Capitalism … is by nature a form or method of economic change and not only never is but never can be stationary. … The fundamental impulse that sets and keeps the capitalist engine in motion comes from the new consumers’ goods, the new methods of production or transportation, the new markets, the new forms of industrial organization that capitalist enterprise creates. … The opening up of new markets, foreign or domestic, and the organizational development from the craft shop and factory to such concerns as U.S. Steel illustrate the process of industrial mutation that incessantly revolutionizes the economic structure from within, incessantly destroying the old one, incessantly creating a new one. This process of Creative Destruction is the essential fact about capitalism.

That’s a quote from Austrian economist Joseph Schumpeter’s 1942 book Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy.

I’m John Fanning and this is the Create with John Fanning podcast.

How’s it goin out there. Hope all is well.

This is Episode 14 of my series of episodes on Imagination and creativity, based around my book Create.

Last time I spoke about the Walls of ageism and retirement, but today I want to talk about one of the greatest Walls to the Imagination, to creativity: capitalism.

This episode is going to be at least twice the normal length I try to put out because of the nature of the subject. This battle between authenticity and this hyper-capitalist global reality we find ourselves living in effects the imagination and creativity in so many different ways. Because I will not be able to get it to be under an hour I’ve left it to be the last Wall episode before heading into Doors towards the Imagination.

Five years after working in a coffee shop on Manhattan I took another creative leap, this time with my wife, to the Black Mountains in the south of France. We created a place for people like us, whose first priority is to honor the need to create. We started La Muse to create an affordable, beautiful, inspiring and comfortable place for creators. Emphasis on the first word, affordable, especially because I’m talking about capitalism. We didn’t understand people wouldn’t come if we didn’t charge regular prices. We thought they’d come because we were offering really cheap prices. But that’s not the way we’ve been conditioned by capitalism. People didn’t come. We were told later that they thought it was a scam, too good to be true. Later, a friend who managed a Hyatt hotel explained to us how each room has to have a different price because people need to assign “value” to what they are buying. At the hotel he managed they only ever rented the presidential suite out twice a year. It was immense. It was empty the whole rest of the year. It didn’t matter, because those two bookings took care of all the fixed costs for the year for the hotel. So we raised our prices even though we wanted to keep them low so creators with no money would be able to come. And of course, creators started coming. That’s capitalism.

Like Camden Town before MTV moved in, like the East Village before it became gentrified, we moved to the Aude, the Cinderella of France. Creative people discover places before developers, because for creators living creatively is the motivation, not status, wealth. Creators are marginalized in our predominant capitalist society, often crossing paths in places they’ve discovered a...