After No! What comes next?

Australia voted No! to the Voice referendum and something beyond an opportunity to acknowledge and address the plight and the pain of the indigenous community seems to have been lost.

Even among those who voted No, there were few who danced on the grave of the Uluru Statement From the Heart, recognizing the depressing reality that the solution to the plight and the all-to-real suffering of the indigenous community is more of the same.

More government bureaucrats, more inquiries, more talk-fests and more throwing good money after bad in the hope the problems go away.

Yet, there is good news.

In just 25 short statements, The Freedom Declaration not only shines a new light on what was taken from the indigenous community through colonization, it also opens a new path to reconciliation through practical solutions that start with the idea of truth-telling.

Truth-telling, however, is more than just acknowledging the physical crimes and injustices visited upon an indigenous population by the colonialists, or about saying “sorry” on behalf of long-dead ancestors.

It is about revealing the treasure that was taken from the colonized not just in Australia but colonized people everywhere, and making restitution beyond the beads and trinkets of appeasement of money, reclaiming useless tracts of land and other meaningless gestures.

Restitution is about restoring what was lost and what was lost lays at the core of The Freedom Declaration.

Just like the Declaration of Independence defined a new nation and forged the American identity, The Freedom Declaration defines a new post-industrial society for a new generation of global citizens.

The Freedom Declaration is the unabashed acknowledgment and recognition that at the core of any successful human society is a socialization process that builds trust by encouraging positive behaviour, while discouraging negative behavior that causing societies to collapse by undermining trust.

The socialization process is often couched in religious terms, explored in myths, simple stories and allegories that not only explain the process in ways beyond mere words, but also facilitate the successful transmission of the core principles from one generation to the next.

Ideas like heaven and hell, sin and virtue, morality and ethics, stories of heroism and sacrifice are all employed with the goal of buttressing the socialization process that builds just and fair societies.

The aboriginal people, for example, use the term "dreaming" as a way of understanding reality and guiding behaviour:

The dreaming explains the origin of the universe and workings of nature and humanity. It shapes and structures life through the regulation and understanding of family life, the relations between the sexes and obligations to people, land and spirits.

Whenever and wherever this socialization process fails, societies collapse, often on a mountain of bones.

This brings us to the tragedy of colonization, which not only robs the indigenous population of material wealth and property, it also undermines the socialization process that defines the people, enabling them to live and prosper in harmony with each other and with their environment.

Often times this socialization process is a millennia in the making and deeply embedded in the psyche of the people, expressed as “ancient sovereignty” in the Uluru Statement, which was over 60,000 years in the making.

This sovereignty, as the authors of the Uluru statement point out, is “spiritual” in nature. It is “the ancestral tie between the land, or ‘mother nature’, and the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples who were born therefrom, remain attached thereto, and must one day return thither to be united with our ancestors.”

The error of colonization lies in the characterization of this “ancient sovereignty” as uncivilized and primitive, even though it has sustained generations of indigenous communities for over 60,000 years. The tragedy of colonization is the attempt to impose, often with misguided religious zeal, a new socialization process based on worthy Christian ideals but alien to the indigenous communities.

What's worse, this new socialization process was often imposed through force, violence, incarceration, brutality and the blatant hypocrisy of “do as we say, not as we do.” It never took hold.

The effect of this failure was dislocation, disorientation and confusion that tore asunder the bonds between the indigenous people, their land and their customs, which helped them make sense of the world.

It reverberates to this day in a sense of loss and powerless, reflected in the disproportionately high incarceration rates of the young, alcohol and drug abuse, domestic violence and a pervading sense of hopelessness, despair and misery.

This is the basis of inter-generational trauma as the wisdom, experience and knowledge that was thousands of years in the making fades into irrelevance, with nothing to replace it except the harsh reality of the court room, cold concrete floors and prison bars that imprison not only the body but also darken the dreaming of the soul, so important to the indigenous way of life.

The authors of the Uluru statement lament in despair, but not without hope.

“We are not an innately criminal people. Our children are aliened from their families at unprecedented rates. This cannot be because we have no love for them. And our youth languish in detention in obscene numbers. They should be our hope for the future.”

Some argue that the simple solution is for the indigenous community to get over it, assimilate and get on with life like everyone else. Many in the indigenous community have done just that, with great success, yet others, deprived of the spiritual food that sustained their ancestors, still feel like aliens in their own land. And when they do speak out they are often mercilessly attacked, vilified and bullied into silence.

This situation will not get better but will worsen because the colonizers themselves are being colonized, not by a physical power but by a seemingly innocuous philosophy called postmodernism, which has been aptly characterized by the late Professor Stanley Rosen as the "enlightenment gone mad."

Postmodernism proclaims the death of grand narratives, teaches that objective truth does not exist, proclaims that everything is relative and subjective and therefore permissible and the spiritual food of the ages of “do as you ought” is being replaced by “do as you will”, as long as you don't break the law.

The indigenous community knows only too well that relying on the law does not work and the broader community is learning the same lesson as court rooms are clogged, jails are over-filled, recidivist crime on the rise and those that can afford it, retreat into gated communities guarded by men with guns.

Deprived of its spiritual food by postmodernism, Western civilization is now collapsing, the signs are everywhere, and inter-generational trauma that plagues the indigenous community is now visiting the children of the colonizers.

Instead of creating a society of socially mature adults, we are increasingly creating a society of adults with the social maturity of toddlers. These adult toddlers are wreaking havoc in all areas of society, indigenous and non-indigenous. They don't listen, they don't care, they don't understand and, when in positions of power and influence, wreak havoc, chaos and misery far and wide, even globally.

This is the message and warning hidden in plain sight in the poetry of the Uluru statement.

The indigenous community is the proverbial canary in the coalmine. Truly listening, understanding its plight and heeding its warning of what will visit us if we don't act, can save us all.

The Uluru Statement has laid down the foundation for The Freedom Declaration, which opens the path to a new type of post-industrial society that builds on the lessons of the ancestors, while exposing the poison of postmodernism that is creating a new stolen generation deprived of hope and opportunity.

Having voted No! to the Voice, Australia has an opportunity to say Yes! to The Freedom Declaration and lead the world into a new type of economy and society based on restoring and reaffirming a socialization process of positive behaviour that anyone, anywhere and anytime will immediately recognize as their own.

This is the hidden gem of the Uluru Statement from the Heart that can now shine brightly through The Freedom Declaration as part of Project Open Democracy and Project Common Vision.