Embrace your daemon, find your genius
My mum once watched me sketch as a kid and remarked that it was surprising – no-one else in our family could draw. I remember being baffled.
“Where did it come from?” didn’t make sense to me. The real question is “Why hadn’t anyone else tried?”
Here’s something I believe wholeheartedly: everyone is creative. Anyone can make stuff, be it a drawing or a poem or a whole new way to be.
Why would anyone think differently? Well, we spend a lot of time being told otherwise.
Genius isn’t special
How many times have you heard that “creatives” are a special type of person? They’re a rare breed. Same with geniuses. And all kinds of other nouns that, in ways big and small, are set apart from the rest of us.
Now, no-one might explicitly say that you’re not creative, or a genius, or special but it’s subtext, right? By setting them – and all manner of other talents – over there, somewhere different, the implication is that the people that remain are, well, normal. Average.
In Big magic, the best-selling author Elizabeth Gilbert explains an older – more abundant – view of genius. It starts with a more magical view of what we’d now call “being in the zone” or a flow state:
In ancient Greek, the word for the highest degree of human happiness is eudaimonia, which basically means “well-daemoned” – that is, nicely taken care of by some external divine creative spirit guide. This daemon of creativity lived in the walls and sometimes helped you in your work.
The Romans had a specific term for that helpful house elf. They called it your genius – your guardian deity, the conduit of your inspiration. Which is to say, the Romans didn’t believe that an exceptionally gifted person was a genius; they believed that an exceptionally gifted person had a genius.
In Gilbert’s telling, genius is something in the air. It visits you. And, really, why not you – if you’re prepared to listen?
Today, there are geniuses. And if you’re not one, well, sorry. Geniuses are rare, fleeting, special. They’re afforded status and privileges. They are, decidedly, not you.
This matters. The way you describe your life is how you’ll live it. Language can’t truly capture reality but words still shape our reality if we’re not careful.
The tragedy, Gilbert argues, is that this view of creativity (let alone genius) locks people into thinking they’re simply not creative. We all have the capacity to be creative, to make things. Go back far enough, Gilbert says, and you’ll have ancestors that made stuff. Creativity is your inheritance by virtue of being born.
Anyone can rebel
I don’t know anyone who looks at the world today and says “Yup, she’s all good”. Why, then, aren’t more people in the streets?
Journalist David Roberts and psychologist John Jost dug into that question in a recent episode of Volt, a podcast about decarbonisation. The masses, if organised, could easily demand change. So, Roberts says, we don’t need to better understand why people rebel – we need an explanation of why they don’t.
Jost’s psychological explanation can be summed up as “system justification”. He says that we, often unconsciously, “justify the social systems on which we depend, whether they’re good for us or not good for us.”
These systems provide a sense of stability, of “cognitive closure”. They help solidify our relationships – and provide something we need to walk away from if you decide to think differently. (It’s hard to leave your family behind, no matter how much you disagree with them.)
This system justification also helps convince us, collectively, that things are the way they should be. Jost mentions the “meritocratic ideology, meritocratic myths” that help keep “people signed on to the economic and educational system we have”.
Roberts perspective as a journalist is more blunt; he thinks that, despite all the evidence to the contrary, most of us still have “stereotypes about rich people, basically, being smarter and better and deserving to be rich and powerful.”
All in all, it’s a comprehensive look at why these exploitative systems stick around. And nowhere in their chat do they mention that people are unable to change – just that it’s hard to do so.
So I want to add one more reason more people don’t get in the streets and demand change: we’ve internalised the belief we can’t do so.
Yes, that means you
We’re taught that revolutionaries are a unique breed. We’re told we’re not creative so we can’t concoct a new way of living. We believe that only a select few can rise above the norm – so the norm is all we have.
I’m not saying this some conspiracy to keep people down. Ideas emerge to justify the status quo as required.
The philosophers Theodore Adorno and Max Horkheimer and talk about this in their book Dialectic of enlightenment:
The whole world is passed through the filter of the culture industry. […] The people at the receiving end are not the masses but individuals organized into masses. The customers are not the public but the people regimented by the culture industry.
And people know it:
The triumph of advertising in the culture industry is that consumers feel compelled to buy and use its products even though they see through them.
In an episode about Adorno and Horkheimer’s work, Stephen West’s podcast Philosophize This explains how this process happens:
When you’re writing a story and you want to make the most money, the characters and plots of those stories that you write naturally become characters and plots that the masses can relate to. People want to be able to easily relate to the characters and immerse themselves in the story. The culture industry is constantly working to turn everyone basically into the same person so that they’ll buy the cultural products that it produces.
The result: a lot of media that boils down to “stay in your lane, heroes are special and anointed people, going against the grain never works, stay small and enjoy your life.”
And that’s the cycle. Everything tells you that this is the way to live, this is the way to go against it (but not really) and that’s that.
In Big magic, Elizabeth gives her readers a permission slip to be creative (in case someone thought they needed one). I’m going to do that for rebellion:
I, Cory Zanoni, give you permission to rebel against the status quo. You’re allowed – encouraged, even – to imagine a better way to live.
Join a political party and help a candidate you believe in. Volunteer with a mutual aid group. Embrace the messiness of your local community. Punt big tech out of your life. Unionise. Radicalise yourself.
There’s a daemon in the air, whispering in your ear and telling you that you can live differently. Listen to it. See what you can make. And don’t let anyone tell you you can’t.