Article by Yuen Yuen Ang: “Every September, world leaders gather in New York City for the United Nations General Assembly. They come weighed down by climate disasters, widening inequality, democratic erosion, trade wars, and threats to multilateralism. They leave with heavier burdens than when they arrived.
We now have a fashionable word for this convergence of problems: polycrisis. Since the Columbia historian Adam Tooze popularized it at the World Economic Forum in 2023, it has become the apocalyptic buzzword of the decade. Tooze himself was disarmingly frank in admitting that he was only giving fear a name.
What the polycrisis concept says is: Relax, this is actually the condition of our current moment. I think that’s useful, giving the sense a name. It’s therapeutic. Here is your fear, here is something that fundamentally distresses you. That is what it might be called.
Therapy, maybe. Diagnosis, no. Solutions, zero. Yet “polycrisis” has caught on worldwide.
Why? Because it is comfortable. Polycrisis is a descriptor that the establishment can agree on without challenging itself. It abstracts the causes of crises, making them appear as natural convergences rather than the systemic outcomes of extractive and exclusionary orders. And it makes the concept appear global when in fact the voices, experiences, and priorities it reflects are overwhelmingly Eurocentric.
The virality of polycrisis reveals something deeper: the enduring power of elite discourse. Even though the term is empty, its followers amplify it—and the echo reinforces paralysis. If leaders remain content with only naming fear, they will consign themselves to irrelevance.
I see things differently. I call this moment a polytunity—a term I coined in 2024 to reframe disruption not as paralysis but as a once-in-a-generation opportunity for deep transformation. Transformation not only of our institutions, but of our ideas, our paradigm, and the way we think…(More)”.
