Social imagination

Social imagination is a necessary ingredient in social intelligence. Imagining the future involves individuals in new ways of using their minds to grasp complexities that they have not yet understood. It enables people to construct new social realities, whether locally or globally. This is not undertaken merely for academic curiosity, but by integrating feelings and actions it enables the individual to remake himself and the world. This approach does not belittle the cognitive/analytic mode, rather it enhances it and sets the individual free to use more of his potential in social action. The social imagination can be thought of as a problem-solving faculty, continually reworking human experience by means of image formation. The obstacles to such imaging lie partly in social institutions, including schools, which discourage imaging because it leads to visualizing alternatives which challenge existing social arrangements. Other obstacles lie in the minds of older generations that have lost the capacity to use such faculties. These may however be re-engaged by techniques similar to those used in meditation. Imaging, like meditation, requires an emptying the mind. Imaging then puts experience together in new ways, possibly as a scenario. It has an experiential quality. The mind is actively engaged in the work of processing experience during imaging. In focused social imaging a person may work with a group of colleagues in terms of some normatively defined goals in order to envision a social conditions in which specific current problems have been resolved. From this activity a working group can emerge with shared imagery in terms of which to design concrete projects to bring about elements of their vision of the future.