This is a very exciting book about how to reignite social and political imagination.
The author starts with :
I'm convinced that were suffering from an ‘imaginary crisis’.
By this, I don't mean that the various crises around us aren't real, but rather that there's a deep malaise affecting our capacity for imagination, whether social or political. We can more easily imagine the end of the world than a better future. The places that once were sources of exciting new ideas - universities, think tanks and political parties—for the most part no longer produce them. A sullen depression has swept over elites, commentators and much of the public, and you're more likely to get a hearing if you try to explain why progress is so difficult, or why decay, collapse and decline are likely, than if you attempt the opposite.
In order to be more imaginative, we need to eradicate materiality bias from our mind :
This is the common error of 'materiality bias’. Our minds find it easier to grasp visible things, and so we usually exaggerate their influence, whereas the invisible things are underestimated. Kings, emperors and the wealthy believed that their glory was best captured in palaces, monuments and statues, and today's futurology focuses much more on stuff and hardware than on changing values, rights or laws, even though these generally affect life even more than the physical.
He quotes few examples of countries that has created institution for imagination :
A few cities have also attempted to institutionalise imagination: Bologna has had a civic imagination office, while Adelaide in South Australia had a Thinker in Residence programme to feed imaginative ideas into the public sector. Singapore's Centre for Strategic Foresight has for the last ten years provided a space for imagination close to the core of government, while Dubai’s Future Foundation and its Museum of the Future have been able to explore fascinating ideas around issues like AI, government and ethics. The UAE has even had a Ministry of Possibilities, designed to push government to think more creatively.
In the interest of national security, there are policies and agency implemented in Sweden and Finland, to combat hybrid warfare and disinformation, probably our Majlis Keselamatan Negara (MKN) and Ministry of Education should take note :
Sweden was, as far as I can establish, the first nation to create a national Psychological Defense Agency to protect against the many attacks it was experiencing (many originating in Russia), while its neighbour Finland was the first to build into its school curriculums rigorous training to help children spot fake news and disinformation.
As an aging nation, the concept of third age should be acknowledged and proper policies should be drafted such as continous tertiary education :
The idea of retirement would lose its meaning and working lives would more closely resemble those in the preindustrial era, where the elderly continue working and contributing as they can. We might expect a great expansion of education for this age group, building on initiatives like the University of the Third Age, in which the elderly teach each other in classes and courses not unlike a traditional university; after all, we know that curiosity is vital for staying fit and healthy.
The concept of psychological prosperity should be emphasized in addressing worsening mental health issues :
What if governments took psychological prosperity as seriously as material prosperity? This is beginning to be talked about as more governments are starting to measure well-being. Some are looking in more detail at how policies affect well-being-for example how social security can affect anxiety as well as material poverty. We could imagine much more serious programmes focused on population mental health, addressing the anxiety or depression affecting 10, 20 or 30 per cent of the population and not just the intense needs currently served by health services (which rarely reach more than 1 per cent of the population in any one year). Such programmes would be likely to combine face-to-face therapy, online support and peer support.
Finally, an exercise to trigger imagination :
One example is the phenomenon of uchronie, or uchronia in English, which creates utopias of the past rather than of future possibilities-the imagined, wishful thinking of how events could have taken a different direction. A popular strand of uchronia in nineteenth-century France, for example, would start with Napoleon's victory at Waterloo and then imagine how things could have evolved differently.
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