This dis-imagination machine.
In the final chapters of Evgeny Zamyatin’s dystopian novel We, the authorities have finally figured out what was causing the turmoil that has permeated the otherwise perfectly calibrated society of synchronised workers and glass houses.
The problem, it turned out, was that some humans suffered from a disease called imagination. The ever watchful guardians identified the part of the brain responsible, and invited all citizens to submit to a simple X-ray procedure to zap it - and get rid of their pesky imaginations once and for all, to get back to the perfect harmony.
(I marvel at the fact that Zamyatin wrote We over 100 years ago and managed to predict both the worst of the Soviet Union - it was written in the midst of the civil war and before Stalin’s purges, but not published in the USSR until 1988 - and the capitalist society we live in right now, in the “west”.)
Today, we don’t need such radical treatment. In From What Is to What If, Rob Hopkins quotes a scholar and a cultural critic Henry Giroux, who writes: “State and corporate sponsored ignorance produced primarily through the disimagination machines of the mainstream media and public relation industries now function largely to erase selected elements of history, disdain critical thought, reduce dissent to a species of fake news, and undermine the social imagination.”
We are numbed out by the onslaught of content and never ending breaking news, we get hooked up on reality TV and celebrity drama we distract ourselves with to cope. We work more hours than medieval peasants (not even an exaggeration), trying to earn a living to keep a roof over our heads and food on our tables (something that should really be a fundamental human right, but is not).
There’s no time to imagine otherwise.
Even our children no longer have time to daydream - school, exams, homework and extracurriculars to pad their future perfect worker CVs leave no space to get bored and to actually think beyond what’s in front of them.
And now have AI that we are willingly outsourcing the job of “imagining” things - atrophying our brains in the process (here’s a link to the findings of a recent MIT study about that).
“Thinking outside the box requires courage,”, writes Kristen Ghodsee in Everyday Utopia. She quotes research by psychologists Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky that found that people want to avoid feeling regret, and that they are more likely to feel regret about a bad outcome resulting from a decision they made, compared to a bad outcome that came from inaction.
Basically: People feel safer doing nothing and not letting themselves imagine.
Ghodsee remarks how dystopian fiction seems to be a lot more popular than utopian projects that could help us imagine not the end of the world but a birth of a new one. This seems closely linked to what Mark Fisher talks about in Capitalist Realism, suggesting that it exemplifies interpassivity, whereby “a film like Wall-E performs our anti-capitalism for us, allowing us to continue to consume with impunity”.
(Did you know that the UK government and US military hire sci-fi writers to prepare for future dystopian scenarios - not imagine better ones?)
There’s no need for explicit propaganda promoting the values of capitalism - by now we all (hopefully) understand that its ideas of limitless growth are not compatible with life on a planet with finite resources. The unstated goal is to make it seem like there’s no alternative, to stop us from imagining something else, to make us feel weird for even thinking we could, like a co-dependent partner in a toxic relationship that can’t imagine a way out because they are in too deep and have to keep enabling the harmful behaviour.
My own relationships with imagination is complicated.
I like to think of myself as a creative person, full of ideas for things - the “shiny bubbles” as I like to call them. My notebook is full of sketches of projects and things I’d like to do when I have the time. My neurospicy brain never rests.
Yet, a lot of these things I imagine are firmly grounded in reality (observing and commenting on what is) and history (researching and reflecting on what was) but they are never about the future (what could be) or even pure fantasy and fiction (I know I have a novel in me but I cannot make myself write down imaginary people and things). In fact, if I’m being completely honest, reading the opening chapter of From What Is To What If, where Hopkins describes his own imagined future where things did turn out ok, made me cringe a bit and speed-read through it.
As I’m exploring radical imaginations through a lot of my current readings, I’ve been wondering why that is.
I know I can’t easily imagine details of a scene or a concept in my head (in photography, that looks like me preferring documenting rather than setting up the scene; it’s a bit of “I’ll see it when I see it” and “nothing I can imagine will be better than real life”) and those dreaded visualisation exercises drive me pretty nuts (I do not KNOW what my ideal house or my perfect day looks like, leave me alone).
It wasn’t always like this. As a child, I was full of imagination. I wrote stories, imagined whole movies in my head, made up alternative universes. I didn’t have an imaginary friend - I was my own imaginary friend, with a different name and way more adventures than my actual life allowed.
But at some point, it stopped. You could say I’ve grown up, like people do, but I think it’s a cop out. Children don’t have a monopoly on imagination - it just gets beaten out of too many of us, like a death by a thousand cuts.
For me, it was never explicit, and I don’t remember any specific incidents. At a certain point I must have observed and absorbed enough of society to understand that my imagination was perhaps too much and wasn’t welcome - or needed. It made me stick out too much. So I have given it up, betraying myself in order to conform, to be safe.
These days, I notice that I often don’t let myself imagine things because I know I can feel them all too vividly. It can actually feel so real it’s almost unbearable. There’s a huge resistance in me in imagining things, making them up. Resistance to the point of tears and a tightening chest.
Is that my body is trying to remember how to imagine? How to trust my imagination and my intuition again? How to not be afraid knowing that things I imagine could come true - because it happened before? To believe that imagining things won’t hurt me - and I won’t get laughed out of the room for imagining them out loud? What is this fear?
Fear of what?
“Fear that we will succeed. That we can access the powers we secretly know we possess,” says Steven Pressfield in War of Art.
***
In Zamyatin’s We most citizens willingly submit to the imagination-zapping procedure in order to get back to “normal”, to their happiness in conformity, forgoing a perhaps once in a lifetime chance to forge something different, something new, something better. To get free. It is easier for them to not imagine, to numb themselves with work and the status quo.
Is it any different for so many of us?
Things you might be interested in:
Book a mentoring session with me to get help with a photography project or business and marketing advice - or for thought partnership to imagine something;
Buy Beauty Hunting, my photography book about walking, mindfulness, healing from co-dependence and a toxic relationship, and finding beauty in the most unlikely places;
Hear me talk about Marketing in the Polycrisis at the upcoming Meadowverse festival on The Portal;
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