imagination deficit
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.
Geoff Mulgan • Another World Is Possible: How to Reignite Social and Political Imagination
Powerful actors must keep us convinced that it’s the people around us—everyday folks whose struggles overlap with our own—who pose the greatest threat to our safety, well-being, and happiness. It is the grandest illusion ever created: in a world where corporations and governments worldwide are poised to annihilate most life on Earth, we are made to
... See moreKelly Hayes • Let This Radicalize You
Her imagination, she knew, was a means to escape this cul-de-sac of despair.
Lynell George • The Visions of Octavia Butler
Imagination, in other words, is the ground on which we fight against determinism, fatalism, the dead hand of hindsight and the unavoidable tendency of our brains, always hungry to find meanings and patterns, to conclude that whatever did happen was the only thing that could have happened.
Geoff Mulgan • Another World Is Possible: How to Reignite Social and Political Imagination
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.
Geoff Mulgan • Another World Is Possible: How to Reignite Social and Political Imagination
Confessional art can be beautiful, and it can be terrible; either way, to love it only as a representation of what we already know is to deny it, and ourselves, a much richer complexity. Pop music is where fantasies are played out, turned into mansions and lived in, where five hundred people can tumble out of a clown car and every dream comes true.
... See moreDirt • Dirt: The Decay of Lying...
we are losing our capacity to “conceptualize a tomorrow that [is] radically different from our present.
walkerart.org • The Gift: Creativity and the Artist in the Modern World
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.
Geoff Mulgan • Another World Is Possible: How to Reignite Social and Political Imagination
we are simply incapable of imagining ourselves on the other side of a profound change, because the present self doing the imagining is the very self that needs to have died in order for the future self being imagined to emerge.
This is why the profoundest changes tend to happen not willed but spawned by fertile despair — the surrender at the rock
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