Hopkins, Rob. _From What Is to What If: Unleashing the Power of Imagination to Create the Future We Want_. White River Junction: Chelsea Green Publishing, 2019. # Progressive Summary A passionate plea for the importance of telling stories of How Things Turned Out OK. # Key Points ## What If Things Turned Out Ok Why is our imagination failing us at a time when we need it the most? - Creativity has been declining since the 1990s, even though IQ scores keep going up, according to research by Kyung Hee Kim - [*Kim - 2011 - The Creativity Crisis The Decrease in Creative Th.pdf*](zotero://select/items/1_WT33C7NR) - IQ and creativity scores were in tadem from 1970s to mid-90s, but then started diverging. IQ scores kept going up, and creativity went down. - IQ scores went up because of reduced inbreeding, improved nutrition, and increasing affluence. - Creativity is tested using something called the Torrance test, developed in 1966. - Imagination went down because of loss of free play and standardised testing. - Recommendations are to increase free play, because imagination involves mental acts, not external actions. Also, problem-finding is a key skill of the imagination, and children should be encouraged to find their own problems to solve. In 1995, Dr Alvaro Pascual-Leone discovered that imagination alone could improve the practice of playing the piano - [Pascual-Leone. 1995. *Modulation of muscle responses evoked by transcranial magnetic stimulation during the acquisition of new fine motor skills*](zotero://select/items/1_ZQK3JTSJ) > A 1992 study by Guang Yue and Kelly Cole found that people who exercised a particular finger muscle increased the strength of that muscle by 30 percent after five days, while a group of people who imagined exercising that particular finger muscle increased their strength by 22 percent. Jackie Andrade and Jon May, researchers at the University of Plymouth, have developed an approach called Functional Imagery Training (FIT) which taps into the imagination to help people change habitual patterns. It reminds me of Vision Mobilisation: - https://www.robhopkins.net/2018/12/18/jackie-andrade-and-jon-may-on-imagination-lemons-and-functional-imagery-training/ Jennifer Coleman, of London's Institude of Imagination, says that we don't give imagination enough time. ## What If We Took Play Seriously # Resonances Agrees with Peter Block that [[Reference Notes/Community]] is the appropriate unit for transformation, not the individual. # Oppositions # Questions / Comments # Quotes ## What If Things Turned Out Ok > "We all, adults and children, have an obligation to daydream. We have an obligation to imagine. It is easy to pretend that nobody can change anything, that we are in a world in which society is huge and the individual is less than nothing: an atom in a wall, a grain of rice in a rice field. But the truth is, individuals change their world over and over, individuals make the future, and they do it by imagining things can be different." > – Neil Gaiman > What if, we wondered, the change we need to see in response to the biggest challenges of our time came not from government and business, but from you and me, from communities working together? What if the answers were to be found not in the bleak solitude of survivalism and isolation, in the tweaking of ruthless commercialism, or in the dream that some electable saviour will come riding to our rescue, but rather in reconnection to community? As we put it: ‘If we wait for governments, it will be too late. If we act as individuals, it will be too little. But if we act as communities, it might just be enough, and it might just be in time.’ > More important than any of the actual projects was the sense of connection, of feeling part of something, of the underlying story starting to shift. A collective reimagining of what the future could be. > Part of the beauty of Transition is that it’s all an experiment. I don’t know how to do it. Neither do you. In Totnes, we were just trying to spark something that might unlock a creative spirit, a renewed sense of possibility, a fresh and hopeful way to think about the future, without any thought that it could spread to other places. > If we can imagine it, desire it, dream about it, it is so much more likely that we will put our energy and determination into making it reality. As my friend and mentor the late David Fleming wrote, ‘If the mature market economy is to have a sequel … it will be the work, substantially, of imagination.’ > Bringing about the world we want to live in, the world we want to leave to our children is, substantially, the work of the imagination, or what educational reformer John Dewey describes as ‘the ability to look at things as if they could be otherwise’ > In 2009 Paolo Lugari, founder of the Colombian sustainable living experiment Las Gaviotas, wrote that ‘We are not confronting an energy crisis, but one of imagination and enthusiasm.’ In 2016 the writer Amitav Ghosh described climate change as ‘a crisis of culture, and thus of imagination’. A year later journalist George Monbiot wrote that ‘political failure is, in essence, a failure of imagination.’ In 2018 David Wallace-Wells wrote of how, in relation to climate change, ‘We suffer from an incredible failure of imagination.’ > Why are we so incapable of coming together to create, sustain and carry out a vision in which we capably address global crises and enjoy our lives more in the process? It seems as though we are becoming less imaginative at the very time in history when we need to be at our most imaginative. Our imagination muscle should be taut and well exercised; instead it is flaccid and untoned. I worry that the deeper we get into a crisis such as climate change, the harder it becomes to imagine a way out. Given everything humanity has accomplished, all of it driven by leaps of the imagination, why is envisioning a safer, saner, happier, more peaceful path forward so consistently beyond our reach? Indeed, why does it seem increasingly beyond our reach? > Even among people who work within the ‘creative industries’, their imagination seems increasingly harnessed to create demand for things nobody really needs, whose production is increasingly pushing our human and ecological systems to the brink of collapse – almost as if imagination has been coopted in the service of our own extinction. ## What If We Took Play Seriously? > ... in order for the imagination to flourish, a person needs to feel safe, relaxed, connected to other people, be nourished with good food, surrounded by hopeful narratives of the future, invited into what-if spaces, exposed to art in all its forms, not feel under surveillance or time pressured, in as equal a society as possible, able to make meaningful contributions and exposed to nature as often as possible in their daily lives. > What I have tried to do in this book is to make the case for a reprioritising of the imagination, the urgent shifting of priorities so that imagination, play and wonder are invited, encouraged and let loose, driven from all levels and in all sectors. > We have relegated the imagination to the margins for too long, and now, as Robert Louis Stevenson put it, we ‘sit down to a banquet of consequences’. > While many of the technologies, economic models and know-how for creating a future in which we can all thrive already exist, what is missing is the longing. Imagination is so important because it helps us create longing, and if we can get that right, other things then follow.