Consider Madness. A Labour Day Reflection

I didn't wake up this Labour Day morning intending to be pessimistic.

But, there can be elegance and insight in the dark. That is what I found this morning in The Surprising Origins of Our Obsession with Creativity by Samuel W. Franklin in Behavioral Scientist.

The illustration (below) that accompanies the article, alludes to one of its themes: the 'use' of creativity in the service of what the French philosopher Jacques Ellul called 'the machine.'

Ellul described the fundamental motivation and goal of the machine - or of la technique as he called it - as efficiency (La Technique: L'enjeu du siècle 1954). Ellul calls it la technique; John Ralston Saul calls it technocracy (Voltaire’s Bastards: The Dictatorship of Reason in the West, 1992). 'Creativity' is used to serve both.

Creativity in the machine

Creativity in the technocracy in which we live:

• Functions as propaganda, masking the realities and agendas of technocracy and technocratic capitalism (growth through consumption); and,
• Is an opiate, soothing the pain of our absorption into the machine.

From Franklin's article:

"[The idea of creativity] satisfied a nostalgia for an earlier age of the genius inventor and entrepreneur, but in a form befitting the ideological and pragmatic realities of the mass society."

The idea of 'mass' is central to Ellul's portrait of la technique. All things 'individual' must be aggregated, because individual variation cannot be tolerated in an efficient system. Aggregates, averages, normal distributions... these are the acceptable forms into which all variance must be pressed. Outliers are madness to the machine.

As long as the efficiency of la technique is the dominant value (and it is), all counter-measures (the entirety of the human relations school of management, of which 'creativity' is a subset), all individuals, must be and are, subsumed.

Efficiency as the prime value must be absolute or it cannot exist at all. Efficiency, with its necessary companion, consumption, has been absolute since the beginning of the 20th century.

Creativity as an idea, serves as propaganda (to ensure our thinking is in line with the needs of the machine), and as opiate. The absorption of the human, the biological, the animal of emotion and sensation, into the machine is painful. I always think of this image from Charlie Chaplin's Modern Times:

The belief we are creative, that we can 'innovate our way out of this,' that we have greater agency than we do, is soothing.

From the article:

"[Post-Second World War] Psychologists developed tests to identify “creative people” based largely on the needs of military and corporate R & D, but they were also motivated by a larger desire to save individuals from the psychic oppression of modernity."

That last line could have been taken directly from The Technological Society (the English translation, 1964, of La Technique).

Human relations memes (creativity, psychological safety, meaningful work, etc.) all serve the propaganda machine (or in the case of Elton Mayo's Hawthorne 'experiments', emerge directly from it), and/or are opiates to reduce the pain of absorption (the "...desire to save individuals from the psychic oppression of modernity.")

A way out?

Franklin's penultimate paragraph reads: "Today’s dogged determination to “do what you love” and our disdain for the nine-to-five; the very fact that we now have a class of people known simply as “creatives” or even “creators”; and the persistence of optimism despite so many cruel realities of modern capitalism—all of these can in some way trace their origins to the immediate postwar cult of creativity."

I'll admit to the 'dogged determination'. But is it getting us anywhere? So far, no. Technocracy continues to grow. Our addiction to infinite, boundaryless growth is clear. It is the black hole of modernism, colonialism, and unlimited-growth-capitalism; the mother of all singularities we are rapidly approaching. Growth through consumption is all the machine knows.

So 'creativity' may give us optimism and determination, but it is - on its own - no way out.

Ellul does suggest a way out: madness.

"A major section of modern art and poetry unconsciously guides us in the direction of madness; and, indeed, for the modern man there is no other way. Only madness is inaccessible to the machine." (The Technological Society)

This Labour Day (in Canada, and on whatever similar day you have in your country), my modest proposal is that we consider madness.

• The madness of being inefficient
• The madness of choosing 'enough' over more
• The madness of less choice
• The madness of collapsing and letting go
• The madness of opting out, radically
• The madness of choosing uselessness
• The madness of being an apostate to your Party or your Profession
• The madness of being irrational
• The madness of embracing contradiction
• The madness of choosing the freaky, the weird, the truly singular
• The madness of renouncing clarity

I'll leave the last words to Lewis Carroll, in case you're thinking madness is not the way for you:

“But I don’t want to go among mad people," Alice remarked.

"Oh, you can’t help that," said the Cat: "we’re all mad here. I’m mad. You’re mad."

"How do you know I’m mad?" said Alice.

"You must be," said the Cat, "or you wouldn’t have come here.”

Lewis Carroll, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, 1865

Thank you for reading.

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Clemens Rettich

#creativity #MIT #behaviour #psychology #ellul #technocracy #society #work #wellness #hr