Social inequality, climate emergency, biodiversity collapse, threats to democracy… the list and urgency of the challenges we face compel us to invent new ways of mobilizing collective intelligence and creativity. What if envisioning the worst could enable better action today?
In the 1950s, psychologist Abraham Maslow turned psychology upside down by no longer viewing patients merely as mentally ill or neurotic, but as people capable of improvement — by looking at what is going well and what could go even better. From this, his colleague Martin Seligman invented positive psychology.
In the same spirit, medical sociology professor Aaron Antonovsky theorized “salutogenesis” in the late 1970s, turning medicine on its head by focusing on the factors that promote health and well-being, rather than those that cause disease — the classic “pathogenesis.” Whereas we usually see life as a river carrying us from birth to death, Antonovsky posits that with salutogenesis, we can “learn to swim against the current.”