Adapted from Cultural Maturity: A Guidebook for the Future
CST’s creative frame helps us reconcile the logical contradiction between a deterministically-ordered world and one in which indeterminacy cannot be escaped. The old picture provided two options, each mutually exclusive to the other. Life could be in the end a throw of the dice, capricious, an expression of Shakespeare’s “tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.” Or it could be predetermined (its direction provided either by the interplay of cause and effect (billiard balls on a table), or by teleological intent. How we resolve this further quandary could not be more important—it ties directly to whether we perceive life as having purpose. The idea that change in human systems is creative offers assistance. A creatively causal reality is fundamentally uncertain—but is far from capricious. (Creative Systems Theory talks of such causality as “meta-determinant.) At the same time it is highly ordered—but according to creative rather than deterministic mechanism. (Which is a good things—because such order involves adaptation and growth, it is ultimately “stronger”—less vulnerable to harm—than deterministic order).