‘Something Wicked This Way Comes’

By the pricking of my thumbs, something wicked this way comes', is a quotation from William Shakespeare's Macbeth, spoken by the Second Witch in Act 4, Scene 1, to signify Macbeth's approach.In Shakespeare's play, the line uses folklore, where a tingling in the thumbs signals evil, to foreshadow Macbeth's arrival and highlight his transformation into a monstrous figure.As a society, we have had a tingling in our thumbs for decades and, like many mild symptoms that can signify deeper problems, we have been resolute in ignoring it, thinking that it will just go away of its own accord.But that tingling hasn't gone away.It has only become worse over time to the point of criticality.As a society we feel this pain in many different ways, including in many aspects of our daily lives, most of which are universal: the impacts of climate change; social injustice; crime; conflict; food insecurity; environmental harm; and health and wellbeing.We can add to that list the global rise in authoritarian and anti-democratic movements.To make matters worse, and drawing on the influence of Systems Thinking, all of these complex and so-called 'wicked problems' are deeply entangled, making them even harder to resolve without risking further and deeper problems occurring elsewhere.The growth of authoritarian and anti-democratic