The complexity defense: polycrisis vs polykrisis

That feels unfair. What, after all, are we supposed to do against the “polycrisis”—this grand claim that our ecological, economic, and geopolitical crises form a system too complex to govern?

The word itself betrays the failure: it reframes a problem of moral agency in the language of systemic mechanics.

Crisis derives from the Greek krísis—from krínein, to sieve, to separate, to judge. It does not name a state of unmanageable complexity. In Hippocratic medicine and Athenian law, it marks the precise moment when human judgment interrupts the mechanical unfolding of events. Concepts like polycrisis, VUCA, BANI, CAS invert this logic: responsibility shifts—elegantly, technically—from discernment into diagnosis.

The contemporary fetishisation of “systems thinking” often functions as a defence mechanism. We transition from the tragic necessity to order incommensurable goods to the technocratic fantasy of managing them. Systems, in cybernetic populism, are teleologically empty: they have feedback loops but no telos; they optimize for equilibrium, not justice. The polycrisis recasts the crisis-as-event into crisis-as-context; naturalising its own violence.

Leaders intellectualize—embracing "complexity" not to lead, but to succeed. An unbearable moral demand—to stop what we are doing—is displaced by the celebration of resilience. Moral agency dissolves into infinite adaptation. The libidinal economy rewards not resolution but ever more sophisticated descriptions of failure. If everything is interconnected, no one is responsible.

The climate emergency is the most devastating proof. The crisis is physical. Its continuation is political—the transubstantiation of a moral crime into a thermodynamic puzzle. Its persistence is not a systemic glitch but the flawless execution of a lethal economic paradigm. We don’t merely fail to map the carbon cycle. We refuse the act of “polykrisis” that would subordinate capital to planetary life.

But we cannot manage our way out of a collapsed moral hierarchy. To treat structural injustice as systemic complexity is to mistake productivity for practical wisdom. What we face is not merely a loss of predictability, but the erosion of our capacity to judge.

A genuine crisis, as Hannah Arendt observed, tears away the façade of managerial routine. It forces us to take a stand without the banisters of precedent. Civilisations do not mature by refining their alibis. They mature by ranking competing ends—and bearing the cost of what must be sacrificed.

“Polycrisis” is not a condition of the world. It is the epistemological shield of a morally bankrupt leadership class that has learned to mistake risk management for responsibility.