The Depth of Our Crises
Till recently, a common model used to explain our world was VUCA - volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous. It was a term coined by the US Army War College, and it quickly was adopted as an understanding across the world.
In 2018 however, futurist Jamais Cascio suggested this was outdated, and proposed a new model for the world we live in - BANI: brittle, anxious, nonlinear and incomprehensible.
You see, we live in an age of polycrisis, meaning there’s not just one crisis – there’s multiple, and each is deeply interconnected with the other.
We face economic downturns, trade wars and rising inflation (and indeed, an entire economic system that’s goals are out of sync with our planetary boundaries).
We face climate change and biodiversity crises – ecosystem collapse, food insecurity, water scarcity, increasing (in both frequency and severity) natural disasters.
We face a rise in populism, authoritarianism and a resurgence of far-right movements; movements that present threats to democracy, and that threaten the major social progress of the last 60 years, including racial and gender justice, LGBTQ+ rights, and climate action.
We face rising global conflict and violence, escalating in no small part by the last three crises.
We face increasing numbers of refugees and large-scale mass migration, as people are forcibly displaced from their homes by all of the previous events.
None of these crises are happening in a vacuum - each intersects and is entangled with the other.
There are many names for this time: the polycrisis, the metacrisis, the Great Unravelling, the Long Dark. Some have predicted it for many years, and and it’s expected this time will last many more.
As changemakers however, key to working in this time is understanding that our crises also run deeper than they appear on the surface. Open the news and you'll see the latest horror: deportations, rising authoritarianism, political chaos, violence waged on innocent people, or the latest climate catastrophe.
Our news and political system present the headline as the problem – and with this, it's easy to think that if we just fixed this particular policy, stopped that one person, raised more money, developed more technology, toppled that toxic party, pushed a little harder, win the next election - we'll be okay.
But the deeper causes of these crises are woven into the foundations of our modern world. They cut to the heart of what it means to be human - our relationship with each other, with the more-than-human world, with power, and with the stories we live inside.
The polycrisis didn’t emerge overnight – it is rooted in centuries of harm: colonisation, slavery, genocide, ecocide. Violence begets more violence until it is interrupted. Trauma, unseen and unheard, begets more pain until it is seen and processed.
So what’s underneath these crises? What is the foundation of our modern world?
First, we can consider the stories that shape our world.
Imagine for a moment that you are growing a strawberry plant. You probably hoped for a healthy plant when you sowed the seeds, but instead it’s struggling to survive, producing only a few tart strawberries at a time.
What are you likely to do?
In most likelihood, it wouldn’t be to blame the plant, or give it a pep talk filled with messages of endurance or how strong it could be after this experience. It’s also unlikely that you would judge or criticise the plant, condemning it for not thriving like the silverbeet you planted nearby.
Instead, you would likely look at the plant’s conditions: the soil, sunlight, rain, or quality of the nutrients.
Stories are the soil of our shared world, shaping our mindset and values. They’re beliefs, values and assumptions, conscious and unconscious, that play out in our thoughts, words, and actions.
Stories determine the shared reality of a culture, they define the limits of what we believe to be possible or impossible, normal or abnormal, wise or reckless, desired or undesirable, and they’re cemented into our world through systems – cultural, economic, and political.
Stories, it is no exaggeration to say, make our world. In today’s interconnected age however, many of the stories underpinning our systems do not serve us:
We have the story of scarcity - a story that says there’s not enough to go around, and that we must hoard, restrict, or dominate to ensure there’s enough.
We have stories of supremacy - that say a certain race, gender, or body is superior to another. That bodies of a certain size, colour, or ability are either undesirable or less valuable.
We have the story of separation - that says humans are separate from the natural world, that we can somehow thrive apart from it. It’s this mindset, one that has forgotten the ways of old cultures, that knew us to be part of a living world, that is at the heart of extractivism and climate change.
It’s these stories that underpin our crises, that shape our relationship to power and resources, and that form the very mindset through which we engage with the crises themselves.
Going further, these stories don't just live outside of us - they live in us, as us and through us.
Between self and world there is not a boundary but a mirror, reflecting patterns that flow in both directions.
I’ll share more on this another week, but in our personal struggles - burnout, exhaustion, imposter syndrome, loneliness - we embody microcosms of our larger cultural narratives; ones built on extraction and scarcity, on domination and control, and on the illusion of separation from the living world that we are made from.
The same mindset that treats the Earth as a resource to be extracted from treats our bodies and spirits as machines to be optimised.
Changemaking for this reason must integrate the inner and the outer, recognising the inherent symbiosis of these domains. The emotional, spiritual and somatic terrain of transformation is as critical as the political and systemic. As we work on one, the other shifts in response, and when we attend to both simultaneously, our efforts gain coherence and power.
Beyond our cultural stories however, there are two other defining factors at the heart of the polycrisis.
The first, is our wisdom gap There is a vast gap between the technological capabilities we hold - weapons of mass horror and destruction, AI and its unfolding capabilities - and the capacity we have to use these tools well. (Which, to be clear, in one of these cases, means *not* using).
As a species, intellectually and capably, we are genius and brilliant. We sometimes forget the wonder behind things we consider every day: phones, video calls, electricity, plumbing, flying.
But the dominant culture we live within, and the stories it is founded on, does not support the development of wisdom; instead it says that greed, fear, domination and control are the natural ways of us, or are instincts to be celebrated. Our ideas of success are correlated with individualism, power, winning and being the top of a hierarchy.
Instincts - equally as instinctive to us as humans, and to the formation of societies - such as care, cooperation, compassion, reflection, love, or empathy are disregarded as ‘soft’, ‘nice-to-haves’, or ‘feminine’.
It is these instincts, however, that allow us to act wisely, and along with long-term thinking, we must develop them to bridge the gap we face.
The second, is the fraying of our relational fabric - our lack of trust in one another, in our public institutions and a rising sense of loneliness.
A study at the University of Southampton showed trust in parliament is declining in 36 democracies, including Argentina, Brazil, France, Italy, Spain, South Korea, Australia and the United States.
A study in the US said the share of adults who agreed “most people can be trusted” declined from 46% in 1972 to 34% in 2018.
There are genuine reasons for this - many valid.
But we need one another - we are communal and relational beings. We thrive in relationship. We cannot do this work alone, and we weren’t meant to.
Without restitching our relational fabric, without nurturing our most beautiful instincts as humans - compassion and love - and without re-writing the stories that underpin our systems and culture, addressing the challenges of this time will feel like a game of whack-a-mole.
To address the depth of our crises, we must return to the foundations: story, wisdom, connection.
Because a polycrisis is also a moment of polyopportunity. If our crises are entangled with one another, unexpected leverage points exist – small places where we can make big change.
Our work is not to prioritise one crisis over another, or to try to tackle the total big picture, but to recognise that each piece of work matters – that each thread is connected to a larger fabric.
In this time, we need economists and activists and politicians – and we also need farmers, and creatives, and teachers, and medical workers, and conservationists, and accountants, and lawyers, and engineers, and artists and all of us, wherever we are, committing to transforming the foundations of our shared world.
(Jon Kabat-Zinn wrote, “Wherever You Go, There You Are” - I think of it this way, wherever you are, there lies the work.)
If our crises run deeper than the surface, than each and every one of us also has a role to play in the world's remaking, because each and every one of us has something to offer, something unique, something beautiful.
