Imagination and the search for a better future
If something has to be imagined before it can be built, what does it mean that all of the futures we're imagining are bleak?
This is part of the “Wondrous Creatures” series, which looks at the world through the philosophy and ideas of Alan Moore. Read more here.
A question for you: can you even imagine a better future for yourself and the planet? Take a moment and think about it. I am not controlling how fast you read this article.
Okay: what did you imagine? The overthrow of capitalism in a glorious revolution? Perhaps a kind of solarpunk ecotopia where we all grow our own food? A world where AI takes all the jobs we don’t want instead of all the jobs we do want? Where humans live in harmony with nature, a la the Navi in Avatar? A futuristic technotopia where we all surf around on hoverboards? A New York City where the skyscrapers are covered in edible native plants and you can dip a cup into the Hudson River and safely take a drink?
There’s no wrong answer here — the world you’d like to see is your own, and you are allowed to have a vision no one else has.
Rob Hopkins, the creator of the Transition Towns movement, regularly asks people to do this exercise at his speaking events. Transition Towns is a global movement trying to remake our communities into something more sustainable in the face of looming climate catastrophe. Hopkins started it in town of Totnes in Devon, England, and it quickly caught on and spread. There are now hundreds of Transition Network groups around the world.
In his truly excellent book From What Is to What If, Hopkins emphasizes what the single most important obstacle is to building our better future: lack of imagination. This is a major problem when it comes to climate change, because climate change is a problem that can only be solved with a staggering amount of imagination, and the problem is coming to a head at a moment when our collective imagination, it has to be said, has totally stagnated.
This isn’t necessarily an accident: we’ve got a stagnant collective imagination because we’re all so goddamn stressed we’re losing our goddamn minds. And this stress is the direct result of a wide swathe of policy decisions made by people in power: every time there’s a cut to social services, where food, healthcare, or other basic needs get a little more expensive, we get a little more stressed out. Every time we pick up our phones and go onto an app that has an algorithm designed to sap us of our attention so they can serve us endless ads, we get a little less focused, a little less free and playful in our minds. Our kids have it worse, because most of our schools aren’t designed to encourage playfulness and imagination, they are designed to encourage achievement and conformity.
See how quickly a discussion of our future can turn into a doom spiral? But there’s good news here: imagination is not a finite resource. If we could get ourselves into places where our thinking was freer, more playful, more imaginative, we could work ourselves out of all of these problems. For a look at how, we should take a look at some of the masters of imagination.
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