In his book The Cultural Creatives: How 50 Million People Are Changing the World, Ray describes new culture values that are emerging within our society from a group he calls the Cultural Creatives and compares their values to those of the Modernists and Traditionalists. He and his co-author traveled many place in the US and interviewed many people to come to these conclusions. I’m not sure how he came up with number of fifty million, but he mentioned that this group of people crossed many normal demographic boundaries similar to the US population. There are two groups within the subculture. One is the core group and the other is called green. All people in these two groups think about the ecology of the whole planet.
Blink, the Power of Thinking Without Thinking by Malcolm Gladwell, gives us very good examples of human behavior and our unconscious values. We have values about people in our unconscious mind that guides our behavior. One such example was that of the campaign and election of Warren Harding to the U.S. presidency in the early 1900s. He was very good looking – tall, dark and handsome and American values were such that this man was elected based on physical qualities rather than his qualifications as a leader. He goes on to tell us that these types of values still exist in America by confirming that the majority of U.S. CEO’s are over 6 feet tall and white.
Sustainability 