The Cult of Creativity: A Surprisingly Recent History

In the creative act, Maslow wrote, we become “free of other people, which in turn, means that we become much more ourselves, our Real Selves.” This authentic self was not the social self that dominated interwar thought but the absolutely autonomous self, free of any entanglements or obligations. Like a modern-day Rousseau, Maslow celebrated the chi

By 1963 Maslow noted, “my feeling is that the concept of creativeness and the concept of the healthy, self-actualizing, fully human person seem to be coming closer and closer together, and may perhaps turn out to be the same thing.” It was perhaps a bit of self-fulfilling prophesy. At a moment when both concepts were still very much embryonic, Masl

One solution was to lean into the immateriality of it all: advertising did not simply get people to buy products, it also imbued those products with meaning. And it was actually this landscape of meaning that made consumer capitalism a force for good, even self-actualization.

Synectics presumed that something about the process of creating, rather than the particular form or purpose of the thing being created, motivated people. It didn’t matter whether they were tasked with designing a new hair dryer or a wheelchair or a marketing plan (all Synectics projects, at some point). All of them could, indeed should, engage the

Yes, institutional calcification is a real phenomenon, and leaders who come from outside and aren’t afraid to shake things up can be incredibly generative (as long as “shaking things up” isn’t just a euphemism for privatizing, downsizing, etc.). But when the whole business of “changing the world” reflexively demeans career experts and specialists a

it was possible to turn anti-consumerist sentiment into more consumerism.

To invoke art was to signal that Synectics’s brand of creativity shared something with art—not in materials, technique, knowledge, or conditions of work, but in a supposed way of thinking, even a way of being in the world. Per Synectics theory, this meant thinking poetically. But it also meant being one with the work.

This narrowing of possibilities was, of course, a structural element of brainstorming. Both the initial framing of the problem and the eventual selection of the solution were typically decided by higher-ups. Brainstorming was not designed to produce truly revolutionary ideas; rather, it exemplifies what the philosopher and literary scholar Mikhail

as fun as the process may be, it must always come back to someone else’s bottom line, the session must always end.