The Future We Want

I’ve been putting myself to sleep at night by envisioning the kind of future world I’d like to see. Being a science fiction writer as well as someone who has spent much of my life doing work toward social change, I’m always thinking about better systems.

But the combination of the polycrises we face (I’m deliberately using the plural of crisis here because we not only have multiple crises that affect each other – thus the poly – but each crisis has its own set of multiple components) with the forthcoming grifter/broligarch/religious and right wing extremist government has urged me more in that direction.

Given that the government will not only not be addressing the polycrises but will in fact be doing things that make them much, much worse, I cannot be satisfied by resistance. And given that the status quo was already shaky – very little being done about climate change, inequality, and the cost of housing, not to mention protecting the country from insurrectionists – I’m not feeling pumped up about trying to get back to that.

Yeah, we need the rule of law and the Constitution here in the United States, but both those things have some big flaws that should have been addressed a long time ago. Most of the resistance will be focused on keeping political things from getting too much worse, but it won’t be fixing any of the underlying problems.

So I am trying to envision what we could have. I recently read an essay Donella Meadows wrote in 1994, “Envisioning a Sustainable World,” and it inspired me to do more imagining of what kind of world we could have.

Meadows was one of the authors of the 1972 work Limits to Growth, which provided a guide to the problems we’re facing right now. You can find out more about her work here and download a free copy of Limits to Growth here:

Of course, I’ve been working on envisioning futures all along.  Lately, I’ve been reading some futurist thinking to help expand my ability to do that. You have to be careful with futurists, since many of them are tied in with tech bro thinking, but there are some very useful skills in that area that help you get past the “there’s no way that could happen” point.

You have to get past the “there’s no way that could happen” point before you can open your mind to anything new.

I’ve also been reading as much of David Graeber’s work as I can get my hands on – damn, it’s a shame that both Graeber and Meadows died young, though it is also fortunate that both left us with a lot of material to work with. Reading Graeber is a constant reminder that things don’t have to be this way.

I was very affected by Kate Raworth’s Doughnut Economics, which was the first book for our economics book club and which we re-read about a year ago. It lays out an excellent way of looking at the kind of systems we need, as opposed to the ones we have.

In addition to all that, I’m exploring complexity thinking as applied to economics – our book club’s current book is J. Doyne Farmer’s Making Sense of Chaos – and backing into some of that thinking by also reading about physics and complexity thinking, since that’s where it started.

The reading I’m doing makes it clear that we’re not actually short on ideas of how to make a better world, but it also shows that too many people are afraid to imagine anything better. So it’s important for all of us to start imagining what a better world would look like, particularly those of us who write science fiction.

As I keep saying, anyone can write a dystopia these days. What we need are people who can recognize the dystopic elements we’re dealing with and point us in a better direction.

Way too much science fiction sets up worlds of empires or ones run by the corrupt and powerful. Just as it is said – by both Frederic Jameson and Kim Stanley Robinson (I think Jameson said it originally and Stan quotes it a lot) – that “it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism,” it also seems to be hard to imagine a world that isn’t run by those greedy for power and money.

But of course, if you read Graeber – his book with David Wengrow The Dawn of Everything is a great starting place – you realize that it doesn’t have to be like this.

The only thing about this exercise that really annoys me is that I’m not going to live to see any of the positive change. I’m not going to get to live in the kind of world I can envision, the kind I know is possible.

I’ll be sharing my ideas on here from time to time and I’ll be delighted if others chime in. One key element in envisioning the future is that it’s a collective enterprise.

We’re social creatures, after all. We don’t need one person deciding what’s best for everyone, and we really don’t need the current crop of people who are trying hard to cram their ideas down our throats.

Stay tuned.