Polycrisis and Metacrisis

The Possibility of a True Perennial Philosophy, for Everything.

This post is about the kind of understanding and discernment required to navigate the complexity of our time, beyond reductionism, beyond institutional dogma, and way, way beyond the limits of a traditional, siloed education.

It explores the notion of a perennial superior philosophy: An Eternal Golden Apex.

This post and all my work is committed to a cause that exposes and denounces the indiscriminate use of AI. #LetsRaiseTheStandard

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This post is aimed at souls of a certain stripe, neurodivergents, and people hungry for a true heterodox education of salience that transcends our dated contemporary models, who are convinced there is a better way to play the human game, at work, in our relationships and our personal lives.

Not all ignorance is equal.

There are some classes of ignorance or ‘not knowing’, some species of neiscience that represent higher orders and magnitudes of consequence than others.

Another way of saying this is that not everything present is equally important, and not everything important is equally urgent, and that this relationship is non-static and constantly emerging.

There is an old but enduring story about a Greek hero, a demigod, who is set ten impossible tasks. To prove the point of how things change, it transpires that after our hero completes his ten tasks, he is informed that the goalpost has shifted, and he is given two more tasks, even more impossible than the first.

The story is called The Twelve Labours of Herakles.

One of the labours is to defeat the venomous river monster called Hydra, a serpent-like beast with many heads. The trope we resonate with is how every time one head was severed, two would grow in its place. This image persists because it speaks directly to the nature of certain problems that we encounter at the intersection of complexity and emergence.

Our typical modern default response to any problem is to break it down, a reductionist intuition. But linear intervention does not adequately map to a wider non-linear context.

The Hydra is a metaphor for the kind of problem that not only resists or defies reduction but is exacerbated by it. Each attempt to eliminate one expression of the problem in a reductionist, linear way, without understanding its deeper structure, causes proliferation; more symptoms, more unintended consequences and more entanglement. This, in turn, produces only more complexity.

The lesson of the Hydra, then, is that there is always a meta-context:

Every situation, every problem, every decision exists within a frame that defines its meaning and constraints. Most failure of understanding, of action, and of resolution occurs not within the problem itself, but within the failure to perceive the wider context that surrounds and informs it.

Our default response to our largest problems is still reductionism, linear thinking and analysis.

The sheer and competing volume of analysis is characteristic of our current problem. Consider how the petabytes of opinion and commentary that drown social media in a viral flood are essentially analysis of what is unfolding in the world. Consider how more analysis of more reports does nothing to improve or simplify business decision-making.

It is not as if we are not informed enough, or simply misinformed. More accurate to say we are malinformed. We are chronically over-informed with so much junk information, so much non-salient noise, that no single human mind can process it without distortion or critical loss of fidelity. This impacts decision-making and degrades coherence.

Salience is not just what is highlighted or visible, but what is relevant to meaningful action.

We cannot parse it all, we cannot discern what is noise and what is salient when there is too much.

Wising Up

There is a particular ‘education’ required in order to navigate extraordinary levels of complexity and extraordinary rates of non-linear change.

Education comes from the original root word, which means “to lead”.

By this, education ought to have meant how our thinking is led, not where it is led to. Modern education is invariably guilty of the latter. We are in dire need, exactly, of the former.

The problem eclipsing our problems is that we don’t know what to pay attention to and why. We don’t have the skills and the knowledge integrated to make wise discernments. We are not equipped.

This ‘education’ I am referring to is critical for surviving the emerging polycrisis and attendant metacrisis, and there is no academic institution on earth capable of providing that education, because every last one of them is a business. They are, invariably, part of and endemic to, the problem.

• Polycrisis is when lots of things are going wrong, in such a way that overwhelms the normal ways we have of dealing with each problem individually and also compounds to render the impact of each individual problem worse or at least harder to address, or both.

• Metacrisis is where we not only lack the context to appreciate the magnitude of the problem, but that we lack the wisdom to evaluate accurately what matters most, and worst of all, are ignorant of this ignorance.

Thought Experiment

Imagine being stuck with ten people in a life raft on the ocean after a tragic shipwreck. There is no food, the drinking water is limited, and there is no certainty about when rescue might happen. There is a leak somewhere, it is getting dark, a storm front is approaching and a lady on the boat is going into labour. There is a gun on the boat, and factions are forming on what to do. One argument that is appealing to some of the actors in this thought experiment is that they should shoot a hole in the hull and let the water out.

This is what a polycrisis is.

A meta-analysis of the whole problem would reveal that there is no pre-established leadership structure or social convention by which the people can organise themselves without conflict, and that even if there were, there is no way by which to determine who is most qualified for such a leadership role. We might say there is a sort of collective blind spot, which occludes what is most relevant, most salient, most beneficial.

The metacrisis, then, is the problem beyond the problem, a higher order perspective looking at the systemic failure, its causes and impacts. In our thought experiment about the life-raft, the metacrisis is the lack of critical thinking, knowledge or context required to assess and respond wisely to the individual problems and thereby to prioritise them. Most specifically, it is that not everyone involved is aware of this.

Each crisis takes a budget of a specific kind of energy and attention to process wisely and respond to appropriately. We can think of each individual crisis as a silo, or a spinning plate and when too many plates are spinning, we cannot attend equally to all of them and we don’t know whether it is better to focus on a few and let the others crash or try and keep them all spinning and invariably crash ourselves by being overwhelmed by the demand. Only, our actual crises are not simply like spinning plates. Every spinning plate is the same kind of problem, but a true polycrisis is where every contributing crisis is a very unique kind of problem.

All our domains of modern education are siloed and to select and distil from each silo what is most relevant and salient and why, is something that we have a cultural collective ignorance about.

On the world stage, our polycrisis includes our mental health crisis, our housing crisis, our economic crisis, the geopolitical crisis, our climate crisis, our technofeudal crisis and our AI explosion crisis. There are many more, and each is completely different. They require different skills, knowledge, understanding and patterns of response. No one person can adequately parse all of this. No one government or billionaire can adequately form a coherent and effective response. At an academic level, it entails and eclipses behavioural psychology, ecology, physical, economics, political science, history, and so many other domains and disciplines that cannot converge.

The metacrisis is not just about what is unfolding, but about our blindness to our own blind spots and our lack of critical appreciation for the missing perspective.

The Next Level

There is a deeply necessary ‘education’ that can not only illuminate the missing perspective but instil the intuition to always seek it.

You cannot give yourself this education, and it is one that no academic institution or other product of our current modern social or cultural operating system is capable of providing.

It is not just that our problems are complex, but that the default modalities we have for discerning and addressing them are impotent and defective.

There is always a meta-context. There is always a transcendent paradigm. I call it the Infinite Golden Apex. It refers to the principle that there is always a superior frame of salience and perspective; an upstream vantage, from which all apparent contradictions, conflicts, and entanglements can be understood more coherently than from within the granular reductionist perspective. This apex is less a place than a stance, a master heuristic by which, if we act as if it always exists, we invariably commit ourselves to striving for it. Whenever the game gets lousy, you’ll know it’s time to break through to the next level.

I am drawing attention to what is so obviously the most crucial education necessary for a human being to safeguard and grow their own sense of agency, to tell what is worth paying attention to, how to parse complexity and seeming chaos and how to respond in a way, that is most beneficial to one’s own life and the prospects of ever living in the kind of world that does not normalise suffering and abuse.

I have put myself through such an education. I was able to do this because I am neurodivergent, a polymath and an autodidact. Being neurodivergent meant I was innately wired to regard everything differently and to disregard orthodox ways of analysing and solving problems. Being a polymath meant I could explore connections across siloes that are are usually not related or considered relevant. I wasn’t autodidactic by choice, I just could not tolerate the limits of the hierarchies I encountered. This was not an easy journey, but the value to humanity is enormous, and I now have the benefit of hindsight and many years of experience from it.

Consider the benefits and the opportunity cost of ignoring it.

What could be more meaningful at this shared moment in history than such an education and the insights it promises? If we begin to normalise these insights and this model of thinking, in the face of any overwhelm or complexity, our default response becomes striving for a superior frame of context. What is that not worth to us?

What is the cost? If this kind of ‘mind’ in humanity does not emerge, we will not survive the polycrisis and metacrisis. How could we?

There is no downside to this. This exists at the intersection of logic, philosophy, systems thinking, continuous improvement, agile methodology, metaphysics and epistemology. This is how all our worthy but limited domains can ever converge.

What would a college degree or MBA prospectus look like if it could make this kind of claim? Can any school of philosophy, any prevailing wisdom tradition, offer this unifying path to teach the ability to discern salience, to navigate complexity, to transcend its own limits in the midst of systemic failure, without collapsing into reductionism or dogma? They cannot.

They can not do this because they were not designed for that purpose. They are products of the same paradigm that is now collapsing. They certify competence within a system, but cannot admit of context beyond it. Failing structures are never incentivised to admit of their own limitations of competency nor arranged to meaningfully interrogate their own flaws of assumption, much less equip students (or employees) with the kind of empowerment that transcends siloed expertise or hierarchies of tenure. It should matter a lot less how long you have held a role, or what title you have, than the superiority of your ideas and what meaningful change those ideas could effect in the world in ways that everyone cares about in the long run. Especially in a time of crisis.

This is the only kind of thinking by which we can transcend our intractable paradoxes and dichotomies of science and religion, political fracture and difficult social relationships.

How long are we going to pretend that things are going to resolve themselves, or that our existing models of thought leadership are capable of enabling such a resolution? We are not short of intelligence in the world, but we are starved for coherence.

I have put myself through such an education, and I am very eager to share what I know in a coherent way, with people who actually get this. I am burning myself out trying to be taken seriously in the clamour of social media, and the only way I am going to solve for that is not via how diligently and formulaically I can write, it is going to be how you respond. There is a clock ticking.

I’m kind of done being polite, playing by a ruleset that serves the smallest, most selfish interest for the least noble among us.

Aren’t you?

Regards,

Rocco

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