Metacrisis

A metacrisis is a crisis at the foundations of a civilization, arising from its core views and values – its basic, dominant worldview or “cultural paradigm”.

Meta tends to denote a self-referential object. A study of many studies is a meta-analysis. However, the idea of metacrisis is not so much a compound or overarching crisis as a foundational set of conditions that generates multiple emergent crises.

On this view, the underlying structure of views and values on which humanity has constructed modern civilization generates and amplifies behaviours that produce crisis symptoms. Understanding the metacrisis is essential if we’re even to begin redirecting our energies towards healing the source of our crises and restoring a stable basis for sustainable planetary civilisation.

Relationship to Polycrisis

See https://forum.secondrenaissance.net/t/polycrisis-and-metacrisis-3-layers-of-causation/299

1. Surface Layer – Manifest Crises (Polycrisis)

   • Concrete global crises: ecological collapse, AI risk, geopolitical instability, mental health epidemics
   • These are symptoms, emerging from failures in the intermediate layer, which in turn are rooted in deeper cultural-ideological and ontological substrates

2. Intermediate Layer – Meta-Systemic Dysfunctions (Metacrisis)

   • Collective action failures (e.g., climate inaction, regulatory capture)
   • Wisdom gap (mismatch between technological capacity and moral/epistemic maturity)
   • Degradation of sense-making and collective intelligence
   • Value misalignment and multi-polar traps (e.g., race-to-the-bottom dynamics)

3. Root Layer – Foundational Ideologies (Cultural Paradigms) & Deep Human Tendencies (Metacrisis)

   • Deep ideological features of modernity (e.g., anthropocentrism, individualism, mechanistic rationality)
   • Amplification of latent human tendencies (e.g., greed, fear, control)
   • These do not cause the polycrisis directly, but predispose systems toward fragmentation, extractivism, etc.