Creativity & Cooperation

I’ve been reading Heidegger’s Discourse on Thinking which has elicited ideas regarding the concept of creativity & where that aligns with what Heidegger says. First let’s summarize the Discourse's ideas as I see it. Heidegger makes the point that there are two ways of thinking, the scientific way & the meditative way. The scientific way delves in facts & experience of physical presence, but doesn’t explore below the surface of reality. The meditative way looks deeper into the experience & the evidence to think about some underlying meaning behind the visible experience. These two ways of thinking & observing are part of being, but they also represent our subjective & voyeuristic observation of the world around us. Many choose merely to observe the surface of this world, to explore only what is available to the five senses without asking the more pertinent questions of why & how. They aren’t interested in implication or interpretation. Others want to explore the deeper comprehensions, to analyze these experiences & contemplate their implications in this world. These individuals become the synthesizers of the results of their analysis & meditation. They create beyond their experience. They will no longer seek to meet the expectations of others. This is what Emerson means by what he says in Self-Reliance: “that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide; that he must take himself for better, for worse, as his portion” and begin to plow his own field & reap his own harvest. This is the person who goes beyond the surface knowledge of understanding & the scientific knowledge to the deeper field under the surface, where the world will produce for those who till the soil. For those who simply see the soil as surface, as path, there is a limit to their harvest. It is the person who doesn’t simply exist, who doesn’t simply follow the example of others & find the job that pays the bills. It is the person who goes beyond, whether that beyond is profitable or not is not the point. If she can be self-reliant, then she can go where she likes. As I sat proctoring the mind-numbing Regents tests, I sat in meditation of the sort that I hope emulated the ideas that Heidegger was suggesting, that there was a horizon that had to be coaxed out with waiting, that if I simply existed while existence spoke to me, it would reveal at least for a moment what that meant. What that moment of existence became was the sound of violence, violence in the humming of the radiator & the electrical current, the violence of the scratching of pencils on paper or pages being turned, pages & paper that attacked the students, damaged them with the mirror to their ignorance & the education system that had developed that ignorance by dampening their flame of imagination, that had salted their fertile soil with meaningless & disconnected trivial information that had no connections to the things around them. Heidegger wanted to move people beyond the surface & into the violence that is often perpetrated upon them as they only look at the surface of their existence.

These tests inflicted punishment for the student's attempts to maintain their independence & creativity. It exposed them to the cruel world of quantification that values only measured results, that without quantification, their ideas & creations lack meaning, lack value. This is the core of the damage that has been done. This is the same damage that has quantified value into monetary value. The conflating of values with money leads to the place where everyone is measured by their monetary value to the system. Productivity becomes a quantifiable, monetary measure. Intelligence becomes a quantifiable, monetary measure. Individual thoughts only have value if they can be quantified by money. Look at how education level is valued only by the average salary that can be gained by pursuing the education level. This nullifies creativity unless creativity can be monetarily measured.

When we speak of creativity, it is necessary to discuss what creation involves. It involves taking the materials of the current world & compounding them into something new, something that hasn’t been on the earth before in the same form. How does this manifest? It manifests in the completed product, that may not be completely new (what really is new?) but new enough & unique enough to make it different from what has come before. It may not really do anything that impressive, but even using the waste of our current world to make a bottle opener is a start. Creativity may simply be producing a garden that wasn’t there before, or repairing a house to fit the needs of a family. These are creative acts that are self-reliant. This is the key to the creative necessity of life: creativity is a strong plank in the house of self-reliance. Self-reliance & cooperation nurture creativity. This creativity comes from necessity & innovation, innovation that seeks to solve problems with one’s own abilities. The more that someone attempts to create beyond their current abilities, the more they establish themselves in self-reliance. The more self-reliant they become the more creative they become, a self-fulfilling prophecy. I have seen individuals who have build their own homes from scratch by learning how to do it & then challenging themselves to accomplish the mission or goal they’ve set. This is the reason why cooperation requires self-reliant individuals, who don’t depend on others, but who recognize that sometimes cooperation yields benefits for a group of self-reliant individuals willing to cooperate to accomplish a larger task beyond the scope of even the most self-reliant individual’s capacity.

This is precisely what the Regents don't promote. The Common Core State Standards (CCSS) won't promote this either. The education that prepares students to pass either of these tests won't develop students' creativity, self-reliance or cooperation. Where is the creativity in regurgitating trivia? Where is the creativity in writing essays that prevent individuality because the rubrics demand specific formation & content? How is self-reliance developed when the CCSS implies that if a student can't pass this test, he must not be capable of anything society might value? Where is the cooperative spirit? Only in conspiring to cheat on the test, which students across the country have demonstrated great imagination & cooperation to achieve. Power to their efforts!

Creativity comes from necessity, & the self-reliant individual meets necessity with innovation & creativity as much as determination & confidence. In fact, it is the failures & corrections of the failed behaviors & efforts that lead to the innovation & creativity that develops the increasingly self-reliant individual. This goes for any skill or activity. Cooperation amidst self-reliant individuals will be competitive in trying to be the individual who discovers or creates the successful innovation that benefits the group or solves the problem faced by  the community. These cooperative efforts can be seen in a basketball team. Everyone must learn to work together, to try new plays & rehearse the routine skills like dribbling & shooting & passing. The better & more adept that each member of the team becomes at using these routine skills improves the deadliness of the team’s attack. The more they trust each other, the more they can push each other to innovate & create situations that exploit the enemy’s weakness. The more they compete with each other to be better & better, the more their competitiveness becomes a driving force against their opponents. In the individual the need to improve their skills becomes a competition with one’s self to achieve more than had been accomplished before.

Creativity has been usurped by the corporate world into the marketing/advertising realm. Many creative people become marketing specialists, creating the commercials & advertising that influences their fellow individuals. So much of creativity is being utilized to manipulate others rather than to create utility & innovation. Even when creativity begins as an honest attempt to make something new, it is often usurped by manipulation or the desire to manipulate.

Creation doesn’t have to be on the Picasso level, it can be as simple as creating a new way of doing something. Whether I’m working on my garden & making it not only functional but also individual & beautiful, I’m creating. When I’m establishing contacts & cooperation between disparate people or neighbors, I’m creating a network that wasn’t there before. We have this notion in the world that somehow creativity is the purview of artists only. Only those who have been ‘recognized’ and have ‘attention’ deserve the adjective, creative. This is a fallacy. There is creativity happening everywhere. The sooner society begins to recognize folk art & people’s arts, the sooner it destroys the notion that the only important art is that which comes from corporations or exists in museums. This is one of the ways that the value of art is put ahead of the value of productivity.

The same is true in athletics. There is no doubt that a great athlete has creativity in their discipline and mastery of their game, but should such an athlete be making outrageous salaries for that? Should they be crowned as something so special that we need to treat them as superior beings or classes?

Celebrity has been one of the greatest of the efforts at trying to demean the average person. Because he's not creative like Bobo here, he should be glad that he's getting anything in this world. What does he expect?

Are we to be satisfied with mediocrity? No. We shouldn’t be satisfied with mediocrity, but the way to dispel mediocrity from our lives is not to shame those whose behavior has been mediocre, but to applaud every effort to rise above mediocrity. Rather than compete for the small pedestal that recognizes only one or a few as being worthy, why not work to make everyone worthy? Why do we feel that if others succeed it lessens our success? Why do we think that if everyone were capable of independence that would somehow infringe on our independence? This is the error in judgement that leads to the ‘zero-sum game’ mentality of the current culture. In a cooperative society, the zero-sum game would have no place. Instead of the mentality that I only win if others lose, the mentality would become (not initially be, but become) 'as everyone gets better, the situation gets better'. Another way of thinking about this is to compare it to the open-source programming versus the Microsoft/Apple nexus of corporate control of source programming. The Linux software becomes better & better as more & more individuals contribute to the programs, which means that many bugs in programming get worked out by everyone to the benefit of everyone. In the corporate model, we must wait for the ‘Genius’ to come along and save us. We are dependent on the ‘Genius’ to solve the problem, leaving us at their mercy & in their ‘debt’.

Cooperation versus competition leads to more not less creativity.