Creativity And It's Discontents
A transcendent overview of how creativity work and interacts with the world around us.
In the final part of the “Creative Dilemma” series, we are going to talk about a popular but misunderstood topic. Creativity has been a driving force in world-changing innovations and large increases in economic progress and prosperity. Creativity has uplifted the poor from their dire conditions centuries ago and drastically improved the living standards for all of humanity. Even with these achievements, there are opposing forces from various sections of our government, academia, and intellectuals who see this force as something very dangerous that needs to be stifled or controlled in a way to prevent certain outcomes from occurring. This essay was written with inspiration from the book "Wealth And Poverty" by George Gilder. Do enjoy.
Certain professions e.g. bureaucrats, economists, etc. see the world from a rationalist point of view i.e. science, processes, etc. This is why they greatly misunderstand the creative process and why they falter when they try to understand or control creativity. The issue is it is not something that can be measured or controlled. Models or graphs are ineffective in discovering how this process works. It isn't based on physical laws or economic theories that fail to comprehend this phenomenon. This is because economies are driven by thoughts not matter.
This sounds otherworldly but hear me out. Economies reflect the laws of mind. One crucial law of mind is that belief precedes knowledge. Novel knowledge doesn't exist without a leap of hypothesis, a projection of certain thoughts or intuitions in the world. This is part of the key logic of creativity which is "leap before you look". This coincides with the notion that nothing new can be seen inside an old place unless a leap is made into new grounds or environments. The old axiom "look before you leap" breeds sameness and certainty in large and rigid industries.
Standard economic models or thoughts imply that businesses create through the purchase of knowledge, that there is a time-space in which they can assemble all the necessary facts and information before taking any leaps. They miss a crucial but overlooked step. The leap, not the look that generates the needed information. It is this leap through the universe, time, and space, beyond established facts or reason, market dogma or standards that opens up the spectacle of discovery.
Creative thoughts aren't inductive processes in which scientists accumulate evidence neutrally and objectively until a theory becomes visible in it. Actually, the theory is the starter point, and the journey for the accumulation of evidence begins. Imagination, intuition, and hypothesis are basically the first tools of learning. The human mind has an unlimited bandwidth for ideation and imagination. This makes it essential that the thinker selects specific concepts to believe. In similarity to certain commitments we pledge ourselves in our lives e.g. marriage, contracts, etc., ideas need trust, and commitment before it blooms fully into reality. The man must engage fully in it with emotion and apparently loves it. Creative thoughts require acts of faith. The believer must trust his intuition, the spontaneous creations of his mind, enough to pursue them vigorously to the point of experiment and knowledge.
Love seems blind according to outside observers but lovers know it is guided by a more transcendent vision and it reveals new realms of knowledge and creativity. Commitment can create its own support. Men who ignore love are doomed to see the entire world as barren, dull, and filled with terror. Love and faith infuse our ideas with life and passion.
Creative thoughts could be seen as religious forays into the world which initially start as a product of faith and belief. But not all ideas or thoughts are true, commitment is key but not enough. The zealot is the man who seizes an idea and imposes his will on it regardless of the response of the world and the facts. What makes creative thinking shine is a sensitivity to responses, feedback is also another part of love.
Creative thought must be open to change and surprise. Also, ideas must be falsifiable i.e. they can be proven true or false. There must be a process of introspection to remove the bad ideas and keep the good ideas. Simply a process of divorce, rejection, or acceptance. Commitment to wrong ideas can lead to disastrous outcomes and subpar results.
But what is the source of the ideas by which intellectual and economic progress happens? The answer is surprisingly chance. Theories arise suddenly and mysteriously either by instinct or luck. This confuses the rationalist because there is an inborn distrust of mystery which clashes with the rationalized and automatic methods of thought.
Throughout millennia, men have sought to create systems that involve step-by-step instructions, rational reasoning, gathering "data" or evidence "objectively" and conclusions inferred through these steps. Rationalists tend to reduce the process of creative thought to the physical matter of the brain bound by physical laws. This could be seen in such theories as Marxism, neo-Keynesianism, Bayesian probability analysis, etc. These theories reject the idea that the core of change and creativity is chance. They assume that chance is random and unpredictable in contrast to human rationality. They assume that the universe is blank and lifeless. They state the mind is a solitary vein of consciousness with no transcendent access to the outer world and governed by physical laws that can be measured and adapted to. They create a fallacy that states that the mind is inert and its future is foreordained. A key insight that is looked at with suspicion by such rationalists but is true is that the essence of the universe is creative consciousness frequently generating new energy and thought. The human mind isn't autonomous or limited to the physical brain. The mind has access to a higher consciousness, sometimes irregularly, after Jung, called a collective consciousness, sometimes defined as God.
As an individual mind merges with the living consciousness that is the hidden part of the universe, he reaches new truths and views new ideas i.e. the projections of photons into the unknown future by which material and intellectual progress occurs. You may ask why people hide from this incredible contact with celestial mystery and power. This is because men run away from this power due to their innate trust in the physical brain. It is scary to leave the comfort of the physical brain with its predefined and predictable laws and delve into the region of dark transcendence where can be found all true light and creativity. If the idea is new and important, it will lead to the rejection of many other conflicting ideas, or force conflicts with predefined notions and laws set by your physical brain.
Even easy creative processes require a plunge into the void—a dependence on untold providence—which rattles many. Modern culture tends to make us afraid or frozen at the thought of entering higher consciousness through narrow deep thoughts and high-and-mighty postures set in our current age. Sometimes what are seen as creative problems are failures incurred by the creative individual. Writing from our limited cache of knowledge can lead to writer's block which is essentially a failure of faith, an unwillingness to give oneself up to a higher power. The endless troves of mathematical economics or sociological research that show barren obsessions and conventional outcomes stem from a refusal to acknowledge that all creativity requires a leap of imagination and faith. The investor who never acts until the stats align with his choice, the athlete who never makes a move until it is too late, and the businessman who waits until the market is proven. All are doomed to mediocrity by their trust in false rationality and failures in faith and imagination.
The process of intuition and faith is the initial phase in the career of ideas. New ideas can easily become old. Once grasped in the vigour of fresh discovery, they tend to spread and diffuse their light, gathering more knowledge and facts, until they settle into a stationary conclusion called matter. Ideas increase in complexity when they cover or absorb more knowledge which leads to rigidity or complicated solutions. Ironically, complicated solutions can turn into complex problems that need to be solved. This can be seen in modern culture which tends to complicate diverse answers, which causes great complexity and constitutes the essential problem of the rationalists
A final element of the law of mind, maybe the most important element of all is the role of problems. Problems, dilemmas, and paradoxes are not sources of despair, fear, and frustration but the necessary spurs of new knowledge and creativity. The rationalists see problems as obstacles to truth, enlightenment, and progress. Ideas that contradict the current truth are dismissed. This conventional thought pattern only yields refinements or adds complexities to previous ideas and banishes the attainment of new illuminations—ways of seeing both sides of a paradox in a different and reconciling light.
The law of mind puts conflict and troubles as the conditions that inspire knowledge in a world that passes through time. Hardships do not repress thought; They generate creativity and demand resort to a saving transcendence. Trouble may even strengthen faith and liberate new energy and truth. A thinker who shrinks from paradox and conflict is nearly prohibited from innovation. The crucial rules of creative thought can be summed up as faith, love, openness, conflict, and falsifiability.
The dynamics of economics consist of the fundamental process of all growth and development in nature and thought: A largely spontaneous and mostly unpredictable flow of increasing diversity and differentiation and new products and modes of production. Business A begins with a new idea, a better lightbulb. Then expands into various sectors such as lightbulb marketing, maintenance, and light variations(colours, etc.) leading to an expansion of lightbulb-related marketing. from high-density lighting to UV rays for disinfection and lights that can basically dance. This pattern of development is usually the same but the process is nonetheless unpredictable, full of the mystery of all living things. For this process to enrich the system, there must be activity beyond the system's control.
New productions must be done by individuals whose work and ideas aren't incorporated by a larger institution. There must be room for individuals to find their unexpected way of dividing and specializing labor, originating and adapting new goods and services. These individuals and their new ideas are the way an economic system grows and changes; they lead to small businesses and new activities that are finally joined with others in new systems, which often become rigid and unresponsive unless they continue to assimilate or shoot off new products and processes. It is this very conventional but absolutely crucial interplay of chance, change, and growth that economists so often ignore.
The critical thing to notice about this process is that most of its motions happen independently and beyond the view of the statistician. It is a personal and mental dilemma that decides whether a man will attempt actions that have huge risks attached to them. Actions that statistics say have a very high chance of failure. Also, do not forget harsh government policies, high taxes, etc. that deter such actions too. It takes an impulse or plunge of faith, a belief in the future despite the odds, and a sensitivity to the needs of others or the common man. Economists miss this crucial interplay between chance and faith that largely determines a nation's future. Chance is the foundation of change and the vessel of the divine.
Life is essentially a lottery, even the act of being born is a miracle against impossible odds. The odds are, and always be against the human condition in our personal lotteries. Chance only works in the long run of the human adventure. A rational calculation of personal risk would force us to avoid risk and seek security. All human creativity and discovery require the transcendence of narrow rationality and an embrace of religious values.
Certain spiritual gifts could be seen as Charity, Faith, and Hope which in the estimation of St. Paul are the finest and greatest spiritual gifts. These gifts work together to free mankind from the bondage of power and the dead hand of the past and open us to the possibilities of the divine. It is the paradox of fortune that our lives, to the extent they are free and open to chance, are also fated and determined. *Stochastic* means "by random chance,", but it comes from the Greek for "skillful in aiming." In every society, the lucky man is seen as somehow blessed. His good chance— and society's redemption—providence
The greatest mistake for any leader is to cut his people from this providence by substituting the glorious unknown of chance with central planning and rational thesis. Success is always unpredictable and thus an effect of faith and freedom. Ever wondered why countries that give limited freedom, collect rents for basic thoughts or explorations, and try to perform central planning on their economies perform poorly or fail? All human pioneers, from poets, and composers, to dancers in their many sudden realizations of truths to scientists on the mysterious organization of matter where life begins, are critically engaged in forms of devotion.
All knowledge of living and growing things is intuitive and thus mystically dependent on the ideas of others and on the worship, however unconscious, of God. God is the foundation of all living knowledge; and the human mind, to the extent it can know anything beyond its own limited reach, partakes of the mind of God. We face certain impossibilities in our world today such as climate change, rising populations, limited resources, etc. which has made a certain class of intellectuals(e.g. rationalists) suggest rolling back on human creativity and chance and focus on central planning to get predictable outcomes which can be measured and controlled. They state this is the end of the road, all inventions have already been invented. Any more innovation and a global crisis may occur. All they see is risk and the only thing they can offer is shrinking progress.
As stated above, these are problems that will elicit creativity from the people. Through chance, faith, and hope, prosperity abounds. These are the new frontiers, the new waves, and oceans that must be traveled upon to create new processes or innovations that will take our world to the New World. It shouldn't be something that must be feared but embraced. The future is forever inestimable: only in freedom can its challenges be mastered. The intellectual class makes the case for stagnancy, fear, and central planning which could be for the Oil crisis, nuclear threat, the death of technology, famine, and whatever else is new to the random statisticians who measure our fate. These problems can be overcome through the presence of faith, recovering the belief in chance and providence, in the ingenuity of free and God-fearing men.
This belief allows us to see the best way to uplift the poor. It will lead us to abandon utopian ideas that see individuals as blank states that can be molded into the Ubermensch. It is the acknowledgment that the greatest resource is the miracle of human creativity in a relation of openness to the divine. We must ensure that this resource must not be denied to the poor, who can be optimistic about the future, and the rich or impressive individuals who can lend leadership, imagination, and wealth to the cause of benevolent change.
Humanity is defined not by the unraveling rationality and purpose gained by it. It is the interactions between various elements that are out of our control and create journeys in each of us to take various leaps to reach a satisfying conclusion. It is to search endlessly until we have the faith and courage to leave ourselves open to change and fate.