This is not any time – this is now!

Our species is addicted to planning. It takes planners, bureaucrats, and engineers to build the Great Wall of China, the pyramids of Chichen Itza and Giza, the Coliseum, Panama Canal, and on and on. ?Writing, counting, accounting, enabling the past to reach into the future. Such is the heavy hand of striving for permanency, defying death to gift the weight of the past to the future. Millennia of trial and error have generated remarkably successful templates for the reproduction of yesterday’s power structures, self-glorifying tributes to the delusions of god-like power and safety defined as living inside prison walls thickened by the ectoplasm of ancestral ghosts. Abiding by the commandments and strictures that promise yesterday’s good futures for the good of future generations. Patriarchy, hierarchy, design, didn’t you notice, we – those in power – know best, know better.

Which lands me in front of the question: it it conceivable to escape from this addiction to planning if we do not diversify the way we use-the-future? And does anyone think it is feasible to engage in such diversification without understanding the sources and functions of imagined futures? Including the primordial role of imagined futures in perception. The perceptions that precede both choices and the consequences, if any, of the experiments launched by making such bets.

My answer is that it is time to try to diversify. If the condemnation of Extinction Rebellion isn't rationale enough for making the effort then the searing vibrancy of today’s version of despair certainly makes the case. (Re)sourcing hope is both a responsibility and necessity. I experienced the thrill of hope that tickles from within when I witnessed the White House surrounded by a wall of flames, the burning candles of a vigil against the war in Vietnam. And like, many of us I lived the shattering of the Soviet dream and the realisation that of our species’ infatuation with war, extermination, oppression, and hate is baked into us. Do I need more evidence for the conclusion that today's dominant institutions, habits, convictions are toxic? And how do I understand what constitutes complicity in perpetuating, contributing to the reproduction of the unconscionable? How do I take into account my privilege? What can I do to reveal, dismantle, and replace the toxic conceit of today’s dominant ways of living that place our species above or beside the world, ensconced in the detachment of hallowed institutions and carefully curated heritage? Isn’t it time to take some risks?

I’m not suggesting making only one bet. Hedge commitments through diversification by all means, but don’t by inaction or an unwillingness to commit to diversification stifle experiments in disruption. I am making a very specific appeal, to commit to a disruption of the mono-cultures of anticipation that have dominated too much of human history. I am calling for efforts to cultivate the theory and practice of imagining the future with the goal of breaking out of the confining utility of using the future only for the future. This is a speculative proposition, one that imagines that we can indeed, in part, plan a break from the past, a transition from an obsession with goals to the generosity of seeding capabilities. It is a speculative bet, that such diversification – putting the role of imagining the not-past, not-present in perception on an equal footing with the pursuit of goals - beckons discontinuity. This is not futures literacy as a democratisation of the master’s tools and the tools of mastery. It is about imagining changes in the conditions of change.

Let’s say, for the purposes of debate, that I am mistaken. History’s verdict will be that futures literacy played little or no role in whatever transitions actually occur, such as the continuation of the folly of being a colonizing species or the victory of the ideological agendas of a green circular economy, whatever. But suppose I am right. That one transitional experiment that might take us away from the current and long-standing role of our species as pillagers and brutal oppressors involves maturing out of the dominance of ‘anticipation-for-the-future’ (Miller, 2018) mono-culture. ?

Such speculation raises the question of the opportunity cost of not experimenting. Only in this case the calculation cannot lean on the hope that cultivating futures literacy will offer a better future. Capabilities only create windows and doors without promising anyone will go through them or what they will find. Holding out the prospect of not knowing what future generations may or may not do, may or may not value, runs against the grain of the planner’s imperative: to create the future (in their own image). And of course, there are still many who glory in humans as apex predators and bet on extending the institutions and habits of the past forever, we must colonise Mars, nay the whole galaxy! What a glorious destiny!

There is no imagining what is unimaginable – that’s a tautology. But it is the wall that blocks us from knowing novelty before the conditions for its emergence occur. So I cannot know what it would be like to live in a world that has diversified the way our species uses the future. I do know that I am a carrier of the planner’s toxicity. This text and the path that has led me here are those of the planner. And if I follow my own logic, I know that I must die and be forgotten if I am to serve as good compost for what I cannot imagine. Yet, inescapably inscribed with legacies, host to the words, hopes, fears, methods, movements of the past, I can still try to gift some suggestions, embodied in my own experiments in planning, that express another way of being, an escape, a bridge, a glimpse, inspiration to cultivate this bizarre human talent that is the capacity to imagine.

#futuresliteracy #futuresstudies