Capitalist Realism and British Rail flying saucers

In 1973 British Rail, Britain’s then nationalised railway service (which for the youngsters was, despite the contemporary 1970s jokes about British Rail sandwiches, far better than the privatised shitshow we have at the moment) patented a design for a nuclear-fusion-powered flying saucer. I’m not making this up - you can read some background here.

I’ve written here before about how people would imagine better and more radical futures before the rise of neoliberalism in the 1980s (check out just about any blog post tagged Acid Communism or Mark Fisher), but I never imagined that British Rail engineers were patenting designs for clean fusion-powered flying saucers in 1973.

While I’ve made a couple of efforts back in June 2022 and July 2019 and I’m still struggling to formulate a key to enable the release from the chains of capitalist realism.

I’ve read about the concept of a reality tunnel, a term coined by Timothy Leary and popularised by Robert Anton Wilson, but I have issues with both of those writers, particularly the latter.

There was some good stuff in Rose Eveleth’s three-part essay on wired.com (first part can be found here, and the second and third parts are linked from that), but an equal amount that I thought was misconstrued (which Paul Graham Raven highlighted in his post Simply imagining better things isn’t enough.

Anyway, this is where my research brain is located at the moment.