How about a little thought experiment? Try to remember the last time you heard ideas and dismissed them as “crazy ideas.” Maybe they were crypto-economics stuff, or maybe extreme procedures on human longevity, artificial intelligence applications which seemed absurd to you.
Now, keep that feeling of skepticism, that almost instinctive reflex of rejection, in your mind. Because, you see, that visceral resistance may be the most powerful indicator that you are facing something truly disruptive. The future, the authentic one, almost never presents itself in an acceptable form. The future, to quote the famous adage, is not a gala dinner. It does not arrive gently, but rather breaks down the door wearing the costume of a crazy idea that you once laughed at.
Because the truth is that the most transformative innovations don’t start in orderly, respectable environments; they arise at the margins, where the rules are still negotiable and the stakes are emotional, not economic. Still don't believe it? Follow me.
The rejection of crazy ideas as a sign of rupture
When something seems strange or even alien to us, it rarely has anything to do with the intrinsic value of the idea. Instead, our psychological defense mechanisms kick in. Status quo bias, loss aversion, and the brain’s threat response conspire to block new concepts before we can rationally evaluate them.
This initial rejection reflex is less a judgment on the idea and more a measure of how far it pushes us out of our comfort zone. Yet, ironically, it is precisely disruption (the chaos we so fear) that pushes societies forward.
Every major breakthrough, from penicillin to Internet, began as a perceived threat to existing power structures or norms. Recognizing our instinctive resistance to “crazy ideas” as a signal rather than a hindrance allows us to question what is truly worthy of rejection and what is worthy of deliberate exploration.
Imagination precedes infrastructure
At the heart of every technological leap forward is an act of imagination, an idea bold enough to challenge the constraints of the present. The infrastructure, on the contrary, is inherently conservative: it requires standards, security, and scale. This causes the predictable delay between conception and construction. And the complaints of certain superficial commentators on social media, who say “yes, there is a lot of research, but then none of it materializes”. It’s not true. And deep down you know it. You know it because you read, watch, listen to and appreciate science fiction content en masse.
Narrative is a project: from the visions of lunar travels of HG Wells to the robots of Isaac Asimov, speculative stories sketch the contours of a world not yet built. Engineers and entrepreneurs often draw on these narratives for inspiration, translating the prose into patents.
Da Star Trek ai mobile phones, from science fiction to electric cars: imagination has always preceded the infrastructures that then made those visions real.
What fascinates me is that building new infrastructure (be it networks, production lines, or regulatory frameworks) requires capital, political change, and cultural acceptance. Imagination has no such constraints. That’s why crazy ideas can anticipate reality by decades, like Star Trek’s communicators anticipated our smartphones.
Cultural delay creates a “time capsule” of genius
Do you still have that feeling of skepticism and rejection about those crazy ideas that I asked you to evoke at the beginning of the article? It's normal. Innovations often exceed the legal, moral and technological conditions necessary to support them. As a result, visionary ideas initially end up archived in esoteric magazines, in the limbo of patents, on sites like Futuro Prossimo or in the footnotes of history, until a change of context suddenly resuscitates them.
And how do these “crazy” ideas resurface? Well, in many ways. The main ones are three:
- Legal and regulatory update: revolutionary concepts such as the genetically modified organisms and the platforms of ride-sharing They waited for updated regulations before they could grow.
- Ethical reassessment: practices once considered taboo (such as psychedelic therapies o human genome editing) are now being reconsidered under new ethical frameworks.
- Technological convergence: Concepts like AGI have required advances in computing power and algorithms; only now GPU farms and deep learning architectures make them practicable.
Crazy Ideas: Survival Requires Transcendence
In an era defined by cascading crisis (climate change out of control, a global epidemic of mental health and a deep social fragmentation), the incremental corrections will no longer be sufficient. Survival depends on transcending our ingrained paradigms and embracing the anomalous solutions we once despised.
And the boldest solutions come from minds that dare to think the unthinkable. Fromvertical farming (once derided as science fiction agriculture, now a means of sustainably feeding urban populations) to the aforementioned psychedelic-assisted therapy (which has gone from countercultural taboo to clinically validated treatment), crazy ideas often prove best suited to addressing the most complex challenges. But what is madness? And what is rationality?
The myth of rational progress
I said it: We tend to believe that progress happens in an orderly, step-by-step fashion, but real innovation defies orderly timelines. It emerges from intuition, randomness, and even chaos. By mislabeling these nonlinear leaps as “irrational,” we often overlook their transformative power.
Progress seems illogical because real breakthrough requires divergent attempts (many, many of which fail spectacularly before anyone succeeds), it depends on accidental discoveries (from penicillin to microwave ovens) and manifests itself through network effects that appear unpredictable.
I can't help but smile when I think about how cultural movements like Dada (based on absurdity), punk rock (a crude do-it-yourself ethic) or Afrofuturism (a fusion of African diasporic mythology with speculative visions of technology) have broken conventions and shaped new realities that no one could have foreseen by following a “rational” path.
How many crazy ideas are we ignoring or laughing at right now, when they could contain the solutions to our most pressing problems? Maybe we should start paying more attention to what seems absurd to us, because therein could be the future we are looking for. As he said Buckminster Fuller:
“You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing one obsolete.”
And what model is newer than an idea that today seems crazy?
