By Khai Seng Hong
If you are paying attention to the news and the world out there, there is a good chance that you might be feeling overwhelmed. Constantly consuming distressing headlines can take a toll on your health. The Oxford English Dictionary has even recognised this phenomenon as its Word of the Year for 2020 - “doomscrolling”.
Crisis, Crisis, Crisis
As a way to help us understand what is happening and why it is happening, people have tried to capture the gravity of the situation using the terms permacrisis, polycrisis and metacrisis.
Permacrisis describes the permanent state of crisis that the world seems to exist in. When one crisis ends, another one seems to appear.
Polycrisis recognises that the multiple crises we face are interconnected and impact each other, cascading in both obvious and unnoticed ways. This allows a systemic view of different crises for example rising authoritarianism, gun violence, mental wellness, climate change, overshoot of planetary boundaries, widening inequality, ethics of new technologies deployed, misinformation and geopolitical conflict, all of which are happening today, at the same time.
The Metacrisis explores deeper dynamics than a polycrisis. Jonathan Rowson, co-founder of Perspectiva, describes the metacrisis as the common underlying dynamics driving all the seemingly different crises that create a polycrisis.
Some of these common dynamics include:
Market economies with perverse incentives to privatise gains and externalise harm (e.g. creating competitive commercial advantage by using cheaper fertiliser that pollutes the river ecosystem),
Multipolar traps where every group races to an endpoint that is collectively bad (e.g. “If we don’t build more weapons, someone else will, and this will leave us in a weaker position, so let’s do it.”)
Infinite growth on a planet with finite resources.
Scenarios for the Metacrisis
Knowing that these problems exist, you may be wondering – how do we resolve them? Nate Hagens proposed 4 scenarios of how the future may play out:
Green Growth – Use of technology to create more productivity in the world to become so profitable that we use the excess funds to heal the planet.
Mordor Economy – Continued growth, with more and more of our economy, energy and materials being directed to the energy and mining sector as cheap fossil fuels become more scarce and difficult to obtain. More resources are also spent adapting to environmental problems like drought, fires and floods.
The Great Simplification – Instead of growing forever, the world manages a graceful descent in terms of energy, credit and materials usage, so that we are living within our planetary means.
Mad Max – The world declines into entropy, with no stability or social contract holding the world together.
Of those 4 scenarios, Nate proposes that the Great Simplification is the one that addresses the metacrisis best. If we are to resolve the metacrisis, I believe we will all need the agency and responsibility to create other alternative scenarios that can help anticipate and imagine hopeful futures that we can aspire towards as a global citizenry.
An Invitation to Imagine
What would the world look like if the market economy creates healthy incentives that reward widening our planning and stewarding boundaries to include social, ecological, mental and spiritual health?
What would the world look like if instead of racing each other to a self-destructive endpoint, we inspire each other to develop pro-social behavior for all?
What would the world look like if we recognise the limits to growth and we live, work and play within a sustainable pace that considers decisions with a timeframe of future generations?
What are you imagining as a preferred world?
With such tough and complex crises to address, the world will need more people to be taking longer-term views through the use of Futures Thinking and foresight tools. Making decisions based on Business-As-Usual assumptions will not allow us to see deep into the crises and help facilitate and create stronger images of the future. With concerted impact by the Futures community, who knows? Maybe the Word of the Year for 2050 will be “hopescrolling”!
Further Reading
An introduction to the Metacrisis by Daniel Schmachtenberger
The Great Simplification by Nate Hagens
Moloch and the Metacrisis by The Pleb Check
Meta-Crisis Meta-Resource by Kyle Kowalski
A Deeper Dive Into the Meta Crisis by Center for Humane Technology
The Illustrated Futurist: The Walk, the Work, and the Will by TFSX
Demystifying and Re-mystifying the Role of the Futurist in the Era of the Metacrisis
© Hong Khai Seng, 2024
KhaiSeng started Studio Dojo in Singapore to explore the intersection between Design, Futures, Organisation Development and Leadership Development. He is deeply invested in helping people, teams and organisations to become more adaptive and healthy through training, coaching and community engagement. Khai Seng thinks Futures is a great avenue to examine how the human and social condition is affected by our understanding and skill in the use of our pasts, present and futures.
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