imagination deficit

I’m convinced that we’re suffering from an ‘imaginary crisis’. By this, I don’t mean that the various crises around us aren’t real, but rather that there’s a deep malaise affecting our capacity for imagination, whether social or political.

the world’s most visible public intellectuals today more often revive or reassert old ideas, rather than generating new ones. The result is that old zombie orthodoxies survive far longer than they should.

whereas the activism I’d been raised on was fuelled by hope, what struck me most about these young people was their profound pessimism. They wanted humanity to avert disaster, but, despite politicians announcing Green Deals of many kinds, they had little hope that their societies could become much better.

At the Institute for the Future we believe that the value of futures thinking is not in predicting the future (something no one can do), but in imagining possibilities of what the future could be. And if there was ever a time we needed such imagination, it is today.

I’ve found a strikingly similar pattern among political leaders, academics, NGO workers, businesspeople and young high-fliers, and not just in Europe and North America. Young people that I met in Africa were generally quite optimistic, but here too, despite burgeoning science-fiction scenes, dynamic hubs of digital innovation and lively political m

This prompted me to review many of the hundreds of books published each year on society, economics and politics. While many offer a striking diagnosis, most offer little in the way of prescription, which is usually left to a final chapter.

Countries that used to define themselves through creating bold new institutions no longer do so—there are no recent equivalents to the NHS or the BBC in Britain; no equivalents of NASA or DARPA in the US. In much of academic life, too, you are more likely to succeed by slightly tweaking an established idea than creating a novel one.18

Are there examples from recent or distant history, when the public imagination has felt really alive? Not just for an elite clique of poets and artists, like the Romantics, or powerful leaders who commission imaginative and artistic people in service of their regimes (think Venice), but when for large swathes of ordinary people it has felt like a m