Another World Is Possible

At the top, the first layer is ethos and vision, where imagination plays a role similar to religion. It provides an overall vision or direction for society that connects in a loose way to individual lives. That vision may be of the nation as a family; of society becoming ever more enlightened and free; it could be a promise of deep equality or futu

Beyond committed individuals, there’s an important role for political parties that are willing to engage with imagination to set up commissions, deliberations and explorations of the landscape ahead of them. Since parties remain our only institutions designed to create synthetic programmes that can win majority support, it’s vital that they attend

What if data were used by citizens to oversee governments, not the other way around?

But there are methods that can be used for the two steps essential to any process of imagination: first, distancing and questioning current reality; and second, designing an alternative. These are designed to put into action Albert Einstein’s comment that ‘Imagination is more important than knowledge. Knowledge is limited. Imagination encircles the

All that imagination can do is widen our menu of choices. It then remains for us to have the wisdom to choose well, avoiding the bad, the bullshit and the ugly.

So, for ideas banks to be useful, they need labels and indexes, and to be categorised with more than keywords. There needs to be some ranking, whether by volunteers or by experts, and some interpretation alongside the ideas themselves. Ideally, there should be some reward or recognition if an idea is adopted, adapted or used. This is a technical

Institutions sometimes seem like the opposite of imagination. They

But the best ways to imagine may be the ones that position this work as a collaboration—done with people rather than to or for them—giving people and communities the freedom to learn by doing and to adapt the general into the particular.

These are just a few of the ways that the pure chemistry of ideas mutates into new compounds through exposure to the oxygen of real societies, patterns which mean that the originators of ideas can rarely know what will happen to them.