Fascism and the Failure of Imagination

as great scientists have said and as all children know it is above all by the imagination that we achieve perception and compassion and hope when was the last time you played pretend and I mean really played when I made a community post a few weeks ago asking you all how you played pretend as kids I got hundreds and hundreds of responses from people raving about their childhood imaginations and how much fun they had pretending to be animals or playing house with their siblings but for a lot of us we haven't done that kind of thing

in a long time sure we might play role playing video games or tabletop games where we adopt a new persona for a few hours but outside of that most of us don't really stretch our imaginations much anymore but why is that why does it feel like we're not allowed to be imaginative anymore like when we grow up we have to stop imagining and playing pretend why does it feel like imagination has been ruined well I've been working on a bigger video about media literacy which will probably be out in June so be sure to subscribe

and ring the bell to get notified when it comes out and while imagination isn't inherently tied to media literacy they're both skills that come down to a person's willingness to meaningfully engage with the real world and with imagined worlds and it really feels like just like how a lot of people are struggling with media literacy there's also a lot of people struggling with imagination and I want to talk about that I want to talk about why it feels so hard to be imaginative today why that's dangerous and what we can do about it let's get

into it shall we but first being a YouTuber means that my job is being imaginative in front of thousands of people and that can be pretty scary after doing this for almost four years though I've actually gotten fairly comfortable with sharing my imagination with 300,000 people but you know what I'm not comfortable sharing my personal information with data Brokers and that is why I use the sponsor of today's video incog incog is a privacy tool that helps you keep your personal information out of the hands of data Brokers so when you use the internet you

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if you use code zoeb you can get 60% off an annual plan like I said it is a super easy tool to use and it gives me such Peace of Mind knowing that my personal information isn't being bought and sold by data Brokers I genuinely cannot recommend incog enough again that link is in cog.org Zoe B using Code Zoe B for 60% off an annual plan and thanks again to incog for sponsoring but with that let's get back to the video before we get into the larger issues surrounding imaginative thinking it's important to acknowledge some

of the personal reasons why people might struggle with imagination one big hurdle to imaginative play is that it feels really vulnerable so I played D andd on a streamed show called what's left of us which is live on the last Friday of every month and you can watch the vods on the channel of our dmj corn and I have links in the description if you want to check it out but for that game I pretend to be a little gnome girl who has a robot dog and lived alone in the woods for most of her

life and she doesn't know how friends work or what taxes are and she is very cute but role playing in front of hundreds of people is not a skill that comes naturally even for me professional YouTuber zoeb because doing imagination with other people is intimate in a really unique way when you play pretend you initiate this sort of social contract where you and the people you're with agree that whatever you're about to do is fake but you're all going to suspend your disbelief that is you are going to turn off the part of your brain

that says um actually that's not realistic so when I play D and D I fulfill my side of the social contract by doing my best to embody this character who exists in this fictional world and the viewers fulfill their side by agreeing to accept our fiction as reality but the problem is that it can be really hard to find people willing to suspend their disbelief like that and more importantly being creative means taking creative risks and risks are scary what if you use your imagination to write a story and no one likes it what if

you come up with a new kind of magic system or a Fantastical creature and everyone thinks it's silly that's a really really scary thing for a lot of people and it's one of the biggest reasons why people are reticent to use their imaginations in these kinds of settings part of the blame for this is definitely on schools schools don't seem to Value imagination at all right in many ways students are actually punished for being imaginative through the punitive use of grades which has essentially conditioned us to fear creative risk-taking even in art classes which are

of course electives that are sequestered off into their own space where you would think that there would be room for creativity and Imagination it's still often about doing things the right way for a grade and when we leave school it gets even worse imagination is seen as childish as a waste of time adulthood is for doing real work in the real world not fantasizing about other worlds or dreaming of new things so it's no wonder we're not very good at being imaginative imagination is scary at the best of times and most of us weren't taught

how to do it and Society at Large doesn't seem to care about it at all but why for one thing imagination doesn't make money or at least it's not guaranteed to make money imagination means creativity and creativity means risk when you make something new you don't know if it's going to be any good or if it'll even work in the first place it's inherently risky so you have to do this Balancing Act of being creative enough that your ideas can sell while not being so creative that your ideas are so new knew that they're scary

you can't have too much imagination you need just enough imagination to come up with new stories new iterations on Old ideas new sequels for established properties but the way those stories are told the underlying structures of them have to stay the same you're free to come up with new stories as long as those stories fit within a three-act structure are written in standard English and meet industry standards of form and style even in business where people say they want innovation what they really mean is innovation within certain boundaries imagination is for making small adjustments to

pre-existing safe bets we see this in education too when we teach students about the world we teach them how to exist within it not how to change it we teach them the status quo how to solve equations and how to write research papers and how the government works we don't teach them to ask if those equations are the only way to solve the problem or why research papers have to be written like that or whether the government should work that way we're not training students to imagine new ways of doing things we're training them to

do what an authority figure tells them to the premier example of this kind of education can actually be seen in everyone's favorite propaganda outfit prageru like I've talked about in another video prageru's lesson plans are bad I think that this is all indicative of just how vapid prageru's view of schooling is their lessons don't include real activities or real discussions because they simply cannot imagine a lesson that isn't someone standing at the front of a classroom talking at a bunch of children who are silently sitting at their desks with a worksheet in front of them

they say that they want to change the future of Education in America but what they're providing with these lesson plans isn't some kind of educational Revolution it's boring now actually just recently came out with their first real class something that is actually being used for real academic Credit in New Hampshire schools and I was thinking about doing a little video on it because when I was looking into it earlier it looks so bad and I think that it is just endlessly fascinating how prer you sees education so let me know in the comments if you

want me to take a look at their econ 101 class so you don't have to but anyway all of these lessons even their craftery art videos all just come down to students following directions and doing things the right way there's no room for imagination or critical thinking or creativity CU they don't care about that they don't care about kids asking questions or expressing themselves or daring to do things differently they care about kids doing what they're told but there's still a deeper question here why do schools and businesses not value imaginative thinking it's like they're

afraid of imagination like they can't risk people trying new things but risk is only a bad thing if whatever you're holding on to whatever the status quo is is so valuable that you just cannot possibly chance losing it and that's interesting right like we're all so invested in keeping things how they are that now we see any suggestion to change things as a threat you can do whatever you want within the system we've given you but don't you dare try to come up with a new system imagine things that fit within this box don't you

dare try to imagine a new box or especially no box at all the only value imagination has is to support our structures not create new ones but what we need to remember is that these structures that we're living within they're all made up to quote ruha Benjamin in her book B imagination a Manifesto imagination does not just animate sci-fi inspired scientific Endeavors or explicitly creative Pursuits like Broadway musicals viral Tik Tok dances and Jean Michelle B's paintings imagination is also embedded in the more mundane things that govern our lives like money laws and gr everything

was imagined language taxes marriage borders democracy they're all just ideas that we either collectively agreed to believe or that powerful enough people forced us to it's like roleplay it's that suspension of disbelief like we all know that money is just pieces of paper but we've all agreed to the social contract that says this piece of paper has value that's what people mean when they talk about something being a social construct these things are only as real as we all decide they are and that's all well and good except as Benjamin goes on to say lest

we forget designing cruel oppressive structures involves imagination to early on in the making of this video I was planning to title it fascists have no imagination but that's not quite right is it it's not that fascists don't have an imagination clearly they do it's the fascist imagination that allows people to imagine children as killers imagine entire ethnic groups as Vermin and imagine themselves as the rightful rulers fascists have an imagination it's just that their imagination sucks their imagination is cruel rigid and static and this cruel rigid static imagination is what I'm calling the fascist unimaginary

and it lies at the heart of bigotry the fascist imagination puts people in boxes based on arbitrary traits and then refuses to imagine that they could ever leave that box white supremacy cannot imagine black philosophers patriarchy cannot imagine women leaders CIS heteronormativity cannot imagine trans people existing the fascist unimaginary shows up in our art too we've been imaginative enough to invent dwarves and mermaids but we couldn't possibly imagine black dwarves or mermaids we can imagine magic wielding ttrpg characters but not ones in wheelchairs we can imagine post-apocalyptic sci-fi super soldiers but not ones who are

trans so we do have an imagination we've imagined so many things all these systems and Concepts and fictions we just can't imagine any further and that kind of doesn't make sense right how can we be imaginative enough to live in this world of Concepts but not imaginative enough to create new ones what is it about the fascist unimaginary that has gotten us so stuck to answer this question I want to briefly discuss psychologist Jean p who studied child development in Switzerland and found that when kids learned games from other kids in this particular case the

game of marbles they went through three distinct stages in their understanding of the rules Eric Zimmerman describes P's findings in his book The Rules we break lessons in play Thinking and design and says P found that children move through three different stages as they learn how to play marbles the youngest kids have a vague sense that there are rules you're supposed to to follow but they don't quite understand how they work and don't fully comprehend the entire system in the second stage usually starting around age five children are able to understand the rules of marbles

and fully play the game but in a very particular way they hold the rules as a kind of sacred authority they play strictly by the rules only and won't permit any bending or breaking of them there is only one right way to play the game the third stage begins around age 10 children come to marbles as a social contract a set of rules that gain their Authority only because the players agree to follow them this means that if everyone agrees the rules can be changed so right now we're stuck on stage two right we've created

these rules for ourselves but now those rules have become sacred and we can't even fathom breaking them it's gotten to the point where it's hard to even see the structure we've built around ourselves or to even remember that we made it in the first place and when we can't even see the structure around us how could we possibly look outside that structure for solutions to our problems so the question becomes how do we get to stage three Zimmerman described stage three as the understanding that games are a voluntary social construct play in this sense is

wonderfully flexible but also quite fragile play happens only if and when we all agree to it to get to stage three we need to First understand that the world around us all its structures and systems are socially constructed and when something is socially constructed that means it can be deconstructed and reconstructed socially too and that starts with you with all of us so like we talked about earlier bigotry is just a failure of imagination it comes from an inability to imagine people living outside the roles that society and history created for them but the opposite

of that fascist unimaginary that unimaginative bigotry that keeps people in boxes is radical inclusion to give you an idea of what I mean here I want to talk about Pixar University a program run by Pixar Animation Studio where they held over a hundred courses including film making painting drawing sculpting and creative writing every member of the Pixar payroll including the animators accountants catering staff technicians production assistants marketers and security guards is entitled and encouraged to spend up to 4 hours of every working week in the Pixar University since anybody can go to any course there's

a constant flow of new ideas running through the organization people from different areas of the organization work with each other and are reminded that they're all part of a single effort in other words rather than putting people into boxes that they're not allowed to leave Pixar actively invited all of their staff to be a part of all of their work and that diversity and solidarity meant that the entire organization got a huge creative boost see imagination is at the heart of empathy it's through imagination that we're able to put ourselves in others shoes imagine how

they live and what they go through and see things from other people's perspectives and if we are going to work together to reconstruct the world around us we're going to need all of us and we're going to need to be able to understand each other but people who are invested in the world staying how it is don't want us to imagine something new they like things just the way they are so as ruha Benjamin puts it is it any Wonder then that those in power work tirelessly to squash us from having radical imaginations that dare

to Envision a world in which everyone can Thrive but they can't kill imagination fully because we all imagine all the time in fact you're probably a lot more imaginative than you think you are as Dr Stewart Brown puts it in his book play someone might not even notice as they fantasize about what kind of house they would like to live in or whom they would like to marry but the brain is constructing a working profile of a future house or future spouse and we continually make up storylines in our heads to keep the past present

and future in context thinking about what you want for your future or creat creating a story out of your past is imagining having conversations with people in your head and giving fake interviews in the shower are playing pretend we are imaginative we are playful Society just tries to convince us that we aren't because imagination and play are harder to control and because they're harder to control they're considered childish and silly and unimportant and so what we're seeing is less and less time and space for play schools are starting earlier recess times are being cut rest

is being replaced by side hustles and media literacy seems to be on the decline as I'll discuss in my larger video on the topic but the truth is play is actually incredibly valuable play according to Jennifer GTI feni nurtures a child's sense of being by giving them time and space to try new things to make inferences and learn from experience to practice empathy and stretch their creative muscles play Not only supports other skills necessary for survival but may be an evolutionary end in itself and because of this children end up thriving in societies that prioritize

play for instance in some hunter gatherer cultures where kids were able to spend hours away from adults just playing pretend with other kids the children in these cultures are among the brightest happiest most Cooperative most well-adjusted most resilient children ever never observed anywhere and the same is true for adults imagination and playing pretend are incredibly valuable to our mental well-being with role-playing games actually being used as therapeutic tools to help people safely explore themselves and their struggles that's honestly part of why I make sure to spend my time playing d and d whether it's on

our monthly streamed show or in the private games with just me and my friends and again if you want to see me pretend to be a little gnome girl with a robot dog whose magic actually comes from the power of imagination the links to the show are in the description and I also know that the crit Award nominations are still open so if you like ttrpg actual play games I will have a link in the description where you can nominate your favorite and help to spread the joy of play anyway I'm not necessarily saying that

playing pretend is practice but I'm also not not saying that obviously imagination and playing pretend aren't able to change the world on their own but they are absolutely important they help us see the structures around us to imagine new world and to live our own lives to their fullest imagination is at the root of empathy solidarity and hope but imagination has been branded as childish and we've been forced into boxes that can strain our creativity simply because the current systems we're working within don't want to have to change our system is stuck in stage two

where the rulle rules are sacred and anyone who tries to play outside those rules is wrong they just want sequels and remakes and iterations and adjustments because they're safe and easy but if we want to get to that third stage if we want to see things change if we want a better world we're going to have to do the hard risky thing and take ownership of our imaginations stretch our creative muscles and get to work and it's work that can only be done together we need to work together to change the education system so it

stops punishing us for our creative risks we need to come together to fight back against the fascist unimaginary in our culture and above all we need to play together to play with something is to explore its possibilities to test its limits to move beyond the functional and utilitarian and into the realm of the unexpected and inappropriate punk rock played with the conventions of how to make music political revolutions play with the established order new ideas play with old ideas in experiencing play we're training ourselves to be flexible and creative to be critical to not just

accept things as they are as we play with something we start to understand it in new ways often we even transform that something into something new play is like a shamelessly generous parasite it grabs on to other things behaviors objects situations but instead of sucking the life out of them them it does exactly the opposite it enlivens them it brings Joy it opens up potentials you never would ever have thought possible thanks again for sticking around to the end of the video I'm sorry it took so long life got in the way but thank you

so much for being patient my next video should be out relatively soon it's a little quick one and then I have my big media literacy video after that so be sure to subscribe to the channel and ring the bell so you get notified when those videos come out I would like to give a huge thanks to all of my patrons and other supporters without whom I would not be able to do any of this I want to give an especially big thanks to Hugh Sophia Justin Lowry Megan louns and Chef Alderson I would not be

able to do this without you thank you so very much if you want to get your name in the credits or get early and AD free access to my videos then join my patreon at patreon.com zoeb or become a channel member using the button below and finally we have our Patron poem of the video for gay frogs Collective here is Pine more ancient than hunger an ache born in the bellies of amoeba who could scarcely dream of trees it burns primordial and sharp everpresent as the moon and Silent as the void dark imprint your fingers

left it wraps my wrists in tendrils man learned to walk in the time it took Earth's unblessed flesh to form you and until next time stay safe stay warm and I will see y'all again soon I hope bye folks I had to record this twice listen it's just it's just been like this month has just been and by this month I mean April has it's been so much it has been from beginning to end so much and I am so thankful for all of your patience and I I am so tired and I cannot wait

for this video to be out I hope that you liked it now I'm just rambling you know it's fine it'll be fine it will be fine and if I just keep repeating that it will be fine then it will be um so it'll be fine you are a very good pillow actually this is quite enjoyable for [Music] me but