According to Paul Ray's research, Cultural Creatives are literally creating a new culture. Innovation by innovation they are shaping a new culture for the 21st century.
Q:Would you please identify some of the characteristics of CC's?
Ray: The Cultural Creatives are 50 million Americans (26% of all adults) who care deeply about ecology and saving the planet, about relationships, peace, social justice, and about authenticity, self actualization, spirituality and self-expression. Surprisingly, they are both inner-directed and socially concerned, they're activists, volunteers and contributors to good causes more than most other Americans. They care intensely about both the most inner and soulful aspects of life and about the big picture of what's happening around the planet. Most importantly, this is a real subculture: a whole way of life and a whole set of beliefs about how the world works, and different priorities for what is most important in life. Demographics don't define them: They're all income levels not just yuppies; all ethnic groups not just whites; all ages 18-70, not just Baby Boomers; and from all parts of the country, not just California. And they're not New Agers, but very grounded and practical people. However, there is one demographic: 60% of Cultural Creatives are women, and the most active and intensely concerned Core group, it's two to one women. To a large extent this is about women's values and concerns coming into the public sphere.
Q: Why are the Cultural Creatives important?
Ray: The sheer size of the CC population
at 50 million people is already affecting the way Americans do
business and politics. They're making new kinds of businesses
and nonprofits, and they're also driving the demand for:
* Ecologically sustainable products and services, and concern
for the whole planet.
* Authenticity- personally, at work, in business & politics.
* Bringing women's issues into public life.
* Bringing spirituality into American life.
If people don't know about the Cultural Creatives they may be
left behind, wondering where all the changes are coming from.
After all, any time one in four Americans are changing their minds
in fundamental ways, it's worth paying attention to, because it's
going to change your life too.
Other important reasons to pay attention to the CC's include:
* The Cultural Creative values and the kind
of new solutions they're creating, give us reason for optimism
about the future.
* There are more Cultural Creatives than voted for Clinton in
the last election. If they get it together, they can win.
* Cultural Creatives are redefining what success means. They're
steering away from success at work and making a lot of money,
towards a more soulful life focused on personal fulfillment, social
conscience, creating a better future for everyone on the planet.
* A new industry is appearing: Lifestyles of Health and Sustainability,
and it's $230 Billion in the U.S. this year, and $540 Billion
worldwide. And, the Cultural Creatives are their entire market.
Q: If they're so important how come we haven't seen them before?
Ray: Actually you have seen them. They're the huge populations who support all the new social movements from the Sixties right up to the present day: Civil rights, peace, environment, women's, jobs and social justice, gay lib, alternative health care, new spiritualities, new psychotherapies, etc. If you look at values, you'll see them. But most of the surveys you hear about study only opinions that are very transitory, while values are slow changing and very deep. Values are much deeper than the demographic categories most surveys use.
Q: Why do you think that CC's can make a difference?
Ray: We're at a tipping point in history, a time when a creative minority can get the leverage to really make a difference. Part of the reason is that these activists and schoolteachers, and artists, and spiritual people, and scientists are following the normal pattern for success. They are turning their grass roots social movements and their projects and ideas into new institutions. Many of the most respectable institutions of today started as controversial grass roots movements. Citizen involvement turns into a huge variety of civic associations like: lobbying groups, political parties, unions, civic clubs, think tanks, institutes, foundations, charities, unions, clinics, and churches. This is what we Americans do, and we're better at it than almost any other country in the world. And that's what's happening now with the Cultural Creatives.
Q: What kinds of things are they doing?
Ray: In between the pure profit making business
and the begging-for-money charity there's a whole rainbow spectrum
of new kinds of organizations and social experiments.Take a yoga
center for example: is it a business, a spiritual place, an education
center, a health and exercise place, or a way of life? The answer
is Yes to all the above. We're crossing categories all the time.
We interviewed a sculptor named Vijali Hamilton who travels around
the world creating something she calls the World Wheel. In each
community she creates an environmental sculpture and she does
community building. She asks the people to go deep into who they
are and how they connect to the rest of the world, and from their
answers they create a piece of theatre, and music, and a community
ritual. Is this art, community building, entertainment, spirituality,
ecology? Again, Yes, to all the above.
The reason why this makes such a difference is that all these
movements have been doing something new in history.They have been
trying to change our minds about what is important and how the
world works. There's a lot more to the movements than just the
people on the ramparts, there's also a huge cultural circle around
those active people who are reframing how we see the world every
day. You have to see what a whole movement is: there's the most
active people at the center, but around them like a target, there's
a huge population of less involved people who give the money,
read the literature, keep track of what's happening, and really
believe in it. There may be a few thousand activists, and hundreds
of thousands giving money, but tens of millions who are changing
their minds and their lives. We have evidence that a typical CC
cares intensely about, and is often involved in, half a dozen
of these new social and consciousness movements, while the rest
of the country care about none, or maybe one or two.
What's more, there's an enormous overlap of all the movements,
and the Cultural
Creatives are right at the center of all of it. They are the common
constituency of all the movements. It's exactly the opposite of
what many pundits have claimed: it really isn't true that if you're
dealing with your own personal growth you've dropped out of social
life. Or if you're an activist, you don't have time for an inner
life. In reality, the more people are involved in ecology issues
the more they are involved in spirituality and personal growth
on the one hand, and social justice issues on the other hand.
What makes Cultural Creatives different than most Americans is
that when you're involved in several movements you've been exposed
to their reframing a lot of times, because that's what these movements
do.
Reframing is a big deal. It lets us look
at our old problems from a new angle of vision. And it gives a
new way of explaining them, and a new way to state our moral concerns.
Reframing means you start to question the unspoken assumptions
of the social codes all around you. It's not okay to let big
business destroy the environment. It's not okay to have nuclear
power. It's not okay to let the foreign policy elite send our
young people off to wars without involving the citizens. It's
not okay to put down, or harm, people who are different than you
are. And so on. If you are exposed to half a dozen big reframes,
two things happen: the content changes your whole world view,
and you get comfortable with the process of questioning the unspoken
assumptions of the old culture. That's where the Cultural Creatives
came from and that's where a lot of our new direction is coming
from. The Cultural Creatives are the ones who have been really
paying attention, applying those reframings in their own lives.
This is a part of the personal life changes that so many Cultural
Creatives have gone through. So often they said to us that they
had to live more authentic lives after opening up questions they
really cared about, and having to live through the experiences
they've had. The Black Freedom Movement called it "walking
your talk" and this need for authenticity was picked up by
every social and consciousness movement since then.
This emphasis on authenticity is at the center of who the Cultural Creatives are today, and is one of the key values they've brought into our culture.