Another World Is Possible: How to Reignite Social and Political Imagination

Because big systems are so slow to change, there is no option but to look far into the future, to 2050 and beyond.

If anything, experts were worse at spotting these trends than non-experts, insiders worse than outsiders.

In each field we can deliberately try to push the boundaries, developing sketches of alternative routes to see if they make sense, if they would work and if anyone would feel at home in a world where they were implemented. By multiplying these ideas across different fields, we create larger ‘possibility spaces’, a bigger menu of options for our soc

much of our social imagination involves scaling up concepts from daily life—the camaraderie of friends, the competition of sports (the ‘level playing field’) or the care of the family—to the level of organisations and whole societies.

our personal sense of pessimism or optimism about the future will likely never be accurate.

We can try to grasp future possibilities rationally. But we can also grasp them viscerally—feeling or even tasting them, as well as seeing.

the weakness of utopias is that they ‘eliminate real people’. He argued, ‘In a utopia real people cannot exist, for the very obvious reason that real people are what constitute the world that we know, and it is that world that every utopia is designed to replace.’1

I think of utopia as more like a verb than a noun, an activity rather than a finished product. We should emphasise utopia-making rather than utopias, and perhaps we need a word for this: ‘utopifying’. The act of thinking about possible utopias is entirely healthy, indeed essential, particularly at a time like ours which is awash with dystopias. But

Hegel once joked, ‘We learn from history that we do not learn from history.’