Reclaiming our Imagination

Imagination is profoundly counter-hegemonic

We are in a crisis of imagination. The hegemony doesn’t like our unfettered imagination. It perceives imagination as a threat to its existence, and rightfully so. A few fallacious myths perpetuated by the hegemonic narrative of modernity/coloniality serve to curtail and systematically stunt our imagination.

1. Cult of the individual. The economic monomyth of infinite growth rests upon a narrative of hyper-individualism. The concept of the selfish, competitive, and self-absorbed human has been so successful that we have started to become what we are told we are. This eminently false narrative has a dual purpose:
   a) to keep us in perpetual isolation, fearful, suspicious, and lonely
   b) to prevent us from trusting others as well as our own selves
   This creates unhappy and easily manipulatable people, which is precisely what the hegemony wants. Communities and solidarity are replaced by mindless consumption and neurotic addiction. Mental health issues have skyrocketed. Addictive technology further exacerbates this brokenness. And all of this is by design.

2. Glorification of speed. Speed and productivity signals ‘efficiency’. The hegemonic culture deifies a facile efficiency that creates meaningless busyness. David Graeber wrote: *“As Orwell noted, a population busy working, even at completely useless occupations, doesn’t have time to do much else.” ~David Graeber, Bullshit Jobs: A Theory. This exaltation of productivity is a mind-game the hegemony plays on hapless citizens. There is a peculiar guilt associated with ‘doing nothing’. It becomes a self-censoring tool. Gig economy has now been added to this specter of productivity in the name of ‘free choice’. In reality, this has created a class of precariat without any benefits or rights. The phantom profit accrues upward while the bruising sense of loss percolate down.

3. Fear of the Other. This is hegemony’s trump card. Endless propaganda, disinformation, misinformation, and obfuscation keep the fear of the Other eminently alive. Relentless bombardment of ‘doctored information’ keep people stuck in a bubble they can’t see beyond. This pernicious and insidious manipulation of entire populations keep the masses in fear of the most vulnerable while the hegemonic masters laugh all the way to the bank. This is a deliberately designed distraction strategy to prevent people from seeing the truth, to keep everyone in a permanent state of insecurity and fear, and expend precious energy in hatred and vilification. Therefore, we see tiny blue boats full of desperate refugees being allowed to drown while mega-scale extraction and expropriation by the cabal of billionaires go unchallenged.

4. Endless distraction and chaos. The hegemony has perfected the art of obfuscation through distraction. With sold-out media at their disposal, they not only manufacture consent, they trash people’s minds with inane banality leaving little room for reflection or even just quiet. Hegemony hates quiet. And brainwashes people into fearing silence. Silent times are only set aside for ‘retreats’ that the privileged can afford. Constant chaos, noise, and stupidity are sold as entertainment in hegemony’s world. Obscene and banal events like Met Gala are fed to a tired, pliant, and benumbed population who are supposed to be awed. Distraction becomes addictive in hegemony’s world because the reality is crushing. And all of this is by by deliberate, meticulous design.

5. Belittling of the unknown. The hegemony detests the mysterious, the miraculous, the uncertain and the ambiguous. They are all cracks in the shiny veneer of the hegemonic dominion through which imagination threatens through burst through. The witch hunt was as much against nature and women as against miraculous imaginaries. The hegemony harps on standardization, homogenization, uniformity, and categorization in a futile attempt to capture the unknown, to shear off the uncomfortable edges, to keep the populace entrapped in a maze of apparent efficiency. The mad rush for solutions, the reluctance to stay with questions, the fear of uncertainty—all arise from an intrinsically superficial and violent narrative that has been gradually imposed on a dynamic and pulsating world.

These different aspects of the hegemony create polarized societies, paranoid individuals, and psychopathic state machineries. The hegemonic narrative has created a matrix, a cage, whose bars may be invisible but they exist. They are invisible only because they have been dressed up as ‘normal.’ If you put these facets of hegemony together, it is easy to see what concerted and deliberate attempts have been made over decades to gradually erase imagination, defile and demean it, and relegate it to the realm of fancy. It is time to reclaim our imagination—a profoundly counter-hegemonic act.

Those who refuse to fit in find themselves ostracized, isolated, shunned. The need to belong is great; the punishment for not conforming is high. But those who don’t conform become the imagineers, the narrative-builders, the vision holders, the wayfinders. They have the foresight and the imagination to dare to dream of a world beyond the constraints and bounds of the hegemony.

Today, we are in a liminal space between two worlds—the old narrative is dying and new ones are being painfully born. The new stories are floating in from the edges and margins, from the unseen, shadowy, deliberately silenced peripheries. Stories silenced for centuries are once again ascending through the cracks and crevices, from the dust and ashes of pulverized lands and once-colonized cultures. They whisper of worlds far more enchanting. They are harbingers of a world predicated on relationality. Now is the time for radical imagination to rise again. To those who dare to imagine, here are a few lines from Toko-Pa Turner to inspire you.

For the uprooted, the abandoned, the shunned and invisible ones.
May you recognize with increasing vividness that you know what you know
May you give up your allegiance to self-doubt, meekness, and hesitation.
…
May you see, with consummate clarity of nature moving through you that your voice is not only necessary, but desperately need to sing us out of this muddle. My you feel shored up, supported, entwined and reassured as you offer yourself and your gifts to the world.

Those daring to reclaim their right to imagine will have difficult terrains to traverse. All the military might and state machineries will be unleashed to curb, curtail, and cure us of imagination. However, the hegemony doesn’t have the capabilities or the wherewithal to meet the challenges of the polycrisis. It is caught in a rut of its own making. Its stunted and diseased imagination allows for only a handful of responses—wars, suppression, coups, genocide, ecocide. And brutal violence. Born out of violence, it can only end in violence.

A brief aside.

Let me clarify what I mean by hegemony. The Hegemony, primarily led by the USA and supported by its vassal states, is a conglomeration of the military-industrial-media-political complex. It is the state machineries supported by bodies like the World Bank, IMF, NATO, WTO and a host of Eurocentric regulations. The hegemony does not include the ordinary people of these nations who are as beleaguered as the rest of the world, stripped of rights and living from pay-check to pay-check, just a step away from destitution. The hegemony owes no allegiance to anyone except its cabal of billionaires who keep the machinery running.

As the Students’ Encampments show, the hegemony will turn on its own citizens the moment they exercise their imagination to dream of a more just, equitable, and pluriversal world. Their sole aim is to accumulate capital while trashing the planet and devastating all sentient life. Peace in the true sense of the word is anathema to the hegemony. By peace, they mean acquiescence, conformism, and staying quiet under brutal oppressions and injustice. Hence, the call for peace is an act of radical imagination and fearlessness.

Just as the hegemony survives by constraining our imagination, a pluriversal world is reconstituted and co-created through our collective imaginaries. Imagination acts as our compass. Deliberately developing and harnessing our capacity for imagination is hard work. It is time to reactivate this core skill.

Imagination arises from a combination of complete presence with an ability to discern patterns across disparate and discrete events. This requires listening and observing deeply, befriending uncertainty, and staying with questions. Tools and frameworks, when applied from this place of spaciousness and deep sensing, allow us to sense into and hold space for emergent future. This, I believe, is Futures Thinking/Sensing.

As we teeter on the brink of polycrisis rapidly devolving into a metacrisis, and a crisis of meaning, imagination is not a luxury. It is a core capacity needed to reawaken and rejuvenate our innate and indelible interconnection with all of life.