Society and Creativity
When I lived in China, I began thinking about how societies foster or inhibit creativity and innovation. The conventional wisdom is that China is less creative and innovative than the U.S. because of its politics, society, and culture.
I began wondering, why is the U.S. only as innovative and creative as it is? If the quality of the environment for supporting creativity and innovation exists on a spectrum, why couldn’t the U.S. be better than it is? This seems like an important, if overlooked question, given the fact that, as an advanced economy on the frontier, prosperity largely comes from doing new things.
One of the advantages that the U.S., as a free country, has over China is that it’s easier to do what you want, regardless of the culture around you. In China, there is very little room to go against the grain and challenge the status quo, because the status quo is held up by a government that needs to maintain near-total control in order to preserve itself. In China, there is an official “stability maintenance” bureaucracy, whereas the U.S. may only have an unofficial, nebulous one. If you have new, contrarian insights that offer a vision of a better world, you can more easily pursue those in the U.S., even if they are disruptive.
However, there must still be many aspects of U.S. society that are unfavorable for doing new things. I would like to lay out some thoughts on this, focusing in particular on culture. As a general comment, to understand this issue, I think it can be helpful to look at how young people are conditioned because this determines what the country will ultimately look like. If the young population has been conditioned in a way that diminishes creativity and innovativeness, they will stay that way until they do the difficult inner work to transcend this, if this ever happens. According to a 2017 study, the U.S. faces a looming creativity crisis due, at least in part, to the educational system, an institution that conditions the young.
One piece of this is that socialization inherently breeds conformity, and so we need to consider what factors in our socialization exacerbate this. Educator John Taylor Gatto argued that the school system exacerbates this. Before the U.S. instituted the current educational system, the socialization process looked radically different. That was also a period of rapid scientific and technological progress, possibly far greater than today. Gatto believes that these are causally linked - that our country was far more innovative without the modern educational system.
Aside from only focusing on the problems, we also need to consider how we can better socialize people to be creative. George Bernard Shaw said, “The reasonable man adapts himself to the world. The unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the unreasonable man.” As children, many of us are praised and rewarded for how well we fit others’ expectations of us, with little regard to who we are and our internal compass.
This leads us to another issue potentially inhibiting creativity in our society which is that, in my opinion, the temperaments needed for creativity and innovation are often marginalized in our society. Strong-willed and intense children are often pathologized because our society doesn’t know how to manage them well. This was certainly the case when I was growing up in the 1990s and 2000s. That intensity is invaluable for driving change and innovation. Not only are these kids and their potential contributions to society often misunderstood by authorities, but by pathologizing them, the environment is programming false beliefs into them that they are defective. This kind of emotional abuse, though perhaps well-intentioned, is destructive and has profound implications for the overall levels of creativity and innovation in our society.
In other words, we’ve defined acceptable behavior in terms of the needs of a limited environment, not the needs of individual human beings. Obviously, more willful children can be more difficult to manage and resources are limited, particularly when children have far less independence than they once did. But that strong will and intensity are what move mountains in this world. Only after understanding and being conscious of those needs does it make sense to consider what kind of bandwidth there exists to meet those needs and how to do so.
This brings us to a related issue, which is that obedience is often exalted as a virtue and anything less than reflexive obedience is pathologized. How can one challenge the status quo in a creative or innovative way if they are still stuck in a conditioned pathway of pleasing external authorities?
This social norm also presents larger problems for a free society. An obedient citizenry comes from training obedient children. In his famous experiment on obedience to authority, psychologist Stanley Milgram concluded, “A substantial proportion of people do what they are told to do, irrespective of the content of the act and without limitations of conscience, so long as they perceive that the command comes from a legitimate authority.” Much of this has to do with how we are socialized. Why? Because all too often, kids that don’t wish to be reflexively obedient to authority are pathologized and broken down. We see healthy, well-adjusted children as having fixed habits of reaction to authority. Obviously, thoughtless rebellion is a problem. However, principled resistance, followed by the pursuit of a creative vision, can be invaluable. Some degree of independence from the approval of external authority is necessary for such an endeavor, which requires a kind of emotional maturity and self-reliance that takes intention and effort to develop. How many of us are given appropriate guidance on how to do that?
Allow me to demonstrate further. When you think of a child that, to use Milgram’s words, doesn’t “do what they are told to do, irrespective of the content of the act and without limitations of conscience”, what comes to mind? For me, what instinctively comes to mind is a child who is told that they have behavioral problems. I think that we are programmed by our society to see it this way. The kids that question authorities are discouraged from this behavior, usually first with some kind of basic disapproval. If that doesn’t work and the child maintains their integrity, they are typically pathologized. It’s been my observation that more recent generations believe that pathologizing is humane because back in their day, kids were just beaten until they acted as they were told. When people are conditioned this way, there is a loss of self, and they develop behaviors to compensate for this (such as addiction, codependency, etc.).
Obedience and modifying oneself to gain approval, while often necessary as children due to the needs of the environment, are not conducive to creativity, innovation, and doing new things. For that, you need to prioritize your own inner compass above others’ opinions. It also involves a lack of respect for the status quo. It’s that eccentric vision for changing the world that is in the driver’s seat. But you can’t step into that if you are still conditioned to associate that with danger from when it was disapproved of by authority figures. For me, I know both the extremes of that impulse and the countervailing force of authority figures attempting to take that away and instill unquestioning obedience. Fortunately, that conditioning can be transcended.
With this way of processing the young, the question becomes, what is lost? What I believe happens is we do what is expected of us rather than follow who we are and take that into the world. Thus, we have less progress and growth as a society than we otherwise would because too many people are conditioned as children in such a way that maintains the status quo.
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What do you think about this? Is there something I left out? Share your thoughts in a comment below.
