Summary
A problem can be solved; a predicament can only be responded to. The distinction comes from the writer John Michael Greer, in a 2006 essay on his blog The Archdruid Report. A predicament has no solution: “Faced with a predicament, people come up with responses”, none of which makes it go away. His archetype is death. Industrial civilisation, he argued, has recast the predicaments of the human condition as problems for technology to fix.
Dougald Hine, crediting Greer, and Vanessa Machado de Oliveira have both taken it up; she says modernity reads its harms as “complicated problems that can be solved rather than complex predicaments that need to be confronted”.
Rationale
By this distinction a deep disposition is a predicament: “it doesn’t seem possible to be free of this”, only to respond with care. Greer offers only responses; we think conditions can be cultivated.