Throughout the recent decade, the concept of metacrisis has developed steadily, and the term has grown in popularity. With thanks to Jonah Wilberg for his research, the timeline below plots some key developments - asking forgiveness from the many thinkers in the related ecosystem whose contribution is missing or truncated.

Deep Antecedents (Pre-2010)

Marxist Tradition (19th–20th c.): Karl Marx theorised economic structures as underlying multiple crises - an early “meta-crisis” concept (though not named so). Gramsci’s “organic crisis,” Althusser’s ideology, and Habermas’s legitimation crisis invoked comparable cultural-political layers.

Phenomenological/Cultural Tradition (19th–20th c.): Nietzsche (nihilism), Spengler (Decline of the West), Husserl (Crisis of the European Sciences), Heidegger (Question Concerning Technology), Adorno, Jonas - all frame civilizational breakdown as cultural or ontological crisis, often linked to technological modernity.

Consciousness Evolution tradition: writers like Sri Aurobindo and Jean Gebser develop the idea of major shifts in human consciousness and worldview and their association with critical points in human history. Later directly influential upon Ken Wilber and the Integral movement.

Club of Rome (1972) Limits to Growth: Used terms like “meta-problem” or “meta-system of problems”.

Donella Meadows (1999) Leverage Points: A founding member of the Club of Rome, Meadows considered the deepest leverage point for system change to be the mindset or worldview from which the system arises.

Early Explicit Uses of Metacrisis

Lane & Van der Leeuw (2011)
Early paper using metacrisis in the context of technological innovation policy - highlighting systemic challenges of innovation governance.

Theoretical roots

Rowson (2014, Spiritualise)
“Many seem to recognise that the world’s major problems have ‘spiritual’ elements that are not adequately acknowledged or addressed, partly because we don’t seem to know how to conduct the debate at that kind of fundamental level.”

2015–2016: Hedlund & Esbjörn-Hargens

Influenced by Roy Bhaskar’s Critical Realism and Ken Wilber’s Integral Theory, the 2015 conference Metatheory for the 21st Century brought metacrisis into academic-metatheoretical discourse.

“I coined the notion of metacrisis with Sean Esbjörn-Hargens in 2015 to express the complex unity or concatenated nature of our twenty-first century planetary crises, due to their systemic nature and overlapping root causes…our introduction was shared with the participants of the Critical Realism & Integral Theory Symposium… and had already made its way into the discourse at the 2015 Integral Theory Conference.”

It’s possible to discern the views commonly associated with the term more generally, within the earlier work of Hedlund & Esbjörn-Hargens:

1. Metacrisis as polycrisis (multiplicity of global crises), plus:
2. Crises share root causes
3. Inner, psychological and cultural roots
4. Epistemological crisis: wicked complexity resists our ability to even perceive it; compounding polycrisis symptoms reciprocally.

2017 onwards: theoretical development by:

Jonathan Rowson (Perspectiva)

Frames the “crisis driving the crises” as a crisis of value, meaning, and perception (truth, beauty, goodness), arising from our deepest cultural understanding of reality. He parses the metacrisis into socio-emotional (the crisis of We/belonging), educational (global paideia/Bildung deficits), epistemic (information ecology, legitimacy, sensemaking), and spiritual.

Zak Stein
Initially: “What is called the metacrisis is, in truth, an educational crisis: our collective incapacity to bring forth mature adults capable of holding, making sense of, and acting within the unprecedented complexity of our planetary situation.” Later: Broadened to a civilizational “crisis of the mind,” retaining education as the key leverage point, and “The metacrisis is a profound misunderstanding of the nature of of what is valuable.”

Iain McGilchrist locates metacrisis in worldview and links with hemispheric theory. Metacrisis roots lie in a dominant mode of thinking shaped by left-hemisphere cognition - analytical, reductionist, mechanistic - while the right hemisphere, with its holistic, relational, context-sensitive mode, has been marginalized.
“…these crises are not merely adventitiously interrelated … but because they share roots at a deeper level…both in the psyche of the individual and that of a civilisation viewed as a whole.”

Daniel Schmachtenberger

Key figure in popularising metacrisis as a term. Frames metacrisis through generator functions: Rivalrous economic/game-theoretic incentive structures (multipolar traps), exponential technological power, fragile complicated systems dependent on complex living systems, polluted information ecology. Emphasis on existential risk and coordination failure.

Throughout this period, authors including Tomas Bjorkman, Indra Adnan, Iain McGilchrist, Vanessa Machado de Oliveira, Jeremy Lent, John Vervaeke and many more are developing related themes and critiques (identifying cultural/spiritual roots of widespread crisis) without necessarily using the term metacrisis or the framing represented here.

Popularisation (2017–2020)

Metacrisis spreads throughout ‘metamodern intellectual niches - Game B, Integral theory, metamodernism. Podcasts and YouTube channels first to engage with this model of the meta-crisis included Emerge, Rebel Wisdom, the Jim Rutt Show, the Stoa, The Side View, State of Emergence, Parallax, the Dark Horse, Collective Insights, Future Fossils, Mutations, and Future Thinkers

Recent formulations

2023 Nicholas Hedlund Visionary Realism in a Time of Metacrisis PhD thesis develops a rigorous academic metatheory integrating Critical Realism & Integral Theory.

(See also appendix VI.) Hedlund’s model of metacrisis itself does not explicitly include worldview or cultural paradigm but concentrates on a ‘laminate’ crisis correlating mostly with what we have called the ‘intermediate layer.’ Nonetheless this recent work explicitly grounds metacrisis approaches in metatheory as “deep causal codes or architectonic generator functions of our worldviews and thus our socio-political order”.

2023 Jonathan Rowson develops work on the relationship of polycrisis to metacrisis, arriving at a new definition:

“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.”

2023 Life Itself offers a distilled account of the polycrisis / metacrisis relationship with the launch of the Second Renaissance initiative, synthesising prior research within the Integral Tradition (Ken Wilber et al.) alongside more explicit theorists of the metacrisis.