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The contradictions inherent in the preceding era are becoming too pronounced. Mass education, relying on the incredible technical tools of the hallucinogenic industry has shaped the very nature of minds and social peace has been established at the price of a loss in creativity.
The dangers of social upheaval have receded but the new generations, educated in the disciplines of both body and mind, are much better equipped than in the past and want to express themselves freely. Conformism, associated with the previous period is accused of stifling human urges and of being antagonistic to the flow of life itself.
Purely mechanical intellectual endeavour is looked upon with suspicion. Extraordinary games in which man and machine competed against each other had even become Olympic sports. However too great an emphasis on the mind had diminished the importance of emotions. People begin to reveal themselves in different ways, prizing independence and universality. There is a growing feeling that while humanity had been busy setting the world to rights it had lost its capacity to survive in its natural environment, for instance on the edge of forest, the precise location in which humanity first emerged.
New forms of settlements are created; small, easily transposed and independent. They can be set up anywhere; in the desert, on ice floes, at the bottom of the ocean, on hollow artificial planets. The quality of daily life, the ability to survive using resources immediately and locally available, the talent to transform constraints into challenges and to create new environments are now seen as the true universal values. Humanity is preparing itself for its destiny out among the stars.
Thus the creative society comes into being in rejecting the restrictions of the overbearing structures of the preceding era.
It pursues freedom as both a pleasure and a necessity - the pleasure of creation and the therapeutic effects of creativity - experienced as a bubble of fresh air bursting free from a suffocating order.