The Future Thinker’s Dilemma

What beliefs keep the system in place? And what new narratives could change or replace the system?

Or, as illustrated by one of my all-time favorite quotes:

*“The task is not so much to see what no one has yet seen; but to think what nobody has yet thought about that which everybody sees.”

*Erwin Schödinger

Most of the institutions shaping the world today are incapable of imagining anything other than their everlasting existence. And so things carry on, no matter how toxic, how ridiculous, or how contrary to values that most people share.

Given everything humanity has accomplished, all of it driven by leaps of the imagination, why is envisioning a safer, saner, happier, more peaceful path forward so consistently beyond our reach? Indeed, why does it seem increasingly beyond our reach?

The thought that keeps me awake at night is that the further we get into the big challenges of Now – economic inequality, climate change, the very real risk of the collapse of many of the key aspects of the economy we depend on, mass migration and so on – the less able we are to imagine a way out of them.