Our world shows signs of breakdown across many systems at once. Polycrisis names an entanglement of crises, ecological, political, cultural and technological, that feed one another. Metacrisis names the conditions that generate them. Just as symptoms signal an illness, polycrisis points to metacrisis.
This short introduction looks at how collective worldviews, above all the cultural paradigm of modernity, sit beneath these failures, and why seeing that takes more than learning new facts: it takes practice, community and changes in how we live.
What’s in the paper
- Three layers of crisis: manifest crises on the surface, failures in our systems beneath them, and foundational ideas and deep human tendencies at the root.
- Leading accounts of the metacrisis: a brief tour of how current thinkers describe it.
- Case studies: today’s crises, from climate breakdown to inequality, read as symptoms of deeper causes.
Fig 1: The polycrisis and the metacrisis, in three layers.
With thanks to Commonweal for its support. There is more on the topic at metacrisis.info.