American Culture Code

[Blairamir]

Have any of you read Clotaire Rapaille’s book, The Culture Code ?
books.google.com/books?id=UxwEw_nSlWYC&printsec=frontcover&dq=culture+code+rapaille&source=bl&ots=RL2tXwwSYZ&sig=vqgZt8uhyliJ_-a_V9u5_ZyV9fQ&hl=en&ei=P1iKTY-BF5SmvQOKrYjcDg&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=4&sqi=2&ved=0CC4Q6AEwAw#v=onepage&q&f=false

Basically he asserts that each of us has culturally implanted ideas, like in the subconscious, that affect many of our decisions. He also writes about how he has used these ideas in marketing automobiles and other products. The following are some brief thoughts from his book.

For Americans, health and wellness means being able to complete your mission (involving an action). The code word for this is MOVEMENT, and Americans glorify the action filled life. Our champions are athletes, entrepreneurs, policemen, firefighters and soldiers; people who take action. The code word for medical doctors is HEROES, so we also admire them.

At the unconscious level, Americans equate work with who we are (an idea that I personally dislike), and we believe that if we work hard and improve our professional standing, we become better people. The job must provide new challenges, analogous to the code word movement, for us to consider a job as healthy.

Home is a potent and pervasive image for us, and the game of baseball illustrates that eloquently: the only way to score is to make it home. The kitchen is the heart of the American home, and we bring friends into our kitchens, unlike the French. Making dinner is “on Code” for home.

Pizza is a perfectly “on Code” dinner because it is circular and everyone shares it, and this fits the American ideals of equality and our natural informality.

Americans also admire people who outwit or beat the establishment or authorities.

 

[levinas12]

Home is a potent and pervasive image for us, and the game of baseball illustrates that eloquently: the only way to score is to make it home. The kitchen is the heart of the American home, and we bring friends into our kitchens, unlike the French. Making dinner is “on Code” for home.

Pizza is a perfectly “on Code” dinner because it is circular and everyone shares it, and this fits the American ideals of equality and our natural informality.

Pizza being circular and therefore equalitarian - I like this. Also, being circular, it resembles baseball and home (you end where you start - T.S. Eliot or Dorothy). Even Tom Wolfe really wanted to go home again but couldn’t.

 

[CountrySteve]

and it seems like everything goes back to violence

 

[Ridgerunner]

I haven’t read the book, but hope I get around to it.

I would certainly agree that there are cultural “imprints” we all have. Many of them are, in my belief, quite ancient.

There might well be cultural “imprints” that SEEM to be peculiarly American, but I’m not sure that’s true.

One has to realize that most people in this country came here for opportunity. They actually came here to accomplish something through their brains and brawn, notwithstanding that they all came from somewhat different cultural backgrounds. To that extent, then, it may be said that individuals of like minds in SOME ways, formed a cultural vein that has become part of a general culture that not all share in quite the same way.

An American Scots-Irish person is not the same as an American German or an American Hispanic in a lot of ways. But most of the ancestors of them all came here for opportunity and in that sense formed a “cultural commonality” they shared.

And, frankly, I do believe that what one does is integral to what he is, and vital to it. One cannot totally “make himself”, but he does so in very important ways.