possibility studies

Indeed, it is this ability to grasp and challenge at the same time, to sense directions of change while simultaneously trying to shift and shape them, that makes imagination both most useful and most exciting.

(5) But the Real is much more than this “reality”! The real refers to the endlessly changing stream of life, “the unbroken wholeness,” to use Physicist David Bohm’s wonderful expression, out of which everything comes, including the Planet we all share. As the Manifesto puts it, the real is characterized by radical open-endedness and becoming. In

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.

Germans talk about the phenomenon of das Verschwinden der Zukunft, the disappearance of the future, and a widening gulf between what people hope for and what they think is likely to happen.

the capacity to cultivate and foster alternatives to social, political, cultural and economic conditions; it is a prerequisite for changing the world for the better.

Indeed, imagination is alive and well in relation to technology: a future is being built where manufactured goods will mainly be grown rather than made, where wars may be settled in a matter of seconds thanks to AI, or where long-standing hopes for the colonisation of space may start to be realised. Technology has repeatedly expanded the space of

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.

There is strong evidence that hope is good for us, and if imagination helps us to hope, then we should worry if it is blocked.