This is my response to the excerpt of the chapter “Where is Creativity” by Hungarian psychologist, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi.
In the chapter “Where is Creativity” from Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s book, Creativity: The Psychology of Discovery and Invention, he states that “in order to survive, cultures must eliminate most of the new ideas their members produce.” 1 While I agree with this, I find that this process is potentially detrimental to the very foundation and idea of creativity. This is because while for certain fields, members are the ones who choose what deserves to be included in the canon, often times it is actually society who decides what becomes part of culture. Moreover, there are a lot of other factors are involved with this decision process other than the idea itself. For example, Csikszentmihalyi describes how one of the major reasons Einstein became a household name was because of the way the media portrayed him, as well as how he fit into certain archetypes that made people more inclined to accept his ideas, such as how he was persecuted by the Nazis and “looked like a scientist from Hollywood central casting”. 2 Hence, there is also the possibility of racial and power dynamics coming into play and affecting what gets incorporated into our culture, such as when ideas generated by minorities are suppressed or overlooked in favor of the white majority. This tendency to reject things that don’t fit in the cultural norm and instead, lean towards things that are in line with or similar to our perceptions may result in our culture becoming stagnant. Ultimately, if the formation of our culture actually hinders creativity, then can there can ever be true creativity?
