Polycrisis
Chapter 2 - Society
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Welcome to the Polycrisis page
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The concept was first coined in the 1970s. The word has been popularized by the historian Adam Tooze to describe the coming together of multiple crises.
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Core ideas
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Polycrisis
The concept was launched by a French theorist of complexity called Edgar Morin, and it was picked up by Jean-Claude Juncker, the President of the European Commission, in 2016, to describe the experience of trying to govern Europe when you had to deal with the Greek debt crisis, Putin's first aggression against Ukraine and the rumblings of Brexit in the background, and the refugee crisis in Syria spilling over into Europe.
It is the experience of not a single crisis with a single clearly defined logic, but things coming together at a single moment, who on the face of it, don't have anything to do with each other, but seem to pile onto each other to create a situation in the minds of policymakers, business people, families, individuals.
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Holism
Thinking about the concept 'polycrisis', the wordt holism is often used.
The label “meaning holism” is generally applied to views that treat the meanings of all of the words in a language as interdependent. Meaning holism is typically contrasted with atomism about meaning (where each word’s meaning is independent of every other word’s meaning), and molecularism about meaning (where a word’s meaning is tied to the meanings of some comparatively small subset of other words in the language.
This makes us wonder whether holism exists in reality, or is a way of looking at reality.
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Complex Adaptive System (of systems)
Can it be that a polycrisis is a complex adaptive system at a meta-level?
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Maybee it is a good idea to first go back to the Incompleteness theorem page in the Worldview chapter.
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A Complex Adaptive System is a system that is complex in that it is a dynamic network of interactions, but the behaviour of the ensemble may not be predictable according to the behavior of the components. It is adaptive in that the individual and collective behavior mutate and self-organize corresponding to the change-initiating micro-event or collection of events. It is a "complex macroscopic collection" of relatively "similar and partially connected micro-structures" formed in order to adapt to the changing environment and increase their survivability as a macro-structure. The Complex Adaptive Systems approach builds on replicator dynamics.
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Deep dive
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Components of a polycrisis
Non-exhaustive list of some elements of the current polycrisis:
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- Geopolitical
- War
- Economic war
- Societal
- Cultural
- Misinformation
- Us - Them thinking
- Social cohesion
- (Mental) Health
- Security
- Cultural
- Economic
- Inequality
- Work
- World supply chain
- Energy supply
- Resources supply
- Techological
- Digitalisation
- Cybersecurity
- Environmental
- Biodiversity
- Water
- Climate
- Energy
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The possible relationships between the elements is an exponential series that quickly becomes very large.
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Do you want to know more?
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