Sixty years ago this week Donald Horne published a little book with a snappy title that captured the zeitgeist.

Seizing the invisible force that defines the spirit of an epoch has long been the holy grail for anyone with something to sell, from books to soap powder, hamburgers to ideas and political parties, a quest now made easier by using social media’s digital data exhaust.

Yet Horne’s The Lucky Country sold 18,000 copies in nine days, thanks in part to a successful promotional blitz that would make an old-fashioned publicist envious: a dedicated episode of Four Corners, tantalising extracts in the five-month-old Australian, Albert Tucker’s arresting image of a weather-beaten man looking backwards on the cover of Australian Book Review and enough niggling reviews to spark a debate.

At the time nearly half the 11 million Australians were under 21. The book gave them, and their parents, permission to be critical.

Horne declared that although Australia had the third-highest per capita income in the world, there was “no longer … a generally accepted public sense of a future”. The imagination of “the men at the top … seems exhausted by the country’s achievements”.

Sound familiar?

Apart from advocating closer ties to Asia – a pragmatic response to Britain’s decision to trade with Europe rather than the remnants of empire – Horne was not prescriptive.

But within three decades the complacent country he described found new ways to make its own luck. The economy was deregulated, the First Peoples were (sort of) recognised, legal ties with Britain were broken, discrimination was outlawed, multiculturalism replaced assimilation, and Australia proudly took its place in the region.

Some things endured – most notably the commitment to a fair go. “Fair-goes are not only for oneself,” Horne wrote, “but for underdogs … Australians love a battler.” Unless, he noted, they were Aboriginal.

Sound familiar?

Towards the end of his life Horne described the trick of his trade in Dying: A Memoir. “People are influenced by what they read if it is related to something already passing through their heads, if it reinforces their attitudes. Or perhaps if it makes what they have been vaguely thinking become more coherent, so that they now know what they believe.”

Techniques for discerning the zeitgeist have been refined for decades, but most now look passé. Surveys, polls, focus groups, media monitoring have replaced the old-fashioned method of debating and listening – what Henry Parkes, the father of federation, called “earwigging”.

The most skilful zeitgeist-hunters have now figured out how to use the data gathered from the ubiquitous surveillance we all tolerate. No longer content with simply discerning the invisible spirit, they are even more ambitious, determined to use the data as a key to the subconscious and turn time-honoured values and mores upside down.

This is new. The tools of persuasion can include entertainment, half-truths and lies, spectacle and threat. It gets inside your head; it is not propaganda as we once knew it.

The global pattern is now visible. Social media-enabled campaigning has upended the established order in country after country and invited autocracy through the door.

The playbook is clear. First trash the prevailing consensus. Then remake it and revel in an unexpected victory.

Brexit was an early example. British leaders had applied their imperial skill to become one of the biggest beneficiaries of the EU. Yet a narrow majority of Britons voted to leave the multilateral organisation that had enabled London to flourish as the European financial centre, propped up the most impoverished regions and kept the economy growing.

It has since contracted.

For more than a century the melting-pot spirit of America was symbolised by the Statue of Liberty and the sacred text “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, the wretched refuse of your teeming shore.” This year nearly 77 million voted to round up 11.7 million illegal aliens and deport them.

The cost and the logistics are mind-boggling, but slamming the door shut will not only keep out the “huddled masses yearning to breathe free” but the brilliant individuals who have powered American innovation.

Last year nearly nine and half million Australians voted to deny the First Peoples a voice, many believing wrongly that it was “not fair”.

Of course, a fair go never applied to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people, but this upending of the national ethos was more insidious. It required the majority to tacitly embrace the One Nation notion of fairness – it’s not fair they’re getting something I haven’t got – an idea once so abhorrent that Pauline Hanson was disendorsed from the Liberal party for expressing it.

Now it has been normalised and is already shaping the next election.

In country after country the bedrock of identity has been challenged.

If 2024 ushers in an epoch with less inequality and technocratic cruelty, those of us repelled by the Trump campaign will eat humble pie.

But if it is the beginning of a period of autocracy, new methods of transformational advocacy, already modelled by the community independents, we will need to reassert the best of humanity; signing online petitions will not be enough.

In 1964, Australia and much of the world was on the cusp of profound change. It was, as we can see now, a hinge year. 2024 promises to be another.

We have been warned.