Maybe we could have “Imagined Futures” as a topic of a future research call.
What I’d find interesting is exploring to what extent members have crystallised future scenarios that they are trying to steer towards.
If the vision is not clear or the pull is not strong , is that a symptom of a ship that’s lost its rudder?
What’s the right mix of structured and emergent in the making of future?
It’s an interesting topic - one that is pretty central to my own research work lately.
My favored approach (synthesizing a lot of other analysts) is to accumulate as many historical trends and patterns as possible, find the best fits for current situations, and then project forward. The tricky part is when well established patterns counteract each other, pointing towards future inflection points that will likely play out chaotically. It’s pretty clear, for example, that exponential growth is a well attested pattern in various areas (population, material production, technical innovation), but that perpetuation of such exponential trends ad infinitum would require exponential expansion of material inputs as well, along with solutions to metabolizing exponentially expanding waste. Not very likely … so inflection coming … the details of how that change of trend might play out are far from certain, however.
Nate Hagens models four plausible scenarios: Green Growth, Great Simplification, Mordor, and Mad Max. Green Growth is green techno-optimism. Great Simplification is a relatively ordered approach to intentional degrowth. Mordor is what the current US administration is doing - great powers fighting to the bitter end to extract the last resources available. Mad Max would be a Hobbesian war of all against all in post-apocalyptic anarchy.
My take is that we will likely see all of these scenarios (and others) play out in various regions of the globe at different times with different local outcomes and with emergent global systemic effects as well. Hagens doubts (as do I) that Green Growth is going to work on planetary scales, because “sustainable” tech like solar panels has not very sustainable supply chains and resource requirements. But it will surely find a niche - the question is how big a niche? And for whom? Mordor will likely be pursued to the point of absurdity, until some sort of cultural transformation turns the political tide. Mad Max already exists in various parts of the world and is likely expand to other territories. Great Simplification would require networks of intentional communities - more or less along the lines of proposals favored by most participants in this forum. One might plausibly imagine those sorts of developments at the prototype level now, with larger global expansion in the wake of some post-Mordor understanding or settlement.
Beyond all that, the entire corpus of sci fi literature and film offers an effectively unlimited stockpile of design patterns for the future. How to make any of these patterns work in practice (at least the more desirable ones), is a question that could use some studied attention.
I wanted to explore the MVP of Imagined Futures - literally take it down to the individual’s level and identify all that’s preventing you from experiencing true, good and beautiful. What needs to change in someone’s life to enjoy their lives more according to the transcedental values.
So my intention would be not to state grand and lofty ideas that affect humanity as a whole, but bring it down to individual and social (very local) level.
For me, that’s the Ikigai model. In any US classroom, random individualism and cultural differences are the baseline expectation. Any more collective vision must be both constructed and earned. So the first pass at anything must involve the first person singular to get much traction.
One of my classes is currently being structured around an Ikigai question of the week. First week it was “what do I love?”. Last week, “what does the world need?” Next week will be “get paid for”. Etc. I’m toying with the idea of following a four week pass around all the questions in the first person singular and then to shift pronouns to “we”. So “what do we love?” and so on. The experiment will be to find out how much group consensus can arise from purely personal reflections in the first instance.
I don’t think it’s the same. I’m interested in what frustrates people to live life to the full- so that we can use it to model future and take note of that comparative state.
The next step is to classify all these visions of future, distilled from frustrations. Then we’ve got a basis for alignment and coherence.
This type of enquiry requires diving into what people’s desires and motivations actually are.
It’s a huge challenge though as people don’t like sharing such deep personal insights.
I’ll be curious to see how well that works. My general impression is that attraction works better than repulsion. But if frustration avoidance turns out to be highly generative, then I’ll gladly revise that hypothesis.
This seems relevant. Deep Future - by Gordon Brander - Squishy Computer
Would it be fair to say your process highlights the possible, the plausible, and the probable, but very much not the preferable? Then it tries to find a pathway to the preferable but avoiding all the others?
Great, very interested in this topic. A couple of years ago I gave a talk on the social psychology of Utopia, connecting it to research on the ‘best possible self’ exercise, ‘mental contrasting’ and the idea of ‘education of desire’ in connection with William Morris’ News from Nowhere in Utopian studies. It wasn’t recorded but these are the slides.
I see it as us always engaged in striving towards something and frustrations are obstacles in the way. Striving to self-realise and striving to transcend. I also think that these two are connected, at different levels.
Frustrations can turn into traumas - a healthy dose of stress and anxiety are conducive to fulfilling aspirations, but the overload leads to paralysis. Yet, it’s extremely easy (theoretically) to remove these obstacles, but only if you bring other people who have particular capacities.
If you need examples, I can furnish. The reason why we don’t turn to other people for help is because we don’t have a clear proposition and no protocols. If we seek assistance we’re deemed to be weak or we trigger of debt of reciprocity. We fear being dependent and owing.
The process starts with taking account of what’s really there behind the veneer of declared generalisations.
super interesting! I’ve got a sailing race now and will respond later 
Got me thinking about this episode: Awakening From the Meaning Crisis by John Vervaeke, Ep. 48 — Corbin and the Divine Double (Summary & Notes) | by Mark Mulvey | Medium
Utopia as “imagined” is one thing. Utopia as ‘imaginal” is something else entirely!
Generally tracking your points in the post this quote above was extracted from. (Yes, examples would be helpful!). On this final sentence specifically, it seems clear from a lot of research - lately Luke Kemp, Goliath’s Curse - that prior to the Holocene, reciprocal behavior was the human norm. Prior to the advent of agrarian and urban lifestyles, open collaboration was the human universal. It follows therefor that fear of dependence and owing is culturally conditioned, a historical artifact, potentially capable of alternation. It’s not a genetic necessity. If anything, our gene pool draws us by instinct to greater collaboration.
Kojin Karatani takes up this insight by repurposing Freud’s return of the repressed, to propose a new mode of economic exchange based on globalized reciprocity. (I got to Karatani by way of Michel Bauwens who has written extensively on commons-based political and economic models). Anyway, to pull all this tighter into typical 2R concerns, it seems entirely feasible that we might identify practices to 1) extinguish fear of dependence and owing, 2) get more in touch with our primal reciprocal impulses, and 3) improve communal relationships at a variety of scales.
I agree. We should be focusing on those.
Jonah, it would be interesting to define what utopia and visualising utopia is.
For me utopia is not conceptualised as an “ideal” static place or society but the persistence of an environment where a flow of one’s optimal engagement with themselves (the sense of safety), others and the world is afforded.
I also agree that the image of an optimised future self is a separate from the outer utopia.
This is maybe where integral theory and spiral dynamics make a lot of sense - interior/exterior individual/collective and subjective/objective.
This is a great topic to explore further.
I’m very interested in Corbin and the imaginal, and also think that kind of approach can be supported more conventional psychological approaches to imagination. In the studies I refer to in the slides, one is exploring the effect of imagination on goals, motivation and personal effectiveness, which approaches the themes explored by Corbin. The differences between the two approaches then end up more at a metaphysical level, becoming less salient from a ‘postmetaphysical’ standpoint. For example, there’s a metaphysical-epistemological element of Corbin’s approach - imaginal access to reality - that could I think be translated into the less metaphysically charged terms of mainstream cognitive science, Vervaeke’s work being an example of that.
It seems a lot depends on what you mean by ‘one’ here. To stand in the tradition of utopian thinking you would I think need to be interested in an environment where everyone is afforded a flow of optimal engagement of this sort. It’s true that this will be envisaged from the point of view of your own desire - this is where the ‘education of desire’ approach comes in - but would you agree that the idea of utopia has an altruistic element of this kind? This to me is partly what distinguishes it from the best possible self approach.
I’d like to start with personal utopias and then synthesise them into a collective one.
Without considering metaphysics much, lately I’ve been reading Vervaeke through the lens of McGilchrist, and that’s how I’m processing the “imaginal”. Namely, McGilchrist argues that “participatory knowing” is just the right brain’s way of processing. So whereas Vervaeke goes down rabbit holes about Gnositcism, angels, guiding spirits and so forth, I’m thinking a more straightforward way to participate in participatory knowing is just anything favoring right-brained perceptions - art, nature, centering, human relationships, etc. This need not be especially esoteric. It just seems esoteric to a culture so overly focused on propositional systems (and the AI implementation thereof), that fairly simple intuitions may appear like messaging from exotic entities or worlds.