From Polycrisis to Metacrisis: A Short Introduction
Rosie Bell & Rufus Pollock – Life Itself Sensemaking Studio
This is the third whitepaper in the Second Renaissance series. We deeply appreciate the support and input of Commonweal. Thanks also to members of Life Itself Research for their comments and review on early drafts, and the scholars of the wider sensemaking community whose foundational work on metacrisis informs this synthesis.
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Synopsis
Our world shows signs of multi-systemic breakdown. In this context, polycrisis names an entanglement of interconnected crises that affect one another - ecological, political, cultural, technological. Metacrisis, by contrast, denotes foundational conditions that generate these crises. Just as symptoms signal an underlying illness, polycrisis points to metacrisis. While the reality of a global polycrisis is increasingly acknowledged, awareness of metacrisis is less common.
Noticing the interactions between our symptoms is an important step towards addressing them. However, deeper diagnosis of an issue is vital to effective strategies for healing. This introductory essay investigates how collective worldviews, particularly within a dominant cultural paradigm of modernity, lie at the root of systemic failures - and offers a number of case studies for rethinking polycrisis as symptoms of metacrisis.
Within a metacrisis frame, the deep stories foundational to our modern worldview shape our relationship to self, others and world, in ways that produce dysfunction. While its symptoms (polycrisis) can be perceived in manifest forms from climate breakdown to inequality and more, metacrisis itself can be more difficult to see: we commonly mistake the core ideas of modernity for reality itself. As such, adopting a frame of metacrisis requires more than learning new facts. To sustain the necessary shift in view can require integration through practice, community and lifestyle shift.
This essay is intended as a bite-sized introduction to the core ideas of polycrisis and metacrisis, and their relationship. We include a brief overview of leading accounts within current social philosophy, while taking responsibility for our particular interpretation (and potential simplification) of the concept. This includes a schematic sketch of metacrisis ‘layers’ which may help readers to make sense of interrelating crisis issues at different depths, and to navigate various existing accounts.
Fig 1: A simplified schematic logic of the polycrisis-metacrisis relationship.
Polycrisis symptoms share common roots in the ‘meta’ layers of our civilizational systems and worldviews. The discourse of metacrisis links issues in the lower two layers with emergent (surface) symptoms. Issues at all three levels affect each other at different timescales. However, the more fundamental drivers exist at the ‘bottom’: in deep-seated human tendencies and foundational ideologies.
In short, a metacrisis is a crisis arising from the “meta” layers of civilization, and especially the cultural foundations.
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