In an era defined by global catastrophic risk, polycrisis describes a collection of escalating crises and their complex interactions. Metacrisis points to the common, foundational conditions that generate and sustain these crises.
This site offers an accessible introduction to metacrisis: what it is, how it relates to polycrisis, and why it matters.
Backed by Life Itself Collective & part of the Second Renaissance Initiative
Metacrisis: a multi-systemic breakdown, emerging from the foundational views, values, and institutional logics of modern culture, threatening the coherence of the current globalised civilization, and the integrity of complex living systems.
Global crises are proliferating. Amid ecological destruction, economic fragility, and escalating AI, the term polycrisis has entered common use to describe this entanglement of failures.
But this framing doesn't reach deeply enough. Metacrisis draws our attention to the foundational conditions that generate our manifest systemic failures. Much as symptoms signal an underlying illness, polycrisis points to metacrisis. And treating symptoms alone doesn’t lead to recovery.
At the level of global society, the roots of our illness reach all the way down to our way of seeing the world and ourselves. A growing field of metacrisis thought explores, among other factors, the ways in which particular worldviews ultimately produce and reinforce global catastrophic risk.
Polycrisis
Entanglement of multiple, escalating crises and their cascading interactions.
Metacrisis
Multi-systemic breakdown emerging from the foundational views, values, and institutional logics of modern culture.
Why this matters
Just as symptoms point to an underlying illness, polycrisis points to metacrisis. Diagnosis is a precondition for wise response.
Viewed through a polycrisis lens, climate breakdown is one escalating crisis among many, interacting with biodiversity loss, food and energy security, economic fragility, and migration. Its principal challenge is the complex task of decarbonising the global economy while maintaining stability in these adjacent systems.
However, metacrisis thinking suggests that we’re failing to meet this challenge because we don’t yet understand its deeper origins. As we try to fix climate breakdown while preserving the systems that created it, the problems get worse.
Climate breakdown doesn’t begin with carbon emissions; it has roots in the fundamental ideas that constitute modern reality and the systems that express them. Among these are:
A mechanistic view of reality (the world is just a complicated machine) leads us to a disenchanted relationship with nature and mistreatment of complex living systems. Meanwhile, the resulting hunger for meaning shows up in runaway consumerism.
A worldview of fundamental separateness casts individuals and nations as rivals for power and resources, driving global co-ordination failure, preventing the collective action needed to meaningfully reduce emissions and halt biodiversity loss, and legitimising extraction by dismissing harm to nature as ‘externality’.
A related story of dominance over others and nature positions humanity alone at the top of a pyramid of power, rather than within an interdependent web of life; erasing the truth that harming nature is harming ourselves.
The idea of humans as self-interested rational agents, coupled with a myth of progress, fuels market fundamentalism and an economic system fixated on endless growth and technological advancement; consuming a finite planet without restraint, and sidelining wisdom, nature and relationship as sources of human wellbeing.
A view that the world is just a complicated machine. This leads to a disenchanted relationship with nature and the mistreatment of complex living systems.
A worldview that casts individuals and nations as rivals for power, driving global coordination failure and legitimising extraction.
Fundamental to all cultures are deeply embedded structures of ideas, that shape and maintain societal norms and behaviours. These structures of belief are so deeply embedded that they don’t even appear to us like beliefs at all – they’re simply the way things are. They act as a blueprint for the choices we make as societies -- what we build, what we destroy, what we think is real, what we treat as unimportant. What we imagine ourselves to be, and how we treat each other and our world.
Over time, as patterns of power and ways of life evolve, these deep belief structures gradually give way to new ideas that redefine our shared reality – a new cultural paradigm emerges. Think, for example, of the way western societies once regarded a biblical God as the source of all knowledge and moral authority -- and contrast the way modern societies now look to science and economics to determine what’s true and how we should live.
The cultural paradigm that has come to be known as 'modernity' was influenced by the European Enlightenment, drawing in turn upon classical and Middle Eastern intellectual traditions. The tools and innovations that transformed material life during the ensuing industrial era further reshaped dominant worldviews and value systems. These structures of thought are highly complex and interrelated, but it can help to simplify them into six ideological 'clusters'.
The crises we face have roots in the deeply embedded structures of ideas and beliefs that shape our societies.
Read White PaperThe nature of knowledge Human reason and observation can reveal universal truths. Knowledge comes from systematic reasoning and empirical data.
The mechanistic cosmos All that exists is physical matter, governed by natural laws. The universe and its living systems are basically complicated machines: the sum of separate parts, of which the smallest are most fundamental.
Improvement as a natural law Human history is a project of continuous improvement through science, technology, and will.
Freedom, legitimacy and competition. The human individual is the basis of truth, morality, and political legitimacy. Rational autonomy underpins their rights and freedom. Self-interest and competition between individuals are normative organising forces that shape progress.
“The metacrisis is the historically specific threat to truth, beauty, and goodness caused by our persistent misunderstanding, misvaluing, and misappropriating of reality. The metacrisis is the crisis within and between all the world’s major crises, a root cause that is at once singular and plural, a multi-faceted delusion arising from the spiritual and material exhaustion of modernity that permeates the world’s interrelated challenges and manifests institutionally and culturally to the detriment of life on earth.”
“The metacrisis is a complex, multifaceted gestalt or ‘laminated system’... the complex unity or concatenated nature of our twenty-first century planetary crises, due to their systemic nature and overlapping root causes.”
“The metacrisis... has to do with how humans understand themselves and the world... systems and societies are in trouble, but it is the psyche that is in the direst of straits.”