Bernard Lietaer - The future of money

with over 500 focus groups. This included a benchmark study in December 1994, focusing on emerging new values among a representative national sample of the American population.'8" It has provided an invaluable set of hard data about the current state of values in that country. Ray found that there are in fact three subcultures cohabiting in the US today. Each is a different world of meaning, and has its own world-view. They are respectively the 'Traditionalists', the 'Modernists' and the 'Cultural Creatives'.

Here is a thumb-nail sketch of each: The 'Traditionalists' are the religious conservatives, Pre-Modern, about 29% of the population and shrinking in relative importance since World War II, with a slight higher density in the Midwest. Until recently they used to share the scene only with the next group: the Modernists.

The 'Modernists': the dominant subculture embodying the official 'Western Way of Life', dropping from a triumphant majority in the 1950s down today to 47% of the US population (88 million adults). It is the viewpoint that has shaped the Industrial Age. But even as their percentages slowly fall over time, the Modernist viewpoint remains exclusively the one reflected in mass media.

Historically, Modernism developed during the Renaissance in reaction to the 'Traditionalist' societies, as a rejection of the religiondominated world- view, which had been the almost exclusive viewpoint until that time. It therefore considers as 'modern' (treated as synonymous with 'sophisticated, advanced, urbane and/or inevitable') the values, technologies and interpretations which oppose themselves to the 'backward', 'under-developed' societies which preceded it. The Modernists kept intact, however, one of the key premises of the previous religion-dominated world-view: the biblical premise that 'Man is to be Master over the rest of creation'.