1. Understanding the Metacrisis: Beyond Climate and Economics

This article is the first in a series of articles based on The Metacrisis - Analysis and The Wisdom Initiative.

What does it really mean that the world is in crisis? And why is the term crisis no longer adequate to describe everything that is happening, from ecological collapse to social fragmentation, from technological acceleration to meaninglessness? The term metacrisis attempts to answer this. It refers not just to one specific crisis, but to a complex and self-reinforcing state in which the way we solve problems has become part of the problem itself. That there is something wrong with our approach and relationship to the world. The metacrisis is therefore not a single event or a single stand-alone issue, but a nexus, a hub of interdependent and deeply interconnected relationships, ranging from psychology and worldviews to socio-economics and geopolitics.

Aspects of the metacrisis

There are many ways to describe the metacrisis, and all point to different sides of the same pattern. Economically and socially, it is about growth: about how growth is linked to energy, and how energy is linked to resource extraction. There is no growth in profits that is not ultimately linked to some form of extraction. [1]

Agriculturally, the meta-crisis is about the many challenges we face as a result of the externalities, the side effects, of industrial agriculture worldwide, and about the vulnerability of the agricultural system to change, whether due to climate or other factors. [2] Ecologically, it is about the limits of the planet’s tolerance: nine areas identified as critical to the well-being of the planet, of which climate change is only one. We are currently exceeding all but two of these limits. [3]

Educationally, the norm is a system of standardised teaching designed to produce high test scores. This system now competes with profit-maximising agendas from social media and AI algorithms for the attention of children and students, both in and out of education. [4] Culturally, we are at war, but it is not really a war of opinions or cultures, but of who can communicate them most effectively through the algorithms of social media. We are fed increasingly empty and profit-driven consumer products and entertainment, partly as a distraction from the state of the world. At the same time, the complexity and sometimes hopelessness of the world are driving us directly towards them. At the forefront of this is an advertising industry that is determined to squeeze every grain of attention out of us for profit, if not also to manipulate us towards certain political outcomes and consumption patterns.

Technologically, we suffer from externality and context blindness, a sacrifice of ecological and human welfare for narrow and short-term growth ambitions, in a climate of limited coordination and regulatory scarcity. Geopolitically, a lack of planetary mandates prevents global affairs that concern us all from being adequately addressed. We lack the wisdom that planetary power requires for stewardship. Spiritually, we suffer from the aftereffects of secularization, modernity, and postmodernity, worldviews that lack meaning and purpose because we believe these have been reduced or relativized, and in which our relationship to each other and to nature is characterized by separation and independence. Any hint of something larger than ourselves is almost absent. This worldview is transparent to us: we believe it is the world as it actually exists to us, when in fact it is our view of the world.

Politically, the most fortunate among us suffer from forms of democracy that are subordinate to the interests of those with the most capital and power, and as voters we are presented with a narrow and polarizing menu of choices, rather than the full range of possibilities that correspond to the diversity of political views. [5] Much of our lives are lived in service, willingly or unwillingly, to the techno-industrial forces of quantity and optimization, blind to quality and human values.

All of this is connected. Not as a single cause, but as a pattern of intertwined processes: economic, technological, psychological, ecological, and spiritual. These processes arise from dynamics that deal with how we see the world, and how we base our actions and our designs on this view. Therefore, the meta-crisis requires not only a new politics, but a new worldview – a new understanding of how we see the world at all.

A crisis in worldview

Many describe the meta-crisis as a breakdown in our external systems: in energy, climate, and economics, but it is also a breakdown in our internal systems: in meaning, trust, and our relationship to ourselves, each other, and reality. The breakdown of internal systems indicates a lack of wisdom, a form of malnutrition that makes us confuse growth with life and speed with progress.

This may seem abstract, but it turns out concrete: when knowledge is reduced to information, when values ​​are reduced to preferences, and when humans are reduced to user, consumer or data point. In other words, we have built institutions that reflect a narrow image of man, and this image now governs how we live, learn and produce. Jonathan Rowson describes it this way in Prefixing the World:

“The metacrisis is the historically specific threat to truth, beauty and goodness, caused by our persistent misinterpretation, misjudgment and misuse of reality. The metacrisis is the crisis within and between all the world’s great crises, a root cause that is both one and many, a multidimensional delusion that springs from the spiritual and material exhaustion of modernity, and that permeates the world’s interconnected challenges and manifests itself institutionally and culturally to the detriment of life on earth.”

Or to put it more simply: we suffer from a worldview that is not well enough connected to reality. We have built our systems on a narrative of separation: man detached from nature, the individual detached from community and culture, meaning detached from the good. What forces underlie this tendency in how we organise ourselves?

Growth

A central aspect, evident from all of the above, is growthism: the pursuit of growth for growth’s sake. Growthism shows how we are trapped in projects where we throw wisdom and welfare out the window for short-term and narrow goals. If we don’t sacrifice our values ​​for profit, someone else will, and we can’t afford to if we want to stay in the game. This exemplifies a trap, much like the arms race.

The result is that we get caught in traps where we have to throw wisdom out the window in order to survive in the short term. Our designs—our strategies, systems, and solutions—reflect what we think the world is. If we think the world is a machine, we design control. If we think the world is a community, we design care. Our limited designs thus spring from a distorted worldview.

This means that every crisis is also an invitation to reflection: What is it about our view of reality that makes crises possible? And what kind of view do we need to have for our solutions to actually be healing?

Wisdom

A common objection to talking about the metacrisis is that it feels overwhelming. And it is true, it encompasses everything. But perhaps the hope lies precisely here: that no one can solve it alone. If the metacrisis arises from a lack of wholeness, only a holistic understanding can meet it. This requires radical changes. These changes cannot arise from the same mindsets and social structures that created the problems in the first place. We need a new approach, one that recognizes the whole, the connections and the deeper dependencies between all parts of society and life. And here we touch on another contradiction with the metacrisis: it requires immediate radical changes, but our approach to it requires patience and a long-term perspective.

If we want to shape a viable future, we must cultivate virtues and long-term thinking, both in ourselves and in the structures we build. At the heart of this work is wisdom. Wisdom means making well-considered, long-term choices that are not guided by short-term gain or immature notions of progress and growth. It is about breaking free from destructive incentives and traps that make us sacrifice human values ​​for immediate gain.

But wisdom is not a rulebook: it cannot be reduced to a set of instructions, automated, mechanized or calculated. Wisdom is a capacity, a disposition, a quality that must be cultivated through community. It cannot exist in isolation, but is shaped through relationships, conversations, practices and culture. And this is where initiatives like Nye Røtter come into play, with the conviction that we need new and deeper roots to face the future.

The Way Forward

The meta in the meta-crisis refers to how the situation we find ourselves in has its roots between or behind all the world’s major crises. Three interconnected concepts are central to understanding this background: worldviews, limited designs, and traps. In the next parts of this series, we will explore how these are connected, and how technology, which is often seen as the solution, is in fact an extension of the same problem.

Footnotes

1. Hickel, J. (2020). Less is More: How Degrowth Will Save the World. Windmill Books.
   
   

2. The Consilience Project (2024). Development in Progress: The concept of progress is at the heart of humanity’s story. https://consilienceproject.org/development-in-progress/. See the section “A High-Level List of Externalities of the Haber-Bosch Method.”
   
   

3. https://www.stockholmresilience.org/research/planetary-boundaries.html
   
   

4. Stein, Z. (2021). “Disarm the Pedagogical Weaponry: Make Education not Culture War” in Rowson & Pascal (eds.), Dispatches from a Time Between Worlds. Perspective Press.
   
   

5. Hine, D. (2023). At Work in the Ruins. Chelsea Green Publishing: “The crude choices offered at the ballot box encourage us to reduce politics to such us-and-them challenges. What goes missing is the possibility that we live in a time that is stalked by multiple dangers.”

Meet the author

Severin Sjømark

Head of AI Strategy & Co-Founder at Deepinsight

Severin Sjømark is Head of AI Strategy at Deepinsight, where he works at the intersection of technology, ethics and healthcare. He is passionate about creating understandings of philosophy, culture, science, technology and society that can lead to more balanced relationships in and with the world. This work can be read on the substack The Magical Flower of Winter [link: https://tmfow.substack.com]