Every society is built on stories – not only the ones found in books, but the quieter narratives that govern what is possible, desirable, or inevitable. Some stories are explicit – economic growth is progress. Others give structure – time is linear, change is incremental, value is measurable. These narratives shape policies, priorities, and perceptions of the realities we experience.
And yet, as the world faces overlapping crises, something vital is missing. Not information. But imagination.
The problem is not just that existing systems are failing. It’s that alternatives have grown harder to imagine. Crises are increasingly met with statistics and calls for action, yet without stories that stir our moral and emotional imagination, these responses often remain abstract and disconnected.
Data can reveal the scope of a problem. But it does not explain why people disengage, or why change stalls even when evidence is overwhelming. Without narrative, without a frame of meaning – systems drift and the public retreats into apathy.
Radical imagination is not a utopian fantasy. It is a practical force; the capacity to perceive structures as contingent, not permanent; to see that the world was made, and therefore can be remade. It expands the moral field, allowing people to care beyond their immediate localities, to feel responsibility across time, geography, and even species.
Literature has always held this space, offering more than distraction or critique. It models alternative ways of thinking, feeling, and being. It teaches how to dwell in complexity without demanding premature resolution. In a world addicted to certainty, reading literature is a radical and much-needed act.
But imagination has been steadily pushed to the margins. It is treated as a domain for artists and dreamers, not decision-makers. Meanwhile, systems thinking remains largely focused on optimisation, not transformation. We calculate efficiency within existing frameworks, rarely asking whether the frameworks themselves are the problem.
This is the imagination deficit of today. A narrowing of our mental horizons. A forgetting that other ways of organising life – economically, socially, ecologically – have existed and still do.
To shift systems, stories must shift first. Not in the sense of propaganda, but in the sense of possibility. Which assumptions are being smuggled into the future as if they were facts? What kind of world is being imagined by default?
Reclaiming imagination as the core infrastructure of our world is not indulgent. It is necessary. Especially now when the stakes are high and the futures on offer feel increasingly flattened and constrained.
What is needed is not just more answers, but better questions. What kind of world might be possible if the dominant story is not scarcity, but sufficiency? Not separation, but interdependence?
Systems alone cannot carry that weight. The stories we tell ourselves and each other can.