Why Are We Not Asking the Deeper Whys?
I’ve been thinking a lot about bravery and imagination. The adrenaline of early quarantine still with us, all of us future architects. We look to this moment for a catalyst for change.
At the launch gathering of 20 Decades of 2020, we split apart to imagine 10 years into the future, 10 years into a reimagined past. I spend my life future visioning. I support myself and my team as an innovation strategist — which means I spend most of my time faced with broken systems and what are the true barriers to change: Antiquated structures, system failure, old narratives. Broken systems are stubborn in their persistence. We work towards the swallow moment where all of the birds fly up together as though they have come to the same insight simultaneously.
This is the first time for me I have done future visioning in the face of a global collective catalytic event, which, in this moment, March 26th, I am convinced is in some way hurling all of us towards questioning everything. In that way, it is an inciting incident I have dreamt of — a wake up, a reflection moment. On the call at least, what we are all aching for is system change.
In our small group, considering the future
Here we are, our moment, the only cost is ink, the only cost is the judgment of the raising of a “bad” idea, the certainties of all of our futures seemingly undone. Yet the collective at first is stymied, quiet, halting, not ready to throw a hat in the ring. Why? We dip our toes in cautiously.
Out of the gate those of us looking at the future had to do the small dance of avoiding the dystopian, the disaster porn we raise our kids on — a reminder that it is still essential to envision a positive future whether entirely achievable or not.
The second step was a clamoring for a data-gathering useful individual biosensor that would help wellness in the face of the pandemic. It’s the technologists in the group who imply that in order to step forward, we have to go back. We, none of us, believe that a sensor is a solution, that more frictionless access to data, whether we are able to keep it personal and safe, vs. currency in someone else’s hands, is actually going to yield progress.
Instead, we gather collectively at the end around a vision of civic engagement at a much smaller scale: citizenry, and sustainability taught by the collective wisdom of the group and passed down to each subsequent generation. In other words: we invented an almanac, and a civics class. WHY?
We live in a time where the most radical impactful ideas are in relation to human-to-human analog tools. The things we could change with bodies in the room, pen and paper, maybe new dances, new songs, new schools, new rituals?
Why even in this moment do we lean into a false sense of technological progress? Stripping us of the time to really know the body knowledge, the bioregionalism, our tremendous curiosity, our inventiveness in doing it for ourselves. Humans carried stories with us as successful analog tools over time, for example, books as the best of all paper prototypes — shared collected technologies where we have to imagine our way into the operating instructions of a human life.
Rejoining the group for a bigger leap
When we regather, it is a flash as the group tending the reimaging of the past has come forward with a shift so substantial that I can feel my own judgement/cynicism kick in: a viral video of slaughter houses has caused the human-centric decision making model to reshift to: Pillars of the new healthcare lens — Housing and income are needed for health, animals are considered as part of our health system and their well being is linked to our well being.
A takeaway: the surprising fact that the amount of bravery and go-big intent in the imaginations of the people examining a past far exceeded the bravery in those of us looking towards the future.
Those who looked to the past imagined an order where there was no longer simply human-centered decision making and design. At the center of the reimagined past: holistic health systems that are community and ecosystem aware. How necessary. How incredibly hard.
Once we have lived it, can see it, we can wish for redesign with 2020 hindsight. But our dearth of raw material looking forward is because we live in a society which has been designed as one long exercise in drinking the Kool-Aid. It has been designed to turn our imaginations off. Why were those of us tasked with reimagining the future not asking: What if there were no longer money? What if all food systems shifted to local? WHAT if travel never came back?
How is it that we are so ill educated and ill-equipped culturally to come together and free ourselves from the future that’s been painted by dominant voices and dominant practices? Why at this juncture would we possibly trust that technology (made with an eye to profit) is going to shift us?
Where does change happen? In the mind and then the world? Where does the imagination fit in?
When we are young, imagination is linked to fantasy vs invention as quickly as possible. And then the professionalization of storytelling into addictive consumption, escapism, wish fulfillment. Sustainability is a human instinct. Every child walks into the world wanting to know how to be deeply self sufficient. How to find their own food, find their own way home, build their own shelter. Collective stories used to teach, not sell.
I think of all the historical moments where women were told not to read. The fear that they would drift towards the imaginary — from the limits of their lived lives off into the vast frontier of potential of the novel. Books bring to life our imagination, allow us to participate in the co-creation of the story, are fully immersive experiences. I was with my father at his death bed. No contemporary form of media had ever trained me for that moment — it was books I had read that helped me know what to listen for in his staggered breath, that allowed me to be aware, awake, prepared to, as a human, show up in that moment.
Now we have homebound children — not free range enough to go off and dangerously climb a tree or swim in the sea, and instead they die over and over on headsets in digital realms addicted to adrenaline of risk without consequence and the chance to build, strategize, collect, form communities of their own in the only space we have left to them.
We have colonized people’s imaginations. We have dampered their desire for communal, small-scale reliance on each other and dumped their relationships into mimicry of media. We have created addiction and shame and unhealthy desire in relation to consumption of food and stuff. We have taught that as adults your primary relationship to body will be inevitable breakdown and pain. We have offloaded health to others.
I’ve stood in the halls of Boeing and the military and seen that the core dividing line in the strategic visionary insight is in fact not between scientist and engineer, or ethicist and anthropologist, but between Star Trek and Star Wars aficionados, and the imagined futures those two narratives bring. Toss a Hollywood concept artist or two in there and you have a design for a new weapons system and I kid you not. We, all of us, live in worlds bounded by our imaginations and perceptions: our “worldview.”
So — those looking at the past in the space of ten years imagine us able to redesign a society, an ecology, and a food system that is not human-centric. And well why not?
What is the bridge between imagined reality and built reality? Does it matter? We need to understand that what we are aiming for is simultaneously the actionable baby steps and the big mind shift. We need to hold both to get to a future we all might want to live in.
