Systems Thinking, Polycrisis, and the Blind Spot of Power – Developing Economics

Why do so many people who claim to “see the whole system” remain blind to power?

This question struck me while listening to a recent episode of Planet Critical. The guest was Joseph Tainter, best known for The Collapse of Complex Societies. Tainter is celebrated as a pioneer of collapse studies and systems thinking. Yet when the conversation turned to the genocide in Gaza, his framing reduced it to Israel’s “historical fear of Arabs.” The structural realities of colonialism, imperialism, and resource politics — central to understanding both Gaza and the Middle East more broadly — disappeared. Here was a thinker revered for complexity, offering an analysis that was Eurocentric, ahistorical, and politically naïve.

This is not about Tainter alone. Similar patterns appear in the work of figures like Nate Hagens and Daniel Schmachtenberger, both of whom have influenced me personally. Their mission is helping people make sense of the complex issues: Nate by weaving ecology, energy, financial systems and human behavior into accessible frameworks; Daniel by building sweeping syntheses across cognitive science, culture, and existential risk.

The often criticise most disciplines for their blindness. But their critique of blindness has its own blindness. Across their work, capitalism, imperialism, colonialism, and class power rarely appear as sustained focal points. Yes, Daniel sometimes critiques modernity and gestures toward indigenous knowledge, and Nate occasionally hosts guests who reference colonial history. But overall, the crisis is cast as a species-level problem — as though “humanity” collectively overshoots limits — rather than as the outcome of specific, historically rooted systems of exploitation with identifiable beneficiaries and victims.

A Larger Pattern

And this is not just about three individuals. They exemplify a broader tendency in the systems thinking and complexity science intelligentsia, especially in the Global North over the past half-century:

• Neutral meta-framing — presenting systems theory as above politics, which in practice avoids confronting entrenched power.
• Universalist problem definitions — describing crises as “human” or “civilizational,” obscuring vast inequalities in responsibility and vulnerability.
• Institutional safety — work that fits comfortably within universities, think tanks, or even corporate boardrooms, where radical critique is unwelcome. Systems thinking has become a staple of business schools.
• Selective canons and guest lists — political economists and sociologists are rarely invited into the conversation, despite the centrality of their disciplines to systemic change.

Even the Club of Rome’s Limits to Growth — groundbreaking in modeling planetary boundaries — exemplified this pattern: technocratic in tone, light on political economy, and silent on power. Many newer frameworks, like Doughnut Economics, while valuable as communicative tools, can replicate the same blind spots when applied in mainstream policy or corporate contexts without a critical power analysis.

This pattern has been noted by others (see Farwa Sial and Guney Isikara), including critiques of the “polycrisis” framing itself, which warn that it risks flattening distinct crises into a vague meta-narrative that sidelines capitalism’s role as the structuring force behind them.

What’s Missing

In my view, at least two key layers are consistently underdeveloped in mainstream systems analysis.

1. Political Economy
Both Hagens and Schmachtenberger sometimes reference Marvin Harris’ cultural materialism, which builds on the Marxist base–superstructure model. Harris divides societies into three layers: infrastructure (material and economic base), structure (social and political organization), and superstructure (ideology and culture).

In this framework, the infrastructure is precisely where political economy belongs — not in a narrow reductionist sense, but as the deep motor of systemic dynamics. Here historical materialism, dependency theory, world-systems theory, and the historical forms of capitalism–imperialism must be engaged.

What’s striking is that if you trace any strand of the polycrisis downward, you hit the same roots: exploitation and expropriation, concentration of power, accumulation of capital, and systems of unequal exchange within and between the Global North and South. These dynamics have been rigorously analyzed for generations within heterodox political economy.

So how can systems thinkers discuss polarization and anxiety in the attention economy without naming these forces? How can they map ecological overshoot without addressing the capital–nature contradiction? How can they talk about wars without situating them in the machinery of empire? If your framework claims to operate across layers but sidesteps these traditions, you are not mapping the system — you are mapping around it.

2. Sociology
A second blind spot lies in the leap from psychology to planetary scale. Most of these thinkers jump from individual behavior and neuroscience directly to global civilization, skipping over the ways societies shape human subjectivity. The result is an essentialist and ahistorical story of “human nature,” as though competitive and extractive behavior were timeless traits rather than products of specific social and economic arrangements.

Sociology offers a crucial counterpoint: our subjectivities are formed historically, collectively, and institutionally. To ignore this is to miss how power reproduces itself not only in structures and infrastructures, but in the very ways we see ourselves and others.

Politicising The System Thinking

Leaving out political economy and sociology produces an analysis that may look comprehensive — rich in data, patterns, and correlations — but remains incomplete and non-transformative. As Callum Cant has argued, this kind of analysis lingers at the level of symptoms, describing overlapping crises without tracing them to structural roots. It often treats data as neutral and universal, overlooking how knowledge itself is shaped by power. The risk is that systems thinking, in trying to describe “the whole,” ends up naturalizing the current order, offering solutions that stabilize rather than challenge the relations of production.

If systems thinking is to fulfill its emancipatory potential, its lens must widen. Biophysical limits, cultural narratives, and human psychology must be placed in dialectical relation to the structural realities of power: capitalism, imperialism, colonialism, class, and social formation at both national and international scales.

Only then can our analysis become both diagnostically complete and strategically transformative — able not just to map the mess, but to chart a way out of it. Otherwise, we risk becoming ever more sophisticated in describing the problem while still orbiting within the gravitational pull of the very system we claim to oppose.

Mohsen Anvaari has a PhD in IT from NTNU and is an IT consultant, photographer and activist based in Oslo. He explores the politics of digitalization, degrowth, and environmental justice.