A SHEEP-LIKE EXISTENCE
Our society is anonymous. It is inhumane, a breeding ground for dictatorship and tyranny because unfortunately everyone tends by nature to lead a life in the herd, a sheep-like existence, thus making it all the easier for the powers that be to keep tabs on us.
For this reason, the creativity of the individual is of utmost importance. Against this creativity all force is powerless; the powerful are more afraid of it than of demonstrating crowds.
We are now living in a time when anxiety and shame about creativity are much greater than any shame about taking off one’s clothes. So a person who is caught stark naked is less ashamed about it than someone who has been caught in the act of creativity. That is of course an incredible perversion of a man-and God-willed necessity, for without creativity of the individual there is no life, no individual life.
Everyone is given an incredible capital of creativity at birth; by the fact of birth everyone is linked to the origins, to the cosmos.
He is still in paradise, as it were. This is a Garden of Eden of incredible proportions, an infinity as limitless as the stars in the sky. Everyone is as different from the others as one star is from the others.
As far away from the others as one star is distant from the others. Now people think they have to make all people be the same in order to achieve a coherent society. In the process they throw the baby out with the bath water and make people toe the line even where it is not necessary.
And man loses his soul.
His roots in the past are also being cut off, and in this way he is deprived of any way of developing in the future, as well. If man no longer has roots, he has no orientation; he is then a toy of the powerful and the modern machine age.
He is then degraded to a kind of consumer machine or to a mere conveyor-belt object which is placed here and there at will. Then man senses very palpably that he is useless, that he has nothing, that nobody needs him, and he leads a passive, vegetative existence.
The true democratisation of man means that he must now develop further creatively.
Only with creativity can the human race move forward. Individual creativity and individual responsibility for all forms of life, for the true values, are what shape society.
But man must first free himself from the greatest and most perfidious serfdom, his dependence on the reduction to the lowest common denominator at the hands of the powerful, which he stupidly - unsuspectingly - accepts, like poisoned candy.
OUR REAL ILLATERACY
IS NOT THE IGNORANCE TO READ AND WRITE
BUT THE INABILITY TO CREATE
Only he who thinks and acts creatively lives.
In essence we are dead, because we are not creative.
Written 1990 for publication in the Austrian newspaper Arbeiter Zeitung, Vienna (not published).
Published in:
Hundertwasser. New York: Parkstone Press International, 2008, p. 93