.

From the presentation to the Isocracy Annual General Meeting, March 25, 2026
As an Australian, I am acutely aware how the intersection between empire, colonies and our globalised world can be best exemplified in my country. The Commonwealth of Australia is the creation of the British Empire, the world’s most successful global colonial empire. And it wasn't a coincidence that this happened, redcoats had to travel halfway across the world, gun down the Wurundjeri and Bunurong people, for me to present to you. But before King and Country get upset and call what happened "settlement", a discussion of imperialism is in order, wherein I will define the qualities that make an empire.

Empire

Four thousand three hundred years ago, near the modern-day city of Hillah in Iraq, there stood a city called Akkad. And inside the clay walls and palaces of this city was a man history knows as Sargon. He established what is considered the world’s first empire. I would now like to recite to you some of the ancient inscriptions that describe him:

Sargon, king of Akkade, … king of the world … lord of the land
conquered the city of Uruk and destroyed its walls.
He was victorious over Uruk in battle, conquered the city,
captured Lugalzagesi, king of Uruk, in battle and led him off … in a neck stock.
Sargon, king of Akkade,
was victorious over Ur in battle, conquered the city and destroyed its wall.
He conquered Eninmar, destroyed its walls,
and conquered its district and Lagaš as far as the sea.
He washed his weapons in the sea.
He was victorious over Umma in battle, conquered the city, and destroyed its walls.
To Sargon, lord of the land, the god Enlil gave no rival.
The god Enlil gave to him the Upper Sea and the Lower Sea
so that from the Lower Sea to the Upper Sea, the citizens of Akkade held the governorships of the land.
Mari and Elam stood before Sargon, lord of the land
Sargon, king of the world, was victorious in 34 battles.
He destroyed their walls as far as the shore of the sea.
5400 men eat daily in the presence of Sargon, the king to whom Enlil gave no rival.

A Tibetan teacher, Chokyi Lodro, allegedly sanctioned harsh physical punishment for misbehaving monks. The original question was straightforward: if a figure regarded as enlightened engaged in behavior that appears immoral, how should Buddhists reconcile that? A discussion that followed, however, was anything but straightforward. Rather than engaging the question within a Buddhist framework, several participants pivoted to a familiar modern argument. They suggested that judging such behavior as "wrong" imposes Western moral standards onto a different culture. According to this line of thinking, moral judgments are culturally relative, and applying contemporary ethical standards to historical or non-Western contexts is a form of colonialism. One commenter explicitly framed criticism of Chokyi Lodro’s conduct as "Eurocentric chauvinism", arguing that we have no grounds to judge actions outside our own "lifeworld".

The following is heavily derived from two interviews on the podcast "Economics Explored" hosted by Gene Tully; namely "Rethinking Property and Taxation" and "The Pirate Party's Economic Platform". In those podcasts and in this article, the ideas of 19th-century economist Henry George are explored and elaborated, including his advocacy for a taxation on land values and an early version of Universal Basic Income. This is supplemented with a more contemporary concern with digital rights, which Henry George also explored through his concerns on patents and copyright. All of these ideas have contributed significantly in my roles in the Pirate Party Australia, the Secular Party, and the Fusion Party, which was established as a merger of the Science Party, Pirate Party, Secular Party, Vote Planet, and Climate Change Justice Party. In 2025, I stood as the candidate for the Fusion in the Federal seat of Bennelong.

Henry George, and the economics of Georgism, is a classical economic approach. Rather than just looking at money and growth rates, he also looked at economic classes, at political economy, like one finds with Adam Smith, David Ricardo, John Stuart Mill, and Karl Marx. His best-selling book from 1879, "Progress and Poverty", was concerned that with such technological progress, there was still so much poverty. George, following a position shared by other classical economists, placed much of the blame on the landlord class, broadly defined as those who derive income from rents without adding to production. This is different to the common term of "landlord" which means a person who rents out a house and land. For George and others, it meant the land value only. Henry George had a big influence in Australia and visited gaining many adherents to his message which still has relevance today with the many problems relating to our natural resources, whether we talk about capital gains tax discounts, negative gearing, mining royalties, and so forth; however you cut it, Georgists emphasise land value taxation (LVT). Another thing the Georgists make a very contribution to in Australia is pointing our our over-investment in land and the resulting property bubbles. George's influence can still be found in state-based land taxes, local councils that assess rates on unimproved site value, and even the building of Canberra.

On January 3, the United States launched a military strike in Venezuela and abducted incumbent Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores, transporting them to New York to face "narcoterrorism" charges. However, Trump and his administration have made it very clear that the action was undertaken to secure access to Venezuelan oil; after all, the United States government has a long history of its own illicit supply of narcotics. The abduction followed a series of airstrikes against Venezuelan vessels in the Caribbean Sea and Eastern Pacific Ocean, seizure of oil tankers, and imposing sanctions on eight Venezuelan economic and security officials for their role in the "suppression and subversion of democracy"; this from the very President who pardoned the participants who stormed Capitol Hill on January 6, 2024.

Such behaviour is quite normal for the United States against Central and South America and the Caribbean. The United States engaged in a number of military interventions (Cuba, Panama, Honduras, Nicaragua, Mexico, Haiti, and the Dominican Republic) in the early 20th century to secure power for is businesses, actions known as "the Banana Wars" (Guerras bananeras), as nicknames by historian Lester D. Langley (e.g., "The United States and the Caribbean, 1900–1970" and "The Banana Wars: An Inner History of American Empire, 1900–1934"). This in turn would be followed by the United States Objectives and Programs for National Security, by Truman in 1950, and then Operation Condor, a horrific series of intelligence operations, coups, and assassinations of left-wings in South America that included the installation of Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet, and involved agents Argentina, Brazil, Bolivia, Chile, Paraguay, and Uruguay. An expected 400,000 political prisoners resulted from the actions, along with approximately 80,000 people killed. A prime supporter and organiser of Operation Condor was Henry Kissinger:

"Kissinger helped to prolong the Vietnam War and expand that conflict into neutral Cambodia; facilitated genocides in Cambodia, East Timor, and Bangladesh; accelerated civil wars in southern Africa; and supported coups and death squads throughout Latin America. He had the blood of at least 3 million people on his hands, according to his biographer Greg Grandin."
-- Henry Kissinger Dies At 100

Libertarian social democracy and democratic socialism share a humane destination: a society where no one is crushed by poverty, concentrated power, or arbitrary domination. We diverge, however, on how to get there, what counts as freedom along the way, and where the journey ultimately ends.

Libertarian social democracy grows out of dialectical libertarianism. We judge institutions by whether they reduce domination and expand real freedom in the world we actually inhabit, not by whether they look “formally libertarian” on paper. This makes libertarian social democracy quite different from conventional libertarianism. That dialectical libertarian stance lets us back transitional, strategic government interventions when they loosen monopolies and dependencies. The aim is not a larger state; it’s a freer people. At most, the state is scaffolding, a temporary structure that can be used to dismantle hierarchy and make room for a voluntary, polycentric order.

Aaron Bastani’s Fully Automated Luxury Communism envisions a world in which technology liberates humanity from scarcity, with the state guaranteeing the basic material and social preconditions of a dignified life. At the core of this vision is Universal Basic Services (UBS) — the collective provision of essentials in the realm of housing, transport, education, healthcare, and information — offered free at the point of use. UBS, as Ian Gough argues, reflects the idea that human beings share universal needs which cannot be met solely through markets, and that certain foundational sectors — the “foundational economy” — must be organized around collective provision, not commodification.

While UBS addresses the distribution of life’s essentials, Modern Money Theory (MMT) and its policy instrument, the Federal Job Guarantee (FJG), focus on stabilizing employment and demand. The FJG, as outlined by Paul, Darity, and Hamilton, would establish a National Investment Employment Corps offering work to all adults at non-poverty wages, with full benefits and inflation-indexed pay. The program would act as a buffer stock of employed workers, expanding automatically during recessions and contracting during expansions — a macroeconomic stabilizer built on employment rather than unemployment.

The synthesis of UBS and FJG represents a natural and powerful convergence between two progressive frameworks: UBS secures the means of dignified living while FJG ensures the right to contribute meaningfully to society. Together, they form the backbone of a counter-cyclical and human-centered economic policy.