Fighting The Astro-Turfing Of Culture, The Gravity Well Of Banality, And The Stifling Grip Of Pre-Packaged Thinking — Martin Weigel

History can get stuck and can go into reverse. Powerful interests will do whatever they can to resist, divert, confuse or disrupt trends that they find threatening. Imagination is one of the weapons with which to confront them—imagination that is compelling, rigorous and thought through.

‘The way decision-makers see it is that the world is not run by people and systems that require imaginative citizens, that require dreamers and thinkers and makers – we’re not needed in the economic models planned out for us.’

It would evaluate policy proposals from elsewhere in the government through a lens of whether they make the country more imaginative, or less. (So any policies likely to increase anxiety, stress and loneliness would not be permitted, for example.) It would train other departments to become more imaginative, more flexible, more playful. Its brief wo