Cultural creatives: 
An interview with Paul Ray
By Ravi Dykema  

       A huge social transformation is moving through the United States, one that crosses all boundaries-age, gender, religious affiliation, ethnicity and political position. This movement encompasses more than 50 million people, called the cultural creatives, whose values and lifestyle are playing a critical role in shaping the present-and the future-of the world. Cultural creatives are defined as people who care deeply about saving the planet, nurturing relationships, expressing peace, embodying social justice, and cultivating authenticity, self-actualization, spirituality and self-expression. They are both inner directed and socially concerned. And they encompass one in every four adult Americans.  

     In a stunning new book called The Cultural Creatives: How 50 Million People Are Changing The World, Paul H. Ray, Ph.D., and Sherry Ruth Anderson, Ph.D., combine 13 years of research and more than 100,000 questionnaires, focus groups and in-depth personal interviews to paint a more accurate picture of this impactful and dynamic new group of people. Here, Nexus publisher Ravi Dykema talks to author Paul Ray about the makeup of cultural creatives, their influence on our lifestyle and

RD:  How did you get involved in writing The Cultural Creatives?

PR:  I started a company called American Lives, Inc. 14 years ago, and up until this past year I did surveys nearly every month on all sorts of topics: how people give money to good causes, who they back politically, what they think of the environmental movement, what they want in houses and cars and food and alternative health care. These surveys were usually paid for by a non-profit organization or a business that wanted to know who their audience was. Frequently they wanted to develop new products or new services, and they wanted to have a sense of their audience's values.

     But once you start talking about values, you shift the game. It's no longer a discussion of demographics-how old people are, how much money they have. Rather, you're talking about people's real priorities in life. Some organizations discovered that their public relations efforts were turning off the people they wanted to reach.

     I focused on speaking to people's values, rather than promoting the superficial garbage that's normally in ads and public relations. If you're not authentic, you'll lose the very people you're trying to reach. And most ad agencies and public relations firms are inauthentic. My job was to help people get better at carrying a cause, whether it be environmental or natural foods or issues of consciousness.

     After 13 years, we realized that we had surveyed well over 100,000 people. For this book, we did 60 in-depth interviews lasting four to six hours each, on what actually happened in people's lives as they became cultural creatives.  

Are you a cultural creative? This list can give you an idea. Choose the statements that you agree with. If you agree with 10 or more, you probably are a cultural creative.   You are likely to be a cultural creative if you... 1......love nature and are deeply concerned about its destruction. Yes  No 2....are strongly aware of the problems of the whole planet (global warming, destruction of rainforests, overpopulation, lack of ecological sustainability, exploitation of people in poorer countries) and want to see more action on them, such as limiting economic growth. Yes  No 3.....would pay more taxes or pay more for consumer goods if you could know the money would go to clean up the environment and to stop global warming. Yes  No 4.....place a great deal of importance on developing and maintaining your relationships.  Yes  No 5....place a lot of value on helping other people and bringing out their unique gifts.  Yes  No 6.....do volunteering for one or more good causes.  Yes  No 7.....care intensely about both psychological and spiritual development. Yes  No 8.....see spirituality or religion as important in your life, but are concerned about the role of the Religious Right in politics. Yes  No 9.....want more equality for women at work, and more women leaders in business and politics. Yes  No 10.....are concerned about violence and abuse of women and children around the world. Yes  No 11.....want our politics and government spending to put more emphasis on children's education and well-being, on rebuilding our neighborhoods and communities, and on creating an ecologically sustainable future.  Yes  No 12....are unhappy with both the left and the right in politics, and want a to find a new way that is not in the mushy middle. Yes  No 13.....tend to be somewhat optimistic about our future, and distrust the cynical and pessimistic view that is given by the media.  Yes  No 14.....want to be involved in creating a new and better way of life in our country. Yes  No 15.....are concerned about what the big corporations are doing in the name of making more profits: downsizing, creating environmental problems, and exploiting poorer countries.  Yes  No 16.....have your finances and spending under control, and are not concerned about overspending  Yes  No 17.....dislike all the emphasis in modern culture on success and "making it," on getting and spending, on wealth and luxury goods. Yes  No 18..... like people and places that are exotic and foreign, and like experiencing and learning about other ways of life. Yes  No Click Here For Your Results

RD:  When you started this process, had you identified cultural creatives as a values group?

PR:  Well, there was a half-assed job that had been done before, called Values and Lifestyles (VALS) by Arnold Mitchell, a science writer who had done a fine literature review on the role of values in social life, and also in consumer behavior. But some of the research was done badly, as it turned out. Many interpreted the VALS program to be about who was enlightened and who wasn't. But as soon as we got enough data from the first surveys, we realized it couldn't possibly have anything to do with who was enlightened and who wasn't. Rather, it had to do with culture, not personal psychology: The people we surveyed had all sorts of mixes of psychological traits, and nevertheless shared a similar world view, sense of priorities and lifestyles. I realized we had developed a better prediction tool, because values are good predictors of what people actually will do. 

     After we had done enough studies, it became obvious that something really different was going on. Because I'm a sociologist, I saw that this was about a major shift in American culture, and this change was slow moving.   

RD:  The group is growing slowly?

PR:  Very slowly. When I looked back over the history of surveys, I found that any grouping of people who would look like cultural creatives would have been too small to measure-less than four percent, under the threshold of what surveys will recognize. By the time I was seriously looking at it, we were already in the low 20 percents. That's a big number-I was totally shocked. I expected the people who shared my values were going to be five percent, maybe 10 percent of the population. I, like other cultural creatives, tended to think I was unique, that not many people shared my values. Cultural creatives like feeling unique, that they invented their lifestyles all by themselves. It's just that they happened to make the same choices as 50 million other people-10 million more than eight years ago. It's not a trivial number.

 

RD:  In this last presidential election, we heard about the black vote, the southern vote, the farmers, but we didn't hear about the cultural creative. What's the deal?   

 

PR:  The campaign organizations are modernist organizations through and through. And they don't want to conceive of deep values. If values were cheap and easy to measure, they'd probably do it. But the fact is it's pretty expensive to do values and lifestyle studies, and you can't do the overnight snap polling. It takes more analysis than that. But the fact is, campaign organizations go out of business between presidential campaigns. And so they could have been in business for 40 years, but for practical purposes, they're 10 years old, because they've only had experience one year in four. So they don't learn well at all.  

RD:  Ralph Nader was certainly appealing to the cultural creatives.  

PR:  He was appealing to a few of them, but he couldn't overcome the 30-year decline in people's trust in politics and government. The re-building of that trust is going to happen at the grass roots level or it isn't going to happen at all. It's not going to happen through TV or with wholesale politics. It's going to happen with personal contacts, where people start choosing their own leaders again, and with leaders who speak on behalf of their real values. None of that's happening-there's no sense of authenticity or trust by cultural creatives in what they're seeing in the national politics. They're saying, "National politics has been bought by the big money interests, so I'm holding my energy away from it." Gore should have walked away with this election-he was part of a party that can claim credit for eight years of prosperity, and he's obviously more capable and smarter than Bush. But the stink of big money, and the fact that Gore looks plastic in public, makes him look inauthentic. Cultural creatives' withholding of energy from the presidential election is part of what made the Gore campaign fail.

 

RD:  If that's not the arena where we're seeing an influence of cultural creatives, where is it?

 

PR:  Mostly in local activities, and in the "lohas" industries: lifestyles of health and sustainability. Right now, lifestyles of health and sustainability as an industry category is $230 billion per year in the U.S. That's a lot of money, and their entire market is cultural creatives. It obviously isn't getting all of them, but it's hitting a lot. The lohas industry is about ecologically sustainable products, natural foods, alternative health care, spiritual and psychological services. It's just beginning to become more visible. And, of course, the lifestyles of the cultural creatives are pretty recognizable. 

 

RD:  What are some of the primary issues?

 

PR:  The cultural creatives phenomenon is also very much about women's issues and concerns, especially on a larger scale-like how our children and grandchildren are becoming affected by big business destruction of the environment and the lousy quality of public schools. Women want to work locally, where they can see the impact, so cultural creatives have a huge impact on voluntary organizations in communities. There's also a general demand for more egalitarian and cooperative relationships at work and at home, and for children to be properly cared for in areas of hunger, health, education. And the demand for gun control and stopping violence is a women's issue. Women are the opinion leaders-cultural creatives are 60 percent women. They're driving the issues, over and over.

 

RD:  Why do you think there are more women than men among the cultural creatives?

 

PR:  I think there's a lot of heavy conditioning on men to watch out for the bottom line, be responsible for their families and put off the inner work until later in life. The women are likely to take that up in their 30s, while men wait until their late 40s. Men also think of themselves as pragmatic, responsible for getting the job done, supporting the family, building a career. And men have some difficulty with dealing with heartfelt concerns.

 

 RD:  What do you think will ultimately happen to our people and our planet?

 

PR:  I see the planet in dire trouble-we're heading for a crisis. We could see a serious crash in civilization, and we're going into a dangerous time in the next 10 to 20 years. At the same time, I think we've got more capabilities as individual humans. Fewer of us are damaged psychologically, and we have more resources to bring to the problem: More technology, more humane social capabilities. There's no reason to be either excessively pessimistic or optimistic. We're not going to move toward a future of unlimited consumption, and we're probably going to see some hard times. The Western culture in general is probably going to fall into a hole, but if we build up capability ahead of time-and the cultural creatives are precisely the ones who will do that-the rebound to a new level of civilization based on different principles is extremely likely. We've come to the end of a 500-year period of modernism as a kind of culture. It started with the Renaissance, accelerated with the Industrial Revolution, and now it's starting to shake itself to pieces. The reason you hear a lot of talk about post-modernism is precisely that the institutions of modern culture are working poorly.

 

RD:  What do you mean by the hole we're shaking ourselves into?

 

PR:  The hole could easily be a monster depression that comes about through partial ecological collapse of our agricultural areas because of irregular weather patterns and global warming. Another part will be the breakout of diseases, both from bacteria and viruses from the destruction of tropical areas, which will be spreading at a much faster rate than ever before-epidemiologists and public health experts are saying we're potentially in for a period of plagues. We're also looking at a time when out-of-control technologies may be serious, like biotechnology. You get any number of side effects from transgenic biotechnology that can create monster allergies and other effects in large populations, but you don't notice it until it's been going for 10 years. There are also potential problems from nanotechnology-the technology of the ultra-tiny, down to the billionth of an inch-that's likely to be used for things like developing tiny robots a millionth of an inch long that can clean plaque out of your arteries. But what if they don't stop? A lot of serious, speculative work by scientists and engineers asks what happens if you get self-breeding nanotechnology problems-it's called the gray glop problem. Suppose a secret nanotechnology lab in Argentina is trying to make the equivalent of a nanotechnology bomb to wipe-out somebody, and the thing gets loose and eats Buenes Aires, then keeps self-reproducing and spreading. How do you shut it off? 

    The point is, we are living in a dangerous world where the standard commercial and geo-political imperatives lead us into deeper danger, rather than away from danger. What we can hope for is that the cultural creatives will start introducing additional criteria. And they are. Essentially, the WTO demonstrations are entirely a cultural creatives phenomenon. All those social movements and issues that came together-environmental, spiritual, union, social justice, global human rights-grow out of a convergence of all the movements that gave rise to the cultural creatives.

     A crucial fact of life about the cultural creatives is that it isn't just about lifestyles, or who's enlightened and who isn't. And it isn't new age. It's about growing social concerns and cultural concerns that have both an inner side and an outer side to them. Christopher Lash, who wrote The Culture of Narcissism 20 years ago, was exactly wrong. It never was the case, as he asserted, that the more you're on a spiritual path, the less you care about what goes on in the world and the more ineffectual you are, or that the more you're involved in external issues, the less you're involved in personal growth. The cultural creatives data shows that, for example, the more people are involved in environmental issues, the more they're involved in personal growth issues, and the more they're involved in social justice issues as well. In fact, what we're seeing is a convergence of all those different, once-distinct movements of the last 30 years into one big mega-movement, as communities of communities all start coming together. They all have the same world view. They all have the same values. And it's the world view and the values of the cultural creatives.

 

RD:  But they're fragmented at present.

 

PR:  They're fragmented in terms of leadership, but the cultural creatives are the overlap of all those constituencies. The people who are in those movements are, in fact, the same people. There's a 40 percent to 80 percent overlap of any pair of movements you care to name-and guess who that overlap is. The typical cultural creative is in a half dozen organizations. The rest of the country cares about zero, one or two issues. The difference is just stunning. It tells us that cultural creatives are the people who care intensely about how things come out, in terms of how the world is developing, and they care intensely about what happens in their inner lives. And they don't see those things as separate.

 

RD:  You're implying that they have more in common with each other than they think.

 

PR:  That's right. If you ask only surface opinions, they might disagree. Some are liberal, some are conservative. Some are Democrats, some are Republicans. But the reality is, they have the same deep values, the same lifestyle, the same view of how the world works. That change in the deep structure of what people care about is the part that really counts. As we talked to people, we found a common thread in the intense caring about everything-from personal growth to planetary issues, social justice issues, women's issues and so on. 

     That's the history of where all these movements have come from, and part of that history has to do with what we call reframing. Every spiritual practice, and a lot of psychological practices, depend on throwing the ego structure out of its normal, habitual way of explaining and understanding the world. The reframing simply is supplying new eyeglasses to give new meanings and interpretations for how things work. Much of the non-violence training that Ghandi started in India was picked-up and copied in non-violence work by the Quakers and by the Black Freedom movement. It was crucial that the Black Freedom protests weren't just any kind of lunch counter sit-ins. They were lunch counter sit-ins by kids who had been taught for six to nine months ahead of time about non-violent protest. That was framed as being authentic.

     We've seen reframing throughout history. Martin Luther King didn't say, "This is another case of ethnic politics and the blacks gotta get ours." He said, "This is about truth and justice and freedom and the American constitution, and who are we as a people, as Americans?" Rachel Carson didn't say, "Keep pollution out of your backyard." She said, "This is about the death of nature." Betty Freidan didn't say, "This is about women getting more money, breaking through the glass ceiling." She said, "This is about who women are as human beings and what our proper role is in public life and what are real, quality relationships." The holistic health people said, "This isn't about whether chiropractors get health insurance. This is about true health and wellness."

     Each of these took a familiar, well-known topic and changed the fundamental angle of vision and interpretation, using reframing to help people see things in a new way. And guess what? They all converged on the same imagery, and it often came back to the planet, the processes of everyday life being more authentic, and the importance of the inner life and inner experience as a way of validating what you were doing. 

 

RD:  How does reframing affect us as individuals?

 

PR:  It can involve a change in somebody's fundamental interpretation of what their life's about. People go through radical healing experiences, or have their careers fall apart. They can use that as an opportunity to go deep, to shed the old identity, and take on a much larger identity. As a result, they come out on the other side able to maintain deeper relationships and have a richer spiritual life. Consider the story of Joe Kresse, a man I interviewed for my book. By the time he turned 60, he said if he had stayed with his career as an accountant with Arthur Anderson, he would probably be divorced, have no family, have a life that was falling apart, and be unhealthy and wondering where he'd gone wrong. By choosing to take an early retirement at 50 and work in a volunteer organization on the questions of how to change the culture and preserve the planet and spiritual life, he did a lot more with his family and had a life that really worked. That flies in the face of everything modernism tells us. He could have been a quasi-millionaire as a top executive in one of the big accounting and consulting companies. But when he chose to do something else entirely, his life was more worthwhile.

 

RD:  It seems a lot of cultural creatives are still in the closet. Isn't it your mission to get them to come out, that they may find more support than they thought?

 

PR:  In many companies, 30 percent of the executives are cultural creatives, and each one of them thinks they're absolutely alone. They'll say to me, "Shhh, don't tell anybody! I'm one of those and I'm all alone here." I ask them how they know that, and they'll say, "Well, nobody ever talks about these values here." "When was the last time you did?" I ask. And they say, "Oh, I wouldn't dream of it." So they're creating a self-fulfilling prophecy. I tell them they can go shopping for allies, because there are other folks who share their values in the organization. But that's part of the issue. If one of the rules of the game in business and political life is that you don't talk about the things you care most about, you'll have the impression that nobody else shares your values.

 

RD:  What does it take to start talking? Who can get the ball rolling?

 

PR:  There are a couple of scenarios. First is a small to mid-size entrepreneurial company with a real hero leader and top executives who happen to be cultural creatives. They'll often drag a lot of the organization with them into considering these values and discover that half of the people who were there already thought that way. And they're often stunned by it. They say, "My God, I could have done this five or 10 years ago!" Or consider the story of Ray Anderson, who's chairman of the board of one of the six largest carpet-making companies in the world. He wanted to promote ecological sustainability and recycle all the carpets they make now, leasing them to their clients rather than selling them. They had to take all the carpets back, and Ray treated it as a creative challenge to the engineers in his company. A lot of them who wouldn't have considered cultural creative issues are actually happy to have those issue in their lives.

     Meanwhile, Ray talks to a lot of other companies about what he's doing in terms of promoting sustainability in business, saying, "We've created the problem. We've got to clean it up. And we're the only ones with the money and the talent to clean it up." He gets a lot of flack from corporate heads and from financial people. But the middle-level people in those organizations are frequently the cultural creatives who say, "Right on. We agree that's incredibly important and we know we can do it. I'd love to see that on the agenda of our organization." The climate can be changed by only a few people continually speaking out in reasoned ways to say, "We have additional values besides the bottom line and issues of power." 

 

RD:  How can a company improve its marketing to the cultural creatives?

 

PR:  Companies will say to me, "We know we've got cultural creatives in our market. Tell us how to reach them better." I start with a discussion of authenticity, and at that point, some of them act like I'm trying to sell cancer. They hate the very idea that they ought to be more authentic and not so bottom-line oriented. Others say, "Oh, thank God. You've given me a great excuse to do what I wanted to do anyway." It isn't a uniform, black or white division. It isn't that all company executives are for cultural creativity or against it. Many are open to being convinced. But if you talk to companies that are in the lohas industries, natural foods, alternative health care, they're glad somebody's named their market accurately and that they don't have to be as narrowly specialized as they thought they had to be. It gives them a good excuse to throw out their old ad agency and get a better one.

 

RD:  What about the Internet? Are cultural creatives more likely to be on the net than others?

 

PR:  They were less likely to be on the net until about two or three years ago. Now they're catching up rapidly because the software is getting easier to use and because parts of the Internet are becoming more female friendly. Plus, it's easier to develop and maintain relationships on the Internet. But a lot of cultural creatives have said in focus groups that they think the Internet is cold-it's not personal enough, it's not relationship-oriented enough to satisfy them. Also, all too many web sites are designed by techies for the approval of other techies, and techies almost overwhelmingly are not cultural creatives. As one cultural creative woman in a focus group said, "That site was designed by guys that I wouldn't have gone out with in high school or college, and I ain't going to go out with them now."

 

RD:  Do you think it's possible to create web sites that are more personal and authentic?

 

PR:  Authentic is important, as is natural feeling. Instead of screaming colors and harsh textures, cultural creatives prefer a more natural feel. And they want sites that have a more artistic quality, not those that are trying to sell something: They'd rather go for information and make their own decisions whether they want to be sold. They're also going to be concerned about developing and maintaining a relationship with a company, which is a new idea for Internet entrepreneurs, who tend to think price is the only reason somebody would buy things from them. That's why a lot of dot-coms are having a hard time right now. Some of the people they most want to reach-that is, the cultural creatives-think what's offered on the Internet is garbage, so they're losing them fast.

 

RD:  So you think there's a great potential for the Internet to serve the needs of cultural creatives?

 

PR:  There is some potential. How much, we don't know. The Internet is like the first inning of the ball game-you hardly know what it's going to look like. It's changing, morphing so fast right in front of our eyes that it's hard to tell what will come next. If it continues to be driven only by technology and nerds, it won't do that well with cultural creatives. If, on the other hand, Internet entrepreneurs understand relationships and human beings and new values, those parts of the Internet could really prosper.

 

RD:  What would you say is the single biggest issue for cultural creatives?

 

PR:  Getting to know each other-having events and occasions where people can meet and see each other face-to-face, to tell their stories and to start building community and relationships with each other, to reject the impersonality of modern life and move in the direction of their heart's desires. Cultural creatives are longing to help create a real society that works-real in the inner sense and real in the interpersonal sense-one that's honest and authentic, and starts looking at what could be created in the future. I see a lot of opportunity for people to create events and occasions where they start to imagine the future they want to live in, and to start creating organizations that can make that work. That's where the opportunity is. 

             Now that you know that there are gazillions of people like you around the planet, what would you do differently? What things have you stopped yourself from trying in the last five or 10 years that you could do now? You can create that artwork, start that publication, write those articles, reach out to people because you know that there are a lot of people who have exactly the same concerns you do, and want to create the kind of world that you want to live in. It's all possible now. We can work together to move the world closer to our heart's desires.