The woman of my world has found a new focus for her contemplations. She’s thinking in the realms where ideas do battle for control of the human imagination, and her focus is a group of folks who propose to challenge one of the oldest and most established of thought monsters to ever migrate from literature into the common psyche… the dystopian vision of the future.
They call themselves “solarPunk," and they're dedicated to an idea I tend to support: the idea that you must be able to dream something before you will be able to translate that something from dream into reality. Kind of a no brainer, really. It’s pretty obvious if you can't wrap your head around an idea while it's still a fantasy, a fiction, you'll have trouble dealing on it as a matter of reality. On that point they and I are very much on a parallel course.
There are other points though where they are, apparently quite unwittingly, making themselves terribly vulnerable to the very things that have been allowing the dystopian vision to shape the modern world. These are elements of the modern culture that are so subtly contradictory as to have become weapons of the covert cultural warfare currently raging for control of freedom where freedom actually begins... which is between the ears of the electorate.
On these points I must stand aloof from their endeavor, to embrace the main thesis of solarPunk without addressing these issues first is to guarantee the ultimate failure of the hope.
Gentle reader, allow me to elaborate a bit and hopefully fully illuminate my concerns. As I said, these are subtle things that can become a bit… chewy…on a first encounter; these are subtle things where those doing battle for control of belief, of perception and imagination, have for several generations worked with deep dedication to set taboo the lines of approach needed to understand and defeat these weapons imbedded within the common culture that gives shape to the common psyche. Fair warning: this will be very politically incorrect.
