Why Creativity?

Here in the early years of the 21st century all aspects of society are becoming more and more mechanized and automated. Post-industrialism is not the end of Taylorism and Fordism, it is the continuation of them at more complex levels and into deeper layers of human activities. From standardized testings, to career plans, mapping and statistics, overarching technologies of systematization, and the computerization and digitization of much of social life this, progress has many consequences. One of them is higher levels of transactional behaviour, self-realization and ensuing self-fixation and X-factorization of human goals.
The anti-thesis to this, is the renewed need for authenticity, for true connection, for play, for non-economic relations, and an upsurge of the need for communal ties, and non-enhanced and non-mitigated reality. The need for experiences and not simulae and simulacrum.

Creativity is at the heart of this. It is what happens when humans engage in open, safe and free interactions. When the plans and outward purposes and uniformed relations have been stripped away. When the iron cage of rationality has been suspended, humans truly connect and engage in free, trusting games of improvisation.
In this we suspend the constraints we put on ourselves and transcend the seemingly possible.
This is where meaning is created, negotiated and transformed.

From the first drawing on walls in caves 70.000 years ago, and the first tinkering of stone and wood, to the freedom of leisure and play, created for the aristocracy of ancient Greece, to the freedom of exploration and inquiry given to Leonardo Da Vinci by the wealth of the Medicis in the early Renaissance. From the abundance of wealth, provided to the Victorian engineers by colonial acquisitions, in the beginning of the industrialization to the room for tinkering with punch-cards in lazy hours at computer labs, given to the nerds at the brink of the digital revolution. It is the open space for people to come together, in spheres of surplus and safe freedom that creates the creativity that has been the driving force of human civilization. Producing the seemingly purposeless ideas that gives form to invention, economics, politics and industry. Animals like humans are embedded with primordial instincts beneath immediate, conscious thought. The human, logical rationality can be systematized and performed by computers and robots.

The act of creativity, the play that creates that most mysterious concept of all, meaning, lies so far only in the soul of man. It is not only the vehicle for our progression, it is at the heart of what we truly are. In the words of Carl Gustav Jung:

As far as we can discern,
the sole purpose of human existence
is to kindle a light of meaning
in an eternal darkness of mere being.