by weaving excerpts from its introduction with ourown language.
So many new words gathered together like this, each bringing with it a new concept and system, creates a dizzying effect. This is good and right, because we live in a dizzying time. What we do now as a global civilization will create one future out of a vast array of possible futures, an array which ranges from utmost disaster to lasting peace and prosperity. The sheer breadth of this range is all by itself extremely confusing, to the point of inducing a kind of mental and emotional gridlock.
But we can do things, if we can figure out what they are. Various good futures are achievable, even starting from our current moment of high danger. So some really comprehensive analysis, destranding, and remapping is now part of our necessary work. Inevitably new concepts and new words will emerge—lots of them. As these inventions pop in our heads, this delightful journal can serve as sourcebook, clarification, diagnostic, and stimulus. It’s an already existing example of the way people playing with language can help bring things and events into sharper cognitive focus. Playful and useful: we trust this journal will prove entertaining and imminently practical.
Though we cannot accurately predict the future, it is now reasonable to expect that many but not all of the culturally embedded perspectives and habits basic to late 20th century life will not continue. Through the medium of language, this journal presents possibilities for the cultural maps of better futures. But without further elaboration it stands like a narrow bridge to a destination shrouded in mist. Would you want to journey there? When radical activists and scholars describe what lies on the other side, they often write manifestos or lists of principles, yet these dry and polemical formulations rarely stir the passions. This where speculative fiction - or syntropic storytelling - holds great promise.
Especially at this historical moment, imagination is not frivolous but crucial: as cognitive psychology’s simulation heuristic argues, people view a possible event as plausible to the extent that they can imagine it. As ecofuturist
notes, “It’s literally true that we can’t build what we can’t imagine... The fact that we haven’t compellingly imagined a thriving, dynamic, sustainable, syntropic world is a major reason we don’t already live in one.”
This journal does not pretend to offer a fully fleshed-out description of an ecotopian and syntropic future, let alone a road map to get there. What it does present is an assortment of conceptual tools, frequency experiences, artistic representations, and a prismatic window into the ecotopian and syntropic multiverse.
The Journal of Syntrepreneurship currently offers:
Journal of Syntrepreneurship
