Such ideas of a chain connecting past and future can also help us to make connections between our lives in biographical time, the larger sweep of historical time and the vastly greater sweeps of cosmic time.

We long ago lost any hope that beauty and truth are connected. But the beauty of ideas—their character and resonance—does influence their appeal. Social ideas that feed off deeper notions of communion, unity, love, harmony, equilibrium and self-organisation seem to engage people, as do those that offer simplicity, symmetry, karma and universality.

Imagination does shape the world, and we are creatures of mind as well as matter, suggestible and wanting to conform.

They point to a future where states could use multiple forms of observation—feedback from citizens’ lived experience; data from sensors or satellites; citizen-generated data; and ‘sousveillance’, or surveillance from the bottom up rather than the top down—and then organise the data received as a commons, open to anyone. That vision would require a

geography of emancipatory imagination that’s very different from the geography of the first civilisations or states that grew up in much hotter climates.

They, like the public, tended to overestimate how much could change in the short term while underestimating how much could change in the longer term.4

Then the shared brain needs to be able to create. Governments need to be able to tap into new ideas, to experiment and invent. Many have innovation labs, teams and accelerators of various kinds, designed to speed up the generation of ideas.

If we lose faith in the future, we are likely to do less to make a better future happen. In this way, fatalism can, indeed, become fate.

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