To varying extents, any creative force necessarily contains elements of destruction, and vice versa. A tip of the hat to Sabina Spielrein, and of course, the ever-transforming body of Taoism.
Even that popular symbolic pinnacle of creation, child birth, implies the razing and reconfiguration of land and resource into shelter and infrastructure, and the accumulation of the energies of countless plants and animals, taken up into the growing and birthing (and birthed) humans as food and energy. That relation is intensified with more births as well: more creation implies more destruction that must be weighted against the regenerative power of the resource field in which this all takes place.
So the direction of a given creative or destructive process is attributable to the ratio and direction of the dueling forces of creation and destruction within them. If a creative process contains much creative power while its destructive forces are properly mitigated and balanced against the creative power of their targets, that process sustains the creation of the intended beneficiaries of that process. One can imagine the undesirable results when the destructive forces achieve a greater proportion in the creative process. And by the same token, a largely destructive process can contain creative elements within it, which if present in increasingly greater amounts, can tip that process over into a state of creation for the intended recipients of that destruction.
For humans, a lot of creative power can be attributed to the power and effectiveness of their tools, and whether the tools - and by extension, their traditions and institutions - aid the creative act while mitigating their destructive tendencies. That shadow side of a given tool that we've talked about before is relevant here. A hammer can be used to drive nails, binding pieces of lumber together to create shelter, with the destruction of a tree perpetuating the life of humans benefitting from it. That same hammer can just as easily be turned against its human master: punching holes in a skull for example. The intention behind the tool, and the direction the tool is pointing matters.
This becomes a more serious problem when the location of the body can no longer be determined. For example, if one is hammering in the dark, or one is growing fatigued and one's attention and focus are drifting, the force of the swinging hammer could be applied towards things detrimental to one's original intentions.
To generalize and complicate that image, this is an even more serious problem when the nature of the creative process is constantly shifting and reconfiguring the body being created and recreated, dispersing it ever outwards even as the executive control of it concentrates and calcifies, while at the same time the destructive processes involved in creation become ever more powerful and widespread, oftentimes owing to the processes of creation. And the tools themselves become ever more complex, and their discernable shapes melt away. I'm thinking here of the creative process of empire, of course.
I've written about this problem plenty of times, though I made the case more explicitly in making use of a combination of the Ouroboros symbol and a maze to describe the ongoing geopolitical and economic realities making up the decline of the US empire, which continues apace. So I want to continue describing these phenomena from a different angle, using the creative and destructive framework in particular.
