This week, a post from the archive: from February of 2022, which I thought might be relevant three years later.
The word crisis comes to us from the Greek krisis: the physician Hippocrates used it to refer to the turning point in the course of a disease, marking whether the patient would recover or…not recover. Centuries ago, it was also used in courts to law to refer to a decision.
Crisis, now, generally means the whole ordeal itself—not simply the turning point.
I like it because crisis is empowering. For those who make up crises, we call them dramatic. But what could be more clarifying than waking up and deciding that whatever happens today will be a really big deal, a crisis of sorts, and the emotional heft I put into the events will pull others into my orbit?
Even more, crisis is clarifying. It’s the automatic reply on your email that says you’re doing something vitally important. It’s the opportunity to focus all your energies in one direction. If our lives are a muddle of desires and hopes, setbacks and accomplishments, and we try to piece together a coherent story out of this puzzle, crisis jolts the story into focus. We must act in one direction. A few veterans I have spoken to talk about the clarity of war. The clarity of your role in the story brings meaning and purpose, and your brain craves both of these.
Case in point: we spend inordinate amounts of time searching for meaning by watching and consuming stories, and when we’re not doing that, we (or, at least I) interpret events to understand them. Language itself (and we humans have cornered the market on language) is a meaning-making tool.
If you’ve been around a toddler, you understand crisis. If you’ve been in high school, you understand crisis. (Odd, that confluence between toddlers and teenagers.) If you work closely with others, you understand crisis. If you follow the news, you understand crisis.
Global warming is a crisis. So is voter suppression. So is what’s happening between Russia and the Ukraine. So are the supposedly (and without any compelling evidence) fraudulent elections in 2020. All of these have the ability to pull people in, create meaning in their stories, and purpose in their lives.
And this is intoxicating. We want meaning and purpose and others around us fighting for the same cause. Some of life’s richest moments come from such times.
Crises happen. They happen with sicknesses, and they happen in our society. We are recovering, by the way, from a global pandemic. It seems to have been a crisis that exposed the cracks in the system rather than the strength of the foundation. People are upset. Inflation is escalating—something many predicted. Our government, which seemed intractably stuck a decade ago, now appears incapable of accomplishing anything. Thinkers are openly wondering how our political parties will be reshaped in the next decade. At the heels of a pandemic, we seem to be entering, rather than exiting, turmoil.
And there will be crises and claims of crises.
The telling sign around crisis is power. I’m not talking about the energy crisis: I’m referring to who has power and who receives power. For crisis often involves the transfer of power. The crisis around elections is certainly about power. Global warming, too, stems from our beliefs about power—both in how to regulate emissions nationally and, globally, how such regulation might create challenges for emerging or maturing economies. We have questions of power, which point to questions of equity. The other side of this is that emerging economies—Haiti, Kenya, the Philippines—are some of those most impacted by global warming thus far.
If crisis and story are related, and crisis asks questions around power, so do stories. Stories you watch on television or read in books are almost always about power. Generally, the less powerful gain power on the rich. Or, the less powerful discover their power. This is why transitional ages—toddlers and teenagers—generate crisis. They are seeking new ways to exert power. We need to teach them that there are healthier ways to find power than generating crisis.
Some adults learn this. Some don’t.
One of the most elemental questions about crisis is to ask what it’s asserting about power—who is without power, and who should have power. This is why we sympathize with toddlers and teenagers: they often lack power. It’s also why we should be wary of those in power claiming crisis, as they are often wanting more power to go their way.
Our leaders have often done this in the past, and not wrongly. Abraham Lincoln claimed crisis in the Civil War (apt, I think) and increased the powers of his office by suspending certain rights of civilians.
More often, leaders use crisis for their own ends. Not unlike an angry toddler.
So the question to ask as you read the news, the next crisis: will this crisis lead to more people being empowered, or will it lead to loss of power? Will it concentrate power into the hands of one person or group, or will it—like a good story—show how the less powerful can gain more power?
After all, the Greek word krisis appears many times in the New Testament—another story of the lesser gaining power over the empire (we’ll leave aside the many atrocities Christians have committed once they had power—and how the less powerful needed a crisis point to overthrow them). But in the founding story, we hear phrases about the central figure of Christianity—Jesus—and that he will not break a bruised reed or quench a smoldering wick. He will not snuff out the weak until he brings judgment or justice or Greek word used in law, krisis, to victory.
Watch for crisis. In our world and in your life, may it bring power to the powerless.