We recognize the biological condition of Homo sapiens—a species whose males are able to procreate from sexual maturity well into old age, while the female is able to produce eggs periodically only for a short time during her lifespan—reflected in the social structure of the preplanning society. The preplanning society faced two impossible problems: the relationship between male and female, and the even more disastrous problem of trickling, irregular births. The preplanning society perished because of these problems. But even the present planning society is not without its issues. It is the intention of my presentation to make the Ministry of Education aware of one of them, namely, the problem of creativity.

At the moment, following the introduction of planned fertilization, society is programmed to expect a life span of eighty years, because this span can be divided into four parts, each of which entails a specific function with regard to creativity. On the first of January of each twentieth year, four hundred million children are born, emerging from sperm and eggs that contained specialized precalculated genetic information. On the same day, fifty million twenty-year-olds are allocated to care for and raise the newborns, while the remaining three hundred and fifty million twenty-year-olds are received by fifty million of the forty-year-olds to be educated. At the same time, the remaining three hundred and fifty million of the forty-year-olds are received by fifty million sixty-year-olds to continue the ongoing creative dialog and to complete projects, while the remaining three hundred and fifty million sixty-year-olds retire, that is, start to enjoy the information that has been developed. At that same moment, four hundred million eighty-year-olds enter euthanasia facilities to die with dignity. The diversion of 12 percent of one generation toward the next presents political problems that have not yet been completely resolved. But this is not my topic. What is of interest here is the distribution of a society into four not quite intersecting cultures.

The planning society presumes that humans live as a society to produce new information, to store it, to hand it on, and to consume it. (When we still had mothers and fathers; that is, lived under the constraints of the preplanning society’s chaotic structures, no one really knew which level of culture they occupied). That’s why we programmed life to consist of four times twenty years: the first twenty serve to receive cultural information; the second to store it; the third serve to develop new information; and the fourth to take pleasure in the fruits thereof. Creativity is limited to the ages between forty and sixty. However, increasingly it appears that it may not be a good idea to reduce creativity biographically to such a degree. This realization rocks the entire structure of the planning society. There is some risk of returning to the chaotic situation of the preplanning society. To confront this risk, it is necessary to contemplate the creative process.

Theoretically speaking, we must distinguish between two types of creativity, the variational and the transcendental. Variational creativity connects already-existing information such that new information is created. Transcendental creativity integrates foreign elements (noise) into already-existing information to result in new information. While the preplanning society veiled both types of creativity, especially the transcendental, in myths like inspiration, intuition, and genius, the planning society has been able to program and manage creativity ever since the formulation of theories of gaming and decision-making, and since the invention of artificial intelligence. The drawback here is that it is impossible to clearly distinguish the two types of creativity from each other, or for that matter variational creativity from information storage. It is this fuzziness of the creative process that threatens to overthrow society’s entire scaffolding.

The forty- to sixty-year-olds guide the twenty- to forty-year-olds in their culture on how to store previously developed information in memory. By necessity, this information is stored variably. Errors emerge that lead to the inclusion of noise. That’s why this culture is creative, even if that is not the intent of the societal program. In their culture, the forty- to sixty-year-olds develop new information, and noise from previous information is included intentionally. The result is usually failure, largely redundancies: additional chess pieces complicate the rules without making the game more interesting. This culture, then, turns out to be less creative than that of the younger generation. The sixty- to eighty-year-olds absorb with pleasure the information developed, which, surprisingly, creates new information—partly because of consumption, partly because of redistribution. The actual situation is as follows: the younger and older generations are more creative than planned; they are even more creative than the generation that is supposed to be exclusively creative, according to the plan. The grey zones between generations blur societal structures. Generational conflicts are increasingly an issue, and we anticipate an uprising by the twenty-year-olds.

The biological contingency of Homo sapiens guaranteed an (empirical) connection between the generations in the preplanning society, as back then, fathers and mothers were needed to beget children. By the way, this necessity was reflected in the human psyche, as is evident in old documents, like Freudian ones. Ever since human beings became de-biologicized, this generational connection can no longer be taken for granted. The social consensus currently consists in the conviction that creativity is society’s only purpose. Were this consensus to fall apart because of the murkiness of the concept creativity, we would anticipate a return to the animalistic and bestial; in short, we would revert to a biological state. The Ministry of Education will have to plan revolutionary projects for the future.