Creative Impulse in Industry: A Proposition for EducatorsMarot, Helen
Science
Creative Impulse in Industry: A Proposition for Educators
Marot, Helen
Business and education -- United States; Technical education -- United States; Working class -- Education -- United States
Modern industrial institutions are developed by an exclusive
cultivation of people's needs and the desire to possess. They are
developed independently, as we have seen, of any need or desire to
create. The desire to possess is responsible for the production of a
mass of goods unprecedented and inconceivable a century and a half
ago. The actual production of all of these goods is unrelated to
the motive of men's participation in their production; the actual
production in relation to the motive is an incident. The sole reason
for the participation in the productive effort is not the desire for
creative experience or the satisfaction of the creative impulse; it
is not an interest in supplying the needs of a community or in the
enrichment of life; it is to acquire out of the store of goods all
that can be acquired for personal possession or consumption. There is
no more fundamental need than the need to consume; but for the common
run of men as a motive in the creation of wealth, it is shorn of
adventure, of imagination and of joy.
The ownership of many things, which mass production has made possible,
the intensive cultivation of the desire to own, has added another
element to the corruption of workmanship and the depreciation of its
value. Access to a mass of goods made cheap by machinery has had its
contributing influence in the people's depreciation of their own
creative efforts. As people become inured to machine standards, they
lose their sense of art values along with their joy in creative
effort, their self regard as working men and their personal equation
in industrial life.
Where the motive of individuals who engage in industry is the desire
to possess, the rational method of gaining possession is not by the
arduous way of work but of capture. The scheme of capture is a scheme
whereby you may get something for (doing) nothing; nothing as nearly
as possible in the way of fabrication of goods; something for the
manipulation of men; something for the development of technology and
mechanical science; and high regard for the manipulation of money.
"Doing nothing" does not mean that manual workers, managers of
productive enterprises, speculators in the natural resources of wealth
production and manufactured goods, as well as financiers, are not busy
people, or that their activity does not result in accomplishment. They
are indeed _the_ busy people and their accomplishment is the world's
wealth. Nevertheless the intention of all and the spirit of the scheme
is to do as near nothing as possible in exchange for the highest
return. _The whole industrial arrangement is carried on without
the force of productive intention; it is carried forward against a
disinclination to produce_.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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