Another World Is Possible: How to Reignite Social and Political Imagination

Imagination is like thin air, cloud-like. Imagination only truly influences the world when it ceases to be imagination and mutates into repetitions, habits and cycles, becoming embedded in the rhythms of daily life, a part of people’s jobs and routines. Societies are best understood as patterns of regularity of this kind—what Pierre Bourdieu descri

Our world is shaped by dominant political imaginaries of which there are relatively few at any point in history.

In a densely interdependent world, our imagination must be shared as well as individual, and it must reach out into the deep future, not just the immediate future. Freedom in the moment is not a true freedom. Without alternative options, we cannot plan or choose. We become slaves to the ideas of others.

The world into which we are born was shaped by a capacity to generate the new through billions of years of evolution. Now, for us, a comparable capacity to imagine, together, is a vital aspect of what it means to be free and alive. Imagination liberates us from the illusion that the way the world is now is the only way it can be. In this sense, ima

Museums of the future Should every city or nation have physical spaces dedicated to exploring the future, combining experiences (using virtual reality), visualisations, games and ‘objects of the future’? We could imagine a new cadre of curators and orchestrators who become skilled in helping people to explore possible future worlds.

Imagination comes alive in its struggles with the reality of the material world and humans with their own purposes, characters and interests. Contrary to the assumption of the Romantics, this kind of imagination always mutates as it becomes actualised, transforming through its interaction with the world of reality, like a chemical forming new compo

Society now and in the future depends on imagination Any kind of social organisation depends on imagination; something has to be thought before it can become real. So, imagination is both the glue for any society and the only fuel for change.

Pioneers of ideas and pioneers of practice are complementary Imaginers have to find collaborators—doers, organisers, regularisers—if their ideas are to be more than imaginary. The collaborators’ job is to turn poetry into prose; theology and prophecy into ritual; compassion into organised generosity; mercy into justice. It involves testing and expe

The most influential ideas tend to be quite simple: generative concepts that can spark multiple interpretations and adaptations.