Nobody in that room was upset he didn’t win. That’s what made the night strange.

March 24, 2026 On Saturday night, election night, I was at the home of a man who had spent five days at pre-polling booths, and then election day itself moving between booths across his electorate. Seventy years old. Even though his guests had long arrived, he was still in his slippers, his feet aching from the week. Running, again, for a seat in one of the safest Liberal electorates in South Australia. A seat he knew, in all likelihood, he wasn’t going to win.

Around the walls of the family home hung corflutes from every campaign he’d run. A visual timeline spanning decades: the same face, the same conviction, the hair trannotessitioning from brown to grey. A life spent showing up for something he believed in, in a place that kept politely declining.

The room was full. Different ages, backgrounds, ethnicities. And even after five days of campaigning, the host and his wife were still at it: making introductions, pouring drinks, moving between conversations. Homemade sausage rolls. Fruit punch. Democracy sausages off the BBQ. Always giving. That part didn’t surprise me at all.

He told us stories from the booth. About the surprising warmth between volunteers from opposing parties once the theatre of it all falls away. He referred to his opponent as “a sweet guy.” Not a rival. Not an obstacle. A person. The basic decency that persists beneath the noise of politics he carried effortlessly.

It was a good night. Warm Adelaide weather, still buzzing with that particular energy that lingers at the end of Fringe season. A fine night to watch democracy happen.

And then the numbers started trickling in.

The early results tracked the predictions. Labor was heading for a landslide, the Liberals in trouble. The ABC’s analysts walked us through their graphs and their funny electorate names, translating it all into digestible chunks. The pre-poll narrative was coming true.

Then a number appeared that none of the graphs had quite prepared us for. A data point the panel of experts paused on. Something that didn’t fit the model.

One Nation, a party built more on grievance than governance, was surging. And as the evening wore on, the picture became impossible to ignore.

The conversation shifted entirely. Not because he lost, everyone had made peace with that. But because something else was happening that nobody quite had words for.

One Nation finished with 22% of the primary vote. The Liberals, 19%. For the first time in South Australian history, One Nation’s support had surpassed that of a major party.

There’s something almost ancient about that moment. Because we’ve been here before: not in South Australia, but in the long history of what happens when people lose faith in institutions.

I’ve been studying Plato lately. And sitting in that room, watching people try to process what they were seeing, I kept thinking about the cave.

You probably know the allegory. Prisoners chained in a cave, watching shadows on a wall, mistaking them for reality. Most readings use it to talk about other people, the ones who can’t see clearly. But the more honest reading is the one Plato actually intended; we are all in the cave. We all, at some point, choose the familiar shadow over the disorienting light of something more true.

The major parties have genuinely failed South Australian people on cost of living, housing, energy, trust. When institutions fail, people don’t go looking for better institutions. They go looking for someone who sounds like they understand the frustration. That’s not irrational. It’s deeply human.

That’s the shadow on the wall. It looks like the real thing. It feels like action. But a party that campaigns on fear without a credible program to fix anything isn’t disruption. It’s the same cave with different chains.

Here’s what interests me more than the politics. The same pattern plays out everywhere. In business. In wellness. In how we make decisions about our own lives. People in genuine pain go looking for relief, and they find someone who gives them a simple answer to a complex problem. The person who could actually help, the psychologist, the experienced advisor, the one who asks hard questions before offering easy answers, feels inaccessible, expensive, unfamiliar. So they find someone more approachable. And sometimes that person genuinely helps. And sometimes they’re selling shadows.

Because shadows are comfortable. The blinding light of leaving the cave, of actually changing, of doing the hard work on yourself, has us scampering back to what we know. The gym membership we sign up for every January and stop using by February. The doom scroll. The cigarettes. The CEO who hires a consultant to tell them what’s wrong rather than asking Jenny from operations, she’s only been there fifteen years, what would she know? We choose the shadow because the light is too much.

Plato called it demagoguery, the art of telling people what they want to hear rather than what is true. We call it influencer culture, echo chambers, and ‘the Algorithm’. The mechanism is identical.

The antidote isn’t cynicism. And it isn’t better arguments. It’s better questions.

Socrates didn’t change minds by winning debates. He searched for truth in conversation, not by convincing others that his truth was correct, but by staying genuinely open to being wrong. It’s a discipline that requires something difficult: letting go of the need to be right long enough to be actually curious.

I’ve been sitting with that idea for a while now, alongside a meditation practice, alongside movement work, alongside years of helping businesses figure out what they actually need rather than what they think they want. And the thing that keeps coming back is this:

The clarity we’re looking for, in how we vote, how we run our businesses, how we live, isn’t somewhere we need to get to. It’s already present. We’ve just covered it up. With noise. With fear. With chains we’ve applied ourselves.

The work isn’t finding something new. It’s removing what’s in the way.

That man in his slippers already knows this. He’s been showing up anyway for thirty years. There’s something admirable in that: something that makes my soul happy, honestly.

There’s something in that worth paying attention to.

I write about philosophy, embodied practice, and clearer thinking. If this is useful, follow along.