How to re-imagine the world…

April 28, 2008

I just finished Anthony Weston’s “How to re-imagine the world”, a wild little book about reawakening radical imagination for social transformation.

Weston’s strengths are definitely in the realm of futuristic/ideation which completely jives with me.

He pitches a few ideas that are aching to be implemented like sports for the homeless, turning military bases into retreat centers, cutting the work week in half, preemptive peace, sun-baked roads that generate electricity, and creating floating cities to name a few.

Some quotes I highlighted from the book

Radical imagination begins with a move beyond complaint and resistance, beyond reactive tinkering or hunkering down or cynical accommodation. The first big move is to an alternative picture of how things could be instead.

Truly generative, inventive, new thinking requires risk-taking and is iteself a discipline. Mental stretching and twisting, conceptual self-provocations, going two steps too far - we need techniques, in short, to shock or seduce our ideas into unexpected and suggestive re-arrangements, freezing up space and generating raw material for the constructive imagination.

How can we make life more ecstatic?

Along with battling poverty we need to ask why we tolerate radical inequality at all. In many African tribal societies, even a single homeless person is felt as a disgrace by all. How did we get where we are?

We know too little of the natural world to come to love it.

Who would Jesus bomb?

A couple sites Weston recommends worldchanging.com and globalideasbank.org

Posted in Books, Quotes, creativity, poverty