Prefixing the World

Why the polycrisis is a permacrisis, which is actually a metacrisis, which is not really a crisis at all.

The future enters into us, in order to transform itself in us, long before it happens.

- Rainier Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet (1929)

I started thinking about the relationship between crisis prefixes (polycrisis, permacrisis, and metacrisis) in January, and I almost published a version of this article back then, but something unexpected happened. The idea of crisis came into my life like a beleaguered celebrity seeking refuge, fleeing from overuse and abuse, asking for a safe place to just sit down and talk.

So we talked, in a manner of speaking, and I started writing, but I couldn’t figure out exactly what, for whom, or for where, I was writing. One idea led to another and I now have about 30,000 words on the past, present, and future of the idea of crisis, and I may have accidentally started to write my next book.¹

Crisis is a fascinating character, and we hope to keep talking, but the task in this post is merely to understand the idea well enough to grasp my main contention here, which is that meta, not poly, should be our prefix of choice. These prefixes that seek to qualify what kind of crisis we are in are not inert, they are psychoactive and influence our sense of possibility. It matters that we get it right.

Really?

Does it really matter?

Yes, I really think so.

Anyone who lived through ‘Take Back Control!’ in the UK or ‘Make America Great Again!’ in the USA knows that words shape reality. Carefully crafted and relentlessly repeated terms enter our world as an invasion of semiotic aliens — identical, ubiquitous, and united. And though we may disagree, resist, query, and laugh, they soon take over, inhabiting our digital devices, colonising our media spaces, and tacitly crafting political context, contention, and atmosphere. Strategic language of this sort is a kind of landscape gardening of civic and cultural space, and the aesthetic changes what we see, where we can move, and what’s allowed to grow.

The idea of crisis goes back to Greek medicine, Latin jurisprudence, and Christian theology, it is central to Marx’s critique of capitalism, it is a premise for war, and it can even be thought of as what Reinhart Kosseleck calls ‘a structural signature of modernity’. Our world has been created through perpetual crisis construction and crisis management, and the over-use of crisis by the powerful has been critiqued as a method of control for precisely that reason. The term applies at all scales, however, and still feels indispensable. The roots of the idea relate to critical moments (e.g. in an illness, in a life, in a battle) the need for resolve, and the importance of judgment, but mostly crisis is used to refer to turning points that come and go in particular contexts. That’s not how it feels today, however, as the global news cycle beams into our pockets and handbags. The experience of crisis today is ubiquitous and enduring.

If crisis is a structural signature of modernity, and modernity is slowly dying, what we are contending with is epochal rather than merely historical. I can see why Crisis needs to talk.

We are living in a phase of an apparent shift in geological time (Holocene to Anthropocene, Capitalocene, or Novocene), a transformed information system that fosters addiction and division by design (the internet-enabled and algorithmically-driven smartphone especially), literally life-changing (or denaturing) technologies like gene editing and synthetic biology, and lifeworld-changing technologies like deep fakes and virtual reality, AI as a kind of enigmatic and accelerating threat multiplier, climate collapse as the nexus of systemic risk to food and water supply, and the resulting fallout in terms of bio-precarity and security risks, as well as socially corrosive levels of inequality, the palpable fragility of national economies and the absence of a competent political class. In light of all that, and plenty more, it is no wonder that crisis talk abounds.

In an emergency, we are above all called to act! Now! But in a crisis, we are called to discern and decide. In a crisis, the clock is indeed ticking, but the quality of crisis time is more Kairotic than chronological – the emphasis is less on action at all costs than on discernment and commitment in the fullness of the moment. The reason we are not responding to proclamations of climate emergency with commensurate resolve, for instance, is that we are stuck in a particular way, mired in our collective immunity to change, entangled in all the other things we feel obliged or entrained to do, and trapped within what my colleague Ivo Mensch calls our ‘So-So’, our Solipsistic Society. And here I mean ‘we’ in the pre-political, pre-analytical sense of the human species as a complex whole. That We is stuck in crisis, and although I am a fan of paradoxes, this is not happy news.

One way to begin to get unstuck is to see crisis as the quality of an injunctive relationship between world and mind and society as that relationship changes through time. By ‘injunctive relationship’ I mean a relationship that asks or even demands something of us. The essence of our predicament is that this relationship is now dysfunctional because we don’t quite know what crisis is asking of us, and because the world is not now changing as it needs to – mind and society are not moving with the spirit of the times. That ‘not knowing how to change at scale’ is the heart of the matter. Reflecting on what crisis means, and what prefixes like ‘poly’ and ‘meta’ evoke is not a waste of time therefore, but a critical part of not wasting more of it.

The reason I think the idea of metacrisis, in particular, is worth fighting for is that it draws attention to interiority (meta as within) and relationality (meta as between) as spiritual features of what is typically assumed to be a political challenge, while also highlighting that a fixation with crisis may preclude other and better ways of being in the world (meta as beyond). What exactly ‘spiritual’ means is another essay, and I wrote a book about it, but if the term bothers you, think of it as our relationship to reality, or try this working definition. It is the belief in the real effects of the underlying, overarching, and inherent spiritual quality of the world that makes the idea of metacrisis distinct, because it suggests there is indeed an underlying cause of the world’s problems, and it is something like a multifaceted delusion: a deep and pervasive misreading of reality. The point is not that political problems have spiritual roots and therefore spiritual solutions, but that political problems arise in a cultural context with spiritual dimensions, and without attending to them we will continue to flounder.

Metacrisis and Polycrisis

I can hardly believe I have to write about the metacrisis again. I gave the idea a thorough treatment in Tasting the Pickle: Ten Flavours of Metacrisis and the appetite for a new civilisation. That essay was written over the course of 2020 as my Covid lockdown survival writing, a place I escaped to when pandemic parenting and clapping for the under-funded National Health Service got to be too much. When it was done, I felt relieved, as if I had nothing more to say about the idea of metacrisis. But ever since the term polycrisis went mainstream, I noticed myself bristling, and I feel a kind of avuncular responsibility to remind people what metacrisis means and why it matters much more than the idea of polycrisis.

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.

That’s my latest definition, but it’s not exhaustive and might change. Meta is alive, and is more like a perspective-shifting manoeuvre in language games than a word with semantic content, and it can move you in several ways at once: within and throughout; between and across; after and beyond. We should not get high on meta, because the meta-move can easily become a kind of escapism, a recurring spasm of indulgent abstraction taking us away from lived experience and embodied reality. Yet when it is used with discernment, meta serves to highlight a dynamic and reflexive relationship with any crisis that is potentially alive in all of us.

Polycrisis refers to the world system of systems beginning to malfunction, with escalating risks due to emerging properties in the whole being significantly more dangerous than the sum of its parts; polycrisis was chosen by The Financial Times as the word to describe 2022, it has become a buzzword in Davos circles, and is growing in popularity among academics, philanthropists and journalists. Polycrisis already has some theoretical sophistication (see below) that will no doubt grow but I believe the term is ultimately insidious because it fetishizes complexity, and amounts to a kind of performative lamentation about the world spinning out of control.

The unit of analysis in polycrisis is the world system as a whole, which is a system of systems, with ‘system’ usually meaning a group of interrelated elements that act according to a discernible set of rules within a unified whole that usually has some kind of goal. Polycrisis typically refers to a situation in which at least three such systems are in a state of crisis, unable to function properly, and affecting other systems to which they are inextricably linked. This kind of effect was palpable during the pandemic when financial, health, and educational systems were so clearly intertwined, but it applies more broadly.

The term polycrisis was recently popularised by historian Adam Tooze, but it has an intellectual pedigree in the thought of Edgar Morin and Anne Brigitte Kern from their book Homeland Earth in 1999. There have been rigorous attempts to clarify the concept for a policy context by The Cascade Institute and more recent excellent overviews by the Post Carbon Institute (relatively empirical) and an elegant reflection by Ville Lahde in Aeon magazine (relatively philosophical). There have also been some early academic considerations in International Relations and Anthropology. In essence, polycrisis says there is a worsening geopolitical predicament confounded by the loss of intelligibility, particularly our inability to understand causal mechanisms at scale, and there is no credible conventional response in sight that is commensurate with the emergence of escalating risks to geopolitical stability.

Poly gives us a lot, but it does not give us Meta’s interiority or relationality, which is where all hope engendered by meaningful action at the level of civil society lies (action gives rise to hope, not vice versa). Poly might help us to stand back and see what is ‘out there’ in perspective, but that is not enough. Just standing back to see the big picture risks delusion, because it is a partial view pretending to be whole. Meta highlights that we also need to look within ourselves to psyche and soul, and also beyond, for a renewal in our worldview or cosmovision which has a direct bearing on prevailing ideologies and social imaginaries. (Paul Marshall’s work on New Axial Vision details this idea well.)

In The Ethics of Terminology in 1902, Charles Sanders Peirce argues that “It is wrong to say that good language is important to good thought, merely; for it is of the essence of it.” Peirce speaks of the need for awareness of “how to develop concepts which are so precise that they can contain and communicate the complexity of ideas and theories”. Of his seven guidelines for developing terminology, the first is “to take pains to avoid following any recommendation of an arbitrary nature as to the use of philosophical terminology”. I believe there is something arbitrary about the recent uptake of polycrisis, with many seeing it as ‘good enough’ as a holding pattern to describe the state of the world but without asking what is implicated, overlooked, and obscured by the term, and how it reverberates aesthetically and epistemologically. Peirce’s seventh point is “to regard it as needful to introduce new systems of expression when new connections of importance between conceptions come to be made out”. This is what I am trying to do here by proposing that metacrisis is a better way to clarify connections between conceptions that matter today.

A Short Quiz

I decided the best way to tease out why the poly/meta distinction matters is with a short quiz. Forgive me, and please answer the following (leading!) questions with yes or no. I’m aware it all depends on the meaning of X, Y, and Z, and the answer can be ‘yes and no, depending on…’ so you’ll have to trust me that the forced choice is a creative constraint for the purposes of edification, rather than wilful entrapment.

1. Do the world’s problems have an underlying/overarching/inherent cause that we might do something about?

2. Do the main ways that those with political and economic power currently try to solve problems (policy, regulation, trade, technology, economic growth) tend to make those problems worse?

3. Is there reason to think our historical moment is qualitatively distinct from other historical moments in a way that calls for a fundamental shift in our relationship to reality?

4. Should we take care to ensure that the terminology we choose to distil the essence of our global situation is as accurate and edifying as it possibly can be?

5. Is there something about the very idea of crisis that militates against the kinds of transformation we now need?

If you think the answer to each of these questions is no, there’s a good chance you’ll share an outlook with advocates for the idea of the polycrisis. If you think the answer to each of the questions is yes, as I do, you are more likely to share an outlook with those who feel we are contending with the metacrisis. I found these questions helpful to highlight that the terminological choice goes beyond mere definitions to some deep intellectual, historical, and spiritual divergences in outlook that the terms carry with them. (Read on to understand why, or see the footnote that connects the questions to the analysis that follows directly.²)

Poly and meta mean very different things. While ‘poly’ highlights the multiplicity and variety of crises, their emergent properties, and cascading risks, it leaves us as a kind of despairing spectator in suspended animation, awaiting instructions. ‘Poly’ tacitly compounds the problem of subject/object dualism that is driving the global problematic, with an emphasis on propositional rather than participatory knowing, minds separate from bodies, humanity separate from nature, technology separate from culture, and people separate from power. The elasticity and ambiguity of ‘meta’ (within, between, after, beyond) not only provides a richer context for our predicament, but serves to highlight different qualities of crisis.

The metacrisis says there is a spiritual crisis within the political failure to attend to myriad crises (e.g. the destruction of our only liveable planet is clearly delusional but also sacrilegious); it also says that there is an epistemic crisis in the apparent inability to see between different features of problems (e.g. the emotional needs driving consumerism, the denial of death at the root of climate inertia, the scapegoat mechanism as a threat to democracy).

In my inquiry into crisis over the last few months, I have come to realise that pathways to viable futures may depend less upon solving a crisis than freeing ourselves from the hold that the idea of crisis has on our minds. If we are stuck in crisis, we may need to let the idea of crisis go, or at least relegate it somehow. All of which is to say, with meta still in mind, that there is also an imperative to start to move beyond crisis perception and mentality toward a more discerning relationship with the world.

As we free ourselves from our attachment to crisis (at its most literal, metacrisis means ‘after crisis’) we start to pay more and better attention to what crisis thinking may unhelpfully perpetuate or occlude. For instance, we may start to attend better to what Bonnitta Roy calls ‘complex potential states’ and Nora Bateson calls Aphanipoiesis. These are different ideas, though I don’t think it’s entirely incidental that they both come from women, and both draw attention to the value of what is latent, unseen, and yet perceptible through the kinds of subtle and appreciative inquiry that are precluded by the ‘I-can-fix-it’ crisis mentality.

I might also draw attention to Jeremy Johnson’s intellectual leadership on integral consciousness, Karen O’Brien’s fractal perspective on the challenge of scale, Joe Brewer’s seeking to regenerate bioregions, and the ‘doomer optimism’ of Jason Snyder, who transcends and includes intellectual puzzles in the act of planting trees and growing his own food. I’m also informed by Iain McGilchrist’s detailing of why relationships are prior to relata, which is consonant with Karen Barad’s agental realism and intra-action, which apparently inspired Bayo Akomalafe’s notion of ontological mutiny, part of which is refusing to be entranced by crisis. And although I have yet to explore her work with the care it deserves, Chiara Bottici begins to put the non-dual perspective to work in her writing on Imaginal Politics.

These approaches all feel relatively free of crisis-thinking, and yet none of them are naive about the scale of the challenges we face. Moreover, all of these perspectives and initiatives can be thought of as in some sense ‘non-dual’ in which the mind and the world, the subject and the object are at once separate and united, and somehow reciprocally constituted. This is deep terrain, but the version I understand best is the (Iain) McGilchrist Manouevre, which refers to “the non-duality of duality and non-duality”, also articulated in The Matter with Things as the vision that reveals separation and the vision that reveals union, the equal necessity but unequal status of spiritual opposites, the unity of multiplicity and unity, and the union of union and division.

I share this perspective here because this non-dual perspective is where transformation lies (the subject/object ‘form’ is what has to be transcended, and/or rendered transparent in its immanence). Yet this kind of transformation is precisely what is hard to see through the mere idea of crisis, which helps us see a problem out there in the world, without really knowing the eye that’s looking. The heart of the matter is that this deep limitation is not allayed, but compounded by ‘polycrisis’, which merely amplifies the limitations of a crisis mentality. Unlike metacrisis, which in principle shows us a way within, between, and ultimately beyond crisis, polycrisis leaves us stuck there.

A statement from Robert Pirsig’s classic multi-million copy bestseller Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (p104) helps to clarify what metacrisis illuminates that polycrisis does not:

The true system, the real system, is our present construction of systematic thought itself, rationality itself, and if a factory is torn down but the rationality that produced it is left standing, then that rationality will simply produce another factory. If a revolution destroys a systematic government, but the systematic patterns of thought that produced that government are left intact, then those patterns will repeat themselves in the succeeding government. There’s so much talk about the system. And so little understanding.

This subtle claim highlights why so much talk about ‘systems change’ is frankly bogus. Until we can see that systems are awash with emotions and epistemologies, there is little hope of really changing them. Again, we need to stand back, but also look within and see beyond. Perhaps the main purpose that ‘meta’ serves that the other terms don’t is that the very word is reflexive and relational, and it encourages us to reflect on the underlying ontology of crisis (what is presumed to be real), epistemology (what and how can we know), and axiology (how do we perceive what is of value) of our challenges.

We could end things here, and life is short, but if the reader is not convinced the choice of prefix matters, or you are still enjoying yourself, I have a few further thoughts for The Afterparty, which is where the best conversations usually happen.

Permacrisis enters the Afterparty

In addition to polycrisis and metacrisis, one can speak of hypercrisis or macrocrisis but they are very similar to polycrisis in spirit. Permacrisis, however, is a useful conceptual mediator, because it helps to show the relationship between polycrisis and metacrisis more clearly. Permacrisis frames crisis as an indefinite feature of life, but it can also thereby be thought of as the structural absence of renewal, and therefore the slow death of this epoch. Metacrisis is therefore crucial because it is both the inside of the polycrisis and the implication of the permacrisis. Polycrisis is currently almost entirely descriptive and not in any sense prescriptive, and therefore lacks any sense of what my colleague Ivo Mensch calls ‘teleogenesis’ (the inception of purpose) or simply an escape pathway, and that means it is effectively a permacrisis. I suppose you could call it a ‘polypermacrisis’, if you want to, though it risks sounding like a particularly bad haircut.

Permacrisis was the Collins Dictionary word of the year for 2022 and its main contribution is to offer a new realism, a resolute rejection of the idea of progress that is fatal to the project of modernity. (In The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity (1987) Habermas writes: ‘The concept of modernity expresses the conviction that the future has already begun: it is the epoch that lives for the future, that opens itself up to the novelty of the future’). Permacrisis therefore also amounts to a tacit historiographical claim that this may be the end of modernity and the setting for the birth of something qualitatively new. That idea of liminal time, an interregnum, or a time between worlds framing is an invitation to the idea of meta-crisis, because the sense of being stuck, of the story of progress having played itself out, means we need to look within, between, and beyond our current conception of the problem, perhaps through a new metaphysics, maybe a new social imaginary, and certainly through new forms of praxis that help us move from stuckness to collective unfolding (and let’s hope that means more than just rioting in the streets).

Further critiques of polycrisis include the claim that it stealthily protects incumbent power. At a recent seminar about Global Governance at UCL, I heard Vinay Gupta speak out strongly against the idea because “‘polycrisis buries the bodies of systemic failure under the mantle of complexity and pretends there is nothing we can do.” And Niall Ferguson critiques the term as being ‘just history’, though he comes from a triumphalist school of thought that tends not to entertain paradigmatic problems.

The critique of polycrisis that matters most to me and to Perspectiva however, is that it is epistemically, ontologically, and axiologically limited, by which I mean it is almost entirely exterior and actual, about the measurable world we know and value ‘out there’, with a human subject held as if a constant in an equation, looking at the increasingly variable object as if they were awaiting instructions. But what if human interiority, the nature and quality of our consciousness, are the active ingredients that matter most?  

There may be other histories of metacrisis, including in the BBC television drama Dr.Who (!) but I first came across the term as a critique of the ideology of liberalism in the political theology of Milbank and Pabst in their book The Politics of Virtue (2016). This version of it is summarised elegantly in a review in The New Statesman by Rowan Williams called Liberalism and Capitalism have Hollowed Out Society: “There are crises and there are meta-crises: a system may stagger from one crisis to another but never recognise the underlying mechanisms that subvert its own logic...” (This line is consonant with the Pirsig quote above).

In a recent essay, Beyond Progressivism, John Milbank puts this version of metacrisis like this: “So we continue to live in the end of history, because the dominant mode of culture and technology remains Western, albeit in a terminally decadent mode of the latter. At the same time, this seeming finality is also not just a crisis but metacrisis. Today, we are not so much subject to passing tensions, potentially resolvable, as to the ultimate emergence of tensions latent in the very foundations of the modern.”

I think we can also feel those “tensions in the very foundations of the modern” in reality-avoidant cultures that are now politically and economically empowered, school and university education systems that are not fit for the purpose of navigating an increasingly unintelligible world, and the instrumental logic of markets and the optimising logic of unthinking machines risking a complete collapse of the perception and appreciation of intrinsic value. Zak Stein and Marc Gafni have developed ‘Cosmo-erotic humanism’ as a metatheoretical response to the metacrisis along these lines, starting with what they call first principles and first values. This builds on Zak Stein’s prior philosophical work, particularly with respect to fundamental questions that we need to learn how to ask and answer relating to intelligibility, capability, legitimacy, and meaning; indeed, Zak argues forthrightly, Education is the Metacrisis. Daniel Schmachtenberger uses the idea of metacrisis slightly differently, to encourage people to get problems in as full a perspective as possible to minimise externalities caused by naive problem-solving, and properly contend with catastrophic risk by understanding underlying ‘generator functions’ like rivalrous dynamics, exponential technology, and consuming our ecological substrate. What all these approaches have in common is that unlike ‘polycrisis’, theorists of metacrisis diagnose our predicament in a way that highlights things we can and must get to work on, even if they might feel slow, oblique, or speculative.

The implication is not that we set down our political, economic, and technological tools, but it does mean that ‘a new government’ is definitely not enough, and widely touted plans for ‘a new economy’ or ‘a new politics’ will not take root without arising alongside some kind of spiritual innovation to shift perception and understanding about the nature of the self and the meaning of life, often through art broadly conceived as work of a contemplative, creative, philosophical and aesthetic in nature. That’s partly what metamodernism is about, but it is also alive in Ben Okri’s call for existential creativity, which broadly says that if we want to save the world from itself, we need to make much better art, as if our lives depended on it (because they do).

The following statement by Paulo Freire in Pedagogy of the Oppressed helps make further sense of what it might take to see that this kind of spiritual, educational, and creative innovation is necessary:

An inauthentic word, one which is unable to transform reality, results when a dichotomy is imposed on its constitutive elements. When a word is deprived of its dimension of action, reflection automatically suffers as well; and the word is changed into idle chatter, into verbalism, into an alienated and alienating “blah”. It becomes an empty word, one which cannot denounce the world, for denunciation is impossible without a commitment to transform, and there is no transformation without action.

Poly and crisis are a kind of dichotomy, with crisis deprived of its dimension of action, which it needs. At first blush, metacrisis does not sound like a call to action, but it really is. In Freire’s terms, unlike polycrisis (there is a crisis to contend with, and it is many crises) and permacrisis (there will be a general state of crisis to contend with in perpetuity) metacrisis does not ‘impose a dichotomy on its constitutive elements’ in the same way. Due to its quality of context shifting, transcendence, self-reference, and relationality, the meta in ‘metacrisis’ conveys what to do about the sense of crisis; it clarifies both your arena and your agency. Meta says there a crisis that is not just ‘out there’ in the world, but ‘in here’ in your heart and mind, and ‘between us and reality’ in the way we relate, notice, imagine, understand, listen and speak. We are participants in crisis, not just spectators. We need to find the agency within and between us, and use it well.

In my experience of working in civil society for 15 years now, changemakers-at-large appear unable to see and appreciate the generative reality of our interiority well enough to act on it as part of ‘the work’. A key part of the problem, I think, is that our prevailing social imaginary (including the science and education that props it up) is under the influence of what Roy Bhaskar calls the epistemic fallacy, which means, roughly, a fixation on how things are known and a lack of curiosity toward how things are.

Progress in public philosophy would mean establishing that the ‘world in crisis’ is actually comprised of three inter-influencing worlds in crisis that are different kinds of reality but part of the same overall reality. This three-world perspective is what connected me with my co-founder of Perspectiva, Tomas Bjorkman, and it is described by Perspectiva in our charitable objects and in our tagline as Systems, Souls, and Society. However, a similar notion is also outlined in different ways in Sociology by Margaret Archer (Structure, Agency, Culture) and Marvin Harris (Infrastructure, Superstructure, Social Structure), in philosophy by Karl Popper (World I, World II, World III), Jurgen Habermas (Technical, Interpretative, Emancipatory Knowledge Interests) Felix Guattari (Environment, Mind, Society), Alexander Bard (Pathos, Mythos and Logos) and in practice by Dave Snowden (Assemblages, Agency, Affordances) and Indra Adnan (I, We, World) amongst others. These people are not all saying the same thing, but the underlying threeness of the world shines through. This is a critical point, because polycrisis is strong on systems, but light on society, and mute on souls. In this sense at least, Poly cannot carry the weight of the world.

I believe shifting perception toward this more stratified, relational, and generative ontology gives us a chance of metamorphosis, described by Ulrich Beck as changing the mode of change (what Paul Watzlawick calls second-order change). It also moves us towards metanoia, the first word in the New Testament in Matthew’s gospel, which is often translated as ‘repent’, but really means a profound and world-shifting change of heart and mind. That’s what we have to go towards, and it is something metacrisis helps us to see and do, but polycrisis does not.

It could be argued that ‘capitalism’ is the underlying problem, and that’s probably correct, but what is capitalism if not a dysfunctional relationship between systems, souls and society? I am partly joking, because capitalism can be defined in so many ways (I am particularly impressed by Jason Moore’s claim that it ‘organises nature’) but the point is that political economy is only ever one dimension of the issue, and capitalism is arguably driven by greed and delusion. So where then should we act?

Delusion is a psychiatric term relating to the misreading of reality but it has deeper psychological and spiritual roots: this includes the Christian idea of sin as described by Francis Spufford (‘the human propensity to fuck things up’), the Hindu notion of maya, and the Buddhist idea of lack, as articulated by David Loy. Delusion also has historical and institutional dimensions (including indefinite economic growth on an ecologically finite planet, or going to war without good reason). In The Master and his Emissary (2011), Iain McGilchrist makes a version of this case based on an epigenetic process through which the delusions of the left hemisphere of the brain under clinical conditions are becoming perceptible in whole persons and whole societies in everyday life, giving rise to delusion writ large. This case is further developed in The Matter with Things: Our brains, our delusions, and the unmaking of the world (2021) published by Perspectiva. My own argument in Spiritualise (2013, 2017) does not refer to delusion directly, but it is also premised on the contention that collectively we are somehow ‘acting out’ our misreading of how things are. The word delusion is the finger pointing to the moon (inaccurately, maybe!) but not the moon itself. I am using delusion as a signpost rather than a sign – it serves to indicate the different ways that we misread reality.

There is no quick fix, but the pathway indicated is transformative education broadly conceived, often described as Bildung, the kind of moral, civic and aesthetic education worthy of our historical moment, which Perspectiva refers to as Realisation. The audacious task is to collectively learn how to relate to the world differently and better, and that includes reckoning with existing patterns of power that perpetuate existing patterns of attending, understanding, and valuing. My recent talk at UCL Centre for Global Governance developed these ideas (see the slides at the bottom of this post) and metacrisis carries them better than any other single term.

The growing popularity of the (mostly descriptive) term ‘polycrisis’ among the world elite will be a helpful development if it acts as a conceptual gateway drug to a reckoning with the (mostly diagnostic) term ‘permacrisis’, because those apparent intellectual dead-ends reveal that this is a Kairotic moment, ripe with risk, meaning and opportunity. That realisation obliges us to break through to the more explanatory and prescriptive idea of ‘metacrisis’ when we actually start to act in a way that fits the crisis at hand, through the kind of reflection needed to inform effective action.

For people working on bigger-than-self issues like ecological collapse, democratic revival, or the wise governance of technology, the language used for the macro context acts as a kind of shared premise and social mandate, and is, therefore, a critical part of the work, because it sets agendas and budgets and priorities. What lies within us (souls) and between us (society) matters every bit as much if not more than what lies (inside and) outside of us (systems), and metacrisis helps us work from and for the relationship between those three worlds.

To choose terminology is to commit to an architecture for thinking and deciding, and a sensibility for feeling and evaluating. Today, as the world teeters and everyone struggles to perceive context clearly, we have a sacred responsibility to get it right.

1. This post is still quite long at just over 6000 words in total. Although the whole post exceeds the Substack email limit, it can be read as two parts. The first part of just over 3000 words is sufficient to understand the main argument relating to the case for preferring metacrisis to polycrisis, and the second part (The Afterparty) is a deeper and more technical exploration for the philosophically inclined reader, lovers of prefixes, and all other admirable creatures.

2. Now that the ideas of polycrisis and metacrisis are clearer, the point of the short quiz makes more sense than it might have originally. Theorists of polycrisis say it has no discernible underlying cause (Q1 above); polycrisis theorists do not appear to entertain the idea that existing approaches to action at scale might be deluded or self-destructive (e.g. complicated approaches to complex systems), or that they might be missing something fundamental (Q2); they also appear to make no connection between the data-rich comparative historical analysis of the present moment and what that implies for the limitations of our overarching view of the world or cosmology (Q3); the term also seems to polycrisis theorists to be ‘good enough’, and there is little reflection on the choice of prefix (Q4); they seem to believe in the need for a crisis mentality to focus attention, and do not entertain the possibility that the idea of crisis might be part of the problem, or self-perpetuating in some way (Q5).

In the absence of solutions, polycrisis is an indefinite feature of our predicament and implies a permacrisis, but each of these ideas is symptomatic of the fact, to echo Einstein, that we cannot solve the problems of the world with the same thinking that caused them. The idea of metacrisis is therefore essential (Q4) mostly because it takes depth seriously, and it says there is indeed a crisis within the crisis that we need to attend to. More precisely, it serves to highlight the spiritual crisis within the systemic crisis (Q1), it reveals the necessity of transcending our self-subverting logics (Q2), it establishes the need to contend with meaning and metaphysics at a crucial turning point (Q3), and it points towards forms of collective action informed not just by political economy and complexity theory, but also by an intellectually dignified commitment to the transformation of human consciousness, part of which is about getting beyond a crisis mentality (Q5) in the most literal of many senses of the term of metacrisis, i.e. ‘after crisis’, or not really a crisis at all.

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