omniharmonicMeta-Crisis
The meta-crisis refers to the interconnected web of civilizational crises — ecological collapse, democratic erosion, epistemic breakdown, mental health epidemics, economic inequality, existential technological risk — understood not as separate problems with separate solutions, but as expressions of a deeper systemic and cultural pathology. The prefix “meta” indicates that it is the crisis behind the crises: the underlying patterns of thought, governance, and relationship that generate cascading failures across every domain.
Addressing the meta-crisis requires a different kind of response than addressing any single crisis in isolation. Climate policy that ignores democratic erosion, economic reform that ignores ecological limits, or technological innovation that ignores epistemic breakdown will inevitably fail because the crises are mutually reinforcing. The meta-crisis demands systemic, multi-dimensional intervention — which is precisely what movements for bioregional governance, regenerative-economics, and participatory-democracy are attempting.
The concept connects to story-of-separation and dominator-culture as diagnoses of the root cultural patterns generating the meta-crisis. It relates to wetiko as an Indigenous framing of the consumptive mind-virus driving civilizational self-destruction. Metamodernism provides the epistemological ground for holding the meta-crisis in view without collapsing into either denial or despair. And dual-power offers a strategic response: rather than trying to reform the systems generating the meta-crisis, build functioning alternatives that can sustain communities as existing systems fail. The meta-crisis is not a problem to be solved but a transition to be navigated — and navigating it requires new forms of collective-intelligence, governance, and relationship to place.