The Mother of Invention

Inventiveness and ingenuity are stimulated by difficulty. In The ‘Republic’, Plato discusses how a basic, needs-driven, society would develop, leading to the concept that need itself is the primary driver of creation and innovation. While Plato provided the foundation, the exact phrasing evolved over time, appearing in Latin, French, and English writings centuries later, becoming a common proverb: necessity is the mother of invention.

Human necessities encompass fundamental survival needs like food, water, shelter, and clothing, alongside crucial psychological and social needs for well-being, such as safety, belonging (love/connection), esteem (recognition), freedom, and self-actualisation (purpose/growth). Having to provide those for oneself is the driving force of creativity, of finding ways to achieve this. Without these, life becomes unsustainable. Modern society, which has been called civilisation, is an advanced stage of human society, where people live with a reasonable degree of organisation and comfort and can think about things like art and education. In such a society, we strive for more comfort. It becomes a goal in itself. Comfort means that your life has been made easier and more pleasant, a situation in which you are relaxed and do not have any physically unpleasant feelings caused by pain, heat, cold, and so on. This basically comes down to the knowledge and the feeling of certainty that your essential needs have been filled in. In practical terms, it means that you no longer have to worry about where your water comes from or your food, shelter, clothing and that you feel safe and belong somewhere.

Modern society, our civilisation, aims to provide those necessities to its people. Water comes out of the tap. Food is appearing in supermarkets. Living spaces are being provided as houses and apartments. Clothes are plentiful in shops. There is a police force and an army to give us a sense of security. There are rules to keep things running smoothly, to streamline human behaviour and social conduct. On the surface it looks like an ideal way of living. No more stress about being alive and how to sustain it. One refers to the fact that people, luckily, are no longer living in the Middle Ages. And yet, our society is filled with anxiety, insecurity, fear. We worry a lot about the future and how we will be able to survive. All our necessities are being provided, brought to our doorstep, and yet we are not feeling relaxed or free from unpleasant feelings. What can be the problem?

It is said that comfort should deliver an easier and a more pleasant life. If we don’t actually have an easier and more comfortable life then that means that we are not comfortable. But why aren’t we when all necessities are being provided? Do we have easy and reliable access to those necessities? Well, not really. Indeed, there is water, food, shelter, clothes, and so on but these are only available to us when we can buy them. We need money. Money is the key that opens the door behind which all these necessities are being kept. They are kept away from us, unless we have the means to get to them. And the means are financial means. How do we get money to get us to our living necessities? We need to work for money. Our society forces us to engage in activities they confront us with, for which they reward us with money. So unless we are able and willing to fill in some of the needs of society, we won’t have access to the necessities of life because we won’t have money. On top of that, the amount of money that is required to buy those necessities is determined by whoever ‘owns’ the necessities. This means that the reason why our modern society does not provide us with ease and comfort is the fact that the necessities for life are owned by someone, by certain individuals and organisations, who control who has access to them and who hasn’t, who control how much money they hand out for what labour, money the people then have to give back in lieu for essential provisions.

To summarise, we can state that in our modern society, in a civilised society, people do not have access to the necessities of life, even though they are in plentiful supply. This a new situation human beings find themselves in. It requires the organism of human beings to adapt to a changed environment.

Charles Darwin declared that organisms unable to adapt to the demands of their environment will fail to pass on their genes and consequently fall as casualties in the ‘war of nature’. This means that a sense of not being able to adjust to the environment results in fertility problems and the numbers of the specific species will begin to decline. This is certainly something that we are starting to see in our modern society.

However, this is precisely the situation in which innovation and creativity will be stimulated. With our backs against the wall, we will become inventive, creative and able to find ways to survive. One of the most pervasive ecological demands is predatory avoidance. In this case, the predator is the locked door that prevents us from getting to the necessities of life. The relentless pressure to outwit predators while balancing homeostatic threats, such as resource depletion, has produced a nervous system that optimises survival actions. These optimal actions provide the organism with a survival intelligence that permits appropriate responses to an array of environments and circumstances that range from non-threatening to life endangering. In humans this behavioural repertoire is supported by a neurobiological system that has endowed us with a powerful set of intelligent survival mechanisms, promoting adaptation to changing ecologies and efficient navigation of natural dangers, including other human beings and the systems they use.

Gonzales, who’s written books on surviving against long odds, reports that “After more than three decades of analysing who lives, who dies, and why, I realised that character, emotion, personality, styles of thinking, and ways of viewing the world had more to do with how well people cope with adversity than any type of equipment or training.” People who believe their fate is controlled by an outside force or forces tend not to thrive in survival crises as well as those who are most inclined to have confidence in their own abilities and to take action. Those who view themselves as essentially in control of the good and bad things they experience tend to survive even such things as natural disasters more readily than those who believe that things are done to them or happen by chance.

An awareness of and a belief in one’s own capabilities activates and mobilises the power to do what is necessary. When the situation has become dire we are able to find a way forward, but only when we truly believe we can. But things will have to become so bad that we don’t see any way of continuing to live the way we were doing. Constant fear brings us to that point.

Living under constant threat has serious health consequences.

• Physical health – Fear weakens our immune system and can cause cardiovascular damage, gastrointestinal problems such as ulcers and irritable bowel syndrome, and decreased fertility. It can lead to accelerated ageing and even premature death.
• Memory – Fear can impair formation of long-term memories and cause damage to certain parts of the brain. This can make it even more difficult to regulate fear and can leave a person anxious most of the time. To someone in chronic fear, the world looks scary and their memories confirm that.
• Brain processing and reactivity – Fear can interrupt processes in our brains that allow us to regulate emotions, read non-verbal cues and other information presented to us, to reflect before acting. This impacts our thinking and decision-making in negative ways, leaving us susceptible to intense emotions and impulsive reactions. All of these effects can leave us unable to act appropriately.
• Mental health – Other consequences of long-term fear include fatigue, clinical depression, and post-traumatic stress disorder.

All of these effects are clearly visible within our modern society at this moment in time. Hence, we do live under constant threat, in permanent fear, and it is exactly this permanence that is going to trigger ‘the mother of invention’. We do need to adapt.

Adaptation is the biological mechanism by which organisms adjust to new environments or to changes in their current environment. Organisms can adapt to an environment in different ways. They can adapt biologically, meaning they alter body functions. An example of biological adaptation can be seen in the bodies of people living at high altitudes, such as Tibet. Organisms can also exhibit behavioural adaptation. One example of behavioural adaptation is how emperor penguins in Antarctica crowd together to share their warmth in the middle of winter. Life manifests as a result of a consistent environment, whereby the structure of the organism and the way it functions is completely adjusted to, and balanced with, its environment. When that environment changes, and the changes are consistent over a long period of time, it will require the organism ‘to adapt’. Hence, the only reason for any living organism to make significant changes in structure and function is a constant stimulus from its environment.

When human society changes from an agricultural to an industrial environment, human beings need to adapt to this. One can see the effect of some of those adaptations in a decline in village living, coupled to an increase in city living. When society changes from free countryside to owned forests, from natural food to artificially stimulated food production, from a local economy to a national, extending to a global, economy, from the highest priority being personal survival to it being the common good, from personal human contact to virtual relationships, from manual labour to robots, from individual thinking to artificial intelligence, from law enforcing agencies protecting the territory and its inhabitants to those agencies surveying and controlling their own population, we can safely conclude that human society has dramatically changed. And that change is constant. It gradually appeared over a few decades but it is establishing itself more and more on the basic concepts that humans are nothing more than a natural resource, such as trees, plants, animals, soil and rocks, and that each individual only has to work for the good of the species and the planet. These concepts do not originate from the experiences of every individual but from the minds of some human beings, who are able to alter human living conditions to suit their own needs. Those are the people who have created this ‘new’ society we are all being confronted with at the moment.

In order for an organism to adapt to a changed environment it has to become aware of the changes within that environment. This awareness happens at an unconscious level as all organisms are intrinsically connected to the rest of nature. Hence, the adaptation will occur spontaneously and naturally. When humans change the human living conditions then our natural system, our unconscious connection to nature and natural life, may not be unambiguously receiving that message. As we are constantly being told we never had it this good, our conscious mind constantly overrides any message arising from your internal natural system. Most human beings are not aware that the changes in our society, that have brought us comfort and ease, are not aligned to a natural comfort. They appear that way, but in truth they are grounds for real concerns.

The awareness that will allow me to change is the realisation that none of the features of our society that are said to bring me comfort, to keep me safe, to allay all fears, are real. None of them, which means that there is nothing that this society has constructed that I can rely on to ensure survival. I need to adapt. This time it is not to the changed human society, as we all have been trying that for the last eight decades. Instead we need to find our way back to our natural path, where our instincts and natural reaction patterns are meaningful and useful. Such a change will only be made by people who feel their backs are up against the wall. Only when it is obvious to that individual that there really is no other way than to turn your back to the entire society, will they manage the necessary changes. It is out of necessity that such major adaptations are successfully executed.

All lessons in life are learned out of necessity. When there is no other way of looking at the situation you find yourself in, when you are confronted with the facts of your situation and you have exhausted all possible ways to rectify the situation, it is then that you will find the direction and the strength to change. It is then that you truly learn the vital lessons in life. When there is a necessity, there is a way forward. Out of necessity we become inventive, creative, wise. The system needs to be pressurised constantly in a particular direction before we awake to what we have been doing, before we become aware of the impact of our behaviour, of our thoughts, of our feelings. It is this awareness that opens the door to finding the appropriate changes.

Every crisis in life is when we focus much better on the aspects that have created the crisis. It is this focus that underlies all the learning we do. First we will try to modify and specify what we already are doing in an attempt to do it ‘better’, more forcefully, but when we run out of options and haven’t achieved to match expectations with reality, we are invited to think outside the box. We need to find a different kind of solution. Only being forced to look for a different way to approach the stalemate, only the necessity of changing our life at a more fundamental level, will make us change our basic patterns in life. A different way of thinking, a different approach to our feelings, will result in options that were not within our field of vision before. Options that couldn’t be considered unless we have reached an existential crisis. In such a situation, we ‘invent’ different options. In terms of phases in our lives when it all goes pear shaped, those are times filled with opportunities to leave behind old patterns of behaviour, of thinking, of feeling. We need to let go of our beliefs, of our habits, of how we feel about our life. We need to invent a different way of living.

After the initial shock of recognising that life has gone down a dead end alley, we need to fully embrace the opportunity handed to us by nature, by life itself. We are being invited to open up new avenues, new horizons in our life. We wouldn’t be looking for these if it hadn’t been for the total devastation we are finding ourselves in right at that moment.

Necessity forces us to examine ways of living that we otherwise wouldn’t even consider to be possibilities.

Necessity gives birth to a new life.

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