Creative Impulse in Industry | Page 8

interest not in the process or in the use of the product, but in the reward,
as wage workers have hired out for the day's work or continued during
their adult life in their trade without interest in its development,
because like their employers they wanted the highest cash return,
wealth exploitation has come to be synonymous in the minds of men
with wealth creation. A creative concept which could survive and
inhibit the predatory concept must rest on such elements of creative
force as are now absent from our industrial institution.

It is almost axiomatic to say that a system of wealth production which
cultivated creative effort would yield more in general terms of life as
well as in terms of goods, than a system like our own which exploits
creative power. It is obvious that the disintegrating tendency in our
system is due to the fact that production is dependent for its motive
force on the desire to possess. It is also obvious that a rational system
of industry which sought to give that desire among all men full
opportunity for satisfaction would also undertake to cultivate the
creative impulse for the sake of increasing creative effort The result
would be an increase in production. As logical as this observation may
be, it is not so obvious how such a social transformation as this implies,
may be effected.
Every advance in wealth creation which has become an institutional
part of an economic system has been impelled and sustained by the
material interests of people who at the time held the strategic position
in the community. The world has progressed, or retrogressed, as the
most powerful interests at any time adjusted the institutions and
customs governing wealth production to their own advantage. As the
controlling interests in our present scheme are the business interests, it
is the business man, not the workman, who directs industry and
determines its policy as well as the general policy of the nation in
which it operates. It is to the advantage of private business run for
private gain, to control creative effort for the purpose of appropriating
the product, and to inhibit free creative expression as an uncontrollable
factor in the enterprise of exploitation.
The appalling and wanton sacrifice of life which are incident to the
evolution of machinery and the division of labor seem to demand at
times their elimination. In weariness we are urged to retrace our steps
and go back to craftsmanship and the Guilds. But it is idle to talk about
going back or eliminating institutionalized features of society. We
cannot go back, we have not the ability to discard this or that part of
our environment except as we make it over. The result of this making
over might be vitalized by methods which had belonged to earlier
periods, but neither the methods nor the periods, we can safely say, will
live again. Neither our own nor future generations will escape the

influence of modern technology. It will play its part. It may be a part
which will lead away from some of the destructive influences which
developed in the era of craftsmanship and which dominate the present.
But a society too enfeebled to use its own experience will not have the
power to use the experience of another people or of another time. It is
beside the point to look to some other experience or scheme of life and
choose that because it seems good, unless the choice is based on a
people's present fitness to adapt that other experience or other scheme
of life to their own experience. The proposition to revert to an earlier
period suggests nothing more than the repetition of an experience out
of which the present state of affairs has evolved.
Nor is there ground for the hope that in time institutions and
relationships will be regulated on principles of altruism. It is not
apparent indeed that such regulations would yield even the present
allowance of happiness incident to our own immature method of
capturing what wealth we can without relation to social factors. As
unfortunate as we are in pursuit of that blind method, it is safe to
predict that the world would be a madder place than it is to-day if every
one devoted himself to doing what he believed was for the good of
everybody else.
The hope of social revolutionists that private business would overreach
itself and defeat its own purpose, grew out of the expectation that its
tribute exactions would draw the subjects of capital together in a
common defensive movement; that the movement on account of its
numbers would overturn business and that in place of private
management democratic control would be instituted. Some such
outcome, sooner or later, seems inevitable if civilization is scheduled to
advance. The