Central themes in America's culture codes

I just finished reading “The Culture Code” by Clotaire Rapaille. Rapaille is a Frenchman who developed expertise in learning how ideas become imprinted in humans based on their cultural upbringing. He has shared his expertise with leading companies to help them market products around the world, based on the distinctive national “culture codes.”

A culture code is an idea-set that emotionally animates people when they are making crucial decisions. The most well-known American culture code is belief in the American dream. Anyone with something to sell to an American would do well to make sure that the message is “on-code”, that is, it resonates strongly with American idea-sets. This applies to everyone from political candidates, to automobile manufacturers, to community activists.

American culture codes present formidable challenges to anyone who might question the standard American way of doing things. Rapaille says that America is an adolescent culture, and exhibits this quality in many ways: “intense focus on the “now,” dramatic mood swings, a constant need for exploration and challenge to authority, a fascination with extremes, openness to change and reinvention, and a strong belief that mistakes warrant second chances.” As a young culture, we are prone to all the mistakes and enthusiasms of adolescents. We don’t ask our elders (other countries, for example) for advice. We are attracted to figures with adolescent qualities: Bill Clinton, for example, or Michael Jackson.

Our adolescent qualities as a nation can help and hinder us. Jungian psychologist James Hillman says America’s innocence is what gets us into trouble: “…that's our American addiction: the addiction to innocence. That's our only addiction. It's not drugs and it's not marijuana and so on. It's the addiction to not knowing. Not wanting to know.” He says America has an ability to plan, but the Iraq war, and the failure in New Orleans to respond to hurricane Katrina, reflect a failure of imagination: we couldn’t imagine what would happen if the plans didn’t work out.

Rapaille’s insights about American culture codes helps us understand verbal and pictorial frames that will resonate with Americans. His code-work provides information to advertisers and others who would like to shape our response to our experience in the marketplace of things and ideas.

Hillman is puzzling over the more difficult task: how do we rescue the American people from our own immaturity? These are useful questions to ponder as we look at a world of increased complexity. The next generation of global changes may call on us to link our youthful capacity for innovation with a more mature ability to envision and imagine the consequences of the actions we take.