Imagine that you’re in a room with four very tall walls, and they’re totally smooth. There are no footholds, and there’s no way out, and you’re in there with nothing, and there’s water pouring in from the top in all directions. What do you do? We were stumped, proposing one solution after another, and none of them worked. And then, the answer to his riddle was: Stop imagining.
https://urbanomnibus.net/2025/01/perhaps-a-lot-of-our-future-is-behind-us/
Not, “stop imagining” because what’s imagined is already here. But rather, “stop imagining because it’s getting us nowhere.”
As in: “Imagination: Always ‘lively.’ Be on guard against it. When lacking in oneself, attack it in others. To write a novel, all you need is imagination” (Gustave Flaubert, novelist).
And yet: “What we have here is a failure of imagination,” intone the critics of this or that policy failure. Yet they are just as likely to demand we take seriously any of their crisis scenarios, even when they are unable to specify what it takes to disprove the scenarios or prevent their recurrence or come up with details about the response structure to be in place after the losses incurred by said crises.
To do the latter requires deep knowledge and realism—that is, far far far far more than the touted imagination. Having the former may even cure us of some crises.
WHEN COMPLEX IS AS SIMPLE AS IT GETS 