A way to understand humanity's global meta-crisis

It's how we think

Every culture develops and functions, mostly unconsciously, according to a socially-constructed set of myths, beliefs, values, assumptions and related cultural norms. This fabricated framework constitutes that culture’s operating paradigm or ‘worldview’. Members of a particular society acquire their culture-specific worldview simply by growing up in their uniquely delimited socio-cultural context.

Modern techno-industrial society’s dominant worldview reflects the values of industrial capitalism – including, paradoxically, socialist and communist versions – and its hand-maiden neoliberal economic thinking. This worldview springs from belief in human exceptionalism, the notion that humans are not part of the natural world nor beholden to biophysical laws; that human ingenuity (technological innovation) can solve any resource or ecological problem. Consistent with this mythic construct, mainstream economics assumes the economy is a self-generating separate and independent system; it contains no useful information about the biophysical environment within which the economy operates in the real world. It is just a small step from there to the prevailing belief that the modern human enterprise need not be constrained by biophysical limits and that infinite growth on a finite planet is possible.

To help understand our contemporary dilemma and the likely outcome, it is useful to think of any cultural world-view as a complex set of memes. Evolutionary biologist, Richard Dawkins, coined the term ‘meme’ – a nugget of cultural information – as a cultural parallel to biological genes – nuggets of biological information. The important point is that memes, like genes, are subject to natural selection – memes can be ‘selected out’ by their environments should they become maladaptive.

People should realize that a made-up social construct may not contain a good ‘map’ of biophysical reality. This begs a crucial question: Does our current global cultural worldview ‘map’ well to the natural world – think: climate chaos, ocean acidification, plunging biodiversity, micro-plastic contamination, falling sperm counts, pollution of everything, etc.? Obviously not. I therefore argue that MTI culture’s simplistic, growth-dependent, anthropocentric, exceptionalist framing of reality has become maladaptive in an increasingly chaotic eco-cultural environment of its own making.

In short, MTI societies are in danger of being ‘selected out’. Collapse or a least a ‘great simplification’ is inevitable – and by some accounts already underway.