OK…general point. I think the majority of people coming to this will not start by seeing a metacrisis or polycrisis. What they will see is collapse – both in terms of their own diminishing life prospects and the increasing level of chaos and suffering in the world. They will reach a point where they are forced to accept that there is no longer any route back to what they once considered “normal”. All this can happen with only a broad, intuitive understanding of polycrisis/metacrisis. Why bother thinking about the details of why, when you already know the outcome of the thought process?
At the moment those people are just lost. They are the people you can find on Collapse of Civilization.
What does “acting on it” mean? In terms of society in general the situation is basically hopeless. Literally nothing they can do is going to make any difference to the general trajectory of world events or make the final net outcome any less bad. So “acting on it” means prepping at the level of their own lives or the communities they live in – and the degree to which that is even possible will depend on their specific situation (in all sorts of ways).
What is missing is a mechanism by which society in general can be changed so that it no longer feels completely hopeless. And the only way to do that is to have a coherent movement growing – a movement which is unlike anything that currently exists because it is ground in the realities of collapse rather than the delusional nonsense of pre-collapse politics. In other words this has to be a political movement which is primarily held together by an acknowledgement that collapse is coming and that we need to prepare and adapt at every level of society from the individual up to the sovereign state. The key insight is that there is a great deal of overlap between what we need to do to prepare and adapt (surviving the collapse) and what we need to do to build a very different sort of civilisation – one that actually works. This will eventually become very important in “collapse politics” (ie the politics of the era of collapse, not “post-collapse politics” – we’re nowhere near that yet). See 2R and the politics of collapse - General - Second Renaissance Forum
Which leaves me with a question about how exactly such a movement can be kept together and what would be the ideological system that guides it. Which is two different ways of asking the same question.
2R as it currently exists is not that movement and not ready to become it either, because the ideological system is missing. It is currently just a bunch of related ideas and groups, many of which do have a role to play in that future movement, but some of which will not, because for one reason or not they cannot fully accept the terms of the ideological system.
This all sounds very theoretical, but I don’t see any way it can be avoided. It is exactly this question that I’ve been focused on for over a decade now. What can define this ideological system? – what should it be, and how could it work? What should it include and what should it not include? This is going to have to decided by a small group of people, and they need to get it right.
At the moment none of the existing groups fit the bill. The closest are probably Deep Adaptation, but DA just doesn’t seem to be going very far. It’s lots of very clever and concerned people talking to each other, deepening their understanding, making contacts…but not actually getting anywhere.
I have spent the last two weeks trying to explain to people what I think the answer is, and it is epistemological. We need to fix our broken relationship with the truth, and that starts by admitting that it is broken. As a society, we’re terrified of the very idea of objective truth. Dealing with reality is the last thing we’re collectively able to do. Almost nobody is even trying. We’re encouraged to wallow in delusion, and it isn’t just the right who are guilty. The left is every bit as bad – it is just a different sort of delusion. Which means we have to figure out the correct way to collectively approach realism. What exactly does “realism” mean? And this is the point where 2R is directly relevant, since that is not a new question for most people here.