The perils of foretelling the future

BLOG: Utopian Pulses

Book cover 'The left hand of darkness' by Ursula Le Guin, with blue artwork
Cover art for Ursula K. Le Guin’s novel The Left Hand of Darkness © 1969 Leo and Diane Dillon

“Don’t you know how useless it is to know the answer to the wrong question?... To learn which questions are unanswerable, and not to answer them: this skill is most needful in times of stress and darkness.”

Ursula K. Le Guin, 1969[1, p. 164]

Some may disagree with this statement. In a time of growing uncertainty, amid threats of climate crisis, ecological collapse, extreme inequality, and even nuclear war, we also need answers. Yet, rather than grapple with these uncertainties to collectively search for answers, many seem to bypass uncertainty altogether. Or in Le Guin words, find quick answers to the wrong questions. Just as humans have for centuries erased uncertainties by the telling of some stories (and not others), we are witnessing the widespread manufacturing of surety, hubris, and even inevitability over what future will come to pass and why. This can be understood as a growing pandemic of the imagination that undermines our ability to connect across divergent realities and desires, to formulate more collective responses to the vast challenges we face.

— by Josie Chambers

The temptation to foretell, or predict, the future has long captivated societies. In ancient times, through fortune tellers, prophecies, and religions. In modern times, also through experts, predictions, and modelling. In her novel The Left Hand of Darkness [1], speculative fiction author Ursula K. Le Guin takes this human desire to its logical extreme by imagining ‘Foretellers’. These are a prophetic people, capable of answering any question about the future. Yet, as one quickly discovers, such certainty is not as appealing nor even possible as it may seem. One man pays a steep price of rubies to ask the question ‘on what day shall I die?’. The Foreteller responds ‘you will die on Odstreth (the 19th day of any month)’ [1, p. 45]. The man’s desire for certainty, yet impossibility of achieving it, drives him to a life imprisoned by his own fear.

It becomes apparent that the real value of ‘foretelling’ in this society is not to predict or control the future. Rather, it is to educate people on ‘the perfect uselessness of knowing the answer to the wrong question’ [1, p. 74]. Foretellers themselves surprisingly seek not to know more answers, but to learn what questions should not be asked; to show people that ‘the only thing that makes life possible is permanent, intolerable uncertainty: not knowing what comes next’ [1, p. 75]. As Le Guin observes, ‘Ignorance is the ground of thought. Unproof is the ground of action. If it were proven that there is no God there would be no religion.’ [ibid] Foretellers embody the danger of trying to project certainty onto a future which is necessarily full of contingencies and can never be fully known. Le Guin shows just how vital uncertainty is to our pursuit of change, and indeed our very existence and social fabric.

Nostalgia: a disease of the imagination

Despite Le Guin’s early caution, the rising uncertainty of our time is not being met by an equal desire to learn how to embrace and navigate this uncertainty. We are instead witnessing a turn towards certainty: the desire to foretell the future based on a particular view of the past. A response that perhaps offers quick resolution of difficult emotions of anger, fear or sadness that such an uncertain future may provoke. Yet a response that does not force people to grapple more seriously with these emotions; a journey that might lead one towards even more prickly uncertainties.

The use of emotions to harden imagined realities into inevitable truths connects back to the origin of ‘nostalgia’. As historian Agnes Arnold-Forster documents in her book Nostalgia: A history of a dangerous emotion [2], the term ‘nostalgia’ was first coined in 1688 by Swiss physician Johannes Hofer who identified it as an illness afflicting European mercenary soldiers. Sufferers became ill with a ‘sadness or depression that arose from the desire to return to one’s home’, stemming from ‘a kind of pathological patriotic love, an intense and dangerous homesickness’ [2, p. 20]. Hofer defined nostalgia as ‘a disease of the imagination, a mental or emotional disturbance’ [ibid]. The Swiss milking song ‘Khüe-Reyen’ was so debilitating in this regard that its playing was even made punishable by death.

While this disease of the imagination proved fatal on occasion, over time it became more attached to a state of mind—a bittersweet sentiment towards not only missed places but also lost pasts. In Zygmunt Bauman’s Retrotopia [3], he describes how nostalgia for an imagined lost ‘better’ past combined with certainty of a terrible future devoid of hope (and who is blamed for it), has fueled right-wing populist narratives. Similar dynamics were already afoot in America in the 1970s, where sociologist Fred Davis documented people’s reconstruction of a false past to reaffirm their sense of belonging following the rapid cultural change of the 1960s: ‘Nostalgia’s gaze looks backwards rather than forwards, for the familiar rather than the novel, for certainty rather than discovery.’ [4, p. 107]. At the same time, he claimed nostalgia tells us more about fears and discontents of the present and imagined future than of past realities [2].

Amid the ongoing rise of populist movements around the world, we still have not managed to recognize nor respond to this phenomenon as not only politically and materially motivated, but also a disease of the imagination. Yet, Trump’s recent re-election was heavily fueled by the imaginary construction of a romantic unlived past, stolen away by immigrants and globalization [5]. The appeal to ‘Make America great again’ is a call to return to this past. Similar movements, such as the rapid rise of far-right leader Georgescu and unfolding political crisis in Romania show how social media can weaponize nostalgia for political gain [6]. While this disease of the imagination may no longer be immanently fatal to its beholders, it is spreading bodily harms across time and space through policy shifts that expand social inequalities and ecological devastations. Ironically, many mobilized by nostalgia are unaware of its potential hazards, even for their future selves.

A pandemic of the imagination?

Lacking visions of better possible futures, many have been drawn towards imagining rosy stolen pasts. Yet, we are not witnessing an isolated disease of the imagination in the form of populist nostalgia. There is a broader dynamic at play—namely, the projection of certainty into the future in ways that diminish our collective ability to remake the present. This wider disease of the imagination extends beyond populist nostalgia and includes several strains with divergent political roots.

One of these strains is deeply familiar due to its long-term proliferation within colonial and extractivist regimes and ideas. However, unlike the nostalgia of populism—rooted in certainty of a worse future‚ it is rooted in certainty of a better future. I am referring to the optimistic faith in technological innovations to create a better (green, just, etc.) future. This disease of the imagination stems from a misplaced sense of certainty that everything will be fine. There is no need for more difficult or uncomfortable governance choices that limit individual freedoms for the sake of collective freedoms. Why cut fossil fuel emissions now when carbon capture technologies might soon be invented? Why redistribute wealth now if we expect to get more from less in the future? This foretelling of an optimistic future has long fueled technologies that benefit those who are seen to matter, often at the expense of many others. This narrative of inevitable technological innovation presumes that ‘the future is known to—and, thus, belongs to—those enlightened experts who understand the dynamics of innovation’ [7, p. 247]. Ethical questions become oriented towards responding to inevitable trajectories rather than questioning and changing the inevitability of those trajectories.

There is also a newer strain gaining ground. Like populist nostalgia (and unlike techno-optimism), this strain clings onto the pessimistic certainty of a worse future. However, it finds its roots in the political Left. I refer to the ‘collapsology’ mindset which is now so prevalent in Western societies—a ‘conviction of the inevitable’ that the future will be terrible, marked by anger towards those deemed responsible, and frustration over our inability to alter the trajectory we are on [8]. Collapsology has emerged in many flavors. The book Postapocalypse identifies a fault line among them which is both class-based and geographical [9]. In particular, it identifies a core ‘Northern’ variant—which responds to the foreseen collapse by building resilient local communities or calling for emergency action—as the source of much critique for being politically ineffective or signaling a moral superiority that alienates those outside of their echo chamber [ibid]. This Northern collapsology strain, while justified in its concerns, risks deepening rifts across cultures and may reduce the ability to form more collective solidarities and responsibilities.

Until we learn to grapple with this growing practice of clinging onto a certain future—be it positive or negative, Left or Right—we will continue to ignore a major reason why it has been so challenging to find each other across political, social and cultural boundaries.

In all three strains, the hubris to foretell the future stems from a place of unacknowledged privilege. The nostalgic populist strain privileges individual freedoms over collective freedoms. The techno-optimist strain confers privilege to those who can wield expertise and resources towards their notion of a desirable future, regardless of the countless dystopian burdens manufactured by such ‘utopian’ projects [10]. The Northern collapsology strain holds the privilege to be more anxious about the future than the present. Others have pointed out how people are already living through the continuous catastrophe that is modernity [11]. Countless indigenous worlds have already ended or are highly threatened, yet they have not given up [12], [13]. This resistance was recently echoed by my Cameroonian colleague Dingha Chrispo Babila who declared ‘we don’t have time for collapse, that’s your problem, not ours’. Rebecca Solnit similarly called climate despair a luxury: ‘Not acting is a luxury those in immediate danger do not have, and despair something they cannot afford’ [14].

All of this is not to dismiss the political and transformative potential of nostalgia, technology, and collapsology broadly speaking. Yet, a pandemic of the imagination seems to be spreading in relation to how these (and other) concepts are being mobilized among populist, capitalist and postcapitalist movements alike to foster an attitude of certainty towards the future. Identifying this common disorder across diverse movements might open up space for alternative modes of engaging with the future. Perhaps there are more uncertain ways to engage with the powerful emotional grip of nostalgia, technological optimism, and collapse. Amitav Ghosh has already spoken of a broader ‘crisis of imagination’—the notion that our collective imagination is wholly inadequate to respond to the climate and interwoven crises of our time [15]. We also know that our imagination of the future matters. Our ‘fictional expectations’ of the future can turn into self-fulfilling prophecies that constrain or enable particular actions [16]. However, we lack deeper understanding of precisely how our imagination is (mal)functioning, individually and collectively—and in ways that cross political boundaries; that don’t permit one side to claim a simple moral high ground over another.

We must therefore directly confront how and why we overdetermine the future. This entails exploring the emotional roots and political consequences. How and why do emotions short-circuit into certain futures and actions? What does this do to our collective ability to imagine and bring about better futures? Recent studies connect certainty over the future with less information seeking, intellectual blindness and antisocial behaviors. For example, in the case of COVID, future certainty (i.e. the pandemic will end soon, or the pandemic will never end) predicted adherence to conspiracy theories and failure to social distance [17]. In the 2020 US Presidential Election, future certainty that one’s own candidate would win predicted claims of election rigging and endorsed violence [ibid]. Until we learn to grapple with this growing practice of clinging onto a certain future—be it positive or negative, Left or Right—we will continue to ignore a major reason why it has been so challenging to find each other across political, social and cultural boundaries. Certainty, or even arrogance, has of course long been critiqued, yet there appears to be something particularly insidious when it creeps into our future expectations and past memories. Such intertwined false constructions can even further narrow our understanding of present possibilities, closing down opportunities for connection across divergent beliefs and desires to reimagine and remake the present. We have been so busy recovering from the recent pandemic of the body, that we have been blind to the growing pandemic of the imagination.

Painting of a landscape with a long road in bright colors, seen through the windshield of a vehicle
Hundertwasser, 655 THE ENDLESS WAY TO YOU, 1967 © 2025 NAMIDA AG, Glarus/Swiss

Dwelling in uncertain futures

What might serve as an antidote to our proliferating pandemic of the imagination? If a core problem is the emotional anxiety or suppression that leads one to bathe in an all too certain future, perhaps we must find ways of dwelling in uncertain futures (a phrase I thank Esther O’Toole for). Ways that address why we crave certainty and tackle the privilege that a desire for uncertainty often signals. For example, highly precarious conditions can lead one to crave future certainty for very good reason. We can find some inspiration from artist and architect Friedensreich Hundertwasser (Vienna, 1928), whose work combines political critique and radical imagination during the highly uncertain times following World War II. Hundertwasser famously said ‘the straight line leads to the downfall of humanity’ [18], referring to ‘uniformity, mass-production, and the oversimplification of truth’ in modern society [19, p. 63]. His work ‘The Endless Way to You’ illustrates a path between the conditions of present critique and possible futures—a journey oriented not towards predetermined ends but towards connecting with ‘you’ (or the other), in an endless fashion [19].

We have been so busy recovering from the recent pandemic of the body, that we have been blind to the growing pandemic of the imagination.

How to journey or dwell in uncertain futures together is something many are struggling with. Indeed, my motivation to write this piece stems from my own realization of just how widespread this pandemic of the imagination is, and exhaustion in trying to understand and navigate it over the past months. For example, in my work at the Copernicus Institute of Sustainable Development at Utrecht University, I taught the MSc course Imagining the Future for Transformation for the second time this autumn. The course experiments with how to make the classroom a more utopian place. The idea is to not only teach about theories of imagination, but also create a critical space where students can challenge their own imagination of possible or preferable futures and put their creative potential to imagine otherwise into practice. As a starting point on the first day of class, each student brings a representation of how they picture the future (in words, drawing, or otherwise). This year I noticed something quite unsettling. Perspectives seemed to be diverging into one of two camps—either towards an optimistic ‘green’ future underpinned by technological innovations, or towards a bleak future on the verge of societal collapse. Strong feelings were shared—even tears, linked to the well-documented growth of climate, eco- and other anxieties about the future [20].

While there were also many views in between, these extreme poles drove much debate in class, and in some cases led to uncomfortable clashes. Sincere questions were sometimes quickly shut down as ‘ignorant’ and in need of correction. For example, one student shared: ‘My openness in class was met with strong counter-opinions, and some classmates expressed frustration and maybe even anger, questioning my view and interpreting it in ways I did not intend. At that moment in the classroom, I felt hurt, vulnerable, and even misunderstood. Instead of engaging in a constructive dialogue, I felt my perspective had been dismissed.’ One student reflected on the bravery it took by some to ask questions that might be perceived as ‘ignorant’ by others yet that revealed important tensions and contradictions to further explore, saying I wish more people were this “ignorant”’. I started to wonder whether there was something about the level of certainty that students—and people more broadly—were holding onto about the future and their emotions surrounding it, that was reducing possibilities for connection and mutual understanding. Certitudes on both sides seemed to be hardening the other. As soon as one side claimed the moral right to ‘correct’ the other, it diminished everyone’s possibility to learn.

This experience led me to wonder—how can we better create spaces and solidarities that enable us to dwell together in uncertain futures? This question will be explicitly at the forefront of next year’s class, and I hope we can fruitfully discuss together how to create such a space for co-inquiry and co-imagination. Hearteningly, we did manage to discuss this openly at the end of the course this year, and a student shared: ‘I am very happy and relieved that at the feedback session we could surface this dynamic and continued to talk about it after the session with many of us, because I think it brought us together again. This makes me hopeful and perhaps this is exactly the kind of process and group attitude that may be beautiful to culture as humanity to construct more just and inclusive futures together’.

This experience led me to wonder—how can we better create spaces and solidarities that enable us to dwell together in uncertain futures?

This course seeks to interrogate the assumptions embedded in our own imaginations, but also does so in conversation with societal initiatives actively working towards a better future. Over 7 weeks, groups of students each worked with one of six such initiatives, ranging from a non-profit organization to a liberation movement, to try to uncover what vision of a better world they are working towards. The idea was to not simply mirror what is already on their website, nor allow students’ own visions to define this, but to probe initiatives with deep questions to consider details or implications of their vision that they may not have explicitly considered before. The students also examined the vision of another societal group that each initiative felt they were struggling to connect with. The students then had the creative task of designing a way of engaging with the distinct visions of better futures to open up towards new possibilities. This was a challenging exercise in co-production, as the groups had to make a deeply appreciative effort to understand each organization’s work and motivations, as well as embrace a critical stance by questioning certain things and offering a different perspective (without inappropriately imposing it). The fruits of these collaborations were shared in a zine the students produced: ‘Visions of a Better World’, which contains some inspiring ideas for how we can engage with diverse and often conflicting visions we find in the world.

While this course was deeply challenged by the pandemic of the imagination we are all in some way entangled, it also gave me hope that there are ways we can better navigate this. The classroom is just one space we can begin to foster fertile ground for the uncertainty and solidarity required to do so. We can also build more reciprocal relationships between university and society to deepen such critical and supportive explorations. Returning to Le Guin’s Foretellers, it is this question—how to dwell in uncertain futures?—that most urgently needs asking, rather than quick answers of what the future will or must entail. We need ways of unpacking why we feel so certain about particular realities and presumed futures, and ways of building political solidarities that can lead towards broader possible realities. The future must not be reduced to a linear path towards certainty, but rather a place to dwell together in uncertainty.

[1]        U. K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness. USA: ACE BOOKS, 1969.

[2]       A. Arnold-Forster, Nostalgia: A History of a Dangerous Emotion. London: Picador, 2024.

[3]       Z. Bauman, Retrotopia. Cambridge, UK & Malden, USA: Polity Press, 2017.

[4]       F. Davis, Yearning for Yesterday: A Sociology of Nostalgia. Free Press, 1979.

[5]       S. Goidel, “How Trump’s appeal to nostalgia deliberately evokes America’s more-racist, more-sexist past,” The Conversation. [Online]. Available: http://theconversation.com/how-trumps-appeal-to-nostalgia-deliberately-…

[6]       C. Postelnicescu, “Romania’s crisis shows that political elites have failed to understand what is expected of them,” Emerging Europe. [Online]. Available: https://emerging-europe.com/opinion/romanias-crisis-shows-that-politica…

[7]       M. Boenig-Liptsin and J. B. Hurlbut, “Technologies of Transcendence at Singularity University,” in Perfecting Human Futures: Transhuman Visions and Technological Imaginations, J. B. Hurlbut and H. Tirosh-Samuelson, Eds., Wiesbaden: Springer Fachmedien, 2016, pp. 239–267. doi: 10.1007/978-3-658-11044-4_12.

[8]       J. Tournadre, “The conviction of the inevitable: Collapsism and collective action in contemporary rural France,” Ethnography, vol. 0, no. 0, pp. 1–20, Jul. 2024, doi: 10.1177/14661381241266936.

[9]       C. Cassegård and H. Thörn, “Postapocalypse,” in Post-Apocalyptic Environmentalism: The Green Movement in Times of Catastrophe, C. Cassegård and H. Thörn, Eds., Cham: Springer International Publishing, 2022, pp. 77–112. doi: 10.1007/978-3-031-13203-2_4.

[10]      D. McConville and D. Danby, “When utopia is oblivion / Quand l’utopie force l’oubli,” in Spherical, Montreal, QC, Canada, Aug. 2024. [Online]. Available: https://labs.spherical.studio/when-utopia-is-oblivion/

[11]       W. Benjamin, “On the Concept of History,” in Walter Benjamin, Selected Writings, Volume 4:1938–1940, vol. 4, E. Jephcott, Ed., Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2003 [1940], pp. 389–400. [Online]. Available: https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/benjamin/1940/history.htm

[12]      D. Danowski and E. Viveiros de Castro, The Ends of the World, Eerste editie. Malden, MA: Polity, 2016.

[13]      Y. Marom, “What To Do When The World Is Ending,” Medium. [Online]. Available: https://medium.com/@YotamMarom/what-to-do-when-the-world-is-ending-99ee…

[14]      R. Solnit, “Why climate despair is a luxury,” New Statesman. [Online]. Available: https://www.newstatesman.com/environment/2023/07/rebecca-solnit-climate…

[15]      A. Ghosh, The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable. Chicago: University of Chicago Pr., 2017.

[16]      J. Beckert, “Imagined futures: fictional expectations in the economy,” Theor Soc, vol. 42, no. 3, pp. 219–240, May 2013, doi: 10.1007/s11186-013-9191-2.

[17]      I. Olcaysoy Okten, A. Gollwitzer, and G. Oettingen, “When knowledge is blinding: The dangers of being certain about the future during uncertain societal events,” Personality and Individual Differences, vol. 195, p. 111606, Sep. 2022, doi: 10.1016/j.paid.2022.111606.

[18]      A. Taschen, Ed., Hundertwasser Architecture: For a More Human Architecture in Harmony with Nature. Cologne: Taschen, 1997.

[19]      S. N. Lynch, “The Survival of Friedensreich Hundertwasser: Consistencies and Contradictions,” Bachelor of Arts with Departmental Honors, Wesleyan University, Middletown, CT, 2013. doi: 10.14418/wes01.1.919.

[20]     B. Wray, Generation Dread: Finding Purpose in an Age of Climate Crisis. Knopf Canada, 2022.