Inhibition of creativity through incarceration of knowledge

Infertility as a Metaphor Heralding Global Collapse (Part #4)

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To the extent that any form of global rebirth is recognized as desirable, inhibition of psychosocial fertility is a matter of concern. This inhibition can be recognized in terms of the interplay between the purported quest for "new thinking" (or "lost knowledge"), the "incarceration" of any detected , and the resulting blindspots:

Quest for new thinking: Much is made of the need for "new thinking" with respect to a global civilization in crisis (Annan calls for 'new thinking' in Mideast process, The Irish Times, 22 February 2002; Richard A. Slaughter (Ed.), New Thinking for a New Millennium: the knowledge base of futures studies, 1996; Edward de Bono, New Thinking for the New Millennium, 2000; William J. Williams, New Thinking for a New Millennium: the processes and application of abstracting, 2000). The "failure of imagination" is specifically recognized as exacerbating crises (Learning from the 9/11 response: groupthink and failure of imagination, 2005).

How is this concern related to the recognition of subtler forms of insight? What new thinking might be essential to the recognition of new insight capable of enabling a new Renaissance? The question is especially provocative when accompanied by any recognition that "there is nothing new under the Sun". This has the implication that such insight may be "under one's nose" -- did one but have the eyes to see it, as argued separately (Re-cognition of higher orders of insight through "new thinking", 2014).

If new thinking is so highly rated, where has it been specifically identified for 2017, 2016, 2015, etc? Is such identification at the global level to be expected of the UN, of the EU, of OECD, or of other institutions? Is it in reality the case that there are no systematic quests for new insights -- and no efforts for their collation or their presentation for critical appreciation? The issue is highlighted in the case of the problematic response to emergencies (Enabling Collective Intelligence in Response to Emergencies: illustrated by the case of deep oil spill containment, 2010).

It can of course be argued that new thinking is very precisely exemplified by patent applications which are necessarily carefully registered in relevant information systems. However, whilst patents are indeed an indication of creativity and innovation in the technical domain, they are far from being an indicator of psychosocial fertility. The massive production of documents could also be considered as such an indicator, but the question would then be what proportion of them are then recognized as "new thinking" and distinguished from what might otherwise be caricatured as "flocking behaviour" governed by simple rules of adapting to the initiatives of peers.

Is "thinking outside the box" effectively penalized in some manner -- as with provision of negative feedback and critical thinking? Are institutions now characterized by an ever increasing reduction in "listening capacity" -- despite their invasive use of surveillance technology? Worse still, is this disguised by the manner in which active request for feedback is increasingly conflated with public relations ("we listen to you") and the process of harvesting addresses for marketing and security purposes -- neglecting the cybernetic functions of such feedback?

Incarceration of knowledge: Is there indeed a sense in which knowledge -- both new and old -- is increasingly "incarcerated" -- possibly because of fears of its disruptive capacity in relation to the prevailing order? The metaphor of imprisonment is potentially valuable globally, notably as one previously explored for individual organizations by Gareth Morgan (Images of Organization, 1986).

• censorship: matters relating to sexuality and its abuse offer the most common examples of censorship and the associated controversies. In a more general sense, this is more readily recognized in censorship of contrary views, notably by religions, ideologies, political parties and disciplines -- whether covertly or openly in support of powerful elites and the values they vigorously claim to uphold. The existence and viability of alternative strategies and explanations is denied -- as exemplified by the widely-cited slogan of Margaret Thatcher: There Is No Alternative (Considering All the Strategic Options: whilst ignoring alternatives and disclaiming cognitive protectionism, 2009). Science, for example, can be said to have censored the works of Isaac Newton over centuries -- appropriately held in an inaccessible vault. This has seemingly been for fear that the major portion of his writings (on religion and alchemy) might undermine his iconic writings as supporting the mainstream paradigm of science.
  
  
• secrecy: much is made of the need for secrecy in the interest of security (typically "national" rather than "global"). Confidentiality is deemed vital to successful competition, irrespective of its potentially problematic implications -- exemplified by the Volkswagen emissions scandal and the US diplomatic cables leak. This curiously echoes the felt need for secrecy in fruitful interpersonal relations -- despite the ever increasing global invasion of privacy for security and marketing purposes.
  
  
• access: knowledge held in documents is effectively incarcerated in the documentation centres where they are held (whether or not those works are publicly available for purchase). However many such centres hold copies, access to each centre necessarily remains impossible or problematic for many. When the knowledge is held in information systems, access to appropriate terminals may be equally problematic -- irrespective of issues of access rights (secrecy) and paywalls (Erica Stone, Why can't regular people access scientific research? TED, October 2016)·.
  
  
• paywalls: however knowledge is held (whether or not it is subject to secrecy or copyright), any access may well be constrained by paywalls. These may be such as to severely inhibit access by many (possibly deliberately so) -- whether to a single document or to sets of interrelated documents.
  
  
• copyright: the future may recognize as astounding the extent to which use of significant insights is severely constrained by intellectual copyright. Arguably, whilst incarcerated in this way, much knowledge is effectively put up for a form of "ransom" -- strangely suggesting a comparison of copyright holders with kidnappers (if not with sex workers). Hypothetically global civilization in need of a vital fundamental insight could be held to ransom by a particular copyright holder, as separately discussed (Future Coping Strategies: beyond the constraints of proprietary metaphors, 1992). The issue is partly recognized in terms of the quest for a "killer app" -- and the (unconscious) ambitions associated with the quest for a Theory of Everything. It is noteworthy that the majority of academic journals are now controlled by a very limited group of corporations -- possibly to be recognized as operating a penitentiary system (Fiona Macdonald, These Five Companies Control More Than Half of Academic Publishing, Science Alert, 12 June 2015).
  
  
• sacred knowledge: scriptures and the secrets of indigenous cultures (and of secret societies) offer another sense in which knowledge purportedly vital to collective renewal may be incarcerated. Variously held to be sacred, especially in the light of the special insight required for its comprehension and fruitful interpretation, these too are thereby rendered inaccessible to most. Efforts to reveal such insights, or to interpret them otherwise, may result in the severest forms of sanction
  
  
• embodiment of insight in art: whilst art is indeed an instance and exemplification of creativity, the subtle insights it purportedly embodies are subject to the manipulations of what has been contested as a dictatorship of taste and fashion, exemplified by the extraordinary valuations placed on it, and the constraints on access to it -- distorted by questionable overvaluation of originals in contrast to copies
  
  
• complexification and obfuscation: vital knowledge may well be presented in complex forms -- equations, symbols, jargon, legalese, and the like -- such as to render it incomprehensible and inaccessible (in part or as a whole) to most (Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway, Merchants of Doubt: how a handful of scientists obscured the truth on issues from tobacco smoke to global warming, 2010). This may be done deliberately even when transparency is required by law. Obvious examples include the unreadable small print on pharmaceutical products and processed food packages. Other examples are offered by vital multilateral treaties articulated in hundreds of articles on thousands of pages. More subtle, but equally obvious, is the imposition on the unwary and the unskilled of complex banking and fiscal procedures via online systems (with which many may be unfamiliar, even if they have such access).
  
  
• misleading oversimplification: strangely complementary to incarceration through obfuscation is the use of oversimplification to render problematic the comprehension of insights they imply. This is most evident in the ambiguous use of sound bites, images and tweets.
  
  
• obsolescence of requisite technology: It has long been recognized that information held on certain hardware media becomes inaccessible when the required technlogy becomes obsolete -- whether intentionally or inadvertently -- often with limited possibilities to transfer that information to current media. Knowledge can then be understood as evanescent -- incarcerated in a form of time capsule in process of dissolution. The process is evident in new ways with the increasing dependence on databases based on software which is subject to relatively frequent upgrades with little consideration of backwards compatibility. Understood otherwise, the knowledge is locked into outdated media of the past.
  
  
• encryption: much is made of the vital need for encryption to protect secrecy vital to security. The quest for unbreakable encryption is curiously matched by the quest for quantum technology to penetrate any such encoding -- in the interests of security. The intention is then to contain vital knowledge in an impenetrable container -- whilst seeking technology to penetrate all impenetrable containers. These complementary quests bear a strange resemblance to the quest of alchemists for the ultimate container for alkahest -- the universal solvent which can dissolve anything, including its container.

Use of the incarceration metaphor invites systematic exploration of processes of imprisonment and prison reform as they apply to knowledge and creativity. Examples might include:

• "visiting rights" in relation to knowledge -- possibly framing the nature of "conjugal visitation rights" as they might apply to fruitful creativity?
• registration of "prison visitors", now paralleled by systematic registration of all online search requests, as has been the case with library book requests.
• "prison culture" and its exacerbation of violence between imprisoned sets of of insights, including "molestation" of the weak by the strong
• "prison guards", for which the parallel of "gatekeepers" has long been recognized
• "radicalization" as a process of concern in undermining "rehabilitation" of knowledge
• "overcrowding" as is evident in the case of libraries challenged by limited shelf-space and lack of resources to extend it
• "death row" as a particular condition in which knowledge is held prior to being "shredded", as is the practice with archives
• "recidivism" as a consequence of abusive (re)exploitation of knowledge when otherwise unconstrained
• "occupational therapy" understood as a need to keep the imprisoned occupied

Such incarceration effectively inhibits cross-fertilization, except under questionably pre-defined circumstances. This is strangely reminiscent of the legendary "lady in the tower" -- locked there awaiting a (princely) hero capable of skillfully bypassing such ivory tower constraints.

Cognitive blindspots: Given the manner in which "new thinking" is systematically avoided by selective framing of any such quest, and the manner in which knowledge is now "incarcerated", there is an obvious case for recognizing that this may engender blindspots inhibiting vital psychosocial creativity. What efforts are made to recognize cognitive blindspots and biases in global risk analysis, as discussed by Eliezer Yudkowsky (Cognitive biases potentially affecting judgment of global risks, In: Nick Bostrom and Milan Cirkovic, eds, Global Catastrophic Risks, OUP, 2008)?

The study by Daniel Goleman (Focus: the hidden driver of excellence, 2013) includes a whole chapter on "system blindness" explained as follows:

Through human history, systems awareness -- detecting and mapping the patterns and order that lie hidden within the chaos of the natural world -- has been propelled by... urgent survival imperatives for native peoples to understand their local ecosystem... Here's the catch. We are prepared by our biology to eat and sleep, mature and nurture, fight-or-flee, and exhibit all the other built-in survival responses in the human repertoire. But... there are no neural systems dedicated to understanding the larger systems within which this occurs.

Systems are, at first glance invisible to our brain -- we have no direct perception of the multitude of systems that dictate the realities of our lives. We understand them indirectly through mental models... and take action based on those models.... We seem curiously unable to perceive in a way that leads us to prevent the adverse consequences of human systems, such as those for industry or commerce....

One of the worst results of system blindness occurs when leaders implement a strategy to solve a problem -- but ignore the pertinent system dynamics... The problem gets compounded by what's called the "illusion of explanatory depth", where we feel confidence in our understanding of a complex system, but in reality have just a superficial knowledge. (p. 137)

Under conditions of such "blindness", psychosocial infertility is effectively characterized by what has been termed "subunderstanding" by Magoroh Maruyama (Polyocular Vision or Subunderstanding, Organization Studies, 25, 2004, 3, pp. 467-480).

The impaired psychosocial engagement with surprise, and the premature exclusion of the improbable, is variously discussed by:

• Nassim Nicholas Taleb: The Black Swan: the impact of the highly improbable (2007)
• Karen A. Cerulo: Never Saw It Coming: cultural challenges to envisioning the worst (2006)
• Joshua Cooper Ramo: The Age of the Unthinkable: why the New World Disorder constantly surprises us and what we can do about it (2009)

As indicated by concerns with confirmation bias, in believing that they know what they need to know, and pretending that they work at the leading edge, institutions become increasingly resistant to what they might otherwise know -- and increasingly vulnerable to surprises from that source. As discussed separately (Unknown Undoing: challenge of incomprehensibility of systemic neglect, 2008), the point has been ironically highlighted by a much-cited "poem" by Donald Rumsfeld (The Unknown) -- presented during a US Department of Defense news briefing on 12 February 2002. The insight has been most recently used in the analysis by Nathan Freier (Known Unknowns: Unconventional 'Strategic Shocks' in Defense Strategy Development. Strategic Studies Institute, U.S. Army War College, November 2008).

The Unknown

As we know, There are known knowns. There are things we know we know. We also know There are known unknowns. That is to say We know there are some things We do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns, The ones we don't know We don't know.

Given the disastrous consequences of such insights in relation to the intervention by a Christian coalition in Iraq, they suggest the ironic possibility of their interpretation in terms of biblical "knowing", carnally understood (Knowingâ-... in the biblical sense, The King's English, 24 January 2011; Knowing in the Biblical Sense, Leithart, 8 October 2014). The capacity of institutions to "know" then merits consideration in such terms (Institutional "rape" as systemic equivalent to individual rape? 2011).

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