Building the Infrastructure of Possibility

Notes from “Intersecting Worlds: The One We’ve Got, The One We’re Building, The Ones We Imagine”

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

Yet it is only through imagination that we can think about the future and break free from these intellectual prisons, usually by imagining one step at a time: how to extend, add to, subtract from or graft something new onto the institutions, laws and norms around us, in what is sometimes called the ‘adjacent possible’.

Bringing about the world we want to live in, the world we want to leave to our children is, substantially, the work of the imagination, or what educational reformer John Dewey describes as ‘the ability to look at things as if they could be otherwise’.18