The following are some of the key ideas that shape my life and work today, and therefore shape the aims and topics of the Metacrisis Meetings Initiative. Below, I write about the ideas in a quick and colloquial way, so you can follow links to find more. The starred terms are ones I created myself.
Societal Collapse; Metacrisis; Deep Adaptation*; Doomster; Monetary Growth Imperative; Ecolibertarianism*; Great Reclamation*; Capital Accountability*; Collapsis*; Critical Wisdom*; Regenerative Leadership; Panecologism*; Gnosticism and Spiritual Revival; Devotional Music.
Societal Collapse
A process of the breakdown of modern industrial societies is already underway, driven by ecological degradation and the internal contradictions of an expansionist economic system. As there is such overshoot and momentum, although breakdown could be softened and new systems seeded, the process can’t be stopped, and so collapse is an appropriate term. It does not necessarily mean near term human extinction, but that becomes increasingly likely without massive awakening and organising. See Chapter 1 of Breaking Together for a fuller discussion.
Metacrisis
A useful term for our global predicament, for some of our conversations, can be “the metacrisis.” The term points towards a deeper crisis underlying the myriad problems we experience today, in politics, economics, culture, health and environment. That underlying crisis is in the assumptions, values, beliefs, norms and habits of our societies. Therefore, the term metacrisis can invite us to consider what is in crisis within ourselves, which can be the beginning of deeper transformations. However, many commentators avoid that when they use the term to speak of a degradation of the traditional values and economic structures which privilege them, rather than realising that is what drives the disruption and degradation. See my speech on ‘the magic of the metacrisis’ for a fuller discussion.
Deep Adaptation*
After becoming collapse aware, many people are inspired to change their lives and engage in a pro-social and pro-environmental manner. That involves working on adapting personally and collectively to increasing disruption, loss, and damage. Some people find the term deep adaptation useful to describe their approach, and use the 5R framework of Deep Adaptation, which I developed, for their reflections and discussions. The term and concept became well known after my paper in 2018 with that title went viral. See the 5R framework for a fuller discussion.
Doomster
Although some people can respond to their awareness or acceptance of societal collapse by becoming insular or disengaged, many people respond by becoming more caring, grateful, courageous and experimental. They integrate ‘doom’ and the associated difficult emotions, to emerge transformed and emboldened, making new contributions to others, either deliberately, or simply by living more from the heart. In Chapter 12 my book Breaking Together, I decided to reclaim the term ‘doomster’ as a positive alternative to ‘doomer’.
Monetary Growth Imperative
One of the drivers of the dominating, extractivist and expansionist economic system that has taken over most of the world, is a particular form of money and credit issuance by private institutions, not governments. Because most money used today is issued electronically as debt, with interest, by private institutions, and those earning the interest do not automatically spend it all back into circulation as wages or small asset purchases, so there is a shortage of money in economies as loans are paid off, unless the economies are expanding to justify new loans. This system means a community or country cannot voluntarily choose to have a stable economy, and reduce energy or destruction of nature (rather than displace it through supply chains), without their money supply shrinking and causing defaults, job losses and lack of investment in the future. Therefore, all aspects of economy and society become infused with an ideology of commodification, expansion and acceleration. Such an analysis does not claim or imply that there is a cabal of any ethnicity that is managing this process for reasons other than capital accumulation. See my article on the monetary growth imperative for a fuller discussion.
Ecolibertarianism*
Once we recognise the systemic causes of ecological destruction and social dislocation, we realise that the cause of our problems is not too much personal and collective freedom, but our manipulation and coercion by those dominating systems. Therefore, attempts to control populations in the name of sustainability, can be regarded as elitist delusions that avoid the need to liberate people and communities to find more harmony with each other and our environments. The concept draws upon the centuries of thought and initiative in the field of left libertarianism. See my article on it for a fuller discussion.
Great Reclamation*
Around the world, people are responding to a decline in the ability of governmental institutions and big businesses to meet a range of their needs and aspirations, as well as the blatant abuses by those organisations, by reclaiming more power in their lives and communities. That involves finding non-corporate ways to meet needs and aspirations, including food growing, community support, and alternative digital services. More up-close and citizen ownership of activities is key, with cooperatives and commons-approaches widespread. In some cases, a recognition of the drivers of societal collapse is inspiring people to reclaim meaning-making about their lives, societies and wider nature. See my blog on this term for a fuller discussion.
Capital Accountability*
Unlike some other human rights, property rights should be predicated upon people maintaining related responsibilities. Therefore, for people to continue to enjoy their property rights, they need to recognise and enable accountability of the use of that property to those who are most-affected. For instance, a company operating a mine needs to be demonstrably accountable to those most-affected. Or, a person with stocks in a company, needs to ensure that the company is demonstrably accountable to those most-affected. Whenever this is not the case, and persists without remedy, then the person should lose their relevant property right i.e. relinquish the mine or the stock. This principle would mean that the fiduciary duty of asset owners, asset managers, and directors of organisations, would include ensuring systems for downwards accountability, to staff, communities, and customers. Efforts towards accountability would not be an optional extra that are only advanced if fully aligned to maximising profits or shareholder value. See the introduction to my book Healing Capitalism, for a fuller discussion.
Collapsis*
Because individuals and institutions of incumbent power are resistant to seeing, and to the general public seeing, that the systems underpinning their power are at fault for social and environmental catastrophe, they promote a range of distracting narratives about what is breaking and why. As the general public experiences worse disruption and decline, so anxieties rise, and we can be manipulated by elites to believe their distracting narrative, which undermines the chance for reducing harm and seeding the new. I call this ‘collapsis’. See my blog on the term for a fuller discussion, with examples.
Critical Wisdom*
As our assumptions about life, society, and the future are fractured, we can feel bewildered and become vulnerable to manipulation, whether from authorities or opportunists. In that context, it is important to cultivate our ability to investigate truth, with what I term ‘critical wisdom’, which involves four capabilities. Logical reasoning remains incredibly important to test any ideas we are told and reduce the various biases that are mobilised in public communication today. The ability to recognise assumptions and views embedded in the terms and symbols we experience in society, and how they enact and enforce power relations, is essential (something termed ‘critical literacy’). Mindfulness, where we can better witness our thoughts and associated emotions, rather than be defined and driven by them, is key. That can also enable our ability to allow our unconscious mind to rise into our consciousness and be assessed, which is one way of understanding our intuition. When combined with knowledge of epistemology, critical wisdom enables transdisciplinary research analysis, which has been the foundation from which I have looked at various scholarly and scientific fields over the years. See Chapter 8 of Breaking Together for a detailed explanation.
Regenerative Leadership
For me, ‘regenerative leadership’ involves action that enables the healing of separations imagined between self, community, nations, nature and the metaphysical. Anyone at any level can enact regenerative leadership, as well as any group or community. Acts of regenerative leadership do not seek to prolong existing patterns, but start from a recognition of damage and the potential for healing by cooperating with people and nature. That healing process can become a central part of people’s aims as they deeply adapt to unfolding or imminent societal collapse. Therefore, my understanding of the term ‘regenerative leadership’ differs from some using it in management consulting. I am also wary of ‘imperialising’ people’s lives by repackaging their positive actions into a meme of regenerative leadership, or any concept and phrase that arises more from discussions amongst the privileged than the people actually doing the positive work. In the coming years I aim to share some examples of initiative-taking that could be described with this term, and what the people involved think of the term.
Panecologism*
Also written with a hyphen as pan-ecologism, this is a term I am using to distinguish from those who claim to use ecological approaches to science but are influenced by orthodoxies and institutional incentives in the natural sciences to reduce attention to the full complexity of living systems and the inescapable salience of that for any policy agenda, including on climate and the environment. Panecologism is the view that nothing on Planet Earth is uninfluenced by the complex interconnections of living systems, which escape our reductionist determinist methodologies. Therefore it is helpful to avoid dismissing or deprioritising the complexity of relationships because of uncertainty on the form and significance of those relationships. Instead, our pursuit of knowledge can involve an openness to the salience of less-understood relationships in living systems. In climatology this approach means not confidently dismissing the importance of biohydrological cycles in climate change because it is a more complex process than the heating effect from carbon gases. I introduced the concept in my essay on climate dogmas.
Gnosticism and Spiritual Revival
I have learned that within all cultures, mystics and contemplatives have had to cope with various waves of violent repression from institutionalised and imperial religions. Key is that such persons have a non-linguistic non-conceptual experience of metaphysical, unified, or divine, consciousness. Therefore, they can perceive the concepts, terms, stories, texts, symbols, rituals, and hierarchies of any religion as fallible tools that can both help us but risk blocking our experience of the divine, as well as distorting ideas on how to abide with the divine through our lives. I have come to learn that the love-first Christianity I identified and was inspired by in my youth, is closer to the spirituality revealed by the gnostic gospels than the official new testament. I have also come to learn that such Gnosticism is within the heterodox and oppressed strands of other Abrahamic religions, and resonates with many ideas from both Eastern and myriad Indigenous spiritual traditions. The suppression of our awareness that all life, including our own, is infused with cosmic consciousness, has been functional in enabling the exploitation and destruction of communities and wider nature. One outcome of metacrisis and societal collapse is more people are questioning the foundational assumptions and beliefs in society, as well as bringing impermanence, insecurity and loss in consciousness, which could lead to a spiritual revival. For some, that will involve non-dogmatic open heartedness. I mention such issues at various times in my work, and will give more attention to it from now on (2025). For instance, see my interview on Buddha at the Gas Pump.
Devotional Music
I am trained as a scholar – over decades. So my response to any issue or idea is to interrogate it with various methodological tools. I am also an educator, and focus on logical explanations. However, both the poetic and the musical can explore and convey ideas and feelings in ways that logically structured prose cannot. In 2021 I began writing poetry and music. I now play in a variety of bands that focus on hosting devotional song circles. I also release my own compositions where I sing about core themes of life and death. My protest rock band is Sambiloto (e.g. “Something’s Needling Me”), my softer folk band is the Barefoot Stars (e.g. “Mystical Cat”) and my live mantra band is the Raama Project (e.g. “The Mariam Mantra“). I’ll list the discography on a separate page in due course.
Thx, Jem Bendell, October 8th 2025.
