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Dominant images of the future control political action in the present, thus locking in a particular path of societal development.
In order to unlock this ideological control of the political space, we need alternative images of the future.
Who should create those images?
In the present political system of representative democracy, political parties or movements assume the responsibility of creating alternative images of the future.
To adapt a famous analogy, politics is a marketplace, not of ideas, but of images of the future.
Continuing with the analogy for a moment: The problem with this marketplace is the same as with any other unregulated market: the formation of monopolies or oligopolies.[1]
The citizen of a representative democracy is first reduced to a consumer, and then presented with a menu of minor variations upon one or two themes.[2]
The second part of this problem can be ameliorated through the creation of a wider variety of images of the future from which we may select.
This may be achieved in different ways, but one method suggests itself due to the fact that it would also solve what, in this analogy, is the first part of the problem of representative democracies, namely that citizens are reduced to consumers.
The solution to both of these problems is to create the necessary structures to allow citizens themselves to create these images of the future.
Thus, the creation of alternative images of the future could be the main task and animating principle of the democratisation of modern representative democracies.
Futures, in the sense of futures studies in general, and participatory futures in particular, can thus serve as the key to unlock the ideological control that dominant images of the future presently exert on our political agency.[3]
[1]: Adam Smith noted how "People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the publick, or in some contrivance to raise prices". (WN I.x.c.27) The political class may be suspected of similarly being unable to stop themselves from creating images of the future that keep themselves in power and their friends in wealth.
[2]: Namely, neoliberal futures in which the actual market organises ever more aspects of the life of the individual, or socialist futures in which state-owned services are offered to a community.
[3]: On participatory futures, see: