Mass Creativity: A Global Imperative©

“If, as is generally conceded, the world is in a rather sorry mess, crying for solutions to problems that are staggering in complexity and magnitude, the encouragement of creative thinking would seem to be the most necessary and immediate goal of all concerned people.”

--George R. Eckstein

The Nobel Prize winner, T. A. M. Dirac, once expressed the hope that “sooner or later someone will find an idea that really fits and leads to a big development.” How prophetic!

A body of data nobody thought or knew existed – a compendium of (currently) 1,721 sobering and revealing insights into the nature of human nature – yields two breakthrough discoveries in social, economic, and political thought. Their publication signals a Copernican Revolution in the way we define ourselves and conduct human affairs, including, almost certainly, the rewriting of very many books.

Homo Creativus©, my term for the first discovery, is the quintessentially creative but historically overlooked human essence and, serendipitously, the logical and only solid foundation for the viable and sustainable global future that everybody wants to see. Homo Creativus© implies that the virtually taken-for-granted rational economic man (Homo Economicus) upon which most modern institutions have been built is, rather, a potential-actualizing being, driven primarily by the development and meaningful engagement of one’s unique set of abilities (with economic consumption and material well-being as the means to that end). 

Global Creativity Crisis, my term for the second discovery, is the real but unnoticed and unsuspected predicament that is threatening our collective survival and the future of Planet Earth. “Global Creativity Crisis” implies that, contrary to the conventional wisdom, the modern crises and the global predicament are not economic, social, political, or environmental crisis, per se. They are not separate crises, either. And they are not due to the so-called "human propensity to evil." The data upon which these conclusions are based powerfully and persuasively demonstrate that the modern crises and the human predicament are, fundamentally, a creativity crisis. This is the inability of the vast majority of people to develop and to beneficially engage their defining (creative) quality as humans and, resultantly, the spreading “epidemic” of meaninglessness of which many psychological, social, economic, political, and environmental problems of our time are the symptoms, or facets.

The twin discoveries and their implications for human affairs are the subject of a six-volume book entitled Mass Creativity: A Global Imperative (in writing). Part of the “global creativity-consciousness” that is becoming increasingly urgent and that I am actively advocating,  Mass Creativity calls to action, inextricably joining all people – parents, educators, business and political leaders, care-givers – in the largest and the single most crucial salvage operation humanity has ever faced: To reclaim our authentic (creative) essence as humans – the best (probably the only) hope of resolving the human predicament and of building the viable and sustainable global future that practically everyone wants to achieve.