Talking Radical Imagination with Max Haiven
The radical imagination is something that emerges when, as I was mentioning, people come together to struggle against the reality that they’ve been forced into.
The radical imagination is something that emerges when, as I was mentioning, people come together to struggle against the reality that they’ve been forced into.
Our current system is clearly not educating young people for the time of the climate and ecological emergency, for a world that is more socially just, equitable and embracing of diversity in all its forms.
The function of imagination is to bring “longing into the world”—I’d say that what this does is to create a narrative gap that we are then moved to fill.
Instead of getting two people, for and against, to debate something, how would it be to take two people who were both really excited about an idea, who dedicated their lives to its realisation, and invite them to imagine that it’s 2030 and that idea has already been part of our lives for several years.
What does the climate crisis have to teach us? Are we listening to what the Earth is telling us, as planetary systems necessary for the maintenance of life continue to unravel?
Christabel Rose Reed is a yoga teacher, yoga therapist and activist. She is on a mission to link inner transformation with social change and empower people to embark on the entwined journey of inner and outer healing. Christabel addresses the question of “What Could Possibly Go Right?”
For almost every important political moment in Western Europe and North America over the past 20 years, there was an article or book by David Graeber that could be said to have helped define it.
What if the bravery and vision that Jersey came to embody meant that future generations would look back and tell great tales, and sing great songs about those people who could see what was coming and who responded with such resilience and vision.
I’m an old union organiser, and the way you get a public imagination is that you organise from the ground up, and you get people together to begin to see a common world.
The imagination is radical. It is the only way to get us beyond what is and to get us to what if. It can get us beyond business as usual, beyond what is in front of us.
While I entirely appreciate that ‘Yes, but’ has a role in holding those in power to account, it also suffocates and stifles and undermines. Just for those few moments, I allowed myself to imagine how our political debates might look if they had ‘Yes, and’ at their heart. I liked what I saw.
One of the few rays of hopeful sunshine in the UK’s currently bleak political landscape is the Climate and Ecological Emergency Bill. In fact, I feel like it is such a vitally important development that I want to use this article to urge you to get behind it, while also offering a rather different perspective on why I feel it matters so much.