The Creative Approach To Ideology

Instead of "true or false" ask "what if?"

Suppose everyone in the world could teleport. How would the world change? Let’s say it’s an app that you download on your phone. You open up maps, select a spot, press a button, and you appear there. What would happen?

Well, borders would matter a lot less. People could commute from anywhere in the world to anywhere else in the world. Where people lived would change. You could get a house deep in the mountains or on an island and go to work in a big office center each day. The real estate market would change, since “location” would no longer matter. People might have secret locations where parties and special events convene. You might only be able to find a secret party a thousand miles in the woods if someone sends you an invite.

How would this change society? Suppose you and everyone involved in a niche interest could actually meet up in person. There might only be a thousand of you in the world, but now you can meet up every day. You could appear as a flash mob in any town square in the world, a major newspaper office, or the President’s bedroom. Now, “radicalization” becomes a totally different issue. People might suddenly appear in places they aren’t supposed to or create flash mobs that actually “flash” into a space.

The very wealthy might start building homes underground, since teleporting into the Earth would be dangerous. Select the wrong spot and you’re buried under the dirt. The exact location of underground lairs would be kept a closely guarded secret. If we were writing this as a story, we might choose a real estate agent or underground lair builder as our main character. Can you see a story this character might be involved in?

Of course, we could go in a totally different direction. What happens if your teleporter breaks while you’re all alone in the artic? Is there a teleportation emergency line that will come get you? What happens to the very poor who can’t afford teleportation in a society where it is required to get to work? Are there entire districts of nothing but industrial space, since no one needs to build housing near them? Is one state designated the “landfill state” and all trash from the entire world teleported there so that the world is clean and this one location walled off from the rest of the ecosystem has to deal with it?

What we’re doing from this premise is world-building. Any good sci-fi writer if given that premise could create an entire world just by asking what would happen if that premise was true. There are many different stories one could create from that idea. The way to create a world or story is simply to as “what if this was true?”

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One can approach ideologies the same way. “What if everyone had human rights and you had to respect them?” is as much a worldbuilding premise as “what if everyone could teleport?” “The free market” is as much a technological innovation as spaceships. If you accept these ideas as a world-building premise rather than debate them, where would they lead?

Here are some real-world ideas that would make excellent world-building premises if accepted as true:

• The world is only 6000 years old, and dinosaur bones were put in the ground to test your faith.

• People can be born in the wrong bodies or wrong-gendered bodies.

• Everyone is born condemned to eternal torture and can only escape it by following one divine being.

• You can shift reality with your thoughts and emotions through a process known as “manifestation.”

• Everyone is equal and all inequality is actually the result of wrongdoing or oppression.

Many aspects of the world we take for granted are actually as wild as any sci-fi premise. Some science fiction stories show this by imagining a world without one of those aspects we take for granted. For example, Ursula K. Le Guin’s book The Left Hand of Darkness imagines an alien society that lacks the concept of fixed gender.

If we lived in a society where everyone was one biological sex, the idea that there are two types of people and you need one of each to reproduce would be a wild sci-fi premise. From this premise, one could imagine all the conflicts that exist between men and women. What happens if they don’t get along after they’ve had a child? Maybe they’d invent a contract to stay together so that doesn’t happen? Would people have to go through elaborate rituals to find the person they want to reproduce with?

If you were worldbuilding a sci-fi story with the premise “it takes two people with opposite biology to reproduce” would you make a world as strange as ours? Could you see all the ways that men and women might relate from this premise? Could you invent marriage, divorce, family courts, dating, birth control, and all the other oddities of our world?

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When most people approach ideology, they approach it from a “true or false” perspective. There is another way to approach ideology: the creative approach.

The creative approach is best exemplified by the improv saying “yes and.” When improv actors do a scene, they never negate what the other creates by saying “no, but.” Instead, they say “yes and.” This same approach can be applied to ideology. Rather than debating what another proposes (“no, but”), run with it (“yes, and”) and see where it leads. Suppose we accept everything you’re saying as true. Then what?