Metacrisis - an Introduction
An accessible introduction to metacrisis: what it is, how it relates to polycrisis, and why it matters.
In an era defined by global catastrophic risk, polycrisis describes a collection of escalating crises and their complex interactions. Metacrisis points to common, foundational conditions that generate and sustain these crises.
Definition
Metacrisis is 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.
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A new white paper offers a fuller introduction to the idea of metacrisis: what it is, how it relates to polycrisis, and why it matters.
Introduction
Metacrisis, simplified
Global crises are proliferating. Amid ecological destruction, the decline of rules-based order, economic fragility, escalating AI and more, people are reaching for new ways to understand multi-systemic breakdown, and language to describe it. The term polycrisis has entered common use, naming an entanglement of crises and their cascading interactions.
But an emerging field of inquiry suggests that this framing doesn’t reach deeply enough. The concept of 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 usually lead to recovery. If we hope to prevent them from getting worse, we must ask what’s causing them.
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 complex factors, the ways in which particular worldviews ultimately produce and reinforce global catastrophic risk.
A Case Study: Climate Breakdown
For example, 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.
Look closely and these fundamental ideas are implicated throughout countless other crises, from social fragmentation and declining mental health to escalating AI, economic fragility, struggling food systems and geopolitical conflict.
Exploring further: A worldview of separateness?
A deep-seated way of seeing reality that reduces the whole to a sum of inanimate parts – treating the smallest parts as most fundamental. This worldview has naturally been amplified throughout an era empowered by machines and empirical science, grounded in units of measurement. A corresponding individualist mindset lies at the root of all dominance paradigms – humans over nature; me against you.
What’s the alternative? A view that understands reality as fundamentally interconnected, interdependent, whole and alive – giving rise to reverence for life, nature and other beings within complex living systems.
Highly influential in this regard is the work of Iain McGilchrist; who suggests that these two modes of attending to reality arise naturally from the brain’s specialised, divided hemispheres. The left hemisphere’s ability to model a world in discrete parts has allowed modern humans to to manipulate the world with extraordinary effectiveness, shaping institutions and cultural behaviours that reinforce its dominance. But, Mcgilchrist warns, this view by itself is fatally deficient. It produces destruction in a world that is truly complex, dynamic and relational – a reality more faithfully represented by the right hemisphere. A healthy culture, he suggests, would restore hierarchy: the analytic talents of the left hemisphere subservient to the right’s holistic relationship with reality.
Unpacking the cultural paradigm of modernity and its core ideologies
Dive a little deeper
Foundations of a civilization: its 'cultural paradigm'
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.
Six ideologies of modernity: a brief guide
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’:
1. Rationalism
The nature of knowledge: science, rationality, and objectivity
All that exists is physical matter, governed by natural laws (scientific materialism). Human reason and observation can reveal universal truths about this lawful, external world.
2. Materialism
A Materialist, Mechanistic cosmos
The universe is a vast machine that can ultimately be predicted and controlled. The living world is nothing more than the sum of small separate* parts (reductionism / atomism).
3. Progress-ism
Linear progress and growth
Human history is a project of continuous improvement through science, technology, and will – legitimising extraction, expansion, industrialisation, dominance over nature and other cultures.
4. Individualism
Freedom and the individual
The rational individual is the foundation of truth, morality, and political legitimacy, and entails the right to think, speak and act freely. Self-interest and competition are natural organising forces that shape progress, innovation and social order.
5. Equality-ism
Equality and liberalism
All humans are created equal – at least in principle. Entailing expansion of circles of moral concern and giving rise to the idea of human rights – though realised imperfectly across gender, class, and empire. This gives rise (with individualism) to political liberalism and human rights.
6. Secular-ism
Secular humanism
Meaning, moral guidance and legitimacy are located in the human, not the divine, and truth in reason and evidence. The idea of a sacred, fathomless, living cosmos gives way to a disenchanted platform for human endeavour – a world of inert matter.
Defining metacrisis: prominent voices
“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.” – Jonathan Rowson
“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.” – Nicholas Hedlund
“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. – Zak Stein