Creativity



The Industrial Age has previously led to the need for vast amounts of human labor to mass produce the materials for consumption, the driver of capitalism. China of today is comparable to the Europe and America in the height of their Industrial Age. The overpopulated poorer classes provide the laborers to make the products for the more affluent. The sales of these materials fill the pockets of the wealthy, who invest in industry. The wealthy are satisfied that their wealth stimulates a trickle-down effect to those less fortunate, less aggressive or less privileged. Crumbs from their oversized loaf.

The cost in human lives can be seen in the stifling of human creativity. Factory workers in China, like their Western forebears, work 14-16 hours a day six days a week. Many are still adolescents. They live in dormitories. They wash their clothes in buckets on the floor and hang them to dry wherever they can. The factory supplies inexpensive meals. The wages are low and are usually sent home to a rural village, where even poorer parents struggle to scrape together a living on overcultivated land with bad water.



Portrait by Peter Petraitis



Too often stifled human creativity is channeled into reproduction. The exploited see having a child as a way of personal empowerment, a way to do things differently. "When I have children they will have a better life." This is their anthem. Unfortunately, in most of the world, economic class boundaries are quite rigid and will become more rigid with overpopulation and environmental degradation. Rich people do not readily pay taxes to uplift the minds of surplus workers. Look at the current political position of the Republican and Tea Parties in the U.S.. So, this desperate form of human creativity leads to even more stifled and frustrated workers to fuel economies for lower wages to maintain the position of the aristocrats.

The free-marketers have an easy answer: Let's all be entrepreneurs. While this works for those with middle-class educations, who can manipulate tax codes, work their middle-class networks and have the means to do market research, it does absolutely nothing for the working class, subjected to inferior public education in alienating environments. The self-satisfied bourgeoisie, the lower tier of the wealthy class, always sing the praises of a readily available upward mobility which is an illusion. It is their way of rewriting their own personal histories to justify their privilege.

As a humanist, I have always tried to encourage personal creativity in the people I encounter in my life. Perhaps this accounts for the number of writers, visual artists and musicians I have known and loved. From my work with those who suffer from mental illness, I know that drawing, poetry and journal-keeping are just as powerful tools for recovery as medications. From my work with the dying, I know the power of art, reading and music as tools for making peace with the past and the inevitable end of life.

Liberation often begins with one creative idea or inspiration, stimulated by art. Freedom is not a political gift to be dispensed by politicians or revolutionaries. Freedom is something that human beings must grab and embrace in moment-to-moment consciousness. This is what frees a slave, who then leads others to freedom. And this is the ultimate creative process in my opinion.