Calling on people to “stay as close to reality as we can” is easier said than done—especially in the realm of international security. Reality, after all, is not a single photograph but a living process filtered through trust, culture, and collective imagination.
The Russia–Ukraine war provides a recent and sobering illustration. U.S. intelligence satellites were showing European leaders clear evidence of Russia’s imminent invasion, yet many decision-makers still refused to believe it. Their “reality check” was not dysfunctional for lack of data—the evidence was there—but because their mental models couldn’t process it. Years of skepticism toward U.S. intelligence, coupled with wishful thinking about deterrence and diplomacy, formed a perceptual barrier stronger than any satellite image.
It’s no coincidence that a German foresight initiative once chose the name Project Cassandra—after the mythic figure cursed to see the future but never be believed. The project explored how literature and cultural imagination can illuminate emerging security risks long before they take shape in the physical world. In that sense, Cassandra was not a mystic but a method: a reminder that stories, symbols, and shared anxieties often contain the early whispers of tomorrow’s crises.
The U.S. defense establishment once dabbled in similar terrain. Lockheed Martin’s WISDOM project reportedly sought to analyze online discourse to detect signs of social unrest—an effort to “read” the digital subconscious of societies. However technical or controversial, such initiatives echo an ancient practice: scanning the collective imagination for patterns that precede material change.
Skeptics often dismiss these imaginative dimensions as “not real.” Yet history suggests otherwise. Ideas and shared mental images of the future—utopias, fears, prophecies, or cinematic visions—repeatedly shape real-world outcomes. They drive policy agendas, inspire revolutions, fuel markets, and legitimize wars. In this sense, foresight is not about predicting the future, but about perceiving the realities in formation within the human psyche.
This is why the emerging notion of Scanning the Latent Psyche feels so timely. In an age when artificial intelligence can process vast symbolic and cultural data, foresight may be able to map humanity’s evolving mental terrain more precisely than ever before. Yet even without advanced tools, we can practice the ancient art of deep listening—attending to the full spectrum of human expression, from the hysterically pessimistic to the naively utopian.
Pessimism and fear-mongering will always sell better than balance and nuance. But that is precisely why foresight must resist the gravitational pull of sensationalism. The future rarely announces itself through breaking news. It murmurs in quiet corners of culture, in stray ideas, in the fiction no one takes seriously. Those who listen—without bias, without arrogance, and without despair—stand the best chance of staying close to reality as it unfolds.
In the end, “staying close to reality” requires more than data. It demands imagination disciplined by humility—the capacity to see not only what is, but what might be, before it hardens into fact.
Subscribe To New Posts Ap-Fi
Posts
Comments
