History has remembered the kings and warriors, because they destroyed;
art has remembered the people, because they created.
– William Morris [1]
Yavor Tarinski || Nowadays we increasingly hear of, and also sense it ourselves, that there is a crisis of creativity. In pop culture there continuously are remakes of the same movie and music concepts, while technology has focused heavily on simulation and the image. It is almost as we experience some sort of déjà vu, where, in a sense, nothing really changes (or nothing is allowed to change for that matter). There seems to be an increasing lack of creativity in our civilization.
The problem is not in human beings per se. It is not as if our species has become less capable of creative thought. The issue lies elsewhere – namely in the social and political architecture. In oligarchic societies (i.e. societies run by elite minorities), there is a constant effort by the ruling class to keep the rest of the population in a state of semi-infancy – just enough to be capable to execute assigned tasks, but not enough to decide on their own. This has profound effect on the anthropological type that society consists of. It predisposes people to boredom, laziness, conformity. As Kevin Reste suggests:
today’s corporate systems — our big, bloated, bureaucratic machines — don’t leave much room for those moments of [creative] madness. The larger and more “sophisticated” these organizations become, the more difficult it is to push through ideas that go against the grain… Every decision now must run through a gauntlet of departments — legal, sales, marketing, distribution, social. Every move must check a box, integrate with another system, and align with standards. [2]
The creeping rules of bureaucracy – in both its state and market forms – demands of human activity to follow specific norms determined by the power centers. Actions and thoughts are channeled along specific traits, with deviation being made an increasingly difficult thing. With the advent of capitalism social relations have further been degraded, as its economic model pushes for the dismantling communities into private individuals and transforming human connections into for-profit exchanges.
Thus, the capitalist logic narrows the scope of human creativity, limiting it to the field of short-term profit. As author and educator Jyotsna Kapur underlines:
By turning the arts into a purely commercial enterprise, neoliberalism has attacked the very core of artistic expression. Art relies on a sense of imagination, resistance, and community that underlies it and exceeds the rules of the market. [3]
In this context common people are reduced to cogs that must make the social machinery operate, without disturbing the established order. There is clear separation between the order-givers (political and business elites) and the order-takers (the rest of society). The creative potential of the great majority is sacrificed in the daily hustle for survival in a world where societies are broken into individuals that compete with each other, rather than cooperate. This situation only works for the benefit of the ruling classes, i.e. those that get to call the shots.
As William Morris has already observed in the 19th century:
Society (so-called) at present is organized entirely for the benefit of a privileged class; the working class being only considered in the arrangement as so much machinery. This involves perpetual and enormous waste, as the organization for the production of genuine utilities is only a secondary consideration. This waste lands the whole civilized world in a position of artificial poverty, which again debars men of all classes from satisfying their rational desires. Rich men are in slavery to Philistinism, poor men to penury. We can none of us have what we want, except (partially only) by making prodigious sacrifices, which very few men can ever do. Before, therefore, we can as much as hope for any art, we must be free from this artificial poverty. [4]
But in order to sustain its legitimacy among the order-taking population, the dominant hierarchical system promises security and comfort. These promises, however, are ambivalent, to say the least, as they are intended for the people only in words. The promised security is actually aimed primarily at sustaining the primacy of private property and the top-down flow of power.
And the pledged comfort actually seeks to promote laziness, boredom and other counterrevolutionary states of human existence. It seeks to “liberate” people from the “burden” of taking responsibility for public affairs, pushing them instead towards life dominated by hobbies and lobbies, where one is supposed to care only for having short-term fun and her’s career. New technologies are also shaped by the dominant political architecture and tend to further promote laziness in the expense of human creativity and imagination.
In regard to the spread of AI apps, Aisha K. Staggers notes that:
It’s efficient, it’s faster, but there’s a catch: we might be on the brink of losing the very essence of what makes us human. If we hand over too much creative control to machines, do we risk losing our ability to imagine at all? [5]
Why is the current dominant political and economic reality so detrimental to creativity and imagination? For one, the latter are not just about individual genius and art – they are the very basis of human existence. Creativity is not simply an accessory to make life prettier (although this is also one of its aspects), but first and foremost, it is the human ability – through the synergy of the collective and the individual – to create significations and to constantly reimagine ways of living, speaking, interacting, etc. True creativity is not simply an alternative fusion of what already exists. It is a step into the new, an act that brings to the forefront something that cannot be accredited to predetermined causes.
This is what makes creation unpredictable and transformative. Philosopher Cornelius Castoriadis defines creative imagination as the core component of nontrivial thinking [6]. Without it, society spirals into repetition and decay, which in turn allows to the parasitic ruling classes to further cement their grip on power and deepen their exploitation of both humanity and nature.
Within the current capitalist order the collective aspect of creative imagination is constantly being pushed to the side and a one-sided individualistic (in fact privatized) distortion of creativity is being promoted as compatible with the enforced neoliberal setting. Castoriadis observes that
work under capitalism therefore implies a permanent mutilation, a perpetual waste of creative capacity, and a constant struggle between the worker and his own activity, between what he would like to do and what he has to do. [7]
The reality of the Nation-State-Complex provides no space for the expression of genuine human creativity. Parliaments and technocracies have monopolized the public space of decision-making regarding public affairs, while capitalism promotes short-term economic ingenuity (within very strict rules of dog-eat-dog competitiveness) instead of creative labor. But creativity requires both a collective and individual dimension. As scholars S. Alexander Haslam, Inmaculada Adarves-Yorno & Tom Postmes suggest, people seem to need a sense of shared social identity to stick to their creative guns and see revolutionary projects —whether in science, industry, the arts or politics – to completion.[8]
In a sense, each and every society is a work of collective creation, with its languages, customs, institutions, etc. emerging from the self-action of human communities. But societies are never in a static state, they either constantly develop under the workings of popular self-creation, or begin degrading and disintegrating under the stifling effects of bureaucratic triviality. Unfortunately, the current dominant hierarchical order has laid the path towards the latter option.
In order to reignite human creative capacities, we need a radical alteration of the political architecture of our societies. If what dominates us today is heteronomy, i.e. the management of the great majority by a small fraction that claims exclusivity on instituting, production of meaning, etc., then we are in dire need of establishing autonomy, in the condition of which all members of society will be able to direct-democratically participate in the management of their life in common. One such setting paves the way for the reignition of creativity, for as Albert Einstein has suggested, everything that is really great and inspiring is created by the individual who can labor in freedom. [9]
Autonomy implies that all individual members of the collective whole are equal bearers of decision-making power regarding the way society functions and the direction it takes. Laws, norms, institutions, relations – all aspects of public affairs open up for popular deliberation within a system of direct democracy. It is the people themselves, in conscious understanding, that undertake the responsibility of how they act collectively. As Castoriadis underlines:
Autonomy means that the political community gives to itself its laws and that it does so knowing that it does so, excluding every idea of extra-social source of the laws and institutions … This is the highest kratos, the highest power that exists in a society. [10]
In one autonomous society there is nothing sacred. The individuals that consist it views history as their collective creation, not as descending from gods or traditions, neither drafted by enlightened elites. It is the everyday commoner that becomes, in her’s democratic collaboration with the rest of her fellow human beings, a force of creativity. In this setting humans en masse are allowed, once again, to create meaning ex nihilo, not in the sense of starting from absolute nothingness, but in producing meanings that, while developed in a given context, are not predetermined in the material reality of the world. In this line of thought, Castoriadis underlines that:
The fact of creation also has weighty ontological implication… it entails the abandonment of the hypercategory of determinacy as absolute… Creation means, precisely, the positing of new determinations —the emergence of new forms, eide, therefore ipso facto the emergence of new laws …[11]
We are already experiencing the negative effects of a society that is rapidly submerging within a crisis of insignificancy. The rise and hold of power by far-right and authoritarian forces in many parts of the world is an indicator of the growing trend of societies descending into reactionary grip. In such conditions creativity gives way to the kitsch of nostalgia – a reality where the imagination of communities is being pulled by the dominant political architecture so as to make it increasingly difficult for people to envision new ways of co-existing and organizing, resorting instead to distorted revisions of pasts that never were.
Such societies lack the social glue presented by collective visions for the future, disintegrating instead into chaotic mobs that seek the guidance of charlatans. It is only through grassroots processes of self-instituting, initiated by social movements, that new significations, meanings, and projects, can emerge and revitalize human creativity. As Castoriadis correctly observes:
I think that we are at a crossing in the roads of history … One road is the loss of meaning … The other road should be opened … through a social and political awakening, a resurgence of the project of individual and collective autonomy … This would require an awakening of the imagination and of the creative imaginary.[12]
Footnotes
[1] Morris, William. 1882. Hopes and Fears for Art. Chapter 2, “The Art of the People.” In Hopes and Fears for Art, delivered before the Birmingham Society of Arts and School of Design, February 19, 1879. Marxists Internet Archive. Accessed September 4, 2025 https://www.marxists.org/archive/morris/works/1882/hopes/chapters/chapter2.htm
[2] Reste, Kevin. 2024. “Creativity in Chains: Is Your Bureaucracy Killing Your Creative?” Medium, October 9, 2024. Accessed September 4, 2025. https://medium.com/@kevinreste_90620/creativity-in-chains-is-your-bureaucracy-killing-your-creative-ff3500ca9836
[3] Kapur, Jyotsna. 2011. “Neoliberalism and Its Uses of Art.” eJump Cut, no. 53 (2011). Accessed September 4, https://www.ejumpcut.org/archive/jc53.2011/KapurCreativeIndus/index.html
[4] Morris, William. 1896. “On Socialism and Art.” Marxists Internet Archive. Accessed September 4, 2025.
https://www.marxists.org/archive/morris/works/1896/precis.htm
[5] Staggers, Aisha K. 2024. “The Imagination Crisis: Are We Losing Creativity to AI?” Medium, September 22, 2024. Accessed September 4, 2025. https://aishakstaggers.medium.com/the-imagination-crisis-are-we-losing-creativity-to-ai-6efe10bea7c4
[6] Castoriadis, Cornelius. 1997. The Castoriadis Reader. Edited by David Ames Curtis. Oxford: Blackwell, p270.
[7] Castoriadis, Cornelius. 2013. “On the content of socialism (part 2).” Anarkismo.net, March 24, 2013. Accessed September 4, 2025. https://www.anarkismo.net/article/25210
[8] Haslam, S. Alexander, Inmaculada Adarves-Yorno, and Tom Postmes. 2014. “Creative Communities Are Key to Innovation.” Scientific American, July 1, 2014. Accessed September 4, 2025. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/creative-communities-are-key-to-innovation/
[9] Einstein, Albert. 1938. “Address at Swarthmore College Commencement.” Swarthmore College Sesquicentennial. Accessed September 4, 2025. https://swat150.swarthmore.edu/1938-albert-einsteins-commencement-address.html[10]Castoriadis, Cornelius. 2025. “Castoriadis: The Problem of Democracy Today.” Radical Theory & Praxis, February 16, 2025. Accessed September 4, 2025. https://radicaltheoryandpraxis.wordpress.com/2025/02/16/castoriadis-the-problem-of-democracy-today/
[11] Castoriadis, Cornelius. 1997. The Castoriadis Reader. Edited by David Ames Curtis. Oxford: Blackwell, p369.
[12] Castoriadis, Cornelius. 2005. Figures of the Thinkable (including “Passion and Knowledge”). Translated from the French and edited anonymously as a public service. Accessed September 4, 2025. https://www.notbored.org/FTPK.html
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