UK creative industries are a tremendous contributor to economic growth, adding£8.8m per hourto the UK economy.The onset of the knowledge era has given way to what has been coined ‘The Creative Economy’, and this new economy is quickly beginning tooutpace the once gargantuan industrial dependent economies of the West.According toJohn Howkins“America exports more value in terms of copyright, than food, soft drinks, cars, computers and planes, and Britain’s fashion industry employs more people and makes more money than do its steel or car industries.”

Click the download button to get your copy of: The Rise Of The Creative Economy Report by PeoplePerHour.

Here we have what might be called a synthesis of Shibboleth bogeys neatly packaged up into a parcel; just like the rubbish the Bankers passed between them in ‘creating value’ that led straight to the 2008 crash ( see article).

In this blurb from PeoplePerHour website (given above italics) there are on display:

A pathological desire to control others (thought)

A sorry economic statistic as if plucked live from Zeus’ head

A name dropping (of John Howkins – who is he?) to add bogus authority

A very confused exposition on American ‘copyright’ exports

An uninformed comparison concerning the UK economy

An assumption of superiority – at least in the form of assumed greater knowledge

No avenue at the place of publication for a full exchange on the topic(s)

Mingling of bias and propaganda with (old) news

Offerings of sage advice and opinion from anonymous author(s)

All without a hint of any self-consciousness of humility

The scenario where the wife or husband snatches a repair job from a spouse’s fumbling hands whilst shouting: ‘I’ll do it!’ is familiar and it has been used before in these articles. The mounting frustrations of the snatcher, and the implicit assumptions of the snatcher behind such frustrations rising to boiling point and then boiling over in them are interestingly relevant to this penchant for organisations and for certain ‘established’ persons to feel a pressing urge and the sense of having a right to offer advice and information, and to colour it as they see fit.

The efficacious strategy I have found for myself has been to train and to restrain myself so that I don’t feed the demons of ‘knowing best’ and so becoming boiling over with frustrations. Sir Walter Scott, a neglected author these days, memorably said to a friend who asked him to endorse his book; ‘Every herring should hang by its own head’. I think he mean that he believed people should try to support their own ventures, make their own calls and judgements, bear their mistakes and approve their own successes themselves – and I might add -  and learn from experience of living one’s life in these ways?  This is my take on life, I make no caveat.

With children mothers and fathers are there to shelter them and to nurture them and to be their guides whilst they are growing up. Classically parents can have difficulty ‘letting go’ when children reach majority.  Partly is gives parents a sense of purpose to continue apron strings when parental purpose has in fact waned away; partly it is them seeing their babies as in need still of parental assistance.  Of course no parent would or should stand by and watch their grown children make a horrendous error through lack of experience. But ‘letting go’ is most essential in the main so that the grown children are able to become fit to survive and look after themselves. Otherwise you get thirty-something couch potatoes unable to boil an egg.

This line of consequence is one which goes far towards justifying Sir Walter Scott in holding his tenet.

The central argument in these cases is to do with freedom.  Freedom is a blank page; and for the person unused to writing down thoughts a blank page is a very scary item, when they are asked and expected to fill it with words.  The blank page is the future as an inexperienced person sees and faces it; they have a mountain of learning to cope with and to climb.  Their blank page is like a vast void off a cliff edge and them standing on the verge and staring into it. Vertigo is commonplace.

So freedom for a person is not so much or merely a God-given right as it is something earned and maintained by effort by them.  Freedom in the main is freedom to do things; and so not knowing how to do things is a restrictive form of bondage. Hence the ugly and grossly misused phrase: Knowledge (and experience) is Power.  It might be better said: Knowledge and experience means freedom from Bondage?

The terrible need we are born with to tussle and promote ourselves; for security and for safety to control as much and as many as we are able to; for supremacy to lord it over whomsoever will allow us to push them around; to value ourselves above them and to base our identity and sense of self on that assumption of superiority; to denigrate those who serve; even to see with awe and respect the guy with the big expensive limousine cruising down the street; and dishonouring contrariwise the little guy with the beat up run-around vehicle because of his apparent lack of status; all these are our sense of ego, our sense of ourselves as contenders, and our fears and anxieties about coming low down in the race of life – as we see life.

This complex of delusions is perceptible in the preamble to the PPH article on the Creative Economy copies and pasted in at the head of this article. The place this PPH preamble is coming from; the place whereabouts it is at; and whereabouts it is heading; are all constrained and confronted by this complex and by its misplaced bid for freedom by dominion over others etc.

This is why the God of Love, Jesus Christ so potently hits the nail on the head when he talks of our need for ‘being reborn of the spirit’; of being ‘as a little child so as to be able to enter the Kingdom of God’; of being ‘provided for in our every need by our father in Heaven’; by our ‘not asking for fine raiment and possessions as the gentiles seek for’; by our ‘trusting to God and leaving completely our desires, safety and security in his hands’; and by merely ‘asking in prayer anything that is the will of Love and it shall be given liberally’.

To be able to deal with this very frightening blank page whichis Jesus’ unconditional offer to us, a person has just one giant leap for a (wo)man to take; as the poet TS Eliot put it:

….. to apprehend
The point of intersection of the timeless
With time, is an occupation for the saint—
No occupation either, but something given
And taken, in a lifetime's death in love,
Ardour and selflessness and self-surrender.

………………………………

A condition of complete simplicity
(Costing not less than everything)
And all shall be well and
All manner of thing shall be well
When the tongues of flames are in-folded
Into the crowned knot of fire
And the fire and the rose are one.

__

Jesus’ simple truths hold the ample answers to everything: ‘whosoever will lose his life for my sake shall find it ‘- ‘I am come to give life; and to give life in abundance’

Crucially, it is the will to lose oneself, one’s ego and one’s pride, to surrender all completely and with full commitment to Jesus and his teachings that is the key to life, through the door of renunciation