Henry Kissinger, ghoul dean of the U.S. national security establishment, was a featured speaker at this week’s World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. The event was titled “Historical Perspectives on War” — certainly a placeholder name, but an appropriate one for a Zoom talk by a 99-year-old man responsible for some of the more notable war crimes of the 20th Century.

The talk itself was mostly a bore. Kissinger spoke — extremely slowly — for about 15 minutes in all, offering vague commentary on the Ukraine and Taiwan Straits crises. (His advice on both: flatter Russian and Chinese power, in the hopes that doing so will avoid nuclear war.) More interesting was the fact that that particular almost-centenarian was invited to present at a forum whose theme this year is “the polycrisis.”

As my friend Spencer Ackerman wrote in his newsletter yesterday, it stands to reason that the WEF would look to a decrepit war criminal to “guide them out of the polycrisis he played a role in creating,” given that “he inevitably reinforces the convictions of this same class, who most benefit from the way the world currently is, that they and they alone hold the keys to responsibly guiding the world out of the polycrisis.”

OK. So what is a “polycrisis”?

Honestly, I’ve been wondering that for a while. The word was apparently coined in 1993 by the French philosopher Edgar Morin in Terre-Patrie (later translated as “Homeland Earth”), an early “sociopolitical manifesto” about the complex effects of climate change. It was revived in 2016 by then-European Commission president Jean-Claude Juncker. Adam Tooze picked up from there and now uses it frequently, to describe everything from inflation to Haiti. He took a stab at a definition last year:

A problem becomes a crisis when it challenges our ability to cope and thus threatens our identity. In the polycrisis the shocks are disparate, but they interact so that the whole is even more overwhelming than the sum of the parts. At times one feels as if one is losing one’s sense of reality. Is the mighty Mississippi really running dry and threatening to cut off the farms of the Midwest from the world economy? Did the January 6 riots really threaten the US Capitol? Are we really on the point of uncoupling the economies of the west from China? Things that would once have seemed fanciful are now facts. 

OK, so it’s — an overdetermined crisis? Some kind of society-wide general anxiety disorder? A disaster Voltron?

Nor is the timeline on when this is happening clear. The Davosites warn in their conference literature that “we’re on the brink of a ‘polycrisis.’” But Tooze was stating that it was already here, as of at least 2022. (The headline of the FT piece quoted above was “Welcome to the world of the polycrisis.”)

The sheer age of the original coinage — 30 years old this year — shows that this was not a new idea last year either. In the FT column, Tooze notes that, 15 years ago, similar conditions prevailed: a financial crisis, a Russian invasion (of Georgia), the swine flu pandemic, already worsening climate change.

You could go back farther than that, too. What about the 1980s: the AIDS pandemic, catastrophic droughts and famines in Africa, wars and hostage crises in Central America and the Middle East, the first waves of neoliberal shock in American and British cities, and nuclear near-misses between the US and USSR? Or the 1960s and 1970s (oil crises, inflation, Vietnam, urban riots in the U.S., South American fascism, more swine flu). How about 1930s and 1940s? A couple of big overlapping crises there spring to mind. What about the 1910s: the Great Influenza, World War I, nationwide race riots, the Mexican Revolution, the Chinese warlord period, all that? And so on.

Frankly, an overlapping, self-reinforcing cycle of disease, war, and society feeling like it’s on the brink of collapse has been the norm throughout human history. One could argue that it’s a narrow geographically specific generation like the mostly white, middle-to-upper-class Boomers and older Gen Xers — born at the start of the long interregnum between European wars, raised in booming prosperity, fully benefiting from antibiotics and vaccines, living their entire adult lives under the protection of the postwar/post-Depression welfare state — (i.e. the people running Davos) that are the exception. (God help me, do I agree with Niall Ferguson?)

But there is of course one thing more unsettling about this particular moment than those in the memorial past. For the first time in human history, we are watching as the climate itself spirals out of control, before our eyes — reaching global mean temperatures not seen since Neanderthals and humans lived side by side, tens of thousands of years before the invention of agriculture. It is a process stirring conflicts around the globe, drowning Californians and Pakistanis in their homes, and threatening the underpinning of civilization itself.

But that isn’t a polycrisis. It’s just one big underlying crisis, with a well-known cause and well-known solutions. It just so happens that those solutions would sap the fortunes and power of those who can afford a membership at Davos (reportedly up to $921,000 this year), fly their emissions-spewing private planes to the Alps, and eagerly await the advice of the likes of Henry Kissinger. So fancy obfuscation it is.

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