The Metacrisis Or what future paths are open to us?
A while ago, I began to take a closer look at the phenomenon of crisis. Wherever I looked, the discourse on crises was omnipresent. We talked about the poly-crisis, perma-crisis, omnicrisis, meta-crisis, crisis of meaning and with the inflationary use I lost my own orientation. Were we even in a crisis? What were we comparing our current situation with? Which description of the crisis made sense to me? It was clear that I, like many people around me, found the world on this side and beyond our immediate sphere of influence increasingly confusing and overwhelming. The more I read and talked about the topic, the stronger my need to localise myself more clearly became. The following text takes stock of my research and mirrors my own development process. It reflects questions such as: What narratives am I embedded in? What do I orientate myself towards? How has my relationship to the world and my view of reality changed? What perspectives and actions for a better future currently seem coherent and meaningful to me in this world of poly/omni/perma/meta-crisis? I presented my exploration and reflections on these questions last week in the form of a keynote at the Pura Vida Retreat Festival. After the very positive response from the participants, I decided to publish it here.
One text, 15 years, 2 very different reactions
How do we realise that our relationship to the world has changed? That a belief that we had deeply internalised is no longer true, perhaps has completely dissolved? For me, change is often a gradual process that is then punctuated by individual moments in which the change is more obvious.
I know myself as a person who is attracted to new things and who spends a lot of time thinking about possible futures, both privately and professionally. I wrote on my website a few years ago that “my inner magnet” is drawn to anything “edgy” and that I loved “bringing new things into the world”.
Part of the creeping change was that new things — technologies, ideas, projects — no longer excited me as much. I avoided conferences that had once inspired me. I bought fewer gadgets. I stopped signing up for all the beta versions of the tools that my friend Jörg, a reliable source for them, recommended to me. Instead, I went for more walks, read books by 19th or 20th century writers and even started subscribing to conservative newsletters on Substack. The “new”, “innovative”, “transformative”, no longer struck me as fresh and full of potential, but as another stale repetitive loop of the past.
This shift was disorientating. Occasionally I was overcome by the feeling that I could be missing out on something. No longer being part of an avant-garde, in the know.
Then, a few weeks ago, I read the Dark Mountain Manifesto, a text that I had already held in my hands, rather sceptically, when it was published in 2009. But what had seemed dystopian and alarmist to me 15 years ago suddenly resonated with me.
The manifesto outlines the ecological and social crises that humanity is facing and argues in favour of turning away from the belief in perpetual growth and technological solutions. It calls for the inevitability of destruction and collapse to be accepted and mourned. It describes the need to recognise the uncertainty of human existence, to return to the local and communal and to humbly reshape our relationship with nature and other living beings. At the same time, the Mainfest emphasises that even if the world as we know it has come to an end, this is not the end of the world. Together we can find ways into an unknown future.
While reading the manifesto now, I realised that one of my most important beliefs and points of orientation had changed: all my life I had assumed, sometimes more consciously, sometimes more unconsciously, that the world was moving forward. My degrees in social anthropology and history prevented me from naively believing in linear development. But I didn’t question the big picture: humanity was striving for more freedom and opportunities for expression, more material prosperity, a longer healthy life. The same scenario included that democratic principles, universal values and technological achievements would spread and be recognised worldwide. I took the basis of this progress, a resilient and stable earth, for granted, despite environmental damage and climate change.
These parameters provided a clear orientation for my own life and my work as an author and social entrepreneur — they were the platform for my “success”. I tried to contribute to scrutinising idealistic and technological achievements from a power-critical perspective and thereby improve them, but in principle to spread them worldwide.
But over the course of the last decade, my projections of progress and the accumulating crises became less and less compatible. Instead of spreading democratic structures, we were confronted with a rapid increase in authoritarian regimes and a shift to the right that was previously unimaginable to me. Instead of tolerance and freedom of opinion, public discourse became more polarised and restricted. For the first time in decades, we discussed the possibility of a third world war. In the technological field, we were no longer concerned with the potential for participation, but with surveillance, disinformation, the loneliness pandemic and the rapid increase in mental illness. And the ever-increasing warming of the climate, despite climate agreements and scientific consensus, and the destruction of nature through our economic and consumer practices, fundamentally questioned the survival of humanity in its current form.
Throughout my life, I had anchored myself in modernity. In a world view that aims to liberate people from abusive institutions of power and oppressive ideologies in order to give them the greatest possible autonomy and freedom of organisation. At the same time, I assumed that the cornerstones of modernity, such as rationality and science, broad participation and the rule of law, would also enable us to overcome the profound crises of the present.
But the deeper I scrutinised my convictions, the more fragile and incomplete they seemed to me. I saw both: enlightenment and modernity had enormously enlarged, differentiated and deepened the world for parts of humanity. It had dissolved rigid cultural and abusive socio-political structures and made the mind glow AND it had created new systems of dominance and hidden a great deal of reality.
Exploitative relationships as the roots of prosperity
From a post-colonial perspective, the industrial revolution in Northwest Europe was not an endogenous development based on medieval culture, new forms of trade, scientific knowledge and technologies, but was based on relations of exploitation. Branco Milanovic summarises four of these as follows: The first was colonisation and the accompanying extraction of the natural resources and populations of Asia, Africa and the Americas. The transatlantic slave trade was the second root of European and US prosperity. Historians see the third development that made the western lead possible as being the regulations dating back centuries that prohibited non-European countries from developing their own capacities and technologies, for example to refine raw materials themselves or to export them at fair prices. This imbalance still exists today, with the global North still extracting more resources from the global South than vice versa. And the fourth burden that the West places on poorer countries is global CO2 emissions, from which the latter suffer disproportionately.
Critical voices, such as those of Daniel Schmachtenberger and Vanessa Machado de Oliveira as well as many feminist scholars, point in the same direction, explaining how the most important institutions of modernity, the nation state and capitalism, are dependent on physical and epistemic violence and unsustainable extraction for their self-preservation.
The philosopher Christoph Menke takes an even more fundamental approach to the question of modernity’s potential for liberation and begins his Theorie der Befreiung (Theory of Liberation) (2022) with the following conclusion:
All the liberations that modernity has brought about since its inception have — sooner or later — turned into the opposite. They have produced new constraints, new orders of dependency and servitude. We know the diagnoses, the list is long: The liberation from external domination and paternalism has led to regimes of self-control and self-discipline; the liberation of our needs and interests from the limits imposed on them by tradition and morality has subjected them to the logic of exploitation of the capitalist economy; the liberation of black people has reproduced racist exploitation in legal form; the liberation of women has integrated them into the economic context of exploitation; the liberation of sexuality has expanded the battle zones of competition; the liberation of words, colours and sounds has subjected art to the calculation of effect. All attempts at liberation, whether political, economic, legal, ethical, cultural or artistic, have become entangled in paradoxes and contradictions; they have produced new forms and strategies of domination.
What has become even more obvious is that liberation has in fact always served to justify domination. One’s own liberation justifies dominating others — in order to liberate them. In the name of liberation, Europe has established its rule over the world: conquered and colonised the global South, forced the old powers of the East to open their ports and borders, subjected traditional cultures to the imperatives of emancipation. This means that liberation can no longer be a promise and a hope. Liberation is not the future that is yet to come and is supposed to come.
(translated from German with DeepL)
My entanglement in inequality
Parallel to this socio-political-philosophical track, I began to explore my personal entanglement in the deep systemic inequalities. As if under a magnifying glass, I was able to study in therapeutic and contemplative settings how my psychological security and identity as an autonomous person was also based on the fact that I blocked out many realities of life that made my lifestyle and social positioning possible in the first place. If someone like me feels empowered and doesn’t have to fight much for their place in society, this automatically means that other people occupy “lower” ranks in a hierarchical structure. Here too, “progress” was linked to dominance and marginalisation.
My belief in improvements within the current paradigm, and with it a confidence that we as humanity can overcome the major current crises, was eroded by yet another set of experiences. Over the past 20 years, I had seen many people in powerful positions advocating for a “better world” and publicly standing on the supposedly right side of history as impact investors, sustainability experts or “green entrepreneurs”. But while I felt the situation was becoming more urgent, most of my peers seemed to continue to rely on unproven technologies, AI advances and responsible entrepreneurs and politicians, as well as a committed civil society that would protect us from the abyss. But what would we really achieve if we rode on sustainability and social justice like another trend wave without changing the fundamentals?
Self-preservation and hubris
Many “innovations” and “sustainability strategies” not only cemented the status quo, but also gave the already privileged population groups a further advantage. This dynamic was aptly described by Anand Giridharadas in “Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World” (2018). We were all doing business as usual, plus a few more train journeys, triangles of sadness and return-orientated investments in green funds. The self-preservation instinct and hubris of the powerful, privileged players, including myself, was too great for me to continue to trust that we would make the necessary course changes.
These different strands of experience meant that the location analysis of the Dark Mountain Manifesto, 15 years after my first critical reading, spoke to me on a deep level. Yes, I myself had the impression that I was living a life that no longer existed in this form. As much as I loved many “modern” facets of my life (I am writing these lines in Café Prückel in Vienna), I could not ignore the contradictions in my own orientations and convictions. We would not be able to resolve the many existential crises in the same processing mode that had created them. The statement that we have reached the end of the world as we know it made sense.
In search of deeper causes — polycrisis versus metacrisis
The Dark Mountain Manifesto emphasises that the end of today’s world is not the end of the world itself. After all, the premises of modernity are just one special variety among many. The Roman Empire had different paradigms than the European Middle Ages or Japan during the Edo period. But in order to move in a new direction and not repeat the crisis-ridden present with our actions, we need an understanding of how we ended up in this world.
There are numerous candidates for the deeper causes behind the unintended distortions. In recent years, an analysis associated with the term “polycrisis” has gained much favour. Our problem, according to British historian and journalist Adam Tooze, who popularised the ‘polycrisis’, is that different global crises, such as climate, inequality or war, are not only complex in themselves, but also closely intertwined. However, a complex, interrelated world cannot be understood, let alone managed, using conventional methods.
I can see some merit in this argument that puts complexity at the centre. As Dave Snowden emphasises in his work around the Cynefin model, complicated environments are fundamentally different from complex ones. At the same time, the degree of exponential non-linearity is very difficult for most people to grasp. I was helped by a thought experiment that Snowden gave in a workshop: Imagine four points and estimate how many different connecting lines there are between them. There are 64. Now imagine 10 points. How many different ways can they be connected? The answer is beyond my, and probably your comprehension: over 3 trillion!
At the same time, the polycrisis thesis does not satisfy me on a deeper level. The way journalists, politicians and technologists talk about the polycrisis, it seems possible to get the climate, food, digital monopolies or mental health “under control” with better technologies, regulations and calculations. More data and better algorithms can help us to comprehensively understand the dynamics of complex systems and derive effective measures from them. This manage & control approach does not question the fundamental premises of capitalist modernity of growth, progress, increased efficiency and control, but still believes in their adaptability. But don’t growth commitments, our materialistic world view and the values of meritocracy amount to ecological and social suicide? Just as millions of people are not so much “mentally ill” as they are living in a crazy world, the categorisation of the polycrisis falls short of the mark.
Just bad luck or deeper causes?
Explanations that try to get closer to the origins of the symptoms appeal to me more. That don’t assume, as Dougald Hine writes, that it was just bad luck that humans discovered fossil fuels that are destroying the climate. Who don’t see fragmentation and polarisation as an unfortunate consequence of complexity or disinformation and the rise of mental health problems as normal side effects of the internet and social media.
The question of the deeper reasons behind the crises is not mental acrobatics.
Depending on which dynamics we identify, we will pursue different answers and solutions. If we were just unlucky and overwhelmed by complexity, we can hope for better methods and technological fixes. However, if we assume that the status quo is a symptom of a deeper problem, we will need to make more radical changes.
Jonathan Rowson from UK think tank Perspectiva convincingly argues that we should be talking about ONE meta-crisis. A dynamic that permeates the most diverse areas of life and leads to their pathologies and crises. For him, as for a number of other researchers, the source of the meta-crisis does not lie at the level of institutions, structures and processes, but in a distorted relationship between humans and the world. Accordingly, the problem lies not so much on the outside, but in the human interior, in a culturally created, incomplete and unresolved relationship to the world.
From this warped relationship with the world, our ancestors developed the cultural norms and values, institutions and other external manifestations that we now consider “normal”, even though they have led us to an existential tipping point.
By consciously incorporating the subjective experience of being, proponents of the meta-crisis take a broader view. They ask themselves: How does reality form in us? Which filters, which collective and individual imprints cause us to include certain aspects of reality and block out others The focus is on the subjective experience of life. It is true that inner and outer dimensions are inextricably interwoven and influence each other. However, within the external structures that characterise and limit them, people constantly create new forms of life from a certain inner attitude that resonates with their respective inner experience and appears plausible and effective to them. In this understanding, the cognitive and emotional patterns of the past have led to fundamental crises in the present.
To ensure planetary and human well-being, we must become aware of these patterns and transcend them within ourselves. In this sense, Rowson quotes a paragraph from Robert Pirsig’s 70s cult book Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance:
The true system, the real system, is our present construction of systematic thought itself, rationality itself, and if a factory is torn down but the rationality that produced it is left standing, then that rationality will simply produce another factory. If a revolution destroys a systematic government, but the systematic patterns of thought that produced that government are left intact, then those patterns will repeat themselves in the succeeding government. There’s so much talk about the system. And so little understanding.
In the following section, I would like to describe some explanatory approaches that assume a distorted or incomplete relationship between us and the world as the basis for the meta-crisis. I will focus on theories that deal with perception and worldviews and leave out explanations that have mainly sociological or economic roots (for the latter, see my betterplace lab colleague Stephan Peters’ forthcoming study on resilience and meta-crisis).
Secularisation, liberalism, modernity and capitalism as misguided superintelligences
Various research approaches locate the meta-crisis in specific historical developments and describe how the scientific revolution in the 17th century gave rise to a new view of the world and humanity that separated humans from other forms of life and the cosmos, thus laying the foundation for a world devoid of meaning. By freeing themselves from religious institutions and their old beliefs for good reasons, as a result of long religious wars and abuses within the church, European societies placed man and his rationality as the highest authority above everything else.
Rowson refers to a book review by Rowan Williams, the former head of the Anglican Church, in which he describes the pitfalls of liberalism and capitalism that emerged in the early modern period as a caesura. As a result of the secularisation of the world, the natural order appears to humans as inherently “disenchanted” and worthless. All of a sudden, it is up to humans to give meaning and purpose to the world. Our species becomes an omnipotent being with no external limits. While in a spiritual understanding, values, beauty and ethics are an integral part of creation and as such are discovered and manifested by humans, values in the secular world are created by the market: through supply and demand, through negotiation processes between people. In this understanding of the world, humans (but also only one group among them, namely white, male northern Europeans) are the crowning glory of creation. Nature, other living beings and other human groups are subordinate to this privileged ruling class and can be exploited and dominated, controlled and managed at will.
In this interpretation, the cause of the meta-crisis is man’s detachment from the world around him, his separation from the creative cosmos. The meaning of life now consists of material enrichment and social freedoms for a small group of people. Against this background, not only did unbridled imperialism and colonialism emerge, but in the same logic we are able to justify contemporary turbo-capitalism as an economic form without alternative.
“The actuality of the world — real relationships, real production, real social activity, even the reality of the physical environment — becomes malleable, because everything is a potential tool for bartering in the competition for control”, writes Williams. Liberalism, capitalism, modernity — they all follow the same script. They are imbued with a belief in progress, and this progress consists of an ever more complete incorporation of the world, populations and spheres of life. Only that which can be quantified and exchanged has value. The aim of development is for more and more people to consume goods and services. In this way, we produce goods that destroy the biosphere and incorporate more and more areas of life that were previously not commercialised into the market. Capitalism, originally conceived as an adaptive system, has lost its ability to adapt and has set in motion a momentum of its own that is destroying the earth and its living creatures. This economic system is like a misaligned superintelligence that is experiencing another exponential turbo boost thanks to the latest developments in the field of artificial intelligence.
Neuronal distortions — the different realities of the two hemipheres
In his articles on the metacrisis, Jonathan Rowson refers to the work of neuroscientist and philosopher Iain McGilchrist. I have written several blog posts about McGilchrist’s work on the different forms of perception of the right and left hemispheres of the brain (you find the first here), which I will not repeat. However, it is important to stress that his research has nothing to do with the simplistic and now disproved older statements about the differences between the brain hemispheres, but is based on an immensely rich body of natural and social science studies. In essence, McGilchrist is concerned with the fact that Western societies have prioritised the left hemisphere’s perception of the world over the right hemisphere since antiquity and even more so since the 17th century. Both draw a very different picture of reality.
The left hemisphere perceives the world like a machine, whereas the right hemisphere perceives it like an organism. The left hemisphere concentrates on details and focusses on fixed, familiar, abstract and mostly inanimate things. It is outward-looking, mental and less embodied. It simplifies and thinks in oppositional terms: either this or that. Its attention is like the focussed beam of a torch. In contrast, the right hemisphere is like a floodlight: it sees the whole picture and the connections between individual elements. It is sensitive to movement, to what is changing and what might be missing. It is at home in the complexity of the world and thinks in complementary terms: both and, this and that.
While the left hemisphere simplifies and manipulates the world — it controls the right hand — and is therefore strong in manifestation, it is the task of the right hemisphere to understand the world. In a healthy balance, the right hemisphere takes the lead, as it maintains an overview of the big picture, while the left hemisphere contributes important details that are relevant for action. However, over the course of history, this balance has shifted, leading directly to the meta-crisis. This is because the left hemisphere notoriously overestimates itself and considers itself the crowning glory of creation, while the right hemisphere is sensitive to danger and sees itself as part of a much larger whole.
The result of this imbalance is a reductionism that only values those things and developments that can be easily instrumentalised and bring direct material benefits. To the extent that we neglect the perspective of the right side of the brain, we lose the ability to understand reality in its larger context and open the way to ever greater fragmentation.
Neglecting the inner dimension of life
Another perception-based interpretation of the meta-crisis states that we have focussed on the external dimension of life in recent centuries and neglected the inner dimension. Humanity’s focus has been on understanding the outer world and making it controllable with the help of rationality and science. In comparison, it neglected the systematic exploration of our individual and collective inner dynamics. There were individual cultural movements, such as the European Romanticism of the late 18th and early 19th centuries, which explicitly focussed on feelings and perceptions. However, this propagated a strongly idealistic view of humanity, which in no way led to a canon of knowledge comparable to the natural sciences. While young people today are taught the groundbreaking insights of Isaac Newton or Werner Heisenberg at school, they only learn about the equally important knowledge of self-reflection, emotional intelligence or group dynamics indirectly and by chance at best.
The mid-20th century British philosopher Allan Watts explained this imbalance with the different qualities of the outer and inner worlds. He called the inner world “wiggly” and the outer world “straight”. Straight, man-made things give us a sense of security and order. The institutions that emerged with modernity, above all the nation state, bureaucracy and the market, endeavoured to make the arbitrary, unpredictable environment controllable with the help of measurements, classifications, dualities and standardisations. At the same time, we have turned away from our inner experience and the subconscious, because these are beyond our control: they are fidgety and amorphous, fluid and without fixed boundaries.
This increasing need for control also ties in well with the thesis of secularisation. In the historical moment in which many people no longer feel embedded in a larger, creative-divine context, the fear of death increases massively and stronger external control and repression mechanisms are needed to curb it. If we allow ourselves to really feel suffering, transience and death in a universe devoid of meaning, we encounter a dangerous abyss. No wonder we withdraw from the inner space and cling to the supposedly safe, controllable outside.
Collective trauma as the root cause of the meta-crisis
An increasing number of psychologists, neuroscientists and wisdom teachers see collective trauma as the cause of the experience of separation between humans and nature and therefore as the root of the meta-crisis. Researchers such as Peter Levine, Gabor Mate and Thomas Hübl have intensively analysed the role of overwhelming experiences on the mental health, resonance and emotional capacity of individuals and entire societies. Traumatic experiences include the injuries and blockages of our ancestors, who in Germany, for example, were perpetrators, accomplices and witnesses to incomprehensible crimes, above all the Holocaust, and who passed these on to their children and grandchildren without being able to process them adequately themselves. Therapists recognise this fragile basis of our lives and have developed terms such as trauma or transference. The former refers to the freezing and splitting off of emotional areas as a result of overwhelming experiences, while the latter refers to the unconscious presence of the past within us.
As a person’s inner world directly influences their experience of the outside world, it follows that we must exclude aspects that we cannot perceive within ourselves on the outside. In these places , we cannot feel empathy and can only enter into fragile, mostly mental relationships. We are overwhelmed by complexity and only have limited resilience in times of crisis. In our life together, traumatisation expresses itself as distancing, arrogance or self-hatred, excessive demands, polarisation, fragmentation or structural discrimination.
Traumatisation is culture-forming. What is considered normal and acceptable in a society, what is seen as deviant and rejected, sanctioned or suppressed, is reflected in our mostly invisible and implicit norms and values. If our ability to feel is limited, we perceive blatant abuses, dominance relationships, exploitation etc. as regrettable but “normal”.
A violated right to Be
In the horizontal-secular space, the question arises as to the value of life itself. How can we even derive an intrinsic right to Be if life is ultimately interpreted as a meaningless coincidence? In this world view, I only become a fully-fledged human being through certain characteristics, my social position and my achievements. The British art and social critic John Berger put it this way in the middle of the 20th century: “A society that equates value with achievement in this way has trained itself to have no compassion for a beggar.”
However, if we assume, like the great spiritual traditions, but also the German Basic Law or the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, that every living being has a right to Be by birth and does not have to work for it, then perhaps you as a reader can explore for yourself how close or far away you feel from this right to Be.
If our right to Be is violated, we compensate for this wound with all kinds of actions and ideologies, such as career and consumption. Of course, not every action and identity is a compensation, because on the basis of a healthy Being, the need for participation, for the two other deep human needs, If our right to be is violated, we compensate for this wound with all kinds of actions and ideologies, such as career and consumption. Of course, not every action and identity is a compensation, because on the basis of a healthy Being, the two other deep human needs — belonging and self-expression/action — arise quite automatically. Hierarchical orders between people and conditions, however, violate this most fundamental of all rights.
My own self-esteem in everyday life is closely linked to my social position, my competences and achievements. Occasionally, the miracle of my Being flashes into view. Then I realise the unimaginably small probability that I was born, from the exact meeting of sperm and egg to the specific conditions that had to be fulfilled for my conception and development. The Mystery of Being informs me during meditation retreats or existential moments, such as confronting a potentially fatal illness or human catastrophe. Then I realise what it is all about and see the many compensation and survival dynamics that determine my everyday life. Then I am shaken by the realisation of how preoccupied I am with the changing content of my sensory impressions instead of the all-important fact of pure existence.
The right to Be is connected with presence. In Being, consciousness is anchored in the present. In the mystical understanding, trauma splits the present into past and future. Since the present is too painful, consciousness splits into two. The past works unconsciously within us and we need a future to redeem and integrate it. Against the background of this principle, modernity is deeply traumatic, because it is precisely the epoch in which a deepened interest in the past (history) and the future (the new) arises. Unable to process the present in a dynamically fluid way, modernity relies on healing, i.e. all progressive solutions and improvements, taking place in the future.
Limited sensemaking
The attempts outlined here to grasp possible deeper sources of the meta-crisis can be described as interwoven. One starting point would be individual violations of the right to Be and collective traumatisation caused by natural or man-made disasters. Traumatisation leads to an inability to feel oneself and others and paves the way for emotional and spiritual, but also social and cultural dissonance. Deep wounds, such as the emergence of patriarchy, in which one population group (men) rises above another (women) without legitimisation and claims to dominate it, must be maintained with ideological and physical violence. As a result, it seems plausible that on a neuronal level, the perceptions of the left, functional hemisphere of the brain have dominated over the qualities of the right, meaning-making hemisphere. In the course of this imbalance, a world view prevailed according to which outward-looking, functional, egocentric values and actions, dominance relationships, competitive thinking, efficiency and growth commitments were regarded as “normal” and superseded other values. This reduced and goal-orientated way of thinking may also have produced better material results in an initial step, an initial advantage that pathologically increased and solidified over time.
As a result of this imbalance, our ability to find meaning and grasp patterns and dynamics in a larger context collapses. For sensemaking, we would have to emphasise the relationships between the individual parts, not the parts themselves. However, the instrumental logic that has dominated in recent centuries has displaced a relationship-orientated way of perceiving. A system that ignores large parts of reality loses its ability to adapt at a certain point and ends up in a perma/omni/polycrisis.
Against the background of approaches that attribute the meta-crisis to phenomena of perception and consciousness, attempts to locate it only in the outside world, e.g. in the increase in complexity, appear too mechanical and superficial. It would undoubtedly be desirable to increase the epistemological quality of those in power so that they better understand how leadership works in complex environments (i.e. very differently than in complicated ones, see Dave Snowden). But this will not be enough to remedy structural external deficits. Why else would people make decisions that accelerate crises, even in many simple and only complicated environments?
What future paths result from the various assumptions about the causes?
Depending on whether we see the deeper origins of the crises in increasing complexity and the associated adaptability of existing systems (polycrisis), or whether we assume a deeper meta-crisis based on violated patterns of consciousness and perception, we will develop very different approaches to solutions.
The soft reform space — saving and controlling
If we find ourselves in a polycrisis, we will endeavour to improve the cognitive decision-making skills of politicians, entrepreneurs and activists. We will try to optimise existing structures and processes and make them more sustainable. This path, described by Vanessa Machado de Oliveira in Hospicing Modernity (2021) as a “soft reform space”, is the most widespread. Basically, it says: “Keep it up, but please make it greener, more humane and more efficient.”
In his book At Work in the Ruins (2023), Dougald Hine, one of the authors of the Dark Mountain Manifesto, describes this approach. The majority of decision-makers, representatives of green growth, sustainability consultancies, impact investors, etc. worldwide assume that we can “save” the world by simply using the right technologies and developing new business models and policies based on the most comprehensive data possible. In this picture, the world is a fish tank in which people control as many parameters as possible in order to manage and optimise the conditions of life. This group is lulled into a sense of certainty that we will “get the climate problem under control” or that “regulations will tame artificial intelligence”. The world as it is will continue to evolve, only getting higher, faster, bigger and better.
The argument against this “control everything” approach is that many of the technologies that are supposed to save us so far only exist as theoretical possibilities or prototypes. Hine also stresses that this approach confuses problems with dilemmas: many of the current crises are not solvable problems. Rather, they are the consequences of solutions that were developed for previous crises.
A simple example of this is the Green Revolution in the first half of the 20th century. It aimed to combat food shortages, low agricultural yields and rural poverty, which was partially successful through the use of new technologies and high-yielding varieties. However, this led to environmental problems such as soil degradation and water pollution, as well as social inequality and dependence on agrochemicals. Current solutions such as sustainable agriculture, biotechnology and precision agriculture aim to address these problems, but bring new challenges. Sustainable methods are often costly and less productive, while genetic engineering and digitalisation raise ethical questions and dependencies on large corporations. This dynamic shows that every solution that emerges within the same paradigm creates new problems, which in turn require further innovation and adaptation.
Manage & Control also contradicts what we know about complex systems: they cannot be controlled. As early as the 1950s, Gregory Bateson, one of the early visionaries of complexity theory, emphasised that only complicated systems can be totally controlled. In complex systems, we never know all the components and interdependencies and must instead take into account factors such as uncertainty, surprise and the emergence of completely new forms. In complex systems, control is at best an illusion and at worst an abuse of living systems. Bateson challenges us to wake up from the mechanistic dream in which the world is controllable and correctable. For the primary units of reality are not isolated factors and things (here we can make the link to McGilchrist), but relationships and connections. New things emerge from the fabric of the whole. A memorable image is that of an embryo to which the heart, liver and eyes are not added, but emerge from the whole and then individualise themselves. Everything organic grows from networks of relationships.
In a complicated world, we can ask: “What do we need to do?” when crises and problems arise. In a complex world, we are part of the world as a resonance chamber. In this world, there are no simple solutions, but various possible paths. Some of them are more fitting or seem more coherent to us than others. Whereby these words, fit and coherence, are also based on resonance relationships.
Radical Reform Space — More inclusion and social justice
In addition to the “soft reform path” of crisis management, which resembles a motorway and in which most of the money, thoughts and identities of companies, NGOs, governments and administrations are invested, there is also a smaller path called “radical reform space” by Vanessa Machado de Oliveira. In this space, activists in particular are committed to breaking down the diverse structures of dominance (the many -isms, such as sexism, abelism, racism, classism, etc.) and enabling all people to live in dignity and participation. They call for a profound structural change in society, including substantial inclusion and the redistribution of resources.
There are various branches within this reform path. Some do not question the premises of modernity, inclusive progress and universal values per se, but endeavour to free them from toxic power structures and make them more inclusive. Others, some associated with indigenous populations, speak out against human exceptionalism. They do not see humans as rulers over nature, but as an integral part of it. In this view, humans are connected to all other forms of life and are called upon to find new answers as part of this comprehensive system. Many representatives of this path focus on local communities, grassroots democracy and ecological economic practices, e.g. in the form of permaculture. However, not all answers that come from this space are necessarily “progressive”. They can also take the form of reactionary nationalisms and supremacy movements.
Beyond reform — accompanying the decline
Another answer, which can be found in the Dark Mountain Manifesto, At Work in the Ruins, and Vanessa Machago di Olivera’s book Hospicing Modernity, assumes that the world as it is today can only be accompanied in its process of decay. From this perspective, our crises are not correctable mistakes, because exploitation and the hierarchisation of life are basic components of the modern worldview. Only when we deconstruct these and dismantle their manifestations — within ourselves and in the external world — can a new space emerge, within which new answers appear that are more adequate for life on the planet.
Since modernity is an integral part of our identities and worldview, our task is to first explore it within ourselves, for example by asking ourselves: How do the beliefs of modernity affect me? Where does my arrogance or self-doubt come from? How do they influence my behaviour and my involvement in shaping external structures?
As part of this self-exploration, we can take stock of our lives: which aspects of the developments of recent centuries are good, what do we want to adopt and continue to cultivate, and what do we want to reject and transcend? This attitude also includes a conscious approach to grief. Tracing and appreciating everything — indigenous knowledge and life forms, biodiversity, etc. — that has been irrevocably lost or is currently dying.
The future paths in me
I can sympathise with all of these future paths. For long, I have been part of the gentle reform path that favours technological innovation, a focus on the common good and incremental improvement. I know the energising pull of a movement that sees itself as part of the future and has sufficient resources to implement it too well for me to reject it completely. And since I believe it is unlikely that this mainstream approach will lose significant traction in the next few years, it seems sensible to me to work selectively to ensure that companies and ideas emerging in this field incorporate principles such as the development of potential, diversity and the conservation of resources. However, as I do not believe in the long-term success of this path, I am less involved today than before.
I also sympathise with the radical reform of dominance structures, the second path. Debates around privilege and intersectionality, including in the brafe.space network that I co-founded (and were we are supported by, amongst others, Held Collective), are some of my most important learning experiences in recent years. I can even understand the retreat into the local, into nature and into community — a path that was foreign to me not so long ago. However, it seems unrealistic that a sufficiently large number of people will embark on this path without being forced to do so by massive disasters.
If we can neither stay on our current course nor return to a manageable past, the third path, conscious hospicing for our world today, may be a necessary and meaningful part of the current paradigm shift. The work of Dougald Hine and Vanessa Machado di Olivera has given me a new perspective on our dilemma and helped me to question key beliefs in my life. It also deepened my understanding how much we have to unlearn before we can develop new structures that don’t reproduce the patterns of the past.
Spaces of unfolding and revelation
Ultimately, however, none of the paths convince me, because they present themselves as a choice between alternatives. But do we have a choice? Is there a world that we can “change” and “save”?
A thought experiment
Here is a thought experiment (adapted from Hine 2023).
Imagine it is the year 1750 and you live in one of the relatively prosperous villages of central England. You meet someone from the year 1900 and they describe how your world will change completely in just a few decades. Every house in the village will be torn down. The farmers live in desolate urban slums and work for starvation wages in factories where they produce wool for the English textile industry. Their profits make a new, small class of industrialists richer than anyone could have imagined in 1750. Your country will become a global empire, the British Empire, whose citizens will serve in the army and die by the hundreds of thousands in faraway lands. Others will leave their homeland, sail across the Atlantic and face an uncertain future in the American colonies.
As a villager, how should you react to this glimpse into the future? You and your contemporaries are not facing a “problem”, because this implies that there is a solution. But you will not be able to change the course of history. You are in a predicament which you cannot avoid, but which you can only deal with in different ways. Many answers are possible, none is the “right” one and none will result in you keeping your lifestyle.
Let’s take this scenario to the year 2024. A visitor from the future comes to us and reports from the year 2200. She describes a world that is alien to us. A few AI-enhanced rulers dominate the majority of people. Automated armies and police are deployed at the touch of a button. Only a few people share the same ideas of reality. Instead, hordes of super-intelligent agents feed their target groups with information finely tuned to their mindsets. Consciousness is no longer just linked to people, but has sought out silicon and other carriers. The climate has partially collapsed and different artificial habitats have been created on the individual continents, as have life stations in space.
What could we do today to prevent this scenario? Doesn’t the course of history show that the world develops independently of our individual wishes and needs, no matter how influential we are? And to what extent are our current criteria and projections suitable for assessing the future? What we see as “normal” in 2024 would very likely have felt like a chilling dystopia in many ways to a farmer in 1750. What will await us in 2200 is no doubt just as alien and terrifying to us today.
A mystical perspective on the future
What follows from this if I:
1. take the analyses of the meta-crisis seriously and place patterns of perception and consciousness at the centre of my considerations?
2. neither assume that the future can be decisively influenced by us or evaluated by our current standards?
3. am convinced that we can never think in terms of complexity from the end result and — instead of putting forward big, new theories that we try to implement — can only take individual next steps based on a sound understanding of the presence?
What attitude can I adopt against the background of these parameters and what actions follow from this?
I would like to attempt to give an answer that may seem far removed from your world view. I myself would have felt the same way until a few years ago. However, in the course of my dozen of years of contemplative practice with the wisdom teacher Thomas Hübl and many discussions and explorations in smaller groups, I can use this perspective to situate myself meaningfully in my own life. I don’t ‘believe’ it uncritically, but use it as a working hypothesis for a wide variety of situations. It helps me that many outstanding philosophers, psychologists and physicists, from Alfred North Whitehead and Henri Bergson to William James, Erwin Schrödinger and Wolfgang Pauli, have approached the question of the deeper structures of reality with very similar hypotheses (and I apologize that I am only referring to men here and will aim to discover more divers sources in the future). I don’t expect this approach to gain mainstream recognition anytime soon, but it could become one of the more promising roads travelled.
In the mystical understanding, humans are not the crowning glory of creation, who “save” the world or autonomously shape a world according to their will. Rather, the future is a co-creative process between humans and the world in which both unfold. This evolutionary process follows certain principles, some of which I will try to outline. Each of these principles could be extended broadly. However, for the sake of readability, I will only outline them briefly. Maybe I can flesh them out in a subsequent publication.
Principle No 1 — The world is not wrong, even if it is in deep crisis
A basic mystical principle is that our world today is not “wrong”, even if it is in deep crisis. It follows its own momentum and we humans are not separate from this. There is no gap between us and the cosmos; we are inextricably linked to cosmic development.
When we look for the causes of the meta-crisis, it is not a question of apportioning blame. It is about realising that our ancestors did the best they were capable of and we are standing on their shoulders. They achieved admirable scientific knowledge, they produced marvellous achievements in art and culture, they developed life in many dimensions according to their given capacities. If we today have a better overview and more perspectives in some areas, then this gives us a new responsibility to act more wisely.
Principle №2 — The world is not a resource, but a resonance space
In the mystical understanding, the duality between man and the cosmos is dissolved. Instead of being the crowning glory of creation, humans are part of a much bigger story, which we can only understand to a small extent and to which we can bow in humility. Any claim to complete control is therefore not only impossible, but also presumptuous and arrogant. The world is not our resource, but our resonance chamber. It does not consist of isolated particles that are put together like a machine, but the relationships between parts are primary. New things are not created by adding something to what already exists, but emerge from the whole. Just as described above: the organs of an embryo are not added to it, but grow out of the organism as such. Or as Allan Watts liked to say: The world “peoples” just as an apple tree “apples”.
Principle No 3 — We can only change things if we can relate to them
If everything that feels individual and separate to us is in fact closely interwoven, then we can only change the world if we can relate to it and resonate with it. When we can feel the connection between ourselves and the outside world more and see how deeply we are interwoven with the external reality we want to change. In this picture, there is no “system out there” that we can change or improve. Instead, we can identify the collective structures within ourselves and understand more deeply how they operate within us and how we often unconsciously reproduce them. Change doesn’t start “out there”, but “here inside me”. By being able to contain more within ourselves — especially positions that are supposedly contradictory — we transcend the polarities and divisions of our world. The world grows, it becomes bigger and more interconnected and as a result it unfolds and changes.
Principle №4 — Being with what is
In contemplative practice, we endeavour to open ourselves to reality as fully as possible. To engage with the world as it is right now. Because reality is whole and wants to be perceived as such. This relates to unconscious and split-off parts of myself as an individual, as well as to marginalised and discriminated groups and qualities in our society, and also to our relationship to nature and creation itself.
But since the history of humanity is also the history of trauma and overwhelm and our nervous systems block out essential aspects of reality, we do not live in a unified world, but in a fragmented one. These split-off, hidden, unfelt parts of the world want to be recognised and integrated. They draw our attention to them by haunting us through all kinds of symptoms and crises.
Principle №5 — Bottom-up innovation through the re-integration of split-off parts
Crises, problems and difficulties are therefore not obstacles, but pointers to issues we need to address. Where the world is light and fluid, there is already enough awareness. But dark aspects — greed, narcissism and abuse of power, poverty, crime, suffering and shame — will only change if we turn towards them and include them in our consciousness (which does not mean that we approve of them). Difficulties cannot be overcome by avoiding them, but by accepting, integrating and transcending them. As Thomas Hübl and other wisdom teachers say: Problems do not stand in our way, they are the way.
From this perspective, it makes total sense why our world is stuck and doesn’t adapt to the circumstances. Why we don’t follow up our knowledge of climate change, polarisation and inequality, surveillance capitalism and the loneliness pandemic with adequate action. Because we are gridlocked, numbed and have normalised the status quo, we may regret our current situation, but are unable to make other choices. Only when we work our way through these rigid traumatised parts , which manifest as pressure, constriction, difficulties and problems, can we become more fluid again and synchronize our outer world with our inner ideas and values. The real crisis is our numbness and absence. It prevents us from adapting our outer world promptly and fluidly to our current needs.
By recognising and integrating split-off parts of the world as our own, the world defragments and expands. Hübl describes this process as “bottom-up innovation”. In other words, we do not shape the future by looking ahead in time, developing visions and then trying to turn them into reality, but by connecting more deeply with the real present and liquefying parts that have been frozen by trauma and integrating them into life in a flexible way. This way we become once again response-able.
Practically, this can look like exploring our Being beyond performance, social position or other characteristics and lovingly uncovering our compensation and survival mechanisms. Inner work also means deepening our ability to relate and better understanding where we cannot relate and are therefore part of fragmentation and alienation. We can sharpen our subtle awareness and support ourselves in groups of like-minded people, as described here (sorry, German blogpost, but there is DeepL).
Principle №6 — Purpose as a magnet for top-down innovation
In addition to this bottom-up innovation through the re-integration of fragmented parts, many wisdom traditions as well as spiritually interested philosophers and scientists assume that a certain developmental dynamic is inherent in the cosmos, which can be recognised by people as latent and potential movements and manifested in the form of ideas and visions, structures and processes, attitudes and actions. The latent future communicates with those who dare to listen. We can describe the link between this evolutionary potential and the person manifesting it with the term purpose.
Purpose acts like a magnet to which we can dock ourselves. This orientation enables us to be in the right place at the right time in life and contribute from there. In other words: Purpose is our connection to a subtle flow of information that guides us and along which we manifest the future. In this understanding, people are not autonomous beings who shape the future out of their own will. Instead, they act like midwives who bring a latent future into concrete forms and structures. In this process, we surf in the complexity of a future that is just emerging, always on the edge of what we can still grasp, using our intuition and contemplative practice as navigation tools. New things emerge and unfold in this space not so much as active action, but in the form of insights or revelations that we receive and realise in humility. In an interesting new article Otto Scharmer and Eva Pomeroy (2024) describe the sense making process involved as “fourth person knowing”. This fourth person perspective “shows up in our individual experience, but it is not of our making. (…) it is something within, between, and beyond us simultaneously.”
Principle No 7 — Top-down innovations through insights and revelations
The path of insight and revelation transcends conventional categories. It is a path that goes beyond the mental and the rational, but includes them. Changes in consciousness, as unpredictable as they are, can create a completely new paradigm. Christianity is a religion of revelation. The truth is spoken from the burning bush. I recently read someone (I couldn’t find the quote anymore, sorry) who stated that Christianity brought down the Roman Empire by making it possible to experience a different form of love, a different way of being in the world, a different way of participating in creation. Historians and religious scholars describe how in the same period, around 2500 years ago, comparable changes in consciousness took place in other parts of the world, represented by figures such as Buddha and Confucius. As in this so-called Axis Age, during which large parts of the world turned away from mythical ideas and towards logos, reason and rationality, we should not rule out the possibility of a radical reorientation of our world today.
Principle No 8 — Open to new forms of expression
There is often no suitable vocabulary for something really new, because how can there be a language for something that has not yet emerged in people’s consciousness? It may even be that many aspects of this new reality into which we are growing cannot be adequately described in words because language, with the exception of poetry, is linked to rationality. My friend and somatic coach Rivka Halbershtadt believes that this new space is partly post-verbal and is about subtly sharing perceived movements with each other.
Principle №9 — Life as perpetual process
Life in the paradigm described here feels very different from what we are conventionally used to. One special feature is that we no longer think and act in terms of results and goals, but engage in the (unfolding) process of life. We do not measure our lives, including social developments, by their outcome, but instead allow ourselves to listen to and manifest life’s own movement step by step. This shifts our idea of the goals we want to achieve: it matters less what we want to achieve as an individual in the next decade or as a company in the next year, but we allow ourselves to be guided by the accuracy and coherence of the process itself, whereby nobody knows where this process will lead us.
New spaces for new insights
Many among those exploring the meta-crisis and contemplating pathways to a future that does not repeat the past in a new guise are wondering what today can transcend existing categories and initiate a shift in consciousness. Where can essential insights come from and transform our culture and humanity? How can people today fall in love with being and creation again? What spaces can we provide in which we can relate anew — to ourselves, to each other as a community and society, to the creative cosmos? Spaces in which we can digest the diversity of information, engage with more facets and perspectives, integrate what has been split off and download new things? In which we do not continue to exhaust ourselves because we are dependent on the energy of the ego, but recharge ourselves because we are connected to a metaphysical power station?
In recent years, I have focussed on creating precisely such spaces myself or contributing to existing ones.
This includes brafe.space, a growing community in which we explore the importance of relational skills and multi-perspectivity as the basis for innovation in entrepreneurship and the financial sector. At innerwork.online, Bettina Rollow and I (together with Anjet Sekkat and Jana Schmitz) reflect on the role of inner competencies for self-organisation and leadership, but also for general life practice, and offer online practice spaces for groups. My colleagues at betterplace lab create similar spaces in the form of programmes and events for civil society organisations, activists and changemakers. At the beginning of this year, I set up Maison Marcelle, a residency for artists, activists and meditators in the south of France, where people have the opportunity to experience themselves anew as far away as possible from their pre-formed everyday lives. I would also include my involvement in the Church of Interbeing, the Wellbeing Project, the Pocket Project and the Sangha centered around Thomas Hübl in this category.
In all of these spaces, we meet ourselves and each other in a higher resolution and in recognition of a creative cosmos. We try to reflect more consciously on our attitudes, needs, conventions and habits and to scrutinise them critically. Instead of acting quickly, we deal with unlearning and not knowing. We endeavour to follow life as a process and to be with what is. Instead of forcing change on the outside, we begin to witness and digest unloved collective patterns within ourselves. Instead of just mentally grasping reality, we try to incorporate more intelligence and data — on a physical, emotional, intuitive, spiritual level. We explore what we can experience and what we can feel, as well as what we turn away from and reject. Instead of recognising exclusion and avoidance as mistakes, we explore what they were once useful for. This is because we have usually turned a deaf ear or developed other defence mechanisms to protect ourselves from even deeper wounds and feelings of being overwhelmed. By recognising what now stands in our way not as wrong, but as a function, we do not deepen the lack or a critical self-view, but recognise our competence. We explore what it means to connect more deeply with the present and integrate mystical principles into our life practice and outer manifestations.
