Your writing cuts with a rare sharpness. Not just diagnosing the crisis, but revealing how language itself has become part of the problem. You name the delusion so clearly: that substitution can stand in for transformation, and that our future can be engineered without reckoning with the ruins it’s being built upon.
But I want to linger on one thread.
You say we are suffering through a crisis of imagination. And I think that’s true, but only partially.
Because I see imagination everywhere. In solarpunk cooperatives, in regenerative land projects, in distributed tech circles refusing extraction, in Indigenous governance revivals, in artists reshaping narrative scaffolds, in mutual aid groups solving what states won't. We are imagining radically, but the system has built-in filters for imagination. If a vision doesn’t reinforce capital accumulation, political stability, or technological spectacle, it’s often made invisible. At best, it becomes a curiosity. At worst, a threat.
So maybe it’s not that we can’t imagine the world differently. Maybe it’s that only certain imaginations are permitted to surface.
And maybe the real crisis is what happens to a society when the vast majority of its creativity is ignored unless it can be monetized, politicized, or abstracted into a market-friendly myth. We are not starved of good ideas. We're starved of recognition. The crisis of imagination is not a lack of ideas, it’s the systemic dismissal of transformative ones.
And yes, there are many who are still trying to build the new within the shell of the old. Not out of naivety, but out of necessity. But alongside them are others who have given up, who retreat into disillusionment, numbness, or digital immersion, not because they lack care, but because to care too deeply without an outlet can become a form of quiet despair.
So I wonder if part of the work now is not just to imagine more, but to coordinate our imaginations in ways that can’t be ignored. To stitch together the fabric of possibility, one thread at a time, until even the systems that once denied our visions are wrapped in them.
Thank you for such a thoughtful response. I love your line “to stitch together the fabric of possibility” reminds me of tikkun olam, which I like to translate as mending the torn fabric of creation. You offer a critical distinction between a lack of imagination and the need to coordinate imaginations. You’ve got me thinking in new ways.
On point! There is a heap of the adjacent possible out there, being imagined and crafted into being. But the dominant narrative systems tend to subsume and co-opt them before that can take hold. It's partly a result of the information ecologies we are part of too. Algorithms are biased towards the dominant paradigm. Both because they are designed to reinforce a world view and because the negativity bias we have as humans tends to drive a significant amount of the engagement online. So these filters you refer to are very strong. And the positive deviants are starved of recognition.
I'd agree that coordinating the imagineers is one of the crux issues. But also enabling the signal of these preferable futures being lived, and artfully crafted into being getting more exposure.
One of the dimensions I am in the midst of research/drafting for a book chapter at the moment is around these themes. Building on some thinking published last year here (https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/10568172)
All terribly true, except that the notion we have until 2050 or 2070 is ludicrous. The cracks are already showing all over.
We can't solve this by fighting entrenched power. Nor by replacing political leadership. Fixes need to come from bottom-up activity. We need to build the new paradigm.
Those of us who do have imagination need to be doing whatever we can, wherever we can, now. People can't be until they are, so we have to be ready for them to come on board when they do. Many will not and will die rather than change addictive lifestyles. We have to be ready for that.
It is absolutely a crisis of imagination....or perhaps fear of change....or a mixture of both.
What is utterly predicatable is that, as the global prognosis worsens, we will look for easy answers to complex questions, and the strongmen demagogues will have their day all over again.
Have you read Anthony De Mello The Way To Love? Great little book that is singing in your choir here about the programming that makes our imagination stupid. We're caught in a trap. And yet we can get out anytime if we can drop attachments that life can only be XYZ.
Real freedom is terrifying to most people. Look at the sledge hammering by the rich to dominate and coerce us.
In our thousands, in our millions we are all Palestinians. Stop the wars on poor people and our ecosystems. Spend a trillion a year restoring ecosystems guaranteeing jobs, making love to the Earth g for 50 years. What else? Create your new world today. There is no way to do it fighting the rich.
Yours wasn't the only newsletter in my inbox today talking about the crisis of imagination!
You might be interested in checking out this study, discovered via Joe Muggs' Erratic Aesthetic newsletter today - really interesting analysis and ideas here:
Also made me think of a couple quotes from adrienne maree brown on imagination: "Imagination is one of the spoils of colonization, which in many ways is claiming who gets to imagine the future for a given geography. Losing our imagination is a symptom of trauma." She speaks elsewhere about the feeling of being 'trapped inside someone else's imagination' which to me articulates a feeling I think a lot of people have in their lives right now even if they can't put their finger on it.
I think the naming of this age as the Anthropocene does at least half of the world a disservice. It is not people but the way some people think (or don't) that has led us to this point - the lack of imagination that you refer to.
In deference to Iain McGilchrist, I would suggest renaming this period the Sinisterocene! I refer to his well-researched theory of the roles of the right and left hemispheres of the brain and his conclusion that the left hemisphere with its grasping nature, its focus on what is immediately useful, its inability to see the whole except as the mechanical construction of the parts it perceives and its lack of emotional involvement is what is driving much of our global progress towards the cliff edge.
My Latin is virtually non-existent but I do remember that right is 'dexter' and left is 'sinister'.
As a sinistral being, I would heartily endorse renaming this period the Sinisterocene or even Sinistocene for brevity and ease of pronunciation. Don't get me started on dexter, how does the word ambidextrous even start making sense... being adept at using both right hands, I mean, FFS.
Thanks Rachel for your essay (I will share it widely) and commentators below for such a helpful thread. I recommend Ruha Benjamin’s powerful little book, Imagination: A Manifesto to add to this important conversation.
YES well said, and processes and tools and collective journeys to support us to rehearse the future we want and to build our collective imagination capacities as we go are part of what we need. We offer an immersive day long process that brings people together to rehearse the future called TOWNANYWHERE see some info and films we've made about the process https://linktr.ee/townanywhere - Im really interested to hear from others about processess and tools that can support this shift thats needed in how we imagine. Author Rob Hopkins said about our process 'Town Anywhere invites us to step into the future, to reimagine and rebuild the world and then to inhabit it. One of the most magival things I've ever been part of. Give your imagination a treat'.
Havent heard that Cincinnati example before. Very interesting case. Reminds of how pensioners are called to make some old 1960s missile again or fix some issue in banking system that hasnt been updated, or any other example anywhere that is left to run on its own. People generally dont put attention to anything that works, until it breaks... more spesific leadership ignores it even if engineers would talk about their concerns.
Nate Hagens and many others talk of Jevon's paradox. Nuclear fission or any other even better energy source would just mean mining trucks factories and rockets would get that new power source to do extraction 10x faster than now as that's how system is geared. Also of "technical backlog", this heavy leaning to future means things are often not fixed, as mattress is constantly being pulled under our feet by economic system. It is conditioned learning and experience.
I find baffling how billionaires talk of more humans on earth are needed when over half of even US people are underemployed or fully out of job(gig economy) already as it is. More and more nice things and innovations are concentrated 1960s NASA Apollo program style by very few dedicated smart minds to make that breakthrough and then it is simply delivered and "multiplied" by various systems to billions of people. This was already happening before digital age. Medicines are good example: very small core team manages to develop new drug. Then industrial capabilities can manufacture billion dozes of that drug in year. Core team is often just dozen people or less, as looking history how few(singular) people made breakthroughs in science and trouble was for everyone else to understand and apply it.
At least one viewpoint from Roman empire was how concentrated wealth over centuries there forced ever more expansion of empire to grow bigger, resembling our systems. Ultimately it collapsed to its weight as huge systems cause various environmental, economic and other issues piling up faster and faster.
The imagination is plastic. The more we rehearse actively hopeful futures, both individually and collectively, the more neurocognitively available they become. Increase the possibility space to more viscerally sense the preferable and collectively craft these realities so the preferable becomes probable.
We all want someone else to fix it, but not ourselves, which is the necessary and missing component. If Cincinnatus came to us today and said, "Everyone, cut your energy consumption in half", we would kill him.
I think, to modify the now well known observation that it's easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism, what is really beyond imagination is the end, or drastic shrinking of industrial production. As many of your guests have made clear, all the strands of the polycrisis point to this as inevitable. But because we are all absolutely dependent on industrial production, including food production, for our survival and because this growing dependency, over the past 250 years, has rendered the entire population of the "developed" world incapable of satisfying their own basic subsistence needs, most people see this looming devolution of industrial production as simply terrifying, actually impossible to contemplate. So all the "solutions" on offer, from "drill, baby, drill" to the Green New Deal, are attempts to evade coming to terms with this looming threat of de-industrialization
We have all been forced by the development of industrialism unwittingly into this situation of absolute dependency on a maladaptive, unsustainable system of work and production that has deprived us of any capacity for what Marxists call self-provisioning. The unraveling of this system is going to be horrific, while being, all things considered, unavoidable. Evolution is a bitch, populations do not get a Get Out of Jail Card when the "crime" is a failed adaptive strategy, especially when the strategy has led to ecological overshoot. So this horror is the event horizon beyond which our imaginations cannot reach. Even oil company CEOs understand that if their industry were to give in to demands to close up shop, the death toll in succeeding months would be, in much of the world, almost extinction level. Their resistance to change goes beyond just greed and their own privilege.
I think those of us in the "world in crisis" space need to recognize how deep the crisis really is, and how the dark future it portends is simply beyond the ability of most people to deal with. Castigating people for lack of imagination is pointless. Nobody can imagine what the world might be like when, and if, we and the biosphere pass through this evolutionary bottleneck. Nobody can imagine what new worlds our descendants may build in this unimaginable world.... And nobody WANTS to imagine the terrible dark passage through a kind of species wide near death experience that will lead to this unimaginable world reborn.... This is only human....
What imagination can do for us is suggest all sorts of things to do to in the here and now to leave behind a foundation of what Dougald Hine calls good ruins for future generations to build on--regenerating ecosystems and regenerating cultures of self-provisioning, relearning skills once common to everybody (without lapsing into survivalist prepperism) is just a start. And nurturing the imagination of hope by emphasizing the transformational potential of crisis.
Your writing cuts with a rare sharpness. Not just diagnosing the crisis, but revealing how language itself has become part of the problem. You name the delusion so clearly: that substitution can stand in for transformation, and that our future can be engineered without reckoning with the ruins it’s being built upon.
But I want to linger on one thread.
You say we are suffering through a crisis of imagination. And I think that’s true, but only partially.
Because I see imagination everywhere. In solarpunk cooperatives, in regenerative land projects, in distributed tech circles refusing extraction, in Indigenous governance revivals, in artists reshaping narrative scaffolds, in mutual aid groups solving what states won't. We are imagining radically, but the system has built-in filters for imagination. If a vision doesn’t reinforce capital accumulation, political stability, or technological spectacle, it’s often made invisible. At best, it becomes a curiosity. At worst, a threat.
So maybe it’s not that we can’t imagine the world differently. Maybe it’s that only certain imaginations are permitted to surface.
And maybe the real crisis is what happens to a society when the vast majority of its creativity is ignored unless it can be monetized, politicized, or abstracted into a market-friendly myth. We are not starved of good ideas. We're starved of recognition. The crisis of imagination is not a lack of ideas, it’s the systemic dismissal of transformative ones.
And yes, there are many who are still trying to build the new within the shell of the old. Not out of naivety, but out of necessity. But alongside them are others who have given up, who retreat into disillusionment, numbness, or digital immersion, not because they lack care, but because to care too deeply without an outlet can become a form of quiet despair.
So I wonder if part of the work now is not just to imagine more, but to coordinate our imaginations in ways that can’t be ignored. To stitch together the fabric of possibility, one thread at a time, until even the systems that once denied our visions are wrapped in them.
Thank you for such a thoughtful response. I love your line “to stitch together the fabric of possibility” reminds me of tikkun olam, which I like to translate as mending the torn fabric of creation. You offer a critical distinction between a lack of imagination and the need to coordinate imaginations. You’ve got me thinking in new ways.
On point! There is a heap of the adjacent possible out there, being imagined and crafted into being. But the dominant narrative systems tend to subsume and co-opt them before that can take hold. It's partly a result of the information ecologies we are part of too. Algorithms are biased towards the dominant paradigm. Both because they are designed to reinforce a world view and because the negativity bias we have as humans tends to drive a significant amount of the engagement online. So these filters you refer to are very strong. And the positive deviants are starved of recognition.
I'd agree that coordinating the imagineers is one of the crux issues. But also enabling the signal of these preferable futures being lived, and artfully crafted into being getting more exposure.
One of the dimensions I am in the midst of research/drafting for a book chapter at the moment is around these themes. Building on some thinking published last year here (https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/10568172)
All terribly true, except that the notion we have until 2050 or 2070 is ludicrous. The cracks are already showing all over.
We can't solve this by fighting entrenched power. Nor by replacing political leadership. Fixes need to come from bottom-up activity. We need to build the new paradigm.
Those of us who do have imagination need to be doing whatever we can, wherever we can, now. People can't be until they are, so we have to be ready for them to come on board when they do. Many will not and will die rather than change addictive lifestyles. We have to be ready for that.
It is absolutely a crisis of imagination....or perhaps fear of change....or a mixture of both.
What is utterly predicatable is that, as the global prognosis worsens, we will look for easy answers to complex questions, and the strongmen demagogues will have their day all over again.
Have you read Anthony De Mello The Way To Love? Great little book that is singing in your choir here about the programming that makes our imagination stupid. We're caught in a trap. And yet we can get out anytime if we can drop attachments that life can only be XYZ.
Real freedom is terrifying to most people. Look at the sledge hammering by the rich to dominate and coerce us.
In our thousands, in our millions we are all Palestinians. Stop the wars on poor people and our ecosystems. Spend a trillion a year restoring ecosystems guaranteeing jobs, making love to the Earth g for 50 years. What else? Create your new world today. There is no way to do it fighting the rich.
Yours wasn't the only newsletter in my inbox today talking about the crisis of imagination!
You might be interested in checking out this study, discovered via Joe Muggs' Erratic Aesthetic newsletter today - really interesting analysis and ideas here:
https://www.ucl.ac.uk/steapp/sites/steapp/files/2020_04_geoff_mulgan_swp.pdf?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email
Also made me think of a couple quotes from adrienne maree brown on imagination: "Imagination is one of the spoils of colonization, which in many ways is claiming who gets to imagine the future for a given geography. Losing our imagination is a symptom of trauma." She speaks elsewhere about the feeling of being 'trapped inside someone else's imagination' which to me articulates a feeling I think a lot of people have in their lives right now even if they can't put their finger on it.
Brilliant Rachel you have absolutely nailed our dilemma
Brilliant!
I think the naming of this age as the Anthropocene does at least half of the world a disservice. It is not people but the way some people think (or don't) that has led us to this point - the lack of imagination that you refer to.
In deference to Iain McGilchrist, I would suggest renaming this period the Sinisterocene! I refer to his well-researched theory of the roles of the right and left hemispheres of the brain and his conclusion that the left hemisphere with its grasping nature, its focus on what is immediately useful, its inability to see the whole except as the mechanical construction of the parts it perceives and its lack of emotional involvement is what is driving much of our global progress towards the cliff edge.
My Latin is virtually non-existent but I do remember that right is 'dexter' and left is 'sinister'.
As a sinistral being, I would heartily endorse renaming this period the Sinisterocene or even Sinistocene for brevity and ease of pronunciation. Don't get me started on dexter, how does the word ambidextrous even start making sense... being adept at using both right hands, I mean, FFS.
😆 Yes, I struggled a bit with the formulation but your more diminutive version works well.
Thanks Rachel for your essay (I will share it widely) and commentators below for such a helpful thread. I recommend Ruha Benjamin’s powerful little book, Imagination: A Manifesto to add to this important conversation.
YES well said, and processes and tools and collective journeys to support us to rehearse the future we want and to build our collective imagination capacities as we go are part of what we need. We offer an immersive day long process that brings people together to rehearse the future called TOWNANYWHERE see some info and films we've made about the process https://linktr.ee/townanywhere - Im really interested to hear from others about processess and tools that can support this shift thats needed in how we imagine. Author Rob Hopkins said about our process 'Town Anywhere invites us to step into the future, to reimagine and rebuild the world and then to inhabit it. One of the most magival things I've ever been part of. Give your imagination a treat'.
Havent heard that Cincinnati example before. Very interesting case. Reminds of how pensioners are called to make some old 1960s missile again or fix some issue in banking system that hasnt been updated, or any other example anywhere that is left to run on its own. People generally dont put attention to anything that works, until it breaks... more spesific leadership ignores it even if engineers would talk about their concerns.
Nate Hagens and many others talk of Jevon's paradox. Nuclear fission or any other even better energy source would just mean mining trucks factories and rockets would get that new power source to do extraction 10x faster than now as that's how system is geared. Also of "technical backlog", this heavy leaning to future means things are often not fixed, as mattress is constantly being pulled under our feet by economic system. It is conditioned learning and experience.
I find baffling how billionaires talk of more humans on earth are needed when over half of even US people are underemployed or fully out of job(gig economy) already as it is. More and more nice things and innovations are concentrated 1960s NASA Apollo program style by very few dedicated smart minds to make that breakthrough and then it is simply delivered and "multiplied" by various systems to billions of people. This was already happening before digital age. Medicines are good example: very small core team manages to develop new drug. Then industrial capabilities can manufacture billion dozes of that drug in year. Core team is often just dozen people or less, as looking history how few(singular) people made breakthroughs in science and trouble was for everyone else to understand and apply it.
At least one viewpoint from Roman empire was how concentrated wealth over centuries there forced ever more expansion of empire to grow bigger, resembling our systems. Ultimately it collapsed to its weight as huge systems cause various environmental, economic and other issues piling up faster and faster.
Imagine not being able enough to spell culture without the cult, you, are, eee?
Thanks for these provocations as always Rachel 🙏
The imagination is plastic. The more we rehearse actively hopeful futures, both individually and collectively, the more neurocognitively available they become. Increase the possibility space to more viscerally sense the preferable and collectively craft these realities so the preferable becomes probable.
♾️🌏🌎🌍♾️ Junkies always have a hard time with "REALITY".
We all want someone else to fix it, but not ourselves, which is the necessary and missing component. If Cincinnatus came to us today and said, "Everyone, cut your energy consumption in half", we would kill him.
I think, to modify the now well known observation that it's easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism, what is really beyond imagination is the end, or drastic shrinking of industrial production. As many of your guests have made clear, all the strands of the polycrisis point to this as inevitable. But because we are all absolutely dependent on industrial production, including food production, for our survival and because this growing dependency, over the past 250 years, has rendered the entire population of the "developed" world incapable of satisfying their own basic subsistence needs, most people see this looming devolution of industrial production as simply terrifying, actually impossible to contemplate. So all the "solutions" on offer, from "drill, baby, drill" to the Green New Deal, are attempts to evade coming to terms with this looming threat of de-industrialization
We have all been forced by the development of industrialism unwittingly into this situation of absolute dependency on a maladaptive, unsustainable system of work and production that has deprived us of any capacity for what Marxists call self-provisioning. The unraveling of this system is going to be horrific, while being, all things considered, unavoidable. Evolution is a bitch, populations do not get a Get Out of Jail Card when the "crime" is a failed adaptive strategy, especially when the strategy has led to ecological overshoot. So this horror is the event horizon beyond which our imaginations cannot reach. Even oil company CEOs understand that if their industry were to give in to demands to close up shop, the death toll in succeeding months would be, in much of the world, almost extinction level. Their resistance to change goes beyond just greed and their own privilege.
I think those of us in the "world in crisis" space need to recognize how deep the crisis really is, and how the dark future it portends is simply beyond the ability of most people to deal with. Castigating people for lack of imagination is pointless. Nobody can imagine what the world might be like when, and if, we and the biosphere pass through this evolutionary bottleneck. Nobody can imagine what new worlds our descendants may build in this unimaginable world.... And nobody WANTS to imagine the terrible dark passage through a kind of species wide near death experience that will lead to this unimaginable world reborn.... This is only human....
What imagination can do for us is suggest all sorts of things to do to in the here and now to leave behind a foundation of what Dougald Hine calls good ruins for future generations to build on--regenerating ecosystems and regenerating cultures of self-provisioning, relearning skills once common to everybody (without lapsing into survivalist prepperism) is just a start. And nurturing the imagination of hope by emphasizing the transformational potential of crisis.