Ch. 8: Dimensions in Culture

We’re going to talk a little bit about Hofstede, but not too much. There’s maybe too much about Hofstede in general, in these courses, but I was going to mostly use him as a framework for what I really wanted to talk about, which is mostly American culture. This class… I’m afraid this class and the next couple of classes are really going to be “Ameri-centric”. And again, I know I’ve said this before, but if I’m talking about America it’s not because I think America’s so amazing, but it is a very useful illustration of what happens when a culture hits a point where it has to decide what it’s going to be in the future. And I think what you see right now, in America but also in France - I mean, I think that’s one of the significant things about that New York Times interview with Macron - is who determines the direction a culture goes in? And is it possible for a culture to go in a couple of different directions at the same time? Even if those directions don’t agree with each other?

OK, Hofstede. I think he just died, as a matter of fact, sadly. And while I think they use him a lot, maybe too much, one thing that I do think is useful to think about, is that this whole area of social psychology and intercultural communications and and diversity and… that whole thing, a lot of it was a result of the Second World War and the period right after the Second World War. I mean, I guess the main two motivating factors behind Intercultural Studies were basically world peace after the Second World War - try not to do that again - and money, which was essentially the central factor behind globalisation and American-led hegemony. Again after the war, and those were the two motivating factors. Right? Let’s not have a war, and let’s make some money.

And what’s interesting is that Hofstede seems to be at the perfect juncture of those two motivating factors. First of all, he was born in Holland in 1928, which means the war started when he was about ten or eleven years old. And he would have been seventeen when it ended. So that’s what he was right in the middle of as a kid. So the whole question of why people act the way they act... well, there’s some motivation right there. He spent his whole childhood watching Europe tear itself apart.

And the second thing is that after he developed these skills, after he got older, he got a job working for IBM, and that’s the money part. And it’s a very late-1950s, early-1960s “Mad Men” kind of approach to social psychology, but I just think that’s interesting. Why people do what they do. 

And I think you already know all of the IBM stuff, how he was hired by IBM to go around and figure out why productivity levels were different in different places. OK, so very quickly, for the people who don’t know it, basically he was hired by IBM because IBM had this, uh… you know, it’s a multinational. And so it has the same business model all over the world, but productivity levels were different depending on where their different headquarters were. So people were measurably more productive in Germany than they were in, I don’t know… Brazil. And they couldn’t figure out why. After all, it was the same job. And so they hired this guy, they hired Hofstede, who travelled around and sent out all these surveys and studied the cultures of the host countries and then came up with this idea of the “Dimensions of Culture”.

And here they are, The Five Dimensions of Culture. Actually, I think there are six, now, but Hofstede started off with five. Here are the five dimensions of culture and you can break every culture down into these five categories and depending on their approach towards these categories you can predict, I suppose, how much money you are going to make, Mr. IBM. Basically. It’s a very simplistic way of looking at it but, you know, it’s close enough.

By the way, do you guys remember the “Four Categories of Culture'' which Hofstede said every culture operates some version of? Symbols, Rituals, Heroes and Myths? It’s interesting, you’ve got all these guys - you’ve got Hofstede and you’ve got Kluckhohn and Strodtbeck and Edward Hall and what all of these guys are trying to do is establish some kind of framework or praxis or whatever by which you can measure every culture. Which is a little reductive, I guess, but I guess it makes sense.

This is the Kluckhohn and Strodtbeck thing we talked about before, justs to make sure that you remember it before we move on. The “who am I, who are we, where are we, what time is it, is it time to go to work?” set of worldview questions.

OK, and before I even talk about the Hofstede's theories, let’s criticise and discredit them. Well, no, but let's at least bring them down a little. It’s… Look, it’s not perfect, you know? It’s convenient, but at the same time there are problems with it. One of them is “is a nation the best way to study a culture?” You know, if I want to understand France, do I go “OK, here is a map of France, and everything within the borders of this map…” You know, how accurate is that?

I mean, especially right now.

If you got that New York Times article I sent you - one of the things that Macron seemed… I don’t know if you read it or not, but Macron seemed to be saying that “We are…” You know, that “the central value of French culture is secularism and this idea of multiculturalism is an unwelcome American influence - and as an essentially American problem it has no place in French culture or in French discourse. It's an American problem.” And so, by that reading, it’s not France’s fault that people are upset, it’s America’s approach towards multiculturalism. Which is an interesting tactic. I mean, maybe I’m reading it wrong, but if that is what he’s saying, it’s kind of interesting. Because he’s kind of shifting responsibility away from an issue that I think is a French debate right now to a “This troublesome aspect of multiculturalism isn’t really a French issue, it’s an American one.” You know what I mean? And it seems to me that most of the people in the debate in France aren’t reading the New York Times. There may be some performative aspects to it, yes. Absolutely. The Black Lives Matter movement may be fashionable at the moment. But at the same time, this seems to be an organic domestic debate within French culture about what it means to be French. Not an invasive kind of outside undermining of French culture.

OK, so back to Hofstede. Nations are not necessarily the best way of studying cultures. Especially when the nations themselves can’t decide what they themselves are. I mean, America… it’s the same thing. Sorry, one more thing about that article. It’s the same thing. It’s the same debate that’s happening in America, right. So either it’s all from the Black Lives Matter movement, which I don’t think it is, or this is a global issue that is hitting France and hitting America and hitting England at the same time because the model that we've all been operating under - call it late-stage capitalism or whatever you want to call it - is shifting rapidly and we're all scrambling around to find out place in it. And really it’s a fight - we talked about this before - but really it’s a fight over which narrative of the nation’s culture are you going to go with? Because the response against the Black Lives Matter movement in America is also basically a… you know, if you come back with “Well, ALL lives matter” it’s a way of using secularism to shut down the debate as well. And again, if you really believe that all lives matter, that has to embrace the Black Lives Matter movement, not compete with it in order to shut it down. I mean, can a secular state also be a multi-cultural one? Or are multicultural states inherently competitive? Beats me.

OK, more problems with Hofstede. So maybe nations aren't the best units of studying culture, and then, on top of that, maybe IBM is not the best unit either. Nation is problematic enough, but then you have IBM on top of that, and… for example, where I live in Dublin is a five-minute walk from Google’s European headquarters, right? And the Facebook headquarters are two minutes from there. And the Twitter headquarters are another three minutes away. It’s all right here. And in my neighbourhood you can kind of tell who is local and who works for Google, or who works for Facebook. For one thing, they’re all in great shape, because they go to the gym all the time. They either work, or they’re at the gym. And they all run around in their lycra and their lanyards and… And I’ve been to San Francisco, and I’ve seen people who work for Google in San Francisco, too. And they basically all have the same look. Yeah, some are living in Ireland and some are living in San Francisco, but they’re all essentially citizens of Google. And so would they be an accurate representation of a national culture? I mean, it wouldn’t even be a very good representation of my neighbourhood. And it’s the same with IBM.

So, OK. Nations, then IBM, and then a couple of other problems. As much as I like Hofstede, you know… He didn’t have a lot of feedback on his surveys. His sample size was small, he combined two separate studies - one from 1968 and the other from 1971 - so right there you have a problem because that’s a three-year span. Things change in three years. Culture changed a lot between 1968 and 1971. And then he only used 40 countries out of… I don’t know, how many countries are there? So then he had to cram all the other ones into that category of 40. And then, outside of that, he only got something like 1000 surveys back. So over three years, using a select group from a relatively small proportion of all the countries of the world, he got 1000 surveys and mashed them together and he said “Here’s culture!”

OK. I mean, I like it. But it’s a lot of faith. You’re asking for a lot of faith. 

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OK, so the Five Dimensions of Culture. Individualism versus Collectivism, Masculinity versus Femininity, which is, uh… I think they recently renamed this category, I forgot what they renamed it. Security, or something along those lines. And I have to admit, for a long time when I was teaching this, I was kind of embarrassed by the whole idea of breaking culture down into terms of masculinity versus femininity, but then it occurred to me that I’m not doing that, Hofstede’s doing that, and I guess it's kind of indicative of the time when he was doing it.

Also, recently, I think that there’s a little more credibility to the category than I used to. At least as a kind of short-hand metaphor. I mean, I'm still a little reluctant to just say “Well, men are like this and women are like that” because I think we’ve kind of moved on from that as far as gender definitions go. But at the same time…

Do you remember yesterday when we played that game “Name that World Leader”? And I showed you a bunch of politicians? I showed you the Cambodian guy and the Egyptian guy and the guy from Zimbabwe? Well, I mean, Jacinda Ardern took care of Covid in… And I know she was on an island and it was easier because she was in the middle of an ocean, but at the same time she was able to pull together a collective response in New Zealand to deal with the virus and it was pretty successful. And she could not be more… in the "Maternal" versus "Paternal" categories, I mean, she had a baby while she was the Prime Minister while dealing with… And meanwhile you’ve got these macho guys like Macron or Trump or Erdogan or Orban and they’re posturing and beating the drum of individualism and the virus is having a great old time. So I think there might be something to it. Maybe there is something to it.

Although then you have Le Pen, so that makes things kind of complicated.

OK, and then Power Distance. And I hope you remember Power Distance, because I think it's really important, both for cultural studies and just to understand what’s going on in the world. Again, the accepted ratio of power within a society, and the most important word in that definition is “accepted". And that means accepted from the bottom, it doesn’t mean accepted from the top because of course they accept it, they get all the stuff. But the only reason that ratio is allowed to exist is because the people at the bottom endorse the ratio. And it's worth looking at why they endorse that inequality. And what happens when they don’t? 1789 in Paris, that’s what happens when they don’t.

And then Uncertainty Avoidance, which is basically how willing is your culture to take a risk? And I think this ties in directly to Power Distance. So the promise of America, for example… or the deal you made when you went to America was traditionally “Look, you come here, good luck. It might work out, it might not work out, but you take your shot.” That’s the whole basis of the American Dream. You go into the mountains. Maybe you get gold, maybe you get eaten by a bear. They’re both possible. And that deal makes sense as long as there is more gold than there are people. As long as there are more resources than there are people competing for them… this goes right back to Malthus. As long as you have more resources than people who want them, then it’s worth taking a chance. However, when you have more people than you have gold in the mountains, the power distance goes up and so does the uncertainty avoidance because why would you take a chance? There are more bears than there is gold. And there are more people competing for what gold there is. Do you understand what I mean?

And so all of these things are interconnected. A lot of these overlap. You know, you have a highly masculine culture, it also tends to be an individualistic culture, and it tends to have short-term goals, and it also tends to have a lower level of uncertainty avoidance. But the “versus” is interesting, you know? Masculinity versus Femininity. Long-term versus short-term. And we talked about this before, about how a culture goes from one set of values to two different and opposing sets of ideas, right? And it feels that this is where we are right now.

Once upon a time - for land-owning white men, anyway - the core values of the new culture were liberty, equality, diversity, self-government, individualism, and unity. And then as the country develops and it becomes more industrial and you have more people and different people, the culture starts to kind of stretch out a little bit. So you’ve got these guys over here, and it’s all self-government and nationalism, and these guys are really into property and guns and religious freedom. And then over on the other side you’ve got these guys who are really into diversity and unity and collectivism. Sort of a country mouse and city mouse, Texas and Brooklyn. But it still holds together, as a culture it still holds together, because you’ve still got enough in the middle that, uh… I’m never going to agree with you about abortion and you’re never going to agree with me about guns but at the same time we can all agree that our kids need to go to school. Or we can all agree that you shouldn’t drive drunk. We can at least all agree that a red light means “stop”. But once you can’t agree on that, then you’re really in trouble.

Your security depends on my security, and my security depends on your security. Selfish selflessness. Even if I don’t like you, I’m willing to work with you, because we’re all in the same boat. Called America, or France, or whatever.

And then what happens - and I’m afraid that this is where we are right now - maybe there is more that we disagree on than we agree on. Maybe there’s more you’re willing to sacrifice, even if you know you need it, to get what you feel you need more than your security. Or your kid's security. And if that’s the case, we’re either going to have to go to two different places, physically, and have our own governments, or we’re going to have to figure out, within this one place, how we can work together. Or do we work together? Or do I just dominate you? Or do you just dominate me? And I really do think to an extent that’s where we are right now, and I think that ties in with the fact that 73 million… I mean, look, Trump lost. But almost half of the people who voted, voted for him. So it’s not like it was a small group over there and a large group over here. And half of the voting population believe in individualism and free-markets and “traditional” values and the other half are arguing for collectivism and civil liberties and equality and diversity. The culture itself is pretty much split down the middle.

And as far as demographics go, the reason that 2042 is a big deal is that 2042 looks more like this second narrative than the first one. Urban, collective, diverse. And if that group gets bigger, then a solid majority of the people can say “OK, this is what our culture is now”. Well, OK, that’s great for these guys, it’s not so great for the guys over here, and those guys are going to fight it as much as they can, do you understand? Because not everybody wants "urban, collective, diverse." And they're allowed not to want it. And if they feel like that's what they're being forced into, and that what they had before is being taken away from them - and that's the message they're hearing again and again and again - of course they're going to fight. Why wouldn't they fight? You would. And if you go back to Hofstede, it kind of, sort of, a little bit falls under this Individualism vs. Collectivism, Masculinity vs. Femininity, Long-Term vs. Short-Term, etc. 

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I don’t think I need to talk too much about individualism versus collectivism. I think we covered most of this already. How people define themselves in relation to society. Self-direction and self-achievement versus in-group loyalty and conformity.

Collectivism. You know, everybody’s working the same…

I’m from a city. Most of you guys are from Paris, more or less, right? Our cultures come from cities and a city works on a collectivist model, right? When it works. You don’t necessarily know everybody, but at the same time, everybody knows the same rules and everybody follows the same patterns of behaviour because if you don’t, in a place where you have that many people concentrated in such a tight area, you just have chaos. Which sometimes you get. And so as we become a more industrialised, urbanied population, we also to an extent become a more collectivist population.

You know, when people talk about China or India being a more “collectivist” society than the United States, there are reasons for that. Like practical, boring, logical reasons. It’s not like the angels came down and said “OK, you’re going to be collectivists.” It's not metaphysics. It was more “Well, we’ve got a hell of a lot of people and we have limited agriculture, and so we’re going to have to figure out how to move along. So that either everybody eats or we kill most of the people here. That’s the choice. And sometimes the decision was, “OK, let’s kill most of the people here.” The problem is the people, so just get rip of the people and you get rid of the problem. I mean, Stalin did it. Mao did it. I know certain hardcore Irish Republicans who would say the potato famine was a pretty convenient was or sorting out the Irish problem. There's only so much collective sacrifice people - even collectivist people - are up for. And what’s interesting is again, as the population - you remember Malthus - as the population grows, that’s the debate. Do we redistribute resources or do we just kill half the people here? I mean, I guess they’re both solutions.

In the United States… I don’t know if you know who Thomas Jefferson was. He was the third president and he wrote the Declaration of Independence and he was the French Ambassador for a while. And Alexander Hamilton, who you might know as the guy from the musical, but before the musical, Hamilton and Jefferson basically set out the foundations of American independence and liberty. And they had very conflicting ideas of the way the country and the culture should operate. And Jefferson said “Look, we just left a king, we just left Europe, we just left a Pope, we just left all our masters behind. And what we need to do more than anything else is have the courage to embrace ‘Freedom’, right? I mean, as close to total freedom as we can.” Rousseau really had his hooks in this guy. I mean, not for everybody. Not for his slaves, of course, but except for them… but if you were a land-owning white guy, it was about Freedom from. Not Freedom to something - which is a more European interpretation of the concept - but Freedom from something. Hamilton, on the other hand, was a Federalist. He wanted a king. He wanted to reinstate an American monarchy. He was much more of a Hobbesian - he figured unchecked freedom was disaster. What's that movie, "The Purge"? That. And he said “No, we need to have a strong centralised government in order to survive.” And that tension, that dynamic in America is still there today.

What can you do that the government can’t stop you from doing, and what do you owe the government? And the way that works in America is through this kind of “States Rights versus Federal Laws” negotiated compromise. So, for example, I know that you guys all think that everybody in America has a gun, right? Well, a lot of people in America do have guns, that’s true. But it depends on where you live. If you live in Georgia, where my father lives, and you have three hundred dollars, you can go buy a gun. There’s this one store that I go to every time I visit my dad, and it’s an amazing place. You can buy a gun, a boat, clothes, I usually buy a pair of shoes when I’m there. Beef jerky. You can buy beef jerky, a gun, a soda, a crossbow, and a boat. I brought my kids there and they were amazed, my little European/Irish kids. Welcome to America! Good Carhartt. But you can't buy a gun - at least not legally, not easily - in Massachusetts. And so you've got this situation where if you're from Boston and you want to get a gun, you've got to get one from some guy who drives up from Georgia. And, at the same time, if you live in... I don't know, Texas, and you want to get an abortion, you've got to drive over to Nevada. In France, as I understand it anyway, the law is the law from Paris to Lyon to wherever.

The Confucian Model

I don’t want to talk too much about this, because I know you’ve heard this before. But just to go over the basic pillars of the model.
It stresses...
1. Virtues
2. Selflessness
3. Duty
4. Patriotism
5. Hard-Work
6. Respect for Hierarchy

One thing, though, I thought was interesting. A lot of my American students, especially a lot of my more conservative American students, are very pro-military. Which is probably not a surprise to you. Although not pro-Trump, which is interesting. But they’re very pro-military. Very much into the idea of protecting freedom, and when they say freedom they’re really talking about individualism. What’s interesting to me is that the model that the military operates on is a collectivist model. I mean, you can’t really have an individualistic army. I mean, you can. You can try, but… I don’t know if you know anything about Roman history but when the Romans came up to England and Scotland and all that, the reason they won was because the Romans worked as an organized group and the Celts - the Scots and all those guys - they would take off all their clothes and they would paint themselves blue and they’d just come charging over the hillside. And for the Romans it was “This is easy! This is so easy! BAM, you’re gone!” because they worked in legions, right? They worked as a collectivist unit. And I thought, well, that’s interesting. That paradox between patriotism and freedom and all of that stuff with this kind of unexamined celebration of conformity and collectivism and hierarchy.

And another group that I found, and I thought this was interesting too. When I was teaching this class forever, they would talk about a Confucian model and they would talk about China as a collectivist Confucian society, which makes an obvious kind of sense, but then I thought “Well, yeah, but then there’s the army…” and then I was reading a book that one of my kids had that was about the Mafia in New York. And this, for example… I dunno, you’ve probably seen pictures like this. This is one of those FBI secret surveillance photos taken from the back of some van or something. So they arrested this gangster in Palermo, in Sicily, and he had a list - this old gangster guy - he had a list that he was carrying around with him, this piece of paper he had in his pocket.

And this is the list, these are the things you have to do to be in the Mafia.

1. No one can present himself directly to another of our friends. There must be a third person to do it. So there’s a hierarchy.
2. Never look at the wives of friends. Fair enough.
3. Never be seen with the police. Understandable.
4. Don’t go to bars and clubs. 
5. Always be available to the Cosa Nostra, even if your wife is about to give birth. So it’s loyalty and patriotism.
6. Appointments must be respected.
7. Wives must be treated with respect.
8. When asked for any information, the answer must be the truth.
9. Money cannot be appropriated - which means, essentially, stolen -  if it belongs to others, or to other families.
10. People who can’t be part of the Cosa Nostra are anyone with a close relative in the police, with a two-timing relative in the family, anyone who behaves badly and doesn’t hold to moral values.

I’m reading this and I’m thinking “They sound like the best people in the world!” You know, be good to your wife, don’t lie, don’t go to bars and clubs. Your mother would be so happy if you married somebody like this. I mean, are you sure this is… But it’s the same idea. And what’s odd about it is that on one level the Mafia is the most capitalistic and competitive organization you could ever find, but at the same time, you know… the FAMILY. It’s all about the family. High-context. The Mafia is a very high-context organization. 

Individualism

OK, so. Belief in the primary importance of the individual and in the virtues of self-reliance and personal independence. Acts based on these beliefs. Yes, OK.

A doctrine advocating freedom from government regulation in the pursuit of a person’s economic goals. Which is interpreted in a lot of places, certainly in America, as “low taxation”. That the government can’t… I was reading one of the students’ essays and one of you guys said you really wanted to go to America because France is too conservative and in America you can make it. And then the student used the “Wolf of Wall Street” as an example of American success, and it’s like… wait, he was a bad guy. He went to prison. He SHOULD have gone to prison. It scares me how many of my students have seen the “Wolf of Wall Street” and said “Yeah, that’s it, man. I’m doing THAT!” Yeah, I want a boat. I want to throw short people at walls. I want to do cocaine with prostitutes.

No, you don’t. It’s not going to make you happy.  

A doctrine holding that the interests of the individual should take precedence over the interests of the state or social group. Which, again, goes into that question of taxation as a moral issue. Right? Should you pay taxes, or is it every man for himself? 

The quality of being an individual; individuality.

This brings me back to that Jefferson thing, and hopefully you guys will remember this because we’re going to talk about it next week as well. But this goes back to that idea of Thomas Jefferson and individualism and freedom.
   

Right? This is the reason. “Live Free or Die” versus the obligations of the Family. This was always the tension in American culture. After the Covid-19 thing, it REALLY became a tension in American culture. Because the Covid thing was such an obvious… I mean, the reason you wear the mask is because we are all in this together and if you don’t wear the mask I’m going to get sick and if I don’t wear the mask, YOU’RE going to get sick. That’s the collectivist argument for wearing the mask. The individualistic argument against wearing the mask is “This is a free country and you can’t tell me to wear a mask”. Now, I’m essentially an urban collectivist liberal academic, right? So for me it’s an obvious argument. It’s like “No, you’ve got to wear a mask because that’s the social contract”. But at the same time, you know, people on the other side feel as unambiguously correct as well. Right?

And so you’ve got these guys who show up at the Michigan State Courthouse, up in Lansing, and I don’t know if you know where Michigan even is but these are the guys who stormed the Governor’s offices in Michigan to protest after the State of Michigan locked down the shops and the malls and all of that sort of stuff because of the virus. But for these guys.... if you go back to our definitions of individualism for a second, the connection between the first definition - the importance of the individual and in the virtues of self-reliance - and the second one, advocating freedom from government regulation in the pursuit of a person’s economic goals - those two things are connected. It’s not like an arbitrary relationship. Part of freedom is the freedom to make money. And so if you shut down the shops - and I know that from a collectivist urban perspective it seems stupid to a lot of people, but these have real economic ramifications - America backed itself into this idea that individualism and freedom mean the freedom to make money.

That was the promise. You get off the boat, you go look for the gold, maybe you get rich or maybe you get eaten by the bear. But you are free to make that choice. And so for these guys, that’s why they’re out there.

And this is this Thomas Jefferson quote that you hear a lot around these guys. And I want you to remember this, because I’m going to talk about it next week. But he said, two years before the French Revolution - because this was the same argument in France, essentially. Maybe not so much about economics, but certain about “Freedom FROM” the monarchy or “Freedom FROM” the king or - and so Jefferson says; “What countries can preserve its liberties if its rulers are not warned from time to time that their people preserve the spirit of resistance? Let them take arms. The remedy is to set them right as to facts, pardon and pacify them. What signify a few lives lost in a century or two? The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants.”

Which basically means a country is only free if the leaders of that country are a little afraid of the people they are leading. If the people are… Look, in France before the Revolution, the king had the power and the people were the subjects of the King. That was not a free society. A free society means that the King - well, first of all you get rid of the King - but if you HAVE a King, the King has to be afraid of the people he’s ruling. So let them take arms. Let them have weapons. That’s why the King’s going to be afraid of them. The remedy is through education. But this final point, “what signify a few lost lives in a century or two?”. Jefferson’s saying, essentially, if people die every once in a while for freedom, that’s a price worth paying. “The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants.”

So Jefferson would look at this scene on the steps of the Michigan State House as essentially a positive sign. This is what freedom looks like. This isn’t the ONLY thing that freedom looks like, but this is freedom because these guys have guns. And they’re standing outside the Governor’s office. And so the Governor had better listen to these people. And that’s the dynamic tension that the country operates along. So you have all this “Don’t Tread on Me” and “Live Free or Die” and all that sort of stuff. 

In France, if you get sick, you can go to the hospital, right? I mean, you can just go. And you don’t have to sell your house? If you get cancer, it doesn’t mean you have to use up all your savings? And housing? How available is housing? Are you guaranteed some degree of housing? I mean, I know there are homeless people in France, because I’ve seen them, but at the same time, what is social housing like? I’m sure it’s not perfect, but do people have access to housing? You don’t have state access to housing? Ok.

Here’s what’s interesting. Again, in the United States, the debate is really between an individualist and a collectivist society, right? Now, in 2012 Obama was the president, and a couple of things about Obama. One, his father was Black. And Two, he grew up in Hawaii, I guess, but really he was from Chicago - so he’s a minority from a city - and Three, he was a community worker, so that collectivist right there. And four, he was young, and so… He was looking like the growing demographic in America. Urban, minority, young. So he was already recognized as a threat to the other side, which is everything else. Individualistic, White, more rural than urban, all of that sort of stuff.

So Mitt Romney was running for president against Obama in 2012, and he gave this speech. And I kind of like it, because it’s an honest speech. I don’t agree with it, but I kind of like it. And the reason it’s an honest speech is because he was talking to other people already on his side about how they were going to make some money so that they could afford to run for the presidency. You know, fundraising. Unfortunately for Romney, the speech was also recorded by a waiter at the fundraiser, who then gave a copy of it to the newspapers. So he got into some trouble for it. But I kind of… I want to read the quote anyway, because I think it’s worth hearing. This is what he said.

“There are 47% of the people who will vote for the people [Obama] no matter what. All right, there are 47% who are with him, who are dependent on government, who believe the government has a responsibility to care for them, who believe that they are entitled to healthcare, to housing, to food, to you-name-it. That that’s an entitlement, and the government should give it to them. And they will vote for this president no matter what. So our message of tax cuts doesn’t connect. He’ll be out there talking about tax cuts for the rich. I mean, that’s what they sell every four years. So my job is not to worry about those people, I’ll never convince them they should take personal responsibility and care for their lives. What I have to do is convince the five to ten percent in the center.”

So this is the Republican candidate for the presidency and what’s interesting to me about that is that he’s basically saying “Look, almost fifty percent of the country disagree with our vision of what the country is, so I can’t worry about that half of the country. I can only worry about the half of the country that are aligned with our vision of tax cuts and personal responsibility and all that sort of stuff.” Well, if it was like TEN percent of the country aren’t with us, but ninety percent are… I asked you before if healthcare is an entitlement in France. And you said yes, right? I mean, do you see yourself as a victim of the government because you get healthcare from the government? Or is that just the relationship a government has to its individuals?

And this is a real, legitimate, debate. It’s not like “Well, OBVIOUSLY this guy’s wrong.” Because from this guy’s philosophical point of view, the job of a government isn’t to provide healthcare. The job of a government is to provide an area for opportunity, if that makes sense. And yeah, that’s great. But this is that existential issue that I talked about before.

And, you know, the other side of that argument is this thing. This is Obama in 2008, with the whole “Yes, We Can” thing, and the most important word in that slogan is “We” - collectivism, right? And this is what he said, he said: “This is our time, to put our people back to work and open doors of opportunity for our kids; to restore prosperity and promote the cause of peace; to reclaim the American dream and reaffirm that fundamental truth, that, out of many, we are one; that while we breathe, we hope. And where we are met with cynicism and doubts and those who tell us we can’t, we will respond with that timeless creed that sums up the spirit of a people: Yes, we can.”

OK, now when I heard that I considered myself part of the “we” that he was talking about, right? OUR people. OUR time. Right? However, going back to the guys on the steps of the Michigan State House… THESE guys, that’s not how they heard it. OK? They didn’t hear themselves as part of “our”. They didn’t hear themselves as part of “we”. What they heard was “Here is a young collectivist Black guy, this Chicago community worker, saying this is OUR time as opposed to YOUR time.” And this goes directly back to the idea that in a post-industrial economy, when the resources are getting scarce, who gets those resources? Who gets the power? So when Obama says “Yes, we can” I think he’s referring to everybody in the United States because I can afford to. These other guys… I mean, interestingly enough, this is Michigan. Michigan is where Detroit is and Detroit is where they used to make cars. You take the factories out of Detroit and these guys, the white working-class guys, their opportunity is already going. Or gone. Because the factory is gone. So when some young Black guy from Chicago, with a good education and a nice suit, gets up and says “this is our time” they don’t hear that as a positive message of collectivism, they hear it as “your time is over, this is our time now”.

So in that environment, we kind of talked about this yesterday. In that environment, somebody like Trump shows up and says “Yeah, you’re right. This is a war, and it’s not a war against another country, it’s a war within the country” that message resonates. That makes a lot of sense to these guys. And it’s not just because they’re all just stupid. I mean, they ARE in trouble, because the manufacturing base is gone. I mean, we talked about this before, but this is what you do in a collectivist versus individualist model of society. The “power distance” - the accepted ratio - I’m going to talk more about this in a second, so maybe I should come back to it. But I want you to remember these statistics, that 80% owns 15% and 20% owns 85%, and within the 80% you have Black and White and Hispanic and Straight and Gay and Urban and Rural and all that sort of tribal affiliation.

And so how do you get people to vote against their own best interests? How do you get people who don’t have healthcare, for example, to vote against healthcare? I mean, Trump was all about dismantling the government in any way possible. Education, health care. And health care’s a really interesting issue to look at all of the Hofstede stuff though, because it is about collectivism and individualism. What is the government? Is the government a separate thing or are we the government? Is the government a collection of “us” or is it this outside body that we have a flexible and ambiguous relationship with?  

I suppose in a republic, like France, or nominally in America, it’s supposed to be representational of “us”.

Masculinity versus Femininity 

This “Masculinity versus Femininity” category. I don’t know. I won’t go too far into this except to give you a few examples. But the idea of a country embodying… seeing itself as a masculine or feminine society, which I think falls directly into what we were talking about before. I think the idea of a collectivist “the country is there to take care of the citizen” - you know, you take care of it and it takes care of you - that’s more of a maternal view of the country as opposed to the sort of individualistic masculine idea of what America is, for example. You know, America’s… mascot? I don’t know what the right word is. Uncle Sam. Who is this authoritative, masculine figure. In France, you have Marianne. And it’s a more maternalistic… I mean, a very POWERFUL maternalistic figure, it’s not somebody soft, but at the same time, it’s the country as the mother. In Germany, historically they refer to Germany as the “Fatherland”. And if you go into the Masculine/Feminine thing, a masculine country doesn’t owe… you know, it’s like Dad. Dad doesn’t owe you anything, Dad teaches you to take care of yourself. Whereas Mom is like “No, you gotta go to the hospital, because you have cervical cancer.”

Ireland is the same way. Ireland is a weird one, because there are… like France, kind of, there are two political leaders. There’s the President and there’s the Prime Minister. And the Prime Minister’s the one who does all the nasty political stuff while the President kind of embodies the values of the culture. And - although not right now, right now the President’s a man - but for the past twenty years or so before that, the President has tended to be a woman AND, even more interestingly, because Ireland is such a Catholic country or least traditionally was a Catholic country, both the women who were the Presidents were named Mary. So, you know, the idea of THE mother. I guess in a way Marianne is the same thing.

And then you have this sort of thing. This kind of schism. Over here we’ve got Trump and him men marching off to a photo-op at a church, versus “The Squad'', which is the name of the young progressive… I mean, these guys are really interesting. One of them is from Michigan as well, and two of them are Muslim. One of them is Puerto Rican, two of them are Black. And they’re all young, and they’re all minorities, and they’re all progressive Democrats. And they’re all women and they drive Trump insane. Especially AOC, who’s kind of a celebrity, really, in America. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. I don’t know if you’ve ever heard of her but she’s, you know… She’s this young, very articulate, very dynamic political leader and, again, kind of a celebrity. Which, as a celebrity himself, Trump takes very personally. At one point he gave a speech suggesting that they go back to where they came from, and they’re American. They’re already where they came from. Maybe not HIS version of American, but…

And then, just more examples. The tensions, which are really well documented, between Trump and Merkel. And, you know, it’s not just because Merkel is a woman and Trump is a man, but at the same time I do think that they tend to embody different values which Hofstede - NOT ME - But Hofstede would kind of slot into the Masculinity/Femininity category. Right?

Power Distance
  
OK, and then Power Distance. Everybody remembers Power Distance, right? Power Distance is the idea… the accepted ratio of power. I just talked about that. The idea of “The American Dream” depends on a relatively low Power Distance, right? I mean, the central belief of the American Dream is that you can be born poor and you can die rich if you work hard enough, right? That’s the myth. I mean, I don’t think it’s necessarily TRUE. Statistically speaking, it doesn’t seem to be true, but enough people believe it and it is the foundational myth in America. What’s happening now, I think, is that people are not believing in it anymore, because their lives are telling them that that’s not true. And so if it’s NOT true, you have to do one of two things. You either change the system or you find somebody to blame for it not working. What happens when people don’t endorse the system?

OK, so… U.S. Power Distance. High Power Distance is restrictive of upward mobility, Low Power Distance offers greater opportunity across class. Low Power Distance means greater access to opportunity, high Power Distance means less. Now, I mean it depends on a couple of things, and again, do you guys remember Malthus? Because this is all about… remember the ratio of population and resources and the competition for the resources? Because this is the same thing. I mean, we’re looking at it through Hofstede, but it’s the same idea. When you have more people than you have resources, then you have a point of crisis because there’s competition for the resources. Who gets the house? Who gets the healthcare? Who gets the education? All that sort of stuff. The American Dream requires low Power Distance but it’s growing rapidly.

OK, I’m going to read you some really sexy numbers here from the Congressional Budget Office, but this is about Power Distance in the United States. “Between 1979 and 2007, incomes of the top 1% of Americans grew by an average of 257%. Since 1979, the average pre-tax income for the bottom 90% of households decreased by $900 while the top 1% increased by over $700,000 (per annum) as federal taxation became less progressive.”

So what that means is the tax laws were re-written by the government to funnel huge amounts of money to the top 1% of people in the country to the expense of the bottom 90%. Right?
“In 2007, the richest 1% of the American population owned 34.6% of the country’s total wealth, and the next 19% owned 50.5%. In other words, 20% owned 85%, and 80% owned 15%. In 2010, 20% owned 89%.”

Now, again, the ACCEPTED ratio of power. So you have a lot of people endorsing a system that works directly against them, if you see what I mean.

“During the economic expansion (2002 - 2007), the income of the top 1% grew ten times faster than the bottom 90%.”

On top of that, the factories are gone, the population is growing, the resources are running out. And so the competition gets worse. And so what you have, when you have this situation, is you have… you know, the stakes are really high. And people are fighting more viciously over this. And it goes back. Look, if you were just a straight-up Marxist, for example - which I’m not, exactly. I think Marx was very good at identifying the problems, I don’t think he had very good solutions - but if you were just a Marxist it would be really easy. You would just say “OK, look. 80% owns 15%, 20% owns 85%, there’s more of us than there are of them, let’s go get the resources.” Right? I mean, that’s what you would do. However, that’s not what you have. In part because of this tribal competition thing. What you have instead is these guys are fighting those guys. And these guys over here are fighting those guys over there, and they’re all fighting over the 15%, if you follow.

This is why this whole multiculturalism thing becomes a political thing, because multiculturalism isn’t just about needing to recognize and respect my ethnicity or gender or experience. It’s more like, uh… who has access to the resources and it’s tribal. Right? That’s what we said in the very beginning of the course.

And so what happens when that happens?

Well, we’ve talked about this before, but THIS is what happens. You know, you have the suicide rate going up from - this is in America from 1999 to 2017 - from 17.8 out of 100,000 to 22.4 out of 100,000. And this one is a huge issue in America, is the opioid epidemic, where you go from 1999 - it says “Drug Overdose Deaths” - in 1999 with men you’ve got 8.2 deaths per 100,000 to 29.1 deaths per 100,000 in eighteen years. Right? So this is what happens when the Power Distance grows.

And this is what it looks like.

Which goes against the whole narrative of the American Dream, I guess. But I don’t want to get too depressing here.

OK, this map is of life expectancy in the United States. And the darker the red, the shorter you can expect to live, basically. So this is where my family’s from, right here. RIGHT here. Kentucky, West Virginia, Ohio. That sort of area right there. Where it is really dark red. In New York, people live a long time in New York. If you live in New York, you’re OK. If you live in Miami, you’re OK. You live in San Francisco, you’re doing great. You live in Seattle, you’re doing great. You live in Chicago, you’re not doing bad. But if you live in West Virginia, or in Ohio, or in Kentucky or Alabama or any of these other dark red places, life looks a hell of a lot more like the photos we were looking at earlier than it does an episode of “Sex in the City”.

So when Trump was running - You remember that “Rhetorical Triangle” thing that I was talking about? About how you have to have the source, and the message, and the receiver? You remember that? And how you have to establish that “I hear you, I see you. I understand what you’re saying.” - Well, that’s what Trump ran on, right? And so he gave this speech, when he was elected, and he said: “Mothers and children trapped in poverty in our inner-cities. Rusted-out factories scattered like tombstones across the landscape of our nation. An education system flush with cash, but which leaves our young and beautiful students deprived of all knowledge. And the crime and the gangs and the drugs that have stolen too many lives and robbed our country of so much unrealized potential. This American carnage stops right here and stops right now.”
Um, you know, my friends in Brooklyn or in San Francisco, they heard that and they were like “What the hell is he talking about? What’re you, crazy? Everything’s fine.” But those guys in the dark red areas heard him. Now, I don’t think Trump was on their side, because he’s the guy who’s benefiting from the tax laws and getting his stuff made overseas, but at the same time he was able to establish, in that rhetorical triangle thing, he was able to establish that he heard their pain. That’s what he was doing.

Well, this is where people are dying. And again, this is sort of the area that I’m most interested in, this is where the drug overdoses are happening. Suicides. And then this is the electoral map of who voted for Trump in the 2016 election. Now, fortunately, this isn’t the most recent map, but at the same time… This is the area right here. So how do you get the people who are sleeping in parking lots waiting for volunteer healthcare, how do you get people to endorse a system that is not working for them? By the way, if you look at this map, you can see New York is blue. It’s all Democrats, right? Washington D.C. is blue. Seattle is blue. San Francisco is blue. It’s the cities that vote for the Democrats and the country, which was industrial…

 

Well, he’s convincing them, or maybe confirming their suspicions, that there’s an enemy. That the reason their lives are bleak is because the “other” - remember, this is “our” time, these are “our” children - he’s encouraging that reading of the Obama message. Why are you unhappy? Why are you miserable? Why don’t you have jobs? Why are you taking so many drugs? Well, because the people in the cities are taking everything from you. 

And the problem that the Democrats have is that they provide him with a target, too. Look, if you have money you vote for the Democrats. And if you don’t have money, that means that, you know… Look, this is the thing that Hillary Clinton said when she was running against Trump, right? And remember, these guys are looking for somebody to blame anyway and she said: “You know, just to be grossly generalistic, you could put half of Trump’s supporters into what I call the basket of deplorables, right? The racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamaphobic - you name it. And unfortunately there are people like that, and he has lifted them up.”

Well, there ARE people like that, but overwhelmingly the people that she needed the support of, and the people that needed her, heard this message and said “Oh, you think we’re deplorable? You think everybody in this area right here, we’re all deplorable? Well, we’re not going to vote for you, then.” And they didn’t. Overwhelmingly they didn’t, because she played directly into the idea of the elite urban Democrats versus the populist rural Republicans. Which was like an early Christmas present to the Trump campaign, who said “Look, Hillary Clinton revealed her true contempt for everyday American.” And you know what? She kind of did. And because she said such a stupid… What’s interesting to me about this quote is that this quote is like the opposite of that Mitt Romney quote about how he can’t worry about those 47%, right? It’s just on the other side. And it didn’t work when Romney said it, either.

Uncertainty Avoidance  

OK, Uncertainty Avoidance. This is the last one for today. Do you remember yesterday when we talked about “Authoritarian Personalities” and how when people are scared they’re going to vote for an authoritarian who’s going to say “Let me take care of this.” OK, well. And “Hegemony”? Right? The whole idea that when a country is scared of the future… when you don’t think the future’s going to be better than now, you’re scared of it. And why wouldn’t you be? After September 11th, I think, the character of the United States changed significantly. And immediately. I really think it was this moment where we realized that “Oh, my God, we are also vulnerable.” And then you turn on the TV and the message just kept being repeated over and over and over. It is a scary world and you are not safe anywhere. And that became the environment in America, arguably since September 11th. Maybe earlier. This is the index that the Department of Homeland Security put out, where every day they would issue this index of your chances of being killed by a terrorist. You’d check the weather, and then you’d check your Homeland Security Index, and it was never below “Elevated”. It was always either “Elevated” “High” or “Severe”. For twenty years. And so you have a generation that has grown up afraid. And so if you’re afraid you vote for…

The school shooting drill thing that all of my American students have had to do. I don’t know if you know what I’m talking about but basically because of the school shootings, the schools have instituted… you know how you have fire drills? Line up and leave the building, that kind of thing? Well, they do those. But they also do shooting drills, and some of them are really elaborate, and involve grown men with real guns going into schools pretending to shoot people, and the students don’t know if it’s a drill or if it’s real. And some of the students know ahead of time and pretend that they were shot, so students run out of classrooms and they see bodies on the floor and they see guys running around with guns and that’s how they operate the shooting drills in some of these states. Right?

The term “mindfuck” is a really useful term when you talk about this sort of stuff.

What I’m saying is if this is the national culture, then it makes sense to vote for the guy who confirms your fears and says “It’s a scary world, vote for me”. It doesn’t make sense to vote for the guy who wheels out his twelve point plan for carbon reduction, we’re in a war! “We’ll take a good look at tax reform.” It’s like, no! We’re in a war! Which is the message that Trump kept pushing home. This is a time of carnage and war, and all that. And of course those are the guys who are rewriting the tax laws.