Have you heard of the “metacrisis”—also called polycrisis, human predicament, long emergency, and other terms? It is the umbrella for all the crises that we face now or in the coming future, with a high degree of certainty. It includes critical threats to the economy, government, democracy, human health, climate, ecology, and the entire biosphere.

The metacrisis—and all the particular crises it includes—is a consequence of human behaviour. We have created these crises, through various bad choices and general short-sightedness. Or you could say, privileging individual (or in-group) self-interest over the rights and needs of the wider world, including other people, other species, and entire ecosystems. We have made a mess. One that is getting worse with every passing year.

Part of the problem is consumption. Part of it is waste. Both of those are aspects of consumer industry: resource extraction, automated production, and disposal of used products and materials. All of these things are done lazily, haphazardly, irresponsibly, and generally poorly. They lead to many negative externalities—side effects—which cause harms to people and other species which almost completely cancel out their positive effects, for the minority of people who benefit from them.

Many people are uninterested in negative externalities. It’s human nature to ignore problems that don’t affect us. But it’s irrational to ignore problems that will affect us later on. All of the problems of the metacrisis—even the ones that seem localized to strangers in foreign countries—will eventually come back to haunt everyone, including those who instigated them, but also many others, too.

Human societies have always had a challenge in regulating the behaviours of their members. I am not an expert. But even a casual familiarity with history should allow most people to come up with many examples. Although there are, I think, two major categories worth thinking about.

The first category is immediate causal feedback.

A primary source of behavioural feedback is violence. We can use violence—and the threat of violent reprisal—as a means to discourage people from doing harm to us. This includes literal bodily harm, but also the removal of various freedoms. In simple societies, it can mean being excluded from social activities, or completely outcast. In more complex societies, in can mean prison sentences, or loss of other privileges, like the freedom to drive a car or engage in certain kinds of business.

People also learn to avoid doing things that harm people they care about, even people they barely know. It’s innate. We can observe how people respond to our actions. If they express emotions of pain or shock, we can recognize it. We can feel what they feel. We don’t need to be punished by anyone else. Our own brains engage a sense of suffering. This is instantly tied to a sense of causality and personality responsibility. Although it is a different kind of pain that felt from violence, it is nevertheless unpleasant. However it actually works, it discourages us from repeating the same actions, to spare others the pain we recognize. We don’t like hurting people we care for.

However, most of the time, we cannot rely on a perpetually raising hand (or sword or gun), to frighten people; or to show them someone’s pained expression, in order to evoke natural compassion. Mostly, people have to be self-managing, and control their own behaviour, without the necessity of terror, horror, or trauma, in order to get along. What people need is less an exterior (including an internalized exterior) direct trigger, and something more subtle and also more functional. Most of our behaviour does not lead to instantaneous impacts for other people. And certainly we rarely, if ever, experience the negative externalities of our choices.

The second category is belief. If a person truly believes that something is wrong, they won’t do it. Maybe the perception of wrongness was trained into them. Perhaps using some kind of violence or threat. Corporal punishment has long been used to indoctrinate and habituate children (and beasts) against behaviours that adults didn’t like. But more often, it is a structured belief system that defines the order of the world, and our place within it.

Social belief systems include a structural description of the relationships of different people, and optionally animals and other species of life, and perhaps other forces in the universe, insofar as they might have agency, or exist as the expression of some other (usually godlike) agent. The relationships between agents defines their roles. The roles define the ethics of the agents, and the means and justifications by which violations of one’s role is punished or otherwise managed.

Historically, we had various kinds of ethical frameworks. Most of them seem to have been religions, or to some degree given validity by their origins in the authority of superior beings. But such beings can also include ancestors, natural spirits, or some other clearly wiser and more powerful agent. The rules have to come from somewhere, and there must be some reason to respect those who came up with them. It is that respect for the rule-giver that makes the framework compelling.

We no longer have an ethical framework adequate to the challenges that we face: as a society, a civilization, and a species. More to the point: until we have such a framework, we will not be able to address those challenges. Because we will not be able to coordinate our behaviour to the degree necessary.

I don’t know where we will find such a new framework and ethics. It may take an appropriate person, to be the agent of higher power and respect, that people can follow. If so, we have not seen such a person yet, though many have (perhaps unconsciously) tried.

All of our current ethical frameworks derive from religions, tribalism (including nationalism), ideology (political-economy systems) or other sources that were (perhaps only marginally) suited to smaller groups of people, often in relation (contrast) to other such groups. None of whom had the power to wreak havok that we have, collectively, today. (Though we still managed to do a lot of damage, even pre-industrially, in various geographical regions and specific ecosystems.)

Can we devise a new framework, and related ethics, with new social roles, to provide a working guide for every living human on the planet?