2022 in one word: Permacrisis

If ‘permacrisis’ is the word of 2022, what does 2023 have in store for our mental health? | André Spicer | The Guardian


In 1940, as the Nazis were closing in on Paris, Walter Benjamin, the German Jewish literary critic and avid collector, knew he had to flee the city. Before leaving, he entrusted one of his most treasured possessions to his friend Georges Bataille, who hid it the archives of the French national library. This was a work titled Angelus Novus, by the artist Paul Klee. The print is of a small angel, wings outstretched, and Benjamin describes how the angel’s “face is turned toward the past”, where he sees history as “one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage”.

More than 80 years after Benjamin described the unending storm of the early 20th century through the look of an angel in a painting, the Collins English Dictionary has come to a similar conclusion about recent history. Topping its “words of the year” list for 2022 is permacrisis, defined as an “extended period of insecurity and instability”. This new word fits a time when we lurch from crisis to crisis and wreckage piles upon wreckage. Today, Klee’s angel would have a similar look on its face.

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Author: patd

“But I don’t want to go among mad people," Alice remarked. "Oh, you can’t help that," said the Cat: "we’re all mad here. I’m mad. You’re mad." "How do you know I’m mad?" said Alice. "You must be," said the Cat, "or you wouldn’t have come here.” ― Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland

21 thoughts on “2022 in one word: Permacrisis”

  1. [André Spicer the author of the book Business Bullshit and professor of organisational behaviour at the Bayes Business School at City, University of London continues]

    The word permacrisis is new, but the situation it describes is not. According to the German historian Reinhart Koselleck we have been living through an age of permanent crisis for at least 230 years. Koselleck observes that prior to the French revolution, a crisis was a medical or legal problem but not much more. After the fall of the ancien regime, crisis becomes the “structural signature of modernity”, he writes. As the 19th century progressed, crises multiplied: there were economic crises, foreign policy crises, cultural crises and intellectual crises.
    During the 20th century, the list got much longer. In came existential crises, midlife crises, energy crises and environmental crises. When Koselleck was writing about the subject in the 1970s, he counted up more than 200 kinds of crisis we could then face. Fifty years on, there are probably hundreds of new kinds of crisis on offer. And even if we don’t actually face more crises than in previous eras, we talk about them a lot more. Perhaps it is no wonder we feel we are living in an age of permacrisis.
    Waking up each morning to hear about the latest crisis is dispiriting for some, but throughout history it has been a bracing experience for others. In 1857, Friedrich Engels wrote in a letter that “the crisis will make me feel as good as a swim in the ocean”. A hundred years later, John F Kennedy (wrongly) pointed out that in the Chinese language, the word “crisis” is composed of two characters, “one representing danger, and the other, opportunity”. More recently, Elon Musk has argued “if things are not failing, you are not innovating enough”.
    […]
    Crises are like many things in life – only good in moderation, and best shared with others. Living in an age of permanent crisis that we have to face alone is likely to be a disaster, not just for societies but for ourselves. The challenge our leaders face during times of overwhelming crisis is to avoid letting us plunge into the bracing ocean of change alone, to see if we sink or swim. Nor should they tell us things are fine, encouraging us to hide our heads in the sand. Instead, during moments of significant crisis, the best leaders are able to create some sense of certainty and a shared fate amid the seas of change. This means people won’t feel an overwhelming sense of threat. It also means people do not feel alone. When we feel some certainty and common identity, we are more likely to be able to summon the creativity, ingenuity and energy needed to change things.

  3. Yes there are times

    When we all need
    To share a little thing
    And i lean out the rough spots
    Is the hardest part that
    Memories remain
    And there are times
    Like these when we all
    Need to hear the radio
    Caused from the lips
    Of the song of sings
    We can share the troubles
    We already know
    Turn em on 2x.
    Turn em on 2x.
    Turn on them sad song
    When all our
    Hope is gone
    Why dont you tune in
    And turn em on
    Reachin to your room
    Room just feel that
    Candle touch
    When all our hope is gone
    Sad song says so much
    Sad song they say
    Sad song they say
    Sad song they say
    Sad song they say
    So much, so turn em on
    Turn em on turn on those
    Sad song
    When all our hope is gone
    Why dont you tune in
    And turn em on
    If someone is open enough
    Oh you write it down
    And every signle word
    Make sense and its easier
    To have them sung around
    Songwriters: Elton John, Bernie Taupin. For non-commercial use only.

  5. Quite the morning news to wake up to – Barbara Walters has died.  She made a huge impact on women and girls around the world.  The times were changing after the 60’s.  Mary Tyler Moore Show, especially the first season and episodes, show a world so different from today, except in the corporate suites. That is the world Walters worked in, but as the highest paid news reader. It was her side gigs that propelled, shot, launched, her life into celebrity world. I enjoyed Walters work, although I did not see much of the daily shows due to working for a living back then. 
     
    Oh yeah, some white homophobic guy died too.

  6. not enough that we have to worry about permacrises in this one paltry life, there’re multiverses of them

    The multiverse was all the rage in 2022, but it goes back millennia – The Washington Post

    Somewhere in the vastness of the cosmos, there are planets resembling Earth. And on these planets live other versions of you, who have made radically different life choices.
    So says the theory of the multiverse. It posits that our universe is but one among myriad other universes, some of which are populated by our doppelgangers.

  9. Permacrisis?
    To quote chicken little “the sky is falling, the sky is falling”
    The sad thing is we are setting here fat and lazy trying to find ways to scare ourselves. 
    Maybe we need to quit watching fantasy on cable news and go to the movies where at least they are honest about being pure entertainment.
    Jack
     

  10. Ya know under the old studio system, if you sent down to central casting for a child molesting pervert, you couldn’t find anybody better than Harvey Weinstein. He just looks the part.
    Jack

  11. There’s been a permacrisis since I was born.   From Tail Gunner Joe to the great evil punkin
    Korea to Ukraine.
    Gore Vidal used to write about it as “The Perpetual War”.
    It’s been rough, I tell ya……atom bombs, fallout shelters, assassinations, wars and rumors of wars, recessions, illegal pot paranoia………OY.
    It ain’t easy being green.

    But then had I not been green.
    Ain’t no tellin’ what I WOULD have been

  13. https://reasonstobecheerful.world/the-year-in-cheer-2022/

    “After 428,000 people passed an anti-gerrymandering initiative in Michigan, the state held its fairest elections in decades.”

    “Nine US cities now have the capacity to generate 3.5 gigawatts of solar power, more than the entire country did just a decade ago.”

    “The number of endangered monarch butterflies found in Mexican forests rose by 35% from the year before.”

    Nope. The sky isn’t falling everywhere, and folks are managing to prop up some that has back up.

    Happy New Year!

    Next year’s word: perma-resilience

  14. Good news about the butterflies.  I like that the motto for the Chinese year of the water rabbit motto is HOPE.

    Anyone got any great New Year’s resolutions?  I’m going for a whole lot more time online and a whole lot more reading.  

  15. BB and Jack have the right perspective IMHO.  Me, I went and caught some live slide blues at lunch and am  watching football rather than cable news autopsies of 2022. 🙈🙉 Jim Harbaugh is looking particularly dyspeptic as the 1st half of the Fiesta Bowl approaches.

    🎊HAPPY NEW YEAR TO ALL🎊🎉‼️

  16. My biggest love is on YouTube, PBS Julia Child The French Chef.  My heart beats fast as she whacks, slaps, pounds and dusts.  Back then I actually sat and wrote the recipes as she cooked, oh yeah I was in high school, then college, and used to taking notes at full speed.  I fell in love with her during French Onion Soup, passed out with Coq au Vin, and just mention her name and I go blank.
     
    For some reason she is now on YouTube, to my happiness.  Something that goes with the electric Sixties is she uses an electric skillet, yes I did buy one, not a huge gas monster in her kitchen. Considering what the current cooks use on any channel or production her kitchen would be considered primitive.  It goes to what is the emphasis of the show?  The tools? The techniques? The personalities?  Or teaching us how to cook at the level of a Cordon Bleu chef?
     
    Watching her after all these years does bring back floods of memories.  Not married and being happy. Life on campus, life drafted and waiting for a letter from your president. Literally a world away.

  17. Traditionally there is only one way out for him.  Go to a foriegn nation hostile to US interests and set up a government in exile.   

  18. Nothing like being on hold as your ticket gets elevated on a worldwide holiday for having your website down. Yeah. Love it. 
     
    I am sure there is one explaination.  It has to do with the dog drool of the KGB/GRU.

    Update: Ticket moved up to top level. Not pretty, seems something got into my software and made a big doo. Tech cleaned up the stuff off the floor. Bad russki, bad russki.

    Happy New year, y’all

    Update – most of website is destroyed. Looks like a long day tomorrow.

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