From Polycrisis to Metacrisis: A Short Introduction
This paper provides an accessible introduction to the polycrisis and metacrisis: what they are, how they are distinct, how they are related and why it matters. In addition, the paper contains short case studies showing how one can apply a polycrisis and metacrisis frame to three major areas: climate breakdown, runaway AI, populism and democratic retreat. This helps ground these ideas in live, visible and real-world issues, making them more understandable and relevant.
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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. Metacrisis, by contrast, identifies 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 first step towards addressing them. However, deeper diagnosis of an issue is vital to effective strategies for healing. This essay investigates how dominant 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 ways of relating to self 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 the frame of metacrisis requires more than learning new facts. To sustain the necessary shift in view, integration through practice, community and lifestyle shift can be necessary.
Fig 1: A simplified schematic logic of the relationship of polycrisis to metacrisis.
White paper
Read and download the full white paper here.
Acknowledgement
This white paper was produced thanks to the support of Commonweal.