The Polycrisis: "If You're Not Really Scared By What's Going On, In The World, You're Braindead"

[hatrack]

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Our globalized world is built on interconnecting systems, and when one gets rattled, the others do too – a heating climate, for instance, increases the risk of pandemics, pandemics undermine economies, shaky economies fuel political upheaval. “There’s a kind of larger instability, or a larger system disequilibrium,” the researcher Thomas Homer-Dixon says. To illustrate the situation, Homer-Dixon uses a video of metronomes on a soft surface. Though they’re all started at different times, they end up synchronized, as each device’s beat subtly affects the rest. When people see it for the first time, “they don’t actually see what’s happening properly. They don’t realize the forces that are operating to cause the metronomes to actually synchronize with each other,” Homer-Dixon says.

In much the same way, it’s often unclear even to experts how global systems interact because they are siloed in their disciplines. That limits our ability to confront intersecting problems: the climate crisis forces migration; xenophobia fuels the rise of the far right in receiving countries; far-right governments undermine environmental protections; natural disasters are more destructive. Yet migration experts may not be experts on the climate crisis, and climate experts may have limited knowledge of geopolitics.

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In addition to bringing people with disparate expertise together, the Cascade Institute, part of Royal Roads University in British Columbia, has developed an analytical framework for understanding the polycrisis, and it operates a website, polycrisis.org, which serves as a hub for the latest thinking on the issue – including critiques of the concept, Homer-Dixon says. The site contains a compendium of resources from academia to blogposts that explore the polycrisis, reflecting, for instance, on what’s already happened in 2025 (a tenuous ceasefire in Gaza, California wildfires, Trump upending the global order, an AI-bubble selloff, and the outbreak of bird flu).

There has been some backlash to the idea of the polycrisis. The historian Niall Ferguson has described it as “just history happening”. The political scientist Daniel Drezner says its proponents “assume the existence of powerful negative feedback effects that may not actually exist” – in other words, when crises overlap, the outcome might not always be bad (for instance, the pandemic lockdowns might have had some short-lived environmental benefits). Some point to past crises as evidence that what we are experiencing is not new. Homer-Dixon disagrees. “We’ve moved so far and so fast outside our species’ previous experience that many elites don’t have the cognitive frame to grasp our situation, even were they inclined to do so,” he wrote in 2023, when the term was the talk of Davos. It’s all a bit overwhelming, as Homer-Dixon acknowledges. “If you’re not really scared by what’s going on in the world, you’re braindead,” he says.

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https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/mar/06/polycrisis-disasters-politics

[Scrivener7]

1. If Niall Ferguson is part of the backlash, that's a good sign that polycrisis is true. He's a moron.

[hatrack]

2. Yep. He's Nigel Farage, with slightly more "intellectual heft".

[lonely bird]

3. Agree

Ferguson is an absolute idiot.

[modrepub]

4. Holding A Candle Over The Abyss

That's what I remember someone saying our civitas was like. Nassim Taleb's idea of black swans expresses our current situation. Our current operating word seems very fragile (non robust). Small unexpected perturbations grow into tsunamis wreaking havoc across our human created systems.

The Covid-19 pandemic is just one example of how something can disrupt and change our whole global system. In many aspects, we are still trying to recover. We'd benefit from some more robust tweaks to our society, but that's probably more than we can do from a top down approach. Smaller, local/individual changes probably have a better chance of being enacted than wide sweeping reforms.