For a guy with a Personal Archive called Cultish Creativity, you'd think A. I'd know a lot about the words cult and creativity, and probably assume that I'd B. jump all over a book called The Cult of Creativity.
I'll grade myself a C on that test. But I did finally read the book of that title, by Samuel W. Franklin, that's been on my shelf for way too long, and now - I have some thoughts.
Creativity is wayyyyyy younger as a concept than I had realized. The modern understanding of the word is literally a post-WWII construct. Franklin explains how organizing the war effort, not to mention the socio-cultural reality of beating the communists/fascists, produced a reflexive reaction.
During the war, you need collective focus. But after the war, how do you invert that? And, almost more important, how do you get the bees in the hive to start acting individualistically again, without losing sight of collective goals?
You don't change the work that needs to be done. You do change the framing of the work. It's a cultural and structural thing, hence cult in the title, and that's how problem-solving, innovation, and creativity all started to become a thing in the mid-1940s in America.
Peter Drucker pointed out how the new managerial priorities were "innovation and marketing" and NOT manufacturing. The concept he understood, and others ran with, was how factory logic would never sustain a consumer economy. The new America would require people who felt like artists while they served capital's needs.
It's a framing thing, not an incentive thing, which - hello behavioral psychology, and no wonder it emerged at the same time. People still very much had to go to work and make stuff. But, without a war effort to make stuff precisely for, the effort that went in needed to be reframed so the effort felt equally significant in the hearts and minds of the modern American.
Creativity was born into this space. It was the answer for preserving and celebrating individualistic dignity inside a collective system built to scale.
At least, that's the way it started out.
Those initial steps, which Franklin tracks in fascinating detail, take us through the years as divergent thinking tests, the birth of "brainstorming" (literally, that's an invention here, too), the study of Synectics, and all the behavioral psychology like I just said - it's all here.
And it mostly worked. Honestly, it really worked, to the extent that it got slowly but massively adopted by every industry you can imagine. The military adopted these ideas, and corporations ate them up as consultants went from one successful reinvention to another. In fact, those business consultants sprang up everywhere, as they always do, promising that not just a few people at a company, but everyone there was creative, and they came up with novel ways to measure and train it, and it only spread further.
In the most Neil Howe sense, you can see how these ideas evolve across generations. The first ideas got planted in adults reacting to the war and the rebuild, then got taught to other adults, who became parents, who instilled them in kids, who grew up and passed them to their kids, and - there's a lot of babies between 1945 and 2023 when the book came out. The creative snowball has only grown in surface area over that period of time.
The Boomers bought into it well. Dignity through creative output, or ideas you came up with and take credit for, still plays. Gen X smelled the BS and went as latchkey and DIY as they could, rejecting the faux-creative institutional ideas. Millennials, with our trophies (at least we elder-millennials always knew those were a joke, fwiw), embraced independence as a virtue and started drifting farther from an institutional/structural understanding of what role creativity played in life, let alone business. And now, Gen Z and Gen Alpha are growing up after the trick has been made visible.
We lived the cycle. Individualism has won so completely that it's basically pathological (have you seen our government? And I don't just mean the current actors). Loneliness, anxiety, the social media apparatus we (mostly) built without thinking about what it would do. The older generations (mis)communicate their individuality through it, while the younger generations feel isolated by it.
The same structures creativity was supposed to humanize in the decade after the war are now rolled up again in the form of homogeneous platforms, evil algorithms, and the modern attention economy.
It's harrowing, genuinely. And it means there's room here to invent the word again. To make it new, again. Not to make creativity great again. Just to point out that everything is cyclical and this idea that felt like the Greeks handed it down from Olympus to us - it's so recent nobody should feel bad about putting a new coat of paint on this, if not tearing it down to its studs and repurposing it for the next few decades, at least.
Maybe I wasn't on top of this history, but the Cultish Creative Personal Archive idea is my intuitive response, in real time, to all of these forces. Just because you weren't conscious when it bubbled up doesn't mean you can't become aware of what to do with it. This is literally where the book found me.
Franklin's core idea on how creativity was invented to solve their crisis sure does make me feel better about searching for the language here, with you, to invent the language for our crisis.
Authentically creative started to sound like a garbage-buzzword, but the self-genuine make-it-your-own reminder is absolutely essential if we want to take that idea back, out of institutional HR's hands, and away from the algorithm's ideas of our roles in endlessly making user-generated content as entertainment for our peers.
We need small-scene belonging. We crave parasocial relationships with mini-cultures. We desire social mediums that serve us to at least balance off the social medias that don't.
The whole social setting is new. And with or without a war (please gods, no war), we are going to rebuild the cultural order as the Boomers die off, the Xs and Millennials get older, and the rest of them grow up.
It's a natural cycle. Understanding what emerged in the last cycle, and the difference between, say Synectics and the Stoics, can make a massive difference in what we focus on. There's a difference between vague yet timeless wisdom on the cyclicality and richness of the human experience and mid-'60s consultant-speak. Not a lot of difference, ahem, but there's a difference.
Samuel W. Franklin's The Cult of Creativity is required reading if you want to understand how creativity emerged as a post-WWII effort to encourage individuality in the shadow of healthy collectivism. It worked for a while until it got warped, like every other idea ever, and now, if we understand it, we have the opportunity to warp it back, until it gets messed up again and the next generation gets to figure that bit out.
I keep going back to it, from the book. How Franklin's reveal on how creativity was invented to solve their crisis - knowing it doesn't make me feel better. It does make me feel responsible. We're not guessing here. We know this. Some of us, I count myself as part of this, are already intuiting what needs to be done. And now we have labels for it.
If you wanted to find the language for our modern poly-crisis, you can find it in the way the prior generation searched for theirs.
Footnote / the actual work in front of us / current self-framing of the antidote here:
Build small scenes (Personal Archive → social medium → balanced with parasocial relationships → networked mini-cultures) in such a way that scaled broadcast culture (social media) doesn't destroy the roots. That's the skill. That's what we're learning and exploring, in real-time.
