The breakdown of creativity

Witnessing the Covid-19 response by many governments, I have wondered ‘why do our problems outrun our solutions?’ Why are our attempts to solve problems inept and futile?

Why do so many decisions that aim to help people damage them instead? Why do well-intentioned policies produce side-effects that negate any positive outcome? Why can’t we ever catch up with the change? Why can’t we think ahead?

We, individuals, suffer from the breakdown of creativity. Government bureaucracy that governs us, all those ‘wicked, worthless servants’, functionaries, technocrats and mediacrats, all those in authority concerned with power and procedures at the expense of people's needs, all those ‘mindless machines’, suffer from the collective breakdown of creativity, too. This breakdown of creativity costs us economies, environment and human lives.

Bureaucrats cannot devise viable solutions. Their goals and values are false and barbaric. The methods by which they arrive at their solutions are irrelevant and bankrupt and only create new problems and despair. The institutional base of their decisions is archaic and out of touch with the present and the future. 

A bureaucrat lacks social intelligence, a deep concern for the common good. He works for business ends, not human ends. He thinks economic advance leads to social advance, while this is the other way around.

He continues to act as if healthy social indicators, such as quality education, freedom of choice, employment, equality, democracy and meaningful artistic and cultural opportunities are not closely linked to economic indicators, such as productivity, price and investments.

He is blind to the fact that the crude drive for material gain has long been replaced by the goals of social responsibility, self-actualisation and creative achievement. People are not naïve anymore to believe that the interests of the society coincide with the interests of the business, that the ‘value’ of people equals to the amount of wealth they divert to their possession.

A bureaucrat cannot see far. His thinking is short-range. His primitive attempts at ‘scientific’ forecasting of probable futures always turns out to be gross blunders. For the lack of ‘flaming imagination of art,’ he cannot imagine alternative policies.

Innovation for him is only a tool to achieve short-term advantages. He can easily discard innovation if it upsets his ‘cost efficiency’. But if innovation brings immediate returns and payoffs, he will rush to implement it without considering any long-term impact and consequences on human life and living systems as a whole. 

Bureaucrats' time is over. Today, creativity stands in polarity to bureaucracy. The world demands creative people to front the positions for deciding the destiny of humanity. We need a new system in which political power is vested on individuals on the basis of their creativity, first and foremost.

We need creative people in charge. People who devise effective solutions for people, set goals of progress, and infuse society with a greater sense of tomorrow. Individuals who are responsible for social good and understand the consequences of their actions. On the brink of a new era, we need them more than ever before. Without creative people at the helm of governments today, a better tomorrow is not possible. 

This article is accompanied by the song Rona Tingz (Corona Things) by MASK artist Bv Accurate (https://youtu.be/hX0STgFAQOw).

Alla Tkachuk, the founder of creativity platform for young people MASK. Follow on Instagram @maskcreativity