24.

THE
12 THREATS
TO CREATIVITY

We have covered a good deal of ground in this story; so let’s here highlight the main conclusions from it all.

The first is that creativity generally thrives in systems that combine:

Small units

Change agents

Effective networks

Shared memory systems

Competition

Such systems create spontaneous experimentation and progress through “survival of the fittest”, but perhaps surprisingly, these “fittest” tend to be whoever, through innovation, has become better at co-operating (such as humans). There are now far more humans than chimpanzees on the planet because we became better at co-operating than they did, and this started a relentless genes-culture co-evolution for us, but not for them.

The introduction of pair-bonding among pre-humans was an excellent early example of improved co-operation, but our greatest hit in that respect is surely the later invention of trade. This concept of cooperation is so radical, that not a single other species has made it. Nor did the Neanderthals, which is probably why our ancestors overcame them.

Voluntary co-operation under competition creates innovation, and this gives us a self-perpetuating creative design space, which again stimulates better use of our social space. The result is constant positive feedback loops between innovation, social networking and genes. This process is exponential; since most new innovations are re-combinations of old ones, the greater the number of ideas we have already had or implemented, the more new ones are within our reach. And innovation is not a pot we are emptying, but an infinitive process, only limited by the laws of physics, which tend to be very generous. For instance, if we learned to smash together deuterium and tritium in an orderly fashion, we would have safe and clean energy for billions of years; if all farming was as effective as in Holland, we could feed 60 billion people and if we could accelerate a rocket to 20% of the speed of light, it would circumvent the Earth in less than a second.

However, innovation only happens if we maintain a system conducive to it, and here we should note how important the prevalence of small units is. All else equal, whenever a system grows more decentralized and thus populated by larger numbers of smaller units, its creative processes will accelerate. Conversely, centralization slows down or kills creativity. When a private company makes a new innovation, it will typically be a question of a few weeks or months before most of its competitors have responded with the same or more. In government, it is not so at all. Government may fall decades after what happens in private business.

Throughout this book we have seen many examples of this. For starters, we saw that ecological speciation is biggest on islands, as Darwin discovered. Another example: the runaway development of the human species from CHLCA (chimpanzee–human last common ancestor) and, in particular, the fast development of the human brain was possible because the population was frequently separated into smaller tribes which mutated and then reconnected with others for co-operation and competition. The third obvious example is ancient Greece, which was highly creative when it consisted of approximately 700-1,000 city states, but became virtually static after becoming part of empires. Creativity also exploded in Western Europe during the Middle Ages exactly in the areas that, like ancient Greece, were divided into countless mini-states, whereas it slowed down in the more centralized areas. In this particular case, it happened because parts of Western Europe, during this era, had the following essential criteria for innovation:

•Small units, since Western Europe consisted of up to several thousand independent and competing mini-states.

•Change agents in the form of constant migration, trade and blending of peoples such as Celts, Anglo-Saxons, Latinos and Jews within the countless mini-states.

•Networks in the form of the Roman ports and road network combined with a sailing culture that was facilitated by accessible Western rivers and natural ports.

•Shared memory systems in the form of common Latin written language, standard measurement units, shared calendar, common legal concepts and so on.

•Competition between the many states which again typically had internal power balance between Masonic lodges, councils, church, nobility, private companies, army and royalty.

This led to an extraordinary chain reaction, which can be summarized by these development phases and new core ideas:

Alongside these developments came a certain optimism and can-do mentality, and, as one thing led to the next, the creative design space grew gradually for a few hundred years. Then, around 1450, it virtually exploded, and it has kept growing frantically ever since. This has created such extensive innovation that the West has arguably produced more than 95% of all global creative output ever - even though its population has never constituted more than a small minority of the world’s total population.

A creative process such as Western creativity has begun in other civilizations as well. However, the historical tendency is that a period of creativity and optimism is extinguished - from within. Once this happens and societies become static again, win-win transactions are replaced with win-lose activity; freedom with coercion and growth with stagnation. Once they become static, people increasingly assume that one man’s gain must be another man’s loss. Of course, they will make the same assumption if they believe that it ought to be static even as it still grows. People in static societies are typically more hostile, envious and aggressive than in expanding ones, and when a society is in decline, you typically get tyranny and/or civil war.

However, even though there were countless attempts to halt the creativity in Medieval Western Europe (censorship, monopolization of trade, anti-enlightenment, Luddism, mad monks), it could never be achieved, as freedom had too many escape routes – when tyranny grew in one place, the creative people and the money just moved on to another, which would then gain power and wealth. Creativity was thus constantly rescued by decentralization.

The most convincing onslaught on Western civilization happened in the 1930s and 40s, where communists, Nazis and fascists almost killed it off entirely in Europe, but because liberal democracy had previously spread to the US and other areas, these new liberal nations became liberators and saved the day.

Western civilization is largely built on ideas that evolved in Greece more than 2,000 years ago, and as we have seen, getting from there to here was a Herculean task. Indeed, each and every victory along the way involved enormous work and much human suffering. Millions were killed in battles to make the present possible, and high numbers of people perished in prisons or were executed for defending values such as freedom, democracy, science, religious tolerance, the rule of law or rationality. Equally, the mere development of the enormous infrastructure and the technology we control today involved vast efforts, with countless people essentially working themselves to death to give us what we take forgranted today

But we made it, and since the spring of innovation can apparently run forever unless we cut it off, should we now safely assume all is fine and dandy? It may certainly feel that way if you are sipping a cafe latte in Vienna, Vancouver or Wellington, and as previously mentioned, in 1992 Francis Fukuyama published his book The End of History and the Last Man, with its central claims that: 1) Western-style liberal democracy (market economy and democracy) is the best model and 2) everybody will eventually figure that out, so that 3) the end-point for history is a world full of such liberal democracies.

At the time of his book (1992), he saw Denmark as the best example of such a well-functioning liberal democracy, and therefore used the term “getting to Denmark” for how you arrived at a democracy of this kind. Perhaps Switzerland is the new Denmark with Australia as the runner-up, but in any case: the West still rocks. Take, for instance a look at the table below, which shows how Western-style liberal democracies receive most of the global top scores for humanistic, economic, environmental and financial excellence:

As we have seen, people living in Western-style societies anywhere have undergone a very strong civilizing process that has made them much more co-operative, peaceful, rational, confident, tolerant, freedom-seeking, individualistic, democratic, creative and even intelligent than in the past. Also, Westerners consistently rank as the happiest people on the planet, whether you measure that as pure happiness or through broader indicators such as satisfaction with life. So it’s no wonder there is a constant flow of people from the outside trying to get in, while the flow of insiders trying to get out (they are free to leave) is tiny.

And these happy Westerners have largely benefitted the world, even as they evidently also did it harm. In essence, Westerners have historically been good at spreading their ideas, capital and technologies to other nations who benefitted tremendously from them. Indeed, quite a few of these have now adapted many or most Western ideas to great effect; for instance, South Korea, Chile, Japan, Hong Kong and Taiwan, spring to mind.

They are still beneficial. In the “Good Country Index”, which compiles a large number of indicators for how much good a nation does for the entire world, the top 20 “good” countries in the 2014 ranking were all Western (led by Ireland, Finland, Switzerland, The Netherlands and New Zealand).⁵⁰³

So obviously Fukuyama was right to claim that liberal democracies work very well (especially, as the tables above shows, in small nations). However, he didn’t really dwell on the complication that once civilizations have reached apparent perfection (having “got to” Denmark), they have an inherent tendency to swing around again and head towards Argentina. Empires always collapse, nations often fail and civilizations sometimes decay, and there are, as we have seen three systematic reasons for that:

Naysayers, who don’t believe in the project

Over-institutionalization, which leads to unintended stagnation

Enemies of reason, who reject enlightenment, culture and voluntary co-operation

Let’s summarize them, starting with the naysayers. These people are the equivalents of the cynics in ancient Greece and Rome; the people who simply did not believe in the project. The modern cynics have some or all of the following wrong conceptions:

End-of-ideas misconception: ideas are resources that we are tapping, and we must be very close to the limit of anything that is possible. So we must prepare for a more static society.

Exclusivity misconception: market economies concentrate information, power and money in ever fewer hands, which could destroy them. To avoid that destruction, the state must redistribute and control everything.

Resource depletion misconception: economic growth in creative societies will lead to depletion of our resources, so it must be stopped.

Environmental destruction misconception: the increasing wealth and technology created by economic growth will destroy the planet, so it should be stopped

As for the end-of-ideas misconceptions, we have seen that there is nothing in the dynamics of creative design spaces that suggest we are close to a natural boundary in terms of innovation or that such a boundary even exists. New technologies keep coming through recombination of older ones, and those that do reach maturity become subject to ever-changing fashion trends. Furthermore, each new core technology stimulates its own mini creative design space with evermore applications for it. So, if anything, the more ideas we have already had, the more we can have in the future, and this is an exponential process. The reality is this: there is no end to innovation in sight, because it has no end.

Our second group of naysayers argue (as they have done for almost 200 years) that liberal democracy brings increasing concentration of knowledge, money and power in ever fewer hands, which will lead to its collapse. This is the stuff of countless novels and movies such as Hunger Games or In Time, but on a more serious note, it has also been the expectation of Karl Marx (Das Kapital), Baran and Sweezy (Monopoly Capitalism) or Thomas Piketty (Capital in the Twenty-First Century). However, capitalism hasn’t collapsed because of capital concentration as predicted by Karl Marx. Nor are we all run by a military-industrial complex as Baran and Sweezy expected.

Instead, free markets have created evermore diversity, pluralism and mobility. For instance, instead of mass-produced standard products, we have moved towards “segment of one”, “mass-to-class”, “Do-it-yourself” (DIY) communities and “maker movement“ manufacturing, which has brought the total number of products available to well over 100 million. Furthermore, we have introduced more products that are entirely customizable, just as well as we have moved many from central locations into the homes (the “I-movement”). For instance, the central mainframe is replaced by the home computer or smartphone, the central printer by home printing, the central cinema with home cinemas, central movie production with home movies and so on.

Company average sizes have also declined as their mentality changed from corporate to crowd and from pyramid to cloud. And their shareholder bases have broadened, partly due to public listings, crowdfunding and new use of stock options. Education has opened up with Massive Open Online Courses, and more women than men go on to higher education. Creative crowd-sourcing is exploding and providing us with collaborative filtering, mass ratings, prediction markets, mass-edited wikis, open innovation contests, and much more. And finally, social mobility has not declined, but has instead increased to the point where being among the very rich now tends to be a very temporary affair. Furthermore, as Piketty’s own numbers actually showed, wealth concentration is not a long-term rising trend.

The third popular delusion among naysayers is based on the seemingly eternal idea that we are on the verge of running out of resources, as was predicted by Thomas Malthus more than 200 years ago or in countless recent best-selling doomsday books such as Our Plundered Planet or Limits to Growth. And since wealth equals resource depletion, the naysayers argue, there should be no room for unnecessary and wasteful luxury lifestyles.

One can understand how Malthus got it wrong, because people had limited knowledge in 1798, but it is harder to see why anyone keeps assuming it now. Since Malthus’ time, the world’s population has grown seven-fold, yet we eat far more per capita.

Most limits-to-growth catastrophists vastly underestimate the creativity of scientists, engineers and businessmen. And even if any of them do understand that power, they might think that this just accelerates our dash to the bottom of the jar. But as we have seen, what actually happens is quite the opposite; we are innovating towards infinity. Resources therefore become increasingly abundant as we grow richer, and this happens precisely because we are getting richer, due to the combinations of efficiency, recycling, compression, substitution, digitization, virtualization, biological cultivation, synthesizing and sharing that money can buy. Meanwhile, the same wealth increase leads to a declining population, which makes the resource problem even smaller.

The idea that we should stop enjoying ourselves because we are running out of things brings to mind the Venetian monk Girolamo Savonarola, who in 1497 arranged public burnings of luxury objects – the so-called “bonfire of the vanities”.

The fourth popular delusion among naysayers sounds roughly like this: “Modern technology and economic growth destroys the world’s environment, so we should have less technology and less wealth.” In the minds of these naysayers, who are often called dark environmentalist, much of science is very dangerous, and should therefore be halted by ethics committees, using the slippery slope argument, the LNT model and the precautionary principle.

However on many fronts, the reality is that the West’s worst environmental problems have long since passed, and there exist very elegant technological solutions to those that remain – and many more are on their way. Strong statistical evidence shows that the cultures and nations that actually create greatest environmental devastation are poor and static, not rich and dynamic. In fact, the worst offenders of all seem to have been some of the Neolithic (pre-civilization) people, and the worst offenders in modern times have been poor or socialist nations.

Dark environmentalism is typically propagated in various forms by such organizations as Die Grühne, Friends of the Earth, Earth Liberation Front, Greenpeace, Environmental Defence Fund, Earth First!, The Sierra Club, the Union of Concerned Scientist, World Wildlife Fund and by bizarre scientists such as Paul Erlich. Their typical aim is to save the planet with an iron fist. The philosophical roots of dark environmentalism are the Germanic Sturm und Drang, Romanticism and Blud und Boden movements (which are much alike and appeal to the same mindsets), and they tend to tie in with opposition to free or global trade and support of centralization. There are clear parallels between such dark environmentalists and the likes of Sultan Selim, who in 1515 forbade the printing press, or with Chinese Emperor Hongzhi, who in 1500 banned maritime navigation. If the dark environmentalists’ power truly matched their ambitions, the creative Western civilization would perish and mayhem follow. However, even the limited influence which they do wield has caused significant unnecessary pollution and millions of deaths and disabilities – possibly more than those caused by Nazism and communism combined.

Even if we don’t agree with the naysayers that the Western project will or should be ended, we may end up destroying it anyway, accidentally, via Carol Quigley’s over-institutionalization, which is the unintended road “from Denmark toward Argentina.”

The public productivity problem. Due to Parkinson’s Law, Mancur Olson’s accumulation of special interests and privileges, the development of welfare coalitions, Mouritzens 1-3 rule, the Tragedy of the Commons, Niskanens public growth sickness, Tim Wu’s Kronos effect, Acemoglus’ and Robinsons’ extractive organizations and so on, the public sector keeps expanding while becoming far less efficient and creative than the private. This leads to Baumols’ cost disease, whereby they automatically absorb an ever bigger part of any economy.

The legal tangle. We move towards evermore mandarin-style legalism, which compromises intuition, freedom, personal moral and creativity.

Over-taxation and public borrowing. The constantly-growing public sector requires ever-increasing taxation. This works like over-fishing in the oceans: we move far beyond the long-term and social optimum on the Laffer curve. The derived funding gaps are then met with unsustainable public borrowing, whereby money that could have been invested in companies and ventures is instead used for public over-spending.

The donation delusions. We instinctively believe that any social problem or struggling business sector must be healed by donating money. The money is then collected from well-functioning people and businesses, and we all feel good. But, surprisingly, the donations often worsen the problems we seek to heal over the longer term. And it contributes to the aforementioned widespread over-taxation and public borrowing, which has its own social costs.

As if all this wasn’t enough, we have even more challenges to creativity and growth, because many modern Westerners take peace, freedom, culture, science, enlightenment, aesthetics and prosperity so much for granted, they treat it with cavalier indifference or even think it trendy to mock it. This is the bizarre netherworld of people – often state-funded academics - who make it their mission or (publicly-funded) job to fight against science, freedom, technology, trade, culture or entrepreneurship:

Neo-Luddites and panic-mongers. Rooted in the German Romantic Movement and the British Luddite Movement, there is constant panicmongering and increased rejection of new technologies such as vaccines, genetically-modified food and nuclear energy. This follows a refusal to weigh costs and benefits of new technologies against one another in a rational manner, so that we instead embrace an increasing culture of “can’t”.

Eco fascists and pseudo scientists. Largely divorced from reality, a small, but vocal group of environmentalists and environmental scientists use scientific fraud or pseudo-scientific media schemes to stop economic growth and technological development. Some go even further and call for global government, suspension of democracy or even use of violence to get what they want. This is echoes of the Blud und Boden movement, if not worse.

Babblers, cynics, charlatans. Post-modernists oppose enlightenment, science and artistic achievement by claiming we cannot test or know anything, should never judge or compare anything, should not assume that the West is better in any way and should reject rationality, science, discovery, beauty and aesthetics. This reflects Colin Martindale’s Law of Novelty, but it has historical parallels in the Islamic Al Ghazali and the Ash’ari schools, which also argued against discovery, rationality, arts and science.

Utopians and social engineers. These are people who believe centralized systems such as fascism and socialism or modified versions of these (corporatism) through wide-scale social engineering can provide fairer and more efficient societies than those based on freedom.

We have now listed the 12 internal challenges to creative, free societies, and these may feel like The 12 Labours of Hercules, although that they do not seem to end as swiftly as his did. One of their consequences is simply widespread pessimism, which can become self-fulfilling. Just listen to these words:

“Will this be the world that your grandchildren will thank you for? A world where industrial production has sunk to zero. Where population has suffered a catastrophic decline. Where the air, sea and land are polluted beyond redemption. Where civilization is a distant memory. This is the world that the computer forecasts.”

This was on the back cover of the aforementioned global best-seller Limits to Growth from 1972. Of course, since this was written, the global economy has grown approximately five-fold, civilization remains and, if anything, is somewhat overdone by now, and air and water quality have improved in most places. So the grandchildren to whom the quote refers to, and who should be alive and well, might be wondering what was wrong with the computer that made the forecast, but they might equally be relieved that people behind the book didn’t succeed in convincing the world that it should limit growth. Here is another quote reflecting pessimism:

“Humanity stands at a defining moment in history. We are confronted with a perpetuation of disparities between and within nations, a worsening of poverty, hunger, ill-health and illiteracy, and the continuing deterioration of the ecosystems on which we depend for our well-being.”

These words are from the opening statement of the Agenda 21 Declaration from 1992, which was, believe it or not, signed by government leaders from 178 countries. What makes this so incredible is that it was written (and signed) in a year in which the global average life expectancy had never been higher; where most of the poor countries had a high and accelerating income growth; where the proportion and numbers of malnourished and starving people in the world had been declining for decades; where illiteracy was rapidly diminishing; and where the air and water were cleaner in most countries than they had been for 100 years. Three years later, in 1995, Jared Diamond wrote:

“By the time my infant sons reach retirement age, half of the world’s species will be extinct, the air radioactive, and the seas polluted with oil.”⁵⁰⁴

Negativism, scaremongering and promotion of zero-growth philosophy are not new phenomena, as one can read in the book The Idea of Decline in Western History by Arthur Herman. Indeed, such ideas are central to many religions; perhaps because they reflect basic instincts of the human mindset, or perhaps because scaring people is an effective way of concentrating power. But while the expectation of decline is not new, it has become unusually widespread in recent decades, possibly since external threats are now viewed as remote and also because, if you can convince people that growth must halt, the next logical step is to implement socialism as the dynamic effects of market economies are no longer needed or desired. That, at least, would explain why so many socialists don’t believe in growth, and vice versa.

Just as well, as the rejection of growth is destructive, so is a Spartan rejection of fashion, art or luxury products, which is, in effect, a rejection of our cultural experimentation and enjoyment of life. As American journalist and satirist H. L. Mencken once wrote about Puritans, they have “the haunting fear that someone, somewhere, can be happy”. Luxury, art and fashion items can be expensive, but it isn’t a big part of our economies. For instance, luxury products which exemplify the pinnacle of craftsmanship, design and technology, constitute approximately 0.8% of the overall world economy.⁵⁰⁵ However, they serve a great purpose by inspiring better products, and by giving society more colour, charm and ambition in just the way that elite sports people inspire amateur sportsmen.

Pursuers of zero growth may not realize that our societies have made many explicit and implicit promises that can only me met if we keep growing. If we turn to zero growth, hospitals will no longer be able to afford the newest technologies, governments will not be able to pay back their debts, and as most government bonds sit in pension portfolios, people will not be able to retire as planned either.

Finally, there is this: if you believe that growth is impossible, undesirable or immoral, it must follow that one person’s gain is at the cost of others, so that those who work hardest and take biggest risks should be met with envy and contempt rather than be viewed as sources of inspiration and admiration.

The Western pessimists typically argue that people are essentially sinners who should live Spartan lives under the firm guidance of the authoritarian and centralized leadership of a large state. Science and technology are viewed with scepticism, and fear or panic leads to the precaution principle plus the slippery slope argument and the demand for zero growth.

It would be a tragedy if Western ideas would finally succumb. But they certainly don’t have to, because, as Quigley pointed out, civilizations can oscillate repeatedly between “Denmark” and inner conflict (France?) without necessarily getting as far as North Korea.

To save Western ideas, the task is to overcome the cult of decline, the legal tangle, the Luddite lunacy, the monopoly mentality, the max tax madness and the culture of “can’t”. We must confront the Neo-Luddites, rent-seekers, neo-Spartans, panic mongers, eco-fascists, pseudo-scientists, babblers, charlatans and social Utopians and keep calling their bluff as Friedrich von Hayek, Alan Sokal, Julian Simon, Bjørn Lomborg and many others have done in times past.

We must also defend growth and experimentation and explain to everyone willing to listen, that when dynamic nations encounter challenges, they find solutions, and as they become richer, their solutions become evermore amazing.

In the following chapter we shall try to outline some thoughts about how we can make it happen.