The Culture Code (4 page)

Most Americans receive their first real imprint of alcohol when they are teenagers. This is a very different window in time from the one in which the French learn about alcohol, and therefore the connection made is different. For most Americans, alcohol serves a function: it makes you drunk. Few American teens ponder the bouquet of the beer they guzzle. Several of Dorian’s friends have already had problems with drunkenness because they associate alcohol with inebriation rather than with taste. They have learned that alcohol can do a job for them, and nothing more. Many of them, in fact, respond to alcohol the way I responded to peanut butter—they find the taste unappealing—but they forge ahead because they know doing so will change their state of mind.

To return to our PT Cruiser session again, I learned that cars are an essential part of American culture because, while American children don’t experience the emotion of driving a car at an early age, they imprint the thrills associated with cars in their youth. Americans love cars and they love going out in them. Throughout the discovery sessions, participants told stories of their excited parents bringing home a new car, about the enjoyment and bonding that comes from families going out for drives together on the weekend, about the breathtaking first ride in a sports car. American children learn at an early age that cars are an essential and vaunted part of family life, that they bring joy and even family unity. When it is time for them to buy a car, this emotional connection guides them subconsciously. They want a car that feels special to them. The distinctiveness of the PT Cruiser gave them this feeling, so they welcomed it into their garages and their lives.

PRINCIPLE
5: TO
ACCESS
THE
MEANING
OF AN
IMPRINT
WITHIN
A
PARTICULAR
CULTURE
,
YOU
MUST
LEARN
THE
CODE
FOR
THAT
IMPRINT

The PT Cruiser was a smash success in America. Yet prior to its release, the new executives at DaimlerChrysler predicted it would fail. Why? Because different cultures have different Codes.

Even our most arbitrary actions are the result of the trips we take down our mental highways. We take these trips hundreds of times a day, making decisions about what to wear, what to eat, where to go, what to say in conversation, and so on. What most people don’t realize, however, is that there is a Code required to make these journeys. Think of the Code as a combination that unlocks a door. In this case, we need not only to punch in the numbers, but also to punch them in in a specific order, at a specific speed, with a specific rhythm, etc. Every word, every action, and every symbol has a Code. Our brains supply these Codes subconsciously, but there is a way to discover them, to understand why we do the things we do.

As I’ve already illustrated, the discovery sessions I conduct for my clients allow us to learn what a particular thing really means to our participants. When my staff and I analyze participant responses after a session, common messages emerge. We discover the Codes when we find these common messages.

These messages vary greatly from culture to culture, and, therefore, so do the Codes. For example, I conducted discovery sessions about cheese in France and in America. The Codes we uncovered could not have been more different. The French Code for cheese is
ALIVE
. This makes perfect sense when one considers how the French choose and store cheese. They go to a cheese shop and poke and prod the cheeses, smelling them to learn their ages. When they choose one, they take it home and store it at room temperature in a cloche (a bell-shaped cover with little holes to allow air in and keep insects out). The American Code for cheese, on the other hand, is
DEAD
. Again, this makes sense in context. Americans “kill” their cheese through pasteurization (unpasteurized cheeses are not allowed into this country), select hunks of cheese that have been prewrapped—mummified, if you will—in plastic (like body bags), and store it, still wrapped airtight, in a morgue also known as a refrigerator.

There is a movement in Europe (instigated by some bureaucrats in Brussels) to impose pasteurization laws throughout the European Union. Knowing what you now know about the French Code for cheese and what pasteurization does to cheese, have you any doubt how the French have reacted to this movement? Their response was so intense that there were even demonstrations in the streets. The notion of forcing the French to pasteurize their cheese is decidedly “off Code.”

This perspective really holds for foods of all kinds. Americans are intensely concerned with food safety. We have regulatory commissions, expiration dates, and a wide variety of “food police” out there protecting us from unsafe food. The French, on the other hand, are far more interested in taste than safety. In France, there is a method of preparation known as
faisandée
. It involves hanging a pheasant (the source of the name) or some other gamebird on a hook until it ages—literally, until it begins to rot. While most Americans would consider the thought of this alarming, French chefs utilize this method because it dramatically improves the flavor of the bird. Safety is not nearly as much of a concern for them or the people for whom they cook. Of course, such culinary explorations come with a price. There are far more food-related deaths in France every year than there are in the United States, even though there are five times as many people living in the United States.

We can return one more time to our example of the PT Cruiser to show how these different cultural Codes affect our responses to things. My review of hundreds of stories told by participants during the discovery sessions revealed that the American Code for cars is
IDENTITY
. Americans want cars that are distinctive, that will not be mistaken for any other kind of car on the road, and that trigger memories of Sunday drives, the freedom of getting behind the wheel for the first time, and the excitement of youthful passion. A car with a strong identity, such as the PT Cruiser or, as I illustrated earlier, the Jeep Wrangler, has a much better chance of breakout sales than a cookie-cutter sedan.

This Code, however, is far from universal across cultures. German automotive giant Daimler-Benz purchased Chrysler around the time the PT Cruiser was on its way to production. When the German executives who now ran the company saw the car, they were appalled. Why? Because the Code for cars in the German culture is decidedly different from the American one. The German Code for cars is
ENGINEERING
. German car manufacturers pride themselves on the quality of their engineering, and this pride is so ingrained that people raised in that culture think of engineering first when they think of cars. The initial PT Cruisers were in no way models of engineering excellence. Their engines weren’t particularly powerful or efficient, the design was anything but streamlined, they didn’t handle very well, and their gas mileage and safety ratings were only average. The new executive team at Chrysler, accessing their cultural Code, believed the PT Cruiser would be a marketing disaster. They relegated production to one plant in Mexico.

This turned out to be a huge (although understandable) mistake. German executives responded negatively to the modest quality of the car’s engineering. American consumers responded positively to the car’s high level of identity. The plant in Mexico was ill equipped to keep up with demand, and there were long waiting lists. If the new executives at Chrysler had understood the American Code for cars, and had relied on it rather than on their own Code, they would have avoided the many problems they had getting the desired number of PT Cruisers onto American highways.

A
NOTION
IS BORN:
DISCOVERING
THE
CULTURAL
UNCONSCIOUS

The notion supported by these five principles is that there is a third unconscious at work. The principles cannot be ascribed to either the Freudian individual unconscious that guides each of us in unique ways or the Jungian collective unconscious that guides each of us as members of the human race. The principles illuminate an unconscious that uniquely guides each of us depending on the cultures that produced us. The third unconscious is the cultural unconscious.

This notion and these principles are irrefutable evidence that there is an American mind, just as there is a French mind, an English mind, a Kurdish mind, and a Latvian mind. Every culture has its own mind-set, and that mind-set teaches us about who we are in profound ways.

In the remainder of this book, I will lead you to the two dozen most important Codes I have discovered. These Codes will show how the cultural unconscious affects our personal lives, the decisions we make as consumers, and the way we operate as citizens of the world. I will also contrast these Codes with discoveries I have made in other cultures to show how the same thing can have very different meaning elsewhere. There are more than a few “wow” moments in this book. There are revelations here that will help you conduct yourself, do business, and regard others with new clarity.

Let’s go fit you with a new set of glasses.

The Codes for Love, Seduction, and Sex

C
ultures are created and evolve over time, though the rate of change is glacial. A culture might not experience a significant shift for generations. When cultures
do
change, the changes occur in the same way as in our brains—via powerful imprints. These powerful imprints alter the “reference system” of the culture, and the significance is passed down to subsequent generations. Indians, for example, consider Hanuman langur monkeys sacred because a Hindu epic written more than twenty centuries ago tells of one such monkey rescuing the king’s abducted queen. The imprint of this legend is so strong within the culture that these monkeys are still free to roam wherever they want in India, even though they regularly stop traffic, invade grain storehouses, and prove a general nuisance.

A culture-founding and culture-changing imprint of another variety took place in ancient Israel. There, neighboring pagan tribes offered pigs as a sacred sacrifice to their idols, a practice Jews found repellent. Compounding this, pigs were filthy animals back then, feeding on carrion and garbage. Eating pork caused the spread of terrible diseases and weakened the community. In response, the Jewish religion forbade the consumption of pork, and many Jews still avoid pork even though most have no contact with pagan rituals and pigs are raised under conditions in which their meat is unlikely to spread parasites. Again, the imprint of scores of villagers becoming deathly ill from meat-borne parasites or witnessing shocking rites was so strong that the culture shifted.

Imprints this strong happen infrequently. Therefore, cultures emerge and change slowly. At slightly more than two and a quarter centuries old, the American culture has experienced relatively few culture-changing imprints. The opening of the West, the waves of persecuted people coming to these shores and finding success, and our country’s emerging as a protector in two world wars were such imprints. It is very possible that we experienced another culture-changing imprint on September 11, 2001, but we will only be certain of this a few generations from now. Regardless, if one were to equate life stages to the evolution of a culture, we are very young. Not as young as the Canadian culture or the South African culture, certainly, but decidedly younger than the elderly British or Japanese. We are, in fact, in the full throes of adolescence—and this metaphor extends beyond our relative age as a culture into the way we act and react.

IF
YOU
DON’T
KILL
THE
KING
,
YOU
CAN
STAY
YOUNG
FOREVER

Our cultural adolescence informs our behavior in a wide variety of ways. It is an incredibly powerful part of our reference system, maybe the strongest in our culture. The theme of adolescence shows up in nearly every American discovery session. Conversely, themes associated with age—patience, sophistication, and the understanding of limits, among others—emerge with great regularity in discovery sessions held in older cultures. You’ll see the contrast between adolescent themes and adult themes throughout this book.

Our adolescence stems from one essential point: we never had to kill the king in order to become who we are.

Every adult was once a child, small and anxious. Then they go through stages of adolescence and rebellion. In the American culture, however, our rebellion took an unusual form. Many cultures act out their rebellion by killing their leaders (for example, the French rebelled by beheading Louis
XVI
), after which their period of rebellion ends and adulthood begins. We never killed our king because we never actually had one. We rebelled against the only king who ever tried to rule us and threw him out of “our room,” but we didn’t behead him. We simply told him to stay out.

For this reason, our rebellious period never really ended. Rather than moving on from it, we hold on to it and reinforce it when we welcome immigrants to our shores. These immigrants have left the country that was forced upon them at birth. Coming here is a huge act of rebellion. Like the American revolutionaries, they leave their old cultures behind rather than “finishing the job” by killing the king. Therefore, they remain rebels, and this constant influx of new adolescents helps keep our entire culture adolescent.

Looking at our culture through this set of glasses explains why we are so successful around the world selling the trappings of adolescence: Coca-Cola, Nike shoes, fast food, blue jeans, and loud, violent movies. America has never produced a world-class classical composer, but has successfully exported rock, hip-hop, and R&B—the music of adolescence—to every corner of the globe. American basketball players who can hardly read make exponentially more money than American scientists do. We are endlessly fascinated with celebrities and all the adolescent mistakes they make.