everything is a mess, but nothing better could ever exist
unpacking some reasons for the failure to imagine our way out of polycrisis
Hello, this is Six Impossible Futures, a newsletter to spark wonder about what's possible. Today, contemplating what hinders our collective imagination
The following post is part of a Seed Pod collaboration about failure. Seed Pods are a SmallStack community project designed to help smaller publications lift each other up by publishing and cross-promoting around a common theme. We’re helping each other plant the seeds for growth!
Futurist Jim Dator is known for his Second Law of Futures: any useful idea about the future should appear to be ridiculous. Well, coming up with ridiculous ideas takes courage — not everyone is willing to voice something that sounds weird, stand by it, and risk facing criticism for it. More than anything, though, it requires imagination — what can academically be defined as “an experiential break from the here-and-now of immediate and proximal stimuli”. (That is — from the constraints of present reality.)
In one of the first lectures in futures studies, a claim was made that has stayed with me: that we are living through a failure of imagination, that we have lost the capacity to renew our images of the future that define what we work toward. The idea that we struggle to navigate polycrisis and find real solutions to urgent problems because of an imagination crisis is almost an axiom in the field. I want to explore why this might be happening.
In this essay, I refer to imagination not as an individual creative skill, but as a collective, societal capacity. While the future doesn’t exist as such, our ideas and imaginings of it do, and they shape how we make sense of the present and determine our actions. That's precisely why imagination gives us the power to shape something worth aspiring to. Scattered ideas may become larger imaginaries — socially accepted and shared frameworks that influence what society sees as possible. While imaginaries are built collectively, they are also constrained collectively — an important point made in this essay on a similar topic. They emerge at the intersection of opening up futures (through imagination) and closing them down (through social fabric). Our collective imagination is thus embedded within, and limited by, the wider system we belong to. What we are capable of imagining and what we consider worth imagining is influenced by our personal lived experiences and broader societal forces.
Some possibilities are discouraged from the start — we internalize the idea that certain futures are simply not possible or not viable, so we don’t even think to explore them imaginatively. Also, there is the challenge of unknown unknowns, as we struggle to imagine things that are in principle possible, but that we don’t yet have the language or context to perceive. The failure of societal imagination is likely not the failure of creative capacity, but the result of dominant systems narrowing what’s conceivable and discouraging anything too ridiculous, too unsettling to the status quo.
One concept that helps explain this, particularly in our era of late capitalism, is capitalist realism, coined by Mark Fisher. The central idea here is that we have absorbed a shared assumption of living at the end of history, a belief that capitalist society is the final form of human civilization, with no next level in this game. This deep-seated belief limits the imaginaries we are able to conceive. Within the system we are also conditioned to channel our dissatisfaction into the consumption of anti-capitalist cultural commodities, indulging in fleeting hedonistic escapes, all while remaining enmeshed in the system. Besides that, Fisher argues, late capitalism has trapped culture in a cycle of repetition and nostalgia, where genuine novelty is replaced by endless recycling of past aesthetics.
Similarly, cultural critic Henry Giroux argues that neoliberal capitalism actively erodes public and social imagination through individualization. For collective imagination to thrive, we need a shared understanding of why the public good and the commons matter. Yet, in neoliberal societies, self-interest and prosperity are prioritized. Individualization also emphasizes personal responsibility and detracts from the need for collective imagining. In this landscape, we lack the connections, time, and spaces necessary for collective imagination to flourish.
Let’s return to Fisher, who builds on Franco Berardi’s concept of the slow cancellation of the future — the gradual erosion of the belief that this world in general is becoming a better place. We all feel the cancellation of the future, but most acutely younger generations feel it. Many young people don’t just feel uncertain about the future; they feel not having any future at all. All they know is financial precarity, climate breakdown, mental health crises, ongoing wars, and the aftermath of a pandemic. It’s no surprise that this has shaped a generation-wide sense that the future is a meaningless concept. As
(Ewan Morrison) notices, Zoomer culture often loops back on itself in fatalistic doom with dystopian bestsellers like The Hunger Games, the nihilism of Euphoria, and an overarching preoccupation with collapse. At the same time, Millennials are experiencing their own disillusionment with once-hopeful visions of the future. This cancellation of the future is, in my opinion, one of the most alarming manifestations of the capitalist realism that Fisher describes. It is a learned helplessness on a generational level, breaking our collective imagination to the ground.Let's broaden the conversation by looking at another, cultural force that may explain the crisis of imagination. (It’s a perspective I’m still processing, but there’s definitely something here.) I came across quite a provocative video essay by
, “On the Negativity of the Internet”, where he unpacks how the rise of critique-driven content online fosters pervasive negativity. According to him, in today’s culture, every idea or piece of media is up for dissection, and if you’re not critiquing, you risk seeming naïve and unserious. This builds a kind of negativity loop where we’re rewarded for finding flaws and punished for expressing approval.Robin draws on the work of Christopher Castiglia, who introduces a phenomenon he calls critiquiness — critique for its own sake, negativity as the default mode of engagement. Castiglia argues that emphasis on identifying what’s wrong distracts from the crucial aim of critique to feed into “a better plan for a better tomorrow”. When negativity dominates, proposing something genuinely hopeful and optimistic starts to feel naïve (Have you considered these limitations, those path dependences, and, of course, those guys in power who’ve already decided everything?). As a result, we may scale our imagination down preemptively to avoid eye rolls, ensuring we don’t appear unserious or unrigorous. We learn to self-edit before we even begin thinking about futures. But where no one wants to be the first to break out of the frame, the frame remains intact. For our collective imagination, it means imagining only what feels “realistic” or “practical” within the existing system and hesitating to propose radical shifts.
Capitalism, through its logic of capitalist realism, reinforces the idea that the world as it is now is the only way it could ever be. It hinders imagination by making it feel pointless. The culture of critiqueness further cements this feeling. By constantly poking holes without offering alternatives, we reinforce the sense that everything is a mess and that nothing better could ever exist. And this is what we know as the failure of imagination.
Castiglia pushes for a critique rooted in hope and imaginative idealism; a critique that challenges the present but also envisions futures full of possibility. He reminds us that futures don’t emerge from cynicism alone, but we need people audacious enough — or even radical enough — to imagine them first. Because “to be truly radical is to make hope possible rather than despair convincing”, in the words of Raymond Williams.
This brings us back to Jim Dator and his ridiculous futures. His Second Law has become almost a pop-futures aphorism. But if we read further down the line we see how he expands on its meaning. Dator argues that
It is the duty of futurists to support and provide an audience for those who have “stupid” ideas in the sure expectation that some of them will turn out to be revolutionary truths while others will not. There is no harm in supporting what turns out to be nonsense, but there is great harm done in squelching something that turns out to be valuable.
For me, this is a reminder not to rely on natural selection of the ridiculous-but-potentially-transformative ideas, because the dominant system will try to mock, silence, and nip them in the bud. This is a call for letting go of our biases about what is worthy of attention, resisting the urge to critique and filter out the unconventional, and instead using our voices to amplify hopeful futures.
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