How The Holocrisis challenges us to confront fear, failure, and mortality
I offer The Holocrisis as a way of saying that our man-made crises are really one crisis, like a tree, whose branches are all individual and different, but stem from one trunk, each of them feeding into and being fed by the trunk.
This article was originally published in the Daily Maverick.
It is natural that we should want a name for the mass of problems humanity is walking into, if only as a short form to represent the ever-lengthening list of varied crises.
These not only include the unintended environmental consequences of the technologies that have enabled our rapid population growth and comfort (climate change; loss of biodiversity; soil degradation; over-fishing; water pollution and scarcity; etc) but also the non-environmental consequences of our technologies of convenience (cyber vulnerability; unregulated AI; the mental health crisis; etc) and not forgetting our very human fear of “the other”, combined with the willingness to use force to outcompete the other (wealth inequality; racism; warfare; etc).
So far, we’ve come up with three names for these:
The Polycrisis, where “poly” implies “many”, and simply tells us there are many crises.
The Metacrisis, where “meta” implies an overarching crisis that encompasses all the individual crises.
The Permacrisis, which suggests we are committed to a future of permanent crisis.
In each case, the new word only adds a single dimension to our understanding: quantity, unity or permanence. I would like to replace this trio with a more expressive, revealing and fertile word: The Holocrisis.
It is derived from General Jan Smuts’ concept of “holism”, first articulated in his 1926 book “Holism and Evolution”. This was a radical idea at the time, which in its simplest form proposed that, in any natural system (including human social systems), the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. More than that, he wrote that the whole “affects and determines the parts, so that they function towards the whole; and the whole and the parts therefore… influence and determine each other, and appear more or less to merge their individual characters: the whole is in the parts and the parts are in the whole…”.
While The Holocrisis is like the other three names in that it encompasses the entirety of man-made crises that now confront us, I coined it to remind us that these many crises are not as discrete or separate as they appear on the surface, but in fact form a living, dynamic whole, whose roots are in the materialistic and individualistic assumptions of modern, civilised humanity.
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I offer The Holocrisis as a way of saying that our man-made crises are really one crisis, like a tree with one trunk and many branches. The branches are all individual and different, but they stem from one trunk and each of them simultaneously feeds into and is fed by the trunk.
The Holocrisis also gestures to the origins of our present predicament in the many choices our ancestors made during the period starting about 12,000 years ago known as The Holocene (from the ancient Greek implying a “wholly new” epoch).
The Holocene marked the steady replacement of our egalitarian hunter-gatherer way of life with an agricultural and urban one increasingly stratified by social hierarchies, driven by values of material accumulation and the unrestrained application of our ever-developing technologies.
And here’s the power in this word. By unifying the crises we face and linking them to the extraordinary burst of human growth and activity over the past 12,000 years, The Holocrisis invites us to look in the mirror and understand that the common denominator of all our man-made crises is us.
If you wanted the shortest possible history of Homo sapiens it might read: “We arrived in paradise. After a very long time, we started to tell ourselves we were separate, took fright at Nature and each other, used our extraordinary gifts and advantages to deepen the separation while simultaneously and ironically connecting up in a global civilisation and, in the process, we created The Holocrisis.”
In personal terms, if I bear this in mind and pause to contemplate The Holocrisis in its fullness, what I see reflected back is an aspect of myself. Indeed, my own instinctive drive towards security, exacerbated as it is by a global culture that encourages individualism and competition, is inseparable from The Holocrisis.
Questions arising
The most natural question to arise when looking at The Holocrisis is: “How can we solve this problem of all problems? How can we get back to a crisis-free way of living?”
This line of thinking is, I believe, a distraction. The Holocrisis is not a problem for which all that’s lacking is the right solution. It is so vastly complex and we who claim to want to “solve” it are so deeply entangled with it, we are in no position to conceptualise getting rid of it, at least not from our present state of collective consciousness.
I further believe that a good part of how we unwittingly engineered The Holocrisis into existence was through our love of “finding solutions” without first having deeply and patiently dwelt in the “problem” long enough for the way forward to present itself in all its complexity.
I find it more pertinent and more challenging to ask: “Why might we have created The Holocrisis?”
There is a well-aired notion in psychology that when an individual is under great emotional or psychological stress, yet feels “stuck” and unable to resolve the stress, he or she may, without consciously willing it, contrive to create external circumstances that precipitate a great crisis and upheaval in their life, in the midst of which they find themselves having to let go of certain old, unhelpful patterns. As the chaos eventually subsides, they may realise they are no longer feeling so “stuck” and space has opened up for them to create new, more appropriate patterns.
In a similar way, might we collectively have become so profoundly stuck in a range of unhealthy patterns of thinking and relating over recent generations that the only way we can imagine breaking free of them is through an almighty, unconscious, self-inflicted Holocrisis? It would have to be created unconsciously, because we would never knowingly design the failure and destruction of so much that we have come to hold so dear.
On this reading, The Holocrisis is not just necessary; it may actually be desirable. I have often pondered a particular dimension of The Holocrisis — say, global warming or systemic poverty and discrimination — and wondered how long it might reasonably take for us to “resolve” it.
The obviously troubling companion thought is that for any one dimension to have a chance of being resolved, most other dimensions have to be well on their own path to resolution, otherwise they will act as a natural brake on the resolution of the one on which we are focusing. These crises are not islands. Put another way, a sick and weakening global civilisation cannot heal one dimension of its behaviour at a time.
In the case of the sustainability of the biosphere, for example, how do we hope to reverse the trend of its destruction without letting go of the core tenets of capitalism that have driven our hunt for cheap gains at the expense of natural systems?
What to do?
We can, of course, allow ourselves to be mesmerised, terrified and depressed by The Holocrisis. We have certainly given it enough power to do that to us most effectively.
To date the most common responses to encountering The Holocrisis are either to deny it and carry on as if nothing were wrong, or to take action to change its course. Hence the now vast and diverse global movements for environmental sustainability and social justice.
I have never doubted the deeply sincere motives that propelled people into these movements, whether as grassroots activists, scientists, entrepreneurs or policymakers. But an honest reckoning tells me that these movements have failed to move the needle sufficiently, for all the effort, networking and money that has been funneled through them.
What have we been missing? Do we have another option?
Imagine we accorded The Holocrisis the respect it is due? Instead of collapsing in front of it, running away from it or imagining that some clever combinations of technology will “solve” it, let’s ask it to take us by the hand and show us what we have been so reluctant to learn about who we actually are. If we undertake this, we should be prepared for it to lead us into unfamiliar, uncomfortable, even taboo territory.
I believe, for instance, that if we allow it, The Holocrisis will introduce us to three aspects of our reality that we moderns typically sweep deep under the rug: Not Knowing, Failure and Death.
Three gifts within The Holocrisis
Not Knowing
Not Knowing is a relative newcomer among the scourges of the collective human psyche and seems to be flourishing in our era. Our ancestors lived in much smaller landscapes of what was known, yet seem to have felt far less discomfort there.
We, by contrast, are awash with information, yet are either at risk of being overwhelmed by its volume or anxiously seeking yet more, as if our best hope of digging ourselves out of The Holocrisis was to find more information.
Thanks to the scientific mindset, we carry quite a deep assumption that everything can and will soon be known, which surely ought to include how to “fix” The Holocrisis?
Yet it is now dawning on some of us that more information and knowledge do not help us to know the things that truly matter. We still have no culturally agreed answers to the big questions, like: “Where did I come from? Why am I here? Where am I going? What makes a good life?”
In pre-modern cultures these questions had agreed answers; our individualistic modern culture carelessly leaves each one of us to answer them and offers only scattered guidance on how to.
What would it mean if we acknowledged that we genuinely do not know how to resolve The Holocrisis? What alternatives to panic do we have in response to that thought?
Failure
In a world where success is idolised and its companion, the accumulation of wealth, pursued with universal longing, the notion of failure has been pushed to the margins, like the sickly child in the playground whom nobody will go near. Failure in our own life is often kept private, buried in the hope of being forgotten. Yet successful people, if they are honest, will tell you that they could only reach great heights because along the way they suffered and eventually absorbed great failures.
The Holocrisis is telling us in the simplest, most powerful terms imaginable that, if our species’ intention was to create a version of heaven on Earth, our current attempt is absolutely failing. And, as luck would have it, the failure is vastly too big to bury.
What would it mean to embrace The Holocrisis as our mightiest failure and therefore our mightiest teacher? What if we re-evaluate our obsession with success, acknowledging that, while we have been highlighting and telling stories about our successes down the generations, our failures have been quietly growing in the shadows and are by now just as big, if not bigger, than our successes?
If we truly gave our ability to fail the attention and respect it deserves, might we come to a fresh, expanded understanding of who we are and what it means to be human?
Death
Unlike our indigenous ancestors over most of the span of human existence, our modern industrialised and secular civilisation regards death in the same light as failure — to be denied, avoided and delayed at any cost. Indeed, we typically regard death itself as a failure, a disaster for all concerned. Without necessarily predicting it, The Holocrisis points towards not just our own but our species’ death, marking the ways we could easily travel together to our end.
Might The Holocrisis be the long-delayed prompt for us to make our peace with death? There is, after all, an enormous body of direct human experience that supports the idea that we are non-physical, timeless beings who have chosen a temporary human life in the physical plane.
Understood from that perspective, the Western compulsion to “win” in this short lifetime by accumulating wealth and power enough to fend off death appears childish. So much of the aggression with which we modern humans regard each other and our fellow species would evaporate if we lost our fear of dying.
These three — Not Knowing, Failure and Death — are among our deepest fears and, as such, contribute powerfully to shaping how we respond to the world around us. It seems reasonable to imagine that, if we want to find less fearful ways of responding to The Holocrisis we have created (“Our Holocrisis”), we could begin by exploring how to dissolve these fears.
In everyday life a certain dosage of fear has a vital role to play in alerting us to danger — a fear of fire can keep us from burning. But the above three fears have become culturally embedded in ways that are quite disabling for individuals and whole societies. To live in fear of not knowing, failing and dying is to become disconnected from reality. Nobody ever knows everything, everyone fails, and every living thing dies.
If honestly confronting The Holocrisis prompts us to encounter and start to transcend these three fears, perhaps we could look forward to a fundamentally different and altogether more appealing experience of whatever time is left to us humans on this planet.
