Context: Culture and the Metacrisis

We are in the midst of a metacrisis. At its core, is a crisis of culture.

Inequality, ecological collapse, climate change, biodiversity loss, rising authoritarianism, and institutional racism are not just symptoms of systemic breakdowns—they are the result of a deeper cultural paradigm.

Culture is the values, belief systems, and ontologies that drive human behavior. Culture shapes how we relate to ourselves, each other, and the network of life. Our current growth-driven, capitalist culture, particularly in its neoliberal phase, commodifies life and resources, reinforcing separation, hierarchy, white supremacy, and exploitation. 

To address the metacrisis, we must rethink and transform the cultural narratives that sustain it.

The deep structure of Culture: 

If we boil down culture to its core ingredients, it is the relationship between self and other.

Self: Unit of the conscious human.

Other: Everything that is not self: the entire “external” world, including animals, objects, trees, water, etc.

Cultures are full of constructs which define our reality. This includes worldviews, ontologies, frames and metaphors. 

The relationship between self and other is mediated through cultural constructs.

Cultural constructs are carried through narratives. Narrative practitioners aim to shift these cultural constructs.  

Dominant western cultural constructs frame non-humans (including nature, animals, ecosystems etc) as “other”.  This separation between humans and nature through the framing “nature is a resource” justifies extraction and destruction of ecosystems. Read more about this example.

We will learn about how narratives function in the next section.

NEXT STEPS: Understand how narratives function (M1.2) and CHL’s approach to Narrative-led Systems change (M1.3).