Failure of imagination
IMAGINATION is our God-given ability to envision possibilities and find ways to realize them. It is not the same as wasting out time in senseless daydreaming.
Imagination allows us to engage in fearless re-vision, i.e., to look at something again in an entirely new perspective. Through imagination, we re-vise the present and fashion it into a hoped-for future. Imagination reshapes our past as a source of innovation and invention.
These days, however, we have handed over this human ability to the demigods of politics, business, and entertainment industry. Through the Internet and other manipulative communication technologies, they have compressed the world into a collage of corporations, e-commerce and social networking sites, governed by the immutable laws of business and greed. We have become anonymous receptors of a web of virtual images that do not interpret reality; they “create” reality for us.
Don’t you notice? We no longer dream our own dreams. They design our fantasies and tell us how to realize it. They appease, mollify, seduce, distract, move, or paralyze us, depending on the moods they create. They have successfully found a way to downsize imagination into a commodity that, for a price, will answer all our needs, tranquilize our anxieties, and eliminate boredom.
The more discerning among us realize that such commodified imagination is decisively false. But the rest who are dumbed down by the media become thoroughly sold into it. Proofs: The tremendous box office records set by sci-fi/superhero movies produced abroad; the lucrative sale of products that promise freedom from bad breath, balding, obesity, pimples, and aging; the growing number of politicians and lawyers who imagine democracy as a system that is remorselessly practical in its tendencies and flagrantly numerical in its focus; the staggering number of the youth who imagine music and entertainment personalities to be the mouthpieces of their repressed and suppressed desires; the alarming statistics of suckers who stubbornly fantasize that our government is achieving great progress and development, even if the obvious reality points to the opposite.
Eugene O’Neill once wrote that people want to be deceived, but that must be taken in the context of his being a playwright. Indeed, we enjoy going to the theater and the movie house, not because we believe in what we see, but because it is exhilarating to bask in the lie. But to carry on with this pretense day in and day out can be enervating. Our minds cannot suspend its disbelief for too long. God gave us minds with a natural affinity to truth.
For so long a time, we have been under the spell of magical and fantastic thrills offered by our speed-loving, data-filled, and violence-soaked culture. Deep inside us, however, there is the quiet longing for order, beauty and peace. We crave and demand a return to the basic virtues that make life worth living. We are nostalgic for the sense of decency and integrity that heroes of the past once exhibited.
Until we decide, collectively and indivually, to use for our benefit the inherent power of imagination that God has given us, we will remain slaves of those who weave fantastic schemes about a magical past that never was, and a future that will never be realized.