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Probably the surest way to greatness as a social scientist is to come up with a new fancy term. Some fancy terms seem like an excuse to sound smarty-pants and give college students something to memorize for an exam. But now and then you come across a fancy term that really can change the world.
More than my new tool to dig out dandelions or even the latest electric car, ideas are powerful. Barry Schwarz, the renowned psychologist, says:
Sometimes a fancy term is the best way to jolt us into noticing our own ideas so we can figure out if they’re true or false.
In the weeks ahead, I’d like to gift you a few of my favorite fancy terms that can change the world.
This week I’m going to start with one that will help you understand why fancy terms and ideas technology matter in the first place.
Ready?
Here’s the term: Social imaginary.
The anthropologist Paige West explains it like this:
In other words, our social imaginary is the way we imagine society, which we’ve learned from society, and which we use to keep on building and rebuilding society.
You might notice there’s a circular loop there. Society teaches us to imagine how the world works, and we make the world work that way, and so on. Forever.
Or maybe not forever.
Maybe we can step back and notice the social imaginary. If we notice it, we can consider whether it’s right. And then we can start changing it.
Donella Meadows, one of my new favorite smart people, lists several examples of social imaginaries gone astray:
Some of those might be true some of the time, but a good bit of the time if we construct society straight along these paths we make a painful way to live. Meadows says, “Those are just a few of the paradigmatic assumptions of our current culture, all of which have utterly dumbfounded other cultures, who thought them not the least bit obvious.” Which is to say, sometimes if we notice what people of other cultures think is crazy about our own culture, we can spot our own social imaginary and ask if it’s really doing what we want it to do.
Here’s an example. For a lot of white people I’ve interviewed in the United States and South Africa, their social imaginary paints a world where there’s not really anything to do about racism except direct their lives toward their own self-interests and maybe occasionally give money to a charity or hire a Black employee. To imagine otherwise is about as difficult as imagining a dragon. But there are lots of other ways we could imagine and shape society. We could envision moving into proximity with more diverse neighbors and following their leadership, or voting for the interests of minoritized groups, or much more.
Social imaginaries change, and when we expand our imagination of what society can be, we can put new ideas into action.
Look around today—what are you ready to start re-imagining?
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P.S. Tomorrow I’ll be sharing this fancy term and more alongside a stellar line-up of speakers at the Kingdom Justice Summit in Madison, Wisconsin. If you live in the area, I hope to see you there! Tickets are available at the door.