Grand visions are more in service of megalomaniacal egos than actual solutions. They all just paint over the very real complexities of the world and expect things to just work as they envisioned. Just get rid of the sparrows eating grains and it will just be fine! There are limits to what complexities can be contained within one human mind, and with a world already orders of magnitudes more complex than that we need the humility to admit that the vision of one human mind is not and cannot be all-encompassing. I think it is fair to say that the usefulness of grand visions is dead.
There’s no requirement that a vision be constrained within one person’s mind, that it be inflexible to changing conditions, that it be incapable of testing policies before it implements them, and who’s to say that sufficiently complex machines or new organizations of people wouldn’t be capable of successfully abstracting society’s irreducible complexities well enough to make good decisions? Couldn’t a grand vision, for example, be one in which local communities make most important decisions for themselves, thus removing most of the computational failures of central governance? I just think you’re picturing fascism or communism when I say grand vision, but imo those aren’t representative of what every grand vision would look like.
