Humans are cognitively optimistic about their personal futures, and persistently pessimistic about the collective one. This gap is not a moral failure. It is a measurable feature of how the brain constructs the future.

When collective futures are framed as desirable, they tend to fail a basic plausibility test: they feel too distant from Business As Usual, the cognitive baseline the mind uses to assess what is credible. Decades of dystopian narratives have widened this gap further, rendering hopeful collective futures not just unlikely, but naïve.

An Utropie is a desirable collective future calibrated to remain within the brain’s plausibility window: close enough to the present to feel real, ambitious enough to motivate change. The word blends utopia with tropisme, the natural tendency of living systems to orient toward what sustains them.

An Utropie is not a dream. It is a direction.

The hypothesis: systematically exposing people to plausible, immersive, desirable futures shifts the cognitive baseline and creates measurable conditions for stronger collective engagement.