The Metacrisis

This spring I woke up from a dream in a state of heat, an unabating heat that did not belong to the chill nights of spring. The only thought I remember having upon waking in this half-dreaming state was that this heat would only rise, that we would all now slowly and excruciatingly die by this relentless, ever-rising heat, that all our models and predictions had been wrong, all our efforts in vain. I quickly fell back to sleep, but a remnant of this somnolent conviction born of dream-logic has remained in me, a spark, a low flame.

Dagsavisen, a Norwegian news paper, has today published an opinion piece that I wrote about the metacrisis (English translation below). This came about as a very condensed distillation of some of my recent learning, thinking and writing. The metacrisis is a massive and complex topic that I here attempt to give an introduction to in just a few paragraphs, and there are countless considerations and factors that are thus not mentioned. I still hope this piece can be thought-provoking, and can inspire curiosity and a desire to learn more about a topic that will affect us all in the coming decades.

If we do not want to keep repeating the mistakes that have led us into this predicament, we must, among other things, learn to see broader and further ahead, coordinate on large scales, recognize that reality cannot be reduced without loss, strive to continuously reshape our view of reality, and develop sense and decision making that allow us to act long-term and efficiently on uncertain grounds. Above all, we must understand that we each have a responsibility for the future. Such moralizing sentiments are easy to scoff at, and quickly drown in social media's attention economy, but this does not mean they cannot have value in inspiring deeper understanding, if not action.

The web version of the piece in Norwegian, as well as the English translation below, contains a number of links to sources that I recommend for those who want to learn more. If you only read one of these, I recommend Development in Progress by The Consilience Project. I am now working on what I tentatively consider phase two of The Magical Flower of Winter, a new essay series in which I go more in depth on the metacrisis and existing approaches to it, and where I attempt to develop the relation of this topic to the work published as the first phase of my project. As I write in the piece below, there are no straightforward and simple solutions to the metacrisis, but there are ways to approach it, ways that interconnect across mitigative and adaptive measures. What I hope to be able to offer through future work is nothing but how I think about the metacrisis, and how I try to understand it, and maybe this can lead to others doing the same, in their own way.

The following is a translated version of the Dagsavisen piece:

On July 7th, E24 reported on the new committee, appointed by the Minister of Climate and Environment Andreas Bjelland Eriksen, that will estimate Norway's climate bill. This in itself is wonderful news, as this work will make it "easier to implement climate countermeasures". The question that should be asked is whether such work is not several decades late, and whether the committee's work instructions are incompatible with the developments in climate and society we have seen in recent times, especially in light of the statement from committee chair Ingrid Hjort that they may discover countermeasures that are "profitable even if climate change were not to occur." Further reason to doubt the committee's compatibility with the state of the world is of course the Norwegian Government's "Green Book", which has been strongly criticized for its vagueness and lack of actions, and which shows a great lack of understanding of the larger socioeconomic context of which the climate crisis is a part. This context is known as the metacrisis, of which the climate crisis is a symptom. In no way do I wish to criticize the committee before it has begun its work, but I do wish to highlight how they are potentially limited by the socioeconomic and political paradigm from which it springs.

The metacrisis, also referred to as the polycrisis, describes the breadth of challenges facing the world today. "Meta" here refers to the fact that the crises stem from something below the surface or outside them, something that binds these challenges together. The World Economic Forum defines it as: "a cluster of interdependent global risks that create a compound effect, so that their combined impact exceeds the sum of their individual parts." The climate crisis is one of these global risks, others that can be mentioned are the loss of biodiversity, resource depletion, increasing socioeconomic inequalities, and accelerating technologies such as artificial intelligence. It is important to note that these risks are catastrophic on their own, that they are interconnected, and that treating them individually will not address the underlying problems. In the simplest possible terms, the metacrisis has arisen as a result of the geopolitical paradigm built around economic growth, a paradigm that is not possible without the consumption of resources and energy, consumption which has now reached heights incompatible with the Earth's finite resources, and which has already driven us beyond multiple planetary boundaries.

Why don't we stop growth? There are no simple answers, but some main features can be pointed to that explain a great deal. Central are game-theoretic "traps" that arise between agents in competition for finite resources. No agent can give up resources or opportunities in the short term, as the economic incentive for growth will lead to short-term losses relative to the other agents. Historically, we have seen this on a large scale in arms races and the tragedy of the commons. This type of short-term gain is only possible if one does not include the cost of external consequences on the environment, something the western industrial world has not opened its eyes to until in the last few decades, of which our use of fossil fuels and the climate crisis is a textbook example. The type of coordination across all agents that is required to resolve such a game-theoretic trap does not exist in our time's geopolitical climate characterized by conflict and a lack of trust. The world community lacks authorities and institutions with a planetary mandate. Opportunism will always win over risk in a competitive climate where impact assessment is carried out in the narrowest possible way and the growth incentive is strong: without this effect, technologies that have saved countless lives would probably not have seen the light of day, but how many lives are lost when you look at the whole? Holistic pictures are not possible to form based on narrow impact assessments. It is of course naive to believe that we will be able to account for all consequences, but something far better should be expected than the opportunism we see daily at the expense of millions of lives in vulnerable countries, if not billions of lives in the future.

How can we approach the metacrisis given the above? It is crucial that we achieve a common understanding that any transition to a world after fossil fuels is not only a question of technology or innovation, as it is precisely technology coupled with growth incentives that has led us into the metacrisis. Green growth is a fantasy, but this is not the same as cracking down on measures that could have mitigating effects on the metacrisis. It is the underlying growth incentive that we must eradicate if we as a society are to be prepared for the consequences that the next decades will bring. If we continue to expect growth opportunities, we are facilitating a continuation of exactly the same opportunism that ignores consequences.

I am positive that the committee will come to these conclusions on their own, not only because the evidence points in this direction, but because they must come to these conclusions if there is to be any chance for Norway to be prepared for the unraveling of the next decades. The interconnectedness of the catastrophic risks in the metacrisis highlights that it is not a problem we can solve, but a predicament we must learn to live through. The time for preventive measures was half a century ago when we began to become aware of the climate effects of our form of society. The time has now come for mitigating and adaptive measures, measures that can allow us to influence when and to what extent the consequences of the metacrisis play out, and measures that can facilitate the change in world view that the coming generations will have to undergo, as well as elaborate strategies for how our children and grandchildren can build the resilience and capacity for unity, cooperation and balance with Nature that will be required as our current social institutions see their end. Nobody knows what a world after capitalism and fossil fuels will look like, but if we do not manage to create it together over the next decades, the world will not look like anything to humanity.