POLYCARP, a holy man living in second century Smyrna, would frequently conclude his prayers with an unusual exclamation: “Oh Lord, what a century Thou brought me into!” Nearly two millennia on, I find myself echoing his sentiment.
We are living through what social scientists call a polycrisis, a state where multiple system shocks interact simultaneously. The collision of a climatic emergency, a crushing cost-of-living crisis, violent political polarisation, and the hyper-accelerated onslaught of artificial intelligence (AI) has dissolved the predictable boundaries of our world. The effect on human psychology is profound and underappreciated.
At the beginning of this year, I noticed a distinct struggle among my colleagues, my friends, and myself to think beyond the next few days. I found myself trapped in the suffocating stasis of an endless present, unable to envision a better future.
This is not merely personal. People worldwide are simultaneously overstimulated and dysregulated, bombarded by a relentless digital torrent of bad news: climatic volatility; geopolitical instability in Europe, the Americas and the Middle East; and rising daily costs. Heightened, real-time awareness of the world’s suffering leaves us feeling helpless to stop it.
It is hard to appreciate how much the mere idea of a better future sustains you until it is taken away. When we collectively lose the capacity to imagine a more just, healthy, and stable world, our willingness to invest in long-term thinking, creative problem solving, or building resilience evaporates entirely.
There is a neurological explanation. UCLA (University of California, Los Angeles) psychologist Dr Hal Hershfield argues that we do not technically think about our future; we remember it. Through a process known as episodic future thinking, our brains construct a mental memory of a future state based on past experiences to guide current decisions. When a polycrisis hits, and daily life shifts wildly due to climate instability and economic shocks, this mechanism fails. The future memory breaks down, leaving us marooned in an anxious, short-sighted present.
How did we get here? The short answer is a toxic combination of global governance failures, systemic deregulation, extractive economic practices, and a rising culture of technological exceptionalism. We have erected new digital idols, actively valuing “silicon intelligence” over human intellect and ancient, hard-won natural wisdom. We are prioritising automated convenience over human creation while simultaneously gutting investment in resilient education, affordable healthcare, and climate adaptation.
Most insidiously, this era drives the large-scale maligning of science and expertise. Anti-intellectualism is not new, but generative AI acts as its ultimate amplifier. Power no longer needs to silence the expert; it simply floods the digital ecosystem with synthetic noise, deepfakes, and automated disinformation until the expert is drowned out and the public lacks the cognitive energy to discern truth.
In George Orwell’s 1984, the intellectual Syme is vaporised because clear vision threatens orthodox power. Today, the strategy has simply inverted.
As overwhelming as this feels, history reminds us that these junctures are not unprecedented. We have stood here before and found a way through.
When the Greeks faced sudden economic collapse during the 2008 debt crisis, anthropologist Dr Daniel Knight of the University of St Andrews in Scotland documented how they switched their national narrative from planning futures to remembering past survival, specifically the Great Famine of 1941 and wartime occupation. By looking back to historical blueprints of endurance, they found the psychological resources to persist.
Knight’s research on 17th century Europe reveals an even more striking parallel. That period endured the Great Plague, economic collapse, the burning of Constantinople and London, a Little Ice Age, and violent religious upheavals. Yet resolution did not result in total collapse. Instead, it gave birth to a more decentralised, democratic governance, improved public sanitation, and massive institutional investment in the sciences and the humanities. The brutal polycrisis of the 1600s was directly responsible for the Enlightenment in the 17th and 18th centuries.
A modern precedent: during the 1973 Opec oil embargo, the Dutch government did not just scramble for alternative fossil fuels. Instead, they listened to urban planners, instituted car-free Sundays, and laid the groundwork for the world’s most robust cycling infrastructure. They emerged vastly more resilient, healthy, and energy-independent.
The antidote to our modern paralysis lies in reclaiming science, public investment, and empirical reason as deeply human traditions. We know intuitively that the current system is under severe strain. We see the increasing extremity of weather events, the plastic choking our oceans, and the skyrocketing costs of safe housing and food. Yet, an Orwellian doublethink persists; we hold simultaneously that our lived experience is unbearable and this is the only way forward. It is not.
Our hospitals, museums, and schools are the literal bastions of humanity’s hard-won progress against the whims of nature and the recklessness of deregulation. We enjoy our current standards of living because of centuries of painstaking scientific inquiry and public welfare investment, not despite it.
That legacy belongs to everyone: Galileo’s defiance, the decimal system of the Islamic Golden Age, surgery techniques and discovery of zero by Indian scholars, the technological innovations by Chinese civilisations, or the ecological sophistication of indigenous traditions.
Science and education are not elite instruments for lecturing the public. They are a universal human inheritance. We must weave that spirit of scientific inquiry back into the fabric of national life. Through frameworks like the National Planetary Health Action Plan and the Science, Technology and Innovation Ministry’s leadership, we can tie science directly to green jobs, resilient infrastructure, and genuine wellbeing.
Scientia potentia est. Knowledge is power. We have been here before. We know how to find the way home.
Prof Tan Sri Dr Jemilah Mahmood, a physician and experienced crisis leader, is the executive director of the Sunway Centre for Planetary Health at Sunway University. She is the founder of Mercy Malaysia and has served in leadership roles internationally with the United Nations and Red Cross for the last decade. She writes on Planetary Health Matters for StarExtra’s monthly Ecowatch pullout.
