Insecurity => creativity?? LO10548

Eric Bohlman (ebohlman@netcom.com)
Thu, 17 Oct 1996 20:06:52 -0700 (PDT)

Replying to LO10544 --

On Thu, 17 Oct 1996, GSCHERL wrote:

> Personal security and stability is only anathema to creativity if that
> security and stability is all-encompassing. Without some risk, people
> will naturally float towards comfort rather than discomfort, to easy
> rather than difficult. It's during the most difficult times that
> people are most creative and personally grow.

You make an important point: anything that creates value involves taking
risks. Now the interesting thing is that the classic American school of
sociology has identified risk-avoidance as a characteristic of the middle
and upper classes, and risk-taking as a characteristic of the lower
classes. Now "common sense" therefore tells you that risk-taking is a Bad
Value that leads to poverty, and risk avoidance is a Good Value that leads
to financial success. I assert that it's the same "common sense" that
tells you that if someone comes down with appendicitis and has to be
hospitalized, that person is going to be frequently missing work in the
future because his appendix is going to keep growing back and causing him
trouble. Imagine a basketball game in which one team is down by 20 points
halfway through the fourth quarter. I'll bet that the team that's down is
playing aggressively and the team that's up is playing conservatively. If
the TV commentator were to suggest that the team that's down was down
because aggressive play leads to a lower score whereas conservative play
leads to a higher score, millions of viewers would bust their guts
laughing. Yet we assume that if we can instill the Value, or Virtue, or
similar Capitalized Abstraction of risk-avoidance in the poor, it will
help them pull themselves up by their bootstraps.

The problem is that risk-taking is a strategy for *changing* one's
position in life, whereas risk-avoidance is a strategy for *preserving*
one's status in life. Risk-avoidance is a strategy for success in an
environment where you've got it good and everything's stable (as it was in
Newt Gingrich's "300 years of American culture" (i.e. the 300 years
between 1945 (VJ Day) and 1973 (the oil crisis)). It's a strategy for
*failure* if you're down or if the environment is rapidly changing. In
_More Like Us: Making America Great Again_, James Fallows contrasts the
way the residents of Houston coped with the collapse of the oil market
with the way the residents of the Southeast Side of Chicago failed to cope
with the closing of the local steel mills. The Chicagoans had "learned"
through years of experience that the Big Institutions (Mayor Daley's
(that's Richard "the policeman isn't here to create disorder. The
policeman is here to preserve disorder" J. Daley, not his son Richard M.
Daley the current mayor) administration, the Church of Rome, the owners of
the mills) would take care of you if you just stayed in your place and
didn't rock the boat. All fine and well until the Big Institutions
realized that there were greener pastures elsewhere. Many of the mill
workers were still unemployed ten years later, because they were trying
their best to employ the Values and Virtues that had served them so well
under the old regime.

*RANT* I'm 37 years old and I personally believe that the 1960s were a
better decade than the 1950s. I am fully aware that that belief puts me
in a *tiny* minority of Americans. I believe that the 1950s were an
extremely unusual period of American history in which the purely
fortituous fact that America was separated by vast oceans from the main
theatres of WWII put us in an unnatural position of economic superiority
over the rest of the industrialized world. S&L fraudmeister Charles
Keating would probably argue (as he did in his dissenting opinion to the
report on "pornography" commissioned by Nixon) that our Puritan
anti-pleasure values diverted our sexual lusts into productive work,
whereas the Europeans were too busy expending their Precious Bodily Fluids
to compete with us (show me the Christian Coalition and I'll show you a
bunch of people who think General Jack D. Ripper is the hero of _Dr.
Strangelove_). I assert that if we could completely recapture the
so-called values (i.e. sexual mores, hairstyles and fashions) of the
1950s, our economic position would not improve by one iota. The notion
that one can wannabe one's way to success is a myth created on Madison
Avenue. *END OF RANT*

My point is that the actions that one takes to *preserve* or *protect*
something worthwhile that one has already attained are completely
different from the ones that one takes to *create* something worthwhile,
and are in many cases completely incompatible with them. Security against
*malicious harm* is worth pursuing; security against *changes in one's
life* is impossible, and the pursuit of it creates a straitjacket.

-- 

Eric Bohlman <ebohlman@netcom.com>

Learning-org -- An Internet Dialog on Learning Organizations For info: <rkarash@karash.com> -or- <http://world.std.com/~lo/>