Dr. Ray ran a company called American LIVES Inc. for 13 years. During that time he accumulated over 100,000 responses to questionnaires and hundreds of focus groups. The demographic information from those responses suggests that a new subculture has been emerging in America since the 60s. This group now represents 26% of the adult population (50 million people) and divides the nation into three demographic subgroups, the Moderns (49.8% of the population), the Traditionals (23.2%) and the Cultural Creatives (CC), 26%).
CCs find the following important:
- Nature and its destruction.
- Problems with the whole planet such as global warming, destruction of the rain forests, overpopulation, lack of ecological sustainability and exploitation of the poor.
- They would pay more taxes if the money would be used to clean the environment.
- Developing and maintaining relationships.
- Helping others and bringing out others' unique gifts.
- Volunteering for good causes.
- Psychological and spiritual development.
- See spirituality or religion as important but concerned about Religious right.
- Equality of women.
- Violence and abuse of women and children.
- Politics should spend more on education, neighborhoods and sustainable future.
- Concerns about the left and right of politics as well as the mushy middle.
- Optimism for the future and distrust media's negativity.
- Creating new and better ways of life.
- Concerned about big business' focus on profit over environment, downsizing and human exploitation.
- Having finances under control.
- Dislikes overspending, conspicuous consumption and "making it".
- Likes exotic and foreign people, places and other ways of life.
Cultural Creatives believe that 'the world is too complex for linear analytic thinking now. To be smart in the global village means thinking with your stomach, thinking rhythmically, thinking organically, thinking in terms of yourself as an interwoven piece of nature". Intuitive is important.
The book also explains that Moderns are the establishment and they rule and often put CCs down and keep them at ill at ease. The Cultural Creatives are creating a new culture in America but often do not even know that they exist as a sub-culture.
This means that CCs often feel out of place, put down and are afraid to say what they really feel.
If you have ever felt this way you are in good company as this letter from a friend of a friend who won a ticket to meet Robert Redford explains:
"For those who know I was the lucky recipient of two tickets tonight, I was on the second row, with no one in front of me, for the Kennedy Center Distinguished Speaker Series featuring Robert Redford. Thanks to insightful questioning by interviewer, Charlie Rose, he had a chance to respond to lots of audience questions, mine being one. I asked him when he knew he was a cultural creative. He smiled broadly and said it came from 'here' as he placed his hand over his heart. He said he had always known though even as an underprivileged child in San Bernardino growing up but didn't know what it was really and didn't know there were others like him.
This also sparked a disclosure of his feeling uncomfortable in his own skin as a youngster, didn't get along well in school, didn't apply himself because he was not interested. He explained it wasn't until he made the movie, Motorcycle Diaries, that he really REALLY understood the scope and breadth of choosing that different path in life, the path of the heart.
Needless to say, I was just glued to my seat hanging on every word! We had dinner first but he didn't come round as the 'stars' usually do. However, when over, there was coffee in the Terrace Restaurant at Kennedy Center (his armchair interview was in the Concert Hall). I was luckily at the ropes at the back of the room and he came down through the line of hundreds of people and gripped my hand smiling and saying thank you as I was thanking him for his contribution to the ecology and to the arts, he winked and while still gripping my hand (he made a big red dent in the finger beside my ring his grip was so tight) he WINKED at me. Oh, my. I could hardly speak for the drive home. Good thing I had Ann to navigate us out of the Kennedy Center! Ha ha. It isn't really even that he is so good looking...it is that he is so good, if you know what I mean. He chose a path that has cost him lots of money and lots of career losses that became others' gains but he stayed on that path."
