The Value of Creativity

I have been recently asked [1] why, in my opinion, some people don’t value creativity. It seems an odd question, as creativity ranks among those things, like curiosity and persistence and foreboding, as something that can be very useful in the right place, but not objectively so. It’s a property of mind that, I guess, has been, on the whole, beneficial to humanity on its evolutionary journey but is not necessarily beneficial to the individual.

Still, lets start with what Creativity is, and the first thing we find is that it’s not very easy to define, and probably impossible to quantify; properties that, though helpful in the realms of sophistry, aren’t very useful to a valuer.

So first I turn to the (Cambridge) dictionary, that refuge of rhetorical scoundrels, which defines it as “the ability to produce or use original and unusual ideas”, and I’m very happy with that, especially as it’s faintly useless. I’m sure we all produce ideas that we think are original and unusual, and so could all consider ourselves creative, but that only means we’ve not personally thought of them before, which doesn’t seem to meet the mark.

A lot must also depend on context. Off the top of my head, the computer hackers of the ransomware sort seem fairly creative, even if most of them turn out to be bored and greedy teenagers who’ve used an off-the-shelf bits of software and the sort of “social engineering” that’s been the tool of fraudsters for millennia. They’re not wholly successful, of course, and it’s refreshing to see the demands they make of well-known corporations receive the same four-day silence the rest of us get, but there’s something about their inversion of the usual rules of modern e-commerce that can’t fail to warm the heart.

As I see it, though, creativity is something more than the mere assembling of a concept, as generation of blandly formulaic celebrity restaurateurs generously suggest. To my mind, it must also include the element of surprise. We may never know the person who first put pineapple on a pizza, but I think can all acknowledge that it was, and perhaps still is, a surprising thing to do, comparable with putting a urinal in a gallery or leading a regiment of elephants through the cheese-making mountains of Europe. In each of these examples, something – an idea – disturbed the perceived normal order of things, and that seems a vital element, whether it happened in the noisy world of military strategy, the silent laboratories of virologists or the gentle bubbling of a kitchen.

There are many, sadly, who don’t care for surprises, as I’m sure most of us discovered in our younger days, and might therefore devalue the experience, however inventive, suprising or original. In addition, creativity isn’t a single-edged sword, which is why none of us can understand our electricity bills, and how whole industries contrive to be both immensely profitable and utterly reliant on subsidies. Every scammer, grifter, love-rat and salesperson is, to a good degree, creative and mightily proud of it they are, but that’s no reason to value them more highly on account of it, or admire their tangled trickery.

And that, I suspect, is why some people – and it should probably be many more – don’t value creativity in itself. It is, to put it bluntly, inherently suspicious and often subterfugal. But that doesn’t mean it’s not valued in the traditional, mercenary way. There is no more creative industry than advertising, for example, nor any more despicable, yet we’re happy to pay higher prices, and have our children singing jingles in the playground, in return for having our days made brighter by beautifully lurid billboards. Without advertising, some will doubtless argue, we wouldn’t have such interesting television shows to watch, or sponsored outrage on the radio, so it’s surely worth directing some of our money to advertisers just for that? It’s practically our culture now and if novelists could only learn to boost fried chicken every few pages, they might find the concept of value more reciprocal than they think.

So, to summarise, some people don’t value creativity because it’s so often abused, and some just don’t put a value on it. Which means the question’s as much to do with what “value” means, and we can all be creative with that.

Acknowledgements, footnotes and the suchlike

A long time ago I read a book [2] on the matter of creativity, including thought-provoking essays from a bunch of artists, scientists, psychologists and mathematicians. It’s a lovely book, but it didn’t do much to narrow things down.

[1] #ScribesAndMakers prompt for 8th October 2025, via Mastodon

[2] Karl H. Pfenninger, Valerie R. Shubik (Eds): The Origins of Creativity, Oxford University Press, 2001