What is the "imaginary crisis", and how does status quo bias contribute to it?

"It's easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism" (Fredric Jameson, 1994): we can picture catastrophe more easily than a fundamentally different way of living. Status quo bias, our preference for the current state, makes alternatives feel like losses and keeps decisions at the default.

The imaginary crisis: films and headlines are full of collapse and apocalypse, but positive alternatives to how society is organised are hard to imagine. The lack of imagination is itself the crisis, because what cannot be pictured cannot be pursued.

Status quo bias, a well-documented cognitive bias:

• people prefer the current state of affairs;
• changes are perceived as losses, even when they would bring gains;
• the existing option automatically seems better or safer;
• the result: decisions often stay with the default, even when alternatives would make more sense.

Together they explain why debates about the future swing between "more of the same" and "everything collapses", and why the space of desirable alternatives in between stays empty.

Go deeper:

• Wikipedia: Status quo bias — the experiments behind the bias and its link to loss aversion.
• Wikipedia: Capitalist realism — Mark Fisher's development of the idea that no alternative seems imaginable.