The War on Imagination

This work is in the public domain in the United States, and those countries with a copyright term of life of the author plus 100 years or less.

“The only war that matters is the war against the imagination. All other wars are subsumed in it” Diane di Prima.

The relationship between cooperation & imagination runs deep. Imagination creates possibility allowing humans to hope & dream. Imagination introduces empathy, allowing humans to recognize themselves in others. Imagination produces innovation which gives humans the ability to work their way out of their problems. Imagination enlivens communication that builds connections between individual dreams & hopes. Imagination visualizes communities in positive, productive networks that share responsibilities & cooperative actions. Imagination allows self-reliance in the individual without compromising their membership in the family of man. Without imagination, man is an island, alone in a sea of indifference.

So when Ms. di Prima says that the war on imagination is the most important war, I have to agree. I have this quote posted front & center of my classroom because I fight this war daily. The imagination is under attack by the system-in-place that controls the majority. The system-in-place sees imagination as uniquely under its control & doesn’t want imagination cropping up in places that where it might question or deny the systems authority to control. This system must weed out the imagination where it sprouts in the orderly garden. If the system can’t eliminate alternative imagination, the system must co-opt it, corrupting it before it can flower into revolution.

Who comprises this system-in-place? Everyone & no one. This system continues because the imagination to see an alternative system or process being possible doesn't have mass exposure. When imagination envisions alternate ways of interacting as humans, the herd criminalizes those ideas. Nietzsche says in Thus Spake Zarathustra, that “He who seeks may easily become lost himself. It is a crime to go apart & be alone. Thus speaks the herd.” That quote has always meant for me that the herd denounces anything that doesn’t compute in the herd mind. The herd will always seek to denounce those who find ways to travel outside the herd. Fear & complacency, two potent weapons against the imagination, reign in the herd, acting as sheep dogs to keep the flock together. Yet, even for those who do attempt to think outside the box, Nietzsche also points out that the herd’s voice still rings in their ears, & they must be constantly on guard themselves of these weapons in the war on imagination: what if I’m not accepted? what if people denounce me? what if I’m wrong? what if I’m exiled from humanity by my thoughts?

Plato’s analogy of the cave offers an image of that individual who ‘seeks to go apart’ when the individual who has been in the cave watching the images on the wall finds his way out of the cave & into the sunlight. In the sunlight, he finds a whole new world, one which isn’t simply flickering shadows across a darkened wall. He must ask himself: do I stay here & enjoy this new found place? or do I go back & bring others with me? Plato’s character returns & like the herd, those whom he seeks to enlighten, rebuke & eventually kill him. This is not a positive way to think about imagination being shared with others.

However, Socrates, who is often equated as the lonely seeker of the sunlight & was executed by the Athenians for misguiding the youth, created beyond himself & inseminated the Greek philosophy that is a benchmark of western civilization. We are all part of the herd, living in the world of humanity. We must be willing to risk imagining alternative ways of living together in peace & cooperation. We must accept the “slings & arrows of outrageous fortune” by empathizing with our fellow humans & seeking to communicate alternatives that don’t attempt to coerce others to accept. We must strive to be self-reliant without being misanthropes. We must imagine that others seek this self-reliance & peaceful cooperation as much as we do. We need to nurture collaboration between other self-reliant individuals. We need to recognize failure to communicate as merely a lesson in how to improve that communication so that we can build an alternative to the competitive, materialistic & nihilistic system that currently controls the way humans interact. Instead of pointing fingers at those whom we believe control the system, we need to point to those who find alternative ways to be productive & self-reliant without harming those around them. We need to model self-reliance by constantly seeking to be more self-reliant, & we need to model cooperation by not being afraid to cooperate with others to produce what we cannot produce alone. The fear of being cheated or disadvantaged by our cooperation must be overcome by attempts to develop ways to minimize those risks rather than denying that self-reliant voluntary cooperation can be benevolent & equitable. Possibly devolving into sloganeering, I reference the lyrics of John Lennon’s “Imagine” where he simply asks people to imagine something other than what is. If enough imagine a better way to live together in peace, we stand a chance of getting out from under the system-in-place.

The war on imagination seeks to maintain the status quo. We must be the forces of change that imagine the possible & work to make it the probable until it can be the reality.