Permacrisis?

The time through which we are living is quite a bewildering one. It seems that we lurch into the next crisis before we have got anywhere close to resolving the previous one. Perhaps this explains why the Collins Dictionary declared “permacrisis” as the word of the year in 2022.

Sometimes I wonder if I am the only one who is bewildered. I was therefore reassured to read Michiko Kakutani’s new book The Great Wave. “It’s difficult to convey just how strange life in the third decade of the third millennium has become,” she writes. “It often feels like a preposterous mash-up of political satire, disaster movie, reality show, and horror film tropes all at once.”

When Kakutani attempts an explanation of why it feels like this she suggests that we face a “confluence of crises.” Our situation, she suggests, is well captured by the military acronym VUCA—volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity. This applies not just to an extreme situation facing the military but to the everyday life of all of us. Now I can understand why I am feeling bewildered.

We are facing not just one crisis but a complex of crises that interlock with one another. These include migration, climate change, authoritarian regimes, political instability, economic disparities and personal disturbance. Such is the scale of this multidimensional crisis that it can easily leave us feeling hopeless and defeated.

Rather than give up in despair, I hope I might offer some blog posts that can start to unpick the hypercomplex crisis and at least offer some understanding of the situation in which we find ourselves. Watch this space.