According to research from the University of Haifa, the discovery of creative solutions is a collaboration between two very different parts of the brain. One brain region is responsible for original ideas; the other for assessing whether the idea is realistic.
The ability of the brain to operate these two regions in parallel is what results in creativity. It is possible that the most sublime creations of humanity were produced by people who had an especially strong connection between the two regions.
It struck me that the sociopolitical breakdown between supposed ‘idealists’ and ‘realists’ is a tension embedded in our own individual brains.
When there isn’t what the researchers call a ‘strong connection’ between the associative and the conservative regions of our minds, our ideas aren’t as creative as they could be.
Likewise, when the idealist and realist sides of a society aren’t strongly connected, then that society’s political ideas aren’t as creative as they could be. And we all suffer.
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After fighting on the losing side during the 2016 EU Referendum, political campaigner Eddie Barnes became interested in how we can form stronger, more collaborative connections between people with radically opposed politics.
Politics will always divide people; indeed, division is necessary in a functioning democracy.
Barnes argues that mature democracies divide in ‘mostly civil ways’ because citizens on either side of the chasm have a ‘basic emotional and empathetic grasp of how the other side thinks and feels’.
If that’s the basic requirement for a ‘mature’ democracy, then the UK is definitely a screaming, sulking, stomping adolescent.
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But Barnes is optimistic that we can find a way back to creative collaboration. He works for Our Scottish Future, a think tank founded by Gordon Brown that was (until Covid-19 intervened) trialling ‘community assemblies’ of citizens with very different political world views.
These assemblies were designed to help people understand each other and move past their differences to find solutions acceptable to everyone.
One element of each assembly involved having to listen to another person for 90 seconds without interrupting. … It was intriguing to see people’s surprise that they shared common priorities and values with each other. We also witnessed groups reaching fresh conclusions about how to navigate some of our thorniest problems.
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This, of course, all sounds very familiar: the community assembly is a basic unit of anarchist decision-making.
I, like many others, was first taught the principles of anarchist decision-making by creative, collaborative activists from the feminist movement. And I have seen these ideas working in practice everywhere from the streets of Cairo to the steps of Saint Paul’s.
Now—lo and behold—Our Scottish Future have also found that these open assemblies are much better at bridging political divides than either ignoring or shouting at each other.
There is hope—and I couldn’t offer up a more striking image for this hope than asking you to imagine one half of your brain as Gordon Brown and the other half as a band of anarchists.
This piece was written using a process I learned on the Ness Labs Content to Creator course.