This paper argues that the contemporary metacrisis is rooted not in a failure of knowledge, strategy, or political will but in a critical misunderstanding of metanarratives: their nature, their function, and their decisive role as the implicit motivational grammar of culture.
Prevailing scholarship, following Lyotard, conflates metanarrative with explicit grand narrative, treating both as targets for deconstruction while leaving the true locus of cultural formation, the implicit, pre-conscious architecture of value, motivation, and purpose, unaddressed. This paper proposes a reconceptualisation of metanarratives as foundational triadic structures of Value, Motivation, and Purpose, which together constitute the deep cultural grammar from which explicit beliefs, behaviours, and social systems are generated.
