The Polycrisis in Numbers: What Should Be Our Takeaway?

And: Neo-Ethics as a Cure for Imperialism

I’d like to highlight some big numbers. Not big in the sense of large — though one is in the trillions — but in the sense of “big deal”: consequential, momentous. Life-changing at a collective level in their implications.

• Climate Change

In 2024, the average global temperature was 1.55 degrees above the 1850-1900 pre-industrial average, exceeding for the first time the Paris Agreement goal of limiting temperature rise to 1.5 degrees. As of March 2025, global atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration is 427 parts per million and continuing to rise at an unprecedented rate.

• Unsustainable Resource Use

As of this year, humanity is using the Earth’s natural capital 75 percent faster than the Earth can renew it. This means that humanity needs 1.75 Earths to sustain its current rate of resource use. The rate of overuse of planetary resources has increased steadily since first crossing the one Earth threshold in 1970.

• Ecological Deterioration

As a result of human activity 6 of the 9 “planetary boundaries have been transgressed, with a seventh (ocean acidification) now close to being breached. These planetary boundaries are nine processes that Earth scientists have identified as being critical for maintaining the stability and resilience of planetary life.

• Wealth Concentration

A recent RAND study concludes that $79 trillion has flowed from the bottom 90 percent of Americans by income to the top 1 percent that would have remained with the bottom 90 percent if the income distribution among the American workers of 1975 had remained the same. (Think about this one.)

• Erosion of Democracy

The annual Democracy Index score fell to a historic low of 5.17 in 2024. And the United States was downgraded from a “full democracy” to a “flawed democracy”.

• Civilizational Fragility

The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists’ Doomsday Clock was recently reset to 59 seconds to midnight, the closest it’s ever been to midnight in its 78-year history, surpassing even the Doomsday Clock settings at the peak of the Cold War and highlighting the increase in global existential threats facing humanity.

What Should Be Our Takeaway?

What should we make of these numbers? For some, they are a source of despondency, despair, hopelessness. Others are jaded about it. Many are checked out, finding distractions.

For the Crisis and Transition Substack these numbers signal an exciting opportunity and an moral imperative to take up transitioning to an ideal society.

The global civilization we now have has taken us to 59 seconds until midnight. It’s not working; it’s flawed at its roots.

The polycrisis has erected a wall, a barrier, blocking humanity from proceeding on its current flawed path. Reforms can slow, but not stop, our trajectory toward collapse. We need to re-envision and redirect humanity’s collective existence. We must change direction or collapse; it’s that simple.

“The Ideas that Are Lying Around”

The neoclassical economist, Milton Friedman, famously observed that:

“Only a crisis — actual or perceived — produces real change. … When that crisis occurs, the actions that are taken depend on the ideas that are lying around. That, I believe, is our basic function: to develop alternatives to existing policies, to keep them alive and available until the politically impossible becomes politically inevitable.”

[Michael Towsey, in his new book, Starting Over: Now is the Time to Build a Cooperative Economy wryly comments that this quote “may well turn out to be Friedman’s only enduring legacy.”]

Needless to say, “the ideas that are laying around” that will deliver us are not the ideas of neoclassical economics or of neoliberalism. They are ideas that recognize interdependency, wholeness, inclusion, cooperation, sustainability, equity, freedom — the cluster of values that form the foundation of what David Korten calls a life-centered civilization.

Imperialism

Among the “ideas that are laying around” that I believe would help move humanity into a life-centered civilization is the concept of “neo-ethics,” introduced in the social philosophy writings of Prabhat Rainjan Sarkar.

Sarkar proposes neo-ethics as the means to solve the problem of imperialism. Wikipedia defines imperialism as “maintaining and extending power over foreign nations, employing both hard power (military and economic power) and soft power (diplomatic power and cultural imperialism).” AI says that, “Imperialism is when a powerful country controls or dominates other countries, often through force or by gaining economic and political influence.”

David Korten, in his acclaimed book, The Great Turning: From Empire to Earth Community, observes that when empires originated about 5,000 years ago this initiated the unequal distribution of power and social benefits to the small portion of the population that controlled them. So, imperialism, in one form or another, has been around for a long while. It’s been a perennial bane of human existence.

Cause of Imperialism

Sarkar recognizes this and wants to rid humanity of imperialism. He starts by describing its cause:

Accumulation is the root cause of imperialism. Imperialism is born when the interests of a nation or empire [or other powerful group] are forced upon other social groups or political units in the process of accumulating political power, military power, land or other material power. The imperialist power wants to dominate, subjugate, exploit or torture others for the expansion, perpetration and consolidation of its own selfish interests. Behind all these selfish interests is the strong psychic impulse of the imperialist ruler — that is the desire for accumulation.

Thus, imperialism is a perversion of power . . . to accumulate more and more physical wealth, material power and political strength.

(Recall the above cited $79 trillion that’s been extracted since 1975 from America’s bottom 90 percent. Imperialism in action.)

Sarkar notes that communist imperialism originates from accumulation in the name of the state and so-called collective interests while capitalist imperialism grows from individual and corporate accumulation. “But in both cases the genesis of imperialism is accumulation.”

How then to eliminate imperialism? Sarkar observes that,

Many methods have been prescribed to fight and eliminate imperialism, but in vain. The disease is still there, and its deadly virus is still deep in the social body. So today the problem of imperialism will have to be analysed from a completely different point of view so that we can get at the very root of imperialism.

And how to address the root of imperialism? It is to deal with the perversion of the drive to accumulate.

Now, it’s not practical for either individuals or society to function without some accumulation. Individuals need to maintain savings for difficult times or for large expenditures — say, having a child or buying a house. And society needs to accumulate to maintain funding for social security and health insurance.

But the accumulation that animates imperialism is pathological. It originates in a perversion of mind: an insatiable tendency to accumulate. This perverted drive to extract wealth is, of course, implicated in the polycrisis. It destroys balance in both the human society and the natural world. It is a dysfunction of our collective existence that must be eradicated for humanity to move forward.

Neo-Ethics

What Sarkar proposes to crush the roots of imperialism is two fundamental principles of life that he calls “neo-ethics”.

The first of these is that human beings should recognize a deep spiritual reality — a supreme entity, a great spirit, a divine being, a cosmic progenitor, a macrocosmic entity, a nameless source — and seek inner peace and fulfilment from finding personal connection with that entity. Matter should not be seen as the primary goal of life as this urge can lead to unhealthy accumulation and, when writ large, to imperialism.

If people recognize that a common divine essence is present in all, they will naturally maintain a belief in social equality. They will have no desire to exploit or dominate others, but only to work with others to build a healthy society.

Second, human beings should find a proper adjustment, or balance, between their material needs and their non-material needs — ie, their mental and spiritual development. Humanity cannot take the path of ascetic traditions that suppress or ignore our material needs; this would prevent the proper development of individuals and the society. There must be continuous advancement in the development and provision of material amenities.

But there also needs to be a proper emphasis on our intellectual, creative, emotional and spiritual development. Humans are fundamentally mental beings. It is not healthy for our lives to be consumed with material desires and consumption. We should have ample scope to develop and express our mental capacities and deepen our experience of spiritual connection.

If there is a proper balance between these two — material needs and the non-material needs — there will be nothing to fuel the compulsion to over-accumulate that sustains imperialism.

Imperialism in the Time of Oligarchy

Bernie Sanders doesn’t agree with the Democracy Index folks who say that America is a “flawed democracy”. He claims that America is now an oligarchy. Those who crave accumulation and are adept at using power toward these ends have dominant influence in the corridors of power, either directly or through those who serve their interests.

The anti-human imperialist impulse to exploit and dominate in order to enhance accumulation for the few is running wild. Again, think of the $79 trillion that’s been extracted from American workers since 1975.

The sickness of imperialism sucks the life force of the society and tears at the social fabric. It also fuels the polycrisis. The oligarchy is making clear — to those who are observing — the necessity for human society to be guided by neo-ethics.