infinity and imagination

” Sometimes fate is like a small sandstorm that keeps changing directions. You change direction but the sandstorm chases you. You turn again, but the storm adjusts. Over and over you play this out, like some ominous dance with death just before dawn. Why? Because this storm isn’t something that blew in from far away, something that has nothing to do with you. This storm is you. Something inside of you. So all you can do is give in to it, step right inside the storm, closing your eyes and plugging up your ears so the sand doesn’t get in, and walk through it, step by step. There’s no sun there, no moon, no direction, no sense of time. Just fine white sand swirling up into the sky like pulverized bones. That’s the kind of sandstorm you need to imagine. “

Haruki Murakami, Kafka on the Shore

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“Useless laws weaken the necessary laws.”

Montesquieu

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“The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.”

Antonio Gramsci

The world is obviously changed, most obviously with 24/7 communication, either through television and radio or through the internet, all bludgeoning our cognitive limits. It’s not a simple world, even though the modes of communication are relatively simple to identify. It creates a labyrinth of connections far more complex than our cognitive capabilities. In addition, lurking within is a mosaic of filthy little self-indulgent self-interests constantly being tweaked by nasty little intentional 24/7 external nudges. Within this mosaic of alternative realities bombarding us mentally, we are enduring the crush of reality. This crush manufactures individual internal worlds which makes it difficult to remember, or even identify, who we are as our inner villains (doubts, insecurities, envy, ambition) find multiple things to pay attention to and engage with. Inevitably under the crush we retreat to entertain, and fight, these inner villains. The victim in this is imagination. With that in mind, I would argue the disappearance of imagination is creating one of the greatest obstacles to creating our future. I would even argue this is the crisis because it is the crisis that underpins all the solutions to any other crisis. And while the disappearance of imagination may appear far far smaller in scale than many of the existential crises (the polycrisis issue) that we face, it is actually the disappearance of imagination which strips us of everything, and anything, we might actually be able to use to discover a world in which solutions, progress and prosperity thrives.

“We should create our life as one creates a dream.”

Victor Hugo

Which leads me to Infinity.

It is within imagination where we can bring forth potential lightness from existing darkness. To that point, I need to say darkness is finite. What I mean by that is it reduces everything to what is close at hand, or we can possibly dimly be seen in the shadows. We, humans, create this darkness because we struggle to face the muchness of the infinite, yet, it is within the infinite within which we can find the solutions to some of the finite issues we currently face. It is within infinite where those who imagine have the opportunity to convince the rest of us to envision better futures and possibly even to rediscover what is important within ourselves. Circling back to the inner villain thought, for the majority of the people as they try to fend off the infinite, they seek out finite realities – and there are a shitload of them. Rather than imagine things, you go to Instagram and search what feels like an infinite amount of images. Rather than use your imagination, you visit Twitter to face what appears to be an infinite amount of opinions, facts, and versions of events. Reality becomes situational; not what can be imagined. Reality becomes finite pragmatism; not infinite possibilities. No matter how diverse our interests, values, dreams, and hopes are they are constantly being squeezed into some logic the Internet, in 24/7 information feeds, offer us. It is a constant menu of concrete so you can replace the abstract. Imagination and infinite possibilities get sacrificed at the altar of pragmatic realities. That creates a depressingly unspectacular vision of what could be and in fact it simply becomes a race to the rationalization bottom. To be clear, I am not suggesting people are passive nor complacent or even sheep in a capitalistic world, what I am suggesting is an increasingly aggressive multiple reality world is playing an increasing role in the process of suggesting “why waste time on imagination when you can find a reality at any given point.” To be clear you cannot imagine a dream, or an envisioned positive state, without engaging with reality. You cannot design a future without materials and, pragmatically speaking, the materials you have in the present are the ones you have to use.

Which leads me to say we need an imagination revolution.

Revolution is a compliment to an idea. That being said, there are more ideas floating around in today’s world then is probably good for us, and we are being crushed by multiple ideas of multiple realities. In any case, true rebels, or revolutionaries, are rare exceptions in the world. There are certainly a large number of people claiming to be revolutionaries and taking some fairly extreme stances, but for the most part they are simply loudmouths, charlatans and jesters. So let me suggest where a revolution should occur in today’s world. It should be happening in the battle between the positive world and the negative reality; the idealists and the realists, and the tug of war of ideas in the space in-between. Why? The people within these realities are either mired in despair or blissfully ignorant in their positivity. Mindfulness, positive thinking, “if you can believe it, it will come true,” are all characteristics of a reality of people detached from the pragmatism of a reality made up of a mosaic of challenges and opportunities. Alternatively, the despair reality is willing to engage with the world, but for the most part they do so by rummaging in the past to resurrect a false reality of what was good in the past. The imagination revolutionary recognizes that the negative is inseparable from the production of the positive and it is within this combination that we can possibly determine a future in which everyone can thrive. The imagination revolutionary actually embraces a version of ‘creative destruction.’ What I mean by that is that once new ideas, that enough people value, are introduced into the culture – either negative or positive reality – the surrounding environment will modify and adapt itself according to the needs of these new ideas. Along the way these new conditions will inevitably be fatal to some of the existing ideas – even the ones that have been historically resilient. Yeah. Imagination doesn’t reside in the intellectual forest of ancient trees, but rather they recognize how forests can be grown. Yeah. Imagination is in the growth business.

Which leads me to end with an important reminder.

The enemy of imagination, and imagination revolutionaries, is certainly finiteness and rationalization.

In fact, one of the consequences of a rationalization reality constructed by industrialization is that imagination has become ‘something to do.’ What I mean by that is that imagination has been replaced by innovation pipelines, blue sky thinking, and any number of constructed tasks to be deployed with a specific objective in mind. They become singular expressions of imaginative imagination when imagination should be embodied within an infinite thought and the pursuit of infiniteness. Yeah. That’s a problem in today’s milestone/KPI/achievement obsessed world., but the essence of the imagination is located precisely in its improbability. In a probabilistic, finite-driven, rationalizing, world that is a challenge. That is why we need imagination revolutionaries who hold imagination high as the idea, and ideal, around which an imagination revolution can occur and a better future can not only be envisioned, but constructed. Ponder.