Where Are The Creators?

When you don’t know how anything works, and you don’t have the talent to create something beautiful or useful to others, I guess you go on a tear.

Literally.

It’s the story of our times: people making their mark by destroying, un-naming and canceling.

Throughout history, great men (and yes, they usually were men) freed the human race from servitude to its own survival. Whether harnessing electricity, democratizing the automobile, mechanizing farm work, vanquishing infection—the greatness wasn’t just the inventions themselves (and they were visionary).

It was that freedom they afforded us and how it led to other good things. Life became easier with each advance. People could live longer lives, a greater number of productive years, and that freedom also led more people to do more innovating. Innovators look for problems that can be profitably solved, and from hunger to transportation to, yes, freedom itself, freedom to choose, or have families, or lie in a hammock.

Creative people—creators—made the life of the average resident in good ol’ Western Civilization better than anyone, at any time, at any income, who ever lived.

Somehow, now, though, we tell a different story.

The creators were sexist, racist, or some other -ist. It’s not a history of progress, but of “oppression”.

The people telling this new story have never created or innovated anything beautiful or useful to others.

These are people who live lives of consumption, but not reflection. You’ll notice they’re never people who drive the truck or turn the wrench. Nor are they usually people who’ve risked their own money to build a business, or signed the front of a paycheck. Some of them have not yet even earned a paycheck.

Many who do work, work in the government, scolding and controlling what we do and how we should do it.

Few have produced anything. Few understand that producers are necessary for there to be taxes, which in turn are necessary for there to be government.

We are slipping into the grasp, and under the control, of people who have neither the talent nor the respect for the creators. Ayn Rand saw it coming.

Not everyone—not even most of us—can be an Edison or a McCormick. What’s required is knowing the connection to, and benefits from, how things work.

The division of labor, and the leisure and prosperity it yields, has produced a fast-growing class of people who don’t know what they don’t know.