Precisely because the future is unknowable, the most useful imagineers may not be the ones who offer complete and coherent visions of the future, but rather the ones who provide ideas and tools that others can work with.

this is where wisdom comes in, to temper and guide imagination, sensitive to the particularities of time and place.

There have been many times when the forms that states took mutated, sometimes strengthening their muscles the better to bully the people and sometimes being reshaped to serve them better.

For society’s imagineers, there are not so many obvious tools, the raw materials being life and society themselves; and there are few academies or colleges that teach the craft of change.

Who, ultimately, needs social imagination? The answer is that we all do, and we need to become more engaged. John Dewey argued that every political project needs to create the public that can be its author.8 In the same way, every utopia has to call into existence the public necessary for its creation, a public that can champion and own it.

Dunning called this effect ‘the anosognosia of everyday life’, referring to a neurological condition in which a disabled person either denies or seems unaware of their disability. He stated: ‘If you’re incompetent, you can’t know you’re incompetent … The skills you need to produce a right answer are exactly the skills you need to recognize what a

Some of the shock absorbers—from faith to family—that helped us cope with setbacks in the past have atrophied. It’s possible that a new basis of solidarity is slowly coming into view in which we are bound together by a new set of shared risks: the risk of loneliness and isolation; the risk of mental illness; the risk of being left behind. But these

That is why I tend to prefer explorers over prophets—explorers being people who set out to map the future through trial and error, who experiment, and who are humble in the face of complexities they can only dimly grasp. The prophets who believed they had unique insights that enabled them to paint comprehensive pictures of a desired future are, for

Benedict Anderson rightly described nations as ‘imagined communities’. They have boundaries and resources but are also held together by selective memories of great battles and heroes—and the equally careful forgetting of uncomfortable facts—woven into useful myths that provide a simplified map of the past into which we can insert ourselves, a