THE FUTURE OF MONEY Bernard A. Lietaer - library.uniteddiversity ...

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'.