Cultural Creatives

Thanks to the book, Cultural Creatives: How 50 Million People Are Changing the World, by Paul H. Ray Ph.D., and Sherry Ruth Anderson in 2000, four short years after our nonprofit, Kindred World, began, we understand that Kindred Community participants are Cultural Creatives – and that we are not alone. We just feel invisible in our industrial culture and its reality-defining media machine. As Ray and Anderson state, we “care deeply about ecology and saving the planet, about relationships, peace, social justice, and about self actualization, spirituality and self-expression. Surprisingly, they are both inner-directed and socially concerned, they’re activists, volunteers and contributors to good causes more than other Americans.

“However, because they’ve been so invisible in American life, Cultural Creatives themselves are astonished to find out how many share both their values and their way of life. Once they realize their numbers, their impact on American life promises to be enormous, shaping a new agenda for the twenty-first century. What makes the appearance of the Cultural Creatives especially timely today is that our civilization is in the midst of an epochal change, caught between globalization, accelerating technologies and a deteriorating planetary ecology. A creative minority can have enormous leverage to carry us into a new renaissance instead of a disastrous fall.”

Listen to social scientist, Paul Ray, PhD, talk with Kindred’s editor, Lisa Reagan, about Cultural Creatives in this podcast interview, Same Planet, Different Worlds.

In this interview, Lisa Reagan connects the dots between her insights from 15 years of holistic family wellness advocacy and Ray’s investigation of a growing segment of Western population that is transforming mainstream culture through their ability to synthesize vast amounts of information with an inner vision of wholeness, make counter-culture choices for sustainability and wellness, and ultimately bring forward a missing but critically needed worldview for 21st century living: practical wisdom.

Paul Ray presented his research findings in the book, Cultural Creatives: How 50 Million People Are Changing the World in 2000, with his wife and co-author, Sherry Anderson, PhD.  In this interview, Ray shares his updated findings from a 2008 study of Cultural Creatives and peeks into his forthcoming book on the missing element of practical wisdom that Cultural Creatives bring to the current, failing industrial culture.

Paul shares why it is vital that they connect with one another and recognize they are participating in a consciousness-raising movement whose impact will not be reported in the mainstream media, but is measurable by any social scientist who cares to look (and whose job is not dependent on him not looking).

Watch the documentary film on Cultural Creatives here.