Personality: Creative
The superior type of man who mobilises and leads his fellows, imbuing them with a goal and a project.
Humanity is divided into two types, as numerous psychologists have noted: the ‘creative personalities’ and the generic human. The latter imitate and reproduce social behaviours and are led only by disciplines external to themselves, by enthusiasms forged by others, by norms that are learned. The first type, the creative personality, is far rarer, imbued with superior capacities. They are their own master, they are self-disciplined and creative.
History is nothing but the fertilisation of peoples by their creative personalities — by their political leaders, poets, artists, spiritual masters, philosophers, inventors, warriors, or entrepreneurs. The very notion of a creative personality affronts the dominant egalitarianism. For it implies that human societies are not haphazard mechanisms, but force fields, dominated by wills and talents, whose advances always come from exceptional energies and intuitions.
Creative personalities exist at every level of the social organism, even the most modest. This notion has nothing to do with ‘class’ and even less with monetary wealth. In no case must the creative personality be confused with a ‘bourgeois elite’. It can appear in the most unexpected realms. It doesn’t expect success, for it’s often disdained in its lifetime. It’s the seed that fertilises the soil. Sometimes, it even reshapes history.
Present Western society is decadent because it tries to eliminate its creative personalities — for the sake of bureaucrats or ideological conformists. It’s an old story, well known to Rome in its decline, but also a struggle lost in advance. No social system can abolish the power of fascination that the creative personality exerts over the generic human, the man at the base. Molière, Mozart, Baudelaire, Nietzsche, Van Gogh, or Céline are not forgettable. But the system tries to make us forget them — however in vain.
The creative personality is animated by what the Greeks called poeisis, poetry, the ‘power to create’. Its dimensions are both political and aesthetic, though the two can be the same. The creative personality possesses both a force that comes from below — telluric, genetic, ancestral, Dionysian — and by a force that comes from on high — what the ancients called ‘inspiration’, that Apollonian energy of unknown origin. The creative personality can be defined by a single word: enthusiasm — which, etymologically, means ‘divine possession’.
(see aristocracy; born leader; elite)
