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

American sociologist C. Wright Mills called the sociological imagination: the capacity to shift from one perspective to another—from the political to the psychological; from examination of a single family to the comparative assessment of the national budgets of the world; from the theological school to the military establishment; from consideration

The shared brain also needs a shared memory—of what was tried in the past, or how to respond to unlikely but threatening risks. A well-organised memory is one justification for a permanent civil service. But few governments organise their memories very well, and many large organisations struggle to know what they know.

For the next few decades, we may be left with a very different landscape of contending imaginaries. Some will be ‘anti-imaginaries’. Politicians can choose to concentrate on dreams and hope on the one hand or fears and nightmares on the other, or they can opt for a pragmatic middle ground (perhaps one where the public are asked to slumber quietly).

The rapidly advancing research on how best to combine artificial intelligence and collective intelligence is promising.25 For example, it has demonstrated AI’s ability to feed back to a group, shifting patterns of opinion in real time in order to facilitate consensus.

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.

They point to a future where states could use multiple forms of observation—feedback from citizens’ lived experience; data from sensors or satellites; citizen-generated data; and ‘sousveillance’, or surveillance from the bottom up rather than the top down—and then organise the data received as a commons, open to anyone. That vision would require a

the most influential are not necessarily the most creative. Instead, we see an interesting pattern by which imagination is plentiful among people who are simultaneously insiders and outsiders.

The reformers of Emperor Meiji’s Japan, Atatürk’s Turkey and even Lenin’s USSR were evangelists of isomorphism, of catching up, better late than never. In each country, their evangelism sparked a reaction—a nostalgic assertion of the unique soul and spirit of the nation in literature and politics and a denunciation of the cold, heartless logic of m

this view is as misleading as its mirror, which holds that human nature can be whatever we want it to be. A more realistic perspective sees humans as malleable, shaped by environments and certainly co-evolving with their environments.