The American Social Imaginary, January 1st, 2025. Introduction. The great Richard Weaver taught us that ideas have

consequences. But when they have massive cultural consequences, the mechanism works differently

than it does when a solitary individual, quote-unquote,

gets an idea. An individual decides that he would like to go out for some ice cream, say, and so he does,

or he has an idea for an invention and he goes into a shop and builds it, or he thinks that his

high time he proposed to his girlfriend, and she becomes his fiancé. These are individual

decisions that are like trying to put

the eight ball in the corner pocket. Agent X does action Y. The cultural consequences of a great

idea are sometimes like that, but not usually. When JFK announced that we were going to put a man on

the moon, that was certainly an idea that was subsequently implemented. You can see a straight line

from the announcement to the moon landing.

It was like an individual action in that respect. But most examples of cultural formation and

achievements do not work like that. The social imaginary. The social imaginary has been defined as,

quote, the set of values, institutions, laws, and symbols through which people imagine their social

whole. Another way to say

this is that the social imaginary is the full menu worldview package. There are aspects of

our social imaginary that are obvious not on the surface. These are the aspects that are

contemporary, current, and hopping around in your Instagram feed. What everybody's yelling about is frequently

part of the social imaginary, although at times there are fads that are nothing more than the foam

off the waves of the social imaginary. But there are other factors that drive the social

imaginary that are running in the deep background. We don't recognize their relevance, but they

nevertheless silently dominate our lives.

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