Don't Ask

Curiosity is essential for personal and national survival. Sadly, few Australians have it these days.

There are many ways in which to measure Australia’s national decline. GDP per head, unemployment, inflation, productivity, housing availability and national debt, among others, are reliable indices of our collective slide down the list of competent, prosperous countries.

You could also throw in such social measures as gangland shootouts, firebombings, machete attacks, NDIS scams and the proportion of people who think women can have penises. These too signify Australia becoming a country not worth taking seriously any more.

But, at the risk of depressing you, I can add another phenomenon that is seldom discussed, despite it being a part of life in Australia almost every minute of every day. This measure, in my opinion, portends an even steeper decline into the abyss, and is already making life in Australia unbearable for many.

It is Australians’ almost complete lack of curiosity about the world and other people.

The most common and infuriating manifestation of this is in everyday conversations. You may have noticed, as I have, that Australians tend to talk mostly about themselves these days. Here’s an example of a conversation I had recently, the one-sidedness of which you might find familiar.

A friend calls me every couple of months to fill me in on what he’s been up to lately. His lack of curiosity in anyone but himself became amusingly apparent during the most recent call when he finally drew breath and asked what I’d been up to.

“Well, I’ve moved to Bangkok,” I said.

“Really? What are you doing there?”

“My wife and I have started a publishing company.”

“That’s great! You can publish my next book!”

I stifled a gasp at how quickly he’d steered the conversation back to himself before saying with weary deference, “Sure. Send it through and we’ll look at it.”

“Oh no, I haven’t written it yet,” he said.

Throughout last year I found myself increasingly encountering conversations like this, and it was one of the factors (socialism, authoritarianism and inflation being just a few others) that drove my wife and me to sell up and leave. I say that with deep affection for what Australia once was, and for the people who still live there who don’t fit this solipsistic stereotype.

A lack of curiosity is fatal for an economy. Australian business executives know curiosity is essential to survival, let alone success. But in what seems to be typical modern Australian style, they don’t foster it in their own companies. A study by YouGov in 2022 found:

“More than eight in 10 (82 per cent) of senior business leaders in Australia believe a culture of curiosity is important for their organisation to adapt and grow in a post-COVID world but only four in 10 (44 per cent) strongly agree their organisation has a curious culture…

“Despite the positive link between curiosity and business growth, four out of five Australian employees (82 per cent) say there are barriers to asking questions and being curious in their organisation. More than eight in ten (85 per cent) of senior business leaders across the country feel the same, admitting that talk about encouraging curiosity is not always supported by action.”

One way to measure this is in patent applications. In 2004, Australians applied for 2600 patents in Australia. That figure rose by a mere 7 per cent, to 2800, in 2025, while the population rose by 38 per cent.

Applications for Australian patents by foreigners, meanwhile, rose from 20,200 to 27,500, or 36 per cent. In other words, the rest of the world is more curious and inventive than us, and is flooding our economy with products we might have invented ourselves if we hadn’t abandoned our hunger to know about stuff.

Of course, the education system doesn’t encourage that these days. It’s too busy telling kids that their culture is criminally colonial, that indigenous knowledges are more spiritual and sophisticated than anything produced by Western Civilisation, and that there’s no point planning for the future because climate change is going to wipe out all life on Earth anyway.

There is no room for ambiguity in this worldview. If the teachers brainwashing kids with this garbage encouraged even a skerrick of scrutiny, the whole thing would collapse. Kids would quickly realise that the entire school curriculum is nothing more than an industrial-scale version of the paranoid pessimism satirised centuries ago in the European folk tale about Henny Penny.

A tolerance for ambiguity is a key factor in curiosity, which is why kids these days are not curious about anything. They’ve been taught that everything is black and white. Nuance, like punctuality and table manners, is a symptom of white privilege.

The worst aspect of this incuriosity is that it makes most Australians oblivious to the threats their country is facing. One needs only to look at Britain to see where our burgeoning Muslim population is taking our country. There are already signs that sharia courts, female genital mutilation, child weddings, honour killings, organised crime and even rape gangs are taking hold in suburbs where white Australians are no longer welcome. But one needs an inquiring mind to see that, and such minds are rare in Australia these days.

To be fair, there is a causal relationship between life in Australia and a lack of curiosity. Psychologists acknowledge that curiosity comes at a cost. American psychologist Paul Silva found in 2005 that a person needs to determine “whether they are able to sufficiently cope or manage the negative emotions that arise from exploring new, complex, uncertain, unfamiliar, or unchartered territory.” There can be social, financial and legal risks involved in seeking new experiences or ideas.

This might not explain why Australians have stopped showing interest in each other, but it does explain the nation’s collective intellectual despair. Australians are bombarded with enough negative emotions already. It’s stressful enough just paying the bills, getting the kids through school and staying off the radar of the country’s burgeoning legions of petty authoritarian bureaucrats without adding explorations into the unknown to the mix.

But here’s the catch: curiosity is not a luxury. It’s essential for survival. In 1943, psychologist Abraham Maslow wrote a seminal study, A Theory of Human Motivation, which identified five levels of human wants: physiological (food, water, air, sleep and sex), safety, love, esteem and self-actualisation. These five desires existed in a hierarchy. A person is unlikely to seek satisfaction at one level unless the lower level is already satisfied. Maslow also found that, without curiosity, not even the basic need for food could be met. An incurious person will starve to death long before he achieves the ultimate goal of self-actualisation.

Those five levels are also a reasonable gauge of how advanced or developed a society is. At the moment, Australia as a country is focused on the first two: basic physical needs and safety. Collectively achieving the social equivalent of love, esteem and self-actualisation would be like reupholstering the seats in an old Kingswood before you fixed the broken starter motor.

The easiest way to pull oneself out of Australia’s mental black hole is to consciously foster simple acts of curiosity. According to an influential study from 2018, there are five types of curiosity:

• Joyous Exploration — The pleasurable desire to seek out new knowledge and experiences for the joy of learning and growth.

• Deprivation Sensitivity — The drive to fill knowledge gaps or solve problems, often accompanied by tension or anxiety until resolved.

• Stress Tolerance — Willingness to embrace the uncertainty, doubt, and anxiety that come with exploring the new or unknown.

• Social Curiosity — Interest in what other people think, feel, and do (through observing, talking, or listening).

• Thrill Seeking — Willingness to take physical, social, or financial risks for varied, complex, and intense experiences.

Each of these has its own rewards that are attractive to different personality types, which can be enjoyed daily without much effort.

Alternatively, you can do what a growing tribe of Australians are doing, and leave. You will quickly discover that there is more to life than the boring grind Australia offers these days. Ironically, the more adventurous you are, the more interested you tend to be in other people, and the better company you become.

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If you want to learn about the tragic human cost of protecting sharks in Australia, watch my entertaining and enlightening documentary, The Heart of Sharkness, here.

I’ve also recently published a new edition of Die Laughing: The Wild Life of Bill Leak. Bill was widely mocked for warning 10 years ago that political correctness would destroy Australia’s awesome culture. Well, who’s laughing now? You can buy the new edition here.