Best Possible Future

Out of every future that could be pulled into being, the one at the absolute top — approached as an image rather than as a proposition, and said out loud until it can be aimed at.

There are an unbounded number of futures available to us. The question this page holds is the simplest and hardest one: which is the highest, for All? At this altitude the answer does not arrive as a proposition to be proved. It arrives as an image — something seen, heard, smelled, tasted — and the canon takes that seriously rather than apologising for it. A single design criterion narrows the search enough to begin: love. If we love, we want a future as close to Heaven as it is possible to get (Heaven On Earth · The Logic Of Love).

Its form in the canon is a litany, not a definition: a hundred and fifty lines of we see · we hear · we smell, each one naming a specific reversal. Waters clean. Weapons become tools (Weaponry To Livingry). Land returned to those it was taken from. Debts released (Jubilee). The displaced come home. Children playing where they were made to labour. Symphony where there was cacophony. Peace that outlasts the generation that made it. The litany works because it is concrete where abstraction goes vague — it is a sharper rendering of the Goal than any sentence about flourishing, and it can be read aloud to people who have never heard any of this before.

Two moves keep it from being a wish. First, the reader is handed the pen: what evils would you see abolished, and what goods would you see burst forth? The Vision is explicitly unfinished, improved by everyone who receives it — one fills up what is lacking, and removes what does not belong. Second, once seen it is aimed at, unwaveringly, and progressed toward a little at a time (Design To The Goal · Continuous Improvement). Without a vision and an aim, the canon's own warning is blunt: we perish wandering in the desert between where we are and where we are going (The Wilderness).

It is therefore the beginning of the compass rather than a decoration on it. Every move is checked against whether it makes life a little more like this (The compass question).

Also called: the Highest and Best Possible Future · the Working Vision · the liturgy of We See Stands on: The Goal · Heaven On Earth · Love · Vision · Ideal Opens onto: The future triad — Best · Worst · Actual · Hell On Earth · The compass question · Design To The Goal · Forward-Looking Story · Prophecy · Dreaming · The Promised Land · Jubilee · Weaponry To Livingry · Liberation and Exodus · Worthy Goal · The Wilderness In play: the door — read aloud at the beginning, and again at every seasonal turning Sources: Best Possible Future (root page, canon-grade; the third most linked un-carried name in its slice) · 3.10 The Highest and Best Possible Future, in The Power of Today (draft) · Audit Ledger memo R-1, which judges the litany "a sharper, more concrete unfurling than the abstract phrasing" of Heaven On Earth · lionsberg.wiki: Best Possible Future Open: The page names two concepts the corpus does not hold anywhere — Configuration Space and Creative Field, the terms it uses for the space of available futures. Both are named once and written nowhere. · The litany is read as sacred by some of the canon and as a first draft by the page itself, which invites amendment; nobody has said which it is.