possibility studies
Germany invented the idea that you can’t have a healthy future unless you’ve come to terms with the past (summed up in the unwieldy word Vergangenheitsbewältigung). After 1945, Germans put huge efforts into confronting their history openly and honestly. But we need this concept’s mirror too. In our own lives, it’s hard to be happy if we have
... See moreGeoff Mulgan • Another World Is Possible: How to Reignite Social and Political Imagination
Of course, possibility beliefs can, and often do, derive from abstract self-beliefs as we get older. But also, simple beliefs about possible actions and their limits might precede, and contribute to, the construction of our self-efficacy, our mindsets, and our identities over time.
Tamar Kushnir • How Children Learn to Transcend Limits: Developmental Pathways to Possibility Beliefs
We can imagine almost anything, but only a tiny fraction of what we imagine can become real. There is no easy way to verify how much change is possible. Hard-nosed realists may be right much of the time, but then, periodically, they become dramatically wrong. Wild-eyed visionaries may be wrong much of the time, but occasionally they become
... See moreGeoff Mulgan • Another World Is Possible: How to Reignite Social and Political Imagination
‘exploratory social science’.
Geoff Mulgan • Another World Is Possible: How to Reignite Social and Political Imagination
For millennia, new ways of organizing social relations have emerged when philosophers, theologians, reformers, writers, and other visionaries imagine them elsewhere, in some idealized world that serves as a mirror to reflect the deficiencies of the accepted state of things.
Kristen R. Ghodsee • Everyday Utopia: What 2,000 Years of Wild Experiments Can Teach Us About the Good Life
It is just that easy to open—or to limit—possibility. The approach, the tone, the details matter.
The approach is seeking—not to lock down a particular direct corrective, although those are necessary at times—but instead to include the nth-order—the ecological habit of change that changes change and keeps changing. There is a realm of "possible"
... See moreThe possibilities of what we might now think, and know, and become are not necessarily novel in the sense of never having been witnessed before. Many artists work in and with historical tropes and beckon, through them, beyond the present horizon. It is that bidirectionality that allows them to crack open the network of thought.
Perry Zurn, Dani S. Bassett • Curiosity and Networks of Possibility
People are not roles. "Finding a way" is about the unique possibilities that occur in relationship between particular people, in that particular water, on that particular day. There is no formula, no method; this realm of possibility is accessed through a sentiment of human care and imagination.
Nora Bateson, Combining
Although imagination is messy and fragmentary, I’ve found many patterns that we can make use of. I highlight that all novel inventions extend, invert or combine existing ideas; imagination is never a tabula rasa. Instead, our minds play with what’s around us, building on already familiar concepts, and we can choose to do this more systematically.