There is a chasm at the heart of politics across the West

The National

29-06-2025

However, there is now a growing feeling that the very idea of the future – how we think, imagine and act upon it – is in deep crisis affecting how we reflect and behave in the present and see our capacity to bring about change.
This essay will assert that this crisis of the future is not something far-off which can be parked until we have time to think about it. Rather it is a crisis in the present and of where we are – and where we are going. It matters and has consequences for all humanity and our planet.
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It will examine the notion of past, lost and alternative futures, the rise and fall of 'the official future' and the danger of being mesmerised by the allure of 'a single story'. The idea of the future reveals much about the current times we live in. Hence, the future is often a projection of present times or trends, hopes and fears, and entails a temporal dimension whereby past, present and future are linked.
Past Futures Still Present
THE future has been with us for a long time. In the 18th century, a genre of utopian fiction arose that addressed epochal changes across the Western world such as the rise of industry, empire and a mercantile class.
In the 19th century, collective movements and ideas explored the explosion of wealth, trade, technology and inequality, rooted in the socialist and collectivist traditions which posed the prospect of a new kind of society based on equality and co-operation.
In the 20th century, scarred by two deadly World Wars, the march of modernity continued politically, culturally and through architecture, design and style. Fritz Lang's iconic 1927 film Metropolis captured a view of the future – of skyscrapers, densely populated cityscapes and flying cars – informed by his first experience of visiting Manhattan. Despite Lang's anti-Nazi beliefs, the film was loved by Joseph Goebbels, Hitler's propaganda chief, and by senior Nazis who saw their brutal dystopian plans foregrounded in its images.
Post-1945, such cities as the new capital of Brasilia, Le Corbusier's designs, the Bruce Plan for Glasgow all represented peak modernity. There was a faith in an innate optimism, and that humanity and human relationships could be remade in a new ordered, clean environment. It turned out differently.
The post-war rise in living standards and consumer revolution across the West revolutionised how we lived. One symbol was the explosion of car ownership and what it inferred about its owner. It was not just about getting from A to B but stood for an expansive vision of the future representing independence, choice and the safety of a privatised freedom where you could create your own journey through time and space.
(Image: Archant)
This transformation was marked by a technological revolution in the home and a shift in how we saw planet earth environmentally and from space. The Space Race between the US and USSR witnessed a plethora of films, drama and writing about science-fiction futures. These were often shaped by threats to earth and how humanity organised and came together to repel, or civilize, it – from Star Trek's first variant in the 1960s to a host of cheaper UK variants such as UFO and Space 1999.
Cold War Scenarios and the Rise of 'the Official Future'
THE Cold War era produced a huge military-industrial complex in the US and USSR. In the former, this saw the creation of the Rand Corporation which advised the US government on how to compete with the Soviets in nuclear weapons, technology and how to practice 'deterrence' and even the fallacy of how to 'win' a nuclear war.
Rand brought together experts, academics and military planners who changed how futures thinking occurred. Their version of the future was influential, had access to the highest levels of government, and was a future about levels of classification and secrecy. In this it fuelled the idea of a secret future which government and authority are deliberately keeping from the public. Rand and other like-minded bodies contributed to the explosion of conspiracy theories which now litter public discourse from 9/11 to Covid.
Rand introduced the world to a host of future thinking tools, namely 'the official future', scenario planning and a 'war room' as the centre of decision-making: mimicked by mainstream politics. Later Shell Corporation pioneered innovative scenario planning in the 1970s spurred on by that decade's oil price spike and global instability.
The Year 2000 produced by the US Hudson Institute in 1967 attempted to provide a comprehensive survey of the next 33 years. It was an impressive collation of materials, trends and data, addressing increasingly complex nature and demands upon government, and expansion of education and skills at work. More revealing is what they missed – including the changing status of women in Western societies, the rise of identity politics, and the emergence of radical Islam. All of which underlined the blinkered nature of privileged 'policy wonk' intelligence in the US and West.
This reinforces a wider truth about such 'official future' thinking, that in their top-down way of analysing the world they have built-in biases. The values inherent within them are often unstated or assumed without scrutiny. The Year 2000 found the Western economic model so universal in its merits that it could not believe it would not be irresistible and spread across the globe.
The Power of Storytelling
ALTERNATIVE ways to imagine the future are available, and one obvious way is through the power of human creativity, imagination and story. Studies about the importance of story and storytelling abound but one of the most ambitious in recent decades has been The Seven Basic Plots: Why We Tell Stories by Christopher Booker.
Booker states there are a finite number of archetypical stories – an argument as old as humanity. He poses that a common theme informing many of them is the search for light and the allure of the dark and the continual battle between the two: an observation he uses to illuminate our ongoing fascination with Nazis in fiction and epic narrative such as Star Wars.
A corollary of this is put by the Nigerian writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adiche who in a 2009 TED talk identified 'the danger of a single story'. She was addressing how Western opinion has traditionally viewed Africa and Africans as 'a basket case', 'hopeless' and 'helpless', and how these external caricatures have come to be internalised by Africans themselves contributing to these descriptions taking even more of a hold.
Adiche posed that rejecting the constraints of 'a single story', whether it concerns Africans or any other group, is a kind of release and liberation. She argues that it aids people to overthrow external attempts to disempower them and helps them make their own story and future by empowering them to tell a more nuanced account of their lives.
These insights informed two futures projects, Scotland 2020 and Glasgow 2020, undertaken with the UK think tank Demos which I led. The Scotland 2020 project came first and entailed both scenario exercises and generated a set of stories, along with a series of policy recommendations.
The more wide-ranging project Glasgow 2020 followed and deliberately did not commission scenarios (there already being an entire industry of such production in various city agencies). It concentrated on the development of stories by the people of Glasgow via events across the city where they created characters, plot lines, relationships, choices and values of its citizens in that future.
The story events represented a representative cross-section of the city, over 5000 people, and involved immersive, deliberative conversations. Humans have an innate ability to talk about the future if they feel they have agency, are respected, trust processes and know that any real future involves difficult choices and trade-offs.
Then as now, the 'official future' of the city was laid out in glossy documents. This 'official future' was nearly always sectoral in the account it told whether about tourism, shopping, culture, economic development. For all the talk of joined-up governance, it was anything but. The stories of the future that people told were not sectional. Instead, they were cross-cutting, value-based and centred on the philosophies in the most general sense people wanted government and public bodies to champion.
People did not address narrow areas such as public health or crime levels; rather they addressed how people related to each other and yearned for official bodies that spoke the same language as them. Many suspected when they spoke about the values of government that, for all the soft ways in which officialdom tried to present things, they were far removed from the values they wanted them to champion. They felt there was a democratic deceit at the heart of how government was conducted.
Tomorrow cannot just be a bigger version of Today
PRESENT in all these discussions was the spectre of 'the official future' – an account with an instrumental view of people, progress and the future which reinforces a prevailing sense of powerlessness. Core to this view of the future is something we came to call 'linear optimism' – a phrase that not one single person verbalised throughout the project but which they often described.
Linear optimism embodies the notion that the future should be, and will be, a better, bigger version of the present. In this it has, as one of its central conceits, a denial of future choice. It says underneath its fake optimistic gloss that all of us outwith government, public bodies and corporates should not bother considering the future because it has already been decided by bodies more important and knowledgeable than ourselves. It says the future is closed and not open for discussion.
Critically for its adherents it has increasingly failed to deliver on its central promise: economic growth, greater prosperity and wider opportunities. The mantra of the globalisers and their vision of a free trade world driven by market forces became the dominant global order after the fall of the Berlin Wall. Yet for all its self-assuredness it has increasingly failed to deliver the goods with flatlining living standards across the West since the banking crash, an unsustainable Chinese economic model driven by debt and a trade deficit with the US, global instability, and the West's neverending wars in the Middle East (which globalisation apologists such as Thomas Friedman said would not happen in a world of interconnected trade).
The New York University-based Centre for Artistic Activism, led by Steve Duncombe and Steve Lambert, utilises similar creative tools as a different way of advancing social change and the future across the world. They make the case that too much radical politics do not contain joy, fun or irreverence, and instead come over as a chore and weight on people's shoulders, leaving people feeling exhausted and lectured. In their opinion, much radical protest is about going through the motions and not looking at the world and gains that people want to make and then thinking about what this would change – and seeing if that change can be advanced and nurtured.
The two Steves put creative imaginations at the core of their work. Their residential in the run-up to 2014 in Newbattle College attracted an amazing array of participants of all ages and backgrounds, of which one said, 'I have been coming to political events since 1961 and this was the most inspiring set of discussions I have ever experienced'. A major take away from their work is the importance of art, specifically that 'art needs activism and activism needs art.'
Lost Futures and Post-Capitalism
THE future of the future needs to address what Mark Fisher described as 'lost futures', drawing on the concept of Jacques Derrida's hauntology. This is, in Fisher's words, 'a society haunted by the remnants of these lost futures, leading to a cultural landscape where nostalgia and revivalism prevail': all contributing to an absence of alternative futures in the present. These 'lost futures' are felt profoundly, producing a truncated, predictable menu of stale choices curtailed by 'the official future.'
The radical science fiction writer Ursula Le Guin added to this the observation, asking whether we can dare to have the capacity to imagine a post-capitalist world and future? Can we outline, beyond such works as Le Guin's The Dispossessed, Iain M Banks Culture series and the work of Kim Stanley Robinson, a real, viable alternative idea of the future?
Jonathan White's recent book In The Long Run: The Future as a Political Idea poses that the notion of the future is about the present and the notion of temporal space, language and capacity: an intelligence which connects past, present and future, and which kicks against the short-termism of party politics today. The space to create that set of connections needs to be made in a world driven by short attention spans, by instant gratification and simple solutions, and by the failure of mainstream politics to treat voters as adults who can make difficult choices.
One view of the future increasingly influential is put forward by Silicon Valley tech bros. They present a view of capitalism, transgressing being human and planet earth which takes a transformative view of AI, transhumanism and even life beyond the limits of our planet. This is a power elite who have been fawned and told that they are unique and that their every desire should be indulged, with their private fantasies projected onto a version of the future which aligns with their capitalist interests.
The absence of futures thinking and literacy in present-day Scotland can be seen in political debate and independence. In office, the SNP have said implicitly don't worry about the future; this is intertwined with independence and any other major choices can be decided the other side of statehood. This is another example of a closed future saying this subject is not up for discussion. This is a major missing dimension of Scottish political debate and a subject I will explore in a follow-up essay.
One issue which needs addressing is agency. The hollowing out and exhaustion of mainstream politics and political parties across the West aids the crisis of the future. This can be seen in the collusion of the traditional Westminster parties in clinging to the broken UK economic and social model and in an inability to map out an alternative terrain on political economy, capitalism and repairing the social contract between government and people.
The geo-political global environment raises major questions not just for politics but the idea of the future. In the immediate post-war era, in the 1950s and 1960s, America represented the future with its open expansiveness, its growing economy, cultural clout and military power – all offering an intoxicating mix of 'the American dream' of freedom and opportunity.
Trumpian America has dealt a deathblow to that version of the US. There can be no going back to how things were before, America is no longer watching the back of Europe and is no longer the shining idea and future. America has become another 'lost future'.
Related to this is the prevalent feeling that we are living in 'end times' – whether that is imminent environmental collapse or the march of technology and AI. This contributes to a diminishing of timescales and temporal space with numerous elections presented as 'the last chance' to save democracy or something else precious. That raises the stakes in numerous contests and the benefit and loss between winning and not winning as seen in the recent American and Brazilian Presidential elections.
The same dynamic can be identified in COP summits and the protests of Extinction Rebellion and from a very different perspective American survivalists. COP summits regularly present humanity as close to 'the midnight hour' to try to motivate the delegations to come to global agreement. But the cumulative effect is an arms race of language.
The Closed Future has to be defeated
THE future cannot be closed. It cannot be left to experts, governments or corporates. The crisis of the future is a major phenomenon in an age of change, disruption and shocks, and cannot go unexplored and unchallenged. If it were, major and negative consequences flow for politics, humanity and the planet.
The open future is the opposite of the closed future. It is a rejection of 'the end of history.' It is not some Blair-Clinton 'third way' narrative and hangover from the era of peak globalisation. Rather it is about prising open the debate on our collective future. Rejecting the end of the future.
Debate across the West cannot be reduced to a choice between a failed neoliberalism and bust economics; a watered-down social democracy which has many historic achievements but is now exhausted and hollowed out and a populism presenting itself as the main challengers to the status quo. In such circumstances the forces of the populist right will have many advantages pretending to be insurgents.
All the above share common ground on economics, the broken social contract, and the way they regard most people as incapable of creating and deciding their collective future with others. They believe the future has been determined.
Mainstream politics are part of a single problematic story which stresses that there is no alternative. Breaking out of that single story that limits, diminishes and depowers us would be a kind of freedom and liberation. But it will require developing visions of different futures, not accepting that the future is over and closed, and finding new forms of political expression beyond the current inadequate forms of party and democracy.
Those different versions of the future and different ideas of society, the world and our planet, are already here. They can be found in fiction, arts and culture, and innovators and imagineers working beyond the mainstream. But 'the official story' wants to hold on, despite its failures, and tell us the lie that there is only one single story – that 'There is No Alternative' to the present state. That deception and the dehumanising, diminishing, reactionary values it represents must be defeated by a vision of the future which tells a very different, more hopeful story of, for – and by – all of us.
We can see all around us dissatisfaction, anger and rage at the status quo and 'the official future' from our communities, across Scotland and the UK, to globally. People know the existing domestic and global order is rotten and indefensible. That feeling and resistance has to be used to create the resources and ideas for that alternative future.