How to think about the metacrisis

I have a friend who read my recent article, Masculinity and the Polycrisis (Hi Dave). He asked me if I could point him to a simple introduction to this topic for him and his clients—one that didn’t include all my discourse about masculinity. There are some really amazing resources out there, including this interview of Daniel Schmachtenberger and all of Nate Hagens’ work on The Great Simplification. But as I considered my friend’s request, I came back to how important it is for me, personally, to conceptualize and express myself on this topic. The first steps that humanity must take if we are to adapt to the metacrisis, is to become aware of this issue and begin to understand the wicked complexity that it poses. To that end, this article is my attempt to offer an approachable introduction to the metacrisis. I’m going to focus specifically on ‘thinking about’ the metacrisis here, but there is so much more to be said on how to ‘feel about’ or how to ‘respond to’ the metacrisis.

What is a crisis?

For starters, let’s consider the term, crisis. Here’s my definition: A crisis is an event or series of events that causes transformational change in an entity. Personal examples include getting a divorce, being fired from your job, or losing your home. In each of these cases some fundamental aspects of your daily routine and your identity change. We often hold a negative connotation toward the term crisis, but under my definition, this is not necessarily the case. Falling in love, landing a new job, and purchasing a new home could all equally qualify as personal crises. Sometimes a crisis is catastrophic. Sometimes it’s as miraculous and beautiful as childbirth (and sometimes it’s both simultaneously).

The words transformational change are important in the definition. If I put on five extra pounds, that’s not transformational change. I could lose those pounds again (theoretically), and who I am as a person isn’t fundamentally altered by the experience. Transformational change is like the caterpillar becoming a butterfly—there’s no going back and the core identity changes.

I am using the term entity very broadly. I include any coherent whole being like a molecule, a cell, and an organism. I also include collectives like a company, a nation, an ecosystem, and a planetary biosphere. In addition, I include intangibles (like an identity) and collectives (like a culture)—you can’t objectively measure these qualitative entities with a ruler, but we experience them firsthand as they undergo subjective transformation.

So: everything is constantly changing. This is the nature of the kosmos. Some changes are gradual and maintain continuity (ex: my hair is becoming more gray). Other changes are abrupt and discontinuous (ex: the death of a parent). The latter qualify as a crisis.

Thinking about thinking

Figure 1. The Thinker in The Gates of Hell at the Musée Rodin

Now that we have an understanding of a crisis, I’d like to segue into one of my favorite topics: thinking, or more properly, cognitive intelligence. For this exploration, I’m going to draw upon Ego Development Theory (EDT), which is a data-driven model for how human cognition and self-sense moves through successive stages of evolution. I’ll share a bit from this model and then we’ll use it to understand the distinctions between a crisis, a polycrisis, and a metacrisis.

Based on interviews with thousands of adults, researchers mapped out distinct stages of egoic development from infant, to adolescent, to the independent, logical adult ego; and then into even higher levels, characterized by, “assimilation and integration towards an ever more conscious sense of belongingness and unity with the ground.”

One of the key metrics for this model is the number of viewpoints that an individual is able to simultaneously hold. Let’s take a tour of how humans hold increasing numbers of perspectives.

Stage 1: Presocial or symbiotic

Infants are fully immersed and embedded into their environment with only the most rudimentary self-sense. They have a “zero person perspective” meaning they hold no clearly differentiated self-sense.

Stage 2: Impulsive

The next stage is characterized by the emergence of the sense of self and the use of simple language like, “Mine,” “No,” and “I want.” In this stage, the individual inhabits a first person perspective which differentiates self from the rest of the world. Here, I know that I’m a me.

Stage 3: Conformist¹

In the next stage, we enter typical early-adolescent cognition where self-sense is defined in relationship with the social group. The term conformist refers to the ways individuals blur boundaries between their identity and the identity of the group, and mold themselves to the norms of the collective. At this stage, I have a very clear sense of others in addition to myself: a second person perspective. This applies both to individuals (wanting to win approval of peers) and to groups (holding a clear distinction between in-group and out-group members).

I like the sports team example. I’m in the group of fans. I have a clear sense for who is in my group and who is in the enemy group for the other team. When my team wins, I become a winner. My identity is con-fused with the identity of the sports team.

Stage 4: Conscientious

The Conscientious stage is what we generally consider to be ‘adult development.’ In this stage, the ego has become largely independent of the environment and social groups and is able to operate on its own. From EDT, “The Conscientious stage is the target stage for Western culture. Our educational systems are intended to produce adults with the mental capacity of [this] stage, that is, rationally competent and independent adults. Democracy as a form of government is based on the capacity of its independent-thinking voters to make reasoned and informed choices.”

In this stage, I’m able to consider my current self, my past self, and my future self. In addition, I’m able to take an objective view of reality - separate from my perspective and your perspective: a third person perspective. In this stage, I can engage in abstract thought and operations. Notice that with each successive perspective I’m able to hold, my cognitive capacity and self-sense become both more complex and holistic.

According to the research, these first four stages cover 82% of American adults. As we progress into the following levels, we are exploring arenas beyond what the vast majority of our society cognizes. A fascinating aspect of studying developmental models like this one is that they’re psychoactive—by studying the model, you will advance upward along the ladder. Cool, eh?

Stage 4/5: Individualist or pluralist

In this stage I come to recognize the system. In all prior stages, the system is either invisible or gets reduced back to a thing instead of a network. At the prior level, Newtonian mechanics and Cartesian analysis describe a world composed of ping-pong balls operating according to a set of laws. This is generally referred to as scientific materialism. But in some cases, the interactions of all the parts are so complicated that analysis is impossible. And sometimes the whole is not the same as the sum of the parts. When there is an organizing pattern, then the whole must be understood as a transcendent unique entity: a system. Discrete parts are easy to see and measure. Patterns require a sophisticated observer to recognize and interpret: the systems view.

My favorite example here is the atmosphere. Let’s say you had data for the temperature, wind speed, and pressure of the whole volume of the earth’s atmosphere in 10 centimeter intervals for this moment now. And let’s say you had infinite computational power and all the right math. With all that data, you cannot definitively tell me what the weather will be in Times Square, New York one month from today at exactly noon. The tiny fluctuations between all those data points are so varied and so important that even with 10cm by 10cm granularity, you cannot definitely predict what the atmosphere is going to do. It’s too complex.

So with a system’s view, we step beyond the well-defined, predictable universe into something that is chaotic, messy, emergent, and fuzzy. This doesn’t mean that nothing can be said about the future of the weather, rather, it means we can make a forecast based on probabilities.

At this developmental stage, I see my own psyche as a system of parts (an internal family system). I understand that identity is socially constructed and conditioned and that different cultures construct identity differently.

The other major cognitive advance at this level is called relativity. According to EDT, at this stage, I recognize that “the meaning of things depends on one’s relative position in regard to them, that is, on one’s personal perspective and interpretation of them…The interpretation of reality always depends on the position of the observer. Thus the idea of the participant observer, the observer who influences what he observes, is now becoming a conscious preoccupation. One can never be as totally detached and ‘objective’ as the rational/scientific outlook of the Conscientious stage would have it.”

Einstein’s special and general theories of relativity are built upon this principle to move beyond Newtonian mechanics: all phenomena are measured relative to the observer. Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle describes how the act of observation impacts phenomena at the quantum level. In physics, it is no longer possible to separate the observed from the observer; every observer’s perspective is equally valid; and different observers record different phenomena. In addition to the hard sciences, this stage recognizes relativity across cultures. Cultural truths and moralities arise within cultural contexts.

Interpreting reality in terms of systems using relativity represents a step beyond the objective third person view into the pluralistic fourth person view.

Stage 5: Autonomous

For today’s purposes, the Autonomous stage is the pinnacle of our exploration of ego development (though the model measures even more advanced stages). In this stage I am able to look across systems, meaning I take a multi-systemic view. So, for example, in order to understand the atmosphere, I may also take into account the temperature phases of the southern pacific ocean (El Niño and La Niña), land systems changes, and stratospheric ozone depletion (as examples). Each individual system is interconnected with each other system in complicated ways.

I may even begin to recognize that atmosphere, ocean, and land-use can only properly be understood by taking all three systems together as a transcendent new entity. We call this level of complexity a meta-systemic view: I’m looking at the ‘system of systems’.

The second big cognitive advancement at the Autonomous level is the recognition of developmental stages as an essential element of the kosmos. Everything is evolving and this evolutionary progression can be mapped out into a series of distinct buckets, which are variously called stages, steps, structures, or paradigms. In fact, the developmental ladder that we’re exploring right now, Ego Development Theory, is one such paradigmatic map. Therefore, this lens is called a paradigmatic view.

To take it one step further, if I were to compare EDT with other developmental models like Spiral Dynamics, Integral Theory, and Piaget's theory of cognitive development, we would then be using a meta-paradigmatic view.

Meta-systemic and meta-paradigmatic perspectives represents a fifth person view. Now, granted, the number of people involved (five?) is not exactly accurate, but the point is that this stage utilizes a fifth level of complexity to make sense of reality.

Crisis, Polycrisis, and Metacrisis

Ok, you made it through our foray into the level of cognitive development, perhaps emerging a bit more sophisticated. Part of the challenge in discussing a topic like the metacrisis is that it’s really complicated—like, layer upon layer of complexity—so I find frameworks like EDT to be essential in order to create a shared language for understanding each other. If I’m talking about a system and you're talking about meta-paradigmatic growth hierarchies, we’re going to fundamentally miss each other because we’re standing on different steps of the ladder.

Here’s the key point: a crisis applies to an entity, a polycrisis applies to multiple systems (and therefore requires a systems view), and a metacrisis applies to the transcendent system of systems—a metasystem (requiring a metasystemic view).

Let’s examine the step from a crisis to a polycrisis. Recall that my definition of a crisis is an event or series of events that causes transformational change in an entity. Now, in a system, the core feature is the organizing pattern. A collection of objects with no organizing pattern is called a heap. A system has a pattern which is what makes it larger than the sum of its parts. Therefore, a crisis for a system is a transformational change in the pattern.

Here’s an example: If you’re following a certain segment of the climate change conversation, you may have heard of the idea that the gulf stream could ‘collapse’ due to warming. There is a current of air that flows in a particular pattern² and that pattern could fundamentally change. This poses a potential crisis for the atmospheric system.

In a system, we’re not so concerned about the stuff—in our example, the actual air molecules—what we’re concerned with the is the pattern, which includes flow, turbulence, chaos, networking effects, and emergence.

In a system, the pattern tends to find a place of stable equilibrium. This is called an attractor. We can create a graph to illustrate this for the more visual learners like myself.

Figure 3. Stability landscape for a system³

In the image above, the blue dot represents the current state of the system. The lower on the graph, the more stable the pattern of the system. The black line represents the possible states of the pattern and the basins where the dot tends to rest are called attractors.

Now let’s consider a crisis. Stressors are incremental shifts to the pattern that move the black line slowly over time. They may make the basin more shallow. Triggers are discrete events (like a meteor strike or a stock market crash) that push the ball out of the attractor.

Figure 4. Stressor, trigger, and systemic crisis⁴

When the ball moves out of the basin, that means the pattern of the system enters disequilibrium and the system is now in a crisis. From here, the ball may fall back into the old basin, it may move to a new basin, or it may bounce around the landscape in chaotic disequilibrium. This is how I understand a crisis at the level of a system.

This is an important advancement, but we must go still further to understand a polycrisis. Our next step is to look at multiple systems. Let’s say I’ve got three interconnected systems: atmosphere, ocean, and land use.

Figure 5. Stability landscapes for three hypothetical systems

Now let’s imagine that the atmosphere system moves into a state of crisis. This disequilibrium will have some amount of impact on our other two systems. Let’s say the atmosphere crisis acts as a stressor on the ocean system. In addition, it triggers the land use system to move into its own crisis. Both the ocean and land use systems then feed back into the atmosphere system, pushing it further into disequilibrium. This acts as a trigger for the ocean system to jump from one attractor to another attractor. And so on. You can see how things get really messy really quickly.

Let’s make a little list here of the possible interactions:⁵

• The stressor for one system can also be a stressor for another system;

• The stressor for one system can also be a trigger for another system;

• The trigger for one system can be a stressor or trigger for another system;

• The crisis for one system can be a stressor or trigger for another system;

• The crisis in one system causes a domino effect;

• The interplay of stressor, trigger, and crisis between the systems may enter a feedback loop and create a runaway cycle.

Systems interact in complex, often chaotic ways. Here’s an important point: a polycrisis is more than multiple systems that are simultaneously in crisis. The concept of the polycrisis uses the recognition that multiple interconnected systems, some of which are in crisis, represents a fundamentally more complex situation. In the visual example below, we have a ‘double pendulum’. Whereas a single pendulum traces a very simple motion back and forth, the addition of another weighted joint makes the whole thing hopelessly complex from a predictive standpoint.

Figure 6. A double pendulum tracing a chaotic pattern.⁶

Now that we have this high-level sense for how systems can interact, let’s look at an actual model:

Figure 6. 2023 Planetary boundaries model⁷

The planetary boundaries model examines human impacts on nine earth systems and offers a framework to begin to understand how these systems interact with each other. In six of the nine categories, our current impacts are beyond the safe capacity of the system (the orange radial bars). I’m not going to go into detail describing each subject area here—you can read that on your own on their website—but this framework describes a polycrisis on purely environmental terms. From the planetary boundaries website:

Crossing boundaries increases the risk of generating large-scale abrupt or irreversible environmental changes. Drastic changes will not necessarily happen overnight, but together the boundaries mark a critical threshold for increasing risks to people and the ecosystems we are part of.

Planetary Boundaries are interdependent, meaning that if we cross one Boundary, we will affect others, or even cause them to cross out of the safe operating space.

Boundaries are interrelated processes within the complex biophysical Earth system. We cannot consider Planetary Boundaries in isolation in any decision making on sustainability. Only by respecting all nine boundaries can we maintain the safe operating space for human civilization.

This is the basis for thinking about the mess we’re in from a systems view. Remember: according to empirical data from the EDT study, 82% of American adults are not using systems thinking. The vast majority of us are not able to comprehend the implications of this graphic. The consequences of not understanding this at a basic level are massive. If human civilization continues on its current trajectory, we will trigger a catastrophic collapse of these systems, each of which is essential for our continued existence.

The polycrisis is so large and so complex that no individual can understand it in its entirety. I mean, seriously, pick any of the categories, like, “biogeochemical flows of phosphorous” and just try to understand that one. And then figure out how it’s connected to the eight other categories in the graph, each with their own subcategories. Forget it.

Furthermore, we’re only talking about the environment so far. We haven’t even opened up the human-system topics like the embedded growth obligations of our financial system, or the fragility of our just-in-time supply chain, or the geopolitics of peak oil, or social media’s deterioration of democracy—all of which interact with each other and with our environmental systems.

And if that weren’t enough, let’s circle back to the topic of relativity. Because each culture and individual can only conceptualize a small fraction of the global polycrisis situation, each person (including you and me and Daniel Schmachtenberger) will create their own social representation for what the ‘crisis’ means. We do not have a shared agreement of what the problem itself even is. In fact, most frighteningly, the nature of this phenomena defies any complete definition. It cannot be defined and because of that we cannot form any discrete solution. Some folks call this the crisis of meaning (which, that term also has multiple different definitions, and then, between the irony and the futility, I just have to start laughing).

Thinking about the metacrisis

At some point, I just draw one giant circle around everything and label it, ‘clusterfuck’.

Figure 7. Adapted from “Domino effects in the global polycrisis” by Jacob Buurma, Vibrant Content.

Besides being a cathartic artistic exercise (which, surprisingly it is), this graphic illustrates our inability to address the polycrisis using systems thinking.

Let us now take another step upward into meta-systemic, paradigmatic, and meta-paradigmatic thinking. Actually, let me preface this by saying, even though I study this material like it’s my job, am passionately embroiled in it, and have written extensively on this topic elsewhere—I am just a baby here and my perspectives on these topics are rapidly evolving. I am figuring this out along with the rest of us. With an appropriate amount of epistemic humility, let’s explore this topic from the next more complex and holistic interpretive lens.

So far we’ve looked at the level of structure (stuff) and the level of system (pattern). Now I want to introduce the term process, which describes what is happening in the present moment. The process addresses the ways the structures interact with the pattern and the ways the pattern influences the structures. The process describes how the system is changing, evolving, and growing. It represents a more comprehensive, yet in many ways simpler, lens on reality.

The process can be spinning upwards, toward more holistic states and expressions. We call this a virtuous process. Alternately, the process can be spinning downwards toward more fragmented states: a viscous process. Virtuous processes create qualities like complexity, wellbeing, compassion, and harmony. Viscous processes create qualities like death, collapse, fear, and noise.

The process doesn’t care about specific future outcomes, it only looks at what’s happening now. In this moment, we’re either advancing or declining. There is always a process and it’s always centered in the present.

The metacrisis recognizes the futility of taxonomizing the polycrisis. Instead, the metacrisis perspective recognizes that all physical, biological, and human entities and systems are unboundedly interconnected, and therefore the multiple entangled crises can be understood as a single meta-entity: the metacrisis. From this perspective we look at the process. Human civilization is currently on a self-terminating trajectory. Our process is creating fear and death. What we need is to spin the wheel toward the affirmation of life. As long as the current macro-process is in place, human civilization will collapse at some point. Any meaningful adaptation to the metacrisis requires us to fundamentally change our macro-process toward the flourishing of life.

This framework offers new perspectives. First, we can understand that incremental changes for the better (like recycling, or microfinance projects in developing countries) create small pockets of good within the larger self-terminating process. Initiatives like these may be inherently good but do not address the fundamental problem humanity is facing in the 21st century. They will not prevent human civilization from self-terminating. It is not sufficient for us to do less harm. What is actually required is to do more good than harm.

Second, we can see that some ‘solutions’ like renewable energy contribute to the growth of the global economy, which means the viscous process then becomes more viscous. Currently, many of these ‘solutions’ are hastening the coming collapse. This is a tough pill to swallow, I know.

Third, the metacrisis perspective may eventually bring you to the sobering and heartbreaking realization that human life as we know it is coming to an end. It is not necessarily that humans as a species will perish. But at some point, either the fundamentals of our civilization will change such that humans are living in balance with the biosphere upon which we depend (i.e., the death of what we know and how we operate), or our society will actually perish, like the inhabitants of Easter Island who cut down all their trees. This third point opens the door to the next conversation about how to feel and what to do with the metacrisis (which will likely be a topic for a future article).

I’ll close with this thought. In 1934, Georgii Gause published The Struggle for Existence, in which he documented his experiments of placing a gram of oatmeal in a petri dish with various species of single-celled protozoans. What he discovered was that when a species escapes the limits of competition—like these organisms in the sterile but food-rich dish—their population follows a predictable pattern that looks like this:

Figure 8. Bacterial growth curve in petri dish

At first, the expansion is small, known as the lag phase. Then the population hits the ‘hockey stick’ and enters exponential growth. Then the population stabilizes as it fills every nook of the ecosystem. Then, when either the food is exhausted, the organism’s waste has polluted the environment, or some combination of both, the population enters a rapid die-off period.

Today, humans are accelerating toward the top of the log phase. By some metrics we are already there. None of us know for sure how much time we’ll have before we hit the death phase, but if we continue to consume our planet as if it were warm oatmeal in a petri dish, this will be our fate.

The question seems to be: with all of the gifts that humanity possesses (cognitive, emotional, and spiritual), can we be more adaptive than bacteria in a petri dish hastening blindly toward our own doom?

1. EDT identifies some intermediate stages, for example, Stage 2/3: Self-protective or opportunist. If you’re like me and you find this material fascinating, then check out the full paper. But for simplicity in this article, I’m going to streamline the model a bit.

2. The Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC) for the climate geeks out there.

3. From my article, Masculinity and the Polycrisis

4. From my article, Masculinity and the Polycrisis

5. For a deep dive here, check out, Global polycrisis: the causal mechanisms of crisis entanglement.

6. Jacopo Bertolotti, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons

7. CC BY-NC-ND 3.0. Credit: Azote for Stockholm Resilience Centre, based on analysis in Richardson et al 2023. Link.