創作の衝動と、AI時代の人間The Creative Impulse and Humans in the Age of AI
The creative force concealed within the human recesses—that impulse of "being compelled to bring something into existence" which everyone has experienced—is a phenomenon as profoundly mysterious as it is bottomlessly fascinating. While this issue has been brought into reactionary focus recently due to the rise of AI, one must ask: have the proponents of this discourse ever fundamentally thought through what human creativity actually is? In fact, it feels as though they fail to understand that the rise of AI is merely a passing current of the times. Facing the fact in real life that one's own creative power was, after all, replaceable, and only then frantically shouting about "human creativity," is nothing more than a lack of preparation. This is something that anyone with the resilient resolve to survive as a creator in this turbulent era already knows.
However, creativity does not possess a definition common to all; its colors, depths, and range differ vastly among individuals. Yet, based on my personal rule of thumb and my observation of gazing into the deep layers of Japanese culture—which relates to my own origins—there is one thing I can say with absolute conviction.
That is: human expression never radicalizes in a state of saturated happiness or within the complete tranquility of being domesticated by a system. Those who are filled, regardless of the content, can only sing songs that affirm the status quo. Their words do not vibrate the air; they can only comfortably stroke the surface of the moment. On the other hand, for me, and for those who truly attempt to confront the world, what lies at the source of creativity? If I were to verbalize that core—that force like magmatic, turbid pent-up energy—it is "Rage."
However, the "Rage" I speak of is absolutely not the momentary explosion of anger tied to the desire for validation or victim mentality that is rampant on social media timelines daily, nor is it the hysterical venting of emotions that seeks to spread mental illness across generations. The Rage I refer to possesses physical mass; it is heavy in specific gravity, high in depth, a "history" itself that has sedimented at the bottom of the gut over a long period, turning cold and hard. To put it another way, it is the historical destiny one takes on regardless of one's will the moment one is born; as one grows and the skin is peeled away by friction with the world, shedding blood, it is that which begins to boil quietly, yet certainly, at the very bottom. Are you aware of this Rage or not? I believe the vitality of human life actually has its origins here.
Therefore, every creator requires the resolve to take on a profound history that essentially transcends the framework of the small ego, and that becomes the one and only starting point for creation.
This world, which we continue to believe is the real and call reality without doubt while engaging in complex daily interactions, is in fact nothing more than a "fiction of reality = social system." In the process of realizing this fiction and struggling to over-adapt to it, we have self-alienated the raw reality that ought to exist into a manageable form convenient for the system. As a result, society has certainly strengthened a uniform tendency toward standardization, and simultaneously, the human self has also been alienated and unified to fit those specifications, processed into replaceable parts.
However, does that perspective not beautify the modern human and the modern world too much, justifying its own harmfulness? In fact, if we gaze coldly at that process, what we exist amidst is a violent selection. Emotions that do not fit the singular unification, noise that does not adapt to the system, thoughts without economic rationality, desires that are not clean and innocent, or things deemed as impurity such as death, disease, and filth—these have been actively cast out as useless, discarded, ignored, and callously trampled upon.
But, just as people in developed nations are suffering backlash for underestimating nature as a controllable resource, all those things that were treated as "never having happened" have certainly not vanished. Even if we act out tranquility as if the crisis has passed on the surface of the world's play, the excluded things are always, certainly, there. They exist in a place outside our field of vision, becoming something turbid and unidentified, mercilessly breaching the borderline of the domain separated from our consciousness/unconsciousness, and continuing to pile up in the abyss of the bottom. This unidentified sediment is the true identity of Rage, but if we change the perspective, it is the substance of anxiety itself. Anxiety as a substance possesses the destructive power to constantly shake human existence from its foundation and collapse our footing. And it does so extremely quietly, like a subterranean water vein, drowned out by the noise of daily life.
As a creator, or as a single human being, do you possess this sediment called Rage within yourself? And do you hold the resolve to endure its overwhelming weight? This is the extremely critical issue that determines the quality and intensity of expression. Because Rage is another name for the resilient will to keep one's eyes fixed on the cruel the real that was left behind, petrified in the past, without looking away.
Do not escape into the drugs prepared by someone else—cheap healing, validation through the number of "likes," or oblivion through alcohol and pleasure—but gaze at the mud at the bottom of your gut. At the bottom of that gut, there is a history as a species, an origin, that transcends personal memory. I view this fundamental anxiety itself as history, but that history is not the horizontal history narrated in academics where years and events are listed inorganically. After all, history as a discipline is merely an arbitrary story for the dominant people or for the maintenance of the system, interpreted from the perspective of reality alienated in the modern era. In other words, the true history that becomes our flesh and blood and shakes our souls is not there.
No matter how harsh, no matter how ugly the memories or emotions may be, one must maintain the stance of facing them without averting one's eyes. That intense load upon oneself is precisely the paradoxical and survival-instinctive propulsion that pushes us toward the future; in other words, it is the source of living. Life radiates its true brilliance only here, not in the safety zone. The reason why the brilliance of life has ceased in modern people, their eyes cloudy like dead fish, lies exactly here. As the price for discarding the load and choosing lightness, they have lost the tactile sensation of living called gravity—that is, the sense of reality of life. No, one could say they voluntarily abandoned it. A disastrous spectacle where, while the number has impressively reached 8 billion, there are almost no humans who possess a real sense of life. This is the answer of the ideal world nurtured by modernity.
Once again, what of the world since modernity, specifically this modern society in which we live? In my eyes, modernity appears to be nothing more than a collective term for a massive concealment project on the scale of humanity, which has continued to hide and bleach every "inconvenient thing" so it cannot be seen. This inconvenient thing is not the flow of social movements seeking transparency in the generally discussed sense. That is, after all, a perspective limited to the scope of the social system's structure; it is too local, merely a game in the palm of the system. And if one believes that the transparency of the social system equals the transparency of the human being, that is the very proof that humans have self-domesticated into the system.
In short, the vector is reversed. Even if we target the system and heighten compliance and transparency, that is merely a fabricated transparency in reality, a transparency of a sterile room, so to speak; it does not lead to gazing at the anxiety itself, nature itself, the real itself, which modern people still refuse to see. Rather, we fall into the paradox that the more transparent it becomes, the less we can see the abyss on the other side. We are merely being made to believe we are free inside a glass prison. Moreover, everyone senses at the bottom of their hearts that this is not true freedom. Concealment is the disease of modernity that occurs at the individual level.
Modern history has abandoned the questions of death, disease, aging, and madness, piling concealment upon concealment to pretend they didn't happen, and ultimately even discarding the turbid passions within the individual's inner self. Eventually, people established that never exposing such unidentified anxiety in social life—and the technique of consideration to not expose it—is the high ethic and basis of social survival. However, as is self-evident if one gouges the inner surface of each individual with a scalpel, no matter how many platitudes humans state in society, one can never know what they are thinking deep inside where it doesn't show. No matter how much we beautify humans and define them as rational beings, humans are, after all, only to that extent. The real, anxiety, and nature have the power to instantly annihilate the world of fabricated decorations we believe in.
That is to say, the linear worldview that humans have "improved" or "evolved" since modernity is a massive lie; we have merely enhanced the technology to conceal, the technology to put a lid on the stinking object. Humans have changed absolutely nothing. At some point, perhaps unable to bear the ugly facts, we engaged in the camouflage of calling the act of erasing these from sight and creating a clean, managed space "progress," and now its perfection has become sophisticated on a global scale. As a result, I feel that finding a living human, a human with blood running through them, a human agonizing over contradictions, has become a feat more difficult than finding water in a desert.
Modern society has constructed a "world" as a universal value for humans by packaging this concealment work with pleasing words like consideration, thoughtfulness, or mercy and diffusing it. However, the cost is too great; recently, as the deception called "the world" has been exposed one after another and can no longer maintain durability, we are driven into a situation where no one has a clue how to deal with it now. Because, as a result of history itself being alienated by the chain of excessive bleaching and concealment, the sense of the indigenous "place" where we should originally put down roots, the sensation of the soles of our feet stepping on the earth, has been completely destroyed. We have become rootless grass, reduced to existences that merely wander, blown by the digital wind.
Consequently, we now inhabit a world with an unprecedentedly high concentration of anxiety, living amidst a sense of entrapment that is suffocating. Since that world can no longer even be maintained, the real that could be concealed in the past can gradually no longer be hidden, inviting situations where it erupts suddenly everywhere. Modern people, suddenly faced with anxiety, are causing mental derangement as an allergic reaction because they have been cultured in a clean room with absolutely no immunity to nature, anxiety, or the real. What is further problematic is that this anxiety itself has undergone liquefaction, spreading omnidirectionally in response to the movement of people and the propagation of information on a global dimension. This is the most important key to considering the problem.
Why? Because now that anxiety itself has liquefied globally and appears constantly everywhere, a situation is occurring where unique history, which should originally have been a problem of an indigenous place, ruthlessly becomes equal to and attacks countries and ethnic groups completely unrelated to that history. There was a common understanding that what globalization liberalized superficially was people, goods, and information, but at the bottom of this beautified movement, the reality of anxiety called history also increased its movement speed and achieved liquefaction. In other words, anxiety has become the ground of the world while remaining hidden, like a virus accompanying people's movement. Hence, it has become possible for the first time in human history to manifest a disease common to all humanity. That is precisely why a crisis is approaching at a level that can no longer be dealt with by a single country, and the pandemic as its symbol thrust that very fact before us. But this is still merely the prologue. What begins now is the merciless counterattack by the things that have been concealed.
And the greatest problem is that the elites who still persist in trying to maintain the established world are skilled at the concealment work of the real within reality, but possess no technology to confront the naked the real. They are powerless against situations not in the manual and can harbor only fear toward the unexpected wild. And the populists and activists who rebel against this elitism are exactly the same. In short, they are birds of a feather. The reason nothing changes whether politics swings right or left is that no one is looking at this bottom, that is, the ground called the real. Because they possess the concealment technology just the same, even if the ideology changes, the situation changes nothing. They are merely repainting the sign and changing seats.
Since modernity, by intentionally losing the impurities of the real—that is, the texture, resistance, and friction of life—we have lost the thickness of the ground we stand on, which is like walking blindfolded on the edge of a cliff. A world so powerless that if we misstep even half a step, or if the ground shakes even slightly, the world at our feet will crumble in an instant. The daily life we believed "certainly exists" disperses, and the anxiety that was supposed to be concealed—the sediment of the real that humanity has tried to hide for hundreds of years—is suddenly thrust before our eyes. The revenge of the real that humanity will face henceforth, like the revenge of nature, will likely ruthlessly wipe out everything believed to be the ideal world built up until now, leaving no trace. We must survive, at least through that era, in the wasteland stripped of illusions.
Then, in this critical situation, what is the role that the creator must fulfill? That becomes the most important and inescapable question thrust upon us. As is self-evident, it is absolutely not to provide anesthesia-like consumption entertainment to kill others' time and deprive them of thought. Rather, it is to face the source of Rage at the bottom of one's own gut, dig it up while becoming covered in blood, and thrust the first step of exposing oneself on the edge of the cliff called the world before people.
It is an act accompanied by intense pain, as if sharing one's own blood or life itself. However, only those who possess the resolve to accept that pain and give form to the unidentified mud can truly touch the souls of others and make them resonate. The background to the reason why soul-shaking expression has long ceased is that people who do not cultivate the power to question the real have simply been used by convenient tools and became carriers of a democratization movement, calling themselves creators. I personally welcome the democratization of technology itself, but the problem lies before that. No matter how much of an era it becomes where anyone can make anything with democratized tools, as long as we are human, the essence of creativity, its abyss, does not budge an inch. Just because tools have evolved does not mean the soul becomes deeper.
Do you hold "Rage" inside yourself, or do you not?
And do you have the will to expose it to the "world" and be bathed in the spray of blood, or do you not?
That single point will be the cruel boundary line dividing whether we will be buried as data called mere content generators in the fictional world that will accelerate further, or whether we can survive as true expressers, or as human beings.