Create Without Fear: Every Act Is Political
- Roy Sharples
- Jun 17
- 5 min read
Before the protest, before the product, before the paradigm shift—
There is a moment of aloneness.
Not isolation. Not loneliness.
But a private clarity. A quiet rupture.
A flicker that says:
What if it doesn’t have to be like this?
It doesn’t come with certainty.
Or applause. Or permission.
It arrives raw. Unpolished.
Something in you says:
Make.
And you do.
That’s how it begins.
That’s how it always has.
To Create Without Fear
Creativity begins in the spaces no one sees.
Before the gatekeepers, the publishers, the platforms, the politics.
It begins without the need to impress.
And often, with the risk of being misunderstood. Or punished.
To create is not just to express—
it is to expose.
To name what the system hides.
To imagine what authority can’t.
That is why the most vital art, the most disruptive ideas,
do not emerge from consensus,
but from confrontation.
Not in public, but in private
acts of defiance.
To create without fear is not to feel brave.
It is to act as if fear has no claim on what you must say.
Even if your voice shakes.
Even if no one applauds.
The Creative Act Is Political
To create is to choose.
To choose is to take a position.
And that position—whether whispered or screamed—is political.
Not in the ballot-box sense—
but in the sense that it rearranges power.
It declares: This matters. This deserves space. This belongs.
And by doing so, it suggests other things do not.
Even silence, when chosen, is a statement.
Even beauty, when made honestly, becomes subversive
in a world that prefers utility.
The creative act is a disruption—
of timelines, of algorithms, of consensus.
It resists flattening.
It pushes against what has been normalized.
It refuses to make itself small for ease of consumption.
When you write something real,
you challenge a thousand invisible rules
about who is allowed to speak,
and what is allowed to be said.
When you make something strange,
you break the contract of expectation.
You let others know the edges have not been sealed.
When you dare to imagine something better,
you expose how broken things really are.
Art doesn’t require a manifesto to be political.
It becomes political the moment it refuses to lie.
The moment it tells the truth no one has paid for.
The moment it says: This is how I see it,
even if no one else agrees.
In authoritarian regimes,
poets disappear.
Painters are silenced.
Songs are censored.
Not because art is irrelevant—
but because it is dangerous.
Because a poem can do
what propaganda never will.
Because a single line of truth
can outlive an empire.
To create is to resist.
To create honestly is to say:
I will not be coerced into silence or sameness.
I will not be optimized, categorized, or branded into compliance.
I will not wait until it is safe to be seen.
The creative act is a form of protest
disguised as a gesture.
A quiet refusal with loud consequences.
So whether you’re painting, coding, filming, or writing—
know this:
you are not just making.
You are choosing.
And that choice reshapes the world,
whether it’s ready or not.
A History of Unfiltered Beginnings
We have been here before.
Over and over again, it begins the same way:
Lascaux (~17,000 BCE)
Ash and pigment on cave stone.
A handprint. A beast.
No audience.
Only a need to say:
I saw. I felt. I remembered.
Mali, 13th Century
A griot sings the names of ancestors into the wind.
History held in voice, not stone.
When books are burned, the body becomes archive.
Athens, 5th Century BCE
Socrates questions power.
Plato writes in exile.
Democracy is born not with a vote—
but with a refusal to accept mythology as truth.
Baghdad, 9th Century
Al-Khwarizmi builds algebra from dust and dream.
The future of logic begins with someone
who sat quietly with a problem
and chose not to look away.
Renaissance Florence
Leonardo da Vinci sketches machines no one believes in.
Writes in mirror script.
Not to be cryptic—
but to protect wonder from the cynical.
Mesoamerica
Maya priests calculate the stars,
map time with breathtaking precision.
They do not wait for Europe’s permission
to understand the universe.
Enlightenment
Mary Wollstonecraft writes in candlelight.
Voltaire speaks from exile.
When power insists on silence,
the page becomes a battlefield.
20th Century
Tesla. Baldwin. Kahlo. King.
Each alone at first.
Each creating from the edge.
Each speaking truth
before the world was ready to hear it.
A Compass, Not a Map
To create without fear is to resist certainty.
To refuse the map handed to you
and follow your own crooked compass instead.
It is to build meaning
where there is only monotony.
To tell the truth
when truth is inconvenient.
To imagine better
when better feels impossible.
It is to be defined not by what you replicate,
but by what you reject.
What you refuse to become.
What you are willing to risk for what must be said.
And sometimes, to be brave
is simply to be honest—
when honesty costs.
The Role of the Creator Is to Take a Stand
The creator’s duty is not to flatter the world,
but to confront it.
To expose what power conceals.
To challenge the architecture of control.
To make meaning in the gaps,
in the silences,
in the systems that do not serve.
Art is not an accessory to freedom.
It is freedom.
A declaration of agency
in a culture that prefers obedience.
To create is to see the world
not as it is,
but as it should be.
And to say so—
without fear of retaliation,
without fear of erasure,
without fear of not being understood.
Situationist Manifesto
Creativity begins alone—
unseen, unfiltered.
It breaks monotony.
It builds meaning.
It disrupts comfort and redraws borders.
It is not a brand.
It is not a campaign.
It is not content.
It is the courage to speak
before you’re sure.
The clarity to name what you see.
The grit to keep going when the world says stop.
The refusal to shrink.
The insistence on being free.
So make something dangerous.
Say something true.
Create as if no one’s watching—
because that’s when it matters most.
Create without fear.
Because the world you want
won’t arrive by itself.
It must be made.
By you.
Read the Book. Stoke the Fire.
by Roy Sharples
How to make the invisible visible by lighting the way into the future.
Founder of Unknown Origins.
Champion of originality in an age of imitation.
Attitude. Imagination. Execution.
Unknown Origins Creative Studios All rights reserved © copyright 2025
