Governments are comfortable with creativity they can predict.
They can live with art that entertains, flatters, or is over as soon as it is seen. They will even promote work that feels daring … as long as nothing actually changes.
Those in power know how to live with artistic expression that splits people’s attention, isolates individuals, cannot be repeated, and disappears when the performance ends. This kind of creativity may generate headlines but it does not build anything that lasts.
Trouble surfaces when creativity settles into collective memory. When it becomes infrastructure instead of decoration.
Autocrats grow nervous when the arts anchor truth rather than chase popularity, when they invite participants rather than spectators, when they exist without institutional permission.
Bullies aren’t threatened by messages. They’re threatened when artists realize they can act together.
What “Behaving” Looks Like
The arts behave when they:
- surprise no one who funds them
- threaten no venue that presents them
- ask nothing difficult of the audience
- end in applause instead of continuing in thought and action
Creativity that behaves is housebroken.
This is why regimes move quickly against drumming, procession, ritual, protest song, and storytelling. These forms stabilize people internally. They reduce gullibility. They create shared reference points that propaganda struggles to erase.
History is blunt about this.
Culture is not decoration. Culture is orientation.
When Creativity Refuses the Bargain
Creativity becomes menacing when artists decline the comfort of safety.
When they choose coherence over novelty. Participation over prestige. Memory over relevance. Joy over permission.
When the arts remember how to organize people, it becomes harder for power to reorganize them.
And when creators begin to collaborate, something else appears.
Not rebellion. Not chaos.
A form of sovereignty that does not require approval.
A version of this post was originally published on Substack, Feb. 12, 2026
Banner image: Thomas Nast’s satirical cartoon “What Are You Going to Do About It” appeared on August 31, 1872 in Harper’s Weekly, National Museum of American History, Ralph E. Becker Collection of Political Americana, CC0
