Macro Cultural

Psychology
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Macro Cultural Psychology
A Political Philosophy of Mind

Carl Ratner

1
1
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Ratner, Carl.
Macro cultural psychology : a political philosophy of mind / Carl Ratner.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-19-537354-7
1. Social psychology. 2. Cognition and culture.
3. Socialization. 4. Psychology. I. Title.
BF57.R38 2011
302—dc22 2010046639
______________________________________________
9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper
I dedicate this book to my friends. Their personal and intellectual support has sustained
my struggle to develop cultural psychology into an intellectual, cultural, and political
force that can improve our social, psychological, and natural existence. My friends’
support has helped me follow Shakespeare’s advice: “pause not, for the present
time's so sick; be fire with fire, threaten the threatener, and outface the brow of
bragging horror.”
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 preface

This book is related to the social, economic, and ecological crisis of our time. The crisis
(for it is one crisis that appears in different forms, rather than a coincidental set of sepa-
rate problems) impels us to rethink many fundamental social issues in order to find
a sustainable, fulfilling way to live. Analyzing the roots of the crisis and reforming them
requires structurally identifying which factors were central to the crisis and need to be
reformed in order to achieve maximum benefit; it also requires knowing the direction in
which their form and content need to be changed in order to truly solve the crisis and
prevent its reoccurrence.
This book addresses these tasks from the perspective of psychology. It regards psychol-
ogy as a cultural specimen—an example that embodies a broad, complex cultural system
and history (genesis), just as clothing, art, furniture, architecture, the prison system, con-
cepts of childhood, and crime statistics do. Consequently, psychology draws us onto the
cultural plane where we can understand how culture works. Psychological phenomena
are windows into culture. They allow us to see a culture’s strengths and weaknesses from
the vantage point of its psychology. The scientific study of psychology thus leads to cul-
tural critique and reform. The psychological critique and reform of society will draw
upon, extend, and refine similar efforts by scholars in other fields such as education,
criminology, medicine, environmental science, and political economy.
Even working memory in young adults reflects on society. The level of working memory
is inversely related to childhood poverty and stress. The greater the duration of childhood
poverty from birth to age 13 years, the worse one’s working memory as a young adult
(Evans & Schamberg, 2009). Working memory is thus a psychological window into social
inequality and a testament to the need for social reform to reduce class distinctions.
Mental illness is also. Prevalence and recovery are closely related to prosperity and
employment. During the Great Depression, the rate of recovery from schizophrenia was
half that of the decades preceding and following the economic crisis. Furthermore, the
national unemployment rate from 1840 through the 1960s has been found to correlate
with admissions to mental hospitals. These social facts about mental illness indicate how
society can be reformed in the interest of enhancing psychological functioning.
The same is true for aggression. Americans kill each other at the rate of 16,000 a year!
Given that this murder rate is far higher than those of almost all other countries in the
world, it is clearly fostered by broad social factors that can be identified and changed by
using the psychology of violence as a cultural specimen (Ratner, 2006a, pp. 4–6).
Suicide is another psychological phenomenon that reflects society and is a window into
its character. China has one of the highest suicide rates in the world, with an overall sui-
cide rate of 230 per million people, while the world average is only 100 per million.
China’s suicide rate is 2.3 times the world average. Recent statistics show that more than

vii
 viii preface

287,000 Chinese end their own lives every year, with another 3 million attempting sui-
cide. Data from the Beijing Psychological Crisis Intervention Center shows that suicide
is one of the top five causes of death in mainland China, and the leading cause of death
for 15- to 34-year-olds. China is the only country where suicides among women outnum-
ber those among men. (In the Republic of Taiwan, by contrast, two-thirds of suicides are
male). It is also one of the few countries where rural suicides outnumber urban suicides.
Half of the suicides on the mainland are by women in rural areas, who commonly drink
pesticide to end their lives (Phillips, et al., 2002). These demographic details of Chinese
suicide direct attention at transforming the structure of rural life, gender relations, and
youth that generate them. The 1-month prevalence of (all kinds of) mental disorder in
17.5 of the Chinese population (Phillips, et al., 2009) testifies to additional social stres-
sors that need to be eradicated.
These sorts of psychological insight into culture supplement insights from other disci-
plines such as public health, education, environmental science, economics, and political
science about how to enhance fulfillment by improving the social organization of our
culture. Psychological insights into culture are possible only if psychological phenomena
are recognized as being cultural specimens.” Psychological theories that ignore culture’s
relation to psychology, develop no understanding of culture that could be used to enhance
psychological and social functioning.
This book shows how features of cultural factors are contained in psychological
phenomena as a kind of secret that can be unlocked with proper analytical tools . These
tools include a social theory that identifies the structure and content of cultural fact-
ors that bear on psychology. I articulate this theory under the name “macro cultural
psychology.”
Cultural factors in psychology may be analogized to atoms in steel: they are constitu-
ents which are invisible to the naked eye, and are difficult to accept from the perspective
of common sense. Looking at a steel beam, it seems inconceivable that it is composed
of atomic particles which are in motion; similarly, looking at a happy mother, it seems
inconceivable that her joy is composed of cultural elements that originate in government
agencies and corporate headquarters. Macro cultural psychology is analogous to atomic
science in revealing constituents of phenomena that are invisible to the naked eye, are
counter-intuitive, and are difficult to understand and believe. Macro cultural psychology
changes our way of understanding psychology just as fundamentally as atomic theory
changes our way of understanding steel beams.
Some readers may ask, “If macro cultural factors structure psychology, how can
you talk about changing them?” The reason I can talk about transforming factors that
structure our lives is that these factors are cultural, which means they are constructed
by people and can be changed by people. While these factors are in existence, they are
powerful organizers of our lives and psychology. However, we can reflect on them, espe-
cially their history, origination, and effects, and we can transform them. I call this “deter-
minable determinism.” Cultural factors determine behavior in the sense of structuring
it; however, this very determinism is determinable by people. We construct it, and we
can change it. Transforming macro cultural factors is a difficult, protracted, organized,
political struggle; against entrenched interests who employ violence against re-
formers (e.g., the American Revolution and Civil War). However, macro cultural change
 ix preface

certainly occurs. People change governments, social systems, school systems, and trans-
portation systems.
Macro cultural change appears impossible only in the face of thinking that separates
structure from subjectivity. This is reification. It is a fiction. People clearly employ their
subjectivity to create emergent cultural structures. This subjectivity is capable of trans-
forming the structures it created. Reification is based upon the misconnception that indi-
viduals can control only personal actions. Macro cultural factors are then deemed to be
beyond individual control. This is a false theory about human action. Humans construct,
maintain, and transform macro cultural factors. This simple change in the theory of
human action dispels any notion of reification. In summary, cultural determinism is real
and should not be denied; however, it is also changeable or determinable (at the struc-
tural or macro level),. The two are dialectically integrated, not opposed.
The term macro culture may be traced to Bronfenbrenner’s ecological model. He enu-
merates a set of social contexts (levels, layers) from the micro, interpersonal level to
broader levels, some of which are never directly experienced—such as parents’ working
conditions that affect their interactions with their children. The broadest level, which
forms the framework of parameters for all the other, narrower levels, is the social struc-
ture: “Finally, the complex of nested, interconnected systems is viewed as a manifestation
of overarching patterns of ideology and organization of the social institutions common
to a particular culture or subculture. Such generalized patterns are referred to as macro-
systems. Within a given society or social group, the structure and substance of micro-,
meso-, and exosystems tend to be similar, as if they were constructed from the same
master model” (Bronfenbrenner, 1979, p. 8; Ratner, 1991, pp. 172–178). The macro level is
the core of, and key to, all the layers and factors in a society. “Public policy is a part of the
macro system determining the specific properties of exo-, meso-, and microsystems that
occur at the level of everyday life and steer the course of behavior and development”
(Bronfenbrenner, 1979, p. 9).
Bronfenbrenner did not have a coherent model of the constituents, structure, or
dynamics of macro culture, but he at least introduced the construct into Psychology. This
book develops macro culture as the basis of culture and of psychology.
Vygotsky stated the general principle of macro cultural psychology: “the structures of
higher mental functions represent a cast of collective social relations between people.
These [mental] structures are nothing other than a transfer into the personality of an
inward relation of a social order that constitutes the basis of the social structure of the
human personality” (Vygotsky, 1998, pp. 169–170). The wording of this statement deserves
emphasis. Vygotsky says that mental structures are nothing other than social relations
of a social structure, and that there is therefore a social structure of psychology. Psychology
is part of the social structure, and it embodies it in form and content. Vygotsky further
said, “Higher mental functions [are] the product of the historical development of human-
ity” (Vygotsky, 1998, p. 34). Psychology is neither a personal construct nor a natural,
biological construct. Shweder (1990, pp. 1, 24) similarly stated, “Cultural psychology is
the study of the way cultural traditions and social practices regulate, express, transform,
and permute the human psyche, resulting less in psychic unity for humankind than in
ethnic divergences in mind, self, and emotion. . . . In the language of cultural psychology
there are no pure psychological laws, just as there are no unreconstructed or unmediated
 x preface

stimulus events. . . . Cultural psychology signals an end to the purely psychological in

psychology. . . .”
In broad strokes, the major postulates of macro cultural psychology are that (a) psy-
chology is implicated in forming, maintaining, and participating in culture; (b) culture is
primarily macro cultural factors such as social institutions, artifacts, and cultural con-
cepts (of time, wealth, childhood, privacy), (c) therefore, psychological phenomena have
properties that are geared toward forming, maintaining, and participating in macro cul-
tural factors; and d) therefore, understanding psychology scientifically requires under-
standing macro cultural factors that are the basis, locus, objectives, mechanisms, features,
and function of psychological phenomena.
Macro cultural psychology emphasizes psychology’s social character as the basis of
psychology’s higher conscious processes such as reasoning, reflecting, imagining, and
remembering. Cultural features and cultural operating mechanisms elevate and expand
consciousness beyond animal consciousness. Human consciousness is more active and
agentive because it has a cultural operating mechanism that deals with complex, vast,
dynamic cultural phenomena.
For instance, human memory is based on symbols (words). Symbols are cultural prod-
ucts, and they have become embedded in our minds, where they act as the constituents
and operating mechanisms of memory. It is because our memory is composed of cultural
symbols that we can recollect specific events (e.g., our 15th birthday, the house we used to
live in, our first kiss). As Volosinov (1973, p. 13) said, “Consciousness takes shape and
being in the material of signs created by an organized group in the process of its social
intercourse. The individual consciousness is nurtured on signs; it derives its growth from
them; it reflects their logic and laws.” If you attempt to study personal memory without
understanding the logic and laws of cultural symbols, and the specific cultural symbols of
the particular culture, your study will be incomplete and superficial.
The more complex the cultural constituents are, the more active and sophisticated psy-
chological phenomena are.
Broader, higher levels of psychological functioning are the prototype for and basis of
psychology in general. Broader, higher levels of cultural psychology “trickle down” to
individual and interpersonal psychological functioning.
Cultural psychology is defined by one’s conception of culture. The details of, and varia-
tions in, approaches to cultural psychology stem from one’s definition of culture. Macro
cultural psychology is distinctive because of its distinctive conception of culture as objec-
tified, institutionalized macro factors.
Macro cultural psychology does not simply seek to identify some cultural factors that
correlate with psychological processes. It seeks to reconceptualize the nature of human
psychology as a cultural phenomenon. Psychology is not simply influenced by macro
factors in certain respects; its genesis, characteristics, function, principles, operating
mechanisms, telos, and explanatory constructs are cultural. Psychology is not outside of
macro culture, operating on the basis of other principles that interact with cultural prin-
ciples. It is part of culture and it has cultural features.
Consequently, the methodology for studying macro cultural psychology is distinctive.
Psychological phenomena are subject to the principles, forces, and dynamics that
govern macro cultural factors. If cultural factors are institutionalized and administered
 xi preface

as cornerstones of social life, then psychological phenomena are also. If cultural factors
are enduring, unifying cultural phenomena, then psychological phenomena are also. If
cultural factors are formed by political struggle among competing interest groups, then
psychological phenomena are also,. If cultural factors need to be reorganized in order to
solve social problems and enhance human development, then psychological phenomena
must be part of that transformative process.
Bourdieu used the term habitus to express this point. Habitus is a structure of cogni-
tive, perceptual, and emotional dispositions that is structured by social positions and
conditions, and which produces and reproduces them. The psychological dispositions of
habitus are so cultural that Bourdieu calls them “cultural capital.” He means that psycho-
logical dispositions are cultural resources that enable one to navigate within a cultural
field—analogous to financial capital being a cultural resource that one utilizes to navigate
within the economic field.
We must think of psychology on an entirely new level, as having an entirely new basis,
character, and function. Whereas mainstream psychology explains culture in terms of
the individual, adults in terms of childhood experiences (e.g., books such as The
Philosophical Baby: What Children’s Minds Tell Us About Truth, Love, and the Meaning of
Life), the human in terms of animal processes (e.g., The Ape Within Us), the large in terms
of the small, the complex in terms of the simple, and the extrinsic (culture) in terms of
the internal (mind, biology), macro cultural psychology explains the small, the simple,
the individual, the child, and the internal in terms of stimulation and organization by the
large, the complex, the adult, and the extrinsic (culture). Large, complex, extrinsic macro
cultural factors are the foundation and function of psychology.
Macro cultural psychology takes facts that are traditionally overlooked or regarded as
marginal (e.g., cultural variations in emotions, and culturally oriented emotions, such as
love for one’s country, fear of god, and delight at viewing Michelangelo’s sculpture David)
and construes them as prototypes of human psychology. Rather than being extensions of
simpler, natural, universal “basic emotions” such as fear and love, these macro cultural
emotions are the basic form of human emotions. Emotions that are invoked on the inter-
personal level are derivatives and extensions of macro features of emotions, not vice versa.
The macro cultural basis of psychology means we must understand the dynamics
of how cultural factors are formed, maintained, and reformed in order to understand
psychology. We must understand the politics, institutionalization, administration, refor-
mation, and structure of cultural factors in order to understand their psychological/sub-
jective elements, aspects, and features. Psychology must be approached as subjective
elements, aspects, and features of culture, not as personal inventions or natural processes,
nor simply as influenced by culture in an external fashion.
Macro cultural psychology is a psychological theory. It is not simply an acknowledg-
ment of cultural “influences” on psychology. It explains why and how psychology func-
tions as it does. It is a general theory about emotionality, perception, motivation, reasoning,
intelligence, memory, developmental processes, personality, and mental illness. It con-
cludes that human psychological functioning is the way it is because it is cultural.
I analogize macro cultural psychology to astronomy. Astronomy is concerned with the
immense, broad system of factors beyond the earth that bear on it and bring it into being;
cultural psychology is similarly concerned with the immense, broad system of factors
 xii preface

beyond psychology that bear on it and bring it into being. Just as characteristics of the
earth are unintelligible if one doesn’t understand the astrophysics of the sun, moon, other
planets, distant galaxies, and the big bang, so characteristics of psychology are unintelli-
gible without first understanding macro cultural factors such as social institutions, social
conditions, artifacts, politics, and cultural concepts.
Neither of the broad systems, of astronomy and macro culture, can be captured through
sense experience; both require sophisticated methodologies based upon inference and
deduction to link focal phenomena (earth, psychology) with their broad origins and causes.
Just as astronomy is fascinating and awesome for its ability to apprehend immense factors
and processes (the formation of galaxies billions of light years away from us), so cultural
psychology is fascinating and awesome for its ability to apprehend broad cultural factors
and processes (such as “consumer capitalism,” “commodification,” “alienation,” and “ideol-
ogy”) and their affects on intimate phenomena such as self-concept, love, and sexuality.
Mathematical competence has been studied in this way, as a specimen of macro cul-
ture. According to research, gender differences in mathematical competence (numeracy)
are largely an artifact of changeable sociocultural factors relating to gender inequality.
There is substantial variability in the size of the sex difference in mathematics. There is
no general, universal sex difference in mathematics achievement. Girls significantly
outperform boys in seven nations, and boys significantly outperform girls in five nations
(Nosek et al., 2009, p. 10593).
The psychology of numeracy reflects and illuminates oppressive politics, and it indi-
cates that they must be politically reformed to enhance psychological functioning.

Using contemporary data from the U.S. and other nations, we address 3 questions:
Do gender differences in mathematics performance exist in the general popula-
tion? Do gender differences exist among the mathematically talented? Do females
exist who possess profound mathematical talent? In regard to the first question,
contemporary data indicate that girls in the U.S. have reached parity with boys
in mathematics performance, a pattern that is found in some other nations as
well. Focusing on the second question, studies find more males than females scor-
ing above the 95th or 99th percentile, but this gender gap has significantly nar-
rowed over time in the U.S. and is not found among some ethnic groups and in
some nations. Furthermore, data from several studies indicate that greater male
variability with respect to mathematics is not ubiquitous. Rather, its presence
correlates with several measures of gender inequality. Thus, it is largely an artifact
of changeable sociocultural factors, not immutable, innate biological differences
between the sexes. Responding to the third question, we document the existence
of females who possess profound mathematical talent. Finally, we review mount-
ing evidence that both the magnitude of mean math gender differences and the
frequency of identification of gifted and profoundly gifted females significantly
correlate with sociocultural factors, including measures of gender equality across
nations. (Hyde & Mertz, 2009, p. 8801)

Differences between girls’ and boys’ performance in the 10 states surveyed were close
to zero in all grades—even in high schools where gaps had previously existed. In the
 xiii preface

national assessment, differences between girls’ and boys’ performance were trivial.
Worldwide, gender differences in mathematical ability are a function of structural gender
issues such as political empowerment, economic participation and opportunity, and edu-
cational attainment. Gender equality in society correlates roughly 0.40 with various mea-
sures of gender equality in mathematical competence. (Noteworthy is the fact that the
United States ranked only 31st out of 128 countries on a measure of gender equality; Hyde
& Mertz, 2009, p. 8806.)
Macro cultural psychology breaks down the traditional isolation of psychology from
culture and politics. This is a seismic shift in conceptualizing psychological phenomena
and the discipline that studies and treats them. Durkheim expressed this when he said,
“Psychology is destined to renew itself, in part, under the influence of sociology. For if
social phenomena penetrate the individual from the outside, there is a whole realm of
individual consciousness that depends partially upon social causes, a realm which psy-
chology cannot ignore without becoming unintelligible” (cited in Ratner, 2006a, p. 67).
Sociologist Lester Ward similarly theorized in 1893 that “social forces are the psychic
forces as they operate in the collective state of man” (cited in Heinze, 2003, p. 235).
Macro cultural psychology is as great a paradigm shift as Einstein’s integration of matter
and energy was. Einstein reconceptualized mass and energy as two forms of the same
thing. Newtonian mechanics did not attribute kinetic energy to mass, and it did not
regard energy as contributing to the mass of an object. However, Einstein saw mass as
energy, and energy as mass. When energy is removed from a system, its mass decreases
proportionally because mass is energy.
Macro cultural psychology similarly reconceptualizes the nature of human psychology.
We see culture and psychology as two forms of the same thing. We see psychology as
including culture, and culture as including psychology. If psychology is removed from
culture, culture vanishes because its subjective side is eliminated, and if culture is removed
from psychology, psychology vanishes because its objective basis and character are
removed. Einstein described the equivalence of mass and energy as the most important
upshot of the special theory of relativity, because this result lies at the core of modern
physics. I maintain that the equivalence of culture and psychology is the most important
upshot of macro cultural psychology because this result lies at the core of what psycho-
logical science must become. (Of course, macro cultural psychology acknowledges the
conceptual distinction between psychology and culture just as Einstein acknowledged
the conceptual distinction between mass and energy.)
Macro cultural psychology corrects the pervasive resistance by social scientists, and
psychologists in particular, to appreciating the importance of culture for psychological
phenomena. A few examples document this insularity:

“By any account, the last twenty years of the 20th century have seen the most
rapid and dramatic shift of income, assets and resources in favour of the very rich
that has ever taken place in human history. This ‘raiding of the commons’ has
been most evident in the former communist nations, especially Russia after 1989,
where an arriviste plutocracy emerged in little over a decade from the hasty, even
squalid, privatization of state assets and public resources. We can see the rise of
the ‘super rich’ in the ‘old’ capitalist nations, especially those such as the UK and
 xiv preface

USA, which have enthusiastically embraced neo-liberalism from the early 1980s.
In both countries the top one or five percent of income earners have more or less
doubled their share of total income since the early 1980s and we have now almost
returned to pre-1914 levels of income inequality. There is no historical precedent
for such regressive redistribution within one generation without either change in
legal title or economic disaster such as hyper-inflation. For reasons which nobody
yet understands, corporate chief executive officers have for two decades obtained
real wage increases of 20 per cent each year and the much larger number of inter-
mediaries earning multi-million $/£incomes in and around finance has hugely
increased.
Where, however, are the social theorists who focus on these processes as central
to understanding the contemporary dynamics of social change? As the rich draw
away and inhabit their ever more privileged worlds, one might expect a revival of
elite studies from contemporary critical writers who are concerned about such
developments. After all, earlier generations of theorists were in no doubt about
the importance of elites and elite formations for understanding the social dynam-
ics of their nations. . . . Yet, from the middle of the 20th century we can detect the
erosion of this animating concern. (Savage & Williams, 2008, p. 1)”1

Cultural psychologists have manifested the same aversion to concrete culture. The most
dominant cultural force in the world over the past three decades has been neoliberalism.
It has restructured entire societies and it has provoked reactions to itself in the form of
religious fundamentalism and movements for economic justice across the globe. Yet the
word neoliberalism is never mentioned in the leading journals on culture and psychology.
The word neoliberalism is never mentioned in the 17 year history of Mind, Culture,
Activity. The word neoliberalism never appears in any article in The Journal of Cross-
Cultural Psychology, which has been publishing for 40 years. Neoliberalism only appears
once in 16 years of articles in the journal Culture & Psychology. While the editors, authors,
and editorial boards of these psychology journals have failed to mention (much less dis-
cuss) cultural and psychological aspects of neoliberalism in their publications, journals


Savage and Williams (2008) explain the demise of traditional elite studies by unraveling the
“pincer movement” that dispelled traditional elite theory. One part of this pincer is the rise of
positivist or neopositivist social science. A central feature of this shift was the insistence by quan-
titative social scientists that the sample survey was the central research tool for analyzing social
inequality. Given their small group size and invisibility within national sample surveys, elites
thereby slipped from view. The other side of this pincer comes from rejecting macro, political-
economic, structural analyses of society and explaining society as the product of micro-level
interactions. These theories “insisted on the distributed, local, and mobile character of socio-
technical relations, thereby rejecting any obvious appeal to an ‘elite’ acting as a ‘deus ex machina’
which orchestrates society. Acting together, these two different arms of the pincer have theoreti-
cally and methodologically ‘whipped the carpet’ away from elite studies which became deeply
unfashionable right across the social sciences from the mid-1970s onwards” (pp. 3–4).
 xv preface

in anthropology, geography, sociology, cultural studies, education, and social studies of

science, have devoted special issues to these central cultural and psychological issues.
Another example of psychologists’ glaring failure to address concrete culture is the fact
that the most famous and decorated social psychology text ever published, The Social
Animal, by Elliot Aronson, which is now in its 10th edition, never mentions social class
once.
A similar rejection of macro cultural issues has occurred in the study of mental illness:

In North America, especially in the United States, the discussion of social factors
in the development of psychotic disorders has changed profoundly over the last
40 years. Whereas macrosocial factors (such as migration and poverty) were once
the subject of study and discussion, they have fallen from prominence and have
given way to a preoccupation with microsocial issues; the social environment has
been reduced to the clinic, and research efforts have focused on how clinicians
diagnose psychosis in minority populations. (Jarvis, 2007, p. 291)2

Ignoring the concrete organization of society in relation to psychology impoverishes

the science of Psychology. Since psychology is cultural, avoiding its cultural character
prevents completely understanding psychology. This constitutes a crisis in Psychology.
Non-cultural approaches to psychology can detect certain elements of psychology; how-
ever, they can never comprehend psychology in a complete, organic manner.
As Zinchenko (1984, p. 73) said, “The exclusion of the real process of the subject’s life,
of the activity that relates him to objective reality, is the underlying cause of all misinter-
pretations of the nature of consciousness. This is the basis of both mechanistic and ideal-
istic misunderstandings of consciousness.” (see also Vygotsky, 1989).
Disguising, discounting, and denying the full nature of the social system is accom-
plished through a myriad of imaginative strategies that, minimize, trivialize, fragment,
mystify, marginalize, naturalize, personalize, and subjectify, the social system. We shall
critique these throughout the book (in part, because they often contradict each other),


Even Mother’s Day has been depoliticized. It originated after the Civil War as an antiwar move-
ment of mothers who sought to stop war from killing their sons and husbands. The Mother’s Day
Proclamation, written by Julia W. Howe in 1870, spoke to this concern, and pleaded for mothers
to work for the peaceful resolution of conflict. This inbuilt political significance to Mother’s Day
has been extirpated and long forgotten in the move to convert Mother’s Day into a purely per-
sonal celebration of mothers.
The same transformation occurred with the term “male chauvinist.” Women use the term
casually and almost humorously to refer to the selfish or domineering behavior of men. There is
no understanding of the political origins of the term or the sexist behavior that is being denoted.
“Male chauvinist” was coined in the United States by women members of the Communist Party
in 1934 (Mansbridge & Flaster, 2007, p. 642). It was part of the party’s attempt to understand sexist
and racist behavior and attitudes as fostered by exploitation of the capitalist system. Party activ-
ists read writings on sexual equality written by Lenin’s wife. As “male chauvinist” entered popular
culture, it became depoliticized by the individualistic, personal ideology of capitalism. It thus lost
its potential to critique and transform the social system that promotes sexism.
 xvi preface

and we shall utilize macro cultural psychology to explain cultural reasons for why they
have been employed. We shall explain how to overcome this impoverishing of Psychology
by developing the new approach of macro cultural psychology.
To reach the truth about psychology, we need a new epistemology that can apprehend
the neglected features of psychological phenomena. In other words, we need a new epis-
temology as well as a new ontology. The concrete cultural reality of psychology is not
obvious and awaiting our inspection, as if all we have to do is turn our gaze toward it in
order to apprehend it. On the contrary, a special epistemology is necessary in order to
apprehend psychology. Existing epistemologies have proven inadequate to the task. This
book will therefore pay attention to how we must develop our consciousness, not simply
to the object that our consciousness must apprehend. This is precisely what Hegel did in
his Phenomenology of Spirit. As he explains in its Introduction. consciousness has two
objects: the object of investigation and the mental process of investigating it [i.e., con-
sciousness itself]. We believe with Hegel that the new and true object (i.e., psychological
phenomena) is revealed via the dialectical process that consciousness executes on itself,
on its knowledge, as well as on its object. The appropriate epistemology for cultural psy-
chology is what I develop under the rubric of a political philosophy of mind.
 contents

Introduction 3

1. Philosophical and Historical Underpinnings of

Macro Cultural Psychology 44

2. General Principles of Cultural Psychology 81

3. Macro Culture and Psychology 139

4. Philosophical Principles of Concrete

Macro Cultural Psychology 223

5. Concrete Macro Culture and Psychology 282

6. Macro Cultural Psychological Analysis

of Micro-Level Psychology versus Micro
Cultural Psychology 382

7. The Politics of Macro Cultural Psychology 448

Appendix A: A Curriculum of Courses in

Cultural Psychology 475

References 477

Index 499
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Psychology is in need of its own Das Kapital.

—Vygotsky
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Macro Cultural
Psychology
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 introduction

MACRO CULTURAL PSYCHOLOGY

AS SCIENTIFIC ENDEAVOR
A number of psychologists have keenly described psychological variations in different
cultures; however, they have not explained them. They have not developed a theory of
cultural psychology with explanatory constructs that integrate culture and psychology.
Such a theory, which reveals the integration of diverse phenomena as rooted in a set of
parsimonious constructs, is the definition of science. All sciences have followed this pro-
gression, from noticing an association among things to comprehending an essential
unity/continuity among them, through a theoretical set of explanatory constructs. These
constructs are first deduced on the basis of powerful reasoning and informed specula-
tion; they are only later rendered visible and measurable and are confirmed by empirical
research.
I will attempt to drive cultural psychology along this developmental pathway. In
order to see where we are going, it is instructive to review the structure of scientific
thinking that guided the development of other sciences from descriptive to explanatory
disciplines.
Darwin’s thinking is an excellent example. Darwin’s accomplishment was nothing
less than to include the entire diversity of all species of living organisms (from bacteria to
fish, to birds, to slugs, to reptiles, to insects, to dogs, to humans) within a simple, consis-
tent, parsimonious set of explanatory constructs. The first step was when Darwin noticed
that fossils and living organisms manifested similar appearances. This was a difficult
perception to voice because Christian religious doctrine stipulated that species had been
laid down separately and sequentially by God in places where He chose to put them.
According to this story, there was no natural, orderly relation among species; they were
arbitrarily placed in different times and locations. However, Darwin was fascinated by
their apparent resemblance and insisted on exploring it.
This was indispensible to probing how and why species shared similarities across time
and across geographical locales. In the next step, Darwin sought a rational relationship
among species and came up with the idea that species change according to biological
principles. This was an important scientific presupposition—that phenomena are orderly,
rational, and explainable—and it motivated him to make the specific deduction that
the relationship consists of one form changing into another form. In 1832, Darwin called
this transformation “transmutation.” Near the end of his life Darwin wrote, “During the

3
 4 macro cultural psychology

voyage of the Beagle I had been deeply impressed by discovering great fossil animals
covered with armor like that of the existing armadillos. It was evident that such facts as
these, as well as many others, could be explained on the supposition that species gradu-
ally become modified; and the subject haunted me” (cited in Quammen, 2009, p. 52).
Similarly, Darwin noticed that finches on the Galapagos Islands had differently shaped
beaks. He surmised an underlying unity among these disparate appearances: “Seeing this
gradation and diversity of structure in one small, intimately related group of birds, one
might really fancy that from an original paucity of birds in this archipelago, one species
had been taken and modified for different ends” (Quammen, 2009, p. 58).
This deduction led to further specification that transmutation, or evolution, was caused
by natural selection, or survival of the fittest in a given ecological niche.
We can see the thinking process involved in the emergence of biological science:

1. First a relationship was noticed where none should have been expected according
to existing theory, which presumed separateness. This entailed perceiving unity in
apparent diversity—or order in apparent randomness.
2. Darwin’s progress toward biological science required jettisoning the theory that main-
tained separateness among current species, and among current and extinct species
revealed in fossils. That theory prevented probing for relationships and their causes.
3. The relationship is seen as requiring explanation.
4. Creative, warranted, speculative deduction is invoked to develop explanatory
constructs. The first step for Darwin was deducing transmutation, or a continuous
change from one form to another. This imaginative “fancy” unlocked an entirely new
way of thinking about speciation.
5. The notion of transmutation within a species was then broadened to encompass
additional phenomena beyond the ones that provoked its discovery. Darwin saw
that transmutation extended beyond the fossils and living forms among one species
(armadillos). It was a rational principle which organized all life. Darwin concluded
that “all the organic beings which have ever lived on this earth have descended from
some one primordial form” (Ridley, 2009, p. 58).
6. This construct of transmutation (or evolution) was then further explained by the
deeper construct of natural selection—survival of the fittest—in 1838. This, in turn,
led to deducing specific biochemical mechanisms for natural selection (i.e., genetics).
7. The final step comprised empirical vindication and refinement. It was not until 1953
that Crick and Watson discovered DNA and empirically vindicated almost everything
Darwin deduced about evolution. They found that the beak shapes of finches were
determined by DNA production of a protein called BMP4, which makes the beak
thicker and wider. In 2003 the human genome was sequenced and found to be similar
to that of chimpanzees. This validated Darwin’s deduction that species evolve from
common ancestors.

This progression of scientific reasoning necessary to develop a science may be depicted

in the form of an expanding triangle, as in Figure 1. The figure depicts the numbered
points listed above in a graphic pattern.
 5 Introduction

(A) 1, 2, 3 (B) (C), (D)……

------------------------------------------

6 7

fig. 1 The Structure of Scientific Thinking. Letters and Numbers Designate the Increased
Broadening and Deepening of Scientifically Pursuing a Topic.

The triangle expands horizontally and vertically. Horizontal expansion (from observ-
able phenomenon A to B) leads to vertical expansion (to unobservable constructs, 4),
which leads to wider horizontal expansion (5, to additional observable phenomena C, D,
and all life forms, for Darwin), which leads to deeper, vertical theoretical expansion of
unobservable constructs (6, to natural selection, and then on to genetics in the late nine-
teenth and early twentieth century) and, finally, to (7) empirical confirmation and DNA.i
New explanatory constructs at levels 4, 6, and 7 do not simply extend to encompass new
phenomena; they lead to reconceptualizing the nature of phenomena. Transmutation and
natural selection radically transformed Darwin’s concept of a species. It was no longer a
singular, arbitrary, static phenomenon. A species was now integrally related to other spe-
cies in a moving, flowing dynamic. It came from others and evolved into others. As such,
it must be possessed of mechanisms, characteristics, and principles that are different from
previous conceptions of species. The explanatory principles transformed the very nature of
the phenomenon called species. The previous conception was wrong and was replaced by
the new one. The new one was more fruitful in leading to deeper insights and encompass-
ing more related phenomena. For instance, evolution opened the field of genetics. Genetics
would never have been discovered under the religious paradigm in which God arbitrarily
placed species in different spots on the earth. The religious paradigm had no need for
genetics and would never have led anyone to develop notions about genetics. The religious
paradigm had to be jettisoned and replaced by natural processes of speciation, such as
natural selection, to allow genetics to develop as an explanation of the new process.
Figure 1 depicts the classic scientific model of a set of parsimonious explanatory
constructs that explain a wide diversity of phenomena. The model unifies disparate
descriptions of diverse phenomena into a coherent explanatory system governed by a few
basic phenomena at levels 4, 6, and 7. Diverse description is subsumed within unified
 6 macro cultural psychology

explanation (Hanson, 1969, chap. 13). Deepening the explanatory constructs from level 4
to 6 to 7 is the definition of science. Noting correlations of phenomena such as A and B
on level 1 in Figure 1 is prescientific thinking.
This general model holds for all sciences, including social sciences. While differences
exist between the subject matter and specific processes and principles of different sciences,
they all have this general form. Einstein (1949/2009, p. 55) said this clearly: “in astronomy
and economics scientists in both fields attempt to discover laws of general acceptability
for a circumscribed group of phenomena in order to make the interconnection of these
phenomena as clearly understandable as possible. But . . . methodological differences do
exist.”
This commentary on science is applicable to the new theory of macro cultural psycho-
logy. It integrates apparently diverse phenomena—culture and psychology—and explains
their synthesis through a parsimonious set of unobservable, but real, constructs. Other
approaches to psychology have misperceived and misrepresented culture and psychology
as separate and distinct, just as pre-Darwinian thinking about species regarded them as
separate and distinct and failed to apprehend their integral relatedness and evolution.
This erroneous thinking fragments a relationship that is intrinsically organic, or syn-
thetic; macro cultural psychology corrects the erroneous inversion of reality that other
approaches perpetrate. It apprehends the true integral relationship between psychology
and culture. We systematically wrench every detail back to culture and away from the
artificial separation that psychologists have imposed. Macro cultural psychology reveals
a whole new nature to psychological phenomena, just as evolution revealed a whole new
nature to species.
Cultural psychology has accomplished steps 1, 2, and 3 (above and Fig. 1). Cultural psy-
chologists have noted a probable relationship between culture and psychology, and they
have rejected some theoretical barriers to perceiving and explaining this relationship
that mainstream psychology has erected. Many cultural psychologists wish to under-
stand this relationship (3) and are therefore advanced beyond mainstream psychologists
who do not. However, cultural psychologists have not achieved a theoretical break-
through (step 4) that explains the relationship between culture and psychology. Therefore,
cultural psychology has not yet achieved scientific status.
Of all the cultural psychologists of different persuasions (including cross-cultural psy-
chologists, indigenous psychologists, and psychological anthropologists), only one group
has moved toward a theoretical breakthrough. This is the small group of psychologists
associated with Vygotsky. Vygotsky, Luria, and Leontiev developed a school known as
cultural-historical psychology that worked on level 4 of our model.
This book continues the work to drive cultural psychology deeper into levels 4, 5, 6,
and 7 of Figure 1. I advance a theoretical position I call macro cultural psychology. The
reason for this name will become clear later on through an elaboration of the position.
This book outlines a comprehensive psychological theory. As such, it is primarily con-
ceptual in nature. While I draw upon empirical research for my hypotheses, tenets, prin-
ciples, processes, and conclusions, I go beyond empirical research, as all conceptual
works do. The reason is that the social, psychological, and natural worlds are complex
and multileveled; they consist of principles and processes that are not fully or directly
observable as empirical facts. While complex reality generates the facts, is implicated in
 7 Introduction

them, and is represented and implied by them, complex reality is not fully expressed in
and captured by the sensory data of empirical facts. Complex reality—social, psycho-
logical, and natural—is only comprehended by the reason of the human mind and objec-
tified in sophisticated, grand theories. These grand theories are certainly based on facts,
but they are also certainly more than a compendium of facts. They must transcend the
facts to fill them in, explain them, and integrate them on the basis of unobservable prin-
ciples, processes, and features. Scientific theories (and conclusions) are creative exten-
sions of data. In this sense they are “underdetermined” by the data. This is certainly the
case with Einstein’s theory of relativity, Darwin’s theory of evolution, geological theory of
tectonic plates, and Vygotsky’s sociocultural psychology (Hanson, 1969, in particular
chap. 13)
After accumulating a rich collection of facts about species in different ecologies, Darwin
speculated about their common causes and arrived at the theory of evolution. The theory
was not “read off ” from the facts, it was added to them. It required great imagination to
fathom evolutionary theory that was not indicated by the facts themselves. This is the
main reason that great theories are so difficult and rare. They require visionary genius to
surmise them. This is why scientific theorists are admired more than the empiricists who
collect the data.
Darwin’s theory was so “speculative” that it was made without any knowledge of the
mechanisms behind it (i.e., genetics). Genetics was similarly discovered by Mendel based
on deductions from experiments with peas. Mendel never “saw” genes. (The science of
genetics was impeded by Church authorities who burned Mendel’s papers in 1894.)
Contrary to positivistic ideology, the deeper and further a scientist can see beyond
what is immediately observable, measurable, and testable, the more brilliant he or she
is—the more perceptive, creative, profound, and farsighted, and the more scientifically
objective in apprehending reality more deeply than what is immediately observable.
Anyone can see an observable fact. Anyone now can see a cell, an atom, or a gene using
a microscope. This is a purely technical skill that is easily learned. It is far more difficult,
perceptive, imaginative, creative, and knowledgeable to envision cells, atoms, germs, and
genes with specific properties without technical aids such as microscopes—without such
aids even having been invented—on the basis of reasoning, imagination, knowledge, and
insight. This is what true scientific breakthroughs consist of.
Transcending empirical data to postulate unobservable, deep phenomena is not anti-
scientific or extrascientific or subjectivistic. It is objective and intrinsic to science. Pos-
tulating invisible constructs such as cells, atoms, germs, gravity, and genes before the
microscope could detect them is more objective than sensory observations about apples
falling, tides ebbing and flowing, and body organs growing to different sizes. for these pos-
tulates refer to powerful, real things that have far more explanatory and predictive power
than empirical facts do. We understand more about falling apples by conceptualizing
properties of invisible gravity than we do by attending to apples themselves (e.g., how
many fall, when they fall).
The unobservable constructs of macro cultural psychology are equally more important,
informative, and scientific than overt behaviors such as income inequality, years of
schooling, years of marriage, voting behavior, frequency of sexual intercourse, and
number of meals a family eats together in a week. In addition, cultural postulates lead to
 8 macro cultural psychology

more comprehensive, penetrating solutions to social and psychological problems than

overt, empirical facts do.
Einstein explained that scientific concepts are imaginatively constructed. The con-
cept must be consistent with the data—however, it is not directly produced by the data. In
Einstein’s words, “There is no logical path to these laws; only intuition, resting on sympa-
thetic understanding of experience, can reach them. . . . Experience may suggest the
appropriate mathematical concepts, but they most certainly cannot be deduced from it.
Experience remains, of course, the sole criterion of the physical utility of a mathemati-
cal construction. But the creative principle resides in mathematics. . . . We have attempted
to describe how the concepts space, time, and event can be put psychologically into rela-
tion with experiences. Considered logically, they are free creations of the human intelli-
gence . . .” (Einstein, 1954, pp. 226, 274, 364). Einstein’s conception of idealizing concepts
contradicts the positivistic conception that concepts are the sum of empirical, factual
experience.
Einstein makes the further point that these freely invented idealizing concepts, which
transcend any direct connection with empirical data, nevertheless disclose the nature
of physical reality. In this sense, intuitively constructed concepts are more empirical than
factual data because they tell us more about reality than mere facts do. Einstein (1954)
states this explicitly: “By means of such concepts and mental relations between them we
are able to orient ourselves in the labyrinth of sense impressions” (p. 291).
A fully developed macro cultural psychological theory will be equally based on creative
reason, intuition, speculation, and understanding, which are not immediately provable
in a strict sense. I believe I offer enough empirical support for my postulates, tenets, prin-
ciples, speculations, and conclusions to render them plausible and worthy of further
research. However, I leave to later research the difficult task of empirically confirming the
postulates, tenets, principles, speculations, and conclusions that I offer. This is a common
situation in scientific discovery.
New constructs often require new methodologies to research them. Methodology is
not theoretically neutral; like most technology, it is theory-laden and directive. For exam-
ple, assembly-line technology supports a particular mode of production in which the
workers are separated from one another and regulated by the speed of the assembly line,
which is set by management. This technology was deliberately formulated to incorporate
that mode of production; it perpetrates that mode of production, hinders a different
mode of production, and would have to be reconfigured to support a cooperative, demo-
cratic mode of production.
We shall see that a new cultural qualitative methodology is necessary to adequately
research principles of macro cultural psychology. Forcing new subject matter to take
a form that is amenable to the capabilities of the old methodology would necessarily
constrict and distort the new subject matter and its theoretical constructs. Methodology
acts as a theoretical constraint on new theories.
It is thus important to not restrict new conceptualization to conventional methodolog-
ical forms. We should not conceptualize new principles of macro cultural psychology in
terms that are amenable to simple, superficial, fragmented statements on a questionnaire,
or to the simple, superficial, fragmented behavioral observations that are the staple
of behaviorism and the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM).
 9 Introduction

We must let our informed imagination concentrate on fathoming unobservable, unmea-

surable, untestable principles, processes, and elements that explain and describe the sub-
ject we are concerned with. Methodology must wait for this in order to adapt itself to
novel constructs. Of course, new theories must be framed in accordance with the general
scientific tenets of precise definition terms and hypotheses that can be confirmed, or
falsified, when new methodologies become available. We cannot make vague, inconsis-
tent statements.
Now that we are clear about our goals and direction, let us introduce the main points
of macro cultural psychology as a political philosophy of mind.

MACRO CULTURAL FACTORS ARE THE GENESIS, LOCUS,

CHARACTERISTICS, MECHANISMS (OPERATING SYSTEM),
AND FUNCTION OF PSYCHOLOGICAL PHENOMENA
The main tenet of macro cultural psychology is that broad, macro cultural factors—such
as social institutions (e.g., government, army, church, health care, media, and corpora-
tions), cultural artifacts (cars, highways, malls, factories, school buildings, books, cloth-
ing), and cultural concepts (about women, children, work, time, justice, honor, success,
character, wealth, land, abortion)—form the origin, locus, characteristics, operating
mechanism, and function (raison d’être) of psychological phenomena. Rather than
explain this now, it will be more instructive to give a sense of what this means with an
example.
A striking example of this tenet is the psychology that was generated by slavery in the
United States. This psychology not only continued after Emancipation but actually inten-
sified, despite the legal abolition of slavery. After blacks had been legally freed and made
citizens, Southern whites sought to maintain their rule over blacks through informal
cultural rules known as racial etiquette (Harris, 1995; Ritterhouse, 2006). Racial etiquette
thus continued (and intensified) the culture of slavery in the absence of legalized slavery.
It testifies to the importance culture has in preserving the political economy of a society.
Racial etiquette included demeanor on sidewalks (blacks were to defer to whites), sexual
behavior, play, forms of address (e.g., “Sir” versus “boy”), and eating behavior. Violations
of racial etiquette were met by beatings and lynchings. Indeed, “as many as a quarter of
the 4,715 lynchings known to have taken place in the South between 1882 and 1946 resulted
from breaches of racial etiquette that were seldom crimes” (Ritterhouse, 2006, p. 36).
A particular psychology was generated by racial etiquette, and it exemplifies how macro
cultural factors are the origins, operating system, characteristics, and function of psycho-
logical phenomena.
One example of the macro cultural psychology of Southern whites was their accep-
tance of lynching blacks as just punishment for violating the cultural codes. Whites
eagerly attended lynchings and derived pleasure from watching black men be hanged
from a tree. In Fort Lauderdale, Florida, in 1935, a white woman, Marian Jones, claimed
that Reuben Stacey had attacked her. A mob of 30 armed men took Stacey to be lynched.
Word of this spread and brought thousands of curious spectators, including women and
children, to watch him be shot and hanged. Excitement was rife among the crowd, and
photographs of the incident show smug, satisfied looks on the faces of some observers.
 10 macro cultural psychology

Ritterhouse (2006, pp. 74–75)ii describes the perceptions, emotions, and cognition dis-
played at these events (with a historian’s perceptiveness that makes for the best cultural
psychology):

Some white southerners not only failed to regard lynchings negatively as horrors
from which innocent children out [sic] to be sheltered, but instead regarded them
positively as exciting events that neither they nor their children should miss. The
mob execution of a black man, woman, or family was not only a public spectacle
but also public theater, often a festive affair, a participatory ritual of torture and
death that many whites preferred to witness rather than read about. Special excur-
sion trains transported spectators to the scene, employers sometimes released
their workers to attend, parents sent notes to school asking teachers to excuse
their children for the event, and entire families attended, the children hoisted
on their parents shoulders to miss none of the action and accompanying festivi-
ties. Children’s responses to what they saw included an eleven-year old [sic] North
Carolina boy who injured a white playmate during a make-believe lynching, and
that of a nine-year-old who returned from a lynching unsatisfied, telling his
mother, “I have seen a man hanged, now I wish I could see one burned.

This is clearly a culturally based, culturally formed, culturally specific, culturally func-
tional, culturally shared psychology that was generated by the cultural practices and
values of racial etiquette. People without these practices and values would not have the
same perceptions, emotions, motivations, desires, and reasoning processes.
A white Southern woman recounted a childhood incident that further expresses the
cultural basis, character, and function of perceptions, reasoning, and emotions. When
she was 8 years old, around the turn of the twentieth century, she and a playmate were
walking on a sidewalk and an 8-year-old Negro girl did not get out of their way. “We did
not give ground—we were whites!” When the black girl’s arm brushed against her, she
turned on her furiously, saying, “Move over there, you dirty black Nigger” (Ritterhouse,
2006, p. 129).
The white girl’s perceptions and emotions were informed by the racial etiquette that
included investing the sidewalk (a cultural artifact) with cultural (i.e., racial and social)
significance—sidewalks were symbolic of white people’s authority and superiority, and
blacks were supposed to yield even if it meant they had to walk in the gutter. These cul-
tural facts generated (a) the white girl’s perception that the black girl’s behavior was
wrong, immoral, and disrespectful; (b) her reasoning that she had a right to correct this
problem; and (c) her emotional response of outrage and aggression. Without the symbolic
significance attached to the sidewalk and the sense of white privilege, the psychological
reasoning, perception, and emotion would not have been elicited.
Another white boy of 10 reacted on the same basis of white privilege. A larger, older,
black girl did not give way to him on a sidewalk, and he hit her hard in the stomach. He
declared in his memoir, “I wasn’t ashamed” (Ritterhouse, 2006, p. 131). He wasn’t ashamed
because his racial status entitled him to hit blacks and encouraged him to do so in order
to preserve the racial status. His lack of shame was culturally based and formed.iii
 11 Introduction

These examples testify to central tenets of macro cultural psychology: the fact that
cultural practices and values determine the situations in which emotions are elicited, the
kinds of emotions that are elicited, and the concrete quality of those emotions.
An interesting cultural quality of the racist anger was that it was directed at violations
of the racial code (i.e., social status of whites and blacks); it was not a personal animos-
ity directed at the black individual. Whites actually felt close to blacks in their every-
day lives, allowing them to hold, feed, clothe, and play with their children, as well as
cook food for the adults. However, whites felt angry if a black momentarily brushed
their arm on a sidewalk, or sat next to them on the bus for a few minutes. Clearly, this
anger was not a personal animosity arising from a feeling that blacks were dangerous,
diseased, or reprehensible individuals who should be always shunned. The discomfort
and anger at blacks’ violation of social rules was a kind of social outrage, a structural
racism that treated the offender in terms of his or her impact on the social order, not
an immediate impact on the white person that imperiled his or her personal safety. Nor
was this anger a feeling of animosity directed at black personhood or individuality
that would impede future close personal encounters between the black individual and the
white person’s family in other situations. It was a situational anger confined to the par-
ticular social situation that was challenged by the black’s behavior.
Macro cultural factors affect emotions (and psychology, in general) because they are
embodied, or incarnated, in psychology. With Southern whites, most, if not all, of their
perceptions, emotions, and cognitions about Negroes were informed by a superior, pater-
nalistic, patronizing, snobbish attitude that they were inferior to whites in intelligence,
morals, civilization, and emotional control. The anger of the 8-year-old white girl who
became furious at the black girl on the sidewalk was a specific kind of anger that was
tinged with white superiority and the expectation of privilege. Superiority was in the
anger. Her anger was not abstract, nor was it similar to other, concrete forms of anger,
such as anger at a spouse for arriving home late, forgetting a birthday, or having an affair.
These forms of anger are tinged with disappointment, sadness, betrayal, or a sense of
being unloved, not with the superiority that was manifest in the girl’s anger. Conversely,
the girl’s anger had no elements of sadness, disappointment, betrayal, or a sense of being
unloved.
The attitude of white superiority sometimes led whites to not become angry at certain
black “misbehavior” and to tolerate it as normal, typical, expected, unavoidable, even
charming and amusing—as long as it did not challenge the racial etiquette of white supe-
riority. Having children out of wedlock, and even stealing things, elicited no outrage or
disappointment from whites because (a) it didn’t harm whites to any significant extent
and did not challenge racial etiquette, and (b) such behaviors were regarded as natural for
such “inferior creatures.” Indeed, whites enjoyed seeing blacks “misbehave” because it
provided vivid testament to white superiority, and it justified whites’ domination of
blacks.
This patronizing tolerance of black “misbehavior” was an ingredient in whites’ self-
concept. It generated a sense of self-pride, benevolence, tolerance, and altruism because
they did not punish blacks in these cases. This benevolent, tolerant self-concept was
based on a sense, and a power relation, of superiority, not on a sense of genuine caring
 12 macro cultural psychology

and helpfulness. Whites’ sense of benevolence depended on the malevolence of enslaving

blacks and patronizing them; however, this escaped the attention of whites. White self-
concept thus had a distinctive quality, or content. It was not an abstract pride, benevo-
lence, tolerance, and altruism; nor was it the genuine benevolence, tolerance, and altruism
that whites practiced toward other whites of similar status.
The affection that whites felt for blacks was also permeated with racial superiority. It
was a paternalistic, patronizing, arrogant affection that was generated by the behavior of
blacks as dutifully deferential, minding their place. “We loved ‘our Negroes’ downward
but expected them to love us upward. . . . My sense of fellowship with Negroes had an
odd tie-in with my snobbery” (Boyle, 1962, pp. 34, 35). Within these hierarchical limits,
these whites felt that their relationships with blacks were beautiful and that a special love
and understanding existed between them and blacks. As soon as blacks became too
familiar or uppity, this special love and understanding unraveled, and the ruling-class
men and women quickly used force to restore their class dominance. This affection that
embodied racial etiquette was a specific, concrete emotion quite unlike the affection that
whites felt for other whites. This other kind of affection, of whites toward other whites,
was more egalitarian and personal and did not incorporate the quality of hierarchical
distancing that characterized affection for blacks.
This cultural phenomenology that identifies subtle differences in the cultural elicita-
tion, expression, target, and function of phenomenological experience is a tenet of macro
cultural psychology. It is also a research topic of macro cultural psychology, and it is a
practical application of macro cultural psychology that sensitizes us to the specific cul-
tural phenomenology of experience and helps avoid abstractions that obscure psycho-
logical functioning.
The psychology of white–black affection was governed by the operating system of racial
ideology. Their ideology structured their caring in a particular—superior—form. This
same ideology kept them from accurately perceiving the form their own caring took;
their ideology blinded them to the social and psychological effects their racist caring had
on black recipients, and it blinded them to its own existence as the operating system that
was behind all of this (i.e., behind the structuring, and behind the blinding of them to the
structure and to the structuring). Instead, the ideology made them believe that their
caring was a natural, empathic response to the blacks. Ideology thus constituted a quatro-
polar operating system of psychology.
A striking example of how cultural values and practices compose the operating system
of psychological phenomena is an incident that occurred in the early 1950s in North
Carolina. A white boy and his friends were playing basketball with some blacks, all
around 12 years old. One of the white boys tried to inflate the basketball using a needle he
took from a black boy named Bobo. The white boy put the needle in his mouth to wet it
before inserting it into the ball. As he put it in his mouth, he realized that Bobo had wet
the needle a moment before. The racial element of this situation generated a powerful
emotional and sensory reaction: “The realization that the needle I still held in [my]
mouth had come directly from Bobo’s mouth, that it carried on it Bobo’s saliva, trans-
formed my prejudices into a physically painful experience. The basketball needle
had become the ultimate unclean object, carrier of the human degeneracy that black
 13 Introduction

skin represented. It transmitted to me Bobo’s black essence, an essence that degraded me

and made me, like him, less than human” (Ritterhouse, 2006, p. 128).
The boy delicately explains how his racial prejudice generated a physically painful
sensation and emotion in him. His cultural thought about blacks became a sickening
sensation in his body. The cultural concept became a psychological phenomenon. The
psychology was continuous with the concept; it was a transformation of the concept into
a psychological form. The two were sides of the same coin. His prejudice was the operat-
ing system of his sensation and emotion in that it generated their qualities in response to
this particular situation. His emotion and sensation were stimulated by the symbolic
significance he attached to the basketball needle. The needle incarnated racist prejudice
about black bodies and people, and the needle transferred this prejudice about black
malevolence into phenomenological sensations and emotions.
Sarah Boyle (1962, pp. 30, 40) recounts similar powerful, body-wrenching emotions
that were generated by the racial code: “When a Negro didn’t ‘keep his place’ I felt out-
raged. My indignation was triggered by a sense of guilt. I had learned that equality with
Negroes were WRONG, and that it was my fault if a Negro attempted them. Therefore,
I was immediately on the defensive at the first hint of familiarity.” When a cleaning lady
who had conversed with Sarah on numerous occasions called her Patty instead of Miss
Patton, “I felt my entire interior congeal! A Negro had failed to call me Miss! And I was
a [sic] guilty as she. How unseemly my attitude must have been to invite to such a thing!
I experienced a terrible wave of depression, mixed with a kind of horror of myself.”
The cultural-emotional dynamic consisted of first learning a cultural concept (code)
that equality was wrong and that it was her fault for allowing it. This cultural instruction
that it was her fault became a feeling of guilt. Guilt is the feeling that an action is one’s
own fault, and this feeling is simply the other side of the coin of the cultural instruction
that equality was Sarah’s fault.
Boyle’s narrative, like the previous one, is exceptional in indicating the essential equiv-
alence of cultural prescription and emotioniv (akin to the essential equivalence of mass
and energy). The cultural prescription was the operating system of guilt; it made guilt
happen in response to particular situations. Culture is in the mind—subjectivity, mental-
ity, consciousness, agency, psychology.
Furthermore, guilt is continuous with defensiveness, for if one feels guilty, one seeks to
defend oneself from blame. Negroes’ “misbehavior” made Boyle look bad and feel bad, so
she became angry at the immediate situation that generated this discomfort. (She over-
looked the real cause of her discomfort, which is the cultural prohibition against equal
behavior. It was more convenient and socially acceptable to blame the black behavior
than the cultural prohibition. Prejudice may be said to result from ignoring macro cul-
tural influences on behavior. Macro cultural psychology is thus an important way to
overcome prejudice.) Each of these slides into the other like the levels of a spiral seam-
lessly slide into one another and become new levels of the original. The cultural prescrip-
tion slides into guilt, which slides into defensiveness, which slides into anger.
Anger, in these cases, is not an independent thing that simply became conditioned
to (associated with) blacks acting uppity. According to conditioning theory, culture
functioned like a kind of switch that simply linked anger (as a given thing with natural,
 14 macro cultural psychology

intrinsic, universal qualities) to black behavior. However, this psychological theory is

wrong. Culture is not a switch that connects natural psychological processes to particular
situations. Culture actually forms psychological phenomena to function in particular
social situations. Culture is the social situations that form psychology in themselves, as
part of themselves.
Conditioning overlooks and denies the fact that the racial code formed the concrete
quality of anger that Boyle experienced, and culture formed the dynamic by which black
behavior elicited this specific form of anger. Whites’ anger at black people was the result
of a net of assumptions and understandings about black peoples’ psychology, nature, and
cultural level, which were internalized from the cultural code. These cultural assump-
tions became located within Boyle’s “psychological infrastructure,” forming it. Fur-
thermore, white anger was not an immediate, quasi-physiological reaction to black
misbehavior; it was the result of a string of continuous, spiraling transformations of
a cultural prescription from guilt to defensiveness to anger. The prescription was there-
fore the operating system of anger that made it happen in response to a particular kind
of situation. The situation itself (i.e., black behavior) did not mechanically generate
anger by mechanically being moved into a proximate connection with anger. It generated
anger only via the cultural prescription against equal behavior.
Behavioral theories such as conditioning, which are drawn from simple animal behav-
ior, do not suffice to apprehend cultural psychological phenomena and must be replaced
by a new cultural psychological theory. Whites’ fury at black infractions was not an
extension of a natural anger that all animals have. It was not a natural anger associated
with a particular situation. The anger was a social anger, formed by social processes and
incorporating social characteristics.
The cultural code of etiquette was also the operating system of Boyle’s perception. The
code oriented her to look inward at her behavior for the cause of blacks’ violating racial
etiquette; it oriented her away from perceiving the oppressive Jim Crow system as the
cause of blacks’ resentment and resistance. The code also led her to regard “misbehaviors”
of blacks as natural deficiencies.
These examples reveal that the cultural code determines (a) the kind of situation in
which an emotion (or perception or self-concept) is elicited; (b) the strength of the emo-
tion; (c) the kind of emotion—anger, guilt, and/or depression; (d) the concrete quality
of the emotion—tinged with superiority, or egalitarian; and (e) the dynamic of the emo-
tion—how it is generated through concepts and related emotions (see Wikan, 2008, for
a similar example).
The cultural code is thus not an external, secondary “influence” on some inner, “basic”
processes of emotion. The cultural code is the mechanism of emotions. It is central to
them, it is inside them, and it constitutes their basic processes.
Another macro cultural feature of the psychology implicated in racial etiquette was
the manner in which it was socialized. Interpersonal socialization practices reflected
macro cultural factors. Mothers were the primary agents of racist socialization because
they were the primary caretakers. Since the social system was racist, the female socializ-
ers of children inevitably socialized racism in their children.
A searing example of maternal socialization of racism occurred when Sarah Boyle’s
mother responded to her unhappiness over a servant’s telling a lie. Boyle’s mother said,
 15 Introduction

“We never do [lie]. Rosemary is a Negro. They aren’t like us. Promises don’t mean any-
thing to them.” Her mother’s statement socialized Sarah into the Jim Crow belief system:
“I don’t think I ever again—that is, never until I became integrated at the age of about
45—expected the truth of a Negro, or held one fully accountable as I would a white
person, for telling me a lie. Another stone in my inner segregation wall had been cemented
firmly in place” (Boyle, 1962, p. 18).
Micro-level interpersonal interactions should not be idealized as a purely personal
realm beyond macro cultural forces. Quite the contrary: macro forces are implemented
in interpersonal relations. White domination was implemented in small, mundane ways
such as a calculated bump with a shoulder, or calling blacks “boy,” or demanding blacks
tip their hats, or requiring them to use the back door to enter a white’s house.
Micro-level interpersonal interactions must recapitulate macro practices in order to
inscribe subtle habits that will be conducive to accepting and participating in macro cul-
tural practices. If micro-level interactions contradicted the macro level, people would
question, resent, and deviate from macro norms. Psychogenesis can never be free of, or
contradictory to, macro cultural factors.
The socialization of racist psychology and behavior was a two-step process. White par-
ents allowed their children to play with certain black children and to treat their black
nannies as surrogate mothers. However, as adolescence approached, parents indicated
to their children that they must distance themselves socially and emotionally from these
individuals. The emotional distancing from racial groups was culturally generated and
culturally specific, and it had a cultural function of promoting social distancing.
Importantly, the adult structure of life overrode the innocent, playful interactions of
childhood. It also overrode the jolts that white children received when Jim Crow inter-
ceded into these interactions and raised tentative questions about what was going on.
These positive and negative experiences of childhood did not immunize white youth
from falling into the adult molds of segregation and discrimination. Nor did it help them
to give these up in adulthood. “For the vast majority, the ‘forgotten alternatives’ of child-
hood interactions remained forgotten” (Ritterhouse, 2006, p. 163). As Boyle (1962) said,
“These incidents were little centers of genuine truth and experience which remained
sealed off by my indoctrination and training, unable to permeate and purify my overall
conception of the Negro people and their situation in the South” (p. 43). This is a powerful
statement about the power of culture to shape one’s cognition, perception, and agency,
and to override direct experience with individuals, as well as one’s own questioning.
Accounts of socialization during the Reconstruction period reveal an additional, inter-
esting cultural pattern. Psychological socialization was generally implicit in the sense that
parents simply acted out racial etiquette and children imitated them without any particular
instructions or explanation. Social life was structured to enforce racism, and explicit,
verbal instructions were generally unnecessary. This made it difficult to identify racism,
because it was rarely explicit. “We were given no formal instruction in these difficult
matters but we learned our lessons well. We learned the intricate system of taboos, of
manners, voice modulations, words, feelings, along with our prayers, our toilet habits,
and our games” (Ritterhouse, 2006, p. 131).
Instructions were given to children only when they breached the etiquette (e.g., by
being too friendly with blacks and not manifesting sufficient distance and superiority).
 16 macro cultural psychology

One case is Lewis Killian’s experience in Georgia in the 1920s. When a black woman came
begging at his front door, he rushed to tell his mother, “There’s a lady at the door.” His
mother spoke with the woman and afterward she rebuked Lewis: “You should have told
me that was a colored woman. Ladies are white!” (Ritterhouse, 2006, p. 80).
The fact that interracial play was tolerated among children testifies to variability in the
racist system. It was not monolithic and absolute; alternatives were present. However, these
alternatives were circumscribed physically and temporally. They were closed off in adoles-
cence as whites and blacks settled into their adult positions in the racist social structure.
Moreover, after the informal interactions were closed off in adolescence, it was necessary
that they be overlooked and repressed or forgotten so as not to contradict adult norms and
raise questions about them. Perception became desensitized to discrimination as it became
normalized. “I went along,” one white woman recalled, “I wasn’t very interested in race at all.
I didn’t see any segregation or discrimination or anything else” (Ritterhouse, 2006, p. 161).
Memory/forgetting is also a cultural phenomenon. It has a cultural origin, character,
operating system, and function. Its cultural character (content) was forgetting nonracist
alternatives from childhood. Forgetting selectively occurred according to cultural rules.
Cultural rules made selective forgetting happen.
Forgetting’s cultural origin lies in racist etiquette that demanded alternatives be fore-
closed. Parents insisted on terminating interracial play and relegating it to an insignifi-
cant episode of childhood unreality. In addition, the entire structure of white society
drew whites apart from blacks and made earlier play psychologically insignificant.

After a certain amount of confusion, frustration, and even defiance, most chil-
dren accept “the way we do things” without question, especially when “the way we
do things” works to their advantage, as white supremacy worked to the advantage
of whites. Interracial play and other forms of childhood racial contact did offer
alternatives to a social pattern scripted by racial etiquette, but because they were
stacked against the incentives of parental love and white peer-group acceptance,
not to mention personal pride and other possible gains in status, the emotional
attachments of childhood were fairly easy to “forget.” (Ritterhouse, 2006, p. 164)

Forgetting’s cultural function was to promote racism as the only conceivable life style
(Ritterhouse, 2006, p. 9).

It was easiest to repress and “forget” one’s fear or guilt or even one’s unacceptable
affection for a black nurse or playmate. That was what most white adults counseled,
usually implicitly rather than explicitly and often by invoking racial etiquette.
In a society in which adult white southerners energetically repressed any political
alternatives to white supremacy, despite their own stated beliefs in Christian and
democratic values, forgetting was also what made the rest of a white child’s world
comprehensible, his or her most important relationships with family and friends
sustainable. (Ritterhouse, 2006, p. 178)

In other words, forgetting early positive interactions with blacks, and also forgetting
guilt over abandoning them in adolescence under the pressure of racial etiquette, enabled
 17 Introduction

white children to accept the exclusiveness of their white adult social world. Memory thus
had, and has, a cultural function of sustaining (acceptance of) social norms.
Agency was also constrained by racial etiquette and functioned to uphold it. As one
white man recollected, “At the age of ten I understood full well that the Negro had to be
kept in his place, and I was resigned to my part in that general responsibility” (Ritterhouse,
2006, p. 167). Lillian Smith (1961, p. 29) recounts how she used her agency to serve Jim
Crow by actively adjusting her psyche to participate in the racial code that framed her
life: “I learned to believe in freedom, to glow when the word democracy was used, and to
practice slavery from morning to night. I learned it the way all of my southern people
learn it: by closing door after door until one’s mind and heart and conscience are blocked
off from each other and from reality.”
All psychological phenomena have this social function. Racial etiquette could not have
been maintained if blacks and whites had not developed appropriate perceptions, cogni-
tions, motivations, emotions, and self-concepts to participate in it. If whites had devel-
oped a truly egalitarian, personal affection for blacks, they would not have treated them
in a patronizing, dominating manner. Their emotional affection had to contain the pater-
nalism of racist social relations in order for those social relations to be maintained.
Whites’ sexuality had to embody racist overtones in order to distance them from blacks.
Whites’ perceptions and cognitions of blacks had to incarnate a sense of their inferiority
in order to justify discriminating against them. Whites’ memory had to selectively forget
alternatives to racial etiquette.
That psychology is part of macro cultural life is the point of macro cultural psychology.
Psychology is not a separate, internal, natural, or individual phenomenon.

PSYCHOLOGY IS POLITICAL
The statement above (“psychology is political”) is true in the double sense that (a) psycho-
logical phenomena (e.g., the psychology of self-concept) are political, and (b) the study
of psychological phenomena—the discipline of Psychology—is political. (Throughout
this book I shall designate psychology as regards psychological phenomena with a lower-
case “p”; I shall designate the discipline of psychology with an uppercase “P.”)

Psychological Phenomena are Political

Psychological phenomena are political because of the following relationships: psychologi-
cal phenomena are cultural, and culture is political; therefore, psychological phenomena
are political. Culture is political in the sense that it is governed by particular interest
groups and benefits the well-being of those interest groups. The dominant interest group
may be small and elite (as in the United States), or it may be the population at large (as
in most of the original hunter-gatherer societies). Psychological phenomena incarnate
political characteristics of culture, and they have a function of supporting them.
We have seen that the psychology of racial etiquette—its emotions, perceptions, cog-
nitions, memory, forgetting, sexuality, and motivation—reflected and preserved the
political-economic dominance of whites over blacks. “In the Jim Crow South, the racial
etiquette white parents taught reinforced and perpetuated a system of inequality what
 18 macro cultural psychology

was rooted in economic oppression and political disenfranchisement” (Smith, 1961,

p. 236).
Ritterhouse (2006, p. 150) explains the political importance of forgetting interracial
play during childhood: “Encouraging their children to ‘forget’ that there might be more
than one way for blacks and whites to relate to each other was the most personal part of
adult white southerners’ broad [political] agenda of repressing any alternatives to rule by
a conservative white elite.” Ritterhouse here also reiterates the point that micro-level
family interactions are the personal part of the political economy; they are not autono-
mous of it.
Sarah Boyle’s self-blame for allowing blacks to transgress social etiquette was political
in the sense that blaming herself distracted attention from the Jim Crow social system
that generated resentment in blacks and made them resist the oppressive system. The
psychology of guilt is political.
Conversely, the political shielding of the social origins of racism that the code promotes
is a psychological misperception of social reality. Psychology and politics are continuous;
they are two forms of the same thing, like mass and energy are.
Gender differences in personality among middle-class Victorian men (aggressive) and
women (deferential) were similarly political in that they reflected and reinforced domi-
nant and inferior social positions of the sexes.

The Study of Psychological

Phenomena is Political
The study of psychological phenomena is political because the conception of such phe-
nomena has implications for how people are treated, and for the social competencies
and positions associated with psychological phenomena.
Macro cultural psychology has implications for society. It treats psychological phe-
nomena as having been formed by macro cultural factors, which means there is great
reason to analyze the latter in order to understand psychological issues, and there is great
reason to change society in order to improve the cultural factors that form psychology.
There is also great reason to encompass people more fully in social structures, because
this is the seat of their humanity.
On the other hand, psychological explanations of cognitive differences among blacks
and whites, and among men and women, are political when they naturalize and univer-
salize these differences, for this conception naturalizes and universalizes the social com-
petencies, opportunities, and positions that cognitive competencies entail. If, however,
gendered cognitive differences are attributed to socially constructed cultural factors, this
allows the associated social competencies, opportunities, and positions that cognitive
competencies entail to be altered by social remediation.
Furthermore, if our discipline fails to fully understand psychological phenomena, then
it, by extension, obscures the social forces that form them. If our discipline treats psycho-
logical phenomena in abstract terms, then, by extension, it treats society in abstract
terms, because the concepts about psychology must be concepts about the society that
forms it. One cannot construe psychology in abstract terms and then use these to reveal
concrete characteristics of cultural factors.
 19 Introduction

If our discipline treats psychological phenomena as natural and universal, it is implic-

itly saying that society has little affect on psychology, and there is little need to analyze
or change society in order to enhance psychological functioning. Similarly, if our disci-
pline regards psychological phenomena as individual, personal constructions, there is
little need to analyze or change society in relation to psychological functioning. A further
implication of this personal view is that cultural influences, structures, norms, obliga-
tions, and expectations should be minimized to allow individuals the space and free-
dom to construct their own personal psychological phenomena. Finally, construing
psychology as constructed and negotiated by individuals is a democratic assumption
about society at large, for only if society is democratic do people have the freedom to
construct and negotiate their personalities, thoughts, feelings, motives, and desires.
Oppressive societies provide for no such freedom. Thus, the psychological theory implic-
itly makes political assumptions about society.
Naturalistic biochemical theories of mental illness (and psychology in general) are
political because they emphasize nonsocial causes that do not reflect on society and do
not generate any critique of macro cultural factors as having deleterious impacts on
psychology.v In addition, biochemical theories incline toward treating disorders with
commercial drugs that generate profit for corporations. This is clearly recognized and
exploited by pharmaceutical corporations who slant psychiatric research on mental dis-
orders to generate profit. To wit, every one of the authors of DSM-III sections on mood
disorders and schizophrenia had financial ties to drug companies. The companies sought
to steer the research conclusions in a direction that would financially benefit them, and
this is why they offered financial inducements to the psychologists.
The pharmaceutical company Upjohn funded a key conference on panic disorders
where researchers preparing DSM-III were debating whether panic disorder was a legiti-
mate disorder that should be included. The conference began with the chief executive
officer of Upjohn saying, “Look, there are three reasons Upjohn is here taking an interest
in these diagnoses. The first is money. The second is money. And the third is money.”
Robert Spitzer, the head of the DSM-III team, explained the connection between the
profit motive and the psychiatric category: “They [Upjohn] were delighted that we had
the category panic disorder because they felt they had a drug for it. If you have a treat-
ment, you’re more interested in getting the category in the DSM. If you have no treatment
for it, there’s not as much pressure to put the thing in” (Lane, 2007, pp. 74–75). In other
words, Upjohn’s profit motive of selling drugs led to pushing the researchers to make
scientific judgments about psychiatric disorders. “Upjohn had paid for the conference
because it hoped the experts attending would endorse Xanax, its drug, as the preferred
treatment for panic disorder” (Lane, 2007, p. 75; Lane demonstrates that there was no
scientific evidence that panic reaction is a mental disorder).
Lane (2009) provides an additional example of the political economy of psychiatric
categories in his interview with David Healy (author of Mania: A Short History of Bi-
Polar Disease, 2008) in a Psychology Today blog post:

Lane: In the mid-1990s, you note, roughly half of all mood disorders were rede-
fined as bipolar disorder rather than depression. What do you think
accounts for that dramatic shift in perspective?
 20 macro cultural psychology

Healy: The key event in the mid-1990s that led to the change in perspective
was the marketing of Depakote by Abbott as a mood stabilizer. Before
that, the concept of mood stabilization didn’t exist.

Abbott and other companies—such as Lilly, who marketed Zyprexa for bipolar disorder—
have re-engineered manic-depressive illness. While the term bipolar disorder had been
there since 1980, manic-depression was the term that was more commonly used until the
mid-1990s, when it vanished and was replaced by bipolar disorder. Nowadays, over 500
articles per year feature bipolar disorder in their titles.
Healy was himself the victim of Big Pharma’s politicization of psychiatric research.
In 2000, he was offered a job as professor of psychiatry and head of the Mood and Anxiety
Disorders Program at the University of Toronto’s Center for Addiction and Mental Health
(CAMH). While he was in the process of relocating to Toronto and looking for a house
to buy, he delivered a lecture at the Center (his new workplace) on the history of psychop-
harmacology. He mentioned that Prozac might make some people suicidal. Within the
week, his job offer was rescinded. The CAMH had recently received a $1.5 million gift
from Eli Lilly, the manufacturer of Prozac.
The story of how Big Pharma has worked to recast psychological phenomena as bio-
logical functions is a fascinating example of the politicization of psychology (see Conrad,
2007; Horwitz, Wakefield, & Spitzer, 2007). Pharmaceutical companies and psychiatrists
profit handsomely by framing (spinning) normal behavior as a disease state that deserves
serious concern and, of course, expensive medical treatment. The DSM pathologizes
many common behaviors in an attempt to generate exaggerated concern and treatment.
Distracted behavior is “hyperactivity,” shyness is “social phobia,” sadness is “depression”
(Horwitz, 2007, pp. 216–217). Exaggerating a common behavior into pathology generates
medical treatment and specialists for it. Thus, the number of children who take medicine
for attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder increased 41 between 2002 and 2005, and an
informal sample of Americans revealed that one-third take antidepressants. Normal,
moderate behavior—such as shyness, sadness, or distraction—generates neither concern
nor profitable treatment.
Psychiatrists now recognize the political and economic implications of their research,
and they found companies that can utilize their research in profitable ways. The presi-
dent of the American Psychiatric Association, Alan Schatzberg, chair of Stanford’s psy-
chiatry department, controlled more than $6 million worth of stock in Concept Therapies,
a company he founded that is testing a drug to treat psychotic depression, and which
will earn him great wealth (Angell, 2009). This conflict of interest clearly introduces
political-economic bias into Schatzberg’s study of psychology. He will be inclined to pro-
mote biochemical theories that will generate sales of the medicine his company sells.
Schatzberg’s commercial interests also introduce bias into his relation to the American
Psychiatric Association, where he will use his presidential power to promote biochemical
theories of mental illness.
Financial benefit is only one crude political consequence of psychological theoriz-
ing and research. A more subtle, pervasive, and dangerous political consequence con-
cerns how people are treated and how society is implicitly conceived. Reuter (2007, p. 7)
stated this clearly: “although the [medical/scientific] discourse of disease describes very
 21 Introduction

real physiological and emotional experiences of suffering, implicit in the narrative is

a sociocultural account of society, social order, social ordering, and, of course, power
relations.”
One of the ways that social ordering is promulgated in psychiatric constructs is by
misrepresenting psychological disturbance as an individual defect that is not related to
the social order. This effectively absolves society from any role in contributing to psycho-
logical debilitation. The given social order is thus exempted from challenge, and is pre-
served by “nonpolitical” constructs and classifications.
To take one example, the DSM-III states that mental disorder “must not be merely an
expectable and culturally sanctioned response to a particular event, for example, the
death of a loved one. Whatever it’s [sic] original cause, it must be considered a manifesta-
tion of a behavioral, psychological, or biological dysfunction in the individual” (Horwitz,
2007, p. 214). This definition is political because it insists mental disorder is an individual
problem that is not caused by cultural stress. This is a remarkable requirement. It insists
that any time mental disorder appears, we can assume, a priori, that its cause lies in a
dysfunction of the individual. This forecloses any research whatsoever into cultural
aspects of mental disorder, because they have been ruled out a priori.
Social stressors are acknowledged to generate disruptive psychological and behavioral
states (e.g., profound sadness, fear, anger, self-blame), but these states are not so extreme
as to qualify as madness. Social stress is predefined to be a normal part of life and to
generate only moderate, culturally sanctioned dysfunction and disorientation. Madness
is reserved for reactions that go beyond the moderate disorientation that is expected to
result from social stressors. Madness is dysfunction that is so extreme it cannot be attrib-
uted to social stressors, because stressors are not so damaging as to provoke it (Horwitz,
2007, p. 215).
Madness is thus due to individual defects that transcend and overreact to social stres-
sors. Stronger individuals would react to stressors with moderate dysfunction, not mad-
ness. Thus a man who goes berserk after being laid off from work is personally disordered,
because this extreme reaction is not expected by social norms. Whatever reaction tran-
scends expected behavior confined within social protocol is defined as a personal dis-
order. The berserk reaction to joblessness cannot, by definition, be socially caused because
it is not condoned by society. Only reactions that are condoned by society as normal are
attributed to social stressors.
The DSM fallaciously claims that only behavior that is expected and condoned by soci-
ety is socially caused. Conversely, all behavior that is socially caused is expected and
condoned. Other behavior is individually caused.
But this is politically induced sophistry. Surely, extreme behavior that is not socially
expected or condoned can be socially caused by social stressors. Conversely, socially
caused behavior can violate social expectations and sanctions. The berserk man is dis-
traught because of social causes—losing his job has devastating consequences for his life.
Extreme reactions testify to extreme conditions, not to idiosyncratic deficiencies.
The DSM defines madness as necessarily outside society. It cannot, by definition, be
caused by social stressors. Any dysfunction that is caused by social stressors is within the
rubric of “normal”; conversely, only normal dysfunction is socially generated. The reason
is that society is defined as not extremely stressful. Consequently, it cannot, by definition,
 22 macro cultural psychology

cause extreme mental dysfunction. Severe mental dysfunction is defined as necessarily

nonsocial. It must be due to individual defects because it cannot be due to social stres-
sors, which are inherently moderate.
DSM definitions of mental illness thus build in a benign conception of society. This defi-
nition of society and mental illness takes the onus of madness off social stressors. This is
political. Politics are built into the definition of madness. They are also built into treatment.
The DSM’s treatment focuses on treating individual defects rather than reforming the
social environment, since the environment has been exonerated by definition (or fiat).
The DSM’s definition makes normal but extreme responses to stress (e.g., depression,
anger) seem pathological. It exaggerates the prevalence of irrational, pathological psy-
chology and creates a mental illness industry. The “pathological” responses are sup-
pressed by treating the individual with heavy medication, while the environment is
treated sympathetically as having to suffer from irrational individuals who disrupt it.
Mainstream psychology routinely attributes extreme forms of harmful behavior to
individual variables rather than social ones. Individual–environment interaction postu-
lates that individual factors, usually biochemical ones, mediate environmental factors to
produce harmful behavior. In this model, environmental factors are only harmful to vul-
nerable individuals, not to biologically resistant individuals. Poverty, abuse, and other
bad conditions are acknowledged, but with the caveat that they do not adversely affect
everyone, only individuals with biochemical abnormalities that exacerbate the effects of
harmful conditions. Most people survive these conditions quite well, according to the
interactionist model. While the interactionist model appears to accommodate all kinds
of variables, it actually emphasizes individual variables as responsible for destructive
behavior.
This is clear in Caspi et al.’s (2002) interactionist model of antisocial behavior. The
authors studied the manner in which levels of an enzyme, monoamine oxidase A (MAOA),
which oxidizes monoamines on neurotransmitters, interact with childhood maltreatment
to generate antisocial behavior. The authors found that “[t]he main effect of MAOA activ-
ity on the composite index of antisocial behavior was not significant, whereas the main
effect of maltreatment was significant” (p. 852). This means that when subjects with a
high MAOA activity were compared with subjects with low activity, the groups were
indistinguishable with regard to antisocial behavior. On the other hand, high and low
maltreatment did lead to significant behavioral differences. Social treatment affected spe-
cific behavior, but genetic predisposition did not. Caspi et al. seek to temper this conclu-
sion by searching for an interaction effect where genetic risk mediates social treatment
and accounts for most of the antisocial behavior. In their words:

We studied a large sample of male children from birth to adulthood to determine

why some children who are maltreated grow up to develop antisocial behavior,
whereas others do not. A functional polymorphism in the gene encoding the
neurotransmitter-metabolizing enzyme monoamine oxidase A (MAOA) was
found to moderate the effect of maltreatment. Maltreated children with a geno-
type conferring high levels of MAOA expression were less likely to develop anti-
social problems. These findings are taken as partly explaining why not all victims
of maltreatment grow up to victimize others, and they provide epidemiological
 23 Introduction

evidence that genotypes can moderate children’s sensitivity to environmental

insults. . . . For all four antisocial outcomes, the pattern of findings was consistent
with the hypothesis that the association between maltreatment and antisocial
behavior is conditional, depending on the child’s MAOA genotype. . . . Among
males with high MAOA activity, maltreatment did not confer significant risk for
conduct disorder, conviction of violent crime, or anti-social personality disorder.
(Caspi et al., 2002, pp. 851, 853)

These comments represent the politics of interactionism. The thrust of interactionism

displaces the predominant causes of destructive behavior from cultural factors to indi-
vidual, biological ones that “interact” with them.
The main effects of Caspi et al.’s (2002) study demonstrate that in general, bad social
treatment leads to more antisocial behavior than good treatment does. The implication is
that to reduce the behavior, better treatment is called for. A widespread social improve-
ment in treatment of children will result in widespread improvement in their behavior
across all individuals. However, the implications of the interactionist model are entirely
opposite. The implications are to identify genetically defective individuals who produce
too little MAOA and therefore have hyperactive neurotransmitters which exacerbate
childhood mistreatment to produce more antisocial behavior than genetically normal
individuals manifest. Biologically abnormal individuals can then be treated with medica-
tion to raise their MAOA levels and reduce antisocial behavior. Social reform in treating
children becomes marginalized in favor of giving them pills—social problems have been
transformed into biological defects.
Whereas the main effects of maltreatment present the maltreated as normal individuals
who have been prevented from participating in society by adverse macro cultural factors
(working through familial interactions), interactionism construes them as biologically
abnormal outliers from the start who are not able to adjust to beneficent, welcoming
social norms. It turns them from outcasts into outliers, from victims into perpetrators.
(The politics of interactionism and biological determinism do not invalidate the theories.
I am simply pointing out that these theories do rest upon political assumptions and have
political consequences. The theories are, however, scientifically invalid. I will explain why
and present documentation in Chapter 2.)
Defining madness as extreme behavior on a normal curve has the same affect of divorc-
ing it from normal behavior. It is statistically deviant. This is politically functional for
obscuring social causes of mental dysfunction, and for obscuring the need for social
reform to reduce dysfunction. As Foucault (1987, p. 62) put it: “If Durkheim and the
American psychologists have made deviancy and departure the very nature of mental
illness, it is no doubt because of a cultural illusion common to both of them: our society
does not wish to recognize itself in the ill individual whom it rejects or locks up.”
In contrast, defining mental illness as an expected extreme response to extreme stress—
as R. D. Laing, the “anti-psychiatirst” does—builds a different politics into psychiatry and
mental illness. Going berserk after losing a job can be considered as an expected response
that is generated by social causes. It does not have to be regarded as a purely individual,
idiosyncratic, unexpected response (Horowitz, 2007, p. 214). Social stressors are so severe
that they generate severe dysfunction. This is a critical politics that places the onus of
 24 macro cultural psychology

mental illness on social stressors, not on the individual. Treatment for mental illness would
then require ameliorating social stress by humanizing the social environment (see Ratner,
1991, pp. 243–312 for extensive discussion of these two approaches, as well as evidence).
A critical, cultural approach to psychological dysfunction would encompass disturbed
psychology within normal social life, as an expected response to the extreme pressures of
normal social life (e.g., poverty, unemployment, competition, romantic rejection,
loneliness)—just as disturbed physical health is an expected, intelligible response to
unhealthy environmental conditions (toxicity, extreme temperature, germs, radiation).
Disturbed psychology would be reconceptualized as an “appropriate and expected
socially patterned defect,” as Fromm (1980) called it, rather than an individual mental
illness. As Foucault (1987, p. 62) said, “the pathological is no longer simply a deviancy in
relation to the cultural type; it is one of the elements and one of the manifestations of this
type” (see Marsella & Yamada, 2007, for a cultural analysis of mental illness).vi
Indeed, research demonstrates that behavior/psychology is directly linked to the inten-
sity of social problems/stressors. Individual mediations/interactions play a comparatively
minor role. Morbid depression, for example, is not due to the interaction of biological
defects (such as genetic defects or abnormal level of serotonin) with social environment.
Genetic epidemiologist Neil Risch and a research team (Risch et al., 2009) reviewed
14 studies with a total of 14,250 participants and found “no association was found between
5-HTTLPR genotype and depression in any of the individual studies nor in the weighted
average and no interaction effect between genotype and stressful life events on depres-
sion was observed. Comparable results were found in the sex-specific meta-analysis of
individual-level data.” The authors concluded: “This meta-analysis yielded no evidence
that the serotonin transporter genotype alone or in interaction with stressful life events is
associated with an elevated risk of depression in men alone, women alone, or in both
sexes combined. . . . The analysis shows no significant allele difference between with and
without depression.” In contrast, “the number of stressful life events was significantly
associated with depression” (pp. 2462, 2466). A major stressful event, like divorce, in
itself raised the risk of depression by 40.
Research on intelligence similarly supports a direct influence of social conditions on
IQ, with individual mediations/interactions playing a minor role. In a natural experi-
ment, children adopted by parents of a high socioeconomic status (SES) had IQs that
averaged 12 points higher than the IQs of those adopted by low-SES parents, regardless of
whether the biological mothers of the adoptees were of high or low SES. Similarly, low-
SES children adopted into upper-middle-class families had an average IQ 12 to 16 points
higher than low-SES children who remained with their biological parents. Being raised
in an upper-middle-class environment raises IQ 12 to 16 points. Black and mixed-race
children were adopted into either black or white middle-class homes. The black and
mixed-race children had the same average IQ at age 9, yet the children (of both racial
composition) raised in black adopted homes had IQs 13 points lower than those raised in
white homes. The race of the adopting family accounted for almost all of the IQ differ-
ence between black and white children (Nisbett, 2009, pp. 32–37, 226).
The solution to socially patterned psychological defects is social change. As Foucault
(1987, p. xxvi) put it, “Only if it is possible to change [social] conditions will the illness
 25 Introduction

disappear insofar as it is a functional disturbance resulting from the contradictions in the

environment.”
Evolutionary psychology provides another example of political issues embedded in
social science. According to Buller (2009), evolutionary psychologists argue that male
jealousy evolved in primitive man as an emotional alarm that signals a partner’s potential
infidelities. These are dangerous because they will produce children which the male part-
ner may think are his, and he will spend his resources caring for another male’s children.
Jealousy would serve to warn him of this possible wasting of his resources on another
male’s offspring.
The evolutionary narrative implicitly contains political assumptions about the nature
of the family. It assumes that men abhor spending their resources on other men’s chil-
dren. This assumes that men are naturally monogamous and naturally favor nuclear
families containing their own spouse and children. The bourgeois nuclear family is thus
built into the male emotion of jealousy. Of course, this theory does not explain why it is
harmful for a male to spend resources rearing another’s offspring. It can clearly be benefi-
cial even in evolutionary terms, as when the offspring of a strong male are raised by
a weaker male after the father was killed, so that the father’s genes would be promulgated
by the offspring. And, of course, humans benefit greatly when this does occur, as when
a man adopts a child whose own father cannot care for it.
The evolutionary account presumes the nuclear family to be natural and jealousy to be
a natural defense of this natural arrangement. This naturalism precludes communal child
rearing in which a man’s child is raised with others, as in a Kibbutz, and the man indeed
spends his resources to support all the children, not simply his own. Naturalism builds
opposition to this communal arrangement into the nature of male jealousy. This is a
political act. McKinnon (2005) is thus correct to designate evolutionary psychology
“neo-liberal genetics.”
Explicating the political assumptions that shape social science theories (and methodol-
ogies) illuminates their details in a novel way: it illuminates the fact that the DSM defini-
tions do not merely describe symptoms, they conceptually create them; they intentionally
pathologize intelligible reactions and misconstrue them as bizarre. They do so by masking
social stressors that foster extreme reactions and treating the latter as individual weak-
nesses. A nonpolitical analysis of DSM would miss these details and ramifications of the
definitions.vii

MACRO CULTURAL PSYCHOLOGY IS A PHILOSOPHY OF MIND

Construing psychology as part of culture is to develop a new conception of psychology.
This new conception is a general psychological theory that is really a philosophy of mind,
consciousness, mentality, and subjectivity. It involves rethinking what these are. Culture
is not simply a new factor that we can correlate with psychology. Relating psychology to
culture must be an internal relationship in which we comprehend why and how they fit
together. We cannot simply take psychology as conventionally construed and add culture
as conventionally construed. Rather, we reconceptualize psychology as a cultural phe-
nomenon, a cultural specimen, a part of human civilization. We must stand back and
 26 macro cultural psychology

rethink what these two enormous phenomena are, so we can see how they are related.
Culture cannot be added to psychology, it must be integrated into psychology. This is
a new way of thinking about psychology that goes beyond accumulating new facts.
We can see that macro cultural psychology encompasses a host of broad issues. It is not
confined to singular statements such as “psychology is influenced by cultural factors.”
Rather, the nature of the influence is also part of the theory. This nature is an internal
relationship in which psychology is organically part of culture, and vice versa. We may
say that the theory consists of particular topical concepts—for example, “psychology is
influenced by macro cultural factors”—that are supported by collateral issues, such as
internal relationships.
Every psychological theory consists of collateral issues that support the main concepts.
Understanding the latter requires understanding the former. For instance, every psycho-
logical theory implicitly rests on, and contains, assumptions about realism, subjectivism,
relativism, constructionism, individualism, reductionism, emergence, atomism, holism,
and objectivity (see Bunge, 1996; D’Andrade, 2006; Ratner, 1997, 2006a, 2007b, 2008a,
2008b). These issues are important not only in cultural psychology, but throughout the
social sciences (for history see Stearns, 2004, 2006; for anthropology see Rodseth, 2005;
for sociology see Brannen & Nilsen, 2005).
Collateral issues profoundly affect the insights of a theory or methodology. The key to
Vygotsky’s brilliance was his deep understanding and reliance on dialectics, rationalism,
systemic thinking, historical thinking, and a political commitment to social transforma-
tion. Vygotsky did not simply roll up his sleeves and begin to study how particular cul-
tural factors are associated with psychological phenomena.
Substantiating macro cultural psychology requires elucidating and substantiating these
kinds of collateral issues that sustain it. Indeed, any theory collapses if the collateral issues
it employs are flawed. A psychological theory that rests upon biological reductionism, for
example, can be criticized for using this flawed philosophical issue, regardless of the spe-
cific content of the theory. We don’t necessarily have to refute the specific biological
mechanism that is invoked (e.g., a neurotransmitter or a gene); we can impugn the theory
because it is reductionistic in the first place, and because reductionism itself is false.
Dealing with these philosophical issues can save a great deal of time compared to refuting
each of the specific mechanisms that is postulated to cause psychology.
As Vygotsky (1926/1997b, p. 308) put it, “The nature of psychological material does not
allow us to separate the psychological propositions from philosophical theories to the
extent that other empirical sciences have managed to do that. The psychologist funda-
mentally deceives himself when he imagines that his laboratory work can lead him to the
solution of the basic questions of his science; they belong to philosophy.”
There is another pedagogical reason for discussing philosophical issues in this book.
Introducing a new conceptual approach requires preparatory groundwork to acclimate
the reader. Readers have acquired a host of assumptions concerning the foregoing col-
lateral issues with regard to the traditional theories (and methodologies) they employ in
their thinking. Again, apart from—or really behind—the particular concepts they accept
(e.g., there are genetic determinants of mental illness) lie broader collateral issues such
as reductionism, individualism, subjectivism, and so forth. These readers resist
accepting alternative theories that rest upon alternative collateral issues, such as macro
 27 Introduction

cultural psychology. To gain acceptance, we need to do more than convincingly present

the tenets of macro cultural psychology per se; we must also convincingly present its col-
lateral issues, and we must explain why the readers’ contrary acquired collateral issues are
flawed. Otherwise, the readers’ collateral issues will resist macro cultural psychology
regardless of how many empirical examples I present. The examples simply won’t “make
sense” to the readers’ general sense that psychology is reducible to biological mecha-
nisms, or that psychology is constructed by individuals rather than organized by broad,
distant, impersonal macro cultural factors.
Consequently, I must help reorient the readers’ collateral assumptions to make them
amenable to accepting macro cultural psychology and its collateral assumptions. Other-
wise, I will be trying to force a square peg into a round hole. The readers’ established
collateral assumptions will act as an autoimmune system that repels a foreign body. To
introduce the foreign body of macro cultural psychology into the readers’ mind, I must
neutralize their collateral assumptions by carefully explaining these as well as my own.
The new cultural nature of psychology is cause for upending conventional concep-
tions of psychology. These had no place for culture, and they invented psychological
constructs, mechanisms, principles, factors, and definitions that had nothing to do with
culture. Given the noncultural nature of this system that has become the field of psy-
chology, it is inadequate to simply throw culture into it. This would preserve the noncul-
tural foundation and system of psychology and add an incongruous single factor that
would have little effect—like throwing a pebble into the sea, it would quietly sink to the
bottom, sit there inconspicuously, and disturb nothing. Because psychology was system-
atically constructed to be a noncultural field comprising noncultural factors, principles,
mechanisms, constructs, and definitions, it must now be deconstructed and recon-
structed in the new terms of macro cultural factors, principles, mechanisms, constructs,
and definitions. Nothing less than this reconstruction of the system can adequately inte-
grate psychology with culture and lead to a complete understanding of their full rela-
tionship. Adding culture to psychology disturbs the entire system in the same way that
adding a baby to a family reorganizes the entire household and its way of life: initially,
confusion, consternation, and conflict reign, but these soon give way to a sense of satis-
faction, accomplishment, and pride, which then advances into an eternity of sublime
bliss!
Our philosophy of mind elucidates fundamental issues. It clarifies basic concepts, defi-
nitions, principles, processes, and factors concerning culture, psychology, and their rela-
tion. It does not simply summarize empirical correlations between cultural variables and
psychological variables. The point of this book is to understand the nature of human
psychology, along with its origins, characteristics, and functions. Why does psychology
exist? What function does it serve? How is it related to the astounding accomplishments
humans have made (both good and bad)? What is the basis/origin of psychology? What
is its operating mechanism? To accomplish this, I examine philosophical issues to gain
insight into complex psychological questions.
A primary theme of this book is that concepts and constructs in cultural psychology—
and in all social science—rest upon ontological, epistemological, and methodological
assumptions. These need to be elucidated and evaluated in order to be comprehended
and improved. Elucidating and evaluating assumptions and ramifications is what I mean
 28 macro cultural psychology

by calling this book a philosophy of mind. For me, elucidating and evaluating assump-
tions and implications is what it means to be philosophical.
For example, the definition of culture determines the entire way we approach cultural
psychology. This follows from the fact that cultural psychology is the study of the rela-
tionship between culture and psychology. What we think psychology is depends on what
we think culture is. If culture is massive, political, social institutions such as transnational
corporations, then psychology has those characteristics. But if culture is primarily inter-
personal, face-to-face interactions, then psychology would have those characteristics, not
the characteristics of political economy.
Our definition of culture also determines how we conceive of the relation between
culture and psychology. If culture is massive institutions, then psychology is socialized by
these institutions in ways particular to them, which differ quite a bit from interpersonal
socialization within an intimate family setting, and psychology and agency are more
forcefully structured by the massive parameters of institutions, which are controlled by
management. In such an environment, psychology and agency are not freely exercised
and negotiated by individuals as they would be in close interpersonal interactions.
All the important issues in cultural psychology depend upon our definition of culture.
This definition drives us to conceptualize all the other aspects of cultural psychology in
a congruent manner (i.e., in a coherent system). All differences among approaches to
cultural psychology stem from different conceptions of culture. Because our definition of
culture is pivotal to the entire enterprise of cultural psychology (including the theories
and methodologies we develop and the conclusions we draw), I shall devote a great deal
of attention to developing an appropriate definition.
To understand the relation between psychology and culture, we must philosophically
analyze what culture is. What are its fundamental characteristics? Why does it exist?
What function does it serve? How is it structured? What is the role of the individual in
culture? How does psychology contribute to culture, and why is psychology necessary for
culture? How does culture stimulate and organize psychology? Why does it do so?
The basic question we ask and answer is, why must psychology be cultural? Why is
it impossible for psychology to exist without being cultural? The empirical fact has a
necessary reason and basis which must be disclosed. It doesn’t just happen to be, it must
be. It cannot be otherwise, as far as we can tell with our current knowledge, which, of
course, may change in the future. It is not simply a matter of saying that psychology is
cultural; we must prove it by elucidating the logical, necessary, internal relation between
the two.
To do so, our philosophy of mind construes human psychology as a logically consis-
tent system of factors (moments) that are congruent with, supportive of, and subordinate
to the fundamental fact that human psychology is a cultural phenomenon. Even bio-
logical and personal factors are congruent with, supportive of, and subordinate to this
fundamental fact. The theory of macro cultural psychology emphasizes and explicates
this systemic, integral nature of human psychology.
Such a reconceptualization of psychology—which explains why and how all the ele-
ments of human psychology, including biological and personal ones, are congruent with,
supportive of, and subordinate to cultural life—requires establishing new elements,
 29 Introduction

mechanisms, principles, descriptors, and explanatory constructs. These will be the focus
of the book. Psychological mechanisms, principles, descriptors, and explanatory con-
structs must be reworked as cultural phenomena. They must be continuous with culture
to enable cultural and psychological phenomena to permeate each other. Culture may
metaphorically be regarded as the cap of the psychological system, and its influence per-
meates all the way down the entire system of elements. It is culture all the way down.
Our philosophy of mind is a complete, consistent, exclusive account of psychology. It
rejects discrepant constructs; it is not an eclectic mix. It includes a variety of constructs
that represent a variety of factors (biological, personal); however, all of the constructs
must be consistent and integrated. They cannot be represented by an additive equation
that preserves their independence. Biology is not added to culture; biology is integrated
with culture because it has become acculturated and has lost the purely biological char-
acter that it retains in nonhumans, who have no culture.
Vygotsky had no tolerance for eclecticism. He criticized it for being unsystematic. He
criticized attempts at synthesizing behaviorism and Freudianism, and psychoanalysis with
Marxism. In such eclectic syntheses, “one often must close one’s eyes to the contradictory
facts, pay no attention to vast areas and main principles, and introduce monstrous distor-
tions in both of the systems to be merged” (Vygotsky, 1997b, p. 261). Vygotsky went on to
criticize his close colleague Luria for attempting to combine psychoanalysis and Marxism.
Vygotsky complained that there were many psychologies but no unified psychology.
“The absence of a unified scientific system that incorporates the whole of contemporary
psychological knowledge has produced a situation in which each discovery of significant
empirical data requires the creation of a new theory . . . the creation of a new psychology,
a psychology that is one among many” (Vygotsky, 1987, p. 54).
Einstein summed up the systemic grandeur of scientific theory when he said, “Science
is the attempt to make the chaotic diversity of our sense experience correspond to a logi-
cally uniform system of thought. In this system single experiences must be correlated
with the theoretic structure in such a way that the resulting coordination is unique and
convincing” (Einstein, 1954, p. 323). Constructing the logically uniform theoretic struc-
ture for psychology is what this book seeks to do.
Unfortunately, many cultural psychologists are leery about systematization. The post-
modern virus has infected many, leading them to regard systematization as an artificial,
impossible, unproductive imposition of a false unity that detracts from the inherent inde-
pendence and unpredictability of things. Many believe that systematization diminishes
the creativity and agency of scholars by forcing them into an organized system of think-
ing. And some believe that systematization is just too serious and “heavy,” and takes the
titillation out of life.
Bruner (2008), for example, declares, “I doubt the time has come (if ever the time will
come) to ‘systematize’ cultural psychology.” Instead, Bruner relishes entertaining “fruitful
dilemmas” at the interface between individual mental functioning and institutionalized
culture. “While these dilemmas may be unresolved, I am no longer dismayed by this
prospect” (pp. 39–40).
This is an untenable and irresponsible position (for an examination of problems with
Bruner’s position, see Ratner, 2002, pp. 75–78). What will cultural psychologists contribute
 30 macro cultural psychology

if we do not resolve dilemmas? Bruner’s statement flirts with the postmodernist arrogance
and impotence of playing with ideas as an act in itself, with no attempt (or possibility) of
comprehending reality or improving life in any practical manner.
Bruner is too perceptive and socially conscious to abide by his own ideology of accept-
ing unresolved dilemmas. Fortunately, he contradicts himself and does attempt to resolve
conceptual dilemmas such as the relation between culture and individual psychology. He
argues that institutions are superorganic structures that shape our psychology and behav-
ior. He argues that intersubjectivity is central to our humanity. He forcefully says, ”I am
convinced that a psychology that excludes the individual embededness in culture is
bound to be shallow” (2008, p. 40). Bruner, like any intellectually and socially responsible
person, holds definite beliefs and rejects beliefs that he deems are unfounded and inhu-
mane, and he thus seeks to resolve dilemmas, not tolerate them. Throughout his career
he has vociferously argued for definite positions in psychology (and education) and repu-
diated others. He rejected stimulus-response psychology, and he revised cognitive psy-
chology to include meanings and social influences because these are central to human
psychology. He did not welcome contradictory, inadequate viewpoints as titillating intel-
lectual dilemmas.
Dilemmas are fruitful if they stimulate us to resolve them. Resolving the dilemmas
of cultural psychology is just as important, scientifically and practically, as resolving pol-
lution and cancer. Bruner recognizes this: “The relation between individual and culture
is by no means just an academic issue. It has reverberations in practically every domain
of ‘practical’ life. It easily (and often) becomes a political issue. And perhaps just as well.
For the mind-culture dilemma bears on issues as pressing as welfare, education, human
rights, and gender equality” (2008, pp. 42–43). Other psychological issues are equally
important. The origins of intelligence and mental illness have critical practical impor-
tance for enabling us to act appropriately to enhance psychological functioning.
With Psychology having such momentous scientific and social importance, we must
treat its dilemmas with the same alarm that we show cancer, AIDS, mental illness, pollu-
tion, and economic crisis. We would be as derelict in accepting the dilemmas of cultural
psychology as we would these other dilemmas. Resolving dilemmas means we must sys-
tematize cultural psychology in a set of logical, valid principles.
Valsiner is a cultural figure who dislikes the systemic scientific thinking that Darwin,
Einstein, and Vygotsky practiced. He asserts that “[c]ultural psychology is being sculpted
in a variety of versions—all unified by the use of the word culture. That may be where
its unity ends, giving rise to a varied set of perspectives that only partially link with one
another. This may be confusing for those who try to present cultural psychology as
a monolithic discipline, but it is certainly good for the development of new perspectives.
Heterogeneity of a discipline breeds innovation, whereas homogenization kills it”
(Valsiner, 2009, p. 6). Valsiner lauds the uncertainty of the term culture.
Imagine a physicist saying that physics is unified by the word physics and the interest
in physical things—and that that is where the unity of physics ends. She then states that
physics is a big tent that welcomes a varied set of perspectives that only partially link with
one another—it includes astrophysicists who study gravitational fields as well as creation-
ists who believe god created the universe in a few years just because He wanted to—but
 31 Introduction

this is O.K. because varied perspectives are valuable. It doesn’t matter that these ideas
contradict each other and only partially interlink, for heterogeneity breeds innovation.
Valsiner is wrong on this issue. Homogeneity around core theoretical constructs, such
as atomic theory, evolution, and the equivalence of mass and energy, has proved to be a
powerful generator of insights. It has unified disciplines, provided researchers with a
common language, and concentrated their collective energy to probe fruitful hypotheses.
On the contrary, heterogeneity of a discipline kills it by dissolving it into a plethora
of antithetical notions having no rhyme or reason other than a titular name. Heterogeneity
eliminates any core principles that are helpful when attempting to understand, explain,
describe, and predict phenomena.
This is why scientists are unsettled by contradictions and seek coherent resolutions.
When confronted by discrepant theories of relativity physics and quantum theory con-
cerning gravity, physicists uncompromisingly favor one over the other: “If we assume
that matter obeys the laws of quantum mechanics and gravity obeys the laws of general
relativity, we end up with a mathematical contradiction. A quantum theory of gravity is
needed” (Maldacena, 2005, p. 58).
Pursuing core scientific constructs that unify a discipline does not endorse dogmatism.
On the contrary, it encourages debate within scientific parameters and then selects the
most logical and empirically confirmed principles as guidelines for further inquiry. These
are clearly open to refinement as the history of science demonstrates (e.g., Einstein refin-
ing Newton’s principles). However, basic principles are indisputably useful, as Newton’s
principles proved to be a boon to physics for centuries, and as Einstein’s are now. Valsiner
would banish such principles and advances. He creates a straw man when he equates
basic principles with dogmatism, and he seeks to oppose both with an unprincipled
eclecticism. His misrepresentation of the problem of dogmatism leads to a misleading
solution.
According to Valsiner, Holocaust studies would be enriched by entertaining the non-
conformist idea that the Holocaust never existed, and biology would be enriched by
entertaining the idea that god created species. Valsiner would be hard pressed to impugn
such heterogeneity after advising that “at the theoretical level we may encounter dis-
courses about distinguishing different perspectives and counter-positioning those—
leading to potential ‘perspective clashes’ within the discipline. Such clashes cannot be
productive for science” (Valsiner, 2009, p. 14).
On the contrary, perspective clashes correct errors and advance science. We have seen
how Darwin’s perspective clash with religious orthodoxy led to a new scientific field that
has had tremendous success. Does Valsiner believe that it was not productive for psy-
chologists and doctors to challenge the view that women’s psychological disturbances
were due to their uteruses floating around in their pelvises? Would we be better informed
and better healers if we indiscriminately accepted both views and did not counterpose
them?
Valsiner’s position would lead us to embrace the 1923 conclusion of R. M. Yerkes, pro-
fessor of psychology at Harvard and one-time president of the American Psychological
Association, that “The decline of the American intelligence will be more rapid owing to
the presence of the Negro” (cited in Lewontin, 1991, p. 25). Yerkes’ viewpoint generalized
 32 macro cultural psychology

to involuntary sterilization laws passed by several states after 1907 for persons deemed
unfit or dangerous. This view and the laws were deemed constitutional by the Supreme
Court when Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes declared “three generations of imbeciles are
enough.” Between 1907 and 1956, over 60,000 Americans were sterilized. Valsiner would
eschew challenging Yerkes, Holmes, and the laws and practices of sterilization on the
grounds that it would be a fruitless perspective clash. This is the conservative implication
of uncritical relativism/eclecticism.viii
In contrast, our systemic philosophy of mind examines the constructs of other
approaches to psychology and cultural psychology. We do so to understand them more
deeply, identify useful points that can be incorporated into macro cultural psychology,
and avoid their errors. Our philosophical examination of psychological approaches elu-
cidates them as systems of constructs (both methodological and theoretical). We draw
out the coherence of the constructs with one another (i.e., how they fit meaningfully
together, and why they do). We explain what each construct has to do with the others—
we do not simply list the facts that coexist. We explain how each construct depends upon
others, reinforces others, is internally related to others, absorbs features from others, and
reciprocally imparts its character to others. We also identify central and peripheral ele-
ments within each psychological system, and we discern how every psychological system
is fostered and permeated by the cultural system in which it exists.
A systemic, integral view of psychological theory and methodology reveals that errors
have great significance because they impact the entire system (theory or methodology).
Since all the elements of a system are integrated, an error reverberates throughout the
system, to a greater or lesser extent. Other elements adjust to accommodate the error.
The error is not simply a single, independent element; it causes perturbations throughout
the system—it forces other elements to adjust themselves in adverse ways. An error drags
down the theory or methodology. It does not completely invalidate it, but it compromises
it. For instance, notions of biological determinism of psychology modulate notions about
the cultural organization of psychology. The former do not simply stand off by them-
selves as just another variable that leaves cultural aspects of psychology untouched. On
the contrary, psychologists adjust their conceptions of cultural organization to accom-
modate biological determinism. This mitigates the full power of culture in the theory and
research.
This makes correcting errors vitally important. Errors impede the development of an
adequate philosophy of mind, or of psychological theory or methodology. We must
uproot errors in order to proceed. Errors are not mere oversights; they are obstacles.
Oversights obfuscate social and psychological issues, and they obstruct attempts to create
enhanced forms of them. They do not neutrally wait to be corrected by more accurate
knowledge; they impede the acquisition of accurate knowledge. This is why I shall make
pointed, “impolite” criticisms of errors that I see in psychological theory and methodol-
ogy. Since errors are intolerable, it is necessary to be intolerant of them. Such intolerance
does not question the well-meaning intentions of the researcher; it questions the product.
Even Vygotsky argued against his dear friend and colleague Luria about the latter’s sym-
pathy for Freudian psychoanalysis and his attempt to integrate it with Marxism. Vygotsky
did not endorse this heterogeneity of perspectives, nor did he fear that repudiating it
would kill the field of cultural psychology.
 33 Introduction

MACRO CULTURAL PSYCHOLOGY IS A POLITICAL

PHILOSOPHY OF MIND
A general psychological theory, or philosophy of mind, must be political in order to be
adequate to its subject matter, which is political. Its subject matter is the political nature
of psychological phenomena, the political nature of cultural factors, and the political
character of social science theories about psychological phenomena. Macro cultural psy-
chology is political in that it does the following:

a. elucidates and evaluates political aspects of cultural factors such as ideology, racial
codes of etiquette, and advertising, which form psychological phenomena; and
b. emphasizes, explains, and describes the political origins, character, and function of
psychological phenomena that derive from political macro cultural factors;
c. elucidates and evaluates the political assumptions and consequences of psychological
(and social science) theories and methodologies (i.e., Psychology).

Because political aspects of these actions are obscured by most social structures and
ideologies, they must be ferreted out by wrenching away public disguises. Objective,
thorough social science must penetrate beneath given appearances to comprehend how
they mask a deeper truth. Appearances do not constitute or illuminate reality; they dis-
guise it. Consequently, they cannot be accepted at face value and simply measured. They
must be questioned suspiciously. A political-philosophical analysis does violence to the
claims of everyday interpretation, and to complacency and tranquilized obviousness
(Foucault, 1987, p. xxviii). I refer to this analysis as “critical hermeneutics.” For instance,
Marx’s theory of commodity fetishism exposes the mystification of social relations in the
commodity as a concealed form of domination that contributes to the creation of alien-
ated subjects.
As an example of the point (b), our political philosophy of mind elucidates political
implications of psychological aspects of Jim Crow. We have seen that Sarah Boyle’s guilt
had the political function of distracting attention from the Jim Crow system as the source
of blacks’ resentment and resistance.
Macro cultural psychology is the only psychological approach that recognizes the full
political characteristics and consequences that psychological phenomena have. This is
because only macro cultural psychology emphasizes the macro cultural formation, fea-
tures, and function of psychological phenomena, which are political. Other approaches
that ignore macro cultural aspects of psychology necessarily ignore political aspects of
psychology that are central to macro cultural factors.
Our political philosophy of mind examines the political core and consequences of macro
cultural factors (a). We used Ritterhouse’s work to emphasize the political-economic core
of the Jim Crow racial etiquette, and we indicated how it mystified people who participated
in it and prevented them from seeing the code itself and its affects on blacks. This mysti-
fication exempted the code, and its basis, from challenge.
Our political philosophy of mind emphasizes that all macro cultural factors are politi-
cal in the sense that they are developed and controlled by particular groups of people in
order to maximize their material well-being and their social power. Different groups
 34 macro cultural psychology

of people in different social positions have different interests in developing macro cul-
tural factors in different directions. For instance, insurance companies define the costs of
paying claims to their insured as “medical losses” and strive to reduce them by refusing
to pay claims and refusing to insure people with health risks; on the other hand, the
people need insurance companies to provide full coverage. The positive care that one
group wants is defined as a negative (“loss”) and is relentlessly reduced by the other
group.
Similar politics pervade all our institutions (e.g., government, the news, the Catholic
Church, corporate farms, banks, and pharmaceutical companies), cultural artifacts
(transportation systems, Internet access, food production, drug production, pollution,
clothing styles, and art), and cultural concepts (about abortion, children, women, homo-
sexual marriage, and wealth).
Even organic crops are political. When Michelle Obama planted an organic garden on
the White House lawn in April, 2009, executives from the chemical industry complained
about the publicity it generated. They urged her to use pesticides on the garden. One
executive said, “Whenever I hear the word ‘organic’ it makes me shudder.”
Groups with different vested interests (which stem from their different social positions)
struggle to control macro cultural factors. The form and direction that macro factors take
at any time is a result of the struggle that depends upon the relative power of the groups.
Macro cultural psychology emphasizes that the political nature of macro cultural fac-
tors is a central source, feature, and function of psychological phenomena.
A political analysis of social science theories and methodologies (c) is valuable for
(1) understanding their roots, emphases, and implications more deeply; (2) constructing
objective theories and methodologies that are useful for suggesting practical social
reform; and (3) trying to resolve theoretical and methodological differences.
All social science theories and methodologies rest upon assumptions about how soci-
ety is and should be organized; what its fundamental principles and objectives are and
should be; how social leaders should be and are selected; what powers they should and
do have; and what powers, rights, and obligations the populace should and do have.
These political assumptions penetrate into the details of social science theories and meth-
odologies—surreptitiously, of course. As Dufour (2008) said about philosophical ontolo-
gies: “All ontologies involve a politics that celebrates, organizes, or prepares for the human
realm of being. . . . Being is therefore never pure. It always has a political translation, or,
one might even say, stand-in” (pp. 17–18). Consequently, understanding the political
assumptions deepens our understanding of the social science details they permeate.
Earlier I indicated this with regard to evolutionary psychology and definitions of psycho-
logical disturbance. Additional examples will amplify this relationship.
Chomsky (1975) acknowledges the political basis of theories language: “As Harry
Bracken has emphasized, ‘The empiricist/rational debates of the 17th century and of
today are debates between different value systems or ideologies. Hence the heat which
characterizes these discussions’ ” (p. 127). Chomsky explains that his nativist, rationalist
theory of universal grammar rests upon a political ideal of freedom:

The doctrine that the human mind is initially unstructured and plastic and
that human nature is entirely a social product has often been associated with
 35 Introduction

progressive and even revolutionary social thinking. . . . But a deeper look will
show that the concept of the “empty organism,” plastic and unstructured, apart
from being false, also serves naturally as the support for the most reactionary
social doctrines. If people are malleable and plastic beings with no essential psy-
chological nature, then why should they not be controlled and coerced by those
who claim authority . . .?
The principle that human nature, in its psychological aspects, is nothing more
than a product of history and given social relations removes all barriers to coer-
cion and manipulation by the powerful.
It is reasonable to suppose that just as intrinsic structures of mind underlie the
development of cognitive structures, so a “species character” provides the frame-
work for the growth of moral consciousness, cultural achievement, and even par-
ticipation in a free and just community.
The conclusion that human needs and capacities will find their fullest expres-
sion in a society of free and creative producers, working in a system of free asso-
ciation . . . draws from the empiricist commitment to progress and enlightenment,
[but] I think it finds deeper roots in rationalist efforts to establish a theory of
human freedom. (Chomsky, 1975, pp. 131–134)

The conversational turn in cultural psychology also rests upon and conveys a political
agenda. Bruner (1982) expresses this clearly: “It is the forum aspect of a culture [in which
meanings are negotiated and renegotiated] that gives its participants a role in constantly
making and remaking the culture—their active role as participants rather than as per-
forming spectators who play out canonical roles according to rule when the appropriate
cues occur” (p. 839).
According to Harre (2009), “The prime source for the root models of scientific expla-
nations in the domain of social phenomena is the conversation . . . . Human beings can
come to realise that they are people and so active agents trying to realise their projects
with others. As such they can come to realise that the constraints that society seems to
place upon their pursuit of worth are grammatical, in the sense that Ludwig Wittgenstein
gave to that term. The story-lines and conventions in accordance with which people live
could be different and new grammars can be created and adopted. All we have to do is to
show people that they are trapped in the silken but fragile shrouds of a pattern of dis-
course conventions.” (pp. 140–142).
Harre emphasizes the social freedom that accompanies the definition of society as frag-
ile shrouds of discourse conventions. Reducing society to conversation enables people to
implement the theory of individual freedom. If society were massive, structured institu-
tions, individuals could not freely arrange their social lives as they wish. It is not an exag-
geration to say that Harre’s political ideal of personal freedom underlies and drives his
theory of culture.
Political ideals also underlie Gergen and Gergen’s (2002, p. 51) principles of social
constructionism:

There is no particular configuration of words or phrases that is uniquely matched

to what it is we call either the world “out there” or “in here.” We may wish to agree
 36 macro cultural psychology

that “something exists,” but whatever “is” makes no demands on the configura-
tion of phonemes or phrases used by humans in communicating about it. Thus,
we remove the privilege of any person or group to claim superior knowledge
of what there is. With respect to truth (a match of word and world) or reason (the
arrangement of words themselves), no science, religion, philosophy, political
party or other group can claim ultimate superiority. More positively, the world
does not control what we make of it.

The politics of this are to equalize and democratize the status of everyone. Gergen
and Gergen try to break down social hierarchies epistemologically. If all epistemologies
are equally acceptable, then there is no reason to privilege one group over another. This
egalitarian political value drives the entire epistemology. It makes it eclectic just as the
politics are pluralistic. (We shall see that this liberal political sentiment drives a large
number of cultural psychologists to disparage qualitative differences among social
groups, between adults and children, between animals and humans, and between nature
and culture. I call these psychologists “Levellers,” an appellation that harkens back to the
English Levellers of 1647. Modern Levellers promote a cosmic harmony among all things
by expunging qualitative differences in achievement. With no thing superior to any other,
none has any warrant to disparage, exploit, or harm any other.)
Furthermore, the epistemology is antirealist (unmatched with an independent reality,
and even unaffected by it—whatever it is makes no demands on our thinking or speaking
about it) for the same political reason. It allows any group to have any opinion it wants
about the world. No group can be challenged about what it thinks because there are no
grounds for posing such a challenge. You can’t say that a group is wrong, because antireal-
ism destroys the very notions of right and wrong—there is no reality independent of us
that could be used as a test. Realism is judgmental because it insists on testing every
opinion against an independent reality, and then rendering judgment about the validity
of the opinion. This leaves people susceptible to being incorrect and therefore judged
to be inferior to others and in need of correction. This would generate social hierar-
chies, which violate egalitarian politics. This is why relativists and subjectivists oppose
realism.
We can see that Gergen and Gergen have formulated their epistemology to support
their democratic politics. Their politics drive them to deny the objective reality of things.
This is why they say it is positive that the world does not control what we make of it.
We may reflexively observe some political assumptions of macro cultural psychology.
One is that macro cultural factors are the cornerstones of our civilization and our human-
ity, and therefore need to be continually scrutinized and reformed so as to make them as
conducive to human fulfillment as possible. So long as macro cultural factors are undem-
ocratic, are controlled by elites for their own self interest, set people against one another,
disregard the interests of the population, are based on violence, and encourage crass
motives and desires in people, people can never be fulfilled. Macro cultural psychology
regards psychology as a part of, reflection of, and window into macro cultural factors.
This enables psychology to provide us with a unique angle for assessing the effects of these
factors on our lives. Psychological phenomena can be recognized as a social barometer
 37 Introduction

that can help us formulate insights into ways to humanize the macro factors as revealed
through psychology.
In this sense, psychological phenomena can be subversive of the status quo if they are
recognized as reflecting its features. Macro cultural psychology is the analytical tool for
realizing this potential. It is the analytical tool that elucidates cultural information from
psychological phenomena and utilizes it to evaluate and reform macro cultural factors.
Macro cultural psychology regards psychology as a cultural specimen that embodies a
broad, complex system and history (genesis)—much like a stone does, or an astronomi-
cal light wave, or a tree, or forensic evidence. These features that are contained in the
specimen as a kind of secret can be unlocked with proper analytical tools that render and
test it. Macro cultural psychology is the key that unlocks the secret cultural essence of
psychological phenomena.
Macro cultural psychology also unlocks the implicit cultural essence of psycholog-
ical theories and methodologies that protect the secret of psychology’s cultural essence.
This cultural secrecy about psychology by Psychology obscures the secrets of cultural
factors that form the cultural essence of psychology. Cultural secrecy about psychology
becomes cultural secrecy about society. This prevents any reformation of society. Whereas
macro cultural psychology hermeneutically draws out the cultural secrets of psychology,
other psychological theories hermetically seal them in. They replace the science of
hermeneutics with the art of hermetics. They do so by minimizing the cultural essence
of psychological phenomena—that is, by ignoring, denying, or obscuring the common
plane that unifies culture and psychology, and by moving the two onto separate planes
where they appear to be governed by separate processes and principles. This “tectonic
shift” moves psychology off the plane of culture and onto the plane of (a) animal and
childhood biology, where innate, natural processes determine behavior; (b) individual
subjectivity (personal meanings and choices); or (c) interpersonal interactions, such as
“family socialization,” which are cut off from broader macro cultural factors.
The theories and methodologies that effect this “tectonic maneuver” act as barriers to
comprehending the unity of culture and psychology, just as geological theories prevented
understanding of the original unity of the continents, biological theories prevented
understanding of the unity of species, physical theories prevented understanding of the
unity of mass and energy, and racial theories prevented whites from unifying with blacks
in the South.
The “science” of economics has similarly misunderstood its subject matter, and even
prevented its understanding, as Nobel Prize–winning economist Paul Krugman (2009)
explains in his article “How Economists Got It So Wrong”: “Few economists saw our
current crisis coming, but this predictive failure was the least of the field’s problems.
More important was the profession’s blindness to the very possibility of catastrophic fail-
ures in a market economy. . . . As I see it, the economics profession went astray because
economists, as a group, mistook beauty, clad in impressive-looking mathematics, for
truth. . . . Unfortunately, this romanticized and sanitized vision of the economy led most
economists to ignore all the things that can go wrong. They turned a blind eye to . . .
the problems of institutions that run amok; to the imperfections of markets—especially
financial markets—that can cause the economy’s operating system to undergo sudden,
 38 macro cultural psychology

unpredictable crashes; and to the dangers created when regulators don’t believe in regula-
tion” (p. 36).
Lewontin (1991) similarly explains how certain doctrines within biological science are
ideological legitimations of the political status quo.
If biology and economics can go astray and be unscientific, Psychology can also. The
fact that a discipline calls itself a science and intends to be a science does not mean that
it is, in fact, a science. It may be unscientific, and even antiscientific, to the extent that it
is colored by a misleading ideology.
A political-philosophical examination means critiquing the culture and politics of
the status quo that go into composing implicit content for social science theory and
methodology, and it means searching for ways to construct theory and methodology
with new cultural-political content that will ultimately lead to more fulfi lling culture and
psychology. In this way, psychological science can contribute to social reform, which will
solve the current socioeconomic crisis.
This is a political act that upsets the status quo and elicits fi erce resistance from it, for
we are challenging scientific and political conventions that support the status quo and
which the status quo urgently wants to leave undisturbed and even unnoticed.
Unsurprisingly, macro cultural psychology is impugned so that the analytical tools nec-
essary to extract and scrutinize social information from psychological phenomena are
silenced. All the debates about cultural psychology—including about theoretical and
methodological issues—have this politics at their core. It is fascinating to observe that
tenets of macro cultural psychology that vividly illuminate concrete psychology and con-
crete culture, and which have the most potential for suggesting substantive changes in
them, are the tenets that are most challenged by mainstream and cultural psychologists.
Those tenets of macro cultural psychology that deal with abstract aspects of psychology
and culture—and which have little potential for suggesting specific changes in them—are
accepted by psychologists. I would argue that the degree of animosity that psychologists
show to tenets of macro cultural psychology is a measure of the subversive potential
those tenets have.

Politics and Objectivity

Contrary to popular assumption, the political assumptions of social science doctrines,
particularly psychological doctrines, can be objective; they are not necessarily antitheti-
cal to objective social science. Political assumptions can distort or reveal the origins,
characteristics, and function of psychological phenomena.
Social science doctrines that are based upon political ideals of individual freedom are
incapable of appreciating the cultural nature of psychological phenomena. In contrast,
doctrines based upon political ideals of humanizing the structure of cultural factors—
and criticizing adverse cultural factors—are attuned to important cultural origins, fea-
tures, and functions of psychological phenomena.
In fact, a certain politics is necessary to become objective in social science. Consequently,
identifying political issues is crucial for attaining objectivity. Social theory that is geared
toward examining and critiquing concrete political aspects of culture is more objective
 39 Introduction

about the concrete origins, characteristics, and function of psychological phenomena

than apolitical, uncritical theories are.
We may say that the politics of Psychology must be geared toward discerning the poli-
tics of psychology. Psychological phenomena embody political features of culture, and
Psychology must apprehend these in order to explain, describe, and predict psychology.
If the concrete politics of psychology are organized as exploitive cultural factors, then
Psychology must be informed by political notions of oppression in order to comprehend
the psychology of oppression. Both psychology and Psychology are politically consti-
tuted. The conception that Psychology has of psychology must match the objective polit-
ical constitution of psychology in order to be scientific. The politics of social science
doctrines are thus key to their objectivity. Politics are not necessarily antithetical to
objectivity.
Our example of slavery and Jim Crow demonstrates this point. These systems were
obviously political. Their constituent cultural factors and psychology can only be com-
prehended if one adopts a political perspective that emphasizes how the system was
designed by the white ruling caste and imposed by it onto the black subaltern caste. This
coercion and oppression is the central political element of the system, and it requires
a corresponding political viewpoint that articulates it. This is why Ritterhouse’s (2006)
description of the cultural code and corresponding psychology were so prescient: she
emphasized and explored the political aspects correctly.
A different political perspective would have overlooked these political issues and
would have misunderstood the cultural factors and psychology. This is exactly the over-
sight the white ruling caste committed. Whites’ political view of Jim Crow misconstrued
it as a natural order that reflected blacks’ inherent inferiority. It was whites’ duty to super-
vise them because they were uncivilized. Whites overlooked the fact that they had
imposed the system on blacks, and they overlooked all the negative consequences that
this imposed system had on black behavior and psychology. The whites’ self-serving
politics impeded their cultural understanding of their own behavior and of the blacks’
behavior. In contrast, Ritterhouse’s objective political viewpoint correctly reflected the
oppressive aspects of Jim Crow and led her to explore them in rich detail.
Political assumptions are normally regarded as introducing biases that invalidate scien-
tific theories and methodologies. This is true for the natural sciences but not for the social
sciences. The reason is that the subject matter differs in the two domains. Natural phe-
nomena are not political, and therefore introducing political assumptions about the
nature of phenomena would jeopardize our understanding of them—as religious and
spiritual dogmas have done. Indeed, the advance of natural science has come about
because natural science repudiates political orientations such as religious and spiritual
dogma. However, social science deals with cultural factors and behavior that are political.
An objective social science must take account of this and be political in this sense.
Social scientists should not attempt to eliminate all political assumptions. They should
only debunk invalid, ideological ones that overlook and misunderstand cultural and psy-
chological phenomena. It is incumbent on us to develop accurate political views of cul-
tural life and psychology, in order to formulate valid, useful psychological theory and
methodology.
 40 macro cultural psychology

We can strengthen social science and cultural psychology by examining the political
assumptions of social science theories and methodologies to see where they are accurate/
true and inaccurate/false. We can understand how their politics informs their social
science, and we can detect errors in the latter that derive from errors in political perspec-
tive. We can correct their social science errors, in part, by correcting their political
assumptions.
Adversaries in social science debates are impermeable to scientific arguments because
adversaries have adopted their positions largely on the basis of political values, not simply
with regard to scientific issues. Political assumptions and implications are why psycho-
logical approaches, theories, and methodologies arouse so much passion. Scientific errors
lead to social and political errors, which lead to mistreatment of people.
Because political assumptions and consequences direct scholarly activity in social
science, debates over scientific issues are futile. Controversies about issues such as evolu-
tionary psychology, positivistic methodology, qualitative methodology, psychoanalysis,
behaviorism, and psychobiological theories are never resolved on the basis of evidence
because the deeper political issues are never addressed and continue to direct academic
activity. It is akin to family arguments over who left dirty dishes in the sink for how long,
how many times. This argument is not really about the overt issue; it is about underlying
issues such as respect, rights, freedom, and power. The dishes will only get cleaned if
these issues are resolved. Similarly, scientific issues only have a chance of resolution if
underlying political values are agreed upon.
The foregoing discussion has hopefully provided the reader with a sense of the scope
of macro cultural psychology. I deliberately used examples from Jim Crow because they
illustrate the tenets so purely. I realize the examples are extreme, because Jim Crow was
such a coercive culture founded upon the political economy of slavery. The reader may
object that less directly coercive societies may not entail as much cultural and political
structuring of psychological phenomena. Therefore, are the tenets of macro cultural psy-
chology generally applicable to other societies? This book will demonstrate that the prin-
ciples of macro cultural psychology are generally applicable. Other societies make them
more difficult to discern because they grant people more leeway in behavior and psychol-
ogy. However, the basic tenets are central to all social and psychological life.
We shall see how contemporary consumer psychology, which is touted as a system
of internal desires that determines the market in consumer goods, is actually determined
by that market, which is controlled by manufacturers and marketers. Thus, even the psy-
chology that appears to be most rooted in individual inclinations will be shown to follow
the same principles as the racial psychology of Southern whites during Jim Crow.
Demonstrating this requires a lengthy, spiraling voyage. The voyage takes us from gen-
eral, abstract features of cultural psychology to increasingly richer, more detailed, more
concrete features of culture and psychology and their interrelation. Chapter 2 begins with
very general, abstract features of culture and psychology; Chapter 3 advances to macro
cultural features of culture and psychology; and Chapter 5 reaches an even more concrete
conceptualization of macro cultural factors and psychology in contemporary consumer
capitalism. [Additional levels may be discovered through further research.]
This project entails stripping away layers of abstraction until we reach the concrete
core of culture and psychology. The concrete is the level at which we live out culture
 41 Introduction

and psychology. We do not live in a world of abstractions. Abstractions usefully illumi-

nate certain basic features of culture and psychology; however, they can occlude vital
concrete features unless special effort is made to emphasize them. This problem is pro-
nounced in the field of psychology, and even in cultural psychology. It prevents the artic-
ulation of concrete aspects of our culture and psychology, and therefore prevents us from
understanding and improving our real social and psychological activity. This is the battle
over the concrete that I mention in the preface. Abstraction is a serious scientific and
political problem (perhaps the central problem), and I address it in Chapter 4. That chap-
ter takes stock of the benefits and weaknesses of abstraction and provides a bridge for
integrating abstract aspects of culture and psychology with vital concrete aspects. Chap-
ter 4 provides the fuel to ignite the booster rocket of the macro cultural psychology
voyager, and enables it to escape the gravity-like pull of abstractions and reach the con-
crete features of culture and psychology in Chapter 5. Chapter 6 carries macro cultural
features toward an explanation of micro-level psychology, and it challenges explanations
of micro-level psychology in individualistic, subjectivistic terms. Chapter 7 explains the
political usefulness of macro cultural psychology for helping to construct a more demo-
cratic, cooperative society and a fulfilled psychology.
Our voyage will stop at places of interest where we will encounter various philosophi-
cal principles that bear on the cultural and psychological issues we are discussing. The
first place, of course, is some history of the launch of macro cultural psychology and
some philosophical concepts that germinate and sustain it.

ENDNOTES
i. This same structure of scientific reasoning advanced geology from a descriptive to an
explanatory discipline. As early as the seventeenth century, geologists noted that the
continental shelves have complementary contours that appear to have been capable of
being fitted together in the past (“1” in Figure 1). However, they did not pursue this pos-
sibility because it seemed inconceivable given their assumption that the earth was solid
and immovable. Consequently, there was no way to conceptualize how presently separate
contours could have formerly been united and then moved apart. The assumption about
the earth’s solidity acted as a barrier to explaining and understanding the complementary
appearance of the continental shelves. (“2,” “3” in Figure 1). It required a novel concep-
tualization of the earth as not solid but rather composed of tectonic plates that moved to
explain and understand the complementary contours of the continental shelves (“4”). The
new geological theory, which was not filled out until the 1960s, permitted the comple-
mentary contours to be fitted together in a meaningful and interesting way that led to an
enormously rich field of study. The theory of plate tectonics revolutionized the earth sci-
ences, explaining a diverse range of geological phenomena (volcanoes, earthquakes) and
their implications in other subdisciplines (“5”). This led to deeper understanding of plate
tectonics (“6”).
ii. From Growing Up Jim Crow: How Black and White Southern Children Learned Race by
Jennifer Ritterhouse. Copyright © 2006 by the University of North Carolina Press. Used
with permission of the publisher. www.uncpress.unc.edu
iii. The phenomenological experience of these cultural incidents was poetically expressed
by a white author: “Struggle. Sudden strange struggle. Hot feelings pouring over you,
 42 macro cultural psychology

driving you to push hard against wiry dark quick breathing little bodies, push hard until
they are off the sidewalk, off into sandspurs and dirt, sobbing angrily ‘We’ll get even with
you, you just wait we’ll get’. . . . And your crowd, flushed and dazed, walk on, victors
for a wan moment over something, you never know what. . . . Anyway, this pushing off
the sidewalk is not one of the Sins you have to worry about. . . . You know you will not go
to hell if you push little colored kids into sandspurs (or later out of jobs) though you may
go there if you steal a nickel” (Smith, 1961, p. 91).
iv. Not all narratives are equally perceptive and equally useful in indicating this equivalence.
Cultural psychological research does not consist in summarizing or averaging all the nar-
ratives that have been collected. It consists in discerning the best indications of the cul-
tural aspects of psychology and then drawing out the subject’s insights.
v. We shall see that humans’ bodily biochemistry is socially organized so that social bio-
chemistry does reflect on society and can generate social critique (e.g., social stress affects
the immune system and therefore generates physical disease). Working upward along this
chain leads from disease to stress to social critique.
vi. A cultural approach would mitigate the social causes of the reactions, and empathize with
disturbed individuals who have suffered social stress. A cultural approach affords dis-
turbed people social support on both macro and interpersonal levels, rather than imper-
sonally writing prescriptions for medicine. The cultural approach is preventive action,
for it alters the environment to lower future incidence of disturbed psychology. The bio-
medical approach emphasizes treatment rather than prevention. It is politically conserva-
tive in that it exempts culture from critique, while sociocultural prevention is progressive
because it critiques the status quo.
vii. Natural science theories can also be political. Darwin’s theory of natural selection drew its
main tenets from the political economy of capitalism, and therefore naturalized capitalist
principles as ingrained in biological evolution. Darwinism claimed that individuals in
a population differ from one another, and they struggle over limited natural resources.
Superior individuals win the competition. This model recapitulates competitive capital-
ism, where individuals compete for limited jobs and market share. “The perceived struc-
ture of the competitive economy provided the metaphors on which evolutionary theory
was built. [And] one can hardly imagine anything that would have better justified the
established social and economic theories than the claim that our very biological natures
are examples of basic laws of political economy” (Lewontin, 2009, p. 20).
In this case, capitalist political economy served the positive function of providing an
accurate metaphor for natural selection. However, bourgeois concepts serve a negative,
obscurantist function of providing misleading metaphors for human cultural-psycholog-
ical activity. For instance, Darwinism, and evolutionary psychology, falsify cultural life
and obscure the collective, collaborative nature of culture. We shall discuss this through-
out the book.
viii. Valsiner contradicts himself. He endorses a clash in perspective that culminates in a vic-
tory for one he prefers. Violating his avowed principles of pluralism and eclecticism,
he denounces behaviorism as “an ideological credo of misplaced objectivity.” It was so
flawed that it has cost the field of psychology a whole century of progress (Valsiner, 2009,
p. 18). Valsiner strongly rejects behaviorism by opposing it (clashing) with a better perspec-
tive: “Obviously, cultural psychology faces the task of restoration of the pre-behaviorist
focus. . . . Cultural psychology cannot deal with behavior as something ‘out there’ that
can be observed. Instead, we can observe meaningful conduct of goal-oriented organisms
 43 Introduction

(not only humans) who are in the process of creating their actual life trajectories out of
a diversity of possibilities. That process may be poorly captured by the use of real numbers,
and hence careful qualitative analyses of particular versions of human conduct are the
empirical core of cultural psychologies” (p. 18).
These are fairly combative and definitive statements about the methodology that
cultural psychology should not utilize, and an alternative methodology it should use to
capture the nature of human psychology.
Nobody is consistently eclectic just as nobody is consistently postmodern (Ratner,
2006b). These doctrines are flawed and will lead to disaster if practiced consistently.
 1
philosophical and historical
underpinnings of macro cultural
psychology

HISTORICAL BACKGROUND
The first macro cultural psychologist can be considered to be Abu Al-Biruni, a Muslim
scholar from Uzbekistan who conducted an extensive ethnography of Indian society and
mentality in 1017. He has been called the first anthropologist, and was a prodigious natu-
ral scientist who knew, 600 years before Galileo, that the earth rotates on its axis daily and
moves yearly around the sun.
The tenets of macro cultural psychology, and of social science in general, originated in the
human sciences movement (Geisteswissenschaften), in Germany in the 1770s. This move-
ment introduced the concept of culture as fundamental to human life. “Culture” referred to
the spirit of a nation (Geist), or a nation’s character. This national Geist was a collective
human mentality that developed historically in national contexts. Culture was a grand his-
torical mentality shared by individuals in a nation. Scholars who explored this were roughly
known as the Gottingen School, as they were centered in the University of Gottingen. They
emphasized the collective, cultural character of individual mentality. For instance,

they considered texts of Moses, Homer, Plato not to be the wisdom of an individual
sage but the expression of a nation’s achievement at a particular stage in its cul-
tural development. What made the individual sage was his success in exploiting
the linguistic possibilities developed by the national tradition. But no matter how
sage, he remained a product of that tradition, trapped in that tradition. Hence, his
poetic (or other) achievement represented the [educational, scientific, philosoph-
ical] achievement of the whole nation, not of some timeless wisdom that existed
autonomously. . . . The Gottingen School had a scientific program: to understand
the collective development of the human mind in society, a process these scholars
came to describe as “culture.” (Carhart, 2007, p. 7)i

These prescient cultural scholars emphasized the concreteness of culture, which reflected
a specific nation in a unique historical configuration. The individual was inescapably part
of this concrete culture. “His language was the language of a particular tribe, and his
notion of truth was a particular truth” (Carhart, 2007, p. 93).

44
 45 Philosophical and Historical Underpinnings

These founders of the human sciences emphasized language as a central cultural mech-
anism that coordinated behavior, concepts, and thinking:

Beginning with Condillac in 1746 and continuing down through Herder in 1772,
the origin of language discussion attracted the attention of philosophers, physi-
cians, pastors, and educators across Europe. It was generally agreed that language
was the mechanism of human cognition. That is, language was the vehicle through
which raw perceptions were transformed into knowledge, thoughts, or ideas in
the mind. After Herder, that is, in the 1770s, language theorists concluded that
they had exhausted the avenues of inquiry that speculated about cognitive pro-
cesses in the abstract and universal individual. Shortly before 1780, a new line of
inquiry opened—that of the simultaneous development of language and society.
Instead of a universal attribute of humanity [which Saussure, in 1916, called
parole], language came to be understood as a product of society [which Saussure
called langue]. As societies were different, so, too, were languages different. If lan-
guage was the vehicle of human cognition, that is, the medium that conveyed
reason, and if languages differed, then so also must reason differ from one society
to the next. . . . A person’s understanding of the world was shaped by his language.
Languages were profoundly different, the ideas they conveyed having been estab-
lished in the beginning of the nation’s history. It followed then that the world must
appear differently to people from different nations.” (Carhart, 2007, p. 78, 85).

Language was thus rooted in society. “The first function of language was not to reason
abstractly but to communicate. . . . Crucial to the connection of ideas and the formation
of language was society” (Carhart, 2007, p. 81).
The original cultural turn was thus a turn toward macro culture, not a turn toward
individual constructions of culture (which it has recently become). Language reflected
cultural activities and values, not personal ones. Language reflected real concerns of a
culture regarding the nature of things. While cultural perspectives varied according to
the ways in which things were utilized and understood, language was realistic in the
sense that it was concerned with how things could be understood and utilized to advance
peoples’ civilization. Language was not a capricious, solipsistic invention of entertaining
symbols divorced from reality.
Structuralist linguistics from Saussure endorsed this realistic orientation. Language as
a system of arbitrary signs arbitrarily linked to a signified object “did not cause Saussure
to renounce realism or deny that words could refer to objects in the world. Although
formed by an arbitrary connection between a particular sound and a particular meaning,
the sign as he defined it was itself a concept with a referential relation to things. Saussure
therefore never supposed that the world is constructed in language and does not exist
independently of our linguistic descriptions” (Zagorin, 1999, p. 8). As a number of schol-
ars have shown, these idealist opinions were not his but conclusions drawn from and
imposed upon his work by the subsequent poststructuralists and literary theorists who
are responsible for the postmodernist philosophy of language. They attributed to Saussure
the belief that reality does not exist beyond the reach of language and that language and
texts cannot reflect the world, which is only a linguistic construct.
 46 macro cultural psychology

The Gottingen School emphasized that language is the mediator between the world and
the mind; only through language could the world be made intelligible.
Herder’s 1770 Essay on the Origins of Language went so far as to argue that language was
what made man human. Without language, man is not human but a kind of beast, like the
feral children that were discovered at the time. Language and its symbolic and cognitive
properties make humans qualitatively different from (i.e., superior to) animals. Herder
wrote: “The difference lies not in quantity nor in the enhancement of powers but in a com-
pletely different orientation and evolution of all powers” (Carhart, 2007, p. 89). Natural
cries are not the origin of human language.
According to these pioneers, human psychological activities are social and conscious,
which makes them qualitatively different from natural processes. Where animals had
instincts, humans had reason, or powers of reflection (Besonnenheit) that allow them to
step back from immediate experience and view circumstances objectively. Culturally
based reason elevated humans far above animals. Cultural abilities are precisely those
that can be developed to greater heights, in contrast to animal natural abilities, which are
generally fixed (Carhart, 2007, p. 100). Culture arms individuals with knowledge and
insights into things. This knowledge and insight increases people’s sensitivity and their
ability to appreciate and enjoy experiences (Carhart, 2007, p. 99).
From its origins, the cultural school was systematic and paradigmatic in emphasizing
qualitatively different systems in humans and animals. These scholars saw that humans
were not merely quantitative extensions of animals. And they recognized different for-
mative processes (evolution) of human powers, a point that most psychologists deny but
which Vygotsky and macro cultural psychology strongly endorse.
For the Gottingen School, culture encompassed the reciprocal development of lan-
guage, learning, and mind. The term culture was first used by Karl Franz von Irwing in
1779 in reference to mind. He wrote a four-volume cultural approach to the philosophy of
mind (Carhart, 2007, pp. 99–100). Thus, the concept of culture encompassed psychology
from the outset. It was originally cultural psychology!
This emphasis was continued by Moritz Lazarus and Heymann Steinthal in their journal
Zeitschrift fur Volkerpsychologie und Sprachwissenschaft (Journal of Cultural Psychology
and Linguistics), which was inaugurated in 1860. It seems that the term Volkerpsychologie
was coined by Wilhelm Humboldt at the turn of the nineteenth century. Its use was con-
tinued by Wundt, who believed that macro cultural factors embody psychology in rich,
complex, objective, stable forms. Macro cultural forms of psychology are more conducive
for psychological research and analysis than variable individual consciousness: “Speech,
myths and customs constitute a series of closely related subjects which are of great impor-
tance to general psychology for the reason that the relatively permanent character of
speech, myths, and customs renders it relatively easy to recognize clearly through them
certain psychical processes, and to carry out through them certain psychological analyses.
Such recognition of general processes and such analyses are much easier here than in the
case of transient compounds of individual consciousness” (cited in Ferrari, Robinson, &
Yasnitsky, 2010, p. 97). Racial codes of conduct, elucidated in the Introduction to this
volume, exemplify the place of psychological processes in cultural customs. Studying psy-
chical processes in macro cultural factors is also advantageous for understanding cultural
components of psychology. Macro cultural psychology utilizes these understandings of
 47 Philosophical and Historical Underpinnings

psychology in culture and culture in psychology to conduct empirical research on the

cultural psychology of individuals.
Another important cornerstone of macro cultural psychology was the historical school
known as the Annales. It arose in France in the 1920s under the leadership of Lucien
Febvre and Marc Bloch, and it included Braudel and Aries in later generations. The
Annales school studied the history of “mentalities” as they are embedded in cultural and
historical structures and processes (Burguiere, 2008; Daileader & Whalen, 2010).
The eighteenth- and nineteenth-century pioneers of culture and cultural psychology laid
out crucial ideas that macro cultural psychology embraces (see Jahoda, 1992, pp. 75–78;
Kalmar, 1987; Ratner, 2006a, pp. 35–40 for some intellectual history of this approach).
Vygotsky, Luria, and Leontiev embraced these ideas in their cultural-historical psy-
chology. In fact, the cultural secrets of psychology that Vygotsky and Luria discovered in
micro-level observations and experimentation originated on the macro cultural level.
These include the facts that thought is dependent upon language, social interaction stim-
ulates and organizes psychology, and psychology is mediated by social artifacts.
Luria gives a sense of this in his statement: “thought was a special process formed in the
course of social and historical development as a result of the role which language plays
in mankind’s social history. That is why thought which in the early stages of history was
itself a concrete activity which only later became a condensed, inner, process, cannot be
regarded as an original ‘spiritual’ act. Thought has its own social history . . .” (my emphasis;
cited in Levitin, 1982, p. 80). Luria says that the dependence of thought on language orig-
inated in the historical development of mankind. The ontogenetic research that Luria,
Vygotsky, and their colleagues conducted on the social formation of thought recapitu-
lated the historical formation of this dependence. The first step of this historical forma-
tion entailed thought’s being a concrete activity of communicating with others—hence
the etymology of consciousness, which is “to know together.” Here Luria endorses the view
of the Gottingen school: only with the development of civilization (e.g., increased divi-
sion of labor) did thought become abstracted from activity as a condensed, inner process.
Thought is not essentially an inner, mental activity. It came to be this way through a cul-
tural-historical development. Macro cultural psychology traces this cultural-historical
development in the changing forms of human civilization.
Macro cultural psychology is thus the realization and revelation of Vygotsky’s cultural-
historical psychology. It reveals the true source and foundation of cultural aspects of
psychology, and it realizes the study of this true source and foundation of psychology’s
cultural features by raising it to the macro cultural level, where it is directly investigated.
This was Vygotsky’s underlying, ultimate goal. He said, for example, “Once we acknowl-
edge the historical character of verbal thought, we must consider it subject to all the
premises of historical materialism, which are valid for any historical phenomenon in
human society. It is only to be expected that on this level the development of behavior
will be governed essentially by the general laws of the historical development of human
society” (Vygotsky, 1986, pp. 94–95).
This is a pregnant statement. It says that human psychology is historical in the sense that
human society is historical. Society is historical in the sense that it is characterized by
epochs of war, famine, revolution, outbursts of science and art, commerce, and changes in
social organization such as the rise and fall of the British Empire; the rise of the Renaissance;
 48 macro cultural psychology

the rise of slavery, and slavery’s eventual elimination by the Civil War. This historical
dimension of human society pertains to its social institutions, artifacts, and cultural con-
cepts. In other words, it refers to macro cultural factors. Vygotsky is saying that psychol-
ogy is part of macro culture and is governed by its historical processes and dynamics. The
macro cultural level is the origin, locus, and principles of human psychology.
Luria explained macro culture and history, and their importance for psychology, very
concretely in his account of the cross-cultural research he and Vygotsky conducted in
Uzbekistan in 1930: “Following the Revolution these areas underwent profound socioeco-
nomic and cultural changes. The old class structure was dissolved, schools were set up in
many villages, and new forms of technological, social, and economic activities were intro-
duced. The period we observed included the beginnings of collectivization of agriculture
and other radical socioeconomic changes, as well as the emancipation of women. . . . We
assumed that [certain] groups who, by participating in the socialist economy, had gained
access to the new forms of social relations and the new life principles accompanying the
changes, had experienced the conditions necessary to alter radically the content and form
of their thought. . . . We were able to establish that basic changes in the organization of
thinking can occur in a relatively short time when there are sufficiently sharp changes in
socio-historical circumstances, such as those that occurred following the 1917 Revolution”
(Luria, 2006, pp. 61–62, 80). The more massive and structural the social change, the
greater the psychological change.
Although Vygotsky primarily researched micro-level interpersonal interactions as
generating psychological development, he clearly understood these to be subordinate to
the macro level, which is where the principles of historical material operate. All of the
micro processes that Vygotsky studied are derived from, and reflections of, macro-level
historical society.
Macro cultural psychology explains why psychology is cultural-historical. Vygotsky
stated the cultural-historical character of psychology, but he did not explain the intricate
relationship between historical processes and psychological phenomena. Macro cultural
psychology fills this lacunae by explaining that psychology is a macro cultural phenome-
non—its unique properties evolved to form the unique properties of macro cultural fac-
tors, it takes form in macro cultural factors, it takes the form of macro cultural factors
(i.e., it incarnates the features of macro cultural factors—in distinctive psychological
forms). Psychology is formed by cultural processes, it functions to support and promul-
gate macro cultural factors, it is socialized by macro cultural factors (as people use them
and absorb their psychological “payloads”), it exists as a macro cultural factor on the
macro level (e.g., romantic love, the individualistic self, and schizophrenia are cultural
phenomena that are the subject matter of art/literature/music and are codified in medical
manuals and in therapeutic diagnosis and treatment). Macro cultural-psychological phe-
nomena define and characterize a culture; they are a cultural tool (means) that people
utilize to define and understand themselves and others; and, finally, they share the politi-
cal character of cultural factors are fought over by contending groups and reflect the
vested interests of the victorious, dominant groups. Psychological phenomena are ele-
ments of culture. They are subject to the principles, forces, and dynamics that govern
cultural factors. If cultural factors are formed by political struggle among competing
interest groups, then psychological phenomena are also, because they are part of these
 49 Philosophical and Historical Underpinnings

factors and essential to sustaining them. If cultural factors are institutionalized and
administered as cornerstones of social life, then psychological phenomena are also. If
cultural factors are enduring, unifying cultural phenomena, then psychological phenom-
ena are also. If cultural factors need to be reorganized in order to solve social problems
and enhance human development, then psychological phenomena must be part of that
transformative process. Psychology is part of these cultural principles because it is the
subjective side of them. It must have their features because its raison d’être and function
is to generate and maintain them. If they are to function and endure, then psychology
must support these features; it must have their features.
Language, and its relation to thought, is a function of macro cultural-historical pro-
cesses, as Vygotsky says. Language does not evolve to more abstract forms and complex
grammars at the level of parents speaking to infants. Rather, the level of linguistic abstract-
ness and complexity that parents use with their children is a function of macro historical
processes. Micro-level discourse cannot explain how language changes at the societal
level. There is no micro-level reason that parents 10,000 years ago should have used sim-
pler language with their children than Germans today use. However, macro cultural pro-
cesses can explain this, because language is a macro historical phenomenon that is
governed by the historical development of society. (The same holds for other behaviors.
The rise of slavery in the United States was not produced on the micro level; it was a
political-economic strategy to obtain cheap labor. Only after macro cultural forces worked
themselves out and established slavery did it become incorporated into family relations.)
The micro level does not fully capture the intricacies of the macro level. The micro level
does not reveal the workings of historical materialism concerning social events such as
wars, revolutions, social reorganization, modes of production, and political economy.
The micro level reflects effects of these macro events, but it does not reveal them in their
full complexity. It is necessary to directly study macro culture in order to capture the full-
ness of Vygotsky’s statement that psychology is governed by the laws of historical devel-
opment of society. Macro cultural psychology does this. It therefore is the realization of
Vygotsky’s cultural-historical school of psychology.
In addition to revealing and realizing Vygotsky’s cultural-historical psychology, macro
cultural psychology revitalizes it. It injects vibrant, new, fascinating material that enriches
our understanding of cultural psychology and takes it to new directions in political
machinations that guide macro cultural factors (Brandist, 2006; Kalmar, 1987; Petit &
Schweikard, 2006; Ratner, 2006a). A fruitful development has been work on “extended
cognition” or “material agency”which emphasizes how the mind is extended in cultural
artifacts (“exograms”) on which it depends and which permeate and structure it. John
Sutton articulates this approach:

parts of material culture are not simply cues which trigger the truly cognitive
apparatus inside the head but instead form ‘‘a continuous part of the machinery
itself ’’, as ‘‘systemic components the interaction of which brings forth the cogni-
tive process in question.’’ On this view, cognitive science is thus not just the study
of the brain: indeed, even neuroscience cannot be the study of the brain alone, for
brains coupled with external resources may have unique functional and dynami-
cal characteristics apparent only when we also attend to the nature of those
 50 macro cultural psychology

resources and the peculiarities of the interaction. . . . Unique historical and cul-
tural features of human beings extended cognitive make-up are thus not acciden-
tal extras added to a basic biologically given mind. Rather, such changing media,
objects, routines, institutions and practices have long been integral parts of the
coordinated, interactive cognitive systems in which our characteristic plasticity is
revealed, engaged and transformed (Sutton, 2010, pp. 37–38).

Macro cultural psychology elucidates the relationship between culture and psychology at
a higher level of complexity than the interpersonal level. For instance, we study the psy-
chology of needs and desires involved with consumerism, and how consumer capitalism
acculturates these needs and desires through media and cyberspace rather than through
parental directions (Applbaum, 2009a).
For instance, adolescents learn to smoke cigarettes from the media more than from
their parents. Research has found that, among adolescents who had never tried a ciga-
rette, exposure to movie smoking was associated with more positive attitudes about
smoking, and with actual smoking 1 to 2 years later. Nearly 20 of those in the highest-
exposure quartile tried smoking later, compared to only 3 in the lowest-exposure
quartile. This relationship remained after controlling for smoking by family and friends,
risk-taking propensity in adolescence, and maternal warmth and limit setting. Interest-
ingly, the effect was stronger among children of nonsmokers than it was among children
of smokers (Heatherton & Sargent, 2009). Commercial movies are thus more influential
agents of socializing smoking than parents; indeed, movies override parental models of
nonsmoking.
A Nielsen study released in October 2009 reported that children 2 to 5 years old watch
more than 32 hours of television (including DVDs, video games, and recorded TV pro-
grams) each week. That’s about 5 hours per day. Even 6- to 11-year-olds who attend school
watch more than 28 hours a week; that’s close to the amount of time they spend in school.
Impersonal media thus rivals personal family socialization and school socialization.
Clearly, this major form of socialization needs to be studied by psychologists.
We study new forms of macro-level social influence that are necessitated by new forms
of capitalist corporate organization. One new form is horizontal subcontracting with
independent providers, which increasingly replaces vertical integration of companies.
Subcontracting requires indirect forms of control and convincing the independent sub-
contractors rather than simply issuing edicts from the top of the hierarchy to subordi-
nates under the direct control of the managers (Applbaum, 2009b). These new forms of
social influence in the corporate world demand corresponding psychological receptivity.
Psychology must become receptive to these new forms of social influence and cease wait-
ing for direct instructions from atop the corporate channel. This psychological receptiv-
ity must work its way back to childhood socialization so that children will grow up
prepared to accept indirect, commodified social influence instead of the direct influence
that was characteristic of vertically integrated companies.
Macro cultural psychology thus emphasizes rich, dynamic, political, national, world-
wide, powerful, surreptitious macro-level operations as factors that explain and describe
how individual psychology is organized (see Ratner, 2011a, b, c; 2012).
 51 Philosophical and Historical Underpinnings

Macro cultural psychology thus reveals, realizes, and revitalizes Vygotskyian theory
and research.
Studying the macro cultural level requires a novel methodology. Many micro-level
observational and experimental procedures are not applicable to theorizing about and
researching broad, massive, distant, enduring, historical macro structures. Macro cultural
psychology is akin to astronomy in that it studies massive, distant, untouchable phenom-
ena. Astronomy requires sophisticated powers of analysis, synthesis, interpretation, and
warranted speculation to comprehend such phenomena; macro cultural psychology
requires the same powers. Historiography offers important clues to developing this kind
of analysis, synthesis, interpretation, and warranted speculation.
Macro cultural psychology received an enormous boost from psychological anthro-
pology in the 1980s. Culture and Depression (Kleinman & Good, 1985), Culture Theory
(Shweder & LeVine, 1984), and Unnatural Emotions (Lutz, 1988) exemplified many bril-
liant contributions. After a brief 10 years of flourishing, cultural psychology was undercut
in the 1990s by an alternative perspective concerning fundamental issues. Differences of
opinion subtly insinuated themselves over defining culture, enumerating important cul-
tural factors, the manner in which culture influences psychology, the nature of agency, and
the use of positivistic and qualitative methodologies to study cultural psychology (Ratner,
1993, 1999, 2008a). I designate this alternative perspective “micro cultural psychology.”
Micro cultural psychology distracted, diverted, and obstructed the realization of the fruit-
ful macro cultural psychology of the 1980s. As I shall demonstrate, micro cultural psychol-
ogy was a counterrevolution to macro cultural psychology. Micro cultural psychology was
not a reverse revolution, but the reverse of a revolution (“La Contre-Révolution ne sera pas
une révolution contraire, mais le contraire de la Révolution,” Joseph de Maistre).

PHILOSOPHICAL ISSUES
Social science theories and methodologies rest upon (and embody) philosophical con-
ceptions of important issues. Therefore, it is advisable to identify the philosophical con-
ceptions that are central to macro cultural psychology before we introduce the specific
principles. A philosophical introduction will prepare the ground for understanding and
accepting the principles of macro cultural psychology. The principles will be rejected if
people are unfamiliar or uneasy with the assumptions they sense in macro cultural psy-
chology; it will be like trying to put a square peg into a round hole. This is why I shall
begin by convincing the reader of some of macro cultural psychology’s underlying and
surrounding concepts.
Another reason for beginning by explaining background assumptions is that they pro-
vide justification for the tenets of macro cultural psychology. It is insufficient and uncon-
vincing to simply enumerate tenets of a doctrine, Enumeration without justification is
open to error. Moreover, it is dogmatic in consisting of assertions without reasons. It has
no power to convince anyone who does not share that same preference, and it has no
lasting power that can withstand transient shifts in popular opinion.
Readers may wonder why I feel compelled to prepare them to accept macro cultural
psychology if it is valid. After all, wouldn’t a valid theory be convincing on its own,
 52 macro cultural psychology

by simply presenting itself to the truth-seeking reader? Unfortunately, this is not the case.
Facts do not speak for themselves; they require hypotheses to ferret them out. Truth does
not automatically persuade people. As Tuana (2004, p. 194) put it:

[A]n account of the conditions that result in scientists accepting apparently true
beliefs and theories is as crucial as an analysis of those that result in their holding
to apparently false theories and beliefs. In outlining the Strong Programme in
sociology of scientific knowledge studies, David Bloor argues against the asym-
metry position common to philosophies of science. On such a position, only false
beliefs that have had a history of influence upon science, such as views about ether,
humors, or phlogiston, are in need of a sociological account. True beliefs or theo-
ries, however, are viewed as in need of no such explanation in that their accep-
tance can be accounted for simply by their truth. Bloor and other SSK theorists
argue that such appeals to truth are inadequate, insisting that the acceptance of a
belief as true, even in science, involves social factors. The appeal to reality thus
does not suffice in explaining why a belief has come to be accepted by scientists.

Indeed, even as brilliant a conception of physics as Einstein’s specific and general

theories of relativity was not immediately accepted by the scientific community; he was
refused the Nobel Prize three times—in 1919, 1920, and 1921—before garnering it in 1922.
Apprehending a new subject matter requires explicating an ontology of that subject
matter and an epistemology that can encompass it. I will introduce new ways of thinking
about psychology and culture in order to comprehend psychology’s cultural character. It
is not possible to simply turn our attention to new issues and expect to comprehend them
using conventional outlooks that are insensitive to those issues. Attention/perception is
not a neutral spotlight that can be shined on any object whatsoever. Attention/perception
is culturally organized (engineered) to be sensitive to certain phenomena. Before it can
be turned to focus on other issues, it must be tuned to receive them.
This was certainly necessary when psychoanalysis, behaviorism, and psychobiology
were introduced and accepted. To gain acceptance for the specific concepts of these doc-
trines (conditioning, unconscious, id, defense mechanisms, genetic vulnerability, sur-
vival of the genotype), a new sense of psychology was necessary. Psychoanalysis construes
psychology as complex, convoluted, dangerous, devious, invisible, requiring expository
procedures, utilizing mental energy and psychic mechanisms, and divided into regions of
the psyche (id, ego, superego). This is a different way of thinking about psychology from
behavioristic conditioning, which conceptualizes psychology as sequences of passively
associated stimuli and responses. It is not only the specific constructs that differ, but also
the entire way of thinking about psychology either as complex, convoluted, active,
dynamic, and struggling or as simple and passive. These senses must be cultivated before
specific constructs will be acceptable.
The same holds for macro cultural psychology. Consequently, I shall devote consider-
able attention to explaining a new sense of psychology that is necessary for comprehend-
ing macro cultural psychology. I will do this by explaining collateral issues that inform
and justify macro cultural psychology. Chapters 1 and 4 address philosophical issues that
bear on the theory, which is explained in Chapters 2, 3, 5, and 6.
 53 Philosophical and Historical Underpinnings

The new sense of psychology I articulate challenges traditional approaches, and it is

challenged by traditional approaches that have shaped the reader’s view of psychology.
Convincing the reader of the validity and usefulness of macro cultural psychology
requires dislodging alternative views that bias the reader against macro cultural psychol-
ogy. A new doctrine is not convincing by itself, in terms of its own merits; it simultane-
ously requires disabusing people of conventional views that militate against the new one.
The constructive efforts to establish a new doctrine must be complemented by decon-
structive efforts to dislodge obstacles to that doctrine. I will devote considerable attention
to the latter as well as to the former.

SYSTEMS AND DIALECTICS

Macro cultural psychology regards psychological and cultural phenomena as integrated
within a system. This systemic relationship enables culture and psychology to reciprocally
form each other with maximal power and fullness. It makes each a part of the other and
saturated with the other. No other relationship between culture and psychology is as deep,
encompassing, rich, dynamic, complex, and interesting as the systemic one. Systemic phi-
losophy (ontology and epistemology) deepens our appreciation and understanding of the
full, rich, integral relationship that exists between culture and psychology. Vygotsky
(1997b) emphasized the systemic nature of phenomena and the need to adopt systemic
philosophy in order to comprehend them: “We must take interest in systems and their
fate. Systems and their fate—it seems to me that for us the alpha and omega of our next
work must reside in these four words” (p. 107). Denying or ignoring dialectical systemic
philosophy impedes the development of macro cultural psychology to comprehend the
full, rich relationship between culture and psychology.
Consequently, it is important to learn from the scholarship on systemic philosophy how to
apply it to cultural psychology. Sawyer (2005) provides a useful history of some pioneers of
systems and emergence. However, he does not discuss the concepts of Hegel and Marx, which
are the most useful. I shall draw on their concepts in developing my notion of a system.
Systemic philosophy emphasizes the following points:

1. A system consists of elements that are interdependent and overlapping

(interpenetrating).

Each permeates the others, rather than remaining external to them. This is called inter-
nal relations. It is a central tenet of the systemic philosophy known as dialectics. For us,
systemic philosophy is dialectical philosophy. It opposes atomistic philosophy that
regards elements as separate and discrete variables, like billiard balls—impacting one
another momentarily and shifting their positions quantitatively. Internal relations are
permanently intertwined and affect one another’s quality. Internal relations are thus qual-
itative relations. They require qualitative methodology to be known in their full interde-
pendence and complexity.
We may illustrate the dialectical systemic model in regard to the four basic elements
of cultural psychology, namely, the relation between culture, psychology, biology, and
personal experience. The dialectical system would look like Figure 1.1.
 54 macro cultural psychology

Culture

Psychology Biology

Personal

fig. 1.1 Dialectical System of Culture, Psychology, Biology, and Personal Experience.

Each element is itself a complex dialectical subsystem. For instance, culture as a dialec-
tical system may be depicted as in Figure 1.2.
Psychology is also a complex dialectical subsystem; it may be depicted as in Figure 1.3.

2. The intertwining of elements makes them congruent with one another.

The qualities of each extend through the others to form a blend that evens out incon-
sistencies. There is not a juxtaposition of inconsistent atoms as is true for atomistic phi-
losophy. That is only possible if each element remains independent of the others and
retains its own identity. Overlapping, interpenetrating elements in a system pressure one
another to adjust. It is like introducing a new member into a family—a process of mutual
adjustment of roles takes place and results in a grand symbiosis.
Thus, biology becomes saturated by culture and psychology to become consistent with
them; it does not remain an independent element with its own fixed properties. For an
element to embody and express a system of interrelated elements, it must be congruent
with them; it could not be independent (self-contained) and express a system at the same
time.
A variety of mechanisms ensure consistency among psychological elements. What
Freud called “defense mechanisms” serve this function. For instance, rationalization of a
bad deed makes it psychologically compatible with one’s positive self-image. Slave owners
justify their practice by downgrading slaves to nonhuman status. In this way their mis-
treatment of slaves does not contradict their self-image of being good to other people.
 55 Philosophical and Historical Underpinnings

Political
economy

Education Family

Culture
Social
science Media

Language Religion

fig. 1.2 Culture as a Dialectical System.

Their self-image pressures them to distort the slave system in a way that is congruent with
it. If they did not rationalize slavery as protecting subhumans, then their actions would
contradict their positive self-image and would cause dissonance. Rationalization pre-
empts dissonance and ensures psychological consistency. Dissociation serves the same
function. Dissociating a bad action from consciousness protects the image of the psycho-
logical system as consistently benevolent. The desire to preserve the sense of benevolence
drives people to exclude contradictory acts from the system by not thinking about them.
Dissociation and rationalization are mechanisms that maintain the integrity of the psy-
chological system.

Self

Memory Emotion

Motivation Cognition
Psychology

Attention Language

Needs Perception

fig. 1.3 Psychology as a Dialectical Subsystem.

 56 macro cultural psychology

3. A dialectical system is not an interaction of disparate, discrete elements.

A coherent, unified system is not a sequence of separate, independent, juxtaposed

elements that “interact.” Interaction implies separate, independent elements that each
contribute some “variance” or influence to others. The elements, or variables, are con-
joined by a “+” that adds their separate, different contributions together. The most dispa-
rate, antagonistic factors are simply thrown together with a +, with little sense of how
their antagonism could be resolved to jointly produce behavior. Interactionism opposes
the internal blending and merging of phenomena in dialectical systems.
The opposition can be illustrated with the example of racial psychology that is exam-
ined in the Introduction. We have seen that white and black psychology was organized by
(and around) the code of racial etiquette. All the elements, such as the biological and the
personal, have adjusted themselves to be congruent with and supportive of racial eti-
quette. This is necessary for racial etiquette to maintain itself. If elements of psychology
were discordant with the racial etiquette, they would undermine it. An additive equation
consisting of such elements would introduce contradictory features to culture.
For instance, if genes, hormones, and neurotransmitters were construed as indepen-
dent factors with given qualities and functions of the sort they have in animal behavior,
and if they were then placed alongside racial etiquette in an equation such as

genes + hormones + racial etiquette = psychology

the independent influence of animalistic genes and hormones would contradict the influ-
ence of racial etiquette. If genes and hormones impelled aggression in response to physical
danger (as they do in animals), they would impede the racial etiquette that calls for aggres-
sion in response to symbolic violations of the code (such as blacks not tipping their hats to
whites or not moving off the sidewalk) that are not physical dangers. Genes and hormones
would lead whites to remain quiescent in the face of these nondangerous symbolic violations,
and this would diminish whites’ capacity to enact the aggressive response that the racial eti-
quette calls for. Whites would have difficulty maintaining their dominant position vis-à-vis
blacks. The racist social order would be imperiled by noncultural biological elements.
Similarly, if human behavior were governed by automatic instinctual mechanisms, it would
impede our ability to form new cultural norms as humans routinely do. A social order can
only be maintained if genes and hormones are marshaled to support its code of etiquette.
Personal activity must also be adjusted to serve cultural codes. It cannot be a freewheel-
ing, idiosyncratic invention, for such heterogeneity would lead individuals to disregard
the organized cultural codes that are the mainstays of social life. Even if personal activity/
meaning were added to culture in another quantitative algorithm such as

personal meaning + racial etiquette = psychology

it would detract from cultural coherence, because personal meanings would contradict
racial etiquette. The algorithm would be adding inconsistent, independent elements that
would counteract each other. Personal meaning would be independent of culture and
 57 Philosophical and Historical Underpinnings

added onto culture from the outside; it would not emanate from culture and be organi-
cally part of it. This is the objective of psychologists who emphasize personal meaning;
they wish to add a personal “otherness” to broad, organized cultural factors.
Combining separate and independent elements would be lethal to cultural coherence
and maintenance because individual meanings would subvert cultural codes. Tempering
cultural dependence, coordination, and solidarity would diminish culture’s ability to sup-
port its individual members; thus, rather than strengthening the individual, it would
deprive the individual of cultural support and weaken him.
For culture and the individual to survive, cultural codes and structures must shape
personal activity in a more or less uniform manner.
Interactionism is eclecticism: it adds disparate, independent elements together rather than
integrating them in a unified, coherent, consistent system. Interactionism allows discrepant
parts to coexist rather than forming a common unity. Interactionism is akin to multicultur-
alism, which allows diverse groups to coexist without forming a genuine community.
Interactionism is faced with the difficult problem of explaining (a) why certain human
behaviors are culturally organized while other behaviors—or portions of behavior—are
due to other kinds of mechanisms, (b) how noncultural mechanisms operate to generate
human complex human behavior, and (c) how cultural and noncultural mechanisms
interact to product seamless behavior. For example, in the supposed dichotomy between
biologically produced basic emotional experience and culturally directed behavioral
expressions of emotions, how do the biological and cultural mechanisms operate together
to produce emotions with behavioral expressions?
Our dialectical formulation avoids this inconsistency by construing biological processes
as consistent with the cultural organization of psychology. To be consistent with culture,
biology cannot determine the specific form and content of psychological phenomena on
its own, for this would displace the formative role of culture. For culture to form psychol-
ogy, biology must act only as a general potentiating substratum that enables culture to
thoroughly organize psychological phenomena.

4. While the elements come to blend together in a symbiosis, they also retain qualitative
distinctness.

This is why they influence one another; if they lost their distinctness, they could not do
so. In other words, while psychology is cultural, it is a particular kind of cultural element
that is different from others such as artifacts. An emotion is not a spoon, although it is
formed by artifacts such as eating utensils, and although a spoon may be invested with
emotional significance (e.g., if it is a treasured heirloom or disgustingly dirty).
Distinctiveness and interplay among different elements coexist within the overall unity
of a system.

5. Within the dialectical system of elements, certain one(s) are more dominant than
others.

The fact that elements are intertwined and reciprocally constitute one another does not
mean they do so equally. We shall see that within cultural psychology as a system (Fig. 1.1),
 58 macro cultural psychology

culture dominates the other elements. Within culture as a dialectical system (Fig. 1.2),
political economy dominates the other cultural elements. Within psychology as a subsys-
tem (Fig. 1.3), cognition and language dominate the other psychological elements. (Because
culture dominates the other elements and subsystems, and political economy dominates
culture, it follows that all the elements and subsystems are dominated by political econ-
omy. This was indicated in the example of racial psychology I presented in the Introduction.
All the psychological elements were dominated by the political economy of Jim Crow and
its racial code of honor. I shall explain and document this point throughout the book.)
The dominant/central elements exert qualitative hegemony over the others. This hege-
mony extends like a ripple effect throughout the system of intertwined elements. Indeed,
the internal relations among the elements make this ripple effect possible.
Vygotsky was a great systemic thinker who adopted points 1 through 6 in his psycho-
logical theory. For instance, he said, “Habits . . . are induced to activity only as subordi-
nate points in some general structure, a common whole” (Vygotsky, 1998, p. 8).

Development of thinking has a central, key, decisive significance for all the other
functions and processes. We cannot express more clearly or tersely the leading role
of intellectual development in relation to the whole personality of the adolescent
and to all of his mental functions other than to say that acquiring the function of
forming concepts is the principal and central link in all the changes that occur in
the psychology of the adolescent. All other links in this chain, all other special
functions, are intellectualized, reformed, and reconstructed under the influence of
these crucial successes that the thinking of the adolescent achieves. . . . Lower or
elementary functions, being processes that are more primitive, earlier, simpler, and
independent of concepts in genetic, functional, and structural relations, are recon-
structed on a new basis when influenced by thinking in concepts and . . . they are
included as component parts, as subordinate stages, into new, complex combina-
tions created by thinking on the basis of concepts, and finally . . . under the influ-
ence of thinking, foundations of the personality and world view of the adolescent
are laid down. (Vygotsky, 1998, p. 81)ii

6. Each element carries, embodies, incarnates, crystallizes, expresses, and represents the
system of other elements, dominated by the central ones.

Biology is laden with the system of cultural, biological, and personal elements. This is
depicted in Figure 1.4.
Figure 1.4 recasts Figure 1.1 from the position of biology.
Figure 1.5 depicts psychology as embodying and expressing culture, biology, and per-
sonal experience. It reorganizes Figure 1.1 from the position of psychology.
Figure 1.5 can be expanded to show the detailed relationship between psychology and
culture, yielding Figure 1.6.
Psychology expresses and reinforces the cultural system. It is an element of the cultural
system that goes into constructing and maintaining it. It is necessary for the
system because a cultural system requires a corresponding psychology that animates
 fig. 1.4 Biology as Laden with
Culture Culture, Psychology, and Personal
Experience.
Psychology

Biology Personal

fig. 1.5 Psychology as Laden

Culture with Culture, Biology, and
Personal Experience.
Biology

Psychology Personal

Family

Political Language
economy

Education Religion

Cultural
Literature, system
music,
Personal
movies
responsibility

Clothing

Psychological
phenomenon/
behavior

fig. 1.6 Psychology as Laden with Culture.

59
 60 macro cultural psychology

fig. 1.7 The Psychological

Perception Subsystem from the Position of
One of its Elements.
Memory

Self
Emotion

cultural behavior. Psychology is also necessary for the individual to participate and suc-
ceed in the system. Individuals require, and strive for, particular emotions, reasoning,
perception, motivation, and self-concept to participate and succeed in the system.
Additionally, psychology is a window into culture, a barometer of how it affects people.
Psychologists can use psychology as a social indicator to suggest ways that culture can be
improved to enhance psychological functioning.
This model indicates that psychology is a macro cultural factor that transmits the cul-
tural system to the individual user of psychological phenomena. Learning an individualis-
tic self, jealousy, personal choice, syllogistic reasoning, rote memorization, the achievement
motive, and so forth implicitly involve learning the cultural system that constitutes them.
Psychology is therefore political because it instantiates a cultural system of norms and
values (cf. Ratner, 2006a, pp. 118–119). Social authorities do not have to explicitly teach
cultural values per se. It is sufficient to socialize psychological phenomena, which implic-
itly teach cultural values that constitute them.
We can similarly recast the psychological system to highlight one of its elements; this
yields Figure 1.7. Or we can reframe the cultural system, depicted in Figure 1.2, to high-
light one of its elements, yielding Figure 1.8. We can also focus on social science as a
cultural element in Figure 1.2 and highlight it as in Figure 1.9.

fig. 1.8 Education as Laden

Political economy with the Cultural System.

Family

Education Media

Religion
 61 Philosophical and Historical Underpinnings

fig. 1.9 Social Science as a

Political economy Cultural Phenomenon.

Family

Social science Media

theory/
methodology

Religion

Social science theories and methodologies implicitly crystallize a host of influences and
values. These must be elucidated in order to thoroughly understand the full significance
and implications of the theories and methodologies. Often, advocates of a theory or
methodology are not aware of the system that underlies them. We must often elucidate
this for the advocates. Vygotsky (1997b) said we must “follow each principle to its ultimate
conclusion, take each concept in the extreme form toward which it strives, and investigate
each line of thinking to the very end, at times completing it for the author” (p. 280). I shall
undertake this often in this book.
As we mentioned in conjunction with Figure 1.6, social science implicitly transmits its
cultural constituents to its users. Therefore, teaching social science is political because it
teaches the cultural values/concepts that constitute social science. Social science is a
socializing agent, just as psychological phenomena are.
The systemic model emphasizes that cultural elements crystallize other cultural ele-
ments plus psychological elements. Every cultural element is informed by the perception,
emotions, memory, self-concept, cognition, and motivation of its participants. This is
depicted in Figure 1.10.

fig. 1.10 The Cultural and

Political economy Psychological Constituting of
Cultural Elements.
Family

Education Media

Emotions

Self-concept
Motivation
 62 macro cultural psychology

Any cultural issue can be the focal element in the systemic model. Ethnicity, gender,
longevity, health, clothing, literacy, numeracy, poverty, masculinity—all reflect a cultural
system that is, of course, differentiated into social class according to the political economy.
Thus, ethnicity or gender is informed by political economy of wealth and power. Being
black in America crystallizes the weight of exploitation and segregation that emanates
from the political economy and permeates many other institutions.
Elias (1978) noted that artifacts objectify, or incarnate, a range of cultural customs,
meanings, social relations, structural elements, and psychology: “The [culinary] knife,
by the nature of its social use, reflects changes in the human personality with its changing
drives and wishes. It is an embodiment of historical situations and structural regularities
of society” (p. 122).
The systemic model is the most profound cultural model, for it recognizes the full cul-
tural factors that constitute a phenomenon and are incarnated in it. Cultural factors are
not outside a phenomenon, or marginal to it; they permeate it. This brings the full weight
of culture to bear on any phenomenon. Nonsystemic models of culture cannot incorpo-
rate culture so thoroughly into a given phenomenon.
All cultural factors crystallize the system. This is true for artifacts, social institutions,
and cultural concepts. Therefore, when someone uses a cultural factor, he or she is implic-
itly utilizing the system that is incarnated in it, and that system becomes transferred to
the individual in the process of its utilization. Cultural factors are socializing agents of the
social system in that they transmit the system to individuals who use a particular cultural
factor. This is depicted in Figure 1.11.
The systemic model portrays the individual in relation to his society; it can be depicted
as in Figure 1.12.
Hegel (1961/1800) expressed this dialectical relation between the individual and the
society of other individuals: “The concept of individualist includes opposition to infinite
variety and also inner association with it. A human being is an individual life in so far as
he is to be distinguished from all the elements and from the infinite of individual beings
outside himself. But he is only an individual life in so far as he is at one with all the ele-
ments, with the infinity of lives outside himself ” (p. 310).
Vygotsky (1997b) expressed this relationship when he said, “[E]ach person is to some
degree a measure of the society, or rather class, to which he belongs, for the whole totality
of social relationships is reflected in him” (p. 317).
Leontiev (1977) similarly expressed the systemic organization of the individual’s psy-
chology as incarnating a cultural system: “Despite all its diversity, its special features, the
activity of the human individual is a system that obeys the system of relations of society.
Outside these relations human activity cannot exist. How it exists is determined by the
forms and means of material and spiritual communication that are generated by the
development of production and that cannot be realized except in the activity of specific
individuals” (p. 182).
We can see that Leontiev emphasizes the systemic nature of society and psychology,
and also that this system is dominated by the mode of production or political economy.
Moreover, he states that the individual is necessary for realizing cultural factors; they do
not exist apart from people.
 Government
policies

Social class
Education

Work rules

fig. 1.11 Cultural Elements as Transmitters/Socializers of Macro Cultural Systems.

Family

Language
Political
economy

Education Religion

Literature, Cultural
music, system Personal
movies
responsibility

Clothing

Individual

fig. 1.12 The Individual as Laden with Culture.

63
 64 macro cultural psychology

7. The fact that an element is constituted by a system of interrelated elements means that
it is overdetermined by multiple factors; it is not determined by a single factor.
8. The fact that an element is constituted by a system of interrelated elements means that
it is different in a different system.

The effect of family wealth/poverty on psychological development, educational and occu-

pational success, and medical care is much stronger in a privatized market economy in
which individuals rely on their own resources (including their family) than in a socialized
economy where public programs equalize the treatment that individuals receive. Moreover,
the amount and kind of influence that the family has on individual psychology in consumer
capitalism is less than during feudalism, colonial capitalism, and industrial capitalism.
Similarly, the impact of advertising on preteens’ consumerism varies in cultural con-
texts. Hong Kong and Danish preteens (“tweens”), for example, respond to television ads
and pop-up ads on the Internet differently. Danish tweens are more influenced by adver-
tising and spend more money on CDs, sports equipment, clothing, and cosmetics than
Hong Kong tweens, while the latter spend more on books.
Friedlmeier, Chakkarath, and Schwarz (2005) state that parental control has different
connotations in different societies; it is not a singular variable (p. 208). In certain societ-
ies parental control is accepted as positive, while in other societies it is disparaged as an
infringement. Authoritarian parental control is resented and inhibits school performance
in Anglo-Americans, but this view is noted far less among Asian Americans who accept
it as educational (Friedlmeier et al., 2005, p. 210). Kim and Park (2006) report that exter-
nal control and the instilling of guilt in children have negative psychological conse-
quences for Western children; however, Korean children feel indebted and duty-bound to
their parents in return for the hard work and sacrifice parents make for their children,
and resentment, rebellion, and other negative behaviors do not result from external
parental pressure in that culture.
Rothbaum and Morelli similarly conclude that “mothers’ physical control [of children]
relates to insecure attachment in Anglo-American families, but not in Puerto Rican fam-
ilies” (Friedlmeier et al., 2005, p. 104). Strong physical control was associated with secure
12-month attachment status for middle-class Puerto Rican dyads.

9. The system concretizes an element with a specific character imparted by the particu-
lar system to which it belongs.

Education has a more concrete character in a capitalist society with a capitalist political
economy, media, and government than it does in a traditional peasant society. The self and
love similarly have concrete, culturally variable characteristics in different cultural systems.
To fully understand an element, its concrete character must be comprehended. This
means that the systemic model is not an optional perspective on psychology; it is a neces-
sary one. If an element is, in fact, part of a system and constituted by the system, then we
must employ a hermeneutic methodology to apprehend the system in the element if
we are to comprehend it. We cannot dispense with the systemic model simply because we
feel more interested in some other model, for to ignore the systemic model is to overlook
the full character of the element. Forsaking the systemic model would be unscientific.
 65 Philosophical and Historical Underpinnings

If psychology is structured in a certain manner, it is incumbent on us to respect this

structure in our research. We cannot discard it as we wish because we prefer “another
take” on the matter.

10. The concrete content of an element thus derives from the structural position of the
element in the system.

It is because the element is structured in the system, in a central or peripheral position,

that its content embodies the other elements. If it were not so structured, it would not
incarnate their features. The manner in which elements are structured determines their
content. It is therefore imperative to pay attention to one’s theory of structure (structural-
ism, holism, atomism), because it directs one’s sense of the content that cultural and
psychological elements possess.

11. The concrete, systemic character of an element is comprehended by a hermeneutic

epistemology or methodology.

Hermeneutics emphasizes the systemic nature of an element internally related to other

elements. This is called the hermeneutic circle. Husserl called this system “the horizon” of
an element. Hermeneutics is the epistemology, methodology, or science of elucidating
the hermeneutic circle that constitutes an element.
A hermeneutic analysis goes beyond the immediate, obvious feature to less obvious
background features that constitute it. There is always more to something than meets the
senses. Every phenomenon is “big” or “pregnant” in the sense that it extends far beyond
itself to politics, society, human nature, and biology. Hermeneutics brings these all into
studying a particular element. The systemic perspective is the ultimate in contextualizing
behavior/psychology.
Hermeneutic methodology uses the target phenomenon as the starting point for a
“centrifugal sweep” to the system behind it. This centrifugal sweep follows the entire
circle of the system before returning to the focal phenomenon armed with full knowledge
of its constituents. This is the distinctive methodology of macro cultural psychology in a
nutshell. It is a syncretic methodology that broadens the focal phenomenon to extend to
its system of constituents.
Vygotsky (1997b) endorsed this kind of methodology. He said that Psychology, as all sci-
ences, begins with a particular example that it regards as a trace of a larger, more complex,
unobservable phenomenon. The trick is to link the trace with its system, and this requires
rational acts of interpretation, induction, and deduction, because the system is not directly
given in the researcher’s sensory observation and experience.

The study of traces, influences, the method of interpretation and reconstruction,

the method of critique and the finding of meaning have been no less fruitful
than the method of direct “empirical” observation. . . . How do the sciences pro-
ceed in the study of what is not immediately given? Generally speaking,
they reconstruct it, they re-create the subject of study through the method of
interpreting its traces of influences, i.e., indirectly. Thus, the historian interprets
 66 macro cultural psychology

traces—documents, memoirs, newspapers, etc. and nevertheless history is a sci-

ence about the past, reconstructed by its traces. It is, therefore, a matter of finding
the right interpretation and not of completely refraining from any interpreta-
tion. . . . The use of a thermometer is a perfect model of the indirect method. After
all, we do not study what we see—the rising of the mercury, the expansion of the
alcohol—but we study heat and its changes which are indicated by the mercury or
alcohol. We interpret the indications of the thermometer, we reconstruct the phe-
nomenon under study by its traces. . . . There is no fundamental difference what-
soever between the use of a thermometer on the one hand and interpretation in
history, psychology, etc. on the other. The same holds true for any science: it is not
dependent upon sensory perception. . . . For psychology, the need to fundamen-
tally transcend the boundaries of immediate [observation] is a matter of life and
death. The demarcation, separation of the scientific concept from the specific per-
ception, can take place only on the basis of the indirect [reconstructive] method.
The reply that the indirect method is inferior to the direct one is in scientific terms
utterly false. . . . The description “this animal is running away from some danger,”
however insufficient it may be, is yet a thousand times more characteristic for the
animal’s behavior than a formula giving us the movements of all its legs with their
varying speeds, the curves of breath, pulse, and so forth. (pp. 271–277)iii

Vygotsky is saying that all science transcends immediate observation of a particular

example, and he links it to a broader, complex, unobservable system. While the subject
matter of psychology is distinctive and requires distinctive methods of interpreting will-
ful behavior (rather than inorganic properties and laws) to apprehend it, it also falls
within the rubric of general scientific principles that require an interpretive tracing of an
example to its broader system.
Figure 1.7 shows that it is a mistake to study a psychological element unto itself as a
variable. Emotions are not singular entities; they are laden with perception, memory, and
reasoning. Given this, it makes no sense to regard emotions as a kind of module that is
processed in a circumscribed area of the brain. Because emotions are internally related to
other psychological phenomena, all of the cortical processing that sustains the others
must be involved in emotions. Emotions must be processed in many areas of the cortex
where their perceptual, memory, and cognitive components are processed. The notion of
circumscribed cortical localization of psychological functions rests upon, and promul-
gates, an erroneous atomistic conception of psychological phenomena.

12. While all factors bear on an element, certain ones are more influential than others.

Complementing the syncretic methodology of hermeneutics, social scientists must

also employ an analytical methodology that distinguishes more important influences
from less important ones.
Criminologists, for example, debate the factors that are most responsible for the drop in
serious crime in the United States in the 1990s. Some believe the drop was due primarily to
stricter sentencing laws (which may have kept offenders off the streets longer and also
frightened potential offenders from committing crimes), while others believe the economic
 67 Philosophical and Historical Underpinnings

expansion allowed potential criminals to find legal work to earn a living (Rosenfeld &
Messner, 2009). It is important to engage in this type of analysis to pinpoint the primary
cause of the drop in crime, because this information is helpful for preventing crime levels
to rise in the future.
Of course, either of these factors is itself part of a subsystem of related factors that must
be identified syncretically. The rising economy encompasses a host of interrelated factors
that must be identified to fully understand how it reduces the tendency to commit seri-
ous crime.

13. Dialectical systemic philosophy emphasizes that an element not only embodies and
expresses the system, but it is also a window into the system from a particular position.

It enables us to apprehend the entire system in a distinctive manner. Each element is a

window into the same system; however, each refracts the system in a distinctive manner.
Education, the media, and psychology emphasize different aspects of the cultural system.

14. The systemic model contrasts with the atomistic model of causation that is reflected
in the notion of independent variables causing dependent variables.

This is depicted in Figure 1.13. This model treats the two represented elements as sepa-
rate even as the independent variable pushes the dependent variable. Each element is
separate and qualitatively independent; they come together only momentarily, as one
strikes the other. There is no sense that media forms emotions by being internal to them
and constituting them as a concrete phenomenon that contains the media as a determi-
nant. Emotions are emotions, pure and simple; the media affect them only tangentially,
by attaching them to certain objects, directing them to be expressed in certain situations,
or affecting their intensity. Anger and love, for example, would vary only in these external
manners; they would not take on concrete, inner qualities.
The contrast between mechanical, external causation and systemic interactions can be
illustrated with the example of gender differences in mathematics that I mentioned in the
Introduction. The mechanical model would posit a list of cultural factors that causes gender
differences in mathematics (Fig. 1.14). The systemic model would look like Figure 1.15.
The conception of “influence,” “causation,” or “relationship” is an important collateral,
philosophical issue that bears directly on macro cultural psychology (and all social sci-
ence). The form of the influence process or the relationship between factors is critical for
understanding the content of the phenomenon.

15. Elements in a system are functional for maintaining the system.

Functionalism is an important and unique aspect of systems that has particular

import for macro cultural psychology. Macro cultural psychology employs a functionalist

Media Emotions

fig. 1.13 Mechanical Model of Culture and Emotions.

 68 macro cultural psychology

Ideology Gender math differences

Wage differential Gender math differences

Political power Gender math differences

fig. 1.14 Mechanical Model of Culture and Cognition.

perspective to understand how psychological phenomena are functional to a social

system.
Psychology acquires specific cultural content that serves to envision, maintain, incar-
nate, and promote particular social systems such as feudalism or capitalism. In capital-
ism, the individualistic self animates free market behavior such as buying and running a
private business, searching for a job, buying a house, and accumulating possessions.
Function is a powerful, distinctive way to understand, explain, describe, and predict a phe-
nomenon. A phenomenon’s function reveals why it exists in the sense of why it is necessary
for that particular constellation of elements, what role the element plays in that system and for
that system, what it reciprocally contributes to the system, and why the system needs it.
An important aspect of functionalism is its “two-sided,” dialectical emphasis on the
system and its individual elements. An element is functional to a system because (a) it car-
ries and promotes the system by reflecting, representing, and extending it; and (b) elements
of a system also reciprocally add their distinctive qualities to it. Functionality denotes the
indispensability of an element to the system. The system needs its elements, and this grants
them importance.
Function introduces teleology into systems, for the element/part has a purpose—it
must accomplish something for the system; it is not simply a byproduct of the system.
Function implies activity on the part of the element to do something for the system
(Ratner, 2006a, pp. 24–25).
Two examples will illustrate this point.

Wage differential

Ideology

Gender
math
differences Political power
differential

fig. 1.15 Systemic Model of Cultural Causes of Gender Differences in Math Performance.
 69 Philosophical and Historical Underpinnings

A teacher in a school functions to convey school rules, standards, and objectives to

students. He or she also actively and creatively prepares for class, leads the class, trouble-
shoots problems, etc. Activity and structural functionalism are combined in the teacher’s
behavior; the school system would not function without the teacher’s activity.
Similarly, consumer psychology is active desire, perception, attention, memory, moti-
vation, and identification with products that implement the needs of consumer capital-
ism to generate profit through sales. Consumer capitalism needs consumer psychology to
animate behavior that will serve the needs of capitalism. Activity and structural function-
alism are combined in the consumers’ behavior. Structure and function do not negate
activity, nor does activity negate structure and function. Activity is functional to structure,
and structure requires and encourages activity in order to function.
The dialectic of functionalism avoids the twin errors of reifying structure (denying
individual activity/agency) and defining activity in individualistic terms, as an individual
act for the individual’s benefit (without social constraints and direction). The functional-
ist dialectic replaces these twin errors with a notion of social activity, or social agency that
integrates activity and agency within a social system.iv
Functionalism also usefully depicts the role biology plays in cultural psychology. We
may say that biology functions to energize cultural behavior. Biology does not cause
human behavior in the mechanical sense in which it causes some animal behavior.
Because functionalism is central to macro cultural psychology, it will enhance our
understanding of the latter by illuminating functionalism with a few specific examples
from other fields where it has become developed in sophisticated, detailed ways.
Darwin’s theory of natural selection was functionalist. Adaptive anatomical features are
functional for survival. They have a purpose in this sense, and they play an active role in
making survival possible, even at the animal level where anatomy and behavior are
mechanically determined by genes. Darwin’s functionalist emphasis is evident in the
original title of his magnum opus, On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection,
or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life. These words indicate that
natural selection plays a function in the sense that it is the means by which species evolve,
or “transmute.” Evolution serves a purpose of realizing something; it does something to
bring about an end. It serves to preserve favored (i.e., most adaptable) races in the strug-
gle for life. We can see in the title (which was shortened to On The Origin of Species) that
Darwin was seeking to understand functions, reasons, requirements, utility, purposes,
and means that lead to outcomes. What does natural selection do? It is the means by
which favored races win in the struggle for survival. It is the way that the struggle for life
is carried out.v
Darwin did not know the specific causative mechanism of natural selection—random
mutation of genes—but he grasped the functional mechanism of heredity by means
of which better-adapted organisms survived and procreated more than less adapted
organisms.
Functionalist theory led Darwin to discover explanations for anatomical features that
escaped other scientists. He was particularly agitated by male peacocks’ large, heavy tails. At
first glance, they appear to have no functional significance—and actually seem to be a hand-
icap because they are so unwieldy. This irritated Darwin because he believed that every
anatomical detail had functional significance. He was so annoyed by the apparent lack of
 70 macro cultural psychology

functional significance of peacock tails that he remarked in 1860, “The sight of a feather in
a peacock’s tail, whenever I gaze at it, makes me sick” (cited in Ridley, 2009, p. 65).
This distress spurred Darwin to pursue a functionalist theory to discover that the
ornate tail is functional: it stimulates sexual acceptance by the female. He developed the
notion of “sexual selection” to provide a functionalist account for all sorts of cosmetic
attributes such as color and beauty that do not enhance survival by obtaining more food
or defending against predators.
Sexual selection was a novel, intuitive idea that Darwin created out of his theory. It was not
an observable, sensory fact; rather, it was an unobservable, and even untestable, construct. It
was based on functionalist theory, and it was informed by a great deal of empirical observa-
tion. However, it was only Darwin’s creative genius that constructed the concept of sexual
selection. Of course, the concept was true, valid, and useful in the sense that it corresponded
to a real phenomenon. It was not imaginary in the sense of being a fanciful invention that
had no correlate in animal biology. Rather, it was visionary for seeing far beyond the given
appearances of things to intuit an important, real principle of animal biological behavior that
less creative, imaginative, intuitive, and rational scientists could not have imagined.
To be good scientists, psychologists should emphasize this important characteristic of
scientific thinking (which I introduced in the first section of the Introduction) called
macro psychology as a scientific endeavor.
In 1628, William Harvey used functionalism to discover that blood circulates through
veins and arteries. Before this, scientists believed that these vessels carried digested food
or air. The noted philosopher Norwood Russell Hanson (1969) explained this as follows:
“Harvey conjectured that nature, doing nothing in vain, would never have given the car-
diac ventricles and vessels so large a relative size without a purpose. His experience had
been that animal conduits always reflected in their sizes and shapes the character of the
substances they transported” (p. 226). In other words, the sizes and shapes of the conduits
had a function, or purpose, to accomplish some end. That function was their raison d’être
and explained their features. Thus, it was possible to deduce from their features what their
function, or purpose, must be. This functionalist perspective led Harvey to conclude that
transporting blood was more congruent with the features of the conduits than transport-
ing air or food. “He was able to argue so as to show why the cardiac and vascular values
are constructed as they are, why the aorta and vena cava are of such great dimensions, and
why the pulmonary artery makes the unusual route it does” (Hanson, 1969, p. 229).
The functionalist theory thus was pivotal to discovering the facts about arteries, veins,
blood, and the heart. (The premise that nature does nothing in vain led to the discovery
of the function of the vein.) Harvey looked for functional relationships and congruencies
between features of veins and blood and their purposes. This is different from searching
for causes of veins’ features in the sense of causal mechanisms that produce them, such as
cell growth, genetic programs, etc. Functionalism looks to understand reasons for things
in addition to the mechanisms that produce them.
I employ the same kind of functional model and deduction from it to understand
how psychological phenomena are functional to social systems. I also use this approach
to understand how Psychology (the study of psychology) is functional to cultural sys-
tems. Of course, the manner in which a part is functional to a system varies with the
kind of thing it is. Human psychology, culture, and veins involve very different kinds of
 71 Philosophical and Historical Underpinnings

mechanisms and processes. Nevertheless, they all have the analogous characteristic of
playing a role in a system that maintains and expresses the part.
We must develop functionalist theory in order to apprehend how elements actually exist
in systems. As I have mentioned, a proper theory is necessary in order to perceive and
comprehend complex phenomena, which are not transparent to sensory observation.
Functionalism emphasizes order and reason among things, for things are ordered in
systems where they play particular roles. They exist for a reason: they serve to maintain a
larger system. The parts must be as they are for the system to maintain; if they were dif-
ferent, they would alter the system that depends upon them. Thus, necessity, order, inte-
gration, wholes, and reason are all defining characteristics of functionalism.
It is as impossible to conclusively prove cultural-psychological functional explanations
as it is to prove Darwinian explanations for peacock tails or valves in veins. However, it is
perfectly scientific to deduce function in a plausible way (Hanson, 1969, pp. 230–231).
Functional explanations can be empirically tested. Biologists set out to test the functional-
ist explanation of giraffes’ long necks—that they function to access food (leaves) on tall trees
which animals with short necks cannot reach, thereby providing a competitive advantage in
feeding. Biologists found that giraffes do not use their long necks to feed on high branches.
Rather, careful observation discovered that giraffes eat off medium level branches. Obser-
vation revealed that male giraffes use their long necks in mating rituals to fight with other
males in order to achieve dominance and gain access to females. Males fight by swinging
their necks and hitting opponents with the bony structures at the top of their heads. Longer
necks can reach competitors at a greater distance, and they deliver a stronger blow to subdue
them. This postulated function is accepted because it is rational, logical, and plausible, even
though it is not experimentally provable. Functional explanations in cultural psychology
must be subjected to this kind of empirical test among functionalist hypotheses.

16. The functionalist-systems approach is invoked at the very beginning of a research

project.

It guides the researcher to conceptualize the target phenomenon as an element in a

system, rather than as a separate variable. The primary questions are as follows:

• How can I conceptualize these elements as parts of systems?

• Which system are they part of?
• What are the other elements of this system?
• How do they depend upon and support one another within this system?
• What features does each element acquire through its role in the system?
• How are an element’s features distinctive to, or particular to, this system?
• How might the features of the elements change if they played different roles in this
system, or if they were transposed to a different system?
• What kinds of methods must I use to elicit answers to these questions?
• What kinds of probing questions must I ask to garner these answers?

A systems approach also examines issues that are not present in the human
behavioral system because they would contradict the distinctly human elements and
 72 macro cultural psychology

interfere with human cultural psychology—a systems approach excludes as well as

includes.

17. Functionalism does not mean that a system is efficient, democratic, or humane.

It simply means that the elements of any system have a function and purpose to express,
reinforce, and contribute to the system. Brutality, coercion, corruption, crime, poverty,
militarization, and inefficiency are functional in these ways to systems where they exist.
They are not accidents, anomalies, or aberrations.
The financial speculation that led to the international economic crash in 2008 was
functional to generating profit for financial corporations. This is why it was initiated and
condoned by managers and government officials. A postmortem has revealed that “[a]t
bank after bank, the examiners are discovering that state and federal regulators knew
lenders were engaging in hazardous business practices but failed to act until it was too
late. (Dash, 2009, B1).” At Haven Trust, for instance, regulators warned about lax lending
standards, poor risk controls, and a buildup of potentially dangerous loans to the boom-
and-bust building industry. Despite the warnings—made as far back as 2002—neither
the bank’s management nor the regulators took action. Similar stories played out at small
and midsize lenders. Then as now, banking lobbyists vigorously opposed attempts to rein
in the banks (Dash, 2009, B1). Bank managers and government regulators knew about,
and abetted, risky activity because they desired to get rich quickly. The strategy failed, of
course, for many; however, this does not negate the fact that it was a staple of the system,
promoted at the highest levels. It was not an accident, anomaly, or aberration.
Deteriorating education is functional to American capitalism, where the most rapid job
growth is in the low-wage service sector, for which a worker does not need much high-
level education. In addition, it is cheaper for the system to import skilled employees from
other countries such as India than to train Americans. This accounts for the fact that only
half of students who enroll in college end up with a bachelor’s degree. Among rich coun-
tries, only Italy has a worse record. Also functional to the capitalist economics of educa-
tion is this fact: because large lecture classes are cheaper for a college than seminars,
freshmen are cheaper than upperclassmen. So, a college that enrolls many freshmen and
then allows many of its underclassmen to drop out may be helping its bottom line.
It is functional for maintaining the class structure that “about half of low-income stu-
dents with a high school grade-point average of at least 3.5 and an SAT score of at least
1,200 do not attend the best college they could have” (Leonhardt, 2009). Similarly, “higher
education is becoming more stratified,” with enrollment growing in the institutions with
the least resources—the public community colleges—as more and more students are
“pushed out of higher-priced institutions” (Delbanco, 2009).
Corruption, bureaucracy, and inefficiency are functional to autocratic systems based
upon personal domination by a ruling clique that rules through exchanging personal
favors rather than by impartial laws.
Functionalism is the only way to explain the persistence of social problems in the face
of plentiful knowledge and resources. For instance, educational preparedness among
American high school students has been appalling for decades. Only 28 of students are
 73 Philosophical and Historical Underpinnings

ready for college-level biology. Just 42 are prepared for college algebra. Forty percent
were unable to use the correct adverb, adjective, or preposition to form a sentence, and
40 were unable to solve multistep math problems involving percentages and fractions.
According to the Department of Education, U.S. high school students have not made any
significant progress in reading or math for nearly 4 decades (Tomsho, 2009, p. A3)! Such
deplorable, persisting inadequacy in basic skills is certainly within our knowledge to cor-
rect. It is not rocket science to teach students how to use adjectives. The fact that no
progress has been achieved in 40 years testifies to the sociology of ignorance—that is, the
fact that social forces conspire and demand ignorance. Otherwise, it would be a simple
matter to correct this problem. Indeed, during the 1950s, when the U.S. government was
alarmed at the scientific gap that was developing with Russia, the Sputnik crisis led to
massive improvements in educational level. Since then, as the economy has stagnated
and class inequities have widened, the demand for educational skills has weakened. This
is why no progress has occurred in 40 years, despite much hand-wringing.
Functionalism is the most profound feature of systems, for it makes the element a rep-
resentative of the system. The element is not simply “influenced” by the system; it bears
the system, and it represents the system. The element is not anomalous or accidental; it is
necessary to the system. Given the system, the element must occur. The element is thus a
window into the system and why the system must produce it.
This has unusual and important implications for understanding social problems. Social
problems are not anomalous or accidental; they are necessary for the system to exist—the
system requires them and prospers from them. They cannot be eradicated without
making far-reaching, fundamental changes to the system that produces and needs them;
consequently, they are windows into the cultural system (and its dominant political econ-
omy) to the same extent that any element is.
It is politically necessary for the status quo to prevent this systemic-functionalist analysis
of problems, for they reveal defects in the system, especially in its core political economy.
This is why social problems are individualized and sensationalized as bizarre, irrational
behaviors of irresponsible individuals. Corruption, Abu Ghraib, financial scandals, and
murder are treated in terms of “rotten apples,” “rogue criminals,” “greedy businessmen,”
and “disturbed individuals,” rather than as symptoms of basic systemic principles. The
more extreme and sensationalized these acts can be portrayed as, the more individual they
appear to be, and the less they appear to be part of organized society.

18. Changing a focal element requires changing the system that forms and sustains it.

It is naïve to expect change in a single element without altering its supportive system.
The element is constituted by the system of elements, and it is supported by them as they
permeate the focal element.
Oftentimes, a subsystem of closely related elements can be changed. It is not necessary
to transform the entire social system to solve every single problem. Certain problems are
more fundamental than others and implicate more of the system than other problems do.
These problems require more fundamental change in more of the system than lesser,
peripheral problems do.
 74 macro cultural psychology

19. Attempts to modify an element meet resistance from counterpressure of the system
of interdependent, other elements.
20. To change the system, it is necessary to modify its central elements, which organize
and constrain the others.

Systemic change is a dialectical concept. It requires first acknowledging the full weight
of the system on any element that one desires to change. One must appreciate (and marvel
at) the excruciating power of the system on the part—how the system has maneuvered
to sustain the part through a complex scaffold. Only then can one begin to figure out a
complex plan to attack the systemic scaffold. Comprehending the system provides ammu-
nition for changing it. Without fully appreciating the system that sustains each element,
efforts to change an element will be naïve and futile. Derogating systems (and systemic
philosophy) as reified or mechanical or fictitious contributes to one’s ignoring the full
weight of systems that must be changed. Derogating systems retards effective change
rather than promoting it.

21. Points 16–18 indicate that dialectical systemic philosophy emphasizes the need for
qualitative, systemic change. In addition, the philosophy provides for the possibility
of systemic change.

The possibility of change rests upon three conditions: (1) the entire system is implicated in
analyzing any element; (2) central elements can be identified and transformed, which will
generate widespread change throughout the system; and (3) elements can be qualitatively
transformed through changing the hermeneutic circle, or horizon, that constitutes them.
Family, education, work, and religion are qualitatively different in different cultural systems.
Systems theory thus has radical social implications for transforming established institu-
tions. In contrast, atomistic ontology, as exemplified in the positivistic notion of a variable,
builds in the assumption that variables are qualitatively fixed and vary only quantitatively.
This is a conservative politics, for it admits only quantitative, piecemeal changes in exist-
ing forms of institutions.

22. Not only does dialectical systemic theory emphasize the need and possibility for
change, but it allows for massive, wholesale, qualitative change that is more sweeping
and encompassing than piecemeal changes allowed by atomism. Internal relations
enable a fundamental change in central elements to reverberate throughout the
tightly linked elements in the system.
23. The fact that humans are formed by cultural systems does not preclude us from
reflecting on them and changing them.

Reflexivity is characteristic of human consciousness, and we can refl ect upon and alter
factors that have formed us, just as we reflect on the behavior that we have produced.
An obvious example is the fact that we can reflect upon and reject the manner in which
our families have formed us. Although family patterns are ingrained in us from birth, before
we are conscious of them; the child is induced to accept the patterns as natural out of
love and respect for the parents who promulgate them; and families employ sophisticated
 75 Philosophical and Historical Underpinnings

techniques to obscure their patterns from becoming conscious, children are capable of
detecting the patterns and repudiating them. It is not easy, and it often requires external
guidance from a skilled therapist who is familiar with family patterns and the devices used
to obscure them. However, it does happen.
The same holds for broader, cultural patterns of behavior. They equally are made to
appear natural, and forces resist reflecting on them and challenging them. However, his-
tory is replete with examples of social transformation/revolution by people who have
been oppressed by social systems and who have come to understand the nature of those
systems and viable possibilities for improving them.
The process of developing social critique and transformation is a fascinating one, and
it is germane to macro cultural psychology. For the moment, I simply emphasize that
dialectical systems theory allows for more wide-sweeping, forceful, unified, enduring,
qualitative systemic change than any other theory.

24. Emphasizing the possibility and need for systemic change is disconcerting to the
status quo.

The status quo cannot abide widespread, systemic, homogeneous change. It can tolerate
piecemeal changes in a few scattered elements—especially peripheral ones—that may
squeeze in next to, and coexist with, established elements. However, the status quo cannot
accept sweeping changes that revolutionize the entire system and change its elements,
including its revered, dominant ones.
This is true in academic disciplines as well as in society at large. Psychologists, for
example, can accept the introduction of cultural variables that explain some “variance” in
psychological processes, along with other variables that explain additional “variance.”
However, psychologists become agitated at the thought that psychological phenomena
are quintessentially cultural in their origins, characteristics, and functions. To reconcep-
tualize all other constructs (e.g., hormones, neurotransmitters, personal experiences,
agency) as subsumed within culture forces them out of their comfort zones, within which
they wish to continue doing noncultural Psychology with an occasional token nod to
cultural variables.
The status quo seeks to quell the power of macro culture in psychology and Psychology
in two ways. The first is to directly challenge the centrality of macro cultural factors. The
second is to indirectly challenge it by challenging the systemic philosophy that empha-
sizes the ability of culture to dominate other aspects of psychology and Psychology.
If culture can be reduced to just another element, then its power to encompass all the
others is mitigated. This is why the ontology and epistemology of systemic philosophy are
often derided as metaphysical or reified.

25. Dialectical systemic philosophy applies to theories about phenomena as well as to

the phenomena themselves.

We have seen that phenomena such as culture, psychology, biology, education, and
emotions exist as parts of systems. Theories and methodologies concerning these phe-
nomena are also systems of integrated, unified ideas. Theories (i.e., approaches to social
 76 macro cultural psychology

science) are not random conglomerations of disparate ideas; a logic runs throughout each
of them.
Theories/approaches are therefore “dogmatic,” “exclusive,” and resistant to change. They
resist new elements that are incompatible with their basic principles.
In this book, I will analyze four approaches to cultural psychology. Each is best viewed
as a system of elementary concepts. The four approaches and their elements are outlined
in Table 1.1.
In the interest of clarity of presentation, I have outlined these theories as being com-
posed of separate rows of elements. In fact, elements of a theory are not separate; they are
organized in a conical structure that is dominated by a few basic, parsimonious concepts
that structure the wide range of individual constructs. This is depicted in Figure 1, in the
Introduction. We shall see that political ideas and views of culture occupy the central,
core positions in these theories (and all social science theories), and that they inform the
range of individual concepts at the mouth of the cone.
The four headings in Table 1.1 refer to levels of analysis. Macro cultural psychology and
micro cultural psychology emphasize the macro or micro (interpersonal) social level in
explanatory constructs. The terms do not refer to particular approaches such as discourse

Table 1.1 Issues and Approaches within Cultural Psychology

Cultural Psychological Issue Macro Cultural Micro Cultural Cross-Cultural Indigenous

Psychology Psychology Psychology Psychology

Nature of culture
Cultural content of
psychological phenomena
Relation of culture and
psychology
Nature of the individual
Nature of agency
Enculturation of
individuals
Methodology
Ontology
Epistemology
Scientific constructs and
generalization
Reaction to mainstream
psychology
Role of biology in
psychological processes
Political assumptions
Political
implications
 77 Philosophical and Historical Underpinnings

analysis, social constructionism, and activity theory. The reason is that these approaches
straddle macro and micro cultural psychology and may be listed in both columns. Certain
researchers within discourse analysis, social constructionism, and activity theory work
with macro issues, while others work with micro issues. Thus, it is ambiguous to mention
the name of an approach, because the name could mask very different kinds and levels of
analyses. The same is true for a given researcher: one person may work with the constructs
of macro and micro levels in different phases of research. (Examples will be provided
during the course of the book.)
Given this ambiguity regarding the kind of work carried on under the name of a researcher
or an approach, it is more informative to use macro and micro cultural psychology to pin-
point the kind of research that is done. This is why I have coined these two terms.

26. Systems of thought embody fundamentally different principles that are irreconcilable.

This is why they develop as different systems/approaches. Of course, they refer to

common topics and issues; however, they approach them in principally different ways.
For example, Harre and micro cultural psychologists construe society as interpersonal
conversation. This is a fundamentally different concept of culture than regarding it as a
system of institutions and artifacts dominated by political economy. Similarly, I quoted
Chomsky in the Introduction as emphasizing the different political implications of
empiricist and nativist theories of cognition and language. In the Introduction, we also
encountered Gergen and Gergen’s subjectivistic, nihilistic epistemology, which is princi-
pally different from realistic epistemology.
In cultural psychology, disagreement reigns over fundamental concepts such as what
culture is; what defines the relationship between culture and the individual; how much
psychology is influenced by culture; what the nature of agency that individuals have is;
whether culture is a real, objective phenomenon or a figment of our perception; whether
positivistic methods are useful for comprehending cultural psychology; whether qualita-
tive are methods useful; whether positivistic and qualitative approaches can be combined;
whether social science can be valid and objective or is strictly a function of the research-
er’s subjectivity; and whether cultural psychology should strive to be scientific at all.
These positions are incompatible and irreconcilable. If you believe one, you cannot
believe its opposite. If you believe culture consists of a series of interpersonal interactions
negotiated at the micro level, you will disregard and deny macro-level social organiza-
tions, class, power, and politics.
Moscovici explained how the focus on individual processes obfuscates properties of the
cultural system:

Society has its own structure, which is not definable in terms of the characteris-
tics of individuals; this structure is determined by the processes of production
and consumption, by rituals, symbols, institutions, and dynamics that cannot be
derived from the laws of other systems. When the “social” is studied in terms of the
presence of other individuals or of “numerosity,” it is not really the fundamental
characteristics of the system that are explored but rather one of its subsystems—
the subsystem of interindividual relationships. The kind of social psychology that
 78 macro cultural psychology

emerges from this approach is a “private” social psychology which does not include
within its scope the distinctiveness of most of the genuine collective phenomena.
It can therefore be argued that . . . social psychology has not been truly concerned
either with social behavior as a product of society or with behavior in society. . . .
For these reasons it is ambiguous to maintain that social behavior is currently the
real object of our science. (cited in Ratner, 2006a, pp. 31–32)

This is a powerful statement that argues that the micro focus has obfuscated social
systems and social behavior. In order to restore social behavior as the object of our sci-
ence, the interpersonal notion of “the social” must be replaced by en emphasis on macro
cultural factors (which encompass interpersonal relations).
Cultural psychology is not one big, happy family in which everyone is working toward
the same goal. Different intellectual, theoretical, political, social, and personal goals divide
the disparate approaches. This is why there is acrimony between different approaches—it
cannot be overcome by a big hug that embraces all of them.

27. At any given time, given available knowledge and evidence, one of the competing
approaches to cultural psychology (and social science, and natural science) appre-
hends the subject matter of cultural psychology more adequately than the others do.

Different approaches to subject matter are not equally valid or useful. The whole point of
scientific inquiry is to test competing viewpoints to determine which is more valid and
useful. This testing has obvious practical implications: we want to know, and need to know,
what phenomena are really like so we can know what to expect from them and how to treat
them to fulfill ourselves. It is dysfunctional to maintain beliefs about things that are false,
for then we cannot predict how they will affect us and how we can affect them to fulfill
ourselves. We need to have objective knowledge about society in order to understand how
to improve it to avoid crises. We need to have objective knowledge about psychology in
order to understand how people will react to us, and how we can make them happy.
The point of this book (and presumably any book on psychology) is to develop an
objective, useful theory of psychology that can help us lead more fulfilling lives. Part of
this development involves discerning and rejecting invalid theories that obstruct this
important goal. Invalid theories are not intellectual curiosities to be entertained; they are
obstacles to useful knowledge that is necessary for advancing (and preserving) human
civilization. They must be repudiated to clear the way for valid, useful theories. Mistakes
mislead people; they are not neutral bits of information and images that are easily over-
come. They actively and insistently structure thinking in erroneous ways. They are
extremely difficult to overcome.
My goal is to reduce the four columns of Table 1.1 to one column: macro cultural psychol-
ogy. Of course, I shall draw upon useful elements of other approaches and incorporate
them into macro cultural psychology. Other approaches raise important questions, and
they contribute important insights to certain issues. These can and should be selectively
integrated into macro cultural psychology. This does not eclectically combine incompatible
concepts with a giant +, as I have criticized earlier. Rather, it discovers important selected
concepts that can be integrated within the principles of macro cultural psychology to
 79 Philosophical and Historical Underpinnings

broaden and deepen it. I still emphasize the superiority of the fundamental principles of
macro cultural psychology over other approaches.
My approach is consistent with Einstein’s view of science. He said: “The development of
physics has shown that at any given moment, out of all conceivable constructions, a single
one has always proved itself decidedly superior to all the rest. Nobody who has really
gone deeply into the matter will deny that in practice the world of phenomena uniquely
determines the theoretical system, in spite of the fact that there is no logical bridge
between phenomena and their theoretical principles. . . . Can we ever hope to find the
right way? Nay, more, has the right way any existence outside our illusions?. . . I answer
without hesitation that there is, in my opinion, a right way and that we are capable of
finding it” (Einstein, 1954, pp. 226, 274).
Einstein is saying that there is one definite world and there can be only one correct
understanding of it. Of course, this is a difficult process of discovery, because reality is
vast and complex; we cannot simply see it through sense impressions. We must use sense
impressions to infer and deduce unobservable properties of reality. We apprehend reality
gradually and incompletely, and from different angles. But the objective is clear: all par-
tial understandings need to eventually coalesce into a “right way” that corresponds to the
real features of the world, which have one definite nature. There cannot be multiple rep-
resentations that are equally accurate. Airplanes fly because of definite, precise physical
principles/laws. Only one account of this can be valid and accepted. If someone adopts
another account (e.g., that airplane pilots have a spiritual communication with airplanes
that makes them fly), it is wrong, useless, and possibly fatal. Similarly, slavery was imposed
on African black people; they did not negotiate it in bilateral discussions that they were
free to decline. That is the truth of the matter and is the only way to say it.
It may take us time to settle upon the truth, and “truth” is always open to refinement. But
as Einstein said, at any given time one representation is superior to others. In addition,
refinements in knowledge usually build upon established truths—they do not obviate
them. Germ theory, atomic theory, and numerous physical and chemical laws are estab-
lished truths that are modified by new knowledge, not negated by it. There is no possibility
that physicists will discover that things are not composed of atoms, or that germs do not
cause disease, or that the physical laws that govern airplane flight are invalid.
I shall attempt to demonstrate that macro cultural psychology is the best model of
cultural psychology that we can devise given our knowledge. While this model is subject
to refinement, I propose that it can serve as the basic framework for understanding
psychology—just as physical laws are the basic framework for understanding how air-
planes fly, as germ theory is the basic framework for understanding disease, and as atomic
theory is the basic framework for understanding the physical composition of things.
Macro cultural psychology is the most complete, comprehensive, consistent, empirically
supported theory of human psychology, and it is also the most useful and helpful view of
psychology for making our social and psychological life as fulfilling as possible.

28. Systems are constructed by individuals; however, they go on to transcend particular

individuals and become “emergent” social entities governed by principles, laws, and
dynamics that are irreducible to individual interactions. In fact, the principles, laws,
and dynamics of systems organize the behavior and psychology of individuals.
 80 macro cultural psychology

Psychological phenomena are also emergent in the sense that they are cultural and irre-
ducible to individual processes. In the sociological tradition of Durkheim, Gordon stated,
“Although each person’s experience of emotion has idiosyncratic features, culture shapes
the occasion, meaning, and expression of affective experience. Love, pity, indignation, and
other sentiments are socially shared patterns of feeling, gesture, and meaning. . . . Social
life produces emergent dimensions of emotion that resist reduction to properties inherent
in the human organism. . . . Socially emergent dimensions of emotion transcend psycho-
logical and physiological levels of analysis in terms of (1) origin, (2) temporal framework,
(3) structure, and (4) change” (Gordon, 1981, pp. 562, 563).

ENDNOTES
i. Reprinted by permission of the publisher from Carhart, M. (2007). The science of culture in
Enlightenment Germany. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Copyright © 2007 by the
President and Fellows of Harvard College.
ii. Vygotsky, L. S. (1998). The collected works of L. S. Vygotsky (Vol. 5). New York: Plenum.
With kind permission of Springer Science and Business Media.
iii. Vygotsky, L. S. (1997b). The collected works of L.S. Vygotsky (Vol. 3). New York: Plenum.
With kind permission of Springer Science and Business Media.
iv. This appears impossible or oxymoronic only from an individualistic point of view that
divorces the individual from systems. It is the individualistic viewpoint that makes systems
appear antithetical to individuals, and vice versa.
v. The title also reveals the Malthusean political-economic construct (i.e., the competitive
life struggle in capitalism, which is dominated by favored races, or species) that Darwin
adopted for the basis of natural selection.
 2
general principles of cultural
psychology

A PHILOSOPHICAL APPROACH TO CULTURAL PSYCHOLOGY

The best way (i.e., the philosophical way) to explain macro cultural psychology is to draw
out (unfold) its principles logically from facts and then logically relate them to one
another. This methodology justifies principles; it eliminates the arbitrariness of listing
them by fiat. This philosophical approach to culture and mind is a logically coherent,
consistent, comprehensive explanation of the relation between culture and psychology. It
does not simply identify elements and correlations; rather, it explains the organic relation
between culture and psychology. It explains the necessity and the value of the relation-
ship for both culture and psychology.
We begin with an obvious observation that human achievements are incomparable to
animals’. Nothing in the animal world is remotely analogous to human achievements such
as medicine, computers, religion, churches, scientific discoveries, painting, books, tele-
communications, the World Bank, the United Nations, and nuclear bombs. The highest
animals are capable of is rudimentary tool use such as poking termites from rotten logs
using a nearby stick, imitating some simple behavior, or associating a few objects with a
very few symbolic forms that have been invented and taught to them by humans; how-
ever, it is perfectly obvious that these are not comparable or analogous to human tools
(nuclear bomb), learning (memorizing the periodic table of elements in a classroom, sit-
ting at a desk), symbolism (mathematics, formal logic, Russian language), social systems
(vast countries of millions of people following socially constructed rules, and supervisory
bodies that regulate those countries, such as the United Nations), or anything else human.
Expressing the uniqueness of human culture, Tomasello, Carpenter, Call, Behne, and
Moll (2005, p. 675) state, “Humans are the world’s experts at culture. Humans do not just
interact with conspecifics socially, as do many animal species, but they also engage with
them in complex collaborative activities such as making a tool together, preparing a meal
together, building a shelter together, playing a cooperative game, collaborating scientifi-
cally, and on and on. These collective activities and practices are often structured by
shared symbolic artifacts, such as linguistic symbols and social institutions, facilitating
their ‘transmission’ across generations in ways that ratchet them up in complexity over
historical time.”

81
 82 macro cultural psychology

Forming and maintaining vast, complex, artificial cultural factors requires corresponding
behavioral mechanisms. These are as different from animal mechanisms as the Eiffel Tower
is from a cave in which bears hibernate. Similar mechanisms would generate similar results;
different results must involve different mechanisms. Since animals have genes, hormones,
and neurotransmitters just like humans, these cannot be the basis of human behavior,
which is radically different from animals’. This is the logical argument I will pursue. I turn
the popular conception—that similar physiological elements in humans and animals indi-
cate similar behavioral mechanisms (e.g., the 98 overlap in genes among humans and apes
indicates behavioral similarity)—on its head. I argue that it really proves that these physi-
ological elements do not determine human behavior. “Chimpanzees are genetically much
closer to humans than they are to most other primates, and yet their cognitive profile is far
closer to that of other primates than it is to that of humans. This suggests that we need to
invoke something more than genetically-entrenched changes in individual capacity in the
case of hominid cognition” (Donald, 1998, p. 13).
I argue that the distinctive behavioral mechanism that animates humans’ incomparable
behavior is psychology. Human psychology is distinctive from animal behavioral mecha-
nisms, and this is why our behavior is more advanced and complex. There is congru-
ence between the mechanisms and the products of behavior. They cannot be mixed and
matched. You cannot explain the invention of art and the rapid changes in artistic tastes
by using animal mechanisms, which produce no art in the animal world.
The only way you can maintain animal mechanisms in human behavior is to deny
differences between human and animal behavior. You must either deny human achieve-
ments and reduce them to animal behavior, or elevate animal behavior to the level of
human achievements. Both actions are obviously invalid.
Continuing our logical argument that human behavioral mechanisms—psychology—
are a qualitatively new phenomenon (with no analogy in animals) that produces qual-
itatively new products (having no analogy with animals), we search for reasons and
causes for psychology in some qualitatively novel aspect of human life. This aspect is
culture.
The argument I shall construct in this chapter is that culture is a qualitatively new order
of reality that has novel and distinctive properties. These novel and distinctive properties
require, elicit, and support (“select for”) novel and distinctive behavioral mechanisms and
capacities. This is what psychology is—a novel behavioral mechanism that has distinctive
capacities suitable to constructing and maintaining culture. Psychology is the subjective
side of culture. All of the superior capacities of human psychology—to think, imagine,
plan, create, analyze, communicate, understand, learn, and remember—are rooted in psy-
chology’s participation in culture.
Furthermore, the novel and distinctive requirements of culture and psychology “work
their way down” to our biology and make it compatible with the new behavioral mecha-
nisms to function in the new environment of culture. It is culture all the way down. With
biology reworked in accordance with cultural requirements, we may say that even bio-
logical aspects of psychology are cultural in the sense that they facilitate the cultural
organization of psychology/behavior.
The new cultural environment, new behavioral mechanisms/capacities (psychology), and
new biological functions and functioning form an interdependent, congruent, mutually
 83 General Principles of Cultural Psychology

reinforcing system. None could exist without the others. All must be present in order for
any one of them to be present.
Because cultural life is a qualitatively new order with new properties, it introduces four
novel qualitative disjunctions in behavioral processes:

1. Human cultural psychology is qualitatively different from animal behavior.

2. Acculturated adult psychology is qualitatively different from infant behavior.
3. Biological processes play a different role in cultural psychology (of human adults)
than they play in noncultural organisms’ behavior (e.g., animal and infant behavior).
4. Human cultures are qualitatively different from one another. Cultural psychology is
qualitatively different in different social conditions; it manifests differences in com-
plexity and sophistication as well as content.

A GENERAL DEFINITION OF CULTURE

To explain how psychology is part of culture and is geared to culture’s characteristics,
we must begin our discussion of cultural psychology with an introductory definition of
culture.
Culture consists of several levels. We shall unfold these throughout the book. We begin
with general features in this chapter, and elaborate more concrete features in chapters 3
and 5. With each set of cultural features, we shall explain corresponding features (levels)
of psychological phenomena. Using emotions to illustrate this process, in this chapter we
explain how human emotionality, in general is stimulated by general features of cultural
interaction and communication – e.g., human emotions are emergent psychological
phenomena that are stimulated by the organized form of human culture. This general
form of culture alters the manner in which biological processes relate to emotions. In
chapter 3 we explain more specific features (levels) of culture, macro cultural factors.
Macro cultural factors are institutionalized and objectified according to rules, and these
are reflected in more specific characteristics of emotions. Hochschild (1978) utilizes this
level of analysis to explain “feeling rules.” For instance, conjugal love is different from
paternal love. Chapter 5 explains particular macro cultural factors, such as the way that
work is organized in capitalism, and its specific effects on emotions. Hochschild explores
this in her research on the ways that service workers in advanced capitalism are forced to
display emotions in particular ways that reflect their work rules (cf. Ratner 2000). The
same progression from abstract to concrete will be described for other psychological
phenomena such as self-concept, perception, developmental processes, agency, and
cognition —e.g., cognition rises from a general human social phenomenon, to more con-
crete forms under the influence of the macro cultural factor schooling, to more concrete
forms under capitalist education (with multiple choice tests based upon rote memory of
discrete information).
In reality, all levels of culture and psychology are integrated. While levels of abstraction
are real, they do not exist independently from one another. Accordingly, my discussion of
any one level necessarily refers to others for fuller understanding. Chapter 3, for example,
refers to certain concrete cultural forms of self and perception in order to illustrate the
 84 macro cultural psychology

general principles of how psychology is related to macro cultural factors. Chapter 5 will
probe more deeply into their concrete features.
If we look at examples of culture—“Jim Crow culture,” “school culture,” “the culture of
high finance,” “coal miner culture,” “military culture,” “Court culture of the aristocracy,”
“working class culture”—we see that they are coordinated, regularized, predictable,
instructed, trained (practiced, learned), ordered/organized, cohesive (consistent), admin-
istered, sanctioned, objectified, enduring, institutionalized, intentional/conscious, con-
structed/produced, variable behavior. Humans craft culture by design; we can change it
voluntarily and rapidly (e.g., decide to pass new laws that stipulate new kinds of behavior
and ban old kinds). Human culture is artificial and crafted, as opposed to being pro-
grammed by natural/biological mechanisms. Cultural behavior is an artifact, just as its
products (tools, instruments, shelter, food) are.
These unique characteristics of cultural behavior give it enormous adaptive advantage
for survival. They provide humans with strength, stability, regularity, flexibility, and social
support. Cultural behavior provides us with extraordinary strength by combining the
skills of numerous individuals in coordinated action in which people are working for a
common goal with joint intentionality. Cultural behavior can change rapidly to anticipate
or react to changes in conditions. Being an artificial product of human design, culture is
something we control and improve. We cannot control nature (rain, heat, cold), but we
can protect ourselves from vagaries in nature by constructing a cultural system within
nature.
The artificial nature of culture militates against any natural explanation of culture or
behavior. Natural mechanisms produce behavior suited to the natural environment. They
are not designed for cultural behavior and cannot produce the artificial behavior that is
the essence of culture. There is an ineluctable contradiction between natural behavior
and artificial behavior, just as there is an ineluctable contradiction between building the
Eiffel Tower and hibernating in a cave. The behavior that directs bears to hibernate in
caves cannot direct the construction of the Eiffel Tower. If we were possessed of the
former, we would be incapable of the latter. That is why bears cannot build Eiffel Towers
and we can.
Culture is a world within a world, a social world within the natural world. Th e relation
may be depicted as in Figure 2.1.
Our food supply, for example, depends primarily upon the economic system in which
we live. The recent food crisis in Africa and Asia is due to the rising price of rice and corn,
which makes those products unaffordable for many people in those countries. And the
price is a function of other economic decisions, such as the choice to use corn for making
fuel, which made less corn available for food. The reduced supply of corn and rice for
food was not a function of natural causes. The culturally constructed economic system
replaces the natural supply of food as the determinant of how much food is available for
people to eat. Natural supplies may be plentiful, but if the price rises and people cannot
afford to buy them, they cannot eat. A related example is Nigeria, which is the 13th largest
oil producer in the world—yet 56 of its population lives in abject poverty.
Nature is outside us and inside us. Culture mediates both of these loci. It mediates
our external interactions with nature (e.g., earthquakes, food sources, trees, animals, air,
water, oil) and it mediates our internal relation to our own biology (e.g., our hormones,
 85 General Principles of Cultural Psychology

Natural World

Cultural World

Person 1

Person 2

fig. 2.1 The Relation Among Nature, Culture, and Individual Behavior.

sense organs, motor organs, cortical processes, physical disabilities). Our own biology
does not directly determine our behavior any more than the external natural environ-
ment does. As Vygotsky said, “Man overcomes nature outside himself, but also in himself,
this is—isn’t it—the crux of our psychology and ethics” (cited in Bakhurst, 2007, p. 65).
Human culture is an emergent system irreducible to individual, physical, or personal
behavior. Since culture is humanly produced and administered, the emergent quality of
society is entirely different from inanimate emergents, such as water emerging from its
constituent hydrogen and oxygen. Inanimate examples of emergence only convey a little
sense of cultural and psychological emergence.
An example of culture as an emergent system is a national banking system. It consists
of rules, symbols, language, and artifacts that constitute a realm unto itself. The organiza-
tion of this emergent realm determines the value of money that people hold. When a
government prints up a lot of extra money, the value of its currency falls, and all the
individuals holding that currency can buy fewer items. This is a rule of the financial
system that affects millions of individuals but is not made or controlled by them. The
currency is not devalued because the millions of money holders did something; rather, it
is because elite bankers and manufacturers did something. The financial system is an
emergent system with its own rules, mechanisms, language, and artifacts. It is the interac-
tion of these that determines the value of money and the population’s standard of living.
This has nothing to do with any natural functions or personal issues.
No animal invents this kind of complicated, artificial system of rules, language, and
artifacts which then determines the quality of life of all the individuals.
The artificial, crafted, produced nature of culture is advantageous because we control
it and improve it. It is a mobile set of mediations that strengthen us vis-à-vis nature, as
Figure 2.1 illustrates.
 86 macro cultural psychology

Culture is a unique environment in that it is constructed by its constituency. Humanly

produced culture expresses human purposes. Vygotsky (1999) explained this in his essay
“Tool and Sign in The Development of The Child” (written in 1930). He shows how
humans imbue natural objects with social significance to make them “ours.” “This inter-
nal merging of the sign and the tool that found a material symbolic expression in the
primitive digging stick indicates that . . . this stick differs from the stick of the monkey in a
very radical way . . .” (p. 63, my emphasis). The stick the monkey uses remains a natural
object, alien to the user. The stick the human uses has become enculturated with cultural
signs and is thereby made into a human artifact. The environment in which humans live
is a human environment. This gives humans an intrinsic organic relation with their cul-
tural environment. We are culture, and culture is us.
While psychology actively constructs and maintains its environment, it does not do so
freely or unconditionally; it is always constrained by conditions. These include historic
customs, current artifacts, institutionalized structures and habits, ideological concepts,
cognitive limitations, and viable (objective) possibilities of the status quo for change. One
cannot make the status quo into anything one wishes; only certain possibilities are emer-
gent from a particular structure.
Another conditioning, constraining aspect of culture is that the culture that people
construct forms a structure that constrains their behavior/psychology. The structure out-
runs the individuals who created it; it imposes constraints on them; it is not the mere
sum of individual acts that can spontaneously renegotiate one another and alter culture.
As I mentioned in the Preface, culture is determinable determinism: people determine it,
but it also determines them. People construct culture in order to organize their behavior
in objectified, collective forms that provide greater strength and resources than they can
achieve as individuals. This is the dialectic of culture and the individual: the individual
organizes and participates in culture in order to derive benefits from culture, and this
entails the individual subordinating self to collective, objectified culture. Culture pro-
vides a new, superior form of individuality and freedom—a collective individuality and
freedom. The individual advances through the collective, organized, administered, ratio-
nal combining of individual strengths in a structure that is greater than, and external to,
the individual. The individual works through the collective structure of culture in order
to become a civilized human and accomplish far more than he or she could by operating
on individual, organismic, internal strengths.
This dialectic of subordinating the individual to the collective in order to enhance/
realize the individual through collective strengths is not an unintended or unwanted
accident; it is the desired advantage of culture. Individuals have to adjust their behavior
to culture in order to maintain its objectified structure, which provides them with bene-
fits to advance their accomplishments. The dialectic of culture is that the activity that
forms culture conforms to culture, and the activity that conforms to culture forms and
reforms it.
Culture is not only the external environment in which we live and locate resources.
Culture constitutes our behavior; it is the operating mechanism of behavior, inside behav-
ior. Marriage customs, for example, are not only an external, institutional context. They
direct whom we can marry, when we can marry, how many people we can marry, how we
conduct ourselves when married, who owns what possessions in marriage, what we must
 87 General Principles of Cultural Psychology

do to terminate a marriage, and how we are supposed to feel about our spouse and our-
selves. Marriage customs are the “operating mechanism” for our psychology, in the same
way that the racial code of etiquette was the operating mechanism of white peoples’ psy-
chology in the Jim Crow South.
In this sense, culture is a true and complete environment that directly relates to our
behavior.
As paradoxical as it may sound, animal behavior is not organized by its environment as
much as human behavior is organized by its environment. The natural environment does
not directly organize the behavioral competencies of animals. Animal behavior is deter-
mined by biological programs internal to the organism. These genetic programs evolve
through random mutations in genes that are independent of the environment. Genetic
mutation is not directly elicited by, required by, or oriented toward the external environ-
ment. The most successful random, internal, biological changes are preserved because they
succeed in a particular environment. However, the genesis and mechanisms of a cow’s
behavioral program are independent of its environment. The environment does not consti-
tute the rules, mechanisms, and operating mechanism of a cow’s behavior the way the racial
code of etiquette constitutes the elements and parameters of Southerners’ psychology.
The natural environment of an animal can force movements in behavior, as when it
produces too little food or the wrong temperature, forcing animals move to more suitable
niches. However, their behavioral competencies do not change in direct response to condi-
tions. Their behavioral competencies are programmed in anatomical structures, which
take many generations of genetic and anatomical changes to evolve through their own
processes. This slow, indirect response to environmental change by internal, nonenviron-
mental processes (i.e., random genetic mutation) is why evolution is an inefficient adaptive
mechanism, and why it was replaced by human cultural behavior.
Humans take account of their environmental conditions to devise new competencies
and social organizations quite rapidly, on the spot. The cultural environment figures
directly in our calculations to revise our behavior accordingly. Culture generates our
behavior (and behavioral change); it is involved in our behavior—it does not stand out-
side our behavior and reward competencies after they have been generated elsewhere in
noncultural processes. This is why cultural adaptation is more efficient than evolution,
which must run through numerous sequences of blind trial-and-error genetic changes
before some are found to be suitable in the new environment. Moreover, it takes many
generations of random changes in individuals before a species is significantly developed.
In contrast, human culture generates immediate, collective change because the individu-
als are formed into groups. When the government passes new legislation, the entire group
changes as a result. New tax codes or interest rates or educational requirements affect
individuals in a top-down manner. Change in animal groups/species occurs in reverse,
bottom-up fashion as individual changes accumulate and the unsuccessful individuals
die out over many generations.
Vygotsky (1999) noted this: “man enters in into a substantially new relation with the
environment, comes to a new functional exploitation of elements and directs and controls
his own behavior, controls himself from outside, compelling stimuli-signs to affect him,
and elicits reactions that he desires. Internal regulation of goal-directed activity arises ini-
tially from external regulation. Reactive action, elicited and organized by man himself,
 88 macro cultural psychology

ceases being reactive and becomes goal-directed” (p. 63, my emphasis). Vygotsky is saying
that the individual regulates himself through social behavior that is developed outside of
him in objectified, collective group processes. The individual does not remain an indi-
vidual who freely acts independently of culture, or who can change culture on the indi-
vidual level of interpersonal negotiations. The individual can change culture only
collectively, through a social movement that apprehends the emergent, collective, objecti-
fied structure of culture. Once culture has achieved emergent, collective, objectified status
that outruns individuals, individuals must act culturally to change culture. The very col-
lective action that forms culture into an emergent, collective, objectified phenomenon is
necessary to reform it. One cannot regress to a precultural form of individual action to
address cultural issues.
Cultural and natural environments are vastly different in their features. They demand
vastly different competencies, processes, and mechanisms of their constituencies. Nature
demands and generates natural behavior and behavioral mechanisms in animals that live
directly in it. Culture demands social competencies and behavioral mechanisms in order
for those living within it to survive and succeed. Not least of these demands is the capac-
ity to design and produce culture itself, along with all of its unique features. Culture that
determines human behavior is determined by humans. This complex dialectic does not
exist with animals and their natural environment.
It is unscientific and illogical to conflate the animal/natural and the human/cultural
systems—that is, to pretend that the international monetary system is somehow analo-
gous to the way in which monkeys distribute food, that the human fear of and response
to voodoo or Catholic damnation is somehow analogous to a monkey’s fear of and
response to seeing a leopard, or that an American presidential election is somehow anal-
ogous to apes’ social scheming. The two can be neither equated nor combined together in
some interaction. Natural, animal behavioral mechanisms would interfere with cultural-
psychological ones. We shall examine this problem in a later section.

PSYCHOLOGY IS CULTURAL: DARWINISM PAR EXCELLENCE

My argument that psychology is cultural is a Darwinian argument. Darwinism is a strong
form of environmental selecting of behavioral mechanisms. Since culture is a distinct and
powerful environment, it must select for distinct behavioral capacities and mechanisms
that are congruent with cultural features. Humans’ behavior is as different from animals’
as culture is from nature, and vice versa.
Darwin and evolutionary psychologists contradict the logic of evolution when they
argue for genetic determination of human behavior in the same mold as animal behavior.
This argument disregards the novel kind of environment that culture is, and the logical
implication that a novel environment would select for (or call for) novel behavioral mech-
anisms (Ratner, 2006a, pp. 70, 201–208).
It takes thousands of generations for genetic changes to accumulate via a sufficient
number of organisms’ out-reproducing other organisms to produce a new morphology.
Yet humans have produced only 100 generations since the founding of the Roman Empire;
this is not enough time for new morphology to genetically evolve. And human behavioral
change does not involve morphological changes in genes, neurotransmitters, or cortical
 89 General Principles of Cultural Psychology

structures, which obviates genetic evolution’s pertinence to human behavior at all.

Naturalistic theories of psychology such as evolutionary psychology are false (Popper,
1974, pp. 259, 266–268, 273–274). Luria (1976, pp. 5–6) stated, “The evolutionary approach,
which was quite valid for a comparative study of mental development in the animal
world, found itself in something of a blind alley when it tried to study evolution of human
mental activity.”
Kroeber (1928) expressed the fallacy of reducing human behavior to biological processes
when he said, “Darwinism is often spoken of as allied to anthropological thought. There is
no specific connection. The one deals with biological phenomena and processes; the other
begins where these leave off. The common element is the wholly generic concept of evolu-
tion, equally applicable in astronomy and geology. Organic evolution is essentially modifica-
tory [the organism is modified into a new species], cultural evolution is cumulative [within
the same species of homo sapiens sapiens]. The one is bound up with heredity, the other in
principle is free from it. The similarity is merely a loose analogy, and the Darwinian point of
view has retarded and confused the understanding of culture” (p. 495; see also Ayala, 1974).

General Features of Culture and General Features of Psychology:

Dialectical Interdependence
The unique features of the human cultural environment elicit, require, and support
unique behavioral mechanisms known as psychology in order to produce these unique
cultural features. Psychological phenomena have the features of culture, which we enu-
merated earlier. This must be true for psychology to be the subjective side of culture.
Culture is thus the impetus of psychology, but it is also dependent on psychology for its
existence. This is the dialectic at the heart of culture.
The dialectic of culture and psychology is that culture requires psychology to construct
it, and psychology requires culture as its impetus and support system. Both of these
moments make culture central to psychology. Cultural features are not marginal additions
to psychology; they are its essence—they are intrinsic to it from the outset, and they are
what psychology is all about. Psychology is made to be sensitive to broad cultural fac-
tors—to comprehend them, design them, administer/implement them, participate in
them, and improve them. Because cultural factors are the cornerstones of social life, psy-
chology must first and foremost serve them. And this is exactly what generates the depth
and breadth of psychology. Psychology develops because it participates in the broad, com-
plex, manufactured, coordinated behaviors that are culture. “Cumulative cultural evolu-
tion is the explanation for many of human beings’ most impressive cognitive achievements”
(Tomasello, 1999, p. 7).
Psychology and culture go hand in hand; they evolved together. There evidently was
some relaxation of biological control over behavior (probably because of some anatomi-
cal mutations in the brain) that allowed flashes of learning and rudimentary thinking to
generate rudimentary, flexible, organized behavior (culture), which then stimulated and
selected for more psychology (and further relaxation in biological programming of
behavior) in a spiral of mutual reinforcement.
Culture and psychology are different sides of the same coin. They are not separate
entities that intersect or interact. Using terms like intersect and interact creates the
 90 macro cultural psychology

misimpression that the two are separate and come together only temporarily and occa-
sionally. It is like a car coming to an intersection of roads: the car is independent of the
roads, and it just happens to cross them at a particular point for a brief time. This is not
the relation between culture and psychology. Psychology does not arrive at culture at
a certain point for a designated time and then move past it. Psychology is in culture all
the time; culture is its essence, raison d’être, impetus, organizing framework, and support
structure.
When we examine the details of cultural behavior that we enumerated in an earlier sec-
tion, we can see that they entail psychology and require psychology of a particular kind.
They require imagination, planning, active construction/production, administering, teach-
ing/learning (van Schalk, 2004), conceptual understanding, communication, symbols, and
joint intentionality. These psychological phenomena are part and parcel of culture. They
come into existence in order to create and participate in unique culture, and they have
cultural features.
For instance, “superorganic” (in Kroeber’s sense) collective institutions and concepts entail
joint consciousness. The act of forming a collective cultural group includes forming a general,
common purpose that all work to realize. The individuals devise a purpose that is broader
than any one of them, which unifies them together and subordinates their differences to a
collective strength that supports all the members. This common purpose includes merging
self/behavior/consciousness with those of others in group action, joint intentionality, collec-
tive agency, and collective rationality (Elber-Vass, 2007; Pettit & Schweikard, 2006; Ratner,
2008b). Tomasello (2008, p. 73) states this well: “The basic psychological underpinning of
the ability to participate with others in acts of shared intentionality, including communicat-
ing with them in human-like ways, is the ability to engage with others in a human-like
cooperative manner.”
Forming joint intentionality is a cultural process; it is not natural. It requires a massive
transformation in the life activity of animals, which is primarily individualized. “Cultural
processes . . . took existing individually based cognitive skills—such as those possessed
by most primates for dealing with space, objects, tools, quantities, categories, social rela-
tionships, communication, and social learning—and transformed them into new, cultur-
ally based cognitive skills with a social-collective dimension. These transformations took
place not in evolutionary time but in historical time” (Tomasello, 1999, p. 7).
Coordinating behavior similarly entails the ability to understand others’ intentions (e.g.,
theory of mind, social referencing). Animals do not have developed theories of mind and
joint intentionality because they do not cooperate in fundamental ways. “Despite some
observations suggesting that some nonhuman primates in some situations are capable of
understanding conspecifics as intentional agents and of learning from them in ways that
resemble some form of human cultural learning, the overwhelming weight of the empirical
evidence suggests that only human beings understand conspecifics as intentional agents like
the self, and so only human beings engage in cultural learning” (Tomasello, 1999, p. 6).
This is a telling example of how culture elevates human psychology above animal faculties.
“The crucial difference between human cognition and that of all other animal species is
the ability to participate with others in collaborative activities with shared goals and atten-
tions shared intentionally. Participation in such activities requires not only especially power-
ful forms of intention reading and cultural learning, but also a unique motivation to share
 91 General Principles of Cultural Psychology

psychological states with others and unique forms of cognitive representation for doing so”
(Tomasello et al., 2005, p. 675). Cultural participation elevates intentionality, motivation, and
cognitive representation.

THE ACT OF PARTICIPATING IN CULTURE

GENERATES PSYCHOLOGY
Because culture is central to the panoply of our life activities—indeed culture is our life
form, our species-being—cultural capacities must be central to our behavioral functions.
Our behavior must be informed by cultural capacities so that our behavior will be cultural.
Cultural behavior cannot be generated by noncultural functions and mechanisms. The
mechanisms and functions that generate cultural behavior must be cultural mechanisms.
Culture is not a by-product or after-effect of noncultural functions and mechanisms—this
would be impossible. If our behavioral mechanisms were acultural—that is, natural or
personal—they would lack the features necessary to generate cultural behavior.
“Although each person’s experience of emotion has idiosyncratic features, culture shapes
the occasion, meaning, and expression of affective experience. Love, pity, indignation, and
other sentiments are socially shared patterns of feeling, gesture, and meaning. . . . Social
life produces emergent dimensions of emotion that resist reduction to properties inherent
in the human organism. . . . Socially emergent dimensions of emotion transcend psycho-
logical and physiological levels of analysis in terms of (1) origin, (2) temporal framework,
(3) structure, and (4) change” (Gordon, 1981, pp. 562, 563; Mesquita, 2007).
For instance, emotions must have features that are sensitive to, are informed by, and
respond to cultural phenomena if the latter are to be maintained. Our emotions are about
events in our life. Since human life events are cultural, emotions must have cultural fea-
tures; they must be culturally nuanced and modulated. They express, respond to, and nego-
tiate cultural intricacies. They do not express simple states of pain, pleasure, and fear.
This is why human emotions are capable of responding to distant symbols and ideas.
Millions of people around the world grieved when Princess Diana of Great Britain died.
They had only heard of her or seen photographs—they had no personal contact with
her—but they felt sad because she was a cultural icon. Their emotionality was sensitive to
cultural icons. Similarly, when a world leader dies, it elicits grief across the globe because
of ideas that leader promoted, not because of any direct sensory experience people had
with him or her. Animal emotions are not sensitive to these kinds of “stimuli.” Human
emotions must have a different operating mechanism in order to respond to abstract,
distant, ideational events. Human emotions are not sensory processes that respond to
purely sensory stimuli such as noise, color, scent, or the sight of a dead group member.
Similarly, when students are afraid to hand in homework late, the students’ fear is based
upon an understanding of the school system’s (abstract) rule that requires timely home-
work and punishes tardiness. Students’ emotions must be based on a conscious under-
standing of abstract rules. This is a cultural operating mechanism of emotions. It is not
natural. Extensive training is required to generate this kind of (cultural) emotion. This
fear is mediated by the institutional system that extends from school test scores to job
opportunities. The student’s fear of getting a low grade is entirely different from a mouse’s
fear of seeing a cat.
 92 macro cultural psychology

If emotions were only sensitive to sensory colors and odors (which generate fear in
animals), they would not relate to complex cultural factors such as school rules. The cul-
tural factors that enhance our survival and fulfillment would then be unsupported by
behavior.
Because cultural life is intricate and complex, emotions that are stimulated, required,
organized, and supported by cultural life must be complexly nuanced (Mesquita, 2007).
Sadness is a case in point. A young woman in love will feel a kind of painful sadness if her
lover breaks up with her. She will feel bitter, humiliated, lonely, and unappreciated.
However, if her lover has to move away in order to get a job or go to school, her sadness
has none of those qualities. Instead, it is a sadness tinged with love that she still feels for
him. It may be a beautiful sadness associated with having had a wonderful experience
that had to end because of insuperable circumstances. The intricacies of social life are
reflected in the nuances of emotions.
The distinctive cultural-psychological quality of human emotions is vividly illustrated
in research on bereavement and anger in Israeli parents whose sons had been killed in a
military-related event. The parents were angry in addition to being sad, and the anger
was based on social principles. For example, one parent of a son who was killed in a
military accident reported, “I am angry because he was killed [in an accident]. In war
there is nothing to do, but here there was a failure that shouldn’t have happened.” The
anger was generated by an understanding that routine military activity should not pro-
duce accidental fatalities. Fatalities generated by war are tolerated and therefore generate
no anger. However, fatal mistakes are intolerable within the acceptable framework of war,
and therefore do generate anger. One’s conception of “normal” military behavior deter-
mines one’s emotional reaction to a military event. Another parent’s anger was aroused
by the institutionalized response to the bereavement (such as the response of the army in
investigating the event). A mother, for example, expressed this source for her anger: “No
one came and took responsibility for this accident.” A third source of anger was the belief
that a certain policy and its signatories led to the death. Ariel Sharon, for example, said:
“The problem is with the Oslo accords, the problem is with our ingratiating governments,
the problem is with the recognition of Arafat and concessions to him” (Ronel & Lebel,
2006, p. 513).
Most parents were angry because they felt that the political and military systems had
abandoned their sons. The parents of soldiers killed during training accidents did not
blame the soldier or the officer who accidentally caused the death of their sons. Simon
said, “I’m not angry at those who were involved in the accident. I am angry because we
were deceived.” Furthermore, the parents perceived the soldiers who actually injured
their sons as victims of the broader organizational culture, and even made efforts to
befriend them (Ronel & Lebel, 2006, p. 515). Anger in these cases was based upon intel-
lectual understandings of errant policies and failed social norms; it was not a direct
response to a physical threat.
The psychology of violence is cultural, just as the psychology of emotions is. The mech-
anisms of violence and emotions are cultural; they are not natural mechanisms with roots
in animal processes and behavior. Human violence becomes a deliberate, conscious, intel-
lectual activity based on geo-political-economic-religious-military-ethical considerations
and calculations. This was clearly the case with the Inquisition, the Spanish conquest of
 93 General Principles of Cultural Psychology

the Americas, and the American invasion of Iraq in 2003—none of these had anything to
do with defending one’s individual survival, propagating one’s genes, defending territory,
responding to frustration, or a build-up of aggressive impulses.
For example, learning in school is completely different from animal learning by trial
and error or even by observation of simple behaviors. Learning in school involves expla-
nation by the teacher of concepts and examples: “This is how we do addition. . . . This is
an example of a redwood tree. It has these four distinguishing features. . . .” Human learn-
ing entails conceptual explanation. The object of learning is conceptualized; it is not
simply pointed to. Learning involves learning the concept, not simply the overt, sensory
features. Learning is taken up in social life and invested with social concepts. There is no
analogy of this deliberate, conceptual, verbal instruction in animal learning.
Animals have no intellectual understanding of policies and norms and therefore cannot
have these as a basis of their anger or other emotions. The parents of the fallen soldiers
were not angry at the individual who killed their son; in every case they were angry at a
social leader who was ultimately responsible for the conditions in which the actual killer
operated. Animal anger does not have this kind of source. Another obvious difference is
the fact that many of the angry parents turned to political action to displace social leaders
who were responsible for the conditions that led to the death of their sons. The parents
did not respond with a physical attack on social leaders, as animals would do. Conversely,
animals do not turn to political action to vote a leader out of office.
Vygotsky and Luria (1993, p. 170) explained this important point as follows: “behavior
becomes social and cultural not only in its contents [i.e., what we think about] but also in
its mechanisms, in its means. . . . A huge inventory of psychological mechanisms—skills,
forms of behavior, cultural signs and devices—has evolved in the process of cultural
development.”
This is how culture elevates us to the level of civilized beings: it imparts its complex,
flexible, planned character to our behavior itself. Humans are civilized because our psy-
chology/behavior is elevated by culture, rather than simply being adjusted by culture.
Psychology is a civilized behavioral mechanism. Culture is not simply a new kind of envi-
ronment; it is a new kind of organism, a new life-form, a new order of biological existence.
Vygotsky and Luria (1993) espoused this position in the following statement: “Paralleling
a higher level of control over nature, man’s social life and his labor activity begin to demand
still higher requirements for control over his own behavior. Language, calculation, writ-
ing, and other technical means of culture develop. With the aid of these means, man’s
behavior ascends to a higher level. . . . [The] industrial environment altered man himself;
it called forth complex cultural forms of behavior that took the place of the primitive
ones. . . . Speech enriches and stimulates thinking, and through it, the child’s mind is
restructured, reconstructed” (pp. 139, 170, 203, 205). Here we see the authors’ systemic
approach to psychology, wherein elements become restructured so as to be consistent
with one another.
On a basic level, cultural construction may be said to create the “mental space” that is
necessary in order for psychology to develop. Cultural behavior fosters psychological
phenomena by restraining behavior. In order to coordinate behavior, everyone has to
restrain his or her action and consult with others before acting. Social coordination
requires separating action from impulses. We do not directly act to obtain food when we
 94 macro cultural psychology

feel hunger; instead, we coordinate a social effort to collectively obtain food. This separa-
tion of behavior from impulse enables the organism to form a symbolic image, or idea, of
the object before acting (Greenspan & Shanker, 2004, pp. 36–37; Vygotsky, 1978, pp. 26,
35, 40, 49–51). This is the origin of consciousness, the mind, and psychology. They occupy
a “space” that is created between impulse and action by social restraint. The impulse
looses its power to determine the action it has in the case of noncultural organisms such
as animals and infants. This power is acceded to consciousness, the mind, and psycho-
logical phenomena. This is one way in which culture generates psychology.
I propose that the cultural existence of people also generates self-reflection. Because
human behavior is formed in group activities, it stands outside the individual. This gives
it an objectivity that can be analyzed and evaluated. Cultural behavior is subject to self-
reflection by the individuals who construct it. The reason for this is that cultural behavior
is beyond the individual, so the individual can gain perspective on the behavior he or she
has been constructing with others.
Self-reflection does not simply derive from internalizing the gaze of others on oneself;
it is more profoundly rooted in the fact that the self is integrated in a collective that tran-
scends self. Self, itself, is part of something grander than itself. The full self transcends the
individual—the individual is only a small part of the self. There is a multiplicity built into
the self: it is itself and more than itself (i.e., the collective). It is this dialectic of the indi-
vidual-social self that enables the individual self to reflect on the broad, collective self of
which it is a part. It is the dialectical contradiction between the individual portion of the
collective self and the entire collective self that enables the individual to reflect on the
collective self. Since the individual self is part of the collective self, when the individual
reflects on the collective, it is an instance of self-reflection. This is the social basis of
self-reflection.
This gives the sense that self can be outside self, as the individual self reflects on self-in-
group. This sense of self outside self becomes internalized so that self reflects on self
within the body. As Vygotsky says, psychology is the internalization of social relations.
Self first becomes the object of contemplation as a group member: self reflects on self-in-
group. Then this social relation becomes internalized, where self reflects on self within
the body. What seems to be a deeply individual act of one person reflecting on himself
or herself actually derives from a deeply social process of the individual being part of a
collective. Without the social self-reflection, individual self-reflection would not occur.
Cultural coordination is also the impetus for communicating information. The coordi-
nation of behavior requires the gathering of information about different situations in the
division of labor. Indeed, our word for sharing ideas and words originally referred to the
sharing of practical duties: communication derives from the Latin roots com (share) and
munia (duties).
As Vygotsky said: “Social interaction based on rational understanding, on the inten-
tional transmission of experience and thought, requires some system of means. Human
speech, a system that emerged with the need to interact socially in the labor process, has
always been and will always be the prototype of this kind of means” (Vygotsky, 1987,
p. 48). “The initial function of speech is social, that of social interaction and social link-
age” (Vygotsky, 1987, p. 74). Elias (1978, p. 117) similarly said, “[S]peech is nothing other
than human relations turned into sound.” According to Tomasello (2008),
 95 General Principles of Cultural Psychology

Human cooperative communication was adaptive initially because it arose in the

context of mutualistic collaborative activities in which individuals helping others
were simultaneously helping themselves. . . . The intimate relation between col-
laborative activities and cooperative communication is most readily apparent in
the fact that they both rely on one and the same underlying infrastructure of
recursively structured joint goals and attention.

Conversely, the psychological faculty of language allows for sharing information rap-
idly across great distances and thus facilitates complex coordination of diverse behavior.
Vocal communication does not require looking at the individuals who are communicat-
ing, whereas communication through gestures requires that both parties be in close
enough physical proximity to be visible to each other. This limits the scope and diversity
of situations that can be coordinated. The more developed and specific communication
is, the more detailed the information it can convey about distant things, and the more
social coordination can be refined. Social coordination—which benefited all the indi-
viduals in the relevant group—was thus an impetus for refining language (i.e., vocabulary
and grammar).
Speech allows not only for distant communication, but also for more rapid communi-
cation than noises (guttural noises) do. Language makes possible the transmission of
phonetic distinctions at rates of up to 20 to 30 segments per second, whereas other audi-
tory signals merge into a continuous buzz at rates exceeding 15 items per second. More
meaningful, identifiable information can be communicated through structured language
than through the unstructured noises that animals make.
We can estimate the historical emergence of speech by studying the physical morphology
of fossilized human mouths and throats and extrapolating the shape and size of the tongue
and larynx. These measurements can then be compared to our modern skeleton. Deviations
from the modern anatomy would preclude speech as we know it. “Fully human speech
anatomy first appears in the fossil record in the Upper Paleolithic (about 50,000 years
ago) and is absent in both Neanderthals and earlier humans” (Lieberman, 2007, p. 39). Fifty
thousand years ago is when Homo sapiens sapiens emerged with their superior cognitive
abilities, tools, and social life (Ratner, 2006a, p. 68). Language and cultural cooperation go
hand in hand; both are central to the emergence of modern humans.
Ontogenetic evidence confirms that cultural activity is central to language acquisition:

Following Wittgenstein’s general approach, Bruner claimed that the child acquires
the conventional use of a linguistic symbol by learning to participate in an inter-
active format (form of life, joint attentional scene) that she understands first non-
linguistically so that the adult’s language can be grounded in shared experiences
whose social significance [she] already appreciates. . . . To acquire language the
child must live in a world that has structured social activities she can under-
stand. . . . The time a child spent in joint attentional engagement [with the mother]
and the mother’s tendency to “follow into” the child’s attentional focus when she
used referential language predicted over half of the variance in children’s language
comprehension and production during the period from 12 to 15 months of age.
(Tomasello, 1999, pp. 109–111)
 96 macro cultural psychology

Vygotsky (1987) also emphasized the reciprocal importance of communication for

culture:

[S]ocial interaction mediated by anything other than speech or another sign

system is extremely primitive and limited. Indeed, strictly speaking, social interac-
tion through the kinds of expressive movements utilized by non-human animals
should not be called social interaction. It would be more accurate to refer to it as
contamination. The frightened goose, sighting danger and rousing the flock with
its cry, does not so much communicate to the flock what it has seen as contaminate
the flock with its fear. (p. 48)

While cultural participation is the impetus for communication, social communication,

in turn, is the impetus for symbolic representation. Social communication requires that
each individual encode and store his or her particular experience in symbolic forms
inside his or her head and then recall and communicate these symbols to others at
another time and place. All the others must develop the capacity to decode the symbols
in order to comprehend what they refer to (Bickerton, 2005; Tylen, et al., 2010). Linguistic
symbols make thinking orderly (rule bound), and objective. Symbols “form part of
explicit rule-governed, conventional – normative systems. They thus transport more
stably between quite different usage-situations, over shifts in modality (written versus
spoken), and are generally less susceptible to local variation . . . But most importantly, the
elaborate combinatorial system of discrete and parsimonious material encodings makes
language an efficient tool for putting complex ideas ‘out in the open’, allowing language
users to share meaning and scaffold joint attention and actions. (Tylen, et al., 2010, p. 6)
Language directs and coordinates attention among individuals. It also makes elaborate
thinking and communicating possible. It would be impossible to think the complex,
elaborate, moving, structured ideas without language.
The vastness and abstractness of cultural factors is another key impetus for abstract
concepts. Macro cultural factors cannot be known or managed by sensory impressions
because they are too vast. One cannot see or hear a government, a war, a university,
a transportation system, democracy, in toto. The entirety of cultural factors can be known
only conceptually. The more complex the objects one deals with, the more abstract the
concepts one needs to develop.
In addition, cultural factors operate according to abstract rules that require (select for)
abstract concepts. “Hand in homework on time,” “You go to the third tree on the left
and I will go to the second big rock on the right in order to trap the animal that was here
last night,” “If the forward is double-teamed, pass the basketball to the point guard,” “Stay
three car lengths behind the truck in front of you,” and “Don’t think women are stupid”
are examples of abstract cultural rules that require abstract cognitive competencies.
“Abstraction is one of the most powerful tools that cultural development fosters in the
mind of the human being. . . . In the mind of the cultural person, abstraction is a neces-
sary, integral part of any type of thought [or] thought process” (Vygotsky & Luria, 1993,
pp. 192–193). Culture produces the mind; brain circuitry does not. The mind-body prob-
lem of how the physical body/brain produces mental, subjective qualia, is the wrong way
to frame the origin of consciousness.
 97 General Principles of Cultural Psychology

Vygotsky (1987) explained the relation of communication and abstract concepts as

follows: “To communicate an experience or some other content of consciousness to another
person, it must be related to a class or group of phenomena. This requires generalization.
Social interaction presupposes generalization and the development of verbal meaning; gener-
alization becomes possible only with the development of social interaction” (p. 48).
Vygotsky is saying that social interaction entails cooperation and coordination among
people. This forces us to consider an object or event in general terms that are communi-
cable to other people. When a hunter sees a particular deer next to a particular tree and
he wants to inform his tribesmen of this when he returns to the base, so they can organize
a hunting party, he cannot point at the deer and the tree, because they are no longer pres-
ent. He must use general terms with general features that his tribesmen can comprehend,
such as deer and tree; his fellows understand these terms because they have all abstracted
them from their individual, concrete experiences. They have identified general, abstract
features of their experiences that are common to all their experiences with deer and trees.
Only social coordination and communication foster this kind of generalization and
abstraction. Animal life that occurs primarily on the individual level of direct, sensory
experience does not force individual organisms to generalize and abstract beyond their
own experiences in order to coordinate and communicate with other individuals.
Social life promotes generalization in another sense. Communication and coordination
bring multiple perspectives together, thereby providing a multidimensional, comprehen-
sive view of the object. Communication and coordination promote a more comprehen-
sive, general view of things than is available to individual organisms. (Of course, one
individual forms a coherent, comprehensive “cognitive map” of multiple features/angles
of an object based upon his or her own experiences with it. However, the diversity of
experiences among multiple individuals is far more comprehensive than any single per-
son’s experiences, and it provides a far more comprehensive, general view of the object.)
The multiplicity of perspectives on a given object (or event) provides wholeness and
definiteness to the object. The object endures beyond one’s immediate perceptual experi-
ence of it because it exists for others beyond oneself. The object is not just “for me” as
I encounter and experience it; it transcends me and my experience—it is “out there” for
others as well. Its existence for others makes it more solid, definite, enduring, real—the
social apprehension of an object objectifies it; sociality is thus key to objectivity.
Construing objects in general terms also holds potential for innovation, because it frees
the object from a single viewpoint and use. A rock is not confined to a given use prescribed
by me; it is a general, abstract thing that affords multiple uses which the social group has
amply demonstrated. Hegelians argue that abstractions are thus radical in the sense that they
always imply more than a given appearance or perspective. A true abstraction incites the
user to consider additional forms that a particular appearance or perspective could take.
Reducing this potentiality to a given form is decried as “one-dimensional”—that is, stifling.
True abstractions are thus politically important for suggesting alternatives to the status quo.
Tomasello (2003) explains this possibility inherent in abstract symbols: “Intersubjective
and perspectival symbols that are learned and used in communicative interactions with
other symbol users create the possibility of examining things from many different per-
spectives simultaneously. . . . It is these kinds of thinking in which nonsymbolic creatures
are unable to engage. They are unable because they do not possess the representational
 98 macro cultural psychology

medium within which to conduct such dialogic and multi-logic forms of mental
activity” (p. 55).
Tomasello emphasizes that cultural tools—that is, symbols—enable perspectival think-
ing and perception. Social perspectivity requires an appropriate cultural medium/means;
it is not a pure psychological capacity apart from cultural means.
We can see that there is a dialectical relationship between sociality, objectivity, definite-
ness, subjectivity, and flexibility: social interaction fosters a general sense of objectivity that
is abstract in the sense of generalizing beyond a particular experience. This makes the expe-
rience definite, and this abstract objectivity holds the potential for novel forms that people
can apprehend and realize, thereby expanding their consciousness and their agency.
Subjectivity/agency/consciousness/psychology is also rooted in culture through the
following sequence: cultural coordination inspires and requires communication, which
inspires and requires abstraction, which inspires and requires symbols, which constitute
the domain of the mental, the mind, and the psychological. Culture and communication
are thus the basis of the mental and the psychological. It is only after humans develop
cultural symbols for the purpose of communicating and coordinating that they can utilize
these symbols as their mental means or psychological operating mechanisms. Symbols
can be used to reflect on the objects they represent, and this enables the creativity used to
mentally reorganize things. Without this symbolic duplication of objects, there would be
little freedom to imagine variations. The freedom to imagine new things is thus a cultural
product. Far from stifling imagination and freedom, culture provides the mechanism for
these attributes. Cultural symbols are also the basis for representing and reflecting on
oneself. Cultural symbols are the basis for representing things creatively in art and music.
Animals cannot produce art or music because they lack cultural symbols, which stem
from cultural communication and, ultimately, from cultural cooperation. If nature is
world one, and culture is world two, consciousness/psychology is world three.
Gentner and Christie (2008) demonstrate that humans’ cognitive competencies (intel-
ligence, problem solving, and comprehension) depend on their ability to grasp relation-
ships among things, which is fostered by language, or social communication. Evidence
for this is the fact that deaf children of hearing parents (“home signers”) do not learn a
linguistic system from their parents (which deaf children of deaf parents do); conse-
quently, they develop a primitive sign language that does not contain symbols for spatial
relations or numbers. These home signers perform more poorly on the spatial analogies
than children with spatial and numerical terms do. (This evidence indicates that sophis-
ticated language does not spontaneously develop on an individual level as nativists who
believe that language is a biological organ or formed module claim; language requires
systematic social formation by people who have worked out a common communication
system. Hearing parents who do not know sign language cannot help their deaf children
develop a common communication system. On their own, home signers develop only a
rudimentary communication system.)
Moreover, cultures that possess few numerical linguistic terms (e.g., the Pirahã people,
whose language for counting terms contains only “one,” “two,” and “many”) also perform
more poorly on numerical tasks than do cultures that have numerical terminology.
Linguistic codes for abstract things sensitize us to them. Even chimps perform only
a relational match to a sample task after they have been given symbolic training. Without
 99 General Principles of Cultural Psychology

this training, chimps fail. Finally, language facilitates young children’s shift from atten-
tion to object to attention to relations as they mature. “Language facilitates the learning
of relational concepts which then serve as cognitive representations” (Gentner & Christie,
2008, p. 137).
This discussion reveals that cultural behavior and its products—institutions, artifacts,
concepts, language, and symbols—are the basis of psychology/subjectivity/conscious-
ness/agency in a variety of ways (see Burke & Ornstein, 1995, for an excellent discussion
of additional ways in which general features of culture stimulate general features of psy-
chology). Culture does not “influence” some primordial consciousness to add certain
extrinsic elements to it; rather, culture forms consciousness:

[T]here is no privileging of nonlinguistic cognition as somehow the real thing—

which we then see if language affects. It is preferable to simply say that cognition
takes many forms depending on many factors, and one form—which is unique
to the human species after 1 or 2 years of age—is linguistic cognition in which
individuals structure their thinking by means of one or another historically
evolved collection of intersubjective and perspectival symbols and constructions.
Language does not affect cognition; it is one form that cognition can take. (Tomasello,
2003, p. 56, my emphasis)

Language extends and rewires the mind:

Our ability to reason about large quantities of countable objects in a generative

and systematic fashion seems to require the acquisition of numeric symbols and
a linguistic counting system. . . . Normal human cognition clearly depends on
normal linguistic capabilities. . . . Over the last 35 years, comparative researchers
have invested considerable effort in teaching nonhuman animals of a variety of
taxa to use and/or comprehend language-like symbol systems. The stars of these
animal language projects have indeed been able to approximate certain superficial
aspects of human language, including the ability to associate arbitrary sounds,
tokens, and gestures with external objects, properties, and actions, and a rudimen-
tary sensitivity to the order in which these “symbols” appear when interpreting
novel “sentences.” But even after decades of exhaustive training, no nonhuman
animal has demonstrated a clear mastery of abstract grammatical categories,
closed-class items, hierarchical syntactic structures, or any of the other basic fea-
tures of a human language. (Penn, Holyoak, & Povinelli, 2008a, pp. 121–122)i

A major difference between human and animal cognition is that animals perceive rela-
tions of observable features of immediately present entities (called first-order relations).
Animals can perceive that a male and a female animal standing before them are different.
Animals do not apprehend relational roles distinct from the observable features of the
individual constituents; nor do they cognize the fact that certain relations logically imply
other relations (Penn, Holyoak, & Povinelli, 2008a, p. 127). They do not understand the
higher-order relation between grandmother-of and mother-of relation. Humans do under-
stand such higher-order relations, which are independent of the physical characteristics
 100 macro cultural psychology

of individual members of the categories. We understand the logical relation between the
abstract categories of “grandmother” and “mother” regardless of the individuals involved
(Penn, Holyoak, & Povinelli, 2008a, p. 126). We are able to reason abstractly in terms of
categories, higher-order relations, or formal structures (cf. Knappert, 1990).
I argue that the human capacity for formal reasoning derives from social coordination
and communication of activity. To coordinate and communicate about social activity,
abstract concepts need to be constructed that encompass diverse individual experiences.
We need abstract, common terms that denote “animal,” “large,” “tree,” and “stream” so
that we can mutually discuss our different experiences.
Vygotsky, Luria, and Leontiev made cultural requirements and processes the basis of
human psychology. As I have mentioned, they regarded psychology as a novel, unique
behavioral mechanism that not only is stimulated by social interaction (e.g., parents
encouraging young children to pay attention, respond, and form words) but also embod-
ies elements of cultural activities.
Language and symbols, in particular, form the operating mechanism of psychological
phenomena. Since language and symbols primarily exist to enable social communication
and coordination, placing language as the operating mechanism of psychology makes
psychology an extension of cultural activities.

According to our hypothesis, all visual perception has a complex semantic and
system-based structure that changes with historical development. . . . The data
show that even relatively simple processes involved in perception of colors and
geometrical shapes depend to a considerable extent on the subjects’ practical
experience and their cultural milieu. . . . In other sociohistorical conditions [out-
side academic activities] in which life experience is basically determined by prac-
tical experience and the shaping influence of school has not yet had effect, the
encoding process is different because color and shape perception fit into a different
system of practical experiences, are denoted by a different system of speech terms,
and are subject to different laws. (Luria, 1976, pp. 41, 45, my emphasis)

An example, which shall be complemented by many others throughout the book,

comes from Luria’s work on color perception. He presented skeins of colored wool to
subjects and asked them to categorize the pieces into small groups of five. Traditional,
uneducated women living in isolated villages and uninvolved in modern social activities
found the task impossible.
In contrast, educated subjects who participated in modern activities found the task
easy. They perceived certain colors as looking similar, whereas the traditional women
perceived them as looking different. The reason for the different perceptual experiences
lies in differing perceptual mechanisms. The educated women treated color as an abstract
property apart from the objects being viewed. “Red” is always the same, regardless of
where it appears. Consequently, certain colors appear similar and can be grouped together
despite their originating in different objects. This abstract sense of color was the percep-
tual mechanism that generated the appearance of certain colors as similar.
The traditional subjects had a different cultural sense of color, which served as a
different perceptual mechanism. They construed colors as properties of objects, and they
 101 General Principles of Cultural Psychology

gave colors object names. Consequently, colors that “came from” different objects did not
look/appear similar, because they contained traces of the different objects. Subjects said,
“This is like calf ’s dung, and this is like a peach” (Luria, 1976, p. 27). The women’s words
reveal the perceptual mechanisms that they used to perceive colors—they explicitly state
that they viewed colors as properties of objects.
This example illustrates that the groups of subjects perceived colors differently—as
appearing similar versus appearing different—because they employed different percep-
tual mechanisms. The perceptual mechanisms were cultural. The sense of color as an
abstract element is a cultural phenomenon that has to do with utilizing colors differently,
and even artificially producing colors apart from their natural occurrences in objects, as
opposed to finding colors that are intrinsically part of objects. Perception is thus not a
natural process. “Perception depends on historically established human practices that
can alter the system of codes used to process incoming information” (Luria, 1976, p. 21;
Ozgen & Davies, 2002).
Tomasello (2003) explains that cultural symbols do not merely represent things; they
represent a social perspective on things. “The intersubjective and perspectival nature of
linguistic symbols creates a clear break with straightforward perceptual or sensorimotor
cognitive representations” (p. 53).
Vygotsky, Luria, and Leontiev recognized that language was only one cultural element
in forming psychology. More broadly, historical practices are the root of psychology. We
have seen that social coordination is the impetus for communication/language. Language
should not be construed as the only cultural basis of psychology. Vygotsky (1999, p. 65)
said, “For some psychologists, the old saying ‘in the beginning was the word’ still retains
its validity. New studies, however, leave no doubt that the word does not stand at the
beginning of the development of the child’s mind. . . . Prior to speech, there is instrumen-
tal thinking. Practical intellect is genetically older than the verbal; action precedes the
word, and even mental action precedes the mental word.”
Donald (1991) makes a convincing argument that symbolic processes, and psychological
functions in general, have a practical social basis: “Language is usually placed at the top of
the cognitive pyramid; but language evolved in, and continues to be employed in, a wider
cultural context” (p. 201). According to Donald, language evolved to enhance cultural
development. That is, language enabled people to conceptualize, plan, coordinate, reflect
on (evaluate), and revise social activity, making it far more effective than spontaneous,
unsymbolized behavior. “Language is the ultimate social arbitrator. It is used for watching
the activities of others, keeping records of interpersonal relationships, regulating interac-
tions, coordinating people, sharing practical knowledge of things like food sources and
neighboring human tribes, and making collective plans and decisions” (pp. 213, 140).
Donald (1991) proposes that social activity inspired the phylogenetic development
of all psychological capabilities, not just language. His argument is that large, complex
group structures have an adaptive advantage over simple, unstructured groups (such as
herds). Organizing complex group activity to maximize this cultural advantage demands
enhanced intelligence, planning, memory, and refined emotions (which motivate specific
behaviors). Furthermore, these psychological capabilities require a biological substratum
such as a larger brain, and especially a larger neocortex. (The relative increase in brain size
as a proportion of body weight is called the encephalization quotient.) Therefore, group
 102 macro cultural psychology

activity is a primary selective factor in increasing psychological capabilities and brain

development (pp. 137–138).
The fact that senses and perception possess a cultural quality that emanates from social
institutions, artifacts, and cultural concepts, rather than from the physical properties of
the stimuli, means that reproducing the physical sounds, smells, tastes, and images from
other epochs is uninformative about how they were actually experienced (sensed) by
those people. Conversely, the absence of physical stimuli does not prevent us from know-
ing how people experienced them, because the experience is not directly determined by
the stimuli. We can learn a great deal about sensory experience from linguistic descrip-
tions that are preserved in print. “In fact, smells are accessible to the historian precisely
because—not in spite of—most written descriptions of smells from the past tell us what
smells smelled like. . . . If the print revolution did, in fact, elevate the eye and denigrate
the nose, ear, tongue, and skin, printed evidence and the sensory perceptions recorded by
contemporaries constitute the principal medium through which we can access the senses
of the past and their meanings” (Smith, 2007, p. 849).

GENERAL CULTURAL FEATURES REQUIRE GENERAL

PSYCHOLOGICAL CAPACITIES RATHER THAN SPECIFIC,
PREDETERMINED CAPACITIES
Gentner (2003, p. 227) explained this clearly:

The great evolutionary advantage of the human species is adaptability. . . . To design

a superbly adaptable species, one might best create one that begins with few biases
beyond those necessary for mammalian life, that has a powerful general learning
mechanism. . . . I am not suggesting that humans are born without constraints. We
appear to come equipped with the basic mammalian starting set of attentional
biases and learning propensities. . . . But in contrast to theories that postulate that
humans have more built-in knowledge and theory than other species, I suggest the
reverse: if anything, we have less. Whereas the frog comes programmed to jump for
looming shade and to flick its tongue for small moving objects, we come prepared
to learn what is dangerous and what is edible. Far from being a disadvantage, our
relatively unbiased initial sate allows us to learn whatever comes our way.
This “less is more” proposal correctly emphasizes the potentiating nature of
human psychological capacity rather than its determining nature. A potentiating
nature expands the possibilities of action while a determining nature narrows
them to what is already pre-determined.

General potentiation, rather than specific determinism, holds even for language. Language
is readily acquired by babies in so many different environments that it appears to be prede-
termined as a universal grammar, or language device. However, the very variability of lan-
guages dictates that language capacity must be very general and abstract, rather than a set of
specific grammatical rules. Levinson (2003) explains this clearly: “Instead of expecting the
biological endowment for language to predict all the interesting properties of observable
languages, we need rather to think about it as a learning mechanism wonderfully adapted to
 103 General Principles of Cultural Psychology

discerning the variability of culturally distinctive systems” (p. 27). Levinson clearly links
general potentiation to psychological/behavioral variability, which is the essence of culture.
He enumerates some of the fundamental parameters of linguistic variation:

Natural languages may or may not be in the vocal-auditory channel—they can be

shifted to the visual-manual one, as in sign languages. When they are broadcast in
an acoustic medium, they may have as few as 11 or as many as 141 distinctive
sounds or phonemes. Languages may or may not have morphology, that is, inflec-
tion or derivation. Languages may or may not use constituent structure (as in the
familiar tree-diagrams) to encode fundamental grammatical relations. Thus, they
may or may not have syntactic constraints in word or phrase order. Languages
may or may not make use of such basis [sic] word class distinctions as adjective,
adverb, or even, arguably, noun and verb. If they do, the kind of denotation
assigned to each may be alien from an English point of view. . . . Almost every
new language that is studied falsifies some existing generalization. . . . We are the
only known species whose communication system is profoundly variable in both
form and content. So we can’t have the same kind of theory for human that we have
for bee or even monkey communication; fixed, innate schemas are not going to give
us a full explanation of language. (Levinson, 2003, pp. 28–29, my emphasis)

Tomasello (1995) disputes the notion that children are even predisposed to language
per se. A linguistic predisposition would founder on the grounds that Levinson enumer-
ated, namely, the vast variability of human languages. How could there be a predisposi-
tion to language when there are only vastly different languages? Instead, children learn
their first words by employing general cognitive abilities to grasp symbols and follow the
social behaviors of their caretakers. Children do not possess an innate template for lan-
guage per se: “In learning their first words, children employ their basic abilities to form
concepts, to follow into the attention of adults, and to reproduce new words in their
appropriate communicative contexts. Later, on the basis of their general skills of catego-
rization, children begin to form more inclusive grammatical categories, including both
syntagmatic categories such as ‘agent’ and ‘instrument’ and paradigmatic categories such
as ‘noun’ and ‘verb’ ” (pp. 150–151).
In other words, children learn Language only through specifi c language. The abstract is
contained in the concrete; it is not a separate realm that children could inherit before
they encounter concrete language.
Vygotsky (1987) debunks the notion of an innate language capacity (universal grammar)
by observing that “[t]he internal relationships between thought and word with which we
are concerned are not primal. They are not something given from the outset as a precon-
dition for further development. On the contrary, these relationships emerge and are
formed only with the historical development of human consciousness. They are not the
precondition of man’s formation, but its product” (p. 243).
It is essential to emphasize the cultural basis of psychological phenomena whenever we
seek to explain and describe them. Their cultural basis, character, and function must
always be brought into explanatory constructs and descriptors. Other elements may
be brought in as well, but as supplements to the cultural elements. The sophisticated,
 104 macro cultural psychology

fulfilling features of psychology, such as creativity, thoughtfulness, emotionality, and

reason, exist only because they exist in cultural behavior, which is active, intentional,
planned, artificial-produced, and variable. Psychological activity and agency are not out-
side of and antithetical to culture; they depend upon culture and are elicited by cultural
activity. The notion that activity and agency must be sought outside culture, be in oppo-
sition to culture, or be insulated from culture inverts the real basis of activity and
agency.
Psychological functions did not evolve on the individual level in order to realize indi-
vidual agency or expression; they evolved as part of cultural activity. They were originally
used to facilitate group, collective interaction. For example, intentionality developed to
facilitate group behavior, which employs a common intentionality to achieve a common
purpose. Survival depended on common purposes that would unify a group in order to
achieve a common purpose that would unify individual strengths and support all the
individuals. Primordial groups were collectives that shared food.
Communicating and understanding/deciphering intentionality had a group objective:
to achieve the common purpose. Each individual’s ideas, vocalizations, and intentions
were important in terms of how they contributed to group knowledge about, and action
toward, the natural world of animal patterns, weather, and geography.
“Theory of mind” that comprehended the intentions of each member was directed
toward these issues. Cultural learning requires extraordinary sensitivity to others in order
to discern the variety of specific goals and purposes they enact. A new kind of social
learning and social referencing must develop. Theory of mind did not originate to help
individuals understand the hunter’s personal feelings about water (e.g., that he associates
it with his father, who used to sit with him near lakes when he was young). That would be
destructive to group survival, as subjectivistic philosophy is today (cf. Zagorin’s [1999]
discussion of the realist basis of language, which I cited in Chapter 1 in connection with
the Gottingen school).
Humans did not leave the animal kingdom as individuals forming and expressing per-
sonal meanings. If primitive individuals had wandered the landscape individually, gazing
at trees and imbuing them with personal significance, they would have been gobbled up in
an instant. Humans were able to forsake their animal behavior only by replacing it with
more powerful, collective behavior. The collective pooling of strengths more than com-
pensated for animal instincts and bodily strength. Individual humans, divested of instincts
and bodily strength, would have been fodder for nature. The basis of human psychology is
cultural, not individual. Accordingly, understanding psychology requires referring to cul-
tural processes. As Vygotsky (1997c) tells us, “The original psychology of the function of
the word is a social function, and if we want to trace how the word functions in the behav-
ior of the individual, we must consider how it functioned formerly in the social behavior
of people” (p. 103).
This is often eclipsed in ontogenetic studies of intentionality. These discussions focus
on caretakers’ directing the attention—or line of regard—of infants to match their own.
Children focus not only on objects, but also on the intentions of caretakers when attend-
ing to objects. While this is all true, it creates the impression that joint attention is
primarily an interpersonal matter of a caretaker and a baby. This disregards the cultural
importance of joint attention and theory of mind in achieving joint attention for
 105 General Principles of Cultural Psychology

group goals. Joint attention originated as an adult phenomenon used to aid survival in
the wild by inducing individuals to refer to the same object in order to coordinate (pool)
behavior. Intentionality filtered down to socialization practices, but it did not originate
there. Parent–child interactions cannot explain themselves. Why would primitive human
parents suddenly start encouraging their babies to follow their line of regard and their
attention? There is no basis for this—but a cultural analysis provides an obvious and
important basis.
It is important to emphasize the cultural basis of even abstract aspects of psychology
(e.g., intentionality, activity, agency, abstract symbolic thinking, self-consciousness, cre-
ativity, language, conscious emotions, and perception). Doing so corrects the tendency to
misconstrue these aspects as natural. After all, because they are universal, it is easy to
misconstrue them as natural. However, the real reason they are universal is that they
partake of cultural features that are universal to all human social life. Universal and gen-
eral are not synonymous with natural.

PSYCHOLOGICAL THEORIES OF CULTURE

INVERT CULTURAL PSYCHOLOGY
Some cultural psychologists attempt to explain culture using natural, universal psycho-
logical principles. They essentially invert the relation between culture and psychology:
instead of culture being the impetus for and structure of psychology, psychological prin-
ciples and mechanisms structure culture. This denies the formative and enriching role
that culture plays in psychology; it really decimates culture altogether. An instructive
example is Malley and Knight’s (2008) article “Some Cognitive Origins of Cultural
Order,” in which they propose a three-step model:

1. The mind “strives to” maximize its expenditure of mental energy. It “seeks to” maximize
the processing of information using the minimum amount of energy. “Human cogni-
tion is geared to the maximization of effects for the expenditure of effort” (p. 56).
2. Attending to a set of related ideas is more efficient in the sense of requiring less effort
than attending to a set of disconnected ideas. “Individual human thought will tend to
favor representations that are systematized more than those that are less so. . . . The
greater an inference’s connectivity to other ideas and the stronger those connections,
the more cognitive resources will be allocated to its processing” (p. 56). The authors
call this principle “relevance.”
3. “The simple but profound cognitive principle of relevance can explain the emergence
of systematic properties in culture” (p. 57). The cognitive principle of relevance leads
people to “attend to those messages that resonate with the contents of their individual
minds . . . consequently such relevant messages would spread more quickly across the
population than messages that did not resonate with existing ideas” (p. 57). The cogni-
tive desire that ideas be consistent or “relevant” to each other accounts for cultural
coherence.

In summary, culture is coherent because its concepts are consistent, because this is
satisfying to the mind, because it is the most efficient use of mental energy. This model is
 106 macro cultural psychology

noteworthy because it explains culture in noncultural terms. Culture ultimately derives

from the psychophysical principle of maximizing the efficient expenditure of mental
energy in the individual psyche. Humans are not oriented toward constructing culture
per se, as a collective body that would benefit the members collectively. Coherent culture
(i.e., interrelated cultural concepts) is an indirect by-product of individual psychophysics
that preserves the individual’s cognitive energy.
This model may be called “psychic thermodynamics,” or thermopsychology, because it
construes mind as a system of energy that operates according to certain psychophysical
(thermodynamic) principles. This analogy is never substantiated; it is a metaphor for the
capitalist principle of maximizing return on investment. Why should the mind have to
operate on the same principle as capitalist industry? It assumes mental energy is expensive
and its use must be minimized. But why does the mind need to conserve its effort? Why
can’t it just produce more? Isn’t it good to spend mental energy thinking, imagining, won-
dering, creating? Why can’t the psyche be “inefficient” and “unproductive” with its mental
energy? What would happen to us? Would we lose the struggle for survival in natural
selection if we slowly wrote our books in our offices? And what counts as maximizing
cognitive effort? Is daydreaming or engaging in thought experiments as Einstein did tan-
tamount to wasting mental energy? And what is mental energy, anyway? Malley and
Knight discuss it as though it were a measurable, physical phenomenon. But it is not.
An additional conundrum regarding the model is its attempt to utilize psychophysics
(thermopsychology) to explain shared culture. It reduces culture to the mechanical asso-
ciation of similar ideas in order to minimize mental energy. The model presents people as
lazy, complacent, and superficial beings who just want to save mental energy and will
accept any conglomeration of ideas that resonate in order to avoid having to think about
them. This is a demeaning, mechanical view of people, and hardly a useful foundation for
culture. Culture is simply a cascading sequence of ideas that follow each other on the
basis of “relevance.” There is no cultural basis to this ideational system, or to the admin-
istration of it. Individuals do not actually collaborate collectively at all; they individually
latch onto ideas that resemble what they already believe. In this model, the individual
benefits as an individual from culture. Consistent ideas provide for individual efficiency
in expending mental energy. There is no collective benefit, nothing the collectivity
achieves, no collective advance such as pooled resources, enhanced military capabilities,
larger buildings, economies of scale, or new inventions from collective brainstorming.
There is not any advancement or civilizing of the human mind through culture. The mind
remains the same in that it obeys psychophysical principles to conserve its energy. Culture
is the result of individual mechanisms; culture does not enhance the individual.
The thermopsychological model of culture is based upon psychophysical principles of
individual psyches. It is the individual who seeks to conserve mental energy by adopting
consistent/relevant ideas. However, this model cannot explain cultural coherence that
includes numerous individuals. In fact, the model precludes cultural coherence; each
individual will have his or her particular set of relevant ideas, but each individual set will
differ from other individual sets. Therefore, each individual will reject the ideas of others
because they do not resemble his or her own.
This model exemplifies the failure of bottom-up, psychological theories of culture. They
account for none of the features of culture we have been discussing in this book.
 107 General Principles of Cultural Psychology

THE ANTINOMY OF CULTURAL PSYCHOLOGY AND

BIOLOGICAL DETERMINISM (NATURALISM)
If psychology is the subjective side of culture and has cultural properties including inten-
tionality, volition, flexibility, abstractness, planning, coordination, administration, imag-
ination, and creativity in envisioning and producing cultural factors, then it cannot be
biologically determined. Biological processes can be involved, but they cannot determine
the form and content of psychology, because this would compete with and contradict the
cultural basis, characteristics, and function of psychology.
Biological determinism means that properties of biological processes determine the form
and content of behavior. Psychobiologists look specifically for this kind of determinism.
They speak of serotonin predisposing people toward various adverse behaviors; they speak
of genes predisposing one to be intelligent or not; they speak of testosterone predisposing
men toward violence. This predisposition is generally not a complete determinism, and
allowance is made for environmental modulations of these predispositions. However, the
predispositions are laden with specific form and content, regardless of how forceful these
are. Even if they determine only a portion of one’s behavior, they still do so as independent
forces. Even if a predisposed individual is not violent all the time, or hyperactive all the
time, or risk-taking all the time, the point is that these traits are part of the behavioral
repertoire. Whatever else is in it, these predispositions are present. They are noncultural
behaviors. As such, they contradict the cultural basis, character, and function of psychol-
ogy that we have outlined. They limit (diminish) these cultural aspects because they are
entirely different. For instance, a predisposition toward violence or hyperactivity would
introduce these behaviors into any society and would contradict cooperation and calm-
ness, respectively—and even if they coexisted with these, they would nevertheless limit
them and push against them.
Another problem is that there is no scientific way to account for such coexistence of
radically different mechanisms. It would be like having two different switches going on
and off. What determines when each one goes on and off? If the violent switch went on
when the individual was trying to cooperate, it would be disastrous. Even if the violent
switch did not negate cooperation, it would still diminish it. Conversely, cooperation
would dampen the violent tendency and cause stress to the organism. Interaction is, thus,
not a solution. When psychologists speak about the percentage of behavior that is deter-
mined by different, interacting factors, they never explain the mechanism of interaction;
they simply postulate amounts of influence. They never explain just how two antithetical
mechanisms can coexist.
This is why Vygotsky proposed a radical formulation that eliminated interactionism.
He proposed that on the human level, culture is the sole determinant of psychology/
behavior. Because biological programs contradict the nature of cultural processes, they
are jettisoned. They do not interact with cultural influences on behavior/psychology.
Vygotsky made this point the core of his thinking: “The nature of the development itself
changes, from biological to socio-historical. Verbal thought is not an innate, natural form
of behavior, but is determined by historical-cultural process and has specific properties
and laws that cannot be found in the natural forms of thought and speech. Once we
acknowledge the historical character of verbal thought, we must consider it subject to all
 108 macro cultural psychology

the premises of historical materialism, which are valid for any historical phenomenon in
human society. It is only to be expected that on this level the development of behavior
will be governed essentially by the general laws of the historical development of human
society” (Vygotsky, 1986, pp. 94–95). Vygotsky called this “the fundamental thesis of our
work.”
Vygotsky (1997b) complained that “psychology wants to be a natural science about
unnatural phenomena” (p. 300). Vygotsky endorsed systemic thinking, and he criticized
eclectic thinking for being unsystemic: “It is this feeling of a system, the sense of a common
style, the understanding that each particular statement is linked with and dependent
upon the central idea of the whole system of which it forms a part, which is absent in the
essentially eclectic attempts at combining the parts of two of [sic] more systems that are
heterogeneous and diverse in scientific origin and composition” (p. 259).

HUMANS’ SOCIAL BIOLOGY: GENERAL, POTENTIATING

SUBSTRATUM OF PSYCHOLOGY REPLACES SPECIFIC
DETERMINING MECHANISM OF PSYCHOLOGY
Because biology is present in psychological activity but does not determine specific activ-
ities, it must play a nondeterministic, nonspecific role in psychology. Biology must be a
general potentiating substratum of all psychology/behavior. As a general energizing plat-
form of all behavior that does not determine any particular behavior, biology plays a func-
tion in psychology that is compatible with cultural aspects of psychology. Biology is not a
separate determinism of the form and content of behavior; it leaves all that to culture.
Biology recedes into the background as a general, nonspecific potentiator of behavior.
Biology adjusts to the cultural dominance of behavior/psychology. Macro cultural psy-
chology does not deny biology in psychology and culture; rather, it changes its role from
deterministic program to general potentiator. Saying Vygotsky was antinaturalist means
he repudiated natural determinism of behavior, not that he rejected natural processes in
behavior.
Vygotsky recognized that this transformation occurs over the ontogeny of the child just
as it did over the phylogeny of Homo sapiens sapiens (Vygotsky & Luria, 1993, pp. 177, 193).
The infant comes equipped with biological survival mechanisms/programs that serve it
until conscious, cultural behavior can be acquired. The infant is not a blank slate; neverthe-
less, its animalistic biological behavioral programs are severely limited in scope and play a
very temporary role—they are quickly superseded by conscious, cultural psychology.
Infantile, natural, biological attention “is characterized by its nonintentional, nonvoli-
tional, character: Any strong and sudden stimulus immediately attracts the child’s atten-
tion and reconstructs his behavior. . . . The child’s natural memory is replaced by the new
artificial [notational] methods. . . . His memory begins to work in a new manner. . . . In the
course of his development, the child does not simply train his memory, but rearms it, shift-
ing to new systems, as well as to new techniques for remembering. . . . If we wish to analyze
the memory of an adult person, we would have to examine it not in the form nature gave
it, but in the form that culture created. Indeed, it would be completely wrong to limit
memory to those laws of reinforcement and reproduction of experience that are embedded
in the natural mnemonic functions” (Vygotsky & Luria, 1993, pp. 179, 180, 186–187).
 109 General Principles of Cultural Psychology

Vygotsky’s nuanced description is confirmed by contemporary research: “Although our

genetic code provides an important foundation for early development, it must be under-
stood as a framework upon which many environmental factors influence future structure
and function” (Fox, Levitt, & Nelson, 2010, p. 31).
Natural, innate mechanisms produce automatic, unconscious, involuntary, fixed
responses to stimuli. Conscious, subjective, willful, intentional, controllable behavior
cannot emanate from the maturation of natural mechanisms; it can emanate only from
new behavioral mechanisms that are cultural. “The work of the intellect begins at the
point where the activity of instinct and conditional reflexes stops or is blocked” (Vygotsky
& Luria, 1993, p. 69). Blurring this distinction is only possible if one closes one’s eyes to
concrete processes and reconstructs them as abstractions (Ratner, 2004c, p. 404).ii
Humans’ culturally based and culturally oriented psychology is prepared by an equally
distinctive biology: “biological systems implement social processes and behavior. . . . The
human brain has evolved to deal with complex social coordination that supports higher
social cognitive functions such as imitation, communication, empathy, theory of mind,
interactions, relationships, and collective enterprises” (Cacioppo et al., 2007, pp. 99–100).
This argument was popularized by Mead and Boas, and later by Geertz. Margaret Mead
(1939) wrote, “[H]uman character is built upon a biological base which is capable of enor-
mous diversification in terms of social standards. . . . Human nature is not rigid and
unyielding [but] extraordinarily adaptable: Cultural rhythms are stronger . . . more com-
pelling than the physiological rhythms which they overlay and distort . . . the failure to
satisfy an artificial, culturally stimulated need . . . may produce more unhappiness and
frustration . . . than the most rigid curtailment of the physiological demands . . .” (p. x).
Boas (1934, p. 34) similarly emphasized that “no proof has been given that the distribu-
tion of genetic elements which may determine personality is identical in different races.
It is likely that there are differences of this kind, provided the anatomical differences
between the races are sufficiently fundamental. On the other hand, the study of cultural
forms shows that such differences [i.e., anatomical differences] are altogether irrelevant
as compared with the powerful influence of the cultural environment.”

HUMAN ANATOMY AND CULTURE

Human biology has been molded according to cultural demands, in order to accommo-
date to those demands. Our hands, mouth, jaw, throat (larynx), tongue, pelvis, and skull
have all evolved so as to be compatible with cultural behavior such as speech, tool use,
manufacturing, and even cooking. Cooking is a distinctive human cultural activity that
radically altered the food we ingest, and this radically altered our digestive anatomy.
Cooked food is easier to chew and digest than raw food. Consequently, cooking selected
for small mouths, weak jaws, small teeth, small stomachs, and small colons. Cooked food
also provides more energy than raw food, and this gave human ancestors more energy to
support more cortical activity (which uses a great deal of energy) and physical activity
(Wrangham, 2009).
Other biological processes also adapted to the cultural environment. Our skulls and
brains have evolved so they can mature under the influence of cultural stimulation and
incorporate cultural input into the brain’s anatomy. A fast-maturing brain would be
 110 macro cultural psychology

formed soon after birth and would be less susceptible to cultural inputs. Even the shape
and size of the skulls (measured as the cephalic index) of U.S. immigrants depend upon
the length of time their mothers have resided in the United States—a fact discovered by
Franz Boas in 1912 and subsequently used to discredit the physical conception of race as
being determined by anatomy.
Even dentition has adjusted to, and facilitates, cultural life. In most mammals, and in
all the other primates, infancy and lactation end with eruption of the first permanent
molars. In humans, by contrast, there is an interval of about three years between wean-
ing—which usually occurs at 30 to 36 months, according to ethnographic observations in
traditional societies and historical accounts from Europe and America—and eruption of
the first permanent molars, an event that usually takes place at 5 to 6 years of age. This
forces children to remain dependent on caretakers to prepare food for them beyond
weaning. Similarly, in the newborn human, 87 of the resting metabolic rate (RMR) is
devoted to brain growth and function. This has the effect of co-opting, and thus prolong-
ing, the growth of other systems. By the age of 5 years, the RMR devoted to the brain is
still high at 44, whereas in the adult the figure is between 20 and 25 of RMR. At
comparable stages of development, the RMR devoted to the relatively large chimpanzee
brain is about 45, 20, and 9 for a newborn, a 5-year-old, and an adult, respectively
(Locke & Bogin, 2006).
These are marvelous biological novelties that conspire to make human infants socially
dependent upon their caretakers for a long time, during which they are taught social
behavior. Human anatomy—including skull and tooth formation—conspires to make
humans cultural beings.
Neotony denotes the fact that human infants are born less mature and formed than
other organisms, and also require much longer to mature. Immaturity consists of lacking
specific determinants of behavior that would prepare infants to survive. Neotony is not
simply a temporal phenomenon of requiring time to mature; it is a psychobiological
phenomenon that is open to the learning of complex cultural routines and is not impeded
by innate, fixed, behavioral programs. Childhood and neotony are thus fundamentally
cultural phenomena: they comprise a cultural relationship between child and caretakers
that exists in order to equip the infant with cultural routines that are not innate.
Human neotony and anatomy involve a major biological transformation of the human
infant that is precipitated and selected by culture for culture. A fascinating, and telling,
detail of neurological development is the fact that “[a]s a rule, circuits that process lower
level information mature earlier than those that process higher level information. For
example, in the neural hierarchy that analyzes visual information, low-level circuits that
analyze the color, shape, or motion of stimuli are fully mature long before the high-level
circuits that analyze or identify biologically important stimuli, such as faces, food, or
frequently used objects” (Fox et al., 2010, pp. 33–34). This means that infants are capable
of simple, sensory experience, although their advanced psychobiological processes must
wait until later to mature, during which time they are culturally formed.
Additional evidence of psychobiological flexibility is the fact that “young children insti-
tutionalized at birth have intelligence quotients (IQs) in the low 70s. However, placing
such children in high-quality foster care before the age of 2 years leads to a dramatic
increase in IQ” (Fox et al., 2010, p. 34).
 111 General Principles of Cultural Psychology

Human biology is so open to cultural influence that Vygotsky (1997a) said, “[T]he
social environment is class-based in its very structure insofar as, obviously, all new
relations are imprinted by the class basis of the environment. This is why certain investi-
gators have decided to speak not only of class psychology, but also of class physiology”
(p. 211).

NEUROTRANSMITTERS
Neurotransmitters are a general substratum for all of our behavior, and they leave the
determination of behavioral reactions to social and psychological processes.
It is not uncommon for a single neurochemical system, or a single psychoactive drug,
to have effects on nearly every behavior that is measured. Serotonin is involved in all
behavior, including appetite, sexual activity, homeostasis, and sleep. Norepinephrine is
involved in the entire sympathetic nervous system, and it is also affected by environmental
stress. Essentially, the same conclusion holds for acetylcholine, dopamine, norepinephrine,
glutamate, and gamma-aminobutyric acid. Each neuron has between 1,000 and 100,000
synapses, which connect to thousands of other synapses on each of the other 100 billion
neurons. Neurotransmitters transmit ions across all these synapses to all these neurons.
Imagine one axon that has 100,000 synapses that connect with tens of thousands of other
neurons, each of which has 100,000 synapses that connect with tens of thousands of addi-
tional neurons. In this vast, complex, interlocking system, how could serotonin focus on,
select out, and control those ions associated with a particular behavior or emotion such as
depression or aggression? A deeper question is, how can electrical ions on a nerve axon
generate depression or aggression? (See Ratner, 2000.)
Furthermore, serotonin connects with 14 different kinds of receptors throughout the
brain. Some serotonin receptors inhibit responses, while others facilitate/excite them.
Serotonin’s effects also vary with concentrations of other neurotransmitters, including
the neuropeptides, dopamine, noradrenaline, and even insulin.
It follows that administering neurotransmitters to humans cannot truly control specific
states or behaviors such as depression, violence, or risk-taking; it affects them only as part
of a general innervation or enervation of the nervous system.
Another cortical chemical, monoamine oxidase A (MAOA), has biopsychological
functions as general as serotonin’s—namely, it operates on the nervous system in general
to facilitate the passage of electrical currents. It therefore cannot have any specific behav-
ioral effect. MAOA is an enzyme that metabolizes monoamines on serotonin, dopamine,
and norepinephrine neurotransmitters (and on bodily cells). Nerve signals move from
the cell body down the axon via electronic action potentials. Action potentials are formed
when positively charged sodium ions enter a nerve cell and interact with the negative
charge of the cell body. At the end of the axon, the action potential stimulates the release
of neurotransmitters in the synapses to conduct the signal to other neurons. Afterward,
enzymes such as MAOA metabolize any remaining neurotransmitter chemicals on the
axon so that a new action potential can form (i.e., positive sodium ions can enter the
nerve cell) and a new electronic signal can move along the neuron. Without metaboliza-
tion of the monoamines, the old neurotransmitter would remain in place and retard the
formation of new action potentials.
 112 macro cultural psychology

MAOA has a purely biochemical function. It is not targeted to facilitate any psycho-
logical function. It does not exist to help us control our actions, engage in a particular
action, or achieve a certain mood state. It simply clears out all old neurotransmitters from
all the 100 billion axons, period.
Biological reductionism reverses the order of the relationship between biology and
psychology (Ayala, 1974). It assumes that a biochemical mechanism generates behavior
and emotion. In fact, any nerve signal for a behavior is generated by the individual’s
psychology. The reason I love my mother is not that some ion makes me love her. On the
contrary, I decide whether I love her depending on how she treats me, and then I generate
appropriate nerve signals that enervate my feeling. The same is true for simple behavior
such as raising my hand. My hand does not robotically move because an ion mechani-
cally makes it move. It moves because I decide to move it and this decision activates the
nerves necessary to effect the decision (Campbell, 1974; Popper & Eccles, 1977).
The central problem for psychobiologists is to explain specific thoughts, feelings, or
actions in terms of biochemical agents that have general physiological effects. That is,
how can energizing millions of neurons that project widely throughout the cortex via
interconnections with millions of other neurons bear on whether we join a gang or
become violent, depressed, or suicidal?

THE CORTEX AND CULTURAL PSYCHOLOGY

Luria called the frontal lobes of the cortex “the organ of civilization.” They were selected
by human civilization to process abstract, conscious, symbolic material that defines
human civilization. No other animal has our kind of frontal lobes because no other
animal has culture.
Macro cultural psychology postulates that language development was stimulated by the
need to communicate in social coordination of behavior. Language thus has a cultural basis.
It is not a biological organ that has evolved in particular brain centers with a definite form
(or a template, such as universal grammar). Lieberman (2007, p. 48) reports, “Although the
Broca-Wernicke model [of language] has the virtue of simplicity, it is at best incomplete. The
behavioral deficits of Broca’s aphasia are not limited to speaking; they involve difficulty
comprehending distinctions in meaning conveyed by syntax and word-finding difficulties”.
Patients also suffer from cognitive deficits. Kurt Goldstein characterized Broca’s aphasia
as “loss of the abstract capacity” and noted an inability to adapt to changing circum-
stances. Contemporary clinical evidence shows that permanent loss of language does not
occur absent subcortical damage, even when Broca’s or Wernicke’s area has been destroyed.
For example, “although magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) showed almost complete
destruction of Wernicke’s area in a 60-year-old patient, he made a full recovery; no sub-
cortical damage was apparent. Moreover, damage to subcortical structures, sparing cortex,
can produce aphasic syndromes” (Lieberman, 2007, p. 48).
Language processing is so flexible that it can migrate to cortical areas normally involved
in vision. “We find that in congenitally blind adults, the left occipital cortex is active during
sentence comprehension, even when the control tasks are more difficult and memory-in-
tensive. Similar to classic language regions, the occipital cortex is sensitive to combinatorial
structure (sentence-level syntax/compositional semantics), lexical semantic information,
 113 General Principles of Cultural Psychology

and in some regions to phonological information. Changes in the response profile of the
occipital cortex were accompanied by increased resting-state correlations with the prefron-
tal and thalamic regions that are involved in language processing” (Bedny et al., 2011,
p. 4431). This is a crucial discovery because it demonstrates that the occipital cortex is pro-
foundly reorganized in blind people to process complex linguistic tasks. Moreover, it forms
new connections with other areas of the brain that are actively involved in language. This
all happens quickly as the result of visual sensory deprivation in congenitally blind children
(see Ratner, 2006a, pp. 256–259 for additional evidence).
These findings confirms my contention that language is not a specific “module” that
is hardwired in the Broca–Wernicke areas of the cortex. Instead, these cortical areas
process abstract thought and symbols, not language per se. Rather than a language tem-
plate (in the form of universal grammar) being hardwired in particular centers of the
cortex, language is the offshoot of a much more general ability, which Goldstein called
abstraction. Thus, the cortex is sensitive to the forming, comprehending, and decoding of
abstract symbols, among which are language.
“Neurons may be constantly modifying connectivity, allowing learning from new envi-
ronments to compete against already existing tendencies. This is well demonstrated in
animals altered neonatally to receive retinal projections to the auditory portions of the
thalamus. Such animals reveal that auditory cortex may be modified by extrinsic activity
to develop retinotopic maps similar to those seen in the visual cortex. The role of envi-
ronment and inputs to the brain may therefore be seen as critical in the bias of network
formation during early life” (Fox et al., 2010, p. 34).
Complex social behavior includes a set of diverse competencies; it is not one discrete
skill. This very character of human behavior prevents it from being reduced to a simple
act that is reduced to a small area of the brain. An activity is not a singular thing with a
simple character that can be localized in a single brain area. Music, for example, involves
motor, auditory, and visual activities. It cannot be localized in a circumscribed “music
center” that is isolated from motor, auditory, and visual processing. Indeed, “musical
competence correlates with an increase in grey matter in motor, auditory, and visual-
spatial brain regions” (De Cruz, 2008, p. 480). The nature of human activity is complex
and multifactorial; it cannot be localized in one tiny, circumscribed cortical area. On
logical grounds, cortical localization of psychological competency is implausible.
For instance, I associate my mother with tough love and Broadway musicals and help-
ing with homework, whereas you may associate your mother with abuse, fear, selfishness,
bad food, rats in the apartment, and alcohol. These contrasting significances relate to dif-
ferent thoughts, emotions, and objects (Broadway musicals versus rats), which will obvi-
ously have different projections in the cortex.
Or, compare the cortical representation of the American flag for an Iraqi who has wit-
nessed American soldiers decimating her country, shooting her friends on the street, and
kicking down her door to take her father to Abu Ghraib prison with George W. Bush’s
cortical representation of that same flag. The contrasting symbolic representations and
experiences surrounding the American flag will lead to different cortical projections
throughout the brain.
Japanese and American subjects process the perception of fearful facial expressions in
different parts of the brain because this stimulus is more affect-laden for Americans than
 114 macro cultural psychology

for Japanese (Moriguchi et al., 2005). Similarly, American men and women engage in
different mental processes when they perform mental rotation tasks, which results in this
activity being processed in the parietal areas of men’s brains, but in inferior frontal regions
of female brains (Hugdahl, Thomsen, & Ersland, 2006). Mental rotation tasks are not
variables or modules that are localized in one fixed, circumscribed spot in the brain.
Complex social behavior cannot be localized in discrete cortical centers. Consider risk-
taking behavior: In a typical risk-taking task, the subject must perceive the stimulus,
recall information about it, use language to understand the instructions for participating
in the risk-taking behavior, and use complex reasoning (including mathematical proba-
bility) to decide which possibility is likely to succeed and what the risks of certain behav-
ior are. Then the subject must decide whether he or she wishes to risk punishment in
order to possibly achieve great gains.
What is noteworthy about risky behavior is its indefinite array of behaviors and the fact
that they depend entirely upon particular, variable situations. Risky behavior includes
playing cards for money, betting on sports, driving a car too fast, committing adultery,
eating a lot of sugar and fat, looking at your notes when taking a test in school, wearing
lightweight clothing in cold weather, not taking medication, smoking cigarettes, diving
into a shallow lake, swimming in shark-infested water, and asking a girl for a date when
she already has a boyfriend.
Most risky behaviors are risky only in certain situations. Gambling in a weekly poker game
for a few thousand dollars is risky if you are poor, but not if you are a billionaire. Looking at
your notes during a test is not risky if the teacher says it is an open-book test. Committing
adultery is risky only in a monogamous marriage, not in an open or polygamous one. Driving
too fast is risky only if there are other cars on the road, and especially if some are police cars.
In addition, risky behavior exists only when the payoff/pleasure is accompanied by a high
probability of punishment/failure. If the probability is low, the behavior is not risky.
Risk-taking behavior is thus extremely complex, variable, situational, and probability
based. Yet risk-taking behavior is asserted to be localized in the right prefrontal cortex
(RPFC) because there is relatively less neural activity there than in the left prefrontal
cortex during some risk-taking tasks. Gianotti et al. (2009) hypothesize that the RPFC
causes risky behavior: “The hypoactivity in the right PFC may thus reflect a lack of regu-
latory abilities to suppress an option that appears more seductive because of the higher
payoffs” (p. 36). In other words, less neural activity cannot control behavior, so when a
risky possibility appears, the brain cannot constrain the tendency to go for it. The authors
go on to suggest that risk-taking behavior can be regulated by biofeedback and other
methods that can alter the electrical activity in the RPFC.
In this model, risk taking involves assessing potential rewards and penalties for an
activity and then pursuing higher payoffs—presumably when the risk of penalty is great.
Normally, we would acknowledge the high possibility of penalty and would desist from
the behavior. But if our RPFC is hypoactive, we cannot control the allure of the high
payoff. The hypoactive RPFC prevents us from controlling our behavioral tendency. We
know it’s dangerous, but we don’t have enough brain activity to control it. Somehow, all
of our cognitive faculties are functional—we know the payoff and we know the penal-
ties—but we cannot resist the seduction of the payoff. This deficiency accounts for any
and all risk taking, including the diverse behaviors I mentioned earlier.
 115 General Principles of Cultural Psychology

Gianotti et al.’s (2009) reasoning is faulty on two grounds. One is that the deficiency
would involve an inability to control all risky behavior—the lack of cortical control over
risk would lead people to engage in every risky behavior that came along. Since it is a
cortical inability to “control tempting payoffs regardless of painful consequences,” it
would indiscriminately enable all such behavioral possibilities. An affected person would
jump into shallow lakes, swim in shark-infested waters, commit adultery, cheat in school,
drive fast, eat junk food, etc., etc. His or her life would be a wreck. The postulated cortical
deficiency is not an inability to control a particular behavior; it is a cortical hypoactivity
for any and all risky behavior. This would be an incapacitating, even life-threatening,
disorder.
The second conundrum regarding the hypothesis is that it cannot explain why this
cortical hypoactivity occurs only with risky behavior. How could the cortex fail to respond
only to risk and not to other behavior? It makes no sense. Why doesn’t the brain fail to
control related behavior, such as pleasure without risk? There is every reason to believe
that a hypoactive RPFC would disinhibit all behavior, including violence. After all, hypo-
activity is a general reduction in activity level; it is not tethered to certain kinds of behav-
ior. Thus a cortically hypoactive person would be out of control in all behaviors.
The postulated cortical cause of the risk-taking behavioral disorder can easily be
assessed: it does not exist. Nobody compulsively accedes to every risky temptation. Risky
behavior is selective; therefore, it cannot be due to a general cortical deficiency (hypoac-
tivity) in controlling behavior.
Psychobiological formulations always ignore the actual complex, variable, intentional,
cultural features of human psychology and replace them with simple, automatic behav-
iors that have nothing to do with psychology. Findings regarding the latter are then
extrapolated to psychology. This is a giant shell game.
The argument for brain localization of psychological phenomena requires that the full
complexity of psychological phenomena be ignored and collapsed into a simplistic cari-
cature of a singular thing, and that the full complexity of cortical activity be collapsed
into a simplistic caricature of a point-for-point correlation between a simple, circum-
scribed psychological phenomenon and a single, tiny, dedicated point on the cortex.
Circumscribed localization of psychological functions is disproven by children who
have had hemispherectomies (removal of half the brain). These children generally develop
normal psychological functions. They lose some vision and motor control over limbs on
the side of the body opposite the removed hemisphere, but they develop normal person-
ality, memory, and even speech when the left hemisphere (generally posited to contain
the language center) is removed.
Susan Curtiss reports fascinating research on children who have had one of their brain
hemispheres removed. Because language is assumed to be hardwired into the left hemi-
sphere (LH), removal of that hemisphere would be expected to destroy linguistic capacity.
This, however, is not the case. In many cases, the right hemisphere (RH) acquires the
capacity for language, and the children go on to develop normal language and intelligence
functions.
Curtiss and de Bode (2003) report research on children who have had their language-
dominant LH removed: “Our results indicate that not only is the isolated right hemi-
sphere capable of supporting language (re)acquisition, but that despite differences in
 116 macro cultural psychology

underlying pathologies and ages at surgery, it develops grammars in a way strikingly

similar to the patterns documented in neurologically intact children. . . . The hemi-
spherectomy children frequently showed lower error rates than normals. As a result, our
investigation provides strong evidence that grammatical development by the isolated
right hemisphere is normal. This remains true whether we are talking about initial lan-
guage acquisition, as in the case with developmental pathologies, or reacquisition, as in
the case with acquired pathologies” (pp. 201, 202).
In fact, when left-hemispherectomy children are compared to right-hemispherectomy
children, the surprising result is that language suffers more when the RH is removed. This
contradicts the assumption that the LH is the seat of language, because if the assumption
were true, ablation of the LH would produce more linguistic deficits than ablation of the
RH. However, 42 of the right hemispherectomies (versus 17 of the left hemispherecto-
mies) failed to develop language, even long after their surgeries (from about 4 years to
9 years after surgery). In addition, two-thirds of the sample who had left hemispherec-
tomy after the age of 4—or near the end of or after the active language acquisition years—
are fluent speakers whose RHs have constructed rich grammars (Curtiss & de Bode, 1999;
Curtiss & Schaeffer, 1997).
These findings suggests an important role for the RH in language development, and
they cast doubt upon the familiar assumption that the LH is the dominant seat of lan-
guage. The findings also cast doubt on the assumption that a universal language template
(universal grammar) is hardwired in the brain, for if it is hardwired, it must be wired into
a particular part of the brain that is especially designed for language. Currently, this part
of the brain is thought to be Broca’s and Wernicke’s areas in the LH. However, Curtiss’s
refutation of the LH as the dominant seat of language impugns the entire assumption that
language is innate, as it is not intrinsic to the LH at all. It is thus perplexing that Curtiss
& de Bode (2003) continue to believe that universal grammar is innate.
The fact that extirpating one half of the entire cortex does not necessarily impair lin-
guistic functioning—and sometimes leads to superior functioning compared with normal
children—is an extraordinary finding. It does more than prove that language is not an
instinct hardwired in specific brain centers—a theory that Tomasello (1995) debunked
long ago in a critique of Pinker. Hemispherectomy findings go far beyond language and
cause us to rethink the entire relationship between psychology and biology. They are not
simply one fact among others; they are a fact that stands out from others, that redefines
others, and redefines theories as well.
The findings I have reported are strong evidence for my contention that psychological
functions are functionally autonomous of biological determinants. Since linguistic local-
ization is touted as the model of innate, psychological modules, the negative evidence
about language indicates that psychological functions are not inbuilt or localized in par-
ticular parts of the brain. (Amazingly, even Pinker [in Tomasello, 1995, p. 143] admits that
“no one knows what either Broca’s area or Wernicke’s area is for,” yet he continues to insist
on localized, innate psychological modules.)
This casts doubt on the notion that psychological functions are innate, because if
they were they would have to be genetically built into specific cortical locations and not
others. Genes are specific programs for specific cellular development in particular places.
 117 General Principles of Cultural Psychology

Genes cannot determine that a universal grammar be hardwired throughout the brain;
they must direct proteins to develop in specific locations. Moreover, it is difficult to imag-
ine how proteins could contain a language template such as a universal grammar. The
absence of specific localization of psychological functions, and the fact that psychological
functions can be acquired by diverse cortical areas, disproves the theory that they have a
particular neurological basis. These neurological findings also refute the notion that psy-
chological functions are separate and distinct, as they are not confined to separate and
distinct brain centers (Ratner, 2006a, pp. 256–259).
The noted neurologist Oliver Sacks (2001) states the following:

The frontal lobes are the latest achievement in the evolution of the nervous system:
it is only in human beings (and great apes, to some extent) that they reach so great
a development. They were also, by a curious parallel, the last parts of the brain
to be recognized as important. . . . They lack the simple and easily identifiable
functions of the more primitive parts of the cerebral cortex, the sensory and
motor areas, for example (and even the “association areas” between these), but
they are . . . crucial for all higher-order purposeful behavior—identifying the
objective, projecting the goal, forging plans to reach it, organizing the means by
which such plans can be carried out, monitoring and judging the consequences to
see that all is accomplished as intended.
This is the central role of the frontal lobes, one which releases the organism
from fixed repertoires and reactions, allows the mental representation of alterna-
tives, imagination, freedom. . . . (pp. ix)

Sacks is summarizing the position of his teacher Elkhonin Goldberg, who was a student
of Luria’s in 1972 before fleeing the U.S.S.R. Goldberg found that a given psychological
activity activates different cortical areas at different times. When a task (e.g., associating a
verb with a noun) is novel, blood flow in the frontal lobes increases, and as the task
becomes more familiar, frontal lobe involvement virtually disappears as other cortical
areas become involved. Similarly, the right frontal lobes generate more blood flow than
the left when a task is novel, but this pattern is reversed as the task is practiced (Goldberg,
2001, pp. 69–71). These empirical results are troubling for the theory of innate cortical
modules because they prove that no one area is specifically and entirely devoted to a par-
ticular psychological activity. We cannot say that X is the innate, dedicated center for
processing Y activity, because Y is processed in several loci. Moreover, both right and left
frontal lobes are active during all phases of a task; it is simply the case that relative activity
(blood flow) is higher or lower in the left or right at different times. Thus, the task is
simultaneously processed in multiple cortical loci; it is not confined to a single, predeter-
mined, physiologically dedicated module. This has important implications for research-
ing brain activity. One must research all phases of psychological activity in order to
comprehend the changing patterns of brain activity. If one studied only familiar tasks, one
would miss these changes.
A related complication is that frontal lobes are relatively more active when the subject
has to make a choice (e.g., how to interpret an event). Once the situation has been
 118 macro cultural psychology

disambiguated, the input of the frontal lobes is no longer critical, even though all the
other aspects of the task remain the same (Goldberg, 2001, p. 80). Again, research tasks
must elicit choice and initiative in order to register this pattern of brain activity. Simple,
standardized tasks will not register it.
Some results similar to those of Goldberg concern numbers. Roman numerals (e.g.,
CMXCIV) are unknown in Japan. Consequently, when Japanese subjects are exposed to
them, their neural activation (as indicated by blood oxygen level in fMRI) manifest the
typical linguistic pattern for letter processing. Upon learning that these shapes actually
represent numbers, subjects immediately show strong activation in a network of brain
areas involved in numerical processing, such as the bilateral inferior and superior parietal
lobule. Although none of the subjects could even remotely identify the numerical value of
the Roman numerals, the fact that they believed, or interpreted, the forms to be numbers
activated brain centers involved in numerical processing (De Cruz, 2008, p. 478).
This finding demonstrates that the individual’s interpretation of sensory input deter-
mines how the brain reacts to it. Cortical activation is not determined by the purely
physical properties of sensory input. In fact, numbers can be represented with words and
can be written alphabetically (one, two). Numbers do not have to be presented in the
form of numerical symbols having particular physical, sensory properties. Thus, the
cortex could not be primed to process numerical forms in certain modules, because
numbers do not always take a particular form. Numbers can be expressed alphabetically
and also verbally. Some cultures even express numbers in terms of body parts; different
parts of the body are assigned different numerical denotations (e.g., shoulders and arms
represent different numbers). These people count on their bodies, not with numerical
symbols on paper. So the brain must be able to process numbers in a variety of forms,
from body parts, to letters, to numerical symbols, to auditory information. Th ere cannot
be one fixed “number center” that processes all numerical information.
Indeed, number words do recruit language areas, and patients with brain lesions in
language-related areas have impaired calculation skills (De Cruz, 2008, p. 481). Among
people who use their body parts to represent numbers, cortical processes handling numer-
ical values must recruit areas that represent bodily parts, which would not be involved in
the numerical processes of Americans, for example, who do not rely on body parts for
calculation. Thus, the very activity of numerical calculation, as one example, is culturally
variable, entailing different elements. Its representation in the brain must therefore be dif-
ferent for different peoples. There cannot be a single, preformed cortical area designated
for numerical thought. And, of course, this pertains to all psychological activities.
Even the visual cortex is dominated by language areas; this is how linguistic categories
structure color perception. The left posterior temporoparietal language region seems to
serve as a top-down control source that modulates the activation of the visual cortex
(Siok et al., 2009).
These examples impugn the possibility that there are single, modular, circumscribed
areas/centers that are predetermined to process certain circumscribed activities. The
absence of specific localization is due to, and reciprocally proves, the fact that psycho-
logical phenomena are not singular, circumscribed entities. Rather, they are complex
phenomena informed by diverse cultural and psychological elements (for Luria’s views
on this, see Christensen, Bartfai, & Humle, 2009).
 119 General Principles of Cultural Psychology

A PHILOSOPHICAL, SYSTEMIC ANALYSIS

OF CORTICAL LOCALIZATION
Brain localization assumes that psychological phenomena have a certain nature, namely,
that they are singular, circumscribed events with fixed features that are universal. This is
the only way that the cortex could have evolved a special, circumscribed module to process
this activity in all people. There is a logical, interdependent, necessary, reciprocally sup-
portive, inviolate congruence between one’s conception of brain localization and one’s
conception of psychology. If you believe one, you must believe the other, and if one is
wrong, the other must be wrong. If psychological phenomena are culturally variable and
involve interpretation (e.g., as to what a number is, what a speaker’s mouth movements
indicate), and if they are not singular, circumscribed, universal events, then they cannot be
localized in cortical modules. Conversely, if psychological phenomena are cortically local-
ized, they cannot be culturally variable and involve interpretation, and they must be singu-
lar, circumscribed events with constant, universal features that match the preformed,
designated cortical module assigned to them in the brain.
The notion of cortical localization of psychological functions has logical, necessary
implications concerning the nature of psychological phenomena, the cortex, and culture
(Luria, 1978). A logical consideration of this relation can generate solid conclusions about
psychology, culture, and the cortex, as well as about the manner in which we conceive of
these (which is Psychology).
Cortical localization means that particular psychological phenomena have designated
sites in cortical areas that are specifically designed to process them. These cortical areas
have physical properties that match properties of psychological phenomena; this is why
those phenomena are localized in those areas and not others. This is analogous to the way
white blood cells have cholesterol receptors that are specifically predesigned to attract
and bind with parts of cholesterol molecules (e.g., LDL). This is how cholesterol comes to
reside in blood cells.
If psychological phenomena had general properties, they could be processed anywhere
in the brain; they would not have to be localized in particular sites. General psychological
phenomena would require an all-purpose cortex.
We can pursue this standpoint to gain additional insights from brain localization into
the nature of culture and culture’s relation to psychology. A specialized, distinctive, natural
psychological phenomenon that has distinctive physical characteristics that are suited to
be detected and processed in a predesigned, matching, specialized cortical center must
have a congruent (logically consistent) social basis and social character. Sadness, for exam-
ple, would have to be essentially the same in all societies in order to have properties that
match the universal “sadness module” that is inbuilt to detect and process it. If sadness
were socially variable, then its variable properties would not be compatible with the uni-
versal, preformed module. The module would be incapable of detecting and processing
these “rogue” properties.
We can see that the localization thesis has clear implications for the relation between
culture and psychology. Culture must be neutral with regard to psychology; it cannot
introduce significant variable properties into it. This essentially marginalizes culture
in relation to psychology. Localization resists the cultural organization of psychology.
 120 macro cultural psychology

The two are logically inconsistent. Each would counteract and undermine the other; they
cannot coexist.
Universal, fixed, cortically localized natural psychology acts on culture in a conserva-
tive manner. Fixed, universal, natural anger, violence, depression, masculinity, femininity,
and childhood development require a complementary social structure that accommo-
dates these properties. All societies must have gender relations that match their natural,
innate, universal, fixed forms of masculinity and femininity. Fixed psychological phe-
nomena thus mandate fixed social relations.
Brain localization, therefore, has powerful, wide-ranging consequences for the nature
of the brain, the nature of psychology, the nature of society, and the relation between
culture and psychology! Cortical localization is not merely a singular, circumscribed issue.
It is an implicit theory of psychology and culture and of their relationship. This is brought
out by a systemic philosophy of mind.
The coherence of this system of elements means that the entire system collapses with a
change in any of the elements. If social systems vary, it will collapse the entire system,
because varying social systems require corresponding variations in behavior and psy-
chology, and this violates the requirements for cortical localization of psychological phe-
nomena. Similarly, if psychological phenomena vary in different cultures, this requires
that the social structure vary accordingly, and also that the brain must be a flexible, all-
purpose organ rather than a specialized organ of modules. And if we discover that a
psychological function is not localized in one cortical area but extends over many areas,
this would impugn the notion that psychological phenomena are specialized, circum-
scribed, fixed phenomena—and this would impugn the idea that psychological phenom-
ena are constant and universal in all societies, and this would impugn the idea that
societies involve fixed and invariable social relations.

EMOTIONS
These findings are supported by a great deal of related evidence. In humans, emotional
arousal depends upon social cues that are interpreted through social constructs. There are
no clear-cut physiological (organic) underpinnings of human emotions (Ratner, 2000).
Subjective feelings of fear and surprise, for instance, are not correlated with any particular
physiological activity. Such findings repudiate the notion that an emotion is a coherent
syndrome of experience, physiological activity, and behavioral expression. There is little,
or no, correlation among the purported components of an emotional syndrome. There is
even little correlation of behaviors within a single category of emotional expressions; for
example, in a methodologically sophisticated study of surprise, surprised vocal expres-
sion correlated 0.06 with eyes widening and 0.16 with eyebrow raising (Reisenzein, 2000).
Such findings repudiate a natural, or evolutionary, basis of emotions.
A related example is research that subjected people to conditions of low and high social
anxiety. The subjects experienced different levels of anxiety, and they reported different levels
of physiological agitation (heart rate, breathing, blood pressure). However, objective physi-
ological measures were indistinguishable across the two groups (Mauss, Wilhelm, & Gross,
2004). The explanation for this result is that high and low anxiety are cultural concepts that
carry prescriptions for physiological sensations. The physiological sensations are generated
 121 General Principles of Cultural Psychology

by cultural prescriptions, not by physiological reactions. When people feel anxious, they
draw on the cultural schema of anxiety to experience the normative sensory feelings that are
prescribed, or embodied, therein. Anxious people are supposed to sweat; this is why they feel
that they do, even when they in fact do not sweat any more than low-anxiety subjects.
It follows that physiological measures are not reliable indicators of psychological stress
(cf. Tavris, 1982, pp. 165–169).

COLOR PERCEPTION
Color perception would seem to be fully explainable in terms of wavelengths of light and
rods and cones, but it isn’t. In Vygotsky’s words,

We shall begin with perception, an act that always seemed to be an act wholly
subordinate to elementary natural laws, and we shall try to show that, in the child,
this developmental process, most dependent on the actual given situation [of
physical stimuli] is reconstructed on a completely new base and preserving exter-
nal phenotypic similarity to the same function in the animal, in its internal compo-
sition, structure, and method of action, in its whole psychological nature, belongs
to higher functions established in the process of historical development and has a
special history in ontogenesis. In the higher function of perception, we already
encounter patterns completely different from those that were disclosed by psycho-
logical analysis for its primitive, or natural, forms. (Vygotsky, 1999, pp. 27–28)

In a powerful experiment, Kay and Kempton (1984) presented subjects with two sets of
two colors and asked them to judge in which set the colors looked more similar. One set
consisted of two wavelengths that were dissimilar but were within one color category (e.g.,
a red that was close to the orange boundary of red and a red that was close to the purple
boundary of red). The second set consisted of two wavelengths that were similar but strad-
dled a color boundary, such as red and purple. Subjects perceived the first set as appearing
more similar, despite the fact that the two wavelengths were quite different. The two colors
in the second set appeared dissimilar despite the fact that the wavelengths were similar.
This study proves that color perception is not a direct reflection of the physical property
of the color. On the contrary, the linguistic/symbolic color category overrides wavelength
as a determinant of color perception. Colors that exist within the same color category
appear similar while colors that exist in two different color categories appear dissimilar,
regardless of the physical distance between their wavelengths. The socially imposed cat-
egorical boundaries among wavelengths determine our perceptual experience of color
(see Ratner & McCarthy, 1990, for extensive discussion, and for a similar example of how
memory for color is socially constructed rather than determined by pure physical prop-
erties of objects; Ozgen & Davies, 2002).

PLEASURE
Cultural beliefs determine subjective pleasure as well as brain activity associated with it.
Plassmann, et al. (2008) found that perception of value can affect pleasure. In the study,
 122 macro cultural psychology

moderate wine drinkers were asked to taste five samples of wine, which were indicated at
price points of $5, $10, $35, $45, or $90 a bottle. Brain scans taken while volunteers sam-
pled the wine indicated more activity in the brain’s pleasure center with wines that volun-
teers believed were more expensive, even though the prices were fictional. Volunteers
showed diminished pleasure in their brain scans while drinking wines that they thought
were inexpensive.
Pleasure, both psychological and as a cortical representation, is generated by cultural
beliefs more than by physiological reactions.

SEX
Sexual desire is functionally autonomous from biological mechanisms. According to
Giles (2008, pp. 50–52),

Eunuchs are males who have been castrated and thus suffer a state of permanent
testosterone deficiency. The practice of castration was carried out in numerous
cultures; from ancient Greece, Rome, Byzantium, to different Islamic societies
and ancient China. In many of these cultures eunuchs were employed as harem
attendants or guards. This was done to keep the attendants or guards from sexu-
ally interacting with the women or getting the women pregnant.
However, although the state of castration may have stopped eunuchs from
impregnating their women charges, it did not stop them from having sexual desire
towards the women or from having sexual intercourse with them. There is much
evidence that such harem eunuchs continued to have sexual desire and were sexu-
ally active with the women. The mediaeval Islamic writer Bayha, for example, tells
us that “the eunuchs have a strong lust for and an amazing attraction to women.”
Thus, in mediaeval Islamic culture “sexual relations of various forms with eunuchs
were very common, as it seems, everywhere. The eunuchs did not lose their sexual
desire, either as active or passive partners.”
One could always protest that the sexual desire that eunuch’s [sic] feel may not
be the same sort of sexual desire that the intact testosterone-sufficient male feels.
There is, however, no evidence to support such a view, a view that seems little
more than a last minute attempt to deny the evidence that eunuch’s [sic] can have
“real” sexual desire.

Giles reports that not only did eunuchs maintain their sexual desire, but they were even
sexually desired by women because of the impossibility of impregnation. To reduce this
desire on the part of women to the minimum, eunuchs were not simply castrated, but in
many cases had their penises removed as well.

But why then is it that testosterone-deprived males in these pre-modern cultures

continued to have sexual desire, whereas various modern studies purport to show
that androgen deprived males have no sexual desire? The answer, as I have sug-
gested, has do with social rather than biological factors. If a man is sexually desired
because of his testosterone-deprived state (as many eunuchs in earlier times were),
 123 General Principles of Cultural Psychology

then being slow to ejaculate, or slow to have an erection (part of the testosterone-
deprived state), need not be seen by the man as a stigma. Consequently, there is no
need for him to try to suppress his sexual desire or avoid sexual activities.
What all of this suggests is that a male’s sexual desire is not dependent on sex
hormone levels in any fundamental way.

Giles is saying that modern men, deprived of androgens, manifest a loss of sexual inter-
est. However, the reason is not that the deprivation directly suppresses desire. Rather, it
is because androgen deprivation causes loss of erection (which is a physical response that
does require hormonal energizing), and men are embarrassed by this in a potential sexual
encounter with women, so the men suppress their sexual interest in women to avoid
being put in this embarrassing position. Suppression of sexual desire is a social psycho-
logical event, not a biological one.
The same functional independence of sexual desire from hormones occurs in women.
“In a large study of over 1,000 randomly selected women between 18 and 75 years-old,
Davis et al. found that naturally occurring testosterone levels had no correlation with a
woman’s sexual desire, arousal, pleasure, orgasmic ability, or sexual self-image” (Giles,
2008, p. 57). Giles (2008, p. 53–55) and Ratner (1991, Chapter 5; 2000) report similar evi-
dence regarding the emotional symptoms of menopause and PMS in women—namely,
that the symptoms are a function of cultural-psychological meanings associated with
menopause and PMS, not the direct result of the hormones on emotions.
The interesting field known as ethnopsychopharmacology has revealed that physical
reactions to medication are culturally shaped and culturally variable.
Psychobiologists often try to impress us with the importance of biological, animalistic
processes in humans by presenting some miniscule, artificial finding and then trumpet-
ing its great significance for human psychology/behavior. This could be done with Miller
and Maner’s (2010) finding that human males are sensitive to female olfactory cues asso-
ciated with ovulation (reproductive fertility), and that this sensitivity affects levels of tes-
tosterone that mobilize mating behavior. An experiment asked female college students to
wear a specific T-shirt on nights close to their ovulation, and a different T-shirt on nights
distant from ovulation. The females could not wear any perfumes, use scented soaps or
deodorants, eat odor-producing foods, smoke, drink alcohol, or sleep with any other
person. The point was to isolate the bodily odors associated with ovulation. The T-shirts
were kept in sealed freezer bags. Then male students were instructed to put their heads
inside the bags and sniff the T-shirts. Their testosterone levels were measured before and
after the sniff test. Results were that sniffing T-shirts worn during ovulation produced 1
to 2 more nanograms/deciliter of testosterone than sniffing T-shirts worn other nights.
The authors trumpet this as an important way that biology affects our sexuality: male sex
hormones are directly affected by biological odors produced by ovulation. It seems we are
creeping ever closer to more biological determinants of psychology.
However, we must emphasize the artificiality of the study and its irrelevance to real life.
Males were only sensitive to female reproductive odors under conditions of extreme iso-
lation. The females were isolated from all other scents, and the males were tested in the
isolated condition of sticking their heads inside plastic bags. In real life, the natural odors
produced by ovulation are masked by environmental scents, and males’ encounters
 124 macro cultural psychology

with females’ reproductive odors are compromised by all the smells around them. There
is every reason to believe that men never get a “good shot” at perceiving specific odors
associated with ovulation, and that these odors consequently have no affect on their
sexuality. The study provides no evidence for real biological influences on male sexual
behavior.
Miller and Maner (2010) correctly point out that the elevated testosterone that results
from sniffing female reproductive odors does not determine any particular behavioral
response. Humans have so much control over their biology—for example, suppressing
pain, hunger, belches, and the instinct to blink when inserting a contact lens into an
eye—that men in a long-term romantic relationship “might down-regulate their responses
to other women’s olfactory signals” (p. 281). And, of course, men who were aroused by
such signals could relieve their arousal through any number of means without having sex
with the odorous woman, or with any women at all. Thus, even if men could detect wom-
en’s reproductive odors, and even if this raised their testosterone level, it would have no
definite effect on their sexual behavior. Thus, these and similar minute physiological find-
ings about sex have no explanatory significance for human sexual behavior. It is not clear
why they attract interest.
The integrated cultural-biological system that has evolved to enable cultural behavior is
anathema to biological determinism of behavior. It is incongruous to propose a throw-
back to a primitive, direct biological determination of behavior when human biology has
evolved around the central task of enabling cultural behavior. In addition to being illogi-
cal and inconsistent, it would be injurious and maladaptive to have a hormone, neu-
rotransmitter, or gene determine some behavior in an animal fashion that would minimize
its cultural organization, for this would impede the development of culture and cultural
behavior, along with all the advantages they offer human fulfillment.

COUNTER-REVOLUTION: BIOLOGICAL DETERMINISM AND

SPECIALIZATION OF PSYCHOLOGICAL FUNCTIONS
Nevertheless, psychologists and science writers (e.g., in the New York Times) resist the
revolutionary reformulating of human biology by culture and psychology. They continue
to regard human psychology within the procrustean mold of naturalistic, animalistic, spe-
cialized biological mechanisms. This is one of the diverse ways of marginalizing culture
scientifically and politically. If psychology is misconstrued as a set of predetermined, fixed
tendencies, each specifically determined by a biological program, this eliminates cultural
features of psychology, and it marginalizes the importance of culture for psychology. The
discipline of Psychology thus contributes to obfuscating culture through notions such as
biological reductionism and specialization. Obfuscating culture is a counter-revolution
against political change, and also against social scientific progress.
Gazzaniga (2002) tries to force human behavior into the parameters of genetic evolu-
tion that govern most animal behavior. He explains the great number of human behav-
iors as the result of genetic variations and their concomitant neuroanatomical forms that
are selected by the environment. The mechanism of behavior is exactly the same as in
animals; humans simply have more variations to account for our greater number of
behaviors. Making the comparison explicit, Gazzaniga says,
 125 General Principles of Cultural Psychology

For a species to have survived, let alone evolve, it had to come to terms with the
challenges of its niche. To cope with those challenges, it had to develop specialized
neural circuitry that supports adaptations and programs for response to an envi-
ronmental challenge. In short, any organism, from Escherichia coli to human has
built in responses. . . . More complex organisms, which possess more complex
behaviors (language, abstract thought), must possess complex and specialized cir-
cuits. As William James noted, humans must have more instincts, not fewer, than
lower animals. . . . The cerebral cortex is not a dynamic, general purpose, learn-
anything, anytime, anywhere kind of device. It has built-in constraints, huge
ones. . . . The brain is clearly not a general purpose computing device but is a col-
lection of circuits devoted to quite specific capacities. This is true for all brains, but
what is wonderful about the human brain is that we have untold numbers of these
capacities. (pp. 203, 211)

In these statements, Gazzaniga compares human behavior to bacteria, he describes

human behavior as instinctual, and he postulates strong built-in constraints on behavior
that take the form of biologically specialized neuroanatomical circuits. He denies that the
brain is a general learning device that can creatively devise a wealth of innovative behav-
iors. Indeed, he advocates a mechanical conception of psychology that never mentions
any creative role on the part of humans in designing their behavior or controlling their
environment.
The first question to ask is, how does this model relate to the ability to participate in
human culture? Can a series of genetically evolved, simple, separate, predefined, fixed,
automatic, specialized circuits and dispositions enable a person to survive in culture,
which is our primary environment? The answer is, clearly, no.
We have seen that culture demands a general processor that constructs or acquires a
wide variety of competencies and behaviors as necessary. The wonderful, rapid variety of
human behavior repudiates this kind of explanation and points to new behavioral mech-
anisms and a new human biology.
Massive, rapid social changes that occurred recently in China, Nazi Germany (from
1933 to 1945), and contemporary Western Europe and the United States involved massive,
rapid behavioral changes, such as quickly learning to survive in a market economy, look-
ing for jobs, negotiating salaries, looking for housing that had formerly been provided by
work units, living with the insecurity of the business market without job security, new
dating and marriage norms, a new sexuality, and using new technology. Even symptoms
of psychopathology can change within one generation, as Ng (2009) found in Shenzhen,
a southern Chinese city that transformed from a small fishing village to a booming
metropolis of more than 12 million in less than 30 years. Especially noteworthy are the
rapid and fundamental changes inflicted on gender roles by Muslim fundamentalism.
These ferocious movements virtually enslave women in the span of a few years, and com-
pletely transform gender relations. Muslim men and women have to make extraordi-
narily rapid, fundamental role changes when they study for years in the United States and
adopt all the American customs of dress, smoking, and sex, and then return to Saudi
Arabia, for example, where they immediately take on entirely new roles, and often adjust
to them seamlessly (at least in the case of men).
 126 macro cultural psychology

It would be preposterous to claim that there are built-in, specialized circuits that con-
strain behavior in these particular forms. It is inconceivable that Saudi women activate
some built-in, instinctive type of specialized neural circuitry when they doff their low-
cut, tight American jeans, stamp out their cigarettes, and don their black robes and hoods
(and retreat into invisible anonymity) on the flight from Los Angeles to Riyadh. It is per-
fectly obvious that these behaviors are culturally learned via a general learning device
that can rapidly acquire and enact a wide variety of behaviors. Gazzaniga’s model does
not address real behaviors such as these.
Gazzaniga tries to hold back this paradigm shift to a new emergent order of cultural-
psychology reality by stuffing human behavioral diversity into the old (animalistic, bio-
logical) paradigm, which cannot account for it.
Neurological research demonstrates that the brain alters in response to novel behavioral
and psychological activities. New neurons develop as people engage in new activities.
Park and Reuter-Lorenz (2009) report that as individuals age, wider areas of the cortex
are recruited to process competencies in order to compensate for deterioration in origi-
nal, primary areas. Whole new areas of the brain participate in psychological functions in
older age. The brain does not constrain our psychological and behavioral activity: “As new
skills are acquired, performance becomes more efficient and less error prone. At the
neural level, this increased efficiency can be explained by the establishment of efficient
circuitry that is highly functionally interconnected, which includes honing the neural
circuitry through practice” (p. 186). “Once it is fully developed, the prefrontal cortex is the
most versatile structure in the brain” (p. 185). It is well known that individuals compensate
for brain damage by recruiting other cortical areas to process information.
Evidence also amply demonstrates that psychological competencies such as IQ are
malleable and change dramatically as social conditions change. This is possible only if
neurophysiology accommodates this malleability and does not constrain competencies
through built-in specialized circuits.
The fact that the human cultural environment is flexible and is characterized by con-
tinual innovations means that fixed, specialized, genetically evolved capacities (as postu-
lated by Gazzaniga and evolutionary psychologists) would be detrimental to cultural life.
This is the antithesis of Darwinian evolutionary principles.
Additional refutation of biological determinism of psychology comes from analyzing
well-known claims. Caspi’s (2003) celebrated finding about depression—that a single
gene helps determine one’s risk of depression in response to a divorce, a lost job, or
another serious reversal—has not held up to scientific scrutiny. Caspi followed 847 people
from birth to age 26 and found that those most likely to sink into depression after a stress-
ful event—such as job loss, sexual abuse, or bankruptcy—had a particular variant of a
gene involved in the regulation of serotonin that affects mood. Those in the study with
another variant of the gene were significantly more resilient. (I critiqued this research in
Ratner, 2004b). Recently, genetic epidemiologist Neil Risch and a research team (Risch
et al., 2009) identified 14 studies that gathered the same kinds of data as the original
Caspi study, from a total of 14,250 participants. The authors reanalyzed the data and
reported that “no association was found between 5-HTTLPR genotype and depression in
any of the individual studies nor in the weighted average and no interaction effect
between genotype and stressful life events on depression was observed. Comparable
 127 General Principles of Cultural Psychology

results were found in the sex-specific meta-analysis of individual-level data.” The authors
concluded: “This meta-analysis yielded no evidence that the serotonin transporter
genotype alone or in interaction with stressful life events is associated with an elevated
risk of depression in men alone, women alone, or in both sexes combined. . . . The analy-
sis shows no significant allele difference between with and without depression.” In con-
trast, “the number of stressful life events was significantly associated with depression”
(pp. 2462, 2466). A major stressful event, such as divorce, in itself raised the risk of
depression by 40.
This is an extremely telling result. It debunks any influence of serotonin on depression.
Not only does serotonin not act alone to cause depression, it does not even interact with
stress to cause depression. It plays no role in depression whatsoever! The only causative
factor in depression is stressful life events (see Joseph, 2004, 2006; Joseph & Ratner,
2012). Genes do not even determine the level of biochemical agents (Fowler, et al. 2007).
Genetic and biological causes of other mental disorders fare no better: indent the
following quote

Despite progress in risk gene identification for several complex diseases, few dis-
orders have proven as resistant to robust gene finding as psychiatric illnesses. . . .
Although these disorders have long been assumed to result from some combina-
tion of genetic vulnerability and environmental exposure, direct evidence from a
specific example has not been forthcoming. Few if any of the genes identified in
candidate gene association studies of psychiatric disorders have withstood the test
of replication and to date, genome-wide association studies of psychiatric disor-
ders have also had limited success. In terms of environmental factors, however,
stressful life events have been well-established as a risk factor for a range of mental
disorders, most commonly major depression. (Risch et al., 2009, p. 2463; Chaufan,
2007)iii

This supports the main effect of social experience on psychological disorder that Caspi
et al. (2002) reported (see the discussion in the Introduction of this volume) in research
on MAOA and antisocial behavior: “The main effect of MAOA activity on the composite
index of antisocial behavior was not significant, whereas the main effect of maltreatment
was significant” (see Ratner, 1989a; 1989b; 1991, pp. 287–288, Chapter 4; 2000; 2004c;
2006a, pp. 201–209, 256–259).
The only plausible explanation for an association of biology (whether genes, hormones,
or neurotransmitters) and psychology is an indirect, mediated one. Biochemical pro-
cesses affect the largely instinctual, nonpsychological reactions of infants (as Vygotsky
acknowledges in his notion of lower, natural reactions). A short allele of gene 5-HTT may
incline some infants to react strongly to fearful stimuli, as Caspi surmises. Some parents
of these infants may find these reactions irritating and may mistreat the child more
than they do children who react differently because of their different physiology. The
mistreatment may take the form of pejorative labeling that comes to be internalized as
the child’s self-definition. This socially induced psychology is what becomes manifest
in the maturing child. It is correlated with biochemistry but is not caused by it (Ratner,
2004c; Dodge, 2009).
 128 macro cultural psychology

UPGRADING PHYSIOLOGY TO GENERATE

SPECIFIC PSYCHOLOGY/BEHAVIOR
Psychobiologists level out the difference between biological and psychological processes
so that the latter appear to be essentially biological rather than cultural. One form this
takes is the misconstruing of physiology as having, or producing, specific psychological
properties.
However, biological mechanisms potentiate only a general capacity for behavior. This
forces psychobiologists to pretend that general capacities are equivalent to specific behav-
iors. Psychobiologists routinely posit connections between biological processes and gen-
eral behavioral capacities, and then they conclude with a statement about specific
behavior (e.g., “a deficit in MAOA leads to hypoactivity in the cortex, and this is why
individuals commit suicide”). However, general processes such as hypoactivity cannot
explain specific behavior.
We have discussed the fact that neurotransmitters have a general function in the ner-
vous system, which is to ferry ions from one axon to other axons. That is all they do. They
do not transmit certain ions pertaining to certain thoughts. There is no way a neurotrans-
mitter could tell which ions contain aggressive thoughts and then selectively transmit or
block those ions and not others. Nor are there receptors of neurotransmitters that are
somehow specifically tied to particular thoughts such as suicide.
Psychobiologists justify their reductionistic formulations by appealing to animal behav-
ior. They find that physiological processes determine particular animal behaviors, so they
insist that these processes play the same role in human behavior. However, biology plays
a different role in human behavior than in that of animals. In humans, biological elements
such as pheromones, hormones, genes, and neurotransmitters energize general behav-
ioral levels, not specific behavior. The same words mean different things in animal and
human behavior. Therefore, using them leads to mistakenly assuming equivalence that is
not present. Psychobiologists think they are explaining specific behavior (as in the case of
animals), but they are really explaining only general capacities. In order to continue using
their animalistic model, they must overlook the differences and conflate general capacity
with specific behavior.
Sapir (1921, p. 9) presented a useful analogy to illustrate the nonspecific behavioral
consequences of physiological-anatomical processes. He said, “There are, properly speak-
ing, no organs of speech; there are only organs that are incidentally useful in the produc-
tion of speech sounds. The lungs, the larynx, the palate, the nose, the tongue, the teeth,
and the lips are all so utilized, but they are no more to be thought of as primary organs of
speech than are the fingers to be considered as essentially organs of piano-playing or the
knees as organs of prayer. Speech is not a simple activity that is carried on by one or more
organs biologically adapted to the purpose.”
Exactly the same argument applies to biological processes and psychological activity.
Neurotransmitters, hormones, and genes did not evolve to generate a feeling of schizo-
phrenic dissolution. They are employed in general processes, in the way that the hand is a
general organ, and are recruited to perform a wide range of activities just as the hand is.
Of course, if the hand is broken, it impedes piano playing because it is used in that activity.
But it does not impede piano playing exclusively; that is only one of the impairments that
 129 General Principles of Cultural Psychology

the person suffers. Similarly, serotonin may affect certain psychological states, but only as
part of its general effects, not because serotonin is specifically linked to a particular state.

DOWNGRADING PSYCHOLOGICAL FUNCTIONS TO

MEANINGLESS BIOLOGICAL PROCESSES
To level out the difference between biological and psychological processes, psychobiolo-
gists complement their upgrading of physiology to psychology by downgrading psychol-
ogy to physiology. They assume that schizophrenia, with its symptoms of estrangement,
fragmentation, disengagement, and dread, is little more than a biological reaction, reduc-
ible to neuronal firings or hormonal chemicals circulating through the body. This is as
wrong as claiming that piano playing is nothing more than moving fingers. It overlooks
the obvious fact that it is not the fingers per se, as physical organs, that generate and
direct piano playing. It is only when the fingers are animated and guided and trained by
consciousness that they can be recruited to play piano. Similarly, it is only when physio-
logical processes are taken up by the mind and used to energize or debilitate particular
states that physiology has psychological effects.
Thus, rejecting a biologistic, animalistic model for human behavior does not deny all
influence of biology on psychology. It simply denies a mechanical, deterministic kind of
influence. Biological processes, when felt, are utilized as sources of information for devis-
ing behavior. This is documented by vast research in emotions and other fields (Ratner,
1989a; 1989b; 1991, Chapter 5; 2000). This is far from determining or regulating behavior
as is the case with animals.
For instance, eating glucose provides an energizing sensation in people. This becomes
information that is interpreted and utilized by the subject. The sugar “rush” may lead
people to feel more energetic and stronger, and even more confident/optimistic about
accomplishing a task and overcoming adversity. People may even take more risks because
they feel confident. This is all a conscious calculation and interpretation based on reason-
ing from knowledge concerning the nature and consequences of bodily processes. The
processes do not automatically and mechanically determine psychological/behavioral
consequences. We saw a vivid demonstration of this in the study about wine tasting,
where subjective evaluation of the wine based on price affected the taste and neural activ-
ity, whereas the actual quality of the wine did not.

HUMAN PSYCHOLOGY VERSUS ANIMAL BEHAVIOR

Our critique of biological determinism (biologism) encompasses the tendency to explain
human psychology in animal terms (animalism). Animal behavior is fundamentally
biologically determined; therefore, animalism implies biologism, and biologism implies
animalism. If one is true, the other is true, and if one is false, the other is false.
Debunking animalism will complement our critique of biologism.
A few examples of animal behavior will clarify how incomparable they are to human
psychology.
Locusts normally are solitary; however, when supplies of food dwindle, the insects
shift in just a few hours from a mutual repulsion phase, in which they avoid other locusts,
 130 macro cultural psychology

to a mutual attraction phase, in which they start banding together in ever-larger groups.
This behavioral change is a two-step process: As locusts concentrate together to feed on
the limited food supply, the sight and smell of other locusts, and the movement of the
hind legs as the insects jostle one another, trigger increased release of serotonin in the
thoracic ganglia, part of the central nervous system. Serotonin within each individual
locust directly, automatically, mechanically, and stereotypically causes the individuals to
band together in swarms, instead of remaining isolated.iv
When researchers injected locusts with drugs that block serotonin’s action or a com-
pound that inhibited their own serotonin production, they didn’t become gregarious,
even when confronted with other insects or after leg tickling. Conversely, when the team
treated solitary locusts with serotonin or gave them a drug that boosted their own pro-
duction, the locusts became gregarious, even in the absence of those stimuli. That shows
that the chemical is both “necessary and sufficient” to generate the gregarious behavior
that leads to swarming.
The chemicals in serotonin directly, automatically, mechanically, and stereotypically
determine the individual’s behavior. There is no consciousness, will, volition, variability,
interpretation, decision making, or refusal. There is no psychology: no perception, memory,
emotions, cognition, motivation, or desire. There is simply movement in response to a
chemical stimulus. This is perfect biological reductionism: the locust’s behavior is entirely
controlled by the chemical properties of serotonin acting on cells. (Reducing serotonin
holds promise for inhibiting locust swarms that destroy massive amounts of crops.) No
other factor is necessary to produce the gregarious behavior; even visual and tactile stimu-
lation from other locusts is unnecessary if serotonin is directly administered. Moreover,
reducing serotonin overrides the visual and tactile stimulation of other locusts that nor-
mally generates gregarious behavior.
This mechanically caused, simple behavior is necessary and useful in the locusts’ lim-
ited environment and response repertoire. Locusts are only capable of a few, simple reac-
tions in their simple, circumscribed environment. Their behavior is eminently suited to
be determined by simple chemical reactions within each individual that automatically
generate physical behavior through the physical properties of the chemicals.
The same is true of ants. Ants find their way to food, their nest, or other places by
following a trail of chemicals known as pheromones which they (or their fellows) lay
down on the ground as they travel. Ants simply follow the chemical path, with no com-
prehension of where they are going or their environment. If you wipe your finger across
the trail of ants raiding your sugar bowl, it disrupts the ants’ movement; they do not know
where to go and just wander around. Again, we see that the ants’ travel is entirely reduc-
ible to a programmed biological response to a chemical agent. There is no psychology (no
perception, memory, motivation, emotion, desire, cognition), no consciousness (com-
prehension) of their environment; there is simply a biological sensitivity to a physical
property that enervates a mechanical physical response.
It goes without saying that human behavior has none of this character. It follows that any
chemicals that are involved in human psychology/behavior must play a different role from
that played in animals. Pheromones and neurotransmitters, for example, cannot cause
behavior in the mechanical, impulsive, stereotyped, uncomprehending, programmed
manner that they do in ants and locusts. If they did play the same role, then human behavior
 131 General Principles of Cultural Psychology

would have the same blind, mechanical, uncomprehending, nonpsychological character that
ant and locust behavior has.
The same is true for genes. The human genome and the chimp genome are 99 identical
in terms of their elements. Yet human behavior is vastly different from that of chimps.
Consequently, it must be the case that the same biochemical elements function very dif-
ferently in the two species. Otherwise, our behavior would resemble chimps’ and we
would live in trees instead of skyscrapers, and we would travel by foot over limited areas
instead of flying in airplanes, we would grunt in simple, limited sounds instead of speak-
ing in complex grammatical languages, and we would be unable to cure disease because
we would not have medical science, hospitals, etc. The fact that we do all these things that
no other animal can proves beyond a reasonable doubt that our behavior is not governed
by biological processes in the same way that animal behavior is.
Rather than researching factors as separate, independent elements, we must consider
them in systems. The human and animal behavior systems are outlined in Table 2.1

Table 2.1 Human and Animal Behavioral Systems

Element Human Animal

Environment Broad Circumscribed

Changing Stable
Cultural-artifactual Natural
Systemic Alien to organism
Designed by humans Not designed by organisms
Expresses human purpose or expressive of them
Behavior Flexible Stereotyped
Mediated by consciousness Immediate response
Comprehending to stimulus
Apprehending Automatic
Willful Impulsive
Socially and individually variable Innately programmed
Learned Species-wide
Behavioral Extrinsic Internal
mechanism Constructed Natural
Cultural practices Biochemical processes
Controllable Generated by random
Interpretation mutation of genes
Mechanical
Biology and Biology is a general potentiating Biological mechanisms
psychology substratum without a specific contain specific behavioral
behavioral program; it is utilized programs that automatically
by cultural-psychological processes respond to stimuli
to serve their concrete character
 132 macro cultural psychology

It is important to emphasize that the cells are described as ideal types to emphasize the
qualitative differences between human and animal behavior. Certainly, there is an evolu-
tionary movement from the lowest animals to higher ones to humans. The elements of
higher animals move toward the human end of the spectrum. They are somewhat open
to learning how to behave in their environments, and they develop primitive cognitive
expectations about them. However, these capabilities are constrained and remain primi-
tive in comparison with human behavioral capabilities and social relations. This justifies
placing animals and humans in two distinct columns, so long as we keep in mind that the
columns are broad and contain variations within themselves.
The human and animal columns are two systems. In a system, all the elements go
together, and each element plays a logical role in relation to the others. There is a coordi-
nation and congruence among the elements of a system.
In a system, elements must have the features they do in order to be congruent with and
support the related elements. Necessity is a property of systems. Necessity is a corollary
of logic. If each element has a logical, functional role to play, then it must have certain
properties. Different properties would make it incommensurable with the others and
nonfunctional in the system. This would undermine the system because it would deprive
the other elements of their support. If the environment were complex and changing, it
would destroy the animal behavioral system, because the new kind of environment could
not be handled by animal behavioral mechanisms. In order for the system to stay intact,
the elements must remain congruent with one another.
Wherever one element exists, we can predict the others will also. Each is a proxy for the
others. Certain changes in the system are minor and are accommodated by the others
without much change. Other changes to a single element may have a central effect on the
system and disrupt the other elements. The extent to which a single element induces
change in the others is a measure of its power.
Where we see that behavior is primarily learned, we know that the behavior is primar-
ily cultural, takes place in a cultural environment, is collective, and involves artifacts and
the panoply of related elements in the cultural behavioral system. By noting one element,
we can know that the others must be present, because elements in a system have a logical,
necessary, functional relation to one another. One depends upon the others and could
not exist without them; they must be present.
Natural behavioral mechanisms cannot generate cultural behavior. They do not have
the attributes and capabilities to produce cultural behavior. Only cultural behavioral
mechanisms have the cultural attributes necessary to generate cultural behavior in cul-
tural environments.
Any innate, specific content to behavior contradicts culture, for such content constantly
resists cultural changes. Even if innate content is deemed to interact with culture and not
determine behavior completely on its own, it nevertheless contributes some fixed, acul-
tural content that resists the construction of social behavior. If jealousy were an innate
tendency that could somehow be integrated with cultural behavior, it would always make
people favor exclusive ownership of things and people, for that is what jealousy does.
Even if it were a “small” tendency, it would resist collective ownership and cooperation to
the extent that it was operative. If violence is a “small tendency,” it too pushes people into
such behavior, even if only to a limited extent. This limited violence would always resist
 133 General Principles of Cultural Psychology

people’s efforts to construct a peaceful society. Similarly, if patriarchy were an innate

tendency, even if only a “small” one, it would always push men and women in a certain
direction. Even if there were countervailing cultural tendencies that might prevail, people
would always be undermined by the nagging patriarchy. Thus, interactionist models of
cultural and innate influences on behavior ultimately water down and constrain culture,
because the innate biological tendencies always introduce antithetical orientations to
what people could construct culturally. Interactionism provides for more cultural flexi-
bility and creativity than biological reductionism does; however, it still constrains cul-
tural flexibility and creativity. For humans to achieve the maximum benefit from culture
regarding fulfillment, creativity, cooperation, ingenuity, and rationality, biological deter-
minants of behavior must be obviated and replaced by thoroughly cultural processes of
behavior. This is why Vygotsky repeatedly emphasized that adult human psychology
marks a qualitative break with natural behavior; it does not develop in continuity with
natural behavior (i.e., in interaction with natural behavior). Psychology is a qualitatively
new realm of social consciousness that supersedes and subordinates natural behavior;
psychology is historical, whereas natural behavior is zoological.
This forces biology to renounce its deterministic control over behavior and switch to a
novel role that energizes psychological activity in general (Ratner, 2006a, pp. 78–80,
103–104, 115).
This is why we cannot breed humans for intelligence, belligerence, conformity, etc., as
we can breed these traits in animals—although we might be able to breed humans for
height, foot size, or hair color, because these are physical attributes.
The highest animals are behaviorally closer to lower ones than they are to humans
because even the highest animals fundamentally live in a natural environment, while
humans live in a cultural one. Culture is a more radical break with nature than variations
within nature are with each other. This accounts for the fact that human behavior is more
different from animal behavior than one animal behavior is from other animal behavior.
Apes are natural animals. They live in nature, they swing in trees, they directly eat
natural foods, they do not grow food, they do not cook food, they do not build houses or
artificial means of transportation such as bicycles, they do not wear clothes, they do not
paint pictures or write poems, they do not have schools with textbooks, they do not have
factories or banks, and they communicate through natural vocal sounds (grunts and
squeals) and bodily gestures to immediate physical objects (Mithen, 1996). Apes mini-
mally transcend nature through simple tools—such as using a stick to poke termites in
rotten wood—and simple social interactions. None of this compares in any way to the
sophisticated physical, social, and symbolic artifacts that humans produce. It is absurd to
compare using a stick to poke at termites to using computers or linear accelerators; it is
absurd to compare ape grunts to Shakespearean prose; it is absurd to compare ape social
interaction to governments and transnational corporations and organized sports. Apes
have clearly not transcended their natural environments in a significant way. This is why
their behavioral mechanisms remain fundamentally natural.
Of course, the rudiments of apes’ artifactual life (their rudimentary tools and social
organization) prepare the way for true culture—but it is not true culture. As Vygotsky
and Luria said, “The use and ‘invention’ of tools by anthropoid apes bring to an end the
organic stage of behavioral development in the evolutionary sequence and prepare the
 134 macro cultural psychology

way for a transition of all development to a new path, creating thereby the main psy-
chological prerequisite of historical development of behavior” (Mithen, 1996, p. 37, my
emphasis).

PROGRESSIVE VERSUS PLURALISTIC DIALECTICS

The fundamental break between human and animal behavioral systems—which include
qualitative differences in environment, biology, behavioral mechanisms, consciousness,
and culture—is captured in Vygotsky’s concept of higher versus lower processes. The
human behavioral system is a clear advance over the animal system (construed as ideal
types, of course).
This qualitative advance, or superiority, is articulated in dialectical philosophy. A central
concept of dialectics is supersession, which is best denoted by the pregnant German term
Aufhebung. This dialectical term means progressive development from one level to another,
more advanced level (Hinaufhebung). This is what Hegel accomplished using dialectical
argumentation in his Phenomenology of Spirit. It is how Marx used dialectics to explain
how socialism would solve the problems of capitalism by moving people to a higher level
of civilization.
Dialectics is an intrinsically progressive concept. It emphasizes qualitative advances and
distinctions that are superior to the lower levels from which they arose. The old, lower
principles and mechanisms are no longer functional in their previous form. The lower
levels must be displaced, superseded, transformed (Aufgehoben) in order to achieve the
higher stages of social life and consciousness.
Marcuse (1987) brilliantly explains that the process of Aufhebung realizes (that is, makes
real) the full potential of a phenomenon to become its highest possible form; it rises from
an immediate, impure, inauthentic form to a developed, true, full form. This “is the inner
goal of the process of Aufhebung, and contains thus within itself its relation to actualiza-
tion: sublation as actualization” (p. xv).

Hegel said, “Finite things are, but their relation to themselves is to pass beyond
themselves and their own being. They are, but the truth of this being is their end.
The finite being does not merely change itself, but it ‘passes away.’ This perishing
is not merely a possibility, as if the finite could be without perishing. The being of
finite things as such is to have the seed of perishing as their in-itself: the hour of
their birth is the hour of their death” (cited in Marcuse, 1987, p. 55).

Intrinsic to dialectics is the process of jettisoning existing forms for novel, higher, fuller,
truer forms. There is no sense of compromising with these and retaining them in a plu-
ralistic integration. Maintaining old forms would prevent self-realization and keep it in a
lower, impure, untrue stage. Progress, not pluralism (interactionism), is the cornerstone
of dialectical philosophy.
In Hegelian terms, human culture and consciousness are the highest, truest form of life.
They cannot be reduced to, or even combined with, lower, limited, natural-biological
processes. They are only possible when lower, limited, natural-biological processes perish
as mechanisms of behavior and give rise to novel, emergent mechanisms. Marx used this
 135 General Principles of Cultural Psychology

important notion to conceptualize communism as a better, truer, more real expression

of humanity than capitalism. Communism is not merely different from capitalism; it
improves on capitalism and makes for a better life. A pluralistic, relativistic misinterpre-
tation of dialectics would reduce communism to simply a different system from capital-
ism, rather than presenting it as a better, more advanced system. Pluralistic dialectics
offers no incentive to choose one system over another because they are all relative to one
another rather than superior and/or inferior to one another. Pluralistic dialectics levels
out differences in superiority and reduces them to differences in style.
Vygotsky (1997c, p. 81) explicitly utilized the progressive aspect of Hegelian and Marxian
dialectics in discussing natural, elementary processes in relation to human psychology.
He reviews Hegel’s concept of Aufhebung and emphasizes the notion of surpassing lower
processes with higher ones. He then directly relates this to psychology: “Using this
[Hegel’s] work, we could say that the elementary processes and the patterns that govern
them are buried in the higher form of behavior, that is, they appear in it in a subordinate
and cryptic form. . . . The process of memorization, thus, does not depend on natural fac-
tors of memory, but on a number of new functions which take the place of immediate
memorization. . . . We observe the reform of the natural functions, their substitution and
the appearance of a complex alloy of thinking and memory which in empirical praxis
received the name of logical memory. . . . People do not differ according to the properties
of their [natural] memory but according to the properties of their logical memory”
(Vygotsky, 1997b, p. 95; see Vygotsky, 1999, p. 28, for a similar statement). Lower, natural,
elementary processes do not remain intact and interact with higher, cultural, conscious
processes (as most psychologists believe). Of course, natural, elementary processes such
as gene, hormone, and neurotransmitter associations continue to exist in human behavior,
but in a subordinate and cryptic (i.e., transformed) manner.
We have seen that sensory processes register sensory impressions; however, these are not
what we react to. Rather, sensory impressions are taken up by higher conscious processes
that interpret, analyze, and remember them. This higher conscious process is what gener-
ates our experience. This point is reflected in the etymology of the word perception, which
comes from the Latin word percipere, meaning “to obtain, gather,” in the sense of gathering
information. The syllables of perception came from per, which means “thoroughly,” and
capere, which means “to grasp, take.” Perception thus means to actively apprehend the full
nature of something by actively gathering and synthesizing information about it. Perception
is not an automatic, mechanical, simple, stereotyped physical reaction to sensory proper-
ties of a thing, as in the case of locusts and ants.
“Only an inability to distinguish between the evolution of elementary and higher func-
tions of thinking and between forms of intellectual activity which are chiefly biologically
conditioned and those which are mainly historically derived, could lead one to deny a
qualitatively new stage in the development of adolescent intellect. . . . It is not only that new
forms appear during the period of puberty, but it is precisely on account of their appear-
ance that the old ones are transformed according to a completely new principle” (Vygotsky,
1994b, pp. 194, 196). In other words, new forms arise on different principles from old forms
and act back to transform the old ones on the basis of the new and different principles that
constitute them. New forms do not develop out of the old ones—“[s]ince the child’s percep-
tion becomes the adult’s perception, it develops not as a direct continuation and a further
 136 macro cultural psychology

improvement of those forms that we observed in animals, even those closest to man, but it
leaps from the zoological to the historical form of mental evolution” (Vygotsky, 1999, p. 28).
New forms act in top-down fashion to adjust old forms to their higher nature. New forms
do not develop bottom-up from old forms on their elementary basis.
Vygotsky explains this dialectic in relation to physiology: “Dialectical psychology pro-
ceeds first of all from the unity of mental and physiological processes. . . . We must not
view mind as special processes which supplentarily [sic] exist on top of and alongside the
brain processes . . . but as the subjective expression the same processes . . . a special qual-
itative characteristic of the higher functions of the brain . . . . However, an acceptance of
the unity of the mental and the physical . . . should not lead us to identify the mental and
the physical.” A unity, after all, denotes different things that are unified, whereas identity
denotes a single thing, an equivalence. “Dialectical psychology . . . does not mix up mental
and physiological processes. It accepts the nonreducible qualitatively unique nature of the
mind” (Vygotsky, 1997b, pp. 112–113). In other words, the unity of the psychological and
the physiological does not imply identity, for that would reduce mind to physiology. The
unity of the two allows for distinct, special qualities of both, which, however, are inte-
grated organically. They are not juxtaposed as in interactionist models. Actually, psychol-
ogy dominates physiology, rather than vice versa. Again, this reflects a top-down model
wherein new inventions subordinate older ones and transform them. Vygotsky insists
that the unity of psychophysiological processes is a new, higher form of behavior “which
we suggest calling psychological processes.” He refuses to refer to the processes that are
psychophysiological by this double name (Vygotsky, 1997b, p. 113), for that would imply
an interaction of two separate processes, whereas Vygotsky insists they are a unity domi-
nated by the psychological.
One could say that our systemic perspective, expressed in the figures of Chapter 1, is a
form of pluralistic dialectics, for multiple elements are integrated together. This is true;
however, the elements are all on the same level of reality. This is the essence of systemic
philosophy—it adjusts all elements so that they are congruent on the same level of reality.
Even biology has a new role to play within the human behavioral system. Thus, pluralistic
dialectics holds for elements on the same level of reality. My objection to pluralistic
dialectics is the attempt to interrelate incongruent elements of different levels (e.g., bio-
logically programmed, mechanical, singular instincts with conscious psychology and
cultural life).
Mitigating the advance of culture with noncultural, precultural, infantile, animalistic,
natural processes may sound like a promising way to achieve cosmic harmony (among
humans and animals, adults and children, culture and nature). However, it fails because
it deprives us of the full power of culture to make us civilized human beings. We can
achieve true cosmic harmony only by expanding and realizing our cultural potential, not
by lessening it. We cannot get in touch with nature by reducing ourselves to nature. We
cannot be saved from ourselves by merging with primordial, natural forces and becom-
ing more like infants and animals. We cannot look inside ourselves to discover our inner
ape or inner child. We cannot move forward by going backward. We must develop our
humanity more thoroughly through improving our advanced, changeable culture, not by
renouncing it and retreating into primitive, immutable natural forms. This is the only
way we can have a balanced relation with nature.
 137 General Principles of Cultural Psychology

Ironically, we must utilize the advances and advantages of culture that we used to create
a crisis in civilization and ecology in order to solve the crisis. The same general features
of culture and psychology create our highest achievements and our most barbaric behav-
ior. We must explain both in the same cultural-psychological terms. The source of our
problems is also the source of our solutions. We cannot look outside cultural psycholo-
gy—to natural or personal processes—to solve the problems that culture allowed us to
create. So long as cosmic harmony includes man, it will be a hierarchical system with
man as the superior being—contingent upon developing a new, concrete culture and
cultural psychology.

ENDNOTES
i. Penn, D., Holyoak, K., & Povinelli, D. (2008a). Darwin’s mistake: Explaining the disconti-
nuity between human and nonhuman minds. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 31, 109–130.
Used with permission of Cambridge University Press.
ii. Luria allowed for the possibility that certain simple psychological processes can occur
through natural, lower mechanisms. In particular, “we may assume that the Muller-Lyer
illusion is fairly elementary and independent of cognitive activity” (Luria, 1976, p. 43). He
attributes it to reflexive eye movements over the two lines.
To me this seems like an unnecessary concession that contradicts and damages cul-
tural-historical psychology. It construes an adult psychological phenomenon in natural,
not cultural, terms. It contradicts the sociocultural psychological theory that “all visual
perception has a complex semantic and system-based structure that changes with histori-
cal development.” It contradicts Luria’s statement that even simple perceptual phenom-
ena depend upon cultural experiences and mechanisms. Luria’s concession pokes a hole
in sociohistorical psychology and opens it to any number of exceptions whereby natural
processes continue to determine some spheres of adult psychological activity. From the
perspective of sociocultural psychology, natural, elementary processes only play a decisive,
determining role in psychology/behavior when higher, cultural, conscious processes are
not available. This occurs in unsocialized humans and in people whose brain cortex has
been injured so that it cannot process higher, cultural, conscious processes. In those cases,
people have to rely on natural, elementary processes, which Kurt Goldstein proved are
never as effective as higher, cultural, conscious processes.
Contemporary research on illusions by Gregory, Rock, and others demonstrates that
optical illusions are largely affected by schemas derived from physical architecture (e.g.,
rectangular versus round buildings). Different architectures generate different cognitive
assumptions, which become the operating mechanisms of perception. These generate cul-
tural differences in the perception of the Muller-Lyer illusion (Ratner, 1991, pp. 207–212; cf.
Ratner 1989b; Ratner & McCarthy, 1990). Optical illusions are not independent of cogni-
tive activity or the cultural characteristics that are built into it.
iii. The same holds for physical diseases: “the primary goal of the $3 billion Human Genome
Project—to ferret out the genetic roots of common diseases like cancer and Alzheimer’s and
then generate treatments—remains largely elusive. Indeed, after 10 years of effort, geneticists
are almost back to square one in knowing where to look for the roots of common disease”
(Wade, 2010, p. A1). For the vast majority of diseases, one’s genome has very little affect
on whether one will contract a disease: http://www.bioscienceresource.org/commentaries/
article.php?id=46.
 138 macro cultural psychology

iv. When locusts live for an extended time in a locale where food is plentiful and can be
obtained individually, genetic drift eliminates the biological basis that switches behavior
from solitary to gregarious. Such risk-free locusts lose the capability to form into swarms.
A food calamity would leave them vulnerable to extinction because they have lost their
natural defense against such a (remote) possibility.
 3
macro culture and psychology

Culture and psychology are more specific and complex than the abstractions discussed
in Chapter 2. Culture is more than “communication,” “coordination,” “norms,” and “sym-
bols,” and psychology is far more than “consciousness,” “thinking,” and “emotions.” The
distinctive contribution of macro cultural psychology is to flesh out general abstractions
with concrete, living forms of culture and psychology. This ascent from the abstract to the
concrete traverses several levels. Chapter 3 moves from general features of culture and
psychology that were explained in chapter two to general features of macro cultural fac-
tors (which are more specific than features of culture in general. Chapter 5 will probe
concrete levels of culture and psychology in particular societies. Chapter 4 will explain
philosophical issues involved in this transition, as well as obstacles to it.

DEFINITION OF MACRO CULTURE

The cornerstones of culture are three broad macro cultural factors: institutions (such as
family, schools, government, economic enterprises, spiritual organizations, and health
care institutions), artifacts (art, tools, clothing, eating and cooking utensils, housing), and
cultural concepts (e.g., about time, wealth, women, morality, nature, and sex). These are not
the only cultural factors; however, they are fundamental to others, such as interpersonal
relations. Micro cultural factors are subsumed within macro cultural factors. The former
are not reducible to the latter, and indeed may stand in some tension with them; however,
micro culture generally operates within the interstices and parameters of macro cultural
factors. The reason for this is that macro cultural factors are fundamental to our material
survival. Our means of subsistence are produced and protected in institutions (corpora-
tions, farms, armies), with artifacts (tools, guns, buildings, classrooms, clothing), using
cultural concepts. Interpersonal relations must be congruent with these macro factors if
the latter are to function efficiently to enhance our survival (Ratner, 2006a, Chapter 2).

Dialectical Integration of Cultural Factors

Macro cultural factors are organized in a system, as described in Chapter 1. The system is
composed of interdependent, interpenetrating cultural factors. Each factor contributes

139
 140 macro cultural psychology

its character to the others, forms them, and is formed by them, yet it is also a distinctive
element in the system. This is an internal, or dialectical, relationship that is a unity of dif-
ferences. No factor is independent of, nor is it reducible to, the others. Each factor is both
itself and others; it has its own character, which is complicated by its dependence on and
penetration by other factors.
The internal relatedness of factors within a system means that each one of the units
expresses the complex system. It is a total social fact (Bourdieu, 2005, pp. 1–3). Childhood,
sexuality, work, sports, motherhood, masculinity, clothing, architecture, technology, and
music each crystallize and represent the social system from a particular vantage point.
They are windows into the system. They bear the weight and power of the system. They
transmit the power of the cultural system to other factors they affect. This is known as
structuralism.
Mejía-Arauz et al. (2007, pp. 1002–1003) put it nicely when they said the following:

Our focus on schooling is not meant to suggest that this institution operates alone
in a mechanistic causal fashion, but to suggest that participation in this institution
is one important aspect of a constellation of related cultural practices that contrib-
ute to children’s repertoires of familiar forms of social organization. In communi-
ties where schooling becomes pervasive, this change is often part of a constellation
of related practices such as bureaucratic occupations, reduced involvement with
extended kin and smaller family size, increased age segregation, and limited child
care and economic contributions by children. We examine differences in school-
ing as a marker of this whole constellation of practices, speculating that schooling
provides key experience with a distinct form of social organization, but it does not
act on its own.

A structural model of education was presented in Figure 1.8.

Once a cultural factor becomes concretized through being qualitatively integrated with
and interpenetrated by other factors, it functions as a cultural bearer and reinforcer of
these other factors and qualities; this is illustrated in Figure 1.11.
The dialectical structure of macro cultural factors makes each one concrete and com-
plex, as it is imbued with the specific features of related factors that permeate it. The
social system as a whole is also concrete, because it comprises these concrete factors.
The dialectical relationship of macro cultural factors means that there are diff erences
and contradictions among them as well as an overall unity. The unity is always in motion;
it results from each adjusting to others that interpenetrate it. Element A adjusts to B,
while B adjusts to A. As A adjusts to B, it changes itself and then this new self (A1) presses
on B, urging it to adjust and become B1. The cycle continues with A1 having to adjust to B1
and become A2.
A key principle of dialectics is that different factors have different strengths. Some exert
more influence over others than they receive from others. Dominant cultural factors
obviously set the tone for the system as a whole through their dominance over subordi-
nate factors. Differences and contradictions internal to the system are a key feature of
dialectics; they differentiate dialectics from static conceptions of structure.
 141 Macro Culture and Psychology

Features of Psychology Depend on and Correspond

to Macro Features of Culture
Macro cultural factors are the basis, stimulus, and genesis of psychological phenomena;
the locus of psychological phenomena; the telos of psychological phenomena; the objec-
tification of psychological phenomena; the affordances and constraints that make psy-
chological phenomena achievable or unachievable; and the mechanisms that promulgate/
socialize psychological phenomena throughout a culture.
Psychology is not simply influenced in some part by some macro cultural factors;
rather, psychology is a macro cultural phenomenon. Its unique properties evolved to
form the unique properties of macro cultural factors; it takes form in macro cultural fac-
tors, and it takes the form of macro cultural factors (i.e., it incarnates the features of
macro cultural factors in distinctive psychological forms). Psychology is formed by cul-
tural processes; it functions to support and promulgate macro cultural factors; it is social-
ized by macro cultural factors (as people use them and absorb their psychological
“payloads”); it exists as an objective, objectified macro cultural factor on the macro level
(e.g., romantic love, the individualistic self, and schizophrenia are cultural phenomena
that are the subject matter of art/literature/music and are codified in medical manuals,
therapeutic diagnoses, and treatments). Macro cultural-psychological phenomena define
and characterize a culture, they are a cultural tool (means) that people utilize to define
and understand themselves and others, and, finally, they share the political character of
cultural factors, which are fought over by contending groups and reflect the vested inter-
ests of the victorious, dominant groups.
Psychological phenomena are elements of macro culture. They are subject to the
principles and forces and dynamics that govern macro cultural factors. If macro cultural
factors are formed by political struggle among competing interest groups, then psy-
chological phenomena are also, because they are part of these factors and essential to
sustaining them. If macro cultural factors are institutionalized and administered as cor-
nerstones of social life, then psychological phenomena are also. If macro cultural factors
are enduring, unifying cultural phenomena, then psychological phenomena are also. If
macro cultural factors need to be reorganized in order to solve social problems and
enhance human development, then psychological phenomena must be part of that trans-
formative process.
The racial code of Jim Crow illustrates these macro cultural aspects of psychology. We
saw that cultural practices and values determined the situations in which whites’ emo-
tions were elicited, the kinds of emotions that were elicited, and the concrete quality of
those emotions.
Racist anger was directed at violations of the racial code; it was anger at a social violation
of socially constructed status and privilege, not a reaction to an immediate physical danger
or insult. Whites accepted black proximity in the household, where blacks prepared
whites’ food and held their children; however, whites felt angry if a black momentarily
brushed their arm on a sidewalk, or sat next to them on the bus for a few minutes. Jim
Crow culture defined the significance of proximity in different situations, which elicited
different emotions.
 142 macro cultural psychology

Cultural experiences and cognitive pressures also suppressed white peoples’ memory of
interracial friendships during childhood. This forgetting had the social-political function
of maintaining segregation and blotting out thoughts that could challenge it.
With Southern whites, most, if not all, of their perceptions, emotions, and cognitions
about Negroes were informed by a superior, paternalistic, patronizing, snobbish attitude.
This was culturally generated and imparted a culturally specific quality to these psycho-
logical phenomena.
The cultural code was the mechanism of emotions, perception, memory, and motiva-
tion. It was central to them, it was inside them, and it constituted their basic processes.
Conversely, the Southern racial code contained psychology. Psychology was necessary to
construct the code, it was embodied in the code, and it was transmitted by the code to
users of the code.
With this general sense of macro cultural psychology, let us examine and corrobo-
rate specific aspects of the dialectical relationship between macro cultural factors and
psychology.

THE DIALECTICAL RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN

MACRO CULTURAL FACTORS AND PSYCHOLOGY
Macro Culture and Psychology are Mutually Constitutive
and Interdependent—Two Forms of the same Distinctive
Human Order; Psychology Guides Cultural Factors and
Dialectically Acquires their Features
In Chapter 2 we saw that psychology constructs cultural behavior and cultural products.
This is its raison d’être, function, and character. In order to do this, psychology must have
cultural features. Psychology takes on the features of what it directs. It is informed by
culture just as it informs culture. Culture constitutes psychology just as it is constituted
by psychology. A concrete historical example of this is the modern self.
The modern self was spawned by economic changes in England during the sixteenth
and seventeenth centuries. These changes entailed activities that increased the reliance on
personal judgment, initiative, and responsibility. Businessmen made business decisions
on their own, and to maximize their own profit; they did not follow traditional commu-
nity business practices, consult with community members, or act for the benefit of the
community. An individualistic self was therefore built into the economic changes.

The culture of modern individualism emerged most prominently and pervasively

in England in the century leading to the English Revolution. It began with the rise
of a Puritan opposition in the 1560’s. . . . Its constituents were the product of pro-
found changes in the English economy. During that century, the privatization of
agricultural holdings and the emergence of a national market had stimulated
widespread commercialization with incentives for specialized production, tech-
nological improvements, and a consolidation of holdings. The increasing role of
individual initiative, business acumen, and responsibility for success in this new
market economy generated a rising group of enterprising rural gentry, yeomen,
 143 Macro Culture and Psychology

and artisans. . . . The dependence of fortune on an individual’s own actions

increased the reliance on personal judgment and initiative. (Block, pp. 39–40)

This description highlights the continuity between macro culture and psychology. The
economic revolution consisted of economic privatization, which entailed and necessi-
tated individual initiative and responsibility. The individualistic self was an integral part
of the capitalist economic revolution. Capitalist business required an individualistic self
that took individual initiative and responsibility for actions. The individualistic self was
functional for capitalism because it provided the subjectivity to undertake the decision
making entailed in private ownership of resources. The subjectivity of the individualistic
self conformed to the business needs of capitalism. Subjective disposition conformed to
social position, as Bourdieu says.
Capitalism and individualism, macro culture and psychology, went hand in hand. They
were two sides of the same coin—continuous with each other, on the same plane, indis-
pensable for each other, mutually constitutive of each other, and expressive of each other.
Business practices and psychology are also distinctive in quality. They could not consti-
tute each other unless they were different units with different qualities to contribute to
each other.
The dialectic of cultural practices and psychology is further illustrated by the risky
behavior of investment bankers and mortgage lenders during 2007–2008, which created
a massive financial failure. Paul Krugman has explained that risky behavior was built into
the principles that governed finance: “Why did the bankers take on so much risk? Because
it was in their self-interest to do so. By increasing leverage—that is, by making risky
investments with borrowed money—banks could increase their short-term profits. And
these short-term profits, in turn, were reflected in immense personal bonuses. If the con-
centration of risk in the banking sector increased the danger of a systemwide financial
crisis, well, that wasn’t the bankers’ problem” (Krugman, 2010).
Risky behavior was not only encouraged by the social system of rewards; it was built
into them. It is the way to maximize the rewards and succeed in the reward system.
(Indeed, the riskiest investments were the most profitable for the investment banks.) Risk
taking is the subjective side of the financial practice. The reward system and risky behav-
ior are not two independent variables; they are two sides of the same thing.
The bankers’ lack of concern for the broader social effects of their behavior was simi-
larly institutionalized in the separation of the reward system from social consequences.
Adverse effects on the society are not calculated in the reward system; they are external-
ized. Rewards are based entirely on immediate, short-term profit. There is every reason
to not attend to social consequences. The economic reward system thus generates and
embodies social irresponsibility and cognitive exclusion. If bankers did expend cognitive
interest and financial resources on social effects of their business practices, they would
reduce not only their own rewards but also the rewards of their investors and the finan-
cial prosperity of the bank.
A new reward system that rewarded managers for enhancing community life would
build in responsibility toward, and cognitive consideration of, the community. Social,
ethical, and cognitive issues would be objectified in and demanded by the macro cultural
factor of business practice.
 144 macro cultural psychology

Nonmechanical Relationship
The relation between culture and psychology is not expressed in the mechanical causal
model of an independent variable causing a dependent variable (Fig. 3.1), for this model
implies that culture and psychology are separate and externally related. It implies a
nonpsychological culture that acts on a noncultural psychology—culture is brought to
psychology via the causative arrow. But such a model implies two qualitatively different
domains: culture and psychology. The problem is that this model affords no way to bridge
these different domains. If psychology is indeed a separate, independent domain, how
can culture reach it, and how can psychology accept the qualitatively different cultural
influence? These separate domains have nothing in common, no bridge that can bring
them together. Merely postulating an arrow and an “influence” does not explain how the
influence works.
In order for two things to be related, there must be a common, continuous thread that
unifies them. They must be internally related, not separate and independent to begin
with. They must belong to the same order of things and be on the same plane.
This is what macro cultural psychology emphasizes: culture and psychology are two
different forms of the same basic thing. They are like energy and matter. While these are
two different forms, they are really interchangeable—they are two sides of the same coin,
as Einstein discovered.
Culture and psychology may be better depicted as in Figure 3.2.
We may say that psychology circulates in cultural factors, and cultural factors circulate in
psychological phenomena. These hidden circulations are akin to atoms circulating in matter.
Atoms are moving around in matter underneath its solid exterior. Psychology is similarly
circulating in cultural factors despite their solid exterior. Clothing, architecture, cars, cell
phones, factories, and corporations are alive with significances and models of self, emotion-
ality, sexuality, perception, motivation, and reasoning. Conversely, psychological phenom-
ena have an “atomic structure” that consists of cultural concepts, practices, institutions, and
artifacts, which are represented in the organization of psychological phenomena.
Just as physics and chemistry explicate the atomic activity in solid matter, so cultural
hermeneutics explicates the cultural organization of psychology and the psychological
activity that is circulating in cultural factors, which are not obvious and observable to the
lay person in the external appearance of the object. Cultural hermeneutics engages in two
complementary analyses: (1) it elucidates psychological phenomena that are implicated in
cultural factors (e.g., what kind of self, emotionality, sexuality, motivation, etc. is implicit
in cultural factors and generates corresponding psychology in users of those factors?),
and (2) it elucidates cultural factors that are implicated in psychological phenomena.
These points are true for all psychological phenomena. Psychology evolved as the
behavioral mechanism for constructing and maintaining macro cultural factors. Culture
was the stimulus and telos of psychology, and both the general and specific properties of
culture provided the constituents of psychological phenomena.

Culture Psychology

fig. 3.1 Mechanical Relation Between Culture and Psychology.

 145 Macro Culture and Psychology

CULTURE

PSYCHOLOGY

fig. 3.2 Integral Relation Between Culture and Psychology.

Within the Spiral of Culture and Psychology,

Macro Cultural Factors are Dominant
Macro cultural factors are the basis of our survival and development as humans. While
they always contain psychology, their form stimulates and calls for the corresponding psy-
chological form. Capitalists sought to establish an economic revolution that would enrich
them. They primarily sought to establish capitalist macro cultural factors such as econom-
ics and politics. Individual initiative and responsibility were psychological counterparts of
these macro cultural factors. Capitalists did not primarily seek to establish a new sense of
initiative for its own sake; they needed a new sense of initiative and responsibility in order
to construct their profitable political-economic system. Thus, both developed together in
a spiral, although the cultural form was dominant as the telos of psychology. We may say
that macro cultural factors conceptually precede psychology in founders’ vision of a new
social order. However, this cultural order cannot be achieved without corresponding emo-
tions, perception, self, motivation, and cognition. Macro cultural factors thus stimulate
and bring out psychology in order to realize themselves. They do not realize themselves
first and then secondarily “influence” psychology; psychology develops as people envision
and construct macro cultural factors.
Within the spiral of capitalist practices and psychology, capitalist development was the
leading element. This is what businessmen sought to achieve. Individualistic self was
the subjectivity necessary to implement capitalism. The self was functional for capitalism;
it did not arise on its own, in a vacuum. Businessmen did not one day just decide to
develop a new form of self; they did so in order to realize a socioeconomic objective.
Incipient capitalist development was the stimulus, incentive, and telos of the individual-
istic self. It also provided the constituents of the self—its concrete qualities. (The indi-
vidualistic self is not an abstraction, as cross-cultural psychologists construe it.) The
individualistic self provided the subjectivity to develop capitalist businesses, and in the
process it molded itself to business needs. In order for subjectivity (e.g., the self) to imple-
ment capitalist business practices, it had to adjust itself to them and take their form. The
dialectical opposite of consciousness’s forming capitalism is that it conformed to the
needs of capitalism.
The dominance of macro cultural factors over psychology is revealed in the fact that
the self, or personality, changes as a function of social changes. Susman (1979, p. 213) explains
that “as cultures change so do the modal types of persons who are their bearers.” In seven-
teenth-century England and America, personality came to be perceived as residing within
 146 macro cultural psychology

the individual, as institutional life became more impersonal. Internal personality was origi-
nally construed as “character.” “The concept of character had come to define that particular
modal type felt to be essential for the maintenance of the social order” (Susman, 1979,
pp. 213–214). Character was defined as citizenship, duty, democracy, work, honor, morals,
manners, integrity, frugality, humility, self-sacrifice, self-control, and guilt over violating
social norms. It was integral to meeting and sustaining the requirements of community-
oriented, small-scale commodity production.
By 1905, a new vision of self had developed. It was known as personality. It emphasized
individual idiosyncrasies (e.g., magnetic, fascinating, creative, forceful, humorous); per-
sonal needs and interests; and self-realization, fulfillment, self-gratification, self-expression,
and confidence. This modal personality type was better suited for consumerism, unfettered
profit motive, and free-market labor. Earlier features of character interfered with the new
economy and had to be superseded (cf. Skeggs, 2004; Sennett, 2006).
Heinze (2003, pp. 227–228) disputes this characterization of change in personality. He
proposes a different kind of change, namely from a coherent self to a fragmented self:

The change in popular understandings of personality centered on the dilemma of

dissociation and integration in regard to both the individual and the nation. The
shift was not from a moral world of character to a social world of personality; it
was from a belief in the unitary and solid nature of personal and national identity
to a sense of those identities as divisible and fragmented. The establishment of
new public definitions of “personality” was connected to a new awareness of split
ethnic identities and of the ethnic fragmentation of American society.

Psychiatrists at the turn of the twentieth century called the United States the “world
capital of multiple personality.”
While the particulars of the personality change that occurred need to be researched—
indeed, the methodology for resolving this kind of historical debate is of utmost impor-
tance to resolving similar questions in cultural psychology about the exact kinds of
psychological qualities that exist in conjunction with specific cultural factors—the impor-
tant point for us is that personality changed in some form with the cultural changes that
occurred in the United States. This cultural basis of psychology is what macro cultural
psychology emphasizes.
The socioeconomic separation of the middle-class family from economic production
in nineteenth-century Europe and America similarly entailed a new psychology. The
socioeconomic transformation converted the family into a place of nonwork, domestic-
ity, relaxation, escapism, privacy, quietness, esthetics, and intensified personal relations.
This novel social situation entailed a corresponding psychology of emotionality, sexual-
ity, pleasure, gender, and identity. These were the subjective side of the new social orga-
nization of the family—they originated in it, and they were necessary for forming and
sustaining it. They were qualitatively distinct from the other elements of the cultural
complex (e.g., decorating the home esthetically) and can be studied as such, and culti-
vated as such. We can reasonably talk about the psychology of femininity and romantic
love—in fact, we must talk about them to have a complete picture of Victorian culture.
However, their character was cultural.
 147 Macro Culture and Psychology

The cultural psychology of the Victorian middle-class family sought out activities,
concepts, and artifacts that were compatible with the social organization of the family.
Victorians desired objects that embodied the nonindustrial, escapist, domestic position/
role of the family. In the design of objects and instruments for the home, reference to
instrumentality and work had to be abandoned or disguised in order to make them palat-
able to the cultural sense of domesticity. Thus, domestic sewing machines, which spread
widely at the turn of the twentieth century, had to be designed in a way that avoided any
industrial connotation. This is why Singer produced light, small, refined, artistically deco-
rated machines that had a bourgeois, feminine aura about them (Sassatelli, 2007, p. 29).
This example shows the way in which psychology was part of, characterized by, and
functional for a cultural complex of social positions, roles, and artifacts. Psychology was
active in the desire for certain kinds of things, and, in its activity, it contributed to and
reflected the social organization of the family, as well as the broader capitalist economy
that had spawned this family.

The Senses
The raison d’être and function of psychology is to bring about macro cultural factors
(such as capitalist businesses). It puts itself into them and develops the sensitivity and
capabilities required to participate in them.
This is brilliantly described with regard to the senses by Chiang and other historians.
Chiang (2008) explains how our sense of smell is organized by cultural and political factors:
“Odors are invested with cultural values and employed by societies as a means of and model
for defining and interacting with the world” (p. 407). The perception and evaluation of
odors is part of culture, expresses culture, and is a window into culture. What smells we are
sensitive to and the sensory quality of smells depend upon the social practices they are
associated with. “In deciding what smelled good and what smelled bad, people were making
decisions about what activities and people they valued” (Chiang, 2008, p. 407). The natural
smell did not determine the value assigned to it. For example, smells associated with racial
and ethnic minorities and the working class (e.g., the smells of their bodies, homes, and
labor) were evaluated negatively because these activities and their actors were socially dispar-
aged. Wealthy people surrounded themselves with different odors (e.g., perfumes) in order
to distinguish themselves socially. Perfumed scents were perceived as pleasant because of
their social association, just as bodily appearances were infused with cultural significances
that determined their attractiveness. “The social and material dimensions of odors became
inseparable” (Chiang, 2008, p. 407). Odor became a proxy of social standing.

Zoning laws in contemporary Western cities have created “domains of smell” that
separate industrial and residential areas and their respective scents. . . . Indeed,
because most smells were subject to interpretation, they were incredibly malleable
and could be used to advance several agendas, whether concerning the social
makeup of a community or the development of its natural environment. Using
their noses, Americans thus developed an alternative way of understanding the
world and of wielding power, one that responded quickly to variable circum-
stances and emotions. (Chiang, 2008, p. 407)
 148 macro cultural psychology

Olfaction, perception in general, and psychology in general are proxies for culture,
represent culture, and promulgate/reinforce culture.
Interestingly, third-world cities such as Bangkok have developed different categories of
odors to signify different social values/distinctions. Thais developed an “olfactory dual-
ism” in which the public stench of refuse was not bothersome, but body odors were. This
reflected the “personalistic” nature of Thai society, which required the utmost cleanliness
of individuals.
A complete cultural psychology of olfaction must emphasize that individuals invest odors
with cultural meanings that define odors as pleasant, unpleasant, refined, gross, etc. This
cultural content (significance) of olfaction is one source for evaluating a group of people who
are associated with a particular odor. However, people are unaware of this acculturating of
odor. People erroneously assume that their perception of smell is natural and that the reason
they dislike an odor and the people and activities associated with it is natural, not cultural.
People thus reify their psychology—their perception—as natural and use it to explain their
social behavior. Naturalizing psychology results in reifying social categories—for example,
individuals justify their abhorrence of manual labor and laborers by saying their distaste has
a natural basis in olfaction (“Of course I loathe them, they smell so foul”).i Macro cultural
psychology negates the reification of psychology and social categories by explaining that
cultural practices, status, and values define the physical odor and the social activities and
actors who are associated with an odor. Since naturalizing psychology results in reifying
social categories, dereifying psychology by explaining its cultural basis is an important wedge
in denaturalizing social categories and demonstrating that social categories are cultural and
changeable, rather than having a natural and fixed basis. Our conception of psychology is
thus critically important for how we conceive of society. Naturalistic conceptions of psychol-
ogy generate naturalistic, reified conceptions of social distinctions, while cultural concep-
tions of psychology generate cultural, changeable conceptions of society.
Additional historical examples of how the senses interact with cultural practices and
and how sensory inputs are taken up by culture, civilized, and acculturated involve
sounds and smell.
“The sounds of bells to particular groups held an emotional meaning that went deeper
than even music, and could elicit reactions that would be largely unintelligible to—and
hidden from—a wholly visualist history. . . . Peals solemnized an occasion and gave rise
to or expressed rejoicing.” The acculturation of sounds was striking in relation to activi-
ties related to slavery: “The sound of the whip, the slaves’ midnight whispers, the planta-
tion work song, held such radically different meanings to multiple constituencies in the
past that we can understand (and interrogate) the sounds only on the terms described by
those constituencies.” The physical sounds were involved in social activities and took on
the meaning of those activities. The physical sounds themselves are not culturally and
psychologically important or interesting. “Historians are more interested in the meaning
the slaves, the masters, the plantation visitors, northern abolitionists, and a whole host of
contemporaries attached to these sounds. How these people listened is not only more
important than what they heard but, in fact, constitutes what they heard” (all quotes in
this paragraph are from Smith, 2007, pp. 851, 848).
Smith (2007, pp. 847–848) provides a similar example of the cultural use and forma-
tion of smell: “Among a particular generation in the U.K, the scent of wintergreen was
 149 Macro Culture and Psychology

associated with medicine and ointments used during the Second World War (not the best
of times). Conversely, wintergreen in the U.S. is the olfactory cognate not of medicine but
of candy.” Wintergreen has a “medicinal” scent in Britain and a “confectionary” scent in
the United States by virtue of its use in different cultural activities. The sensory experi-
ence of Wintergreen (i.e., what it smells like, how it smells to us) is thus culturally formed
by the cultural activity in which it is embedded.
These examples express the fact that our senses (and, by extension, our psychology,
mentality, consciousness, and agency) are involved in our cultural activity, become
formed by that activity, embody, express, reinforce, and provide insight into cultural
activity. Importantly, it is through subjectivity’s activity of participating in culture that it
becomes acculturated by culture. Acculturation is an active process, not a passive one.
Acculturation of senses draws them into the orbit of macro cultural factors. This may
be thought of as “social conditioning” of psychobiology by absorbing it into cultural fac-
tors. This “social conditioning” is the inverse of classical conditioning as Pavlov described
it. Classical conditioning associates a stimulus with an internal, natural response of the
individual: a stimulus (e.g., a sound) becomes associated with salivation or an eye blink,
and the stimulus then comes to elicit that internal, natural reaction in the same automatic
manner in every situation. Social conditioning conditions a natural reaction, such as
smell, to social behavior, so that the reaction denotes the social behavior. Social condi-
tioning is centrifugal whereas classical conditioning is centripetal.
Volosinov (1973, p. 39) explained this dialectical relationship of social conditioning as
involving the intermingling of subjective and objective: “The inner sign must free itself
from its absorption by the psychic context (the biological-biographical context), must
cease being a subjective, in order to become an ideological sign. The ideological sign
must immerse itself in the element of inner, subjective signs; it must ring with subjective
tones in order to remain a living sign and not be relegated to the honorary status of an
incomprehensible museum piece.” In other words, the psychological must be transformed
from an internal biological, biographical (personal), or subjective entity and meld with
cultural ideology, and the sociological ideological sign must reciprocally meld with indi-
vidual consciousnesses and take on subjective qualities. This dialectical relationship puts
consciousness/psychology and cultural factors on the same plane, although they possess
distinctive qualities. They are two sides of the same coin. Vygotsky similarly spoke of the
conversion of social relations into mental functions (Lantolf & Thorne, 2006, p. 266;
Ratner, 2002, p. 59).
The leading role of environment on psychology is a main point of Vygotsky’s thought:

In contrast to the maturation of instincts or innate tendencies, the motive force

that determines the beginning of [concept formation in the adolescent] and sets
in action the maturational mechanism of behavior impelling it forward along
the path of further development is located not inside but outside the adolescent.
The tasks that are posed for the maturing adolescent by the social environment—
tasks that are associated with his entry into the cultural, professional, and social
life of the adult world—are an essential functional factor in the formation of con-
cepts. . . . Where the environment does not create the appropriate tasks, advance
new demands, or stimulate the development of intellect through new goals,
 150 macro cultural psychology

the adolescent’s thinking does not develop all the potentials inherent in it.
(Vygotsky, 1987, p. 132)ii

Psychological Phenomena are Formed in Macro Cultural

Practices on the Macro Cultural Level
The foregoing examples demonstrate that psychological phenomena originate on the
macro level, in macro cultural factors/activities, in order to animate macro cultural factors/
activities. They are essentially macro level phenomena that have macro cultural properties
capable of enacting macro cultural behavior for cultural institutions, artifacts, and con-
cepts. Again, psychology is not simply influenced by macro cultural factors at a distance;
psychology is an element of macro cultural factors. It is not primarily a personal, interper-
sonal, or natural phenomenon.
This radical reconceptualization of psychological phenomena is illustrated in
Ritterhouse’s examination of racial psychology. Racial identity was formed in a socially
constructed racial contract such as the racial code of etiquette. This cultural factor (which
was incarnated in socially institutionalized norms; artifacts such as buses, drinking foun-
tains, and kitchen tables; and cultural concepts) delineated standards, models, concepts,
sanctions, and injunctions for perceiving, feeling, thinking about, and treating members
of a racial group. As Charles Mills (1997, p. 63) put it, “ ‘White’ people do not preexist but
are brought into existence as ‘whites’ by the Racial Contract—hence the peculiar trans-
formation of the human population that accompanies this contract. The white race is
invented, and one becomes ‘white by law.’ ”
Literacy and numeracy are other prototypes of psychological phenomena that are
formed on the macro cultural level to facilitate macro cultural factors. Literacy and
numeracy were historically formed as macro cultural competencies in order to enact
commercial activities. During the rise of capitalism, business centers had the highest
rates of literacy (Ratner, 2002, pp. 23–24).
Numerical calculations are obviously vital to commerce, so as people become inclined
to engage in commerce, they seek to develop and learn mathematics. Businessmen pro-
vide funding incentives to mathematicians to develop and teach mathematics. Commerce
was the incentive for Greek mathematics, Babylonian mathematics, and Renaissance
mathematics. In the New Guinea highlands, as commercial activities were introduced,
children changed their counting systems to become more sophisticated mathematically.
Literacy and numeracy originated on the macro level of commerce in order to generate
sophisticated commercial activity. They were encouraged by commercial leaders and
institutionalized in educational centers. Where macro cultural factors do not call for psy-
chological competencies in literacy and numeracy, they do not develop to a significant
extent (Ratner, 1991, pp. 98–99).
This is true for numeracy among the Saora tribal people in Orissa, India. Saora math-
ematics has a distinctive number system with its own algorithms, yet it has no written
symbols and is expressed only in verbal words like “two.” Moreover, Saora math is con-
fined to the working out of simple problems of everyday life, such as finding posts strong
enough to support the weight of a hut. Saora math operates at a low level of abstraction.
 151 Macro Culture and Psychology

It includes few abstract terms, one of which is weight; it does not use abstract principles
that can be generalized to other phenomena, and it does not include hypotheticals or
idealizations. Panda (2006) explains that the distinctive character of Saora mathematics
has a cultural basis. It is organically part of their social and moral life; it is learned in
practice rather than in school; it is not formalized in symbols or books; it is not practiced
as a separate discipline; it is not regarded as a topic in its own right; there are no exercises
or homework to work on and think about. These attributes can be diagrammed in a
figure similar to Figure 1.3.
The cultural character of Saora math shapes the cognitive processes that can be invoked
to solve mathematical problems. When a mathematical word problem includes some
unethical behavior that contradicts everyday social norms, the Saora cannot perform the
abstract calculation necessary to solve the problem. For example, when presented with
the problem, “Ajit bought 100 kg of rice for 4 Rupees/kg. He mixed 5 kg of stones in the
rice and sold them at the same rate of Rs 4/kg. How much profit did Ajit make?” Saora
children and adults alike became incensed at Ajit’s behavior and said he should be pun-
ished for mixing stones with the rice. They refused to treat the problem as a calculation of
abstract, hypothetical, idealized numbers, according to general principles. (This is another
illustration of how cultural factors become the operating system of mental processes.)
This example illustrates the psychological system that is mathematics, emotions, etc.
Saora mathematics is not a specialized competence; it is integrated with psychological
phenomena such as emotions and morals. Western math is a very different phenomenon
resting upon a different psychological system. Our math is abstract and specialized, like
our logic. To engage in mathematical thinking is to bracket out real life concerns such
as real situations, ethical issues, and even emotions about the topics involved in the math-
ematical problem (Ratner, 1991, pp. 92–93, 101–102, 136–137).
The two different mathematical-psychological systems demonstrate that mathematics
is not a singular, homogeneous, universal competence. Consequently, it makes no sense
to talk about mathematics as an innate capacity. Such a capacity could pertain only to a
given, singular, universal form. It makes no sense to speak about an innate capacity for
myriad different kinds of activities such as Saora math and modern Western math. The
fact that math is a very different activity with a different psychology in different countries
rules out a particular biological determination of it, because there really is no “it” that
could have an innate mechanism. Mathematics develops differently in different cultural
activities. It is a historical product, not a biological or personal one.
The universal-biological conception of mathematics imposes a restrictive form of
mathematical thinking on students. School administrators in Orissa treat mathematics as
a variable with a singular, universal quality that is contemporary, Western, abstract math-
ematics. No other mathematical system or cognition is acknowledged. Consequently,
school administrators make no effort to understand the native mathematical system, or
to form a bridge from it to contemporary math. They simply impose the modern system
on the children, believing them to be mathematical virgins. However, the children have
already acquired a contrary mathematical concept and cognition, which impedes their
learning school math. Not perceiving this, administrators attribute the children’s failure
to innate cognitive and motivational deficiencies. The children are blamed and punished
for their failure to learn the “universal,” “natural” math that children “everywhere” learn.
 152 macro cultural psychology

It is imperative that educators appreciate the cultural, variable forms that psychological
phenomena take. This will help them to construct bridges from one form to another. It
will correct their “imposed ethic” of an abstract, Western mathematics and the tendency
to impose it on children as though it requires no cultural-psychological preparation
because it is the natural, homogeneous form that all mathematics takes and which all
children are inclined to absorb because of their natural capacity.
Evidence suggests that all psychological phenomena have a macro cultural origin,
genesis, locus, characteristic(s), and function, rather than a biological one. Ogbu calls
these macro cultural factors psychological amplifiers.

Cultural activities are amplifiers when they require, stimulate, increase, or

expand the quantity, quality, and cultural values of adaptive intellectual skills.
Some obvious cultural amplifiers in Western middle-class eco-cultural niches
include handling technology, participation in a large-scale economy, negotiating
bureaucracy, and urban life. These cultural activities require and enhance intel-
lectual skills such as abstract thinking, conceptualization, grasping relations,
and symbolic thinking that permeate other aspects of life (Ratner, 2006a,
pp. 86–87).

Color perception varies dramatically in different cultures. We have seen examples from
Luria’s research in Chapter 2, where we discussed how different people living at different
levels of modernity perceived colors in different terms. Ozgen and others have confirmed
cultural differences in color perception. The explanatory constructs of color perception
lie in macro cultural factors.
Memory is another psychological phenomenon that is generated by cultural needs and
objectified on the macro cultural level. Free recall, for example—defined as the ability
to recall discrete facts such as one’s age or address—is necessary in order to remember
discrete information that is produced and used in modern society Mistry and Rogoff,
(1994, pp. 140, 141). Free recall is institutionalized in schooling. It is demanded by school
requirements. Teachers transmit these requirements by designing tests that demand rote
memory of discrete facts. They instruct students to practice free recall. They instruct
them how to acquire it. Cultural requirements such as these generate a need in students
to acquire rote memory.
Other features of educational psychology are required and structured and administered
by pedagogical methods. Such features include motivational processes, sense of time/
punctuality, self-control of emotions and body movements (e.g., raising one’s hand to be
recognized before speaking), and individuality/privacy (sitting separately and working
separately, no copying from others, no allowing others to copy one’s work). These psycho-
logical phenomena are crafted by policy makers in education ministries, education
departments, and legal codes. They do not emanate from the students themselves.
These psychological phenomena are thus element of macro cultural factors, designed
to facilitate macro cultural factors (i.e., remember the discrete bits of information that
they produce and use), and objectified on the macro level. They are cultural resources—
or cultural capital— that are necessary for achieving cultural goals. In this sense psycho-
logical phenomena are macro cultural factors.
 153 Macro Culture and Psychology

Contextual and rote memory are different forms of memory; the memory process
and operating mechanism are different. As Luria and Vygotsky said, “The structure of
mental activity—not just the specific content but also the general forms basic to all cogni-
tive processes—change in the course of historical development” (Luria, 1976, p. 8; cf.
Luria, 1971).
“Scientific studies show that in the process of cultural development of behavior, not
only the content of thinking changes, but also its forms; new mechanisms, new functions,
new operations, and new methods of activity arise that were not known at earlier stages
of historical development. . . . Higher mental functions [are] the product of the historical
development of humanity” (Vygotsky, 1998, p. 34, my emphasis).
Of course, a host of individual factors affect a person’s ability to acquire this cultural
competence. These individual factors range from personal models and supporters in
childhood to personal interests and neuroanatomical deficiencies. These personal factors
affect variability in the competence. However, personal factors are not the genesis of rote
memory. Personal factors cannot explain why rote memory develops in particular societ-
ies and not others. There is no way to explain why people would personally invent rote
memory at the same time in a particular historical era, while other people develop other
personal reasons for preferring contextual memory.

Biological Explanations
It is therefore impossible that people have an innate, natural competence for rote memory.
Rote memory is not a natural competence; it is a culturally developed competence.
A natural, innate individual competence for it could not exist where it was not culturally
developed. This would be as absurd as suggesting that people have an innate competence
for computer programming. Computer programming was socially developed in recent
decades. It would be impossible for some humans to have naturally had this competence
in earlier times, before the phenomenon was even invented. Individuals can have certain
distinctive experiences that facilitate their acquisition of computer programming once it
has been culturally invented. But their facility is not based in natural biological mecha-
nisms that precede programming’s cultural development.

Logical Reasoning
Syllogistic reasoning is another psychological phenomenon that is fashioned at the macro
cultural level as part of macro cultural life to fulfill cultural needs/objectives. While
Westerners are good at drawing conclusions from premises on purely logical grounds,
traditional people have no facility for this form of reasoning. Instead, they make deduc-
tions on the basis of personal experience (Ratner, 1991, pp. 91–92; 2006a, p. 104). Abstract
syllogistic reasoning is fostered by formal education and book learning. Here, immediate
experience is superseded by theoretical, abstract principles and issues. Syllogistic logic
forms to deal with this kind of material; as with abstract, cultural emotions, its form
changes to take into account the form of the material it is reasoning about. The cultural-
historical form of the material stimulates, demands, and elicits a corresponding operating
mechanism of subjectivity.
 154 macro cultural psychology

Logical reasoning, like literacy and numeracy, is a cultural phenomenon. It is an

element of social life. It is socially constructed on the macro level out of macro practices
and products. Its existence, raison d’être, function, operating mechanism, and character
are all cultural.
Logical reasoning, like literacy, numeracy, and adolescence, is not an extension of
or add-on to a natural, internal process. It is derived from the complex of social life.
It requires, embodies, and “runs on” the culturally specific features of macro cultural fac-
tors. Culture does not add onto a natural process; it formulates distinctive, emergent
phenomena on the macro cultural level of reality. This is the only way these phenomena
can have the properties necessary to construct, maintain, and participate in cultural life.
Of course, individuals are the agents of this construction, but they operate as cultural
members working to develop cultural life (factors) and operating within these parame-
ters and processes.
Individual processes, whether biological or personal, cannot account for the social
demographic variation of psychological phenomena (called psychographics); nor can
they account for the abstract, cultural features of psychological phenomena.

Psychological Phenomena are Objective, Objectified Cultural

Phenomena, or Collective Representations
Psychological phenomena are propounded and discussed on the macro cultural level
in formats of pedagogy, literature, philosophy, social science, psychiatry, television,
movies, consumerism, job and school qualifications, and religion. They are definite, tan-
gible, identifiable, widely shared, cultural phenomena that can be apprehended to serve
as cultural means for individuals to use in shaping their psychologies.
We have seen, in the Introduction, that many psychological constructs are invented by
commercial companies, such as pharmaceutical companies, for commercial purposes.
This is true of panic disorder, hyperactivity, and erectile dysfunction (Ratner, 2006a,
pp. 117–118). These were invented on the macro level of institutions (corporations) and
artifacts (medicine), and they were promulgated in medical journals, newspapers, and
television advertisements.
Rote memory is objectified in teachers’ manuals, school tests, spelling bees, cultural
ideals, movie characters, games, trivia questions on radio and television programs, and
performance criteria for jobs. This makes rote memory available as a cultural pressure
and a cultural means for students to utilize to achieve cultural objectives.
Because psychological phenomena are objectified competencies that characterize a
society and promulgate a certain kind of society, they have political consequences and
they are pasisonately debated. Educators, parent groups, etc. debate the kinds of psycho-
logical competencies that school should cultivate. Rote testing of fragmented material, for
example, is a cultural issue, with some people arguing that it is a good way for children to
think, while others argue that it is a limited way of thinking. The winners of this cultural-
political struggle define the psychological competencies of children for a given era.
An interesting example of this point is the manner in which the newly formed indi-
vidualistic self was publicly debated in eighteenth-century France. The debate reveals
the political consequences of psychological issues. It also reveals how objective, macro
 155 Macro Culture and Psychology

presentations of psychology form models that individuals draw on in forming their

psychologies. Goldstein (2005) reports that French writers in Revolutionary France,
inspired by Locke, developed in later eighteenth-century France a reaction against
Cartesian rationalism that took the form of a “horizontal fragmentation of the self.” This
Enlightenment sensationalist idea of the human mind, Goldstein demonstrates, appealed
to its Republican advocates primarily because it allowed individuals to be conceived
as equally adept in their mental faculties. However, social critics of the violence of the
French Revolution attributed its political excesses to this psychological fragmentation.
As a result, a backlash against the fragmented self of discrete empirical sensations arose
in the early nineteenth century. This led philosophers to restore essential features of the
unified Cartesian social psychology, in the hope that it would restore more balanced,
moderate behavior. This philosophical development of the self was politically motivated.
The restored psychological ideal was promoted to provide a foundation for a stable
political order by encouraging awareness and cultivation of one’s own consciousness, or
moi. The philosophical moi emphasized “interior reflection” rather than sense experience
as the key to knowledge. This diverted attention from the real world to the self. The phi-
losopher Victor Cousin, in particular, represented the possession of private property as
the logical extension of the moi, and thus his psychological theory provided a basis for a
stable, bourgeois social order in which property ownership would be understood as nec-
essary for fulfillment of the self. The new self was also designed to revalorize hierarchy,
because it assumed that individual selves possessed unequal abilities. Thus, social posi-
tion was explained by individual differences rather than by unequal social status at birth.
Goldstein points out that the new philosophical-psychological ideal was promulgated
in French secondary school curricula under the July monarchy. At the insistence of
Cousin, a subject called psychology was added to the standard lycée course in philosophy
in 1832. Philosophy exams tested for knowledge of this ideal moi. In fact, much of the
curricula was based upon and justified by this notion of self. It became hegemonic in
mid-nineteenth-century schools, where it defined the norm for bourgeois males’ under-
standings of themselves and their role in society. Thus, the psychology of the self reflected
the ideologies of bourgeois individualism and bourgeois social supremacy, and it was
systematically taught to bourgeois male youth to inculcate a bourgeois self that would
enable them to succeed in the new capitalist society. This example testifies to the way in
which psychology is a macro cultural factor that carries cultural values into the psycho-
logical systems of individuals. The French bourgeoisie needed a bourgeois psychology in
order to succeed in the capitalist order, and they used schools to inculcate it.
Goldstein reports that the two cultural conceptions of self (promulgated in school
curricula) became internalized into a real experience of selfhood. They were not purely
intellectual concepts; they were a “technology of the self.” She says that many educated
French around the time of the Revolution experienced a fragmented self due, in part, to
the philosophical model that was internalized.
With psychology being the behavioral mechanism of cultural behavior, culture requires
that psychological phenomena be objective and objectified so that they are publicly avail-
able to guide appropriate cultural behavior. If psychology were ineffable, private, and
idiosyncratic, it could not guide the behavior of masses of people toward a common cul-
tural goal. Culture, and its benefits, would then be compromised.
 156 macro cultural psychology

Objective, Objectified Psychological Phenomena are

Objectifying, Unifying Models (Templates) That People Use
to Define, Understand, Acquire, and Express Psychology
Objective, objectified psychological phenomena—such as cognitive, motivational, and
emotional requirements for acceptance into schools and workplaces—are compelling
public, objectified ideals that people seek to achieve because they are necessary for cul-
tural success.
A student who seeks admission to a university must employ admissions criteria as his
or her model, or “mediational means” for adjusting his or her concentration, memory,
vocabulary, reasoning, motivation, emotions, choice of reading, extracurricular activities,
appearance, and demeanor. A bank teller and law clerk adjust their demeanor, speech,
posture, and gestures to psychological aspects of workplace rules in order to succeed.
We define our stress in psychiatric terms (macro cultural concepts) such as “depressed,”
“hyperactive,” and “schizophrenic.” These terms mediate and shape our experience of
being stressed; they do not simply express our experience. We utilize cultural ideals of
beauty as the “mediational means” through which we perceive ourselves and feel attrac-
tive or not—as social reference theory emphasizes. We utilize child-advice books and
articles as the means for understanding and interacting with our children.
People feel inadequate if they have not acquired the appropriate cultural psychology
(cultural capital) to help them succeed.
This is proven in the case of body image and eating disorders. Ninety-nine percent of
3- to 10-year-old girls in the United States own Barbie dolls whose waist is, proportion-
ately, 39 smaller than the waist of an anorexic woman. The result of women viewing
their own bodies through the lenses of the cultural model is that girls as young as 6 years
old prefer slim body forms and are dissatisfied with their own body shapes. By 8 years of
age, 40 of girls wish to be thinner than they are, and this percentage doubles in only
three years, as 79 of 11-year-old girls wish to be thinner than they are (Dittmar, 2008,
p. 126; Dittmar, Halliwell, & Ive, 2006, p. 284). The social ideal of a slim body is an insis-
tent force—a demand—on girls that they feel obliged to imitate, and they feel miserable
when they fail. They feel worse about this failure as they mature, which indicates that
social comparison (and conformity) figures more prominently in the perceptions, emo-
tions, reasoning, and motivation of children as they mature. It is not compensated for or
superseded by a growing personal agency. Girls would not feel bad about themselves, and
would not resort to harmful eating disorders in order to achieve the social ideal, if the
ideal were not an insistent demand. If they could cavalierly reject it, they would not feel
badly about not measuring up to it. The truth is that they feel bad about not having met
the social demand which they feel they need to meet in order to be successful (popular)
and even to feel good about themselves.
Male sexuality is subject to the same kinds of objectified social models. Pornography
has become a widespread model, or lens, through which many men construct their sexu-
ality. In a recent study, one man said, “Sex just seemed so ordinary; it was no longer thrill-
ing or magical the way it had been before i-porn. . . . When I don’t have those images in
front of me I just can’t get that aroused. Sex is no longer as physiologically exciting” (Paul,
2005, p. 96). Another man said, “I think my erections have been affected because I’m not
 157 Macro Culture and Psychology

as hyperstimulated by sex as I am by porno” (Paul, 2005, p. 98). Thirty-five percent of men

who view online pornography said it made sex less arousing (Paul, 2005, p. 153). Women
also measure their attractiveness against pornographic images and often feel inferior, and
resentful, when their partner watches pornography (Paul, 2005, pp. 157, 171, 231).
Numerous studies, all conducted among adults, confirm that sexual media content
reduces various dimensions of sexual satisfaction. For example, Kenrick, Gutierres, and
Goldberg have shown that men who were exposed to Playboy-type centerfolds found
their partners less sexually attractive and rated themselves as less in love with them than
did men who were exposed to abstract art. Similarly, Weaver, Masland, and Zillmann
have reported that men who had watched a sexually explicit video featuring beautiful
women were less satisfied with their (female) partners’ bodies than men who had watched
a nature film. In an elaborate study in which subjects were exposed to sexually explicit
videos in hourly sessions over the course of 6 weeks, Zillmann and Bryant found that
such exposure decreased subjects’ sexual satisfaction with their partner. Subjects who
had watched the sexually explicit videos were less satisfied with their partner’s physical
appearance, affection, sexual curiosity, and sexual performance than were subjects in the
control group (Peter & Valkenburg, 2009).
In a study of 1,052 Dutch people between the ages of 13 and 20, Peter and Valkenburg
(2009) found that exposure to online pornography reduced sexual satisfaction (at what-
ever level of sexual activity subjects were involved, from French kissing to mutual mas-
turbation, etc.) in both boys and girls, equally. Furthermore, the subjects compensated
for this decline in interest by turning to more use of online pornography to find the sat-
isfaction they were missing in personal sex; they tried to use the source of their problem
to solve it! They used the media as mediational means for their own sexual feelings. They
compared their bodies, their partner’s bodies, and their own feelings to the objectified
cultural models they used as their standards.
Cultural-psychological models are compelling to the individual and also to the culture.
They are compelling to the individual because we are cultural beings who succeed in
society by utilizing cultural resources. Cultural-psychological models are compelling for
culture as a way of organizing shared behavior that maintains the coherence of culture.
Objective, objectified, objectifying psychological phenomena unify peoples’ psycho-
logical phenomena by presenting standardized, common psychological models and defi-
nitions for them to adopt. Cultural cohesion depends upon this psychological unity, or
Geist. King (2010, p. 19) explained this with regard to collective memory: “The act of
commemoration is central to the maintenance of social groups; would-be communities
have to remember together and the memory of violence, loss and, above all, war provides
some of the most potent collective resources for this process of unification.”
Objectified psychological phenomena objectify people’s experience to such an extent
that they override direct interpersonal interactions. The racial psychology of blacks and
whites in Jim Crow Southern America was due to macro cultural factors that overrode
personal contact among the races. Sarah Boyle, an aristocratic woman who was born in
Virginia in 1904, said, “I was with Negroes far more than with whites, and inevitably
when I suffered my numerous small injuries, it was in dark arms that I was crooned over.”
Nevertheless, “My thoughts became saturated with the assumption that Negroes belonged
to a lower order of man than we” (Boyle, 1962, pp. 14, 15).
 158 macro cultural psychology

Ritterhouse points out with her usual insight that the macro cultural basis and locus of
racial psychology was so dominant that it could not be pierced by personal experience.
She observes that this cultural-psychological fact required that racism be changed at the
macro cultural level, not at the personal level, for the personal level is not strong enough
to combat the cultural sources of racism.

The comparative openness of childhood race relations was not enough, in itself,
to encourage and sustain dissent [from racism] among white southerners. Instead,
the effectiveness of white adults’ racial teachings and, more broadly, the complete-
ness of Jim Crow as a social system was such that change could come only through
persistent and organized [political] effort on the part of blacks.
If white Americans truly hope to prevent their children from becoming racists,
then they must learn to think of racism in broad societal—rather than narrow
interpersonal—terms. And they must act accordingly. That is, they must learn to
see and decide to redress the racial injustices built into the very structures of our
society. “Not being racist” in the sense of not using the N-word is simply not
enough. (Ritterhouse, 2006, pp. 235, 237)

Mediational Means for Psychological Expression

Mediational means do not structure psychology only by structuring our acquisition of
competencies; mediational means also structure psychology by structuring the way we
express our psychology. In order to make ourselves understood, we express ourselves
through common mediational means that have shared meanings understood by many
people. If we want to get accepted into a prestigious school or job, we must express our-
selves in the institution’s terms to demonstrate that we possess psychological qualifica-
tions. Think of the preparation you undertake in advance of an interview or a class
presentation: You carefully practice your form of expression. You cultivate your style of
expression to make it favorable. You shape your gestures, speaking style, vocabulary,
grammar, tone of voice, memory of facts, sense of humor, and ways of articulating ideas
in order to convey to interviewers your knowledge, motivation, dedication, and trust-
worthiness. In this way, the means of expression are as formative with regard to psychol-
ogy as the means of acquisition are.
Psychological expressions do not simply express us; they form us, because they must
take cultural (culturally recognized and accepted) forms. We are not free to express our-
selves any way we please. We structure our psychology so it can be expressed in socially
acceptable and comprehensible ways.

The Dialectic of Acquisition and Expression

The mediational means that compose our mode of expression also affect our mode of
acquiring psychological phenomena. For example, a school test is the form of expression
for students’ knowledge. The form of the test determines a great deal about how the
teachers teach the material and how the students learn/acquire it. A multiple-choice test
 159 Macro Culture and Psychology

of discrete facts leads to a pedagogical style that emphasizes this form of material; it also
leads to students’ concentrating on and memorizing this form of material. The school test
is thus a powerful pedagogical instrument that frames the learning and thinking process.
The test is not simply a measure of what one already know, and it is not simply an oppor-
tunity to express oneself; it shapes what one learns and knows and how one comes to
learn/know it. The test thus forms your cognition, rather than merely expressing it.
Cultural psychological models become the forms that our psychological competencies
and our expression of them take. This is what makes them cultural.
The concept of mediational means overcomes the distinction between active and
passive, subjective and objective. Mediational means are objective, cultural phenomena
that carry subjective, psychological phenomena, which the individual actively incorpo-
rates as his or her own. Existing cultural phenomena, extrinsic to the individual, are
actively appropriated to his or her subjectivity. Macro cultural psychology does not turn
people into passive robots; it emphasizes their active subjectivity in being cultural par-
ticipants. Geertz articulated this with his typical eloquence: “Culture orders action, not
by determining it, but by providing the forms in terms of which it determines itself ”
(quoted in Elson, 2007, p. 253).

Psychological Phenomena Embody and Express Features—Both

General and Specific—of Macro Cultural Factors as Their Form
(Operating Mechanism) and Content
One of the ways in which macro culture maintains its character is by insinuating itself into
psychological phenomena, which are the operating mechanisms of behavior. Whenever
people express psychology, they express and promulgate macro cultural factors embodied
within it. Southern racist political economy required that citizens adopt the racial code as
their template for psychological functioning.
Vygotsky made this point clearly: “the structures of higher mental functions represent
a cast of collective social relations between people. These [mental] structures are nothing
other than a transfer into the personality of an inward relation of a social order that
constitutes the basis of the social structure of the human personality” (Vygotsky, 1998,
pp. 169–170). The wording of this statement deserves emphasis. Vygotsky says that mental
structures are entirely (i.e., nothing other than) social relations of a social structure, and
that there is therefore a social structure of psychology. Social structure is in psychology;
psychology embodies the social structure in its form and content.
Cultural factors become the operating mechanism of our consciousness, or psychol-
ogy; they become the technologies of self (cf. Burkitt, 2002; Clark, 2006; Ratner, 1997,
2002, 2006a, 2007a). We think, perceive, and feel through, with, and in terms of cultural
factors. “It is through technologies that the self is produced in all its aspects, including
those that serve domination and those that challenge it through the powers of critical
reason” (Burkitt, 2002, p. 236).
Cultural factors become the filters that structure our perception, emotions, reasoning,
memory, self, motivation, and mental illness. This is what Vygotsky called “mediational
means” (Lantolf & Thorne, 2006, Chapter 3). Bourdieu developed the term habitus to
denote the same kind of process whereby social positions, conditions, and relationships
 160 macro cultural psychology

become recapitulated in the mind as a set of dispositions and attitudes. The habitus is
culturally structured behavior/psychology. Foucault (1988) used the term technologies
of the self to denote the same phenomenon. Technologies of the self are cultural factors
that become the means through which we structure our psychology to achieve socially
required feelings, reasoning, memory, self, attitudes, and behavior.
These concepts all have in common the idea that psychological reactions are not direct,
immediate, natural, or personal responses to a stimulus. Instead, psychological reactions
are mediated and informed by macro cultural factors such as artifacts, cultural concepts,
and institutional practices. These cultural factors become the basis and constituents of
psychological operations. Vygotsky said, “A basic, indisputable, and decisive fact emerges
here: thinking depends on speech, on the means of thinking, and on the child’s sociocul-
tural experience. . . . As Piaget’s research has shown, the development of the child’s logic
is a direct function of his socialized speech” (Vygotsky, 1987, p. 120). In other words,
thinking is mediated and informed by cultural phenomena such as speech. Speech is the
means of thinking—what I call the operating mechanism of thinking.
The relationship between the cultural means and psychology is quite subtle: the former
contain the latter and impart it gradually as the child utilizes it: “the child learns relatively
late the mental operations corresponding to the verbal forms he has been using for a long
time” (Vygotsky, 1986, p. 87). In other words, the cultural means, or mechanism, of psychol-
ogy assert their influence over psychology before the individual—who has been utilizing
cultural means—is aware of it.
Psychology, subjectivity, and agency are so profoundly constituted by macro cultural
mediational means that “the history of behavioral development transforms into the his-
tory of the development of artificial, auxiliary ‘means of behavior’ ” (Vygotsky & Luria,
1993, pp. 77, 105, 118).
For instance, modern arithmetic includes abstract concepts for “five” and “two.” We can
add these concepts together and instantly arrive at the sum of “seven.” Primitive people
who lack this abstract cultural symbol must add by individually counting each of the
unitary objects. These people arrive at the sum of seven by an entirely different mental
operation than we do. The thinking process depends upon the nature of the cultural
means of thinking. Our abstract numbers function as a “thought machine” that perform
calculations for us and saves us the effort of enumerating individual units (Vygotsky
& Luria, 1993, pp. 130–132; cf. De Cruz, 2008, p. 486).iii Our computation of numbers
depends upon cultural concepts of number.
Other cultural concepts also function as thought machines that form the operating
mechanism of psychology. The cultural concept that an embryo is a person is not simply
a single idea; it is a thinking process that generates conclusions and emotions. This atti-
tude generates the conclusion that aborting an embryo is murdering a human being,
which in turn generates intense emotions of fury and disappointment over the act of
abortion.
Cultural concepts also structure perception and misperception. They can make one
unaware of important things, and they can make one’s thinking superficial. For example,
if you believe that each individual is fully responsible for his or her own behavior, then
when you see a poor man you will blame him for being poor. You will attribute his poverty
to his personal laziness or stupidity. You will overlook social conditions that contribute
 161 Macro Culture and Psychology

to his poverty, such as economic conditions that reduce jobs and wages. Your attitude
about personal responsibility will distort your perception and your cognition to exagger-
ate personal qualities and overlook social conditions that affect behavior (Ratner, 1994).
Likewise, the cultural ideology that you adopt determines your intelligence. It makes
your observations and explanations of things more or less profound, comprehensive,
insightful, and valid. In this Vygotskyian view, intelligence has nothing to do with the
speed at which you compute answers to questions. It is all about how profound and accu-
rate your understanding is—and this is a function of the cultural mediational means you
employ to understand things.
Educators concerned with intelligence should thus abandon the search for technical
features and technical measures of intelligence, such as computational speed or memory
capacity. They should instead teach their pupils the best cultural mediational means—
natural science theories, social science theories, logical reasoning, analytical skills, asking
questions, soliciting information from other people and databases, and cooperating with
others to identify common interests and solve common problems—that will enable them
to become intelligent.
The idea that macro cultural factors are the means by which we think, perceive, feel,
recall, and become mentally dysfunctional brings culture into the mind. It eliminates the
conundrum of an external cultural factor influencing the mind from afar, from across the
social space that separates culture and mind. Cultural factors do not operate from afar
on the mind; they operate from within the mind because they have been internalized as
our mental means. Mediational means make the mind cultural. They bring into existence
“the ontological complicity between mental structures and structures of objective social
space” (Bourdieu, 1998, p. 77). Psychological phenomena take on the features of cultural
“mediational means” (cf. Levin-Rozalis, 2007).
We have seen how the self takes on features of capitalist business, and we have seen how
Jim Crow emotions and perception were colored by cultural scripts. Human emotionality
in general takes on the features of macro cultural factors (Ratner, 1991, pp. 76–83).

Emotions
The prototypes of human emotions are macro level emotions such as love for one’s coun-
try, anger at injustice, love of art, national shame, dejection about political trends, resent-
ment of a rival country’s technical superiority, fear of economic depression, and admiration
for a form of government. Such emotions are (and must be) informed by consciousness
of abstract phenomena such as morals, nations, and economic systems; knowledge of
economic dynamics; and sense of democratic government (Ratner, 2000).
Anger and guilt are based upon ethical and legal values. If Jill injures John by mistake,
John would typically understand this and not become angry. But if Jill deliberately injures
him, he legitimately becomes incensed. The reason is that anger is triggered by the ethical
and legal principle that deliberate, willful injury is wrong. Western legal principle distin-
guishes between willful and accidental injury, condones different responses to them, and
dispenses different punishments for them. A legally sanctioned reaction to deliberate harm
is anger or even retaliation. These are not sanctioned in response to accidental or incidental
injury. This legal distinction permeates the culture and is the basis of anger. (If John did
 162 macro cultural psychology

become angry at an unintentional injury, this would be a sign that he lacked a social under-
standing of the [legal] difference between intentional and unintentional injury, or that he
lacked the personal competence to distinguish them in practice.)] Animals cannot experi-
ence our kind of anger because they lack its cultural basis. Research shows that cultures
devoid of the concept of personal responsibility experience little anger. Injury is attributed
to fate or accident, and it generates frustration and annoyance but not anger at a person
(Ratner, 1991, pp. 77–78; 2006a, pp. 106–107).
Human anger is thus based upon macro cultural concepts such as personal responsibility,
fate, and accident. It is not simply a response to an action, such as an injury; it is based on
a macro cultural operating mechanism of a legally sanctioned concept such as intentional
harm.
Guilt similarly depends upon the cultural concept of personal responsibility for a
misdeed. If we unintentionally injure someone, we become sad but not guilty. We must
(implicitly) know the cultural concept of personal responsibility in order to feel guilt.
Sadness is an emotion that is organized by culture. Buddhism accepts the fact of suffer-
ing and sorrow as everyone’s common fate. Hopelessness is therefore usual, expected,
understood, and shared. Actually, Buddhist religious customs construe sadness as enno-
bling and pleasurable because it testifies that one is an ordinary person who is afflicted by
the common problems of life, which are usual, expected, understandable, and shared; they
testify to human frailty and humility. Accepting this state of affairs defines one as a good
person. Sadness testifies to one’s strength of character and to ones commonality with other
people. Striving to avoid or alter one’s fateful position is a manifestation of hubris. Sadness
in Buddhist societies rarely degenerates into depression because it is socially shared,
understood, and accepted. North American sadness has quite different qualities because
of its conceptual underpinning. Sadness in North America is regarded as a deviant state
that contradicts our normative values of success, pleasure, and optimism, and as a per-
sonal state due to personal misfortune that is shared by few other people. This conceptual
basis makes sadness a solitary, lonely, unusual, disturbing, unpleasant, pitiful, helpless
(“what shall I do?”), overwhelming state of failure that one anxiously seeks to overcome.
However, these qualities make it difficult to overcome and lead to degeneration into
depression (Ratner, 1997, pp. 106–107).
The difference between the two forms of sadness is not simply the situations that trigger
sadness, but rather the quality of feeling itself. The feeling of sadness is a different experience
for a Buddhist in Sri Lanka than it is for an American. Of course, there is some common
element that makes both of them forms of sadness. However, this common element is shot
through with specific differences. (Ratner, 1991, pp. 265–268; 1997, pp. 106–107).
Shame is another emotion whose very quality depends upon and varies with cultural
concepts. Shame that rests upon Taoist concepts has a different quality than shame that
rests upon modern concepts of self, success, material wealth, and social relations. Ancient
Taoists believed shame to be an intrinsic human frailty, namely, the inability to achieve
Tao. Tao is an ideal state in which the individual relinquishes intellectual reasoning and
achieves an intuitive awareness of the unity of subject and object. The near impossibility
of achieving this state of self-fulfillment causes shame. Shame, in this sense, is a universal,
ontological, permanent condition that results from the inability of the human being to
relinquish his or her own consciousness and merge with the world. It is a socially shared
 163 Macro Culture and Psychology

bond that unites people and is infused with sympathy and compassion. This emotion is
qualitatively different for a modern Korean woman who feels shameful because of her
poor dress, for example. For her, shame is a personal lapse at a specific time and situation;
it is a failure to employ reason and self-control (rather than relinquish them). Modern
shame is theoretically possible to avoid through greater personal resolve (e.g., work
harder and live better), and it has nothing to do with human nature or with overcoming
the distinction between subject and object. In addition, modern shame involves condem-
nation by others that ostracizes the individual; it is not a shared feeling infused with
bonding and commiseration. The two kinds of shame share a general sense of inadequate
capability; however, the feeling of inadequacy is quite different as a result of the different
mediations that modulate it (Ratner, 2000, p. 11).
Here we see that cultural elements constitute the operating mechanism of emotions.
The cultural environment is not outside of emotions, “affecting” or “influencing” them. It
is not merely a “context” to emotions. The cultural environment is inside of psychology,
and psychology is inside of cultural factors. The culturally shared nuances of emotions
cannot be explained from inside the individual.
Romantic love is a cultural-historical psychological phenomenon whose operating
mechanism is cultural (Ratner, 1997, p. 139; 2000; 2006a, pp. 105–106; 2007a, pp. 96–98).
Cultural values and practices make romantic love specific to historical eras.
Feminists have pointed out that romantic love reflected and reinforced the social posi-
tion of the genders. Women’s socioeconomic dependence on men during the Victorian
era colored their experience of romantic love—it made their love a dependent, subordi-
nate love, a love that construed the man as protector and provider. These social issues
were built into women’s romantic love.

For Simone de Beauvoir, women’s self-abnegation through love not only rein-
forced their subordination but resulted from a subjectivity constituted through
that subordination: “There is no other way out for her but to house herself, body
and soul, in him who is represented to her as absolute, as the essential.” “The word
love has by no means the same meaning for both sexes.” Women invest far more
in love and they give far more affection to men than they receive in return. This
was not seen as part of women’s nature, rooted in some essential way in the femi-
nine psyche, but as a product of the material conditions of women’s lives. Love was
linked to women’s search for a positive identity, a sense of themselves as valued, in
a society which undervalues and marginalizes them. . . . It served to tie women to
monogamous marriage. (Jackson, 1993, p. 205)

All of these cultural issues constituted the emotion of romantic love for men and
women.

Violence
Earlier we saw that violence exists on the macro cultural level in the form of wars, economic
competition, slavery, throwing people out of work without any support system, and reli-
gious and political conflict. These acts of violence are based upon economic interests, codes
 164 macro cultural psychology

of honor, religious ideology, and nationalism. They are not natural acts based upon natural
behavioral mechanisms that preserve the life of the individual organism. Furthermore, the
violence that is marshaled around macro cultural factors such as unemployment, poverty,
discrimination, war and imperialism is far more destructive than interpersonal violence.
But even interpersonal violence is a function of macro cultural factors. Domestic vio-
lence is far more common among poor people in the United States than among wealthier
people. Poverty, unemployment, and substance abuse clearly contribute to interpersonal
violence, as does violence in the media. Enormous differences in the homicide rates of
different countries further testify to the importance of macro cultural factors in interper-
sonal violence. Australia’s homicide rate is around 1 per 100,000 population, while the
U.S. homicide rate is around 6 per 100,000, or six times higher.

Macro Cultural Psychology Encompasses Micro Level Psychology

The macro attributes of psychology extend to micro-level stimuli and to natural stimuli
such as physical sounds, smells, and colors. For example, we become afraid of an animal
in the woods because we utilize the macro properties of emotions that originated on the
macro level to deal with macro cultural factors. We become afraid of a bear because we
recognize it to be “a bear,” not simply a form of a certain size, color, and odor. Th e physi-
cal features trigger conceptual knowledge, and this is the basis of our emotion. Physical
features do not directly generate our emotions; emotions are mediated by cultural knowl-
edge of physical features.
We utilize our conceptual knowledge of animals and bears to perceive a bear as danger-
ous. We do not become afraid simply because of its size or gestures. If we didn’t believe it
to be dangerous, or if we had a gun with which we could kill it, we would not fear the
bear. Our emotion depends on abstract, conceptual cultural knowledge about things
(“bears are dangerous,” “this gun will kill the bear”), which is required by cultural life.
Animal fear is not generated by this process or operating mechanism; it is a different kind
of fear from what humans experience.
Personal and interpersonal behavior do not exist on their own. What appears to be
individual behavior is only the immediate, apparent appearance that masks a deeper cul-
tural reality of cultural influences and mediational means, which have to be elucidated in
micro-level behavior by a scientific macro cultural psychology.
Personal expression and communication are derivative functions of macro cultural
emotions. The latter are capable of explaining the former because broader, more complex
phenomena can explain smaller, simpler ones. The converse, however, is not possible.
Simple, natural, physical, or personal processes do not have the scope (e.g., the great
abstraction and depth of knowledge) to generate emotions that are necessary to initiate,
sustain, and reform broad macro cultural factors such as country.
Macro cultural psychology takes macro-level forms and processes of psychological
phenomena as the basis (i.e., prototype) of human psychology. Rather than these cultural
forms and processes being extensions of simpler, natural, universal, or personal ones, the
macro cultural forms are the basic prototypes that become extended in personal, simple
interactions.
 165 Macro Culture and Psychology

Psychological Phenomena Promulgate Macro Cultural Factors;

They are Therefore Political and Subject to Political Struggle
Because psychological phenomena embody and express macro cultural factors, they are
functional for them and actively promulgate them. As people acquire culturally formed
psychological phenomena, they acquire the cultural system that formed them. Psychology
is therefore a powerful socializing agent of macro cultural factors.
Social leaders and groups have a vested interest in promoting particular forms of rea-
soning, perception, memory, self-concept, and emotions, as well as particular content to
these functions, for the form and content and psychology support particular kinds of
macro cultural factors that have similar forms and contents. Earlier we discussed the
historical struggle over conceptions of the self in France, which arose because each con-
ception incarnates and promulgates different cultural systems and power relations.
Missionaries and political leaders are well aware of this. Under the guise of “pedagogy”
and “helping people to acquire social and cognitive skills,” they cultivate culturally formed
ways of reasoning, perceiving, feeling, motivation, memory, and self-concept that draw
people to the values and practices of the cultural system behind (and inside) psychologi-
cal phenomena (Ratner, 2006a, pp. 54, 118–119, 169).
The perception and memory of issues relating to a specific war similarly generate sup-
port or disparagement of the war itself, and of the policies that initiated it. If American
soldiers are glorified perceptually, emotionally, and in memory as heroes who protected
their country from a threat, it implies that the war was necessary to protect the country.
(The slogan “support the troops” during the American invasion of Iraq thus implicitly
drummed up support for the invasion itself under the guise of supporting the individual
soldiers.) If American soldiers are vilified as agents of imperialism in our perception of
them, memory of them, and emotions toward them, it leads to discrediting war and the
vested interests that initiated it.
King (2010, p. 3) observes the cultural politics of collective memory: “it is an implicit rule
that participants in any social order must presuppose a shared memory” and that these
“images of the past commonly serve to legitimate a present social order.” Commemorating
the war dead does not recall the past so much as represent the present; it is a charged
manifestation of existing understanding and practice. “Relationships of power often deter-
mine whose accounts are included and whose are excluded in the construction of a collec-
tive memory” (Rahman, 2010, p. 61).
Lebel (2005, 2010) conducted empirical research that illustrates the ways and means by
which Israel’s Mapai party, which dominated the State’s political institutions during its
first three decades, formulated ritualized frameworks for bereavement and commemora-
tion of the military dead. Two objectives infused state remembrance of the fallen: a con-
scious effort to associate Mapai, under the leadership of David Ben-Gurion, with glorious
military and political events for which so many made the supreme sacrifice; and pari
passu, a deliberate attempt to remove its chief political rival, Herut, from any recollection
or participation in this aspect of public memory. Remembering and forgetting were inex-
tricable parts of the forged historiography. Methodical exclusion through a selective
remembrance of the war dead and wounded was also a leading tactic in the framework of
 166 macro cultural psychology

a general policy designed to delegitimize Mapai’s main political rival. On the other hand,
the reactive behavior of Herut confirms research descriptions of marginalized groups
which, ousted from the perimeters of state memory, attempt to regain entry and, through
this effort, attain political legitimacy.
These examples illustrate how memory is constructed at the macro level and objecti-
fied in it for macro political purposes. The collective memories did not originate at the
individual level, were not generated by individual cognitive mechanisms, and were not
negotiated at the individual level; nor were they extrapolated from the individual level to
the macro level. They were developed as macro cultural phenomena. Collective memory
has the cultural function of unifying a population around political ideals; it forms a tem-
plate that individuals use to adjust any outlier memories they may have acquired from
other sources. A culturally informed memory generates appropriate cultural-political
behavior that supports the political interests that informed memory with appropriate
content.
Of course, not everyone accepts the official template, because there are alternative
sources of information about historical events. Leaders of social groups struggle mightily
to impose their vision on the collective memory. The victorious view is usually that of the
economic elite, because they have access to the strings of power that dominate the media
and other sources of information. If they fail to control ideology and psychology in a
society, their socioeconomic dominance will be jeopardized, because they will have lost
a crucial way to control people’s behavior.
Individuals utilize some cultural mediational means as their mnemonic mechanisms;
this is how they become cultural members and succeed in cultural activities. Individual
memory is not a matter of individual or natural cognitive mechanisms, because these
would displace culturally constructed, culturally useful, and culturally variable psycho-
logical mechanisms.
Wertsch found that college students who independently wrote essays about the ori-
gins of the United States employed a common cultural explanatory concept. All of the
students believed that the founding events in American history were motivated by a quest
for freedom:

[O]ne of the most striking facts about the texts is that all of them were fundamen-
tally grounded in the quest-for-freedom narrative tool [i.e., ideology]. No matter
how much or how little the subjects seemed to accept and agree with this narra-
tive tool, they all used it in one way or another. . . . [Even] subjects [who] con-
veyed that they were resisting the quest-for-freedom narrative, in the end still
employed it. In fact no student even attempted to employ another narrative tool
in any extended way. . . . In such cases, individuals may try to resist the ways in
which such cultural tools shape their actions, but they are often highly constrained
in the forms that such resistance can take. (cited in Ratner, 2002, p. 85)

This research confirms Bourdieu’s point that “[i]t is in each agent, and therefore in the
individuated state, that there exist supra-individual dispositions capable of functioning
in an orchestrated or, one could say, collective way” (cited in Ratner, 2002, p. 85).
 167 Macro Culture and Psychology

Macro Cultural Factors are the Impetus or Telos of Psychology

in That They Inspire Psychology and Call for it to Construct Them
The formation of the individualistic self illustrates this process. Precapitalist merchants
and manufacturers struggled to fashion a capitalist economy to enrich themselves and
consolidate their growing socioeconomic power. As they struggled to erect this new
system, they changed their activities, their outlooks, and their responsibilities. All of
these drew a new self-concept, an individualistic self, into existence. As the individualis-
tic self became consolidated and defined, it led the new subjectivity to more clearly design
the socioeconomic system.
Existing macro cultural factors are the impetus for new cultural members to develop
particular forms of psychology. Students, for example, are impelled to learn academic
forms of thinking, memory, perception, self, and emotions in order to reap the rewards
that high academic performance brings. Work criteria similarly become the impetus for
new employees to develop requisite skills in order to obtain and succeed at jobs.

Established Macro Cultural Factors are Structured Structures That

Structure Psychological Phenomena Positively or Negatively
Adolescence
Condon (1987, pp. 7–8) explains how changes in technology and social institutions among
the Inuit Eskimos fostered adolescence and adolescent psychology. In traditional times,
before Euro-Canadian contact, the transition from childhood to adulthood was rapid
and unaccompanied by a prolonged period of adolescence. The harsh arctic climate and
scarcity of resources forced children to quickly acquire adult skills for survival. They did
so in the context of the isolated nuclear family; these family units were dispersed over a
wide area, with little interfamilial contact. Interactions with parents far outweighed inter-
actions with peers in terms of importance. This complex of factors precluded an adoles-
cent social and psychological stage between childhood and adulthood.
In the modern period, interlocking technological and institutional changes have dra-
matically changed the progression of Inuit life stages. Increased economic prosperity and
security allow parents to earn a living without the contribution of their children. This allows
children to attend school instead of working. In addition, the population is concentrated
into settlements, which enables children to form a peer culture. During its development,
this peer culture adopted many of the styles portrayed on television, which had become
affordable with the new standard of living. These interlocking factors placed children in a
separate social position from their parents, which had been impossible previously. They
contributed to the elaboration of a stage of life now referred to as the “teenage” years.
Adolescence is a social role, a social stage of life, a social space, and a social psychology.
Adolescence is a complex cultural phenomenon that includes social positions, social orga-
nization, technology, and psychology. The psychological element is part of the macro cul-
tural complex. It is qualitatively distinguishable from concentrated population settlements,
economic prosperity, and school attendance, and it can be studied as a distinctive element
and promoted as such. We can reasonably talk about the psychology of adolescence and
 168 macro cultural psychology

understand the subjective experience as such; it is not eliminable or reducible to the other
cultural elements. In fact, we must talk about it to have a complete picture of adolescence.
However, it is always an element of the macro cultural complex on which it depends (orig-
inates) and which it expresses, represents, embodies, and supports. The subjectivity of
adolescence cannot exist without the objective conditions. Psychological dispositions
would be impossible without the social position, as Bourdieu emphasizes.
Cultural Psychology strives to identify the cultural complex of which psychology is a part.

Poverty
Research uniformly documents the stifling psychological effects of poverty (Ratner, 2002,
pp. 119–121). For example, Ogbu (1987) argues that low levels of literacy are due to social
conditions and historical and ongoing social practices such as discrimination: “the prob-
lems experienced by minorities in acquiring literacy and in academic performance gen-
erally are a function of their adaptation to the limited opportunity historically open to
them for jobs and other positions in adult life requiring literacy, and where literacy pays
off ” (p. 151). He critiques those who attribute low levels of literacy to psychological and
interpersonal factors such as cognitive style, communication style, style of interacting
with others, pattern of language socialization, and upbringing.

Fatalism
Martin-Baro (a priest and psychologist who was murdered by a Salvadorian death squad for
his progressive political activities) explained how fatalism among Latin American people is
tacitly structured by macro activities and concepts: “Fatalism is a way for people to make
sense of a world they have found closed and beyond their control; it is an attitude caused
and continually reinforced by the oppressive functioning of overall social structures.”
Martin-Baro highlights the political implications of a macro analysis of psychology:
because conditions promote fatalism, social reform is necessary to eliminate it. “In order
for the Latin American masses to do away with their fatalism, not only must they change
their beliefs about the nature of the world and life, they must also have a real experience of
changing their world and determining their own future” (cited in Ratner, 2006a, p. 90).

Emotional Structuring by Television Programming

Emotions are structured by the placement of advertisements in television programs.
Advertisements are strategically placed immediately before or after an intense emotional
scene. Just as someone is about to be murdered or proposed to, or just as a main character
is about to discover which person has done something serious to him or her, an advertise-
ment interrupts the completion of the emotional scene. Similarly, just after a team has
scored a touchdown or a goal, an advertisement interrupts the completion of the emotional
scene. Or, news announcers tell us that important breaking news is coming up—but first,
an advertisement. One has to wait several minutes to complete the emotion, and the inter-
ruption dulls the intensity of the climax. It does not flow from the strength of the build
up; it occurs on its own, apart from the buildup, which was occluded by the advertisement.
 169 Macro Culture and Psychology

We become used to this form of fragmented, impoverished climax to things that can be
experienced as an isolated event only distantly related to the powerful, substantive signifi-
cance that generated the climax from afar.
This emotional fragmenting is built into the formatting of television scenes. It serves
not only as a model but also, and even more directly, as a kind of physical structuring.
One must wait for the ad to pass in order to complete the emotion. The program itself
interrupts our emotions with advertisements. It does not permit a long, continuous
development and resolution of our emotions. Instead, our emotions build, then are inter-
rupted and displaced by a completely irrelevant advertisement, then are rekindled and
resolved by the program. We are incapable of continuing and resolving the intense emo-
tions on our own. We are forced to wait for the program to complete its ads and then
resume the emotional scenario for us.
This formatting of programs directly structures our emotions. It is not only the program
that is interspersed with commercial messages; our own emotions are interspersed with
commercials. Our emotions are fragmented by commercials, and our emotions depend
upon commercials to be completed and resolved. We must wait for the commercial to
pass before we can complete our emotional experience. Commercials are the carriers,
intermediaries, means, and mechanisms by which our emotional interest can be consum-
mated. Commercials are implanted in the very center of our emotions in a literal, physical
way, with the precision of a computer chip or electrode.
Structures of media programming also organize attention, concentration, desire,
memory, and cognition. For instance, news programs raise the important issue of what
you should do with your investments in this era of financial crisis. Just as your interest is
attracted and your thinking is started, they get suspended by a commercial interruption:
“We’ll have the answer for you after the commercial break.” Only after you have been
forced to watch the commercial does your question get answered by the news “expert.”
Your interest and thinking become broken up by the commercial. Your thinking process
can be completed only after the commercial break has run its course. Thinking is made
to be dependent upon the commercial break—it is dependent upon the break’s finishing
and allowing you to resume your interest in and thought about the issue.
This curtailing, distracting, and commercial mediating of emotions and thinking is a
macro cultural emotional system and a cognitive thinking system. It is designed by mar-
keting leaders and built into programs by program directors to serve their economic
interests of inducing us to watch the ads in order to complete our emotional arousal. This
cultural emotional system and cognitive system is political in the sense that it is based on,
reflects, and functions to sustain a political-economic cultural factor.
This is a new form of socialization—by impersonal media, not by personal interactions
with caretakers—that psychologists need to consider. Older theories and processes of
socialization that focused on interpersonal socialization do not apply. New theories and
processes of socialization need to be considered in order to take account of macro cultural
influences on psychology.
A macro cultural psychological hypothesis is that this emotional format is recapitulated
by people in their personal relationships: Individuals are habituated to brief bursts of
emotion that are incomplete, displaced by other events (cell phone calls, text messages,
e-mails), and completed after a hiatus. Individuals feel uncomfortable with extended,
 170 macro cultural psychology

continuous emotional responses from another person, which appear heavy-handed and
burdensome compared with the habituated brief bursts of incomplete emotions.

Macro Cultural Factors are Political

Macro cultural factors are political in the sense that they are shaped by vested interests. They
are usually not the result of dispassionate, technical decisions. Rather, they are initiated and
maintained to advance the interests of a particular group of people. These interests include
financial well-being/wealth, power, and social status. Different groups struggle to advance
their interests in the form that macro cultural factors take. The form that cultural factors
eventually take is determined by the relative strength of the competing groups. Business
groups, labor unions, women’s groups, and ethnic groups are examples of the political inter-
ests that struggle for control over cultural factors. Each group is primarily interested in
advancing its interests through the laws and principles that govern macro cultural factors.
Time, and its material objectification in time pieces, is political in this sense. Algerian
Kabyle people viewed the French introduction of the European clock with suspicion
because it pulled them away from the fragile, organic unfolding of life, turning life—with
all of its tragedies and joys—into something to be mastered rather than accepted.
Consequently, the clock was seen as a symptom of “diabolical ambition” and often referred
to as the “the devils’ mill” (Bourdieu, 1963; Ratner, 2002, p. 42).
Most of the struggles among interest groups are won by the ruling class (i.e., corporate
capitalists, in the United States). The ruling class rules because it has the power to impose
its will on the way cultural factors are organized, despite the resistance of competing
groups, and because it has successfully distracted and disoriented masses of people so
that they do not care about politics and allow the ruling class free reign in many cases
(Lukes, 2005, 2006). Politics does not imply equal power of expression; it is usually an
unequal struggle with outcomes predictably weighted in favor of the ruling class, though
often disguised as compromises. When the ruling class ceases to win political struggles
and impose its interest on macro cultural factors, it ceases being the ruling class.
Politics is the vested interests that particular groups of people have in promoting a
particular social organization of cultural factors. It is the reason that these groups strive
to organize culture in particular ways. Politics is the way that social arrangements benefit
certain groups—by enriching them materially and enhancing their status/power—and
impoverish other groups.
Politics is the activity involved in constructing and maintaining a socioeconomic system
in particular directions that further vested interests. Politics is therefore power to control
social life and stamp macro cultural factors with features that reflect and reinforce vested
interests. Power and politics are interrelated; without politics there is no power, because
there is no active agency to direct social life.
This broad sense of politics as supporting or challenging vested interests is implied in
terms such as the “politics of food,” Which refers to the way food industry executives
arrange and manipulate the production, marketing, and consumption of food in ways that
enrich themselves and maintain their power over the industry and over dissenters to the
system, or the “politics of fear,” which includes ways that the government manipulates our
fear of terrorism, for example, in order to enlist our support for government policies.
 171 Macro Culture and Psychology

Power
Power is the ability to affect the decisions that others make. Power is part of social interac-
tion in that people seek to affect the actions of others. Of course, this can take a great
number of different forms. You might seek to convince your children to clean the house.
A military commander may invade a country to control the behavior of its people.
Politicians and businessmen can contrive to make tax laws beneficial to the rich and bur-
densome to the poor, thus affecting standards of living through policies. Businessmen have
power over peoples’ livelihoods by determining where to employ workers. Power can be
used for benevolent purposes, such as when a teacher assigns a book or a homework
assignment to help students learn important material. Power can also be used for malevo-
lent, oppressive purposes. (Fromm distinguished these as rational authority and irrational
authority.) Power is not necessarily democratically negotiated, nor is it necessarily an inter-
personal process. Power is not a general, abstract thing; it takes variable, specific forms.
The politics of constructing and administering macro cultural factors is a systematizing
force that structures areas of a culture in a consistent fashion. A systematic account of
culture must therefore emphasize the politics of macro cultural factors. Ritterhouse stated
this precisely: “Like other dominant groups in other contexts, whites in the South had to
work hard, primarily to counter black resistance but also to co-opt all members of white
society, including their own children. To be effective, their efforts also had to extend to
all areas of life, including but also reaching far beyond the arena of formal politics”
(Ritterhouse, 2006, p. 13).
Since politics is the real director of society, ignoring it leaves us with no director
(reification) or the wrong director (separate individuals). Eliminating politics also elimi-
nates exploitation from society., For without politics society is either an autonomous
mechanism that cannot exploit anyone or democratically administered by independent
individuals who cannot exploit anyone.
Terms like cultural factors and cultural context are lifeless abstractions that exclude
the driving forces that design and maintain these factors and contexts in the face of
competing interests from other groups. We must remember that factors and contexts
embody, express, and perpetuate political interests of a dominant group of people. Political
interests are the living, purposeful, intentional, directional forces of factors and contexts
that make certain things happen prevent other things from happening. Politics explains
the coercive power of culture on individual behavior. It emphasizes that our cultural con-
text does not surround us like a shell; rather, we live within a political system whose
leaders and beneficiaries actively pressure us to act, think, and feel in particular ways. The
notion of a “context” obscures the active, intentional ways in which the context is made to
structure our behavior by social leaders who are exercising their political interests. The
term “political interests” corrects this and emphasizes the precise, intense, intentional,
motivated, directive power that cultural factors have on our behavior and psychology.
The activity that is built into cultural factors is politics. Politics is what animates and ener-
gizes cultural factors. It is their inner activity, their “atomic structure”! It is the energy within
the mass. Without politics, cultural factors would be either inert or pure subjectivity.
Politics integrates the subjective and the objective; it avoids the twin dangers of mechanism
and idealism, reification and subjectivism. Politics is subjective motives, but these are
 172 macro cultural psychology

social—they have to do with maximizing power to enforce a particular kind of social

organization on cultural factors and people’s behavior. They are not pure ideas; they are
ideas in the service of social structures and power relations. Politics takes different forms.
In a humane society it will be take the form of factual and rational discussion in order to
get to the facts of a matter so that people can understand and improve their conditions. It
will not persuade people through appearances, charisma, and emotional appeals. These
tactics distract from the facts and truth. They are akin to advertising messages which
cover up real qualities of things with false appeals. Important political decisions should be
made on the basis of fact and reason, so the driest, unemotional, uncharismatic, un-sexy
presentation is preferred.
Politics obviously are at play in the workings of and debates about education, econom-
ics, ecology, abortion, medical research, and food policy. We have seen how conceptions
of the self had political implications that generated political struggle over self-concept in
the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. A similar political struggle is currently being
waged over the meaning and treatment of obesity.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (of the U.S. Department of Health
and Human Services) defines obesity within a medical frame, as a chronic disease and a
biological health risk. The National Association to Advance Fat Acceptance (NAAFA)
opposes this definition and defines obesity within a social justice frame, declaring that
obesity is not necessarily unhealthy and that the concept is used to discriminate against
fat people and is therefore unacceptable because it infringes on social justice and human
rights for all individuals. NAAFA discourages weight loss and believes that people of
every size are, or can be, healthy. The group seeks to purge fat of its pejorative meaning
and render it as neutral as any other descriptor, such as short. In fact, NAAFA goes so
far as to elevate obesity to a positive state: the fat (especially female) body is touted as
a symbol of beauty and empowerment. NAAFA seeks to have obese included in the
protected legal categories of race, gender, and sexual orientation. NAAFA uses moral
indignation over the judgment of others as a weapon. It ascribes to a relativist social
philosophy according to which all approaches to life are fine and no one has the author-
ity to judge another. “Size diversity” is proposed to complement ethnic diversity and
tolerance.
The Center for Consumer Freedom (CCF), a food industry group that represents over
30,000 restaurants and taverns in America, along with the tobacco and alcohol indus-
tries, frames obesity as a market choice of how one wishes to be and says it should be
tolerated as part of the laissez faire, free-market system. Food consumption and obesity
are framed as matters of personal responsibility and individual authority. The CCF warns
of government control and a loss of individual autonomy. CCF even opposes warning
labels on food identifying fat content (Kwan, 2009).
These three interest groups actively struggle to promote their definition (frame) of this
cultural concept (and refute opposing frames) in order to control this cultural factor. These
groups employ economic and political pressure to sway social institutions—Congress, the
media, schools—to support their interests and frames.
To understand macro cultural factors such as concepts about obesity, artifacts, and
social institutions, it is essential to understand the political interests that are expressed
 173 Macro Culture and Psychology

in them. Politics colors the features of macro cultural factors, which means that thoroughly
understanding the coloration of cultural factors requires understanding their politics.
Understanding how pharmaceutical companies conspire to direct psychiatric diagnoses
in order to generate drug sales (which we discussed in the Introduction) is vital informa-
tion for understanding the details of the resulting diagnoses and medications.
All social science theories and methodologies are animated by political views
about society, justice, well-being, and freedom, as we discussed in the Introduction. Their
politics directs many of their features and provides handles for understanding their fea-
tures. Politics gives us a clearer sense of what animates these, where they lead, why they
go together, and why they are appealing to people. We can use critiques of political
orientations to sensitize us to potential errors of politically-directed thinking in social
science.
This point is illustrated in another example of a macro cultural factor in the field of
academic psychology. Intelligence and achievement tests (e.g., school exams) all factor in
speed as a criterion of success. If you solve the problems slowly, you will complete fewer of
them and will receive a lower score of intelligence or knowledge. Perceptual and memory
tests also define these phenomena in terms of speed—how quickly one recognizes a stim-
ulus, and which memory comes to mind first. Word association tests assume that the first
response to a stimulus word is the most important because it occurred most quickly.
Psychological importance is thus defined in terms of speed of response. A response that is
slow to occur is deemed to be meaningless psychologically.
Building speed into criteria for psychological phenomena is political in the sense that
speed is a value in modern capitalist society, which strives for rapid turnover of capital to
generate profit. Accordingly, behavior is geared toward speed so people will be accus-
tomed to working faster, getting to work faster, and deciding to spend money faster. This
cultural value is political because it sustains the political economy of capitalism.
Psychological science builds this political value into its very definitions of psychological
phenomena. If you cannot produce and reproduce information quickly, you are deemed
to not possess the information at all. The slow student is deemed to be the stupid student
who does not know the information and cannot solve the problem. In other words,
knowledge that is slowly produced and reproduced is (socially) useless knowledge, tan-
tamount to no knowledge at all. Slowly produced associations are deemed to be psycho-
logically unimportant because they are socially devalued in a profit-driven society of
rapid productivity.
University final exams are similarly political in their reflection of the demands of capi-
talist work. The exam system consists of each instructor scheduling exams independently,
without regard for the other exams that a student is taking. The result is that sometimes
two final exams are scheduled for the same day, perhaps an hour apart, or three or four
exams are scheduled on two consecutive days. This time pressure interferes with students’
understanding of material because they cannot fully concentrate on preparing for each
exam, and they often confuse the subjects. While such an ordeal is an invalid measure of
intellectual knowledge, it does mimic the pressures that employees face at work. White-
collar employees, especially, are often asked to prepare several reports within a day or two.
They have to work rapidly on several issues simultaneously. Thus, the university exam
 174 macro cultural psychology

system is more a measure of how well one will be able to handle capitalist work pressure
than it is a measure of how much knowledge one has acquired.
The definition and measure of intelligence/knowledge are political in that they build
in and reinforce a particular socioeconomic system, structure, and principles, namely,
that productive speed and efficiency are prioritized over deep understanding and solving
of issues.
In this case, the political-cultural definitions of psychological phenomena are psycho-
logically invalid. The first/quickest response to a stimulus is not necessarily the most
important or meaningful for the subject. The slow student may be the most brilliant stu-
dent in terms of breadth and depth of knowledge. The student who can produce rapid
answers may not be very intelligent at all. “Intelligence test” is thus a misnomer. Such
tests are not testing intelligence or knowledge of subject matter; they are testing socially
required cognitive skills such as rapid recall and combination or presentation of informa-
tion. This is harmful to society in the long run because deep knowledge and thought are
being selected against rather than selected for by the social environment.
Illuminating the political ideals that drive social science definitions deepens our under-
standing of these definitions. We can more fully see the broader issues they address and
significations they contain.
A political-cultural analysis also makes us extremely careful about the way we theorize
about human psychology, because it has deep implications for how we think about human
beings and the structure of society, as well as possibilities for changing that structure in
particular directions.
However, a final assessment of theory and methodology must rest upon scientific con-
siderations. We cannot accept or reject social science on political grounds alone. For
instance, Carol Gilligan’s research into gender differences in morality and personality
was animated by a political agenda of opposing sexism in society and in Psychology. She
sought to reverse the misrepresentation of women’s morality as less developed than men’s,
which Kohlberg had espoused. While her goal may be politically appealing, her research
was flawed. Its scientific demerits disqualify it. Hyde (2005, pp. 589–590) summarizes
some of the recent scientific critiques:

Women, according to Gilligan, speak in a moral voice of caring, whereas men

speak in a voice of justice. Despite the fact that meta-analyses disconfirm her
arguments for large gender differences (Jaffee & Hyde, 2000; Thoma, 1986; Walker,
1984), Gilligan’s ideas have permeated American culture. One consequence of this
overinflated claim of gender differences is that it reifies the stereotype of women
as caring and nurturant and men as lacking in nurturance. One cost to men is that
they may believe that they cannot be nurturant, even in their role as father.
Inflated claims about psychological gender differences can hurt boys as well.
A large gender gap in self-esteem beginning in adolescence has been touted in
popular sources (American Association of University Women, 1991; Orenstein,
1994; Pipher, 1994). Girls’ self-esteem is purported to take a nosedive at the begin-
ning of adolescence, with the implication that boys’ self-esteem does not. Yet meta-
analytic estimates of the magnitude of the gender difference have all been small or
close to zero. . . . In short, self-esteem is roughly as much a problem for adolescent
 175 Macro Culture and Psychology

boys as it is for adolescent girls. The popular media’s focus on girls as the ones with
self-esteem problems may carry a huge cost in leading parents, teachers, and other
professionals to overlook boys’ self-esteem problems, so that boys do not receive
the interventions they need.iv

Psychology is a Cultural State of Being, a Cultural

State of Mind, a Cultural Identity and Membership
Because psychology emanates from, embodies, and enables participation in macro
cultural factors, we may say that psychology is a cultural state of being, a cultural state
of mind, a cultural identity and membership. As Vygotsky said, psychology is not pure
consciousness or subjectivity; psychology contains and expresses a social order.
For instance, romantic love is an emotion that stipulates a cultural position: it estab-
lishes a concrete cultural relationship—a personalized one—through emotional ties.
Jealousy is similarly a social relationship, of possessiveness and exclusiveness. The indi-
vidualistic self is also a cultural state of being in the sense of being self-reliant, private,
self-interested, and able to easily refuse entanglements and social requests that do not
further one’s self-interest. Similarly, when a student hates an unfair teacher, the emotion
places him or her in a cultural position that supports justice. When he or she or loves an
easy grader, his or her emotion supports loose academic standards. Memory, perception,
and conversational style are similarly cultural states; they are cultural competencies that
place one in a particular social position.
Sex is also a cultural state and cultural identity. We have sex to achieve cultural ideals
such as intimacy, attractiveness, prowess, prestige, attention, revenge, blackmail, preg-
nancy, masculinity, femininity, maturity, independence (e.g., from parents, a spouse, or
the church), or money. We do not have sex simply to achieve a pent-up physical release.
Sex is far more than sex per se; it is a cultural psychology that achieves a cultural state, or
cultural membership, of a particular kind. A sexual relation is a social role, an identity,
just as an emotion or self-concept is (e.g., caring, dominant, submissive, gentle, soft,
pleasing, “hard to get,” conquering, needy, protective, virginal, youthful, mature/experi-
enced, distant, vulnerable, invulnerable, companionate). This is what people want from
sex, just as they want and get a culturally ideal social relationship from romantic love,
an individualistic self, or rote memory. Sex is a culturally defined physical interaction.
Sexual release/pleasure is a carrier of, and means to, cultural achievement, just as pur-
chasing a Mercedes Benz is. All human activity is artifactual in the sense that it is socially
constructed, invested with cultural meanings and definitions, and a means to cultural
ends.
All gender relations, including physical ones, are primarily social relations, roles, and
identities. Gender is a social role and identity embodied in a physical body. Gender and
sex recapitulate the principles of identity formation; they are not independent processes.
The physical body evokes attraction or repulsion because of the cultural qualities it rep-
resents. Muscular strength in men today is attractive because it symbolizes the strong,
masculine social role; the curvaceous shape of the female body is attractive today because
it symbolizes the softness of women’s social role and character. It is cultural significance
that generates sexual interest and attractiveness. A woman is sexy to the extent that her
 176 macro cultural psychology

body symbolizes the features of the idealized feminine social role (e.g., softness). Physical
features are not sexually appealing in themselves, naturally and universally. For instance,
food scarcity in premodern times led to a social craving (ideal) of plentiful food, which
was objectified in aesthetic idealization of the corpulent body. The corpulent body was
attractive because it embodied the social ideal of plentiful food consumption, which was
generally confined to upper-class people (this is why rich people are called “fat cats”).
The sexual appeal of bodily features is analogous to the sexual appeal of accoutrements
to the body such as clothing and jewelry. These are imbued with cultural significance,
which is what determines their sexual appeal. Styles of jewelry and clothing are appealing
because they symbolize (and conjure) socially desirable demeanors. Sparkling jewelry
represents a sparkling demeanor (and conjures it). Large, dark sunglasses are sexy because
they conceal the woman from view and enhance her mysteriousness. Revealing clothing
indicates a woman’s sexual audaciousness in social life. It is not simply that the body is
exposed physically but the social implication that the body is available for a sexual inter-
course (i.e., its sociality) that makes revealing clothes stimulating. Sleek cars and cell
phones are sexy because they represent socially admirable swiftness and agility. Bodily
sexual appeal follows the same principle: it is a socially constructed artifact whose cultural
significance generates sexual attractiveness.
People shape their physical attributes to conform to cultural ideals, just as we shape
accoutrements to conform to cultural ideals. People use exercise routines, diets, surgery,
push-up bras, dyes, hair removal, etc. to shape particular body parts to conform to cul-
tural ideals of those body parts. Culture makes the body sexy, the body does not make
culture sexy (e.g., by displaying a naked body). The body is not intrinsically sexy any
more than diamonds, gold, and bras are. The body is a cultural artifact like all human
phenomena. There is a social logic to sexual attractiveness; it is not arbitrary, natural, or
personal. This makes human sex incomparable to crude, natural animal sex.
Homosexuality follows these principles of macro cultural psychology. Homosexual
physical attraction is cultural in the way that all human physical attraction and sexuality are
cultural. It is culturally symbolized (by the homosexual community), culturally variable,
culturally situated, and based in cultural experience. It is an identity, and it is a social rela-
tion with a partner, with the homosexual community/lifestyle, and with the heterosexual
world. Homosexuality contains a social logic, as all physical attractiveness does. There
cannot be a special, exclusive, natural mechanism that governs homosexual attraction and
psychology while other forms of sexual attraction, gender, and psychology are cultural.
Variation in what constitutes masculinity/femininity and what is sexually attractive
militates against any natural, inborn, hardwired, fixed, sexual response to a given stimu-
lus. There cannot be an innate attraction for masculinity or femininity or to a particular
bodily attribute (e.g., weight, shape, scent, hair) because the specific forms that these
take and that are considered attractive change over generations. Nor could genetic evolu-
tion occur quickly enough to adapt to (catch up to) social changes. This is why evolution
does not govern the variability in psychological phenomena. Level of sexual desire and
activity is also a cultural ideal that regulates bodily arousal. When women and men feel
little sexual desire, it bothers them, because they are falling short of the cultural “norm,”
which emphasizes strong sexual desire. Sexual desire is a public, objectified, objective,
objectifying phenomenon—like beauty—that is the mediational means by which we
 177 Macro Culture and Psychology

evaluate and experience our own sexuality. Culture sets the norm for sexual desire; sexual
desire does not set cultural norms for sexuality.

Psychological Phenomena are Macro Cultural Factors

and Have Features of Macro Cultural Factors
The foregoing points testify to the major role that psychological phenomena play as cor-
nerstones and unifiers of culture. Psychological phenomena are obdurate, objectified,
objective, objectifying, unifying cultural factors which generate unified social behavior.
They define a society (e.g., as “repressed,” “exuberant,” “sensual,” “irrational,” “suspicious,”
“empathic,” or “romantic”).
Jackson (1993) explains love as a macro cultural phenomenon. It is not only objectified
in macro culture, literature, entertainment, etc.; it is also a basis of the cultural institution
of marriage. Love is a criterion for whether one should form a family, and also with
whom one should form the institution of a family. Love operates on this macro institu-
tional level and is the subjective side of it.
This was clearly the genesis, telos, and function of romantic love. It did not develop as
a spontaneous personal expression or natural need. On the contrary, all the personal
workings of romantic love during late adolescence are preparation for finding a certain
kind of person with whom one will form the family institution.
Since psychological phenomena are part of macro cultural factors, they share its poli-
tics. Psychology is only as democratic as the macro cultural factors of which it is a part. If
macro cultural factors are dominated by a ruling class, then the psychology that is part of
them is equally dominated by the ruling class. A punctual sense of time was invented by
factory managers who needed workers to be punctual in order to have regular produc-
tion using timed mechanical devices such as assembly lines and chemical processes.
Managers had to fight with employees and punish them in order to instill this cognitive
competency (Ratner, 2006a, p. 61).
Hindu codes of conduct and psychology for the Indian population, codified in the
Purans, were written by the upper-class Brahmins in the fourth century A.D. and imposed
on the population.
Psychology is no more democratically constructed than churches, factories, or schools
are. Psychology is controlled by the same leaders who control other aspects of society.
Psychology is just as political as government, business, education, and religion. This is
why the struggle to change psychology must be a struggle to change culture (cf. Skeggs,
2004). Psychology will only be democratically constructed by people when macro cul-
tural factors are democratically constructed. It is wrong to insist that psychology is in
principle democratically negotiated without considering the actual political system of
which psychology is part.

Macro Cultural Factors Embody, Transmit, and

Socialize Culturally Formed Psychology
Max Weber pointed out that individualism is built into the Protestant religion. One of
the religious tenets holds that the individual has a personal relationship with god.
 178 macro cultural psychology

Each individual can communicate with god personally, without the mediation of the
Church. Furthermore, each person has a unique calling from god to act in a particular
manner. God gave each individual unique skills to enable him or her to discover and
fulfill his or her calling. To accept Protestantism is to accept the notion that one is a
unique individual. This is the political motivation for believing in Protestantism. One
becomes an individual within Protestantism, as one imbibes its orthodoxy.
Similarly, cathedrals embody and express a psychology of awe. They are designed to objec-
tify the grandeur of god and church, and the humility and helplessness of the devotee.
It is important to recognize this macro-level localization of psychological phenomena –
which is carefully described by sociologists known as institutionalists (Friedland & Alford,
1991; Friedland, 2009). Psychological phenomena reside in macro cultural factors, not only
in individual psyches. Psychology is political because it partakes of the political features of
macro cultural factors.
For example, marketers of cigarettes built psychology into the cultural artifact of the
cigarette. In the 1930s, marketers convinced movie directors and producers that they could
augment the expressiveness of emotions displayed by actors by strategically employing
cigarettes. Cigarettes could express self-confidence, anxiety, shyness, or surprise accord-
ing to the way they were smoked in conjunction with other behaviors. To reveal acute
distress, actors were advised to crush out a half-smoked cigarette with awful finality.
Calmly smoking in bed was an indicator of just-finished sex (Brandt, 2007, pp. 86–87).
Marketers originated the idea that cigarettes could be socially conditioned to represent
cultural-psychological states. Marketers invented cigarettes as the mediational means for
modeling and expressing emotions.
Intimate aspects of psychology are socialized by macro cultural factors. “The media
play an unprecedented role today in shaping girls’ views on their romantic and sexual
lives. Given the fact that older adults are reluctant to discuss issues of intimacy other
than, perhaps the mechanics of and morality surrounding sex, it shouldn’t surprise us
that young people turn to the media for education and guidance in the area of life they
arguably think more about than any other” (Stepp, 2007, pp. 43–44).
Similarly, a psychology of time is built into cultural artifacts such as parking meters,
bus schedules, train schedules, and application deadlines. These artifacts run on time that
expires at a certain point and cannot be recaptured. If one misses the expiration point,
one is severely punished—by fines, missed travel, and missed opportunities. These arti-
facts socialize this psychology of time; they transmit it to users of the artifacts through
rules and consequences.
Of course, not everyone accepts these facets as they are presented. Some modification
and rejection occurs. This is an empirical matter—we must empirically ascertain the
extent to which imposed models and mediational means are actually accepted. Empirical
research generally does confirm this top-down model. In cases where research claims to
have identified some popular resistance to the top-down model, the psychological phe-
nomena turn out to recapitulate it. We shall demonstrate this with examples of consumer
psychology in Chapter 5.
I recognize that not all psychological phenomena are initiated by social leaders at the
macro level for political purposes. Occasionally, members of the populace introduce a cul-
tural practice or cultural meaning. If it is fashionable and unthreatening, it is encouraged
 179 Macro Culture and Psychology

and adopted by the powers that be. If it is threatening to the social order, the upper class
will attempt to crush it in one way or another. Of course, sometimes they cannot crush
it and the counterculture grows. It then coheres into a movement and forces changes in
society.
Since the political character of macro cultural factors and psychology reflects the polit-
ical interests of dominant political factions, macro-level socialization may be termed
“mental engineering.” Mental engineering denotes the fact that technologies of self and
mediational means are specifically designed by social groups to structure psychology and
behavior in politically acceptable ways. Mental engineering denotes the social purpose
and function of technologies of self and mediational means. It denotes the politics of
these, the ways in which they preserve social power and control and enrichment of vested
interests over other interest groups. Mediational means and technologies of self, on the
other hand, are neutral, apolitical terms that obscure political issues. “Mediational means”
implies that these means are neutral toolkits for us to utilize to accomplish our purposes.
“Mental engineering” implies that cultural means have a political character stamped in
them that is specifically designed to channel our psychology in appropriate ways. This is
clearly the case in hierarchical class societies, where macro cultural factors are dominated
by a social-economic-political elite, rather than by the populace.
When they are designed by dominant political groups to enhance their power at the
expense of the populace, mediational means make us ignorant as often as they make us
intelligent; they make us insensitive as often as they make us sensitive; they make us ego-
centric as often as they link us to other people. Superficial news programs and talk shows,
sensationalistic and frivolous entertainment programs, and misleading advertisements
are examples of oppressive mediational means that people use as their “own” ways of
making sense of the world and directing their behavior, emotions, perceptions, self, moti-
vation, reasoning, and mental illness. (Dittmar [2007, pp. 23–24; 2008, p. 203] describes
the oppressive politics and psychology of consumerism.) Mediational means are political.
They cannot be glorified as necessarily providing people with resources for fulfilling
themselves. Their political character must be investigated, not assumed or disregarded.
Cultural factors are mediational means in the sense that they are the intermediaries
between social leaders and the people. (They are not simply mediations between an indi-
vidual and the world.) Cultural factors are telecommunication agents, in that they convey
distant communication. They communicate appropriate behavior and psychology from
social groups to subjects across vast distances and spaces. They transfer the political
interests from leaders to people so people know how to behave “properly.” “Resources are
the media through which power is exercised; resources are structured properties of social
systems, drawn upon and reproduced by knowledgeable agents in the course of interac-
tion” (Giddens, 1984, p. 15).
Socialization by macro cultural factors is a distinctive and important topic. It is different
from micro-level, interpersonal socialization—which is the exclusive focus of psycholo-
gists. Macro socialization is not a distant, occasional process. Advertisements and media
images impinge on children in a constant, intense process. Students’ psychology is social-
ized by their curricula. The curriculum induces cognitive competencies, self-concept,
motivation, and aspirations. The curriculum is an emergent, extrinsic, macro cultural
factor that socializes students’ psychology.
 180 macro cultural psychology

Macro cultural
factors

Individual A Individual B

fig. 3.3 Macro Cultural Socialization.

Macro cultural socialization is necessary to spread common cultural psychological sig-

nification throughout a population. Interpersonal socialization would be too fragmented
and idiosyncratic to accomplish this massive, common socialization of shared cultural
psychology. The personal interactions within the family thereby reflect broad, common,
public, objectiver Geist. This may be diagrammed as in Figure 3.3. In contrast, an interper-
sonal model of culture and socialization would look like Figure 3.4.
This process would take forever to establish a coherent culture across millions of people.
Moreover, it would never be successful, because there would be tremendous slippage
from the first dyad to the last —as studies on rumor transmission document. A coherent
culture must involve top-down, uniform socialization (from educational codes to driving
laws); it cannot be created through interpersonal interactions.
An example of macro cultural socialization is primary education in Texas. The 15-mem-
ber State Board of Education has a budget of $22 billion and publishes 48 million text-
books every year. Seven of the board members are Christians committed to including a
right-wing Christian orientation to the state’s educational programs and textbooks. One
board member, who has served since 1999 and was chair of the Texas State Board of
Education for 2 years, identifies himself as a young-earth creationist who believes that the
earth was created in 6 days, as the Book of Genesis has it, less than 10,000 years ago
(Shorto, 2010, p. 32). The conservative views of the board are a macro cultural force that
extends through the textbook publishing industry and educational guidelines to most of
the other states.

People Use Macro Cultural Factors to Express

Their Psychological States, and Also to Appropriate the
Psychology That Cultural Factors Contain
People Use Macro Cultural Factors to Express Their Psychological States
We use birthday and anniversary gifts and engagement rings to convey feelings. Different
artifacts, for example, express carefully graded emotions (e.g., from attraction to love).

Individuals

Culture

fig. 3.4 Interpersonal Constitution of Culture.

 181 Macro Culture and Psychology

One must use culturally appropriate macro cultural factors that represent appropriate
objective, objectified psychology.
School tests and assignments are expressions of students’ knowledge and motivation. If
you want to convince your teacher that you understand the material, you will express
your understanding through the artifact of the test.
If you wish to intimidate, someone you must use culturally appropriate artifacts such as
a gun. If you stick pins in a voodoo doll, you will fail to intimidate the person if he or she
does not believe that voodoo dolls can harm him or her. However, a person in a different
society may well believe in voodoo and will be intimidated by your use of it.
Sociologists speak of feeling rules, which are cultural rules for expressing feelings in
culturally understandable ways. These cultural forms of expression act to form the qual-
ity of the feelings themselves—just as expressing memory capacity in rote exercises acts
back to form the memory process itself.
The fact that we use macro cultural factors to communicate psychology tells us some-
thing important about the nature of psychology. To use culturally appropriate artifacts to
express emotion (or any psychology), objects must represent the emotions of both the
giver and receiver. Both parties must understand that the artifact is conveying the same
specific emotion. Both of their emotions must be represented, or objectified in the object.
The giver of a diamond ring knows that the ring objectifies love, and this is why he uses
it to convey his love. The receiver knows that the ring objectifies love, and this is why she
feels the giver’s love “through” the ring. The giver’s emotion, the receiver’s emotion, and
the objectified emotion in the ring must all be aligned in order for the ring to be used as
a medium of expression. The same is true for fear and voodoo dolls, and for intelligence
and school tests.
This means that psychology is not a purely subjective, individual attribute. It is a public,
common, objective attribute that is represented by public, observable objects. These
objectified cultural forms constitute personal experiences of psychological phenomena.
It is not the reverse. This is depicted in Figure 3.3. The public use of an object to convey
an emotion—for instance, romantic love—is witnessed by separate individuals and
becomes their common mediational means or mechanism for generating the same emo-
tion. People’s emotional socialization has occurred on the cultural level, via their witness-
ing of emotions displayed publicly along with cultural artifacts. The artifact first socializes/
induces the psychology in individuals and only thereafter expresses that psychology.
Individuals do not spontaneously imbue artifacts with personal meanings. If they did,
there would be no commonality to individuals’ psychology. Each would imbue artifacts
with different, idiosyncratic meanings. Artifacts would thus lose their function as means
of transferring psychology among individuals. The only way that artifacts can function as
cultural means of expression is if they first function as cultural socializers of psychology.
Only they will diverse individuals be able to utilize an artifact to express a common psy-
chological process. Thus, the artifact that is used to convey emotions among people, and
which seems to be the instrument of their agency, is the socializer of their emotional
agency.
The objectiver Geist is originally developed through a social process that forges a
common cultural character/meaning to the psychological phenomenon. This makes
psychology an emergent, extrinsic, exogram that transcends idiosyncratic individuals.
 182 macro cultural psychology

This social forging of psychology is inspired by the need to objectify it in a cultural arti-
fact. The pioneers know that in order for each individual to be able to communicate his
psychology through the cultural artifact, the psychology itself has to be culturally formed
so as to have a general, common, shared quality. This quality can then be expressed
through the artifact in understandable ways.
Berger and Luckmann’s (1967) classic work The Social Construction of Reality explains
how subjectivity (e.g., psychology) is externalized, objectified, and “sedimented” in cul-
tural factors, which reciprocally structure the subjectivity of people who use them.
It is true that after symbols have become objectified in objectiver Geist, some opposition
appears and strives to change those symbols. A struggle ensues, and change may or may
not be effected, depending upon the relative strengths of the positions. A new norm
may be established which then rules for a period. This certainly occurred in the cases of
women’s rights and racial discrimination.
Yet, at any given point, a widespread cultural coherence is necessary if the culture is to
maintain and provide the collective benefits it is designed to provide, and if the ruling
class is to maintain its position. Social stability is not always achieved, of course. Periods
of social conflict over cultural factors (including conflict over psychology) disrupt cultural
coherence and the benefits it offers to people.
Widespread norms do not necessitate compliance from every single individual. Pockets
of deviation can be tolerated if they do not threaten the broad norms and fundamental
dominance of ruling classes.

People Use Macro Cultural Factors to Appropriate

the Psychology That Cultural Factors Contain
In addition to being the mediational means that form the operating mechanism of
our psychology, macro cultural factors are important founts of psychology that we draw
upon in order to generate psychological states.
For instance, many women, when they become upset or depressed, invigorate them-
selves by buying an expensive dress. Marketers and entertainment programmers have
systematically built images of happiness and success into clothing. Consequently, women
can utilize this cultural factor that is endowed with the cultural-psychological signifi-
cance they are seeking to generate this sense in themselves. They are using the cultural
artifact to generate their own feelings. They come to feel good about themselves because
they are using a cultural artifact that already possesses this cultural-psychological sense
(objectiver Geist). They are not endowing this artifact with their own, idiosyncratic mean-
ings; rather, they are absorbing the cultural-psychological sense from the artifact into
themselvesv. Activity is organized by culture; it is neither absent from culture, nor inde-
pendent of culture.
This is why psychology is culturally shared: psychology is disseminated to the populace
via macro cultural factors which transcend and encompass their individual experiences.
Luria (2006, p. 68) explained this succinctly: “Categorical thinking is not just a reflection
of individual experience, but a shared experience that society can convey through its
linguistic system.”
 183 Macro Culture and Psychology

Social Agency: Using Cultural Means to Achieve Cultural Objectives

The fact that we actively and teleologically use cultural psychological phenomena as
mediational means to achieve cultural ends means that we are cultural agents. We use our
agency to acquire and promote cultural means and cultural goals. “Mediational means”
really refers to a process of enculturation whereby people actively participate in their own
enculturation by actively using and taking over cultural factors as their own mechanisms
of behavior.
Jackson (1993, p. 212) explained this well:

Our subjectivities, including that aspect of them we understand as our emotions,

are shaped by social and cultural processes and structures, but are not simply
passively accepted by us. We actively participate in working ourselves into struc-
tures, and this, in part, explains the strength of our subjection to them. We create
for ourselves a sense of what emotions are, of what being in love is. We do this
by participating in sets of meanings constructed, interpreted, propagated, and
deployed throughout our culture, through learning scripts, positioning ourselves
within discourses, constructing narratives of self. We make sense of feelings and
relationships in terms of love because a set of discourses around love pre-exists us
as individuals and through these we have learnt what love means.

Acculturation of psychology does not only emanate from the cultural side, from social
leaders who seek to promulgate cultural factors. Individuals participate in their own social-
ization. We actively seek to become socialized in the mores of the culture. We hone our
psychological phenomena in accordance with cultural standards so they can communicate
with others and succeed in the culture (Ratner, 2006a, pp. 102–103). Idiosyncratic psychol-
ogy would doom us to a noncultural existence where we could not communicate or coordi-
nate with others, receive their support and stimulation, or participate in cultural activities.
Agency is not a private, personal attribute that seeks personal expression; it is cultural
in the sense of striving to acquire cultural competencies. Agency is the subjective side of
socialization that complements objective pressures from macro cultural factors.
In a general sense, the individual’s good and the culture’s good are interdependent and
hinge on the same phenomenon, namely, cultural psychology. Coherent, stable culture
depends upon individuals’ acquiring common psychological behavioral mechanisms.
Individual success also depends upon acquiring culturally-appropriate psychology that
animates culturally successful behavior. Cultural psychology is the common element that
unifies individual and culture, subjectivity and objectivity.
The cultural constitution, location, and usefulness of psychology make it difficult to
alter psychology. It is objectified and sedimented in cultural factors that are enduring
cornerstones of civilization; they are the keys to our success. Substantive psychological
change requires altering the macro cultural factors that sustain them.
Agency is not only constrained by culture and draws upon culture for its motivation
and direction; it is located in the elements of the cultural system, and it works through the
cultural system,. The cultural system is literally the operating mechanism of agency—just
 184 macro cultural psychology

as the numerical system is the operating mechanism of numerical calculation. This point
is demonstrated by considering the agency of a corporate manager and an employee in a
capitalist firm.
The manager has enormous power (to realize corporate goals and to affect his or her
employees and the community at large) only because he or she commands the institu-
tional structure of the corporation and its structural relation to other institutions. The
manager has the power to summarily terminate the employment of his or her employees.
They, in turn, must obediently leave the premises when the manager orders them to. If
they do not, the police will forcibly remove them. Both behaviors are mediated by the
legal structure of the institution. The manager’s power to terminate employees is not a
personal power based on personal qualities. If he or she walked up to employees as an
individual, not as a manager, and told them to leave the premises at once, they would
laugh. The manager’s power to dismiss the employees is a legal, institutional power.
Anyone who occupied the manager’s position or role would have the same power by
virtue of the position, not because of his or her individuality. Agency is externally located
in the system; agency’s power is a function of the system and works through it.
The workers’ response is also determined by the legal structure of the institution. Their
agency is reduced by the institutional structure (in proportion to the degree to which the
manager’s agency is augmented by it). Workers’ agency is also externally located in the
system; their agency’s power is a function of the system, not themselves.
A different institutional structure would elicit different kinds of agency from both
manager and workers. For example, the manager and workers might discuss manage-
ment-proposed layoff plans and investment plans in a worker-owned cooperative.
The corporate manager’s agency extends far beyond the employees in the firm. It affects
the education of children whom the manager has never met. This effect results from the
institutional structure of society: education is funded by tax revenue, which is taken from
wages, which depend upon corporate hiring policies, which depend upon investment
strategies.
The corporate manager does not directly affect your education by interacting with you
(or with tax collectors, or policy makers) personally, as one individual to another indi-
vidual. Rather, he or she affects your education through the network of social institutions
that are linked to his or her corporation. It is the institutional connection between wages,
taxes, educational budgets, training and hiring of teachers, and building of schools that
gives the manager’s business action the ability to affect your education, as well as the
education of millions of other students.
In the eyes of free-market ideology (which has permeated the discipline of psychol-
ogy), the notion of a social system composed of cultural factors that set parameters of
individual action appears stifling. However, our example of the manager’s power through
institutions proves that this is an illusion.
Macro social systems are the basis of individual agency and fulfillment. You can receive
free education (for a number of years) because of the social system of taxes that fund the
construction of schools, printing of books, and training and hiring of teachers. You could
never receive this level of education apart from the macro system (i.e., as a separate indi-
vidual). It is vital for your humanity that you participate in a massive cultural system and
develop appropriate psychological mechanisms that facilitate this.
 185 Macro Culture and Psychology

Particular social systems based upon particular social principles of course generate
oppression and stultification of many people. These systems need to be reorganized in
democratic ways. However, the general presence of a cultural system and macro cultural
factors is vital to human existence and fulfillment. This is why is it necessary to reorga-
nize systems and factors rather than eschewing and ignoring them.

Women’s Smoking
Agency is usually touted as independent of macro culture—as expressing the individual,
resisting culture, and recasting culture in more fulfilling, personal terms. It is therefore
useful to examine a concrete example of agency as cultural phenomenon.
Cigarette smoking by women is an illustrative example, for it appeared to break out
from women’s sheltered, conservative social position. It became a symbol of women’s
individual freedom and their social equality with men. It appeared to break the male-
dominated conventions and usher in women’s voice. In fact, women’s smoking appeared
to dissolve cultural conventions altogether and replace them with individual personal
expressions.
Before middle-class women took up smoking, smoking was a male activity that was
ritualized as a code of etiquette that excluded women. At the turn of the twentieth cen-
tury, “Choices of smoking products, the decision to smoke, when one smoked, and ‘the
freedom to smoke’ were governed by conventions of etiquette and taste, what can col-
lectively be called prescriptions. For the most part, these prescriptions set out what was
respectable ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine’ activity, with the smoker’s reputation on the line”
(Rudy, 2005, p. 4). These prescriptions were expressed in etiquette guides, fiction, poetry,
cartoons, newspapers, and trade journals. Smoking was political in the sense that it
objectified and promoted social practices.
Smoking was a male activity for all classes. It expressed this social distinction, and it
also enforced it (as depicted in figure 1.10) Women were prohibited from smoking, which
separated them from men in this domain. The physical act of smoking (or not smoking)
expressed and enforced a social relation. Women’s use (or nonuse) of the culturally sig-
nificant artifact (of cigarettes) was an indication of their social-psychological competence.
If they violated social norms governing the artifact’s use and did smoke, they would be
regarded as socially and psychologically remiss. Personal attributes were defined in terms
of one’s use of macro cultural factors (cf. Skeggs, 2004). (Prostitutes deliberately violated
the sanction and did smoke as a way of displaying their non-normative social role to
potential customers. In this sense they adopted and reinforced the social prescription that
women’s smoking was disreputable. They used the normative, conventional, objectified
meaning of smoking to indicate their availability for unconventional behavior. Their
customers shared their understanding of the normative meaning of smoking and thus
comprehended a prostitute’s smoking as indicating her participation in non-normative
behavior.)
Rudy observes that this collective representation of smoking represented a change from
the mid-nineteenth century, when women did smoke. He does not explain this change. It
was undoubtedly related to the domestication of women and the family under the capi-
talist political economy of the Victorian era.
 186 macro cultural psychology

Rudy does explain the political forces that led to cigarettes’ taking on new cultural sig-
nifications, objectifications, and totalizations in the twentieth century (as in figure 1.10).
A primary force was the manufacture of mass-produced cigarettes.
Industrial capitalism generated profit by mass-producing and mass-distributing low-
cost products. Cigarette-making machines produced 200,000 per day, in contrast to
the 2,000 that hand-rollers produced. Manufacturers had to dispose of this huge addi-
tional supply. They did so by encouraging more people to smoke and by dissolving social
restraints against smoking. The profit motive of industrial capitalism encouraged wom-
en’s smoking so people would consume more product, thereby enabling the companies to
generate more profit. Moral objections to women’s smoking “carried less weight against
the advertising revenue to be had from tobacco.” “Advertisers seized on early debates
about the meaning of smoking for women as opportunities.” A 1928 ad featuring aviator
Amelia Earhart proclaimed that Lucky Strikes were the cigarettes carried on the Friendship
when she crossed the Atlantic. This was followed by the slogan, “For a Slender Figure—
Reach for a Lucky Instead of a Sweet.” “ ‘The Reach for a Lucky’ campaign ingeniously
brought together several goals [cultural meanings]. By suggesting Luckies could help
women assume ‘the modern form’, it associated the cigarette with contemporary trends
in beauty, fashion, and the changing women’s roles. Second, the use of testimonials by
public women, the Lucky Strike campaign took advantage of the ‘cult of personality’ that
emerged in the 1920s as a force in advertising.(ibid.)”
In 1929, a cigarette-industry executive employed Freud’s nephew, Edward Bernays, who
was an advertising consultant, to manipulate women to expand their smoking habits in
accord with the requirements of profitability. The executive realized that women gener-
ally smoked indoors but not outdoors. He realized he could increase sales and profits if
he could convince women to expand their smoking to the outdoors, so he proceeded to
reengineer their smoking behavior. Bernays constructed the fictitious notion that ciga-
rettes were “torches of freedom” for women, and he pushed this notion so women could
feel free to smoke outdoors. His PR campaign included hiring debutantes to march in the
1929 New York City Easter parade brandishing their “torches of freedom” outdoors in
public. He also hired feminist Ruth Hale to send out the invitations to the debutantes. The
feminist invitations read, “Women! Light another torch of freedom! Fight another sex
taboo!” Bernays hired a photographer to record the parade and sent his photos to news-
papers, who reported this fascinating cultural event of women’s smoking on the street,
without any inkling that Bernays had produced it (Rudy, 2005, pp. 84–85).
Brandt (2007) notes, “That smoking appealed to women before the onset of targeted adver-
tising does not reduce the significance of tobacco industry efforts to recruit women smokers”
(pp. 69, 70, 72). Thus, it was the advertising companies that drew together appealing cultural
meanings within the form of the cigarette in order to sell it. They made the cigarette incarnate
a set of cultural meanings. They were cultural meaning makers. “The cigarette revealed the
power of the technique of investing a commodity with cultural meaning in order to motivate
consumption. . . . It is perhaps its remarkable range of meanings—and their successful defi-
nition and construction through advertising and promotion—that makes the cigarette such
as powerful symbol of the consumer culture” (Brandt, 2007, pp. 87, 99).
This profit motive was complemented by social changes. After World War I, more
women worked in the labor force and demanded the same social rights as men. Many
 187 Macro Culture and Psychology

adopted smoking cigarettes as a social symbol of their equality with men. Women’s choice
to smoke thus had a social basis. It “totalized” new social and economic conditions. This
new cultural practice of and signification to women’s smoking rejected the previous cul-
tural notion that smoking was disreputable for women. (This was a different gambit from
the way prostitutes used smoking at the turn of the century; they had accepted the cul-
tural meaning of smoking as disreputable for women.) Women simply appropriated the
male value of respectable smoking for themselves. They took the established cultural
meaning of smoking—as iconic of freedom and urbanity—and adopted it. They did not
invent a new symbol or conception of freedom and urbanity, nor did they impute a per-
sonal, idiosyncratic meaning to smoking. Women simply pushed their way into the men’s
world and appropriated male practices and meanings.
Smoking illustrates the dialectic of macro cultural factors and subjectivity: economic
conditions (women working in the labor force and mass-produced cigarettes) led ciga-
rette manufacturers to encourage women’s smoking as a way of earning profit. Women
used smoking as a token of their new economic status; they adopted the symbolic social
status of smoking that had been developed by men as a token of their own economic
independence and extended this token to themselves, and they demanded the “right” to
smoke. Advertisers used this demand/desire in their advertisements.
Women used cultural artifacts to achieve cultural goals of status and economic partici-
pation. Their use of smoking promoted capitalist economic conditions. It also enriched
and empowered the cigarette manufacturers and marketers.
Women’s agency did not create the demand to smoke out of personal choice. Nor did it
liberate women from capitalism, or limit capitalism’s power over them. On the contrary,
it served to plunge women more deeply into the capitalist economy and to enhance the
profitability of the economy. Smoking did facilitate the movement of women from the
domestic economy to the labor force; however, this was a movement within the capitalist
system, not to a liberated position outside it. Furthermore, this particular symbol of
women’s liberation was injurious to their health.
This unconventional action by women was neither personal nor creative in the sense of
being radically new, self-determining, empowering, or fulfilling. It was socially conditioned
and socially functional, despite its appearance of personal idiosyncrasy and liberation.
This is true for many cultural-psychological acts that appear unconventional, agentive,
creative, and liberatory. Usually, they are limited to the adoption of prevailing values,
which are then applied to a marginalized group of people or behaviors. Civil rights is a
case in point. Civil rights extends prevalent principles of democracy and equality of
opportunity to minorities and women who have traditionally been excluded from their
coverage. While this is an important step forward, and often requires great courage and
sacrifice, it is compatible with the dominant status quo. It does not introduce new social
principles to reorganize the structure of social life. It simply extends existing principles.
Thus, while black workers gain rights equal to those of white workers, neither race gains
equality with capitalist owners of workplaces and resources. Capitalist social organiza-
tion—along with alienation, exploitation, commodification, and social class—remains
intact regardless of which ethnic or gender group participates. Consequently, civil rights
is not liberatory in a fundamental way that overcomes exploitation, alienation, social
classes, or commodification of resources and people (Ratner, 2009c).
 188 macro cultural psychology

Individual Experience and Social Agency

Of course, people do have personal, unique experiences with a particular set of friends
and relatives. Nobody else has exactly the same set of friends and relatives that you do.
But unique sets of friends and relatives do not equate with unique experiences, because
different sets of friends and relatives still live in the same culture and share many values,
interests, and practices. The fact that your parents are different individuals from mine
does not mean that your family experience was entirely different from mine, because
both our parents employed common cultural practices in raising us just as they spoke a
common language to us. Despite being different individuals, they all spoke English to us,
they all used child-centered socialization practices (as opposed to Puritan parents), they
all encouraged us to study hard and get good grades, they all taught us to obey the law,
and they engaged in numerous other common cultural activities. Experience with unique
people does not equate with unique experience, because different individuals are not
unique; they share cultural characteristics. Of course, your parents may have pushed you
to play soccer while mine pushed me to play piano—but millions of other parents encour-
age their children to play soccer and/or piano.
It is also true that in capitalism, especially, individuals seem to oppose society rather
than conform to it. They “do their own thing,” act unconventionally, violate social con-
ventions and laws to maximize their self interest, cheat, slough off, play computer games
in class while the teacher is lecturing, and refuse to study for tests. Does this invalidate
our argument that cultures strive for coherence and that individual agency is cultural in
finding cultural means to achieve cultural goals? I argue that it does not, for the reason
that individualistic acts of self-interest and hedonistic pleasure are themselves central to
consumer capitalism. In other words, the very resisting of cultural norms is culturally
normative! I discuss this in Chapter 4. Marx (1973, p. 156) put it aptly when he said, “[P]
rivate interest is itself already a socially determined interest, which can be achieved only
within the conditions laid down by society and with the means provided by society;
hence it is bound to the reproduction of these conditions and means. It is the interest of
private persons, but its content as well as the form and means of its realization, is given
by social conditions independent of all.” We shall explore this point below.

These Aspects of Cultural Psychology Comprise a General

Psychological Theory That Explains All Psychological
Phenomena, Including Those That Exist Outside
Normative Macro Cultural Factors
The Case of Mental Illness
Forms (symptoms) of mental illness are cultural phenomena. Consider the remark-
able parallel between Kraeplin’s description of schizophrenia (dementia praecox) and
T. S. Eliot’s description of modern society. Kraeplin defined schizophrenia as “a loss of
inner unity of intellect, emotion, and volition”; T. S. Eliot diagnosed the modern condi-
tion as a widening rift between thought and emotion, intellect and sensation, and a gen-
eral failure to achieve “unity of sensibility” (Sass, 1992, p. 357). It could not be coincidental
 189 Macro Culture and Psychology

that the inner, psychological loss of unity and the outer, social rift arouse simultaneously.
The “modern condition” clearly fosters psychological dis-integration. The psychological
and the social are continuous with one another on the same plane. Psychologists and
psychiatrists try to break the unitary plane and place psychology and society in separate
realms. The unity (homology) of psychological disturbance and social relations is seen in
historical accounts of mental illness (Sass, 1992, p. 362).
The feeling of personal worthlessness (i.e., the “inferiority complex”) is a historical con-
struct of recent origin. Previously, individuals felt a sense of sinfulness but not personal
inadequacy. The notion of personal worthlessness arose during the past century, evidently
reflecting a rising individualistic concern over personal inadequacy, which is bred by
intense competition (Ratner, 1991, p. 270). This is a momentous fact for macro cultural
psychology. If anything seems to qualify as a personal construct, it is the haunting sense
that one is worthless. Yet the possibility of this feeling is itself historical. While people
have always suffered misfortune and defeat, the psychological response to this, and inter-
pretation of it, as blaming oneself and feeling worthless is historically cultivated.
Another pathological symptom, the schizophrenic divided self, emerged only in the
late nineteenth century in conjunction with multiple, disjunctive social roles. While ear-
lier views recognized distinct functions or components of self such as soul and body,
these all revolved around one self. The nineteenth century marked a new conception of
different selves or personalities within one individual. This was reflected in Robert Louis
Stevenson’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886). This cultural-historical fragmentation is reca-
pitulated in the symptomatology of mental disorder. As one patient said, “It is as if some-
thing is thrown in me, bursts me asunder. Why do I divide myself in different pieces?
I feel that I am without poise, that my personality is melting and that my ego disappears
and that I do not exist anymore. Everything pulls me apart. The skin is the only possible
means of keeping the different pieces together. There is no connection between the dif-
ferent parts of my body” (Sass, 1992, p. 15).
The symptoms of schizophrenia—withdrawal, highly idiosyncratic and abstract pat-
terns of thinking, and a preoccupation with hidden meanings—bear unmistakable con-
gruence with the broad social relations and concepts of capitalism (such as individualism,
privacy, and privatized meaning). Sass (pp. 369–371) explains it well:

Consider the emphasis on disengagement and self-consciousness that was fos-

tered by the ideas of philosophers like Descartes, Locke, and Kant (as well as by
patterns of socialization in daily life). . . . This turned modern human beings away
from the search for an objective external order, enjoining us instead to turn
inward and become aware of our own activity. . . . to take charge of constructing
our own representation of the world. . . . Central to these tendencies is a pervasive
detachment, a disengagement that demands that we stop simply living in the body
or within our traditions and habits, and by making them objects for us, subject
them to radical scrutiny and remaking.
Related currents, more closely associated with romanticism and its aftermath,
have tended to glorify the inner self, by implying that human fulfillment lies in
discovering one’s own uniqueness and recognizing the central role of one’s own
subjectivity. (It is only with romanticism that autobiographies come to be filled
 190 macro cultural psychology

with forms of self-reflection focused on the drama and idiosyncrasies of one’s

own inner life. . . .)
If schizoids and schizophrenics, like other human beings, are subject to the
influences of their social milieu, it is not hard to see how a number of their core
traits (the asocial turning inward, the lack of spontaneity, the detachment from
emotions, the hyperabstractness, the anxious deliberation and cognitive slippage,
and the exquisitely vulnerable sense of self-esteem, for example) might be exag-
gerations of tendencies fostered by this civilization. . . .
[This is why] what evidence there is suggests that schizophrenic illness did not
even appear, at least in any significant quantity, before the end of the 18th or
beginning of the nineteenth. . . . Catatonia was not described until after 1850.
Even more telling is the absence or extreme rarity of descriptions of clear instances
of individual cases of schizophrenia, at least of the chronic, autistic form, in either
medical books or general literature prior to the 19th century. The first clinical
descriptions are those of Haslam and Pinel in 1809; the first literary descriptions
that definitely qualify are those of the main characters in George Buccaneer’s
story “Lenz” and Honore de Balzac’s “Louis Lambert,” both written in the 1830s—
and this despite the fact that easily recognizable descriptions of all other major
mental diseases, including affective psychoses, can be found in ancient as well as
Renaissance and 18th century texts. Many writers in the 18th century made sys-
tematic attempts to describe the known forms of mental illness, which resulted in
works like Pinel’s diagnostic system (1901). But despite the striking clinical picture
that schizophrenia presents (at least in its acute and florid forms), one can find no
account of it in these or any earlier works. (Sass, pp. 364-365). Even Eugen Bleuler,
who coined the term schizophrenia in 1908, described a “specific type of alteration
of thinking, feeling, and relation to the external world which appears nowhere
else in this particular fashion” (ibid., p. 14).

Sass (1992, p. 10) explores “one of the great ironies of modern thought: the madness of
schizophrenia—so often imagined as being antithetical to the modern malaise, even as
offering a potential escape from its dilemmas of hyperconsciousness and self-control—
may, in fact be an extreme manifestation of what is in essence a very similar condition.”
Sass explains the methodology necessary to elucidate the congruence between macro
culture and psychological symptoms:

A comprehensive model of the social origin both of schizophrenia and of the

modernist sensibility would need to go beyond this discussion of abstract ideas
and mentality and to acknowledge as well how each of these conditions is intri-
cated with the modern social order—with patterns of political and bureaucratic
organization, family structures, economic practices, and technological develop-
ments of modernity. The most influential descriptions of these aspects of moder-
nity come from the founding fathers of sociology: Karl Marx—on the alienating
consequences of certain economic structures and relationships; Max Weber—on
the growing rationalization, technologization, secularization, and bureaucratiza-
tion of modern life; and Emile Durkheim—on the juggernaut of industrialization
 191 Macro Culture and Psychology

and the growing reflectiveness that cause traditional values to lose their quasi-
natural status (ibid., p. 371).

Foucault (1987) describes the structural congruence between symptoms of mental

illness and the alienated, exploitive character of capitalism. He debunks the idea that
mental illness is a separate realm from society. In fact, the phenomenological sense of
separateness and delusion that many patients experience is caused by and recapitulates
the alienation, self-obfuscation, and contradictions of capitalism. It is not caused by a
deficit in consciousness itself. “It is not because one is ill that one is alienated, but insofar
as one is alienated that one ill” (p. xxvi).

It would be absurd to say that the sick man machinizes his world because he proj-
ects a schizophrenic world in which he is lost. . . . In fact, when man remains
alienated from what takes place in his language, when he cannot recognize any
human, living signification in the productions of his activity, when economic and
social determinations place constraints upon him and he is unable to feel at home
in this world, he lives in a culture that makes a pathological form like schizophre-
nia possible. . . . Only the real conflict of the conditions of existence may serve as a
structural model for the paradoxes of the schizophrenic world.
To sum up, it might be said that the psychological dimensions of mental illness
cannot, without recourse to sophistry, be regarded as autonomous. . . . In fact, it is
only in history that one can discover the sole concrete apriori from which mental
illness draws. . . its necessary figures. (Foucault, 1987, pp. 83–85, my emphasis)

In sum, while individuals construct morbid symptoms, their construction is shaped by

macro cultural factors and made from cultural factors. Detachment, skepticism, subjec-
tivism, and other psychological mechanisms of mental illness were objective constructs
objectified on the macro cultural level by novelists and philosophers. They were not spon-
taneously constructed by mental patients. This is an important tenet of macro cultural
psychology—that psychological constructs are macro-level constructs that are widely
known in a population. These are the mediational means that individuals draw on as their
psychological mechanisms for dealing with stress and other social factors. Of course, not
all individuals draw on the same cultural tools; however, they draw on some cultural tool
for their psychological operations. This makes these operations cultural.
Macro factors generate mental illness by exerting specific stressors and stresses on people
(e.g., alienation, detachment, insecurity of unemployment and competition—which were
not prevalent in other societies) and unique models for coping with these stresses (e.g.,
fragmentation, skepticism, detachment, subjectivism). This two-pronged cultural influence
can be diagrammed as in Figure 3.5.

Biological Explanations
The fact that mental illness is generated by cultural pressures (such as alienation, oppres-
sion, and social contradictions) and utilizes cultural concepts (such as detachment, skep-
ticism, and subjectivism) as its operating mechanism makes mental illness a cultural
 192 macro cultural psychology

Stressors
Symptoms

Macro
cultural
factors Coping

fig. 3.5 Two-Pronged Cultural Shaping of Mental Illness.

phenomenon that is not reducible to biochemical processes. Biochemical processes are

not sensitive to the cultural stressors I have just enumerated, nor are they capable of gen-
erating culturally specific symptoms such as detachment. The social stress of losing a job
is qualitatively different from the stress experienced by a rat receiving a shock in a maze.
The rat’s biological sensitivity to shock is insensitive to social issues such as losing a job.
Consequently, a different operating mechanism is required in humans that is sensitive to
cultural stress and which generates cultural-psychological symptoms to it. Mental illness
is cultural in the same sense that emotions are: their operating mechanism is cultural; it
is sensitive to abstract cultural phenomena, and it is formed from cultural phenomena
such as cultural concepts. The operating system of mental illness is no more a simple,
automatic, biological response to stress than emotions are a simple, automatic, biological
response to color, odor, and size of physical stimuli. (The term “stress” obscures the qual-
itatively different, cultural nature of human stress; it makes it seem that all stress is the
same, akin to a rat’s after being shocked.)

Demographic Variations
The fact that not everyone in a culture becomes mentally ill does not negate the fact
that mental illness is cultural. Society, especially modern society, is complex and diverse,
and not everyone in it is exposed to the same stressors in the same degree. The fact that
some people escape it simply means that they occupy more sheltered social positions.
People who are exposed to stressors intensely and extensively will suffer more illness than
those exposed in lesser degrees. Detailed research has proven that mental illness is mono-
tonically related to the number of social stressors experienced (Ratner, 1991, Chapter 6).
This is why mental illness is overrepresented in the lower classes, where stressors are
greater.
What is remarkable about the cultural content and historical specificity of forms of
mental illness is that they exist among people in the depths of despair and disorientation.
One might expect estranged, confused, anxious, isolated individuals to strike out with
random, idiosyncratic responses that lack social significance and commonality. However,
the fact is that the victims draw upon cultural models (values, concepts, practices) as
their mediational means for coping with adversity. Even in their misery and confusion,
 193 Macro Culture and Psychology

they display social sensitivity to, and social dependence on, macro cultural factors to
guide their psychological reactions. This is why there is social coherence to mental illness
in particular historical epochs. Our epoch has schizophrenia, eating disorders, and
hyperactivity, which other eras lacked. Conversely, the Victorian era had thousands of
cases of hysteria, which has disappeared today because the cultural-historical stressors,
stresses, and coping mechanisms have changed.
North American and European symptoms of disturbance rest upon Protestant values of
individualism, self-control, rationalism, activism, and introspection. Catholic societies,
which value communalism and fateful acceptance of destiny and higher authority, mani-
fest quite different symptomatology. Whereas American patients tend toward active symp-
tomatology with ideational distortion and elaboration, Catholic Latin patients tend toward
passive symptomatology with a suspension of cognitive effort. Americans tend toward
obsessional thoughts, intellectualization, guilt, and self-blame, while Latinos suffer more
somatic complaints, sleeplessness, and obesity. Americans are more lonely and suspicious
than Latinos, while Latinos are more dependent (Ratner, 1991, pp. 268–278; see Marsella &
Yamada, 2007, for cultural variations in mental illness).
Anorexia and bulimia manifest demographic variations. These implicate cultural stres-
sors, stresses, and coping skills in the disorders. A demographic analysis reveals that 90
of anorexics are women. Additionally, these eating disorders become prevalent among
non-Western women to the extent that non-Western countries adopt capitalistic social
relations. Eating disorders have increased six-fold in the past 25 years in Japan. Without
question, the rise in eating disorders in Japan correlated with increasing industrializa-
tion, urbanization, and the fraying of traditional family forms following World War II.
Additional macro cultural factors that spurred eating disorders include middle class
gender roles for Japanese women and slim body ideals of beauty.
Anorexia is rare on the Caribbean island of Curaçao. The few cases that exist are confined
to well-educated, high-income women of light skin who have lived abroad. No cases of
anorexia are found among the majority black population. A cultural psychology is involved
in this demographic fact. Curaçao women who become anorexic adopted light-skinned,
Western, middle-class ideals of thinness because these ideals are salient to their social posi-
tion. Achieving the thin body that represents middle-class status (as a collective represen-
tation) was a means to gaining middle-class identity. This class significance of slimness
is what accounts for the “tyranny of slenderness” in modern society. These women were
attempting to emulate the white upper class and distance themselves from the black major-
ity who shunned them because of their skin color, middle-class lifestyle, and international
experience. The middle-class aspirants encountered difficulty moving up due to their
mixed racial background and skin color. They couldn’t modify their skin color, but they
could modify their body weight as a stamp of their middle-class qualification. Black, lower-
class women had no hope of entering the middle class, so they did not strive to adopt its
proxies, such as slim body form. Idealized body image and the use of eating disorders to
achieve it are objective, objectified, objectifying cultural means (coping strategies) to
achieve cultural objectives under particular cultural stressors and stresses (cf. Ratner, 2002,
pp. 39–40, 49–50; Ratner, 2006a, pp. 100–101).vi
Non-normative psychology is thus actually normative because its causes, constituents,
and demographics are cultural.
 194 macro cultural psychology

Individuals utilize cultural means to cope with cultural stressors. They may choose
alternative cultural means (e.g., withdrawal, separating an inner and outer self, skepti-
cism, subjectivism). However, this individual activity does not make mental illness an
individual creation. Its causes and constituents are cultural. Unhappy individuals in
Curaçao did not spontaneously invent the thin body image as an ideal for feeling success-
ful; they appropriated it from the macro cultural level, where it (recognizably, objectively,
commonly) represented middle-class identity and success as a collective representation.
The whole psychology of anorexia may be regarded as a playing out of cultural pres-
sures on women’s subjectivity. Most women fail to achieve the slim body form because it
is contradicted by another aspect of consumer capitalism: the constant stimulation of
consumption to increase sales and profit. One form this takes is the stimulation of con-
stant consumption of food, especially profitable, processed, addictive food such as junk
food. This economics culminates in obesity, which afflicts one-third of Americans.
Leontiev (1978, Section 4.4) described this clash aptly: “If the individual in given life
circumstances is forced to make a choice, then that choice is not between meanings but
between colliding social positions that are expressed and recognized through these
meanings.” (Our analysis of problems in the educational psychology of students utilizes
this notion of role clashes between the social institution of consumerism and the social
institution of education.)
This cultural clash of values causes enormous stress and anxiety in women. Most
women agonize about their failure to achieve cultural ideals of body image. By 8 years of
age, 40 of American girls wish to be thinner than they are, and this percentage doubles
in only 3 years, as 79 of 11-year-old girls wish to be thinner than they are. (Incredibly,
most women who are dissatisfied with their weight are objectively of normal weight [75
of the women] or even underweight [30 of the women] according to health charts.)
Psychological angst over body shape is the subjective expression of competing cultural
pressures. Competing pressures generate competing subjective desires and intrapsychic
struggle (thinness versus consuming food). If one of the cultural pressures were absent,
the other would be easier to achieve without intense psychological struggle.
Individuals cannot easily renounce either ideal because both are grounded in cultural
pressures. Achieving the cultural ideal of slimness requires strictly controlling oneself to
abstain from the opposite ideal of constant consumption. This is why anorexics report
intense struggles to control their urges to eat. The personal-psychological struggle to con-
trol oneself is the subjective manifestation of competing cultural pressures. This is often
portrayed as a struggle between good and evil, mind and body, purity and contamination.
However, these metaphysical notions mask the cultural clash of slenderness versus con-
sumption that is rooted in capitalist political economy.

The Normative Basis of Abnormal Behavior

Thus, we see that abnormal behavior is actually rooted in normative macro cultural
factors. We can formalize this into a macro cultural psychological theory of abnormal
behavior.
The logical proposition of macro cultural psychology is that if psychology is cultural and
rooted in the political economy of a social system, then this holds for destructive behavior.
 195 Macro Culture and Psychology

If all psychology is explainable by the same parsimonious constructs—which

it must be in a scientific account—then destructive behavior must be rooted in central
political economic features of society that radiate into many other domains. Indeed, this
is the radical import of macro cultural psychology, for it exposes the central features of the
society to critique by implicating them in extreme, destructive psychology. Bourdieu once
observed that all violence has to be paid for, and, for example, the
structural violence exerted by the financial markets, in the form of layoffs, loss of secu-
rity, etc., is matched sooner or later in the form of suicides, crime and delinquency, drug
addiction, alcoholism, a whole host of minor and major everyday acts of violence.
Insulating cultural factors from destructive psychology exempts them from critique
and challenge, because they have no bearing on problematic behavior. This is precisely
what legitimators of the status quo strive to do. They are more concerned about insulat-
ing macro cultural factors from destructive psychology/behavior than from constructive
behavior because this is necessary to exempt the society from critique. This is why
destructive psychology (e.g., violence, mental illness) is mystified more than any other
psychological phenomenon (i.e., it is treated as deriving more from biological factors
than other psychological phenomena, and as being less tied to cultural factors).
Macro cultural psychology elucidates the cultural basis of malicious psychology/
behavior and then suggests how to eradicate the behavior and its basis. This is not only
politically useful; it is also scientific.
Linking extremely destructive psychology/behavior to macro cultural factors provides
a normative basis to such behavior. This approach makes us see broad social norms as
more destructive than they appear to be, because they are shown to generate destructive
behavior. Cultural psychology thus gives us new insight into the character of cultural fac-
tors by elucidating their contribution to psychology. Specifically, I argue that because psy-
chology is cultural, malicious psychology must be fostered by destructive cultural factors
(i.e., destructive normative conditions).
Of course, extremely destructive behavior such as mental illness or mass killings in
schools, businesses, or military bases is not in itself routine, normative behavior, but it is
continuous with destructive norms, not a radical departure from them.
Therefore, wherever there is a prevalence of extremely destructive psychology/behavior,
we predict a high prevalence of destructive behavior in society. For instance, mass killings
at military bases will occur within a context of a great deal of abusive, violent, criminal
behavior among “normal” soldiers who do not reach the extreme level of mass killings.
This is exactly what we find at Fort Hood, in Texas. Staff Sgt. Gilberto Mota, 35, and his
wife, Diana, 30, an Army specialist, returned to Fort Hood from Iraq in late 2007 after
being deployed for over a year; in April 2008, Mota used his gun to kill his wife, and then
he took his own life. In July 2009, two members of the First Cavalry Division, also just
back from the war with decorations for their service, were at a party when one killed the
other. That same month, Staff Sgt. Justin Lee Garza, 28, under stress from two deploy-
ments, killed himself in a friend’s apartment outside Fort Hood, 4 days after he was told
no therapists were available for a counseling session In November 2009, a soldier killed 13
fellow soldiers on the same base. The New York Times reported that the November attack
occurred in an area that had seen a noticeable uptick in crime and violence since the
beginning of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Reports of domestic abuse had risen by
 196 macro cultural psychology

75 in the previous 8 years. While violent crime had been decreasing by 7 in similar-
sized towns across America, in the base town of Killeen, it had risen 22. And most
chilling were the statistics on suicide. According to military officials, since 2003, there
had been 76 suicides by personnel assigned to Fort Hood, with 10 in 2009” (Moss &
Rivera, 2009). At least 15 of American soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan are taking psy-
chotropic medicine to deal with stress—not including the soldiers who take illegal drugs
to cope.
We do not find mass killings among a normative group of happy, secure soldiers. We do
not find high concentrations of severe mental illness in communities of happy, secure,
fulfilled individuals. We find them in communities of widespread psychological distress.
The intensification of extremely destructive behavior is proportional to the intensifi ca-
tion of normal destructiveness. Extreme violence is not as exceptional as it seems. It is
part of a pattern of “normal” violence.
This normative shift in the median and the range of destructive behavior is diagrammed
in Figure 3.6. If we represent mass killings at military bases (or schools) or severe mental
illness as the upper degree of psychology/behavior in society C, we can see that this
behavior occurs in society C in which the norm of psychology/behavior is destructive.
The destructive norm is due to destructive macro cultural factors that are central to the
society. In contrast, the upper limit of the range in society A is a low level of destructive-
ness (that does not ordinarily include mass killings or a high prevalence of serious mental
illness) because the macro cultural factors generate a general norm of nondestructive
behavior. Extreme, destructive psychology/behavior is part of a normative pattern of
social behavior that emanates from macro cultural factors (particularly the political
economy); it is not an individual phenomenon that arises in all societies regardless of
their social system and norms.
My cultural psychological hypothesis reverses the traditional theory of violence. I argue
that increases in the median level of destructive behavior (i.e., in normative levels of
destructive behavior) explain the intensification of extremely destructive behavior,
because both of them are generated by destructive macro cultural factors. The traditional

Mass
killing
Destructive behavior

Median

Destructiveness of macro cultural factors

Society A B C

fig. 3.6 Normative Shift in Range and Median of the General Behavior Underlying Extreme Behavior.
 197 Macro Culture and Psychology

hypothesis is that the intensification of extremely destructive behavior, generated by an

unusual spike in disturbed individuals, pulls the median level up. Traditional Psychology
uses the anomalous appearance of disturbed individuals to explain median and extreme
levels of destructive behavior. Macro cultural psychology points to normative macro cul-
tural factors as the explanation for median and extreme levels of destructive behavior.
Macro cultural psychology looks to normative behavior to explain the extreme, whereas
traditional Psychology looks to extreme behavior of abnormal individuals to explain the
median.

The Politics of Abnormal Psychology

Tracing abnormal behavior to normative cultural factors is political because it impugns
normal culture as the instigator of abnormal psychology/behavior. Only a critical social
perspective will have the fortitude to adopt this approach to social science. Regarding
capitalism as rational and efficient and free could never allow for conceiving of it as
something that generates destructive behavior/psychology. A benevolent view of capital-
ism (must) turn social problems back onto deficiencies in individuals.
This is the politics of conventional Psychology and psychiatry. It has led to a gross
marginalizing of macro cultural factors in relation to mental illness:

In North America, especially in the United States, the discussion of social factors
in the development of psychotic disorders has changed profoundly over the last
40 years. Whereas macrosocial factors (such as migration and poverty) were once
the subject of study and discussion, they have fallen from prominence and have
given way to a preoccupation with microsocial issues; the social environment has
been reduced to the clinic, and research efforts have focused on how clinicians
diagnose psychosis in minority populations. (Jarvis, 2007, p. 291)

In reflecting broad macro cultural factors, mental illness displays their organizing prin-
ciples, structure, and politics. Mental illness is not deliberately cultivated by the power
structure of society; it is a byproduct of the power structure and the manner in which it
has organized social institutions, cultural concepts, and artifacts. This is an important
point for understanding many psychological and social elements of society. The fact that
they are not deliberately cultivated by the power structure should not lull us into believ-
ing that they are unrelated to it. We must elucidate the politics of psychological and social
phenomena that do not appear obvious as the politics of foreign policy or finance do.
Mental illness appears to be cultural only from a critical cultural perspective, for only
such a perspective reveals culture to be untenable, unfathomable, and the cause of the
patient’s mystifications. If culture is regarded as normal, then the patient’s mystifications
and disorientation appear to be individual deficits in his mental functioning. This is a
crucial example of how critical politics is necessary for scientific objectivity. R.D. Laing
brilliantly pioneered this viewpoint. Psychological disorientation can only be objectively
comprehended as the result of a mystified, mystifying social reality (i.e., as a cultural phe-
nomenon) if the observer is critical of his or her culture. Legitimizing the culture throws
the patient’s disorientation back on himself or herself—not on the normal society—and
 198 macro cultural psychology

makes it noncultural. The politics of mental illness is thus key to its scientific explanation
and treatment, and to politically preventing mental illness. Abnormal psychology has to
be deculturized in order to legitimate society. This is because abnormal psychology is
problematic behavior that would reflect on problematic social organization if it were rec-
ognized as cultural. This deculturization must be reversed by a critical politics if mental
illness is to be scientifically understood, treated, and prevented.

Macro Culture and Micro Family

A great deal of mental illness occurs in destructive family interactions. However, these
interactions are precipitated by broader macro stresses that Sass and Foucault have enu-
merated. This point is the crux of Bronfenbrenner’s ecological model, which situates
micro-level interactions within the sphere of macro processes. Bronfenbrenner refers
to micro-level interactions as proximal processes, which are reflections of distal macro
cultural processes, as moonlight reflects sunlight. Shared, unifying macro cultural factors
explain why so many families in a country are so dysfunctional as to produce mental ill-
ness in their children. An analysis of family alone cannot explain varying prevalences and
forms of dysfunction in different societies.
Micro, proximal processes cannot be the primary source of mental illness, which is
historically specific and variable. Individual, separate interactions cannot explain the cul-
tural coherence and similarity that mental illness manifests. The millions of families in
one country that generate particular forms of mental illness in their children do not
coordinate with one another to produce similar stresses and coping mechanisms. The
similarity in symptoms across millions of separate patients must be explained by broader
cultural similarities at the macro level. These radiate down to micro-level family interac-
tions and unify them with shared characteristics.
Mental illness testifies to an important principle of macro cultural psychology: seem-
ingly personal, marginal psychological reactions are actually macro-level phenomena.

Psychopathology and Biology

It is wrong to say that schizophrenia is a biological disease and that the symptoms of deper-
sonalization, estrangement, fragmentation, etc. are cultural add-ons. The symptoms define
the disturbance; they are not auxiliary to it. If one does not feel fragmented, etc., then one
is not schizophrenic, just as one is not depressed if one does not feel sad. Mental illness
cannot be defined biologically because that eliminates the phenomenological and psycho-
logical aspect of it entirely. It would be oxymoronic to say that a psychological disturbance
is not psychological! And because the psychological content and experience are historical,
as Sass and others have shown, it must be the case that mental illness is a cultural-historical
phenomenon—not a biological one—in essence. The cultural-historical sense of self defines
schizophrenia; biology does not. Biology could only serve as a marker of schizophrenia if
there were a constant, universal association between the two. There is not. Schizophrenia
cannot be detected from and indicated by a precise biological marker the way that a cancer
cell is biologically distinct from a normal cell.
 199 Macro Culture and Psychology

Macro Cultural Psychology is an Ideal Type of the

Main Parameters of Human Psychology; Individual and Group
Variations/Transformations Issue From This Framework
Our formulation is the ideal type, or basic formation, of cultural psychology. It is the place
we must begin before considering modifications and variations. From this ideal-typical
base, we can recognize that the cultural reproduction of cultural psychology is not mono-
lithic. Individuals can select among cultural factors, and we can modify the psychological
features we draw from them. We can separate psychological phenomena from their exist-
ing cultural base and utilize them in novel ways. This is an important aspect of cultural
life, and it must be studied. We must investigate how much variation there is and how
deep the differences are. We must understand how variations impact on cultural unity
and coordination. We must regard variations as variations on a basic core. We cannot be
fascinated by variations to the extent that we treat them as fundamental and ungrounded
and ignore or deny the basic core of cultural psychology.
From the ideal-typical base of cultural psychology, we can also recognize that problem-
atic aspects of cultural activities may be noticed by participants who engage in social move-
ments to transform them. This will lead social reformers to develop a new psychology that
can construct new cultural factors, and which will be objectified in them and transmitted
by them. The process by which social problems/contradictions are noticed and utilized to
reform/transform society is another important topic of cultural psychology.

Macro Cultural Psychological Hermeneutic

Methodology of the Cultural Origins and
Characteristics of and Psychology:
The Tyranny of Bodily Slenderness
A dialectical epistemology known as cultural hermeneutics elucidates the manner in
which a cultural factor embodies and reveals the social system as a whole. Cultural herme-
neutics reveals the concrete social character of schools, sports, popular music, news pro-
grams, the structure of college exams, the black robes that Saudi Arabian women are
forced to wear, low-cut jeans and thong bikinis that Western girls wear, car designs, and
the doffing of caps that black slaves were forced to perform (cf. Bourdieu, 2005; Dant,
1999; MacKenzie & Wajcman, 1999 for a cultural hermeneutics of material culture).
Cultural hermeneutics also reveals capitalism through these cultural factors.
The science of cultural Psychology situates psychological phenomena in the cultural
complex of social conditions, social positions, social roles, and social stages of which they
are a part. It identifies the cultural complexity of psychological phenomena. It traces them
back to the cultural systems of which they are a part, as indicated in Figure 1.10. Cultural
Psychology restores psychology to its cultural systems; it corrects the prevalent tendency of
psychologists to detach psychology from these phenomena’s actual cultural complexity.
Cultural Psychology exhumes the cultural complexity that psychologists typically entomb.
Cultural Psychology realizes the reality of psychology’s cultural complexity, which psychol-
ogists typically obfuscate.
 200 macro cultural psychology

Because cultural factors are the purpose, raison d’être, function, and locus of psycho-
logical phenomena, the formation and administration of cultural factors is placed at the
core of psychology. This includes the background conditions that make these factors pos-
sible and necessary, and the political struggle that brings them into being and determines
their specific form. Disregarding this concrete historical genesis of cultural factors, and
concentrating instead on interpersonal interactions, obscures the purpose, function,
raison d’être, and locus of psychological phenomena.
Cultural hermeneutics does not simply identify individual cultural factors. Rather, it
elucidates the function that each factor and the psychological phenomenon have for the
cultural system. It explains why these exist, why they are necessary, how they contribute
to the system.
Cultural hermeneutics explains the concrete, systemic character of cultural factors as the
genesis, locus, constituents, telos, structuring structures, and function of psychological
phenomena.
Consider eating disorders, which we mentioned earlier. A cultural hermeneutics would
apprehend the significance of slimness in modern Western society. Anorexia and bulimia
are designed to make the body slim, so what does slimness denote and incarnate in
modern Western capitalist society? What is the cultural origin and significance of this
“tyranny of slenderness”?
A provisional explanation of slenderness would note that it is represented widely across
the array of social life. Slenderness is represented in sleek, thin, light consumer products,
such as cell phones, flat panel televisions, and thin and lightweight laptop computers.
Even the fad of stainless steel appliances expresses this preference for a sleek appearance.
Slenderness is reflected in architecture that emphasizes sleek lines and sharp angles that
move dramatically from point to point, rather than ornate, complex contours. Slenderness
is also a feature of tight clothing for women. The slim body is thus continuous with the
general image of sleekness and slimness that represents nimble capital. (Slim, sleek bodies
and things become defined as sexy; however, the real, fundamental reason for the ideal of
slimness is not sex. Sexiness is the result, not the cause, of the incredible lightness of
being.)
With slenderness being a widespread style, we hypothesize that there are reasons for it in
the central core of society’s political economy. These reasons will illuminate the symbolic
cultural meaning that slimness has. Without identifying these core reasons for slimness, its
cultural significance will escape us—as will the significance of eating disorders.
Our hypothesis is that slenderness symbolizes agility and the ability to move and change
direction quickly, free of encumbrances, independently. These attributes are important to
modern capitalist society.
The investor is nimble in shifting his or her capital to maximize profit; the employer is
nimble in anticipating production demands and increasing or decreasing his or her labor
supply to prepare; the manager is nimble in shifting work to low-wage areas and shifting
suppliers to lower costs. Employees are nimble in moving quickly to higher-paying jobs.
In the process, existing contracts and commitments are quickly dissolved. The individual
is independent insofar as he or she is free of encumbrances (i.e., commitments, responsi-
bilities, discussions, social interactions, and regulations beyond the immediate self). All
of these interfere with one’s agility and ability to maximize one’s self-interest.
 201 Macro Culture and Psychology

In capitalism, everything is fast-moving. One must be quick on one’s feet and zip
around from place to place, opportunity to opportunity, with maximum speed before the
opportunity disappears.
This agility is objectified in the physical form of slimness and sleekness. Things and
people take this form to symbolize the foregoing attributes of capitalist political economy.
Corpulence is antithetical to these attributes. Corpulence is slow, ponderous, inertial,
regulated, and weighted down (by its weight).
This is clear in the case of cell phones and laptop computers. The slim, sleek cell phone
or laptop is available for use whenever I want it. I can access it quickly, use it quickly, and
put it away quickly. It affords me independence, “freedom,” choice, and spontaneity. It is
not complicated or drawn out, it does not require waiting, preparing, thinking, or train-
ing. The whole sense is freedom from encumbrances and regulations. The whole sense is
to maximize personal use. Portable + mobile = nimble—always moving to new location,
getting away, diversifying, expanding horizons and novelty.
Cell phones are also personalized in that they contain the user’s own favorite contacts.
Standard landline phones are impersonal, common instruments that cannot be customized
to reflect the user’s own needs. Cell phones also allow the user to be socially engaged and
connected as often as he or she desires; they help us overcome isolation and loneliness.
Cell phones also bring a variety of tasks under the user’s immediate control. This
enhances the user’s sense of individual power and autonomy, and it enhances speed and
productivity. Many tasks that one needs to accomplish are readily performed with one’s
own cell phone and laptop. Having these tools saves time that might otherwise have been
spent locating various separate devices.
Cell phones and laptops crystallize a complex of cultural values and conditions. The
phones draw together these values and conditions. To use Sartre’s term, the phone “total-
izes” them.
The tyranny of slenderness that defines the female body is an element of the general
lightness of being which characterizes modern capitalism and its products. It represents
the form of capitalist success. It is the bodily form and physical identity of capitalist suc-
cess. It displays to the world that one has achieved cultural success. Slim women are not
simply proud that they “look good”; they are proud that they have incorporated and dis-
played the elements of capitalist success in their own body. They are literally the embodi-
ment of success. This is why women try so hard to conform to the tyranny of slenderness.
Failure means cultural failure, the inability to partake of the elements of cultural success
in the broadest, deepest symbolic sense; it is not simply the failure to imitate photogenic
sexy images of models.
This is the cultural root of eating disorders that strive to slenderize the body. It explains
why women desperately strive to control their body weight through dieting.
Slenderness recapitulates and represents and reinforces bourgeois life. A collective life-
style would not admire slimness, agility, and mobility in the same way to the same degree,
for collective life is slower, more integrated, more committed, more encumbered with
considerations for a large community. One does not nimbly and agilely move away on
one’s own for one’s own success on a moment’s notice. One “sticks around,” consults with
others, sacrifices for others, accedes to others, supports others over the long term. This
quality of life and sense of life will be objectified in different styles of objects and people.
 202 macro cultural psychology

Cultural psychology requires a conception of culture. If psychology is part of culture

and incarnates its characteristics, it logically follows that whatever culture is determines
what psychology is. Ignoring what culture is has deprived researchers of any coherent
guide as to what cultural factors, processes, dynamics, and principles are most important
in cultural psychological phenomena. Developing a coherent theory/model of culture is
therefore a central need that occupies the following section.

Macro Cultural Factors are Structured in the Form of a Cone, or

Funnel, with Political Economy at the Stem or Base
Cultural elements are distributed horizontally along the mouth of a cone, and also verti-
cally to the cone’s stem (Fig. 3.7). On the horizontal level we might find factors such as
Confucian philosophy related to family or the educational system. These factors are, in
turn, related to deeper, central factors at the stem or core. These deeper factors are more
central in the sense of radiating into and permeating the array of disparate factors along
the mouth. The deep cultural factors that form the core of the social system are political
economy. Political economy is the politicized economic principles, or the economically based
political interests, of the mode of production.
For example, capitalism is a political economy. It comprises economic principles that
are implemented through politics. It is not purely a collection of economic laws working
themselves out in technical ways (e.g., “the market is undergoing a correction”), nor is it
purely political activities based on desires (e.g., “Republicans are just greedy”; “they just don’t
get it”). It is both: economic principles, outcomes (conditions, trends, structures), require-
ments, and objectives that characterize a social system, and which are actively promoted
through a variety of interventions and manipulations by their leading representatives.
The political economy refers to the class structure, the power structure, economic
institutions, forms of ownership of resources, ways of generating wealth, profit motive.
The conical analysis argues that these core factors are more influential in a social system
than others. They determine the features of other cultural factors . Other cultural factors
reciprocally influence economics and politics. However, in the totality of reciprocal rela-
tionships, economics and politics stand out as dominant. They are not the exclusive cul-
tural influences, and they do not eclipse the others. However, they are relatively more
dominant than the others.

fig. 3.7 Conical Model of Culture.

 203 Macro Culture and Psychology

The economics of manufacturing, for example, are clearly more influential in society
than painting or sculpture. Automobile production employs hundreds of thousands of
employees; uses a vast array of resources; affects a large number of socioeconomic sectors
such as the steel industry, the oil industry, and the transportation industry; and affects
the legislative process, including election results. Through all this, automobile produc-
tion affects the lives of many more people than painting and sculpture do.
The conical model admits a range of power and influence among factors. Between the
mouth and the stem of the cone lie intermediary factors that are intermediate in influ-
ence. Government may be one such intermediary factor.
Each level and each factor in the conical structure has a corresponding psychology. We
saw that early capitalist business had a corresponding self-concept, on the macro level.
Education, the family, and the army also have corresponding psychologies, which are the
subjectivity that animate them. These subjectivities overlap to some extent but not com-
pletely, just as the macro cultural factors partially overlap with each other.
Political economy is the core of the social cone. It expands into the horizontal level,
coloring the factors there, and unifying the entire system with a distinctive quality. A flat,
elliptical model, such as the horizontal array of factors at the mouth of the cone standing
on its own, would lack a core, common, character.
The centrality of political economy to the social system as a whole imbues the various
cultural factors with its character, which they transmit to their psychological elements,
with various modulations. Psychology thus is imbued with political economy in various
ways. The influence of political economy on psychology is not singular and direct, it is
varied, modulated, and indirect.
Because political economy is at the root of all social phenomena, all the various social
sciences ultimately must confront this common factor. This common object (and objec-
tive) unifies the social sciences, including Psychology—they are all dealing with various
offshoots of political economy.
The relation between political economy and other cultural factors is complex. While
political economy is dominant, it is not monolithic. Other factors retain distinctive fea-
tures which reciprocally modulate political economy. Thus, the “same” political economy
(e.g., in the United States, Britain, and Canada) has different nuances by virtue of some-
what different history, geography, ethnic movements, and/or particular forms of govern-
ment and foreign relations. The unity of a social system is a unity of different elements;
each retains some distinctiveness and some ability to influence others.
Today, commodity production—a central principle and practice of the capitalist owner-
ship, production, and distribution of goods—dominates virtually every sector of society
from health care to day care, to news, entertainment, politics, education, sports, interna-
tional affairs, and scientific research.vii The political economy also dominates personal life.
For instance, socioeconomic status (SES) is monotonically related to mortality, infant
mortality, osteoarthritis, cancers, hypertension, chronic disease, infectious disease, and
mental disorder. Low SES is associated with obesity, smoking, less physical activity, more
baseline illness, and higher blood pressure. In a Canadian survey, the incidence of depres-
sion in the upper class was 1.9; in the middle class it was 4.5, and in the lower class it
was 12.4 (Adler et al., 2002, p. 1100). Every change in social position generates a corre-
sponding change in health indicators. Health differences appear even at the upper levels
 204 macro cultural psychology

of the social hierarchy, between the very rich and the moderately rich. Even the course of
disease varies with SES. Health is thus a social issue. The conditions in which one lives
exert an influence on the individual’s health in a top-down pattern. Variations in social
position affect physiology such as cortisol levels, HDL cholesterol, and the immune
system. After controlling for standard risk factors (including age, obesity, smoking, less
leisure time, physical activity, more baseline illness, and higher blood pressure), the lowest
social grade (messengers, doorkeepers, etc.) still had a relative risk of 2.7 for coronary
heart disease mortality compared to the highest grade; clerical workers had a 2.2 relative
risk, and mid-level professionals had a 1.6 relative risk compared to the executives in their
respective fields. The remaining grade differences in coronary heart disease mortality
result from grade differences in job control and job support (see Adler et al., 2002, for a
summary of this research).
Economic pressure generates stress and emotional/behavioral problems in parents,
which lead to interparental conflict and negative parenting, which lead to behavioral
problems in children. Economic improvement reduces these behavioral problems in par-
ents and children (Conger & Donnellan, 2007, pp. 183–185). The strongest determinant of
performance in school and in jobs is SES; it is far stronger than individuals’ personalities
(Conger & Donnellan, 2007, p. 189).
The top-down, downward causation model is confirmed by the finding that residing in
a neighborhood that is federally designated as a poverty area (characterized by a high
proportion of low-income families, substandard housing, many unskilled male laborers,
etc.) is a risk factor for mortality above and beyond the characteristics of the individual.
Residing in a poverty area predicted 9-year mortality rates, even controlling for the indi-
vidual’s own socioeconomic characteristics (e.g., income, education, access to health
care, health behaviors, and social isolation) (Adler et al., 2002, p. 1104). In other words,
even if you personally are well situated in your standard of living, health care, and social
network, living in a poverty area will adversely affect your mortality. Protective factors
and coping skills are insufficient to ward off this effect of poverty.
An important testament to the dominance of social class over other cultural factors is
the fact that it mediates the effect of good schooling on psychology. Good schooling has
a stronger, more positive psychological effect on wealthy students than it does on poor
students (Ratner, 2006a, p. 130). This is because poverty is such a negative influence that
even good schooling is insufficient to counteract it. Wealthy students live in advanta-
geous conditions, so the positive effects of good schooling are complemented rather than
cancelled.

Vygotsky and Luria’s Historical Materialism

Marx provided this kind of cultural theory. His theory of historical materialism con-
strued society as a system that was dominated by a political economic base or core that
consisted of the means of production and the mode of production. This core was the
major social factor that set the tone for other social factors.
As Marx said, “The relations of production in their totality constitute what are called
the social relations, society, and specifically, a society at a definite sate of historical deve-
lopment, a society with a peculiar, distinctive character. Ancient society, feudal society,
 205 Macro Culture and Psychology

bourgeois society are such totalities of production relations” (1962b, p. 90). “The sum total
of relations of production constitute the economic structure of society—the real founda-
tion on which rise legal and political superstructures and to which correspond definite
forms of social consciousness. The mode of production in material life determines the
general character of the social, political, and spiritual processes of life” (Marx, 1904, p. 11).
Marx and Engels clearly stated that the political economic base was not the only impor-
tant social factor, and that others contributed to the overall character of the social system,
including the political economic base. The political economy and all the other social factors
had to be specified in different societies.
Vygotsky, Luria, and Leontiev followed Marx’s general theory of historical materialism.
They endorsed the centrality of political economy to culture, and they emphasized the
centrality of social class within political economy. Vygotsky (1997a) said that the “social
environment is class-based in its very structure. . . . We must be profoundly historical and
must always present man’s behavior in relation to the class situation at the given moment. . . .
Class membership defines man’s psychology and man’s behavior” (1997a, pp. 211–212).
Vygotsky (1997a) similarly stated that “every epoch has its own form of education” because
educational activity has always corresponded to “those particular economic and social
structures of society that defined the whole history of the epoch” (pp. 55, 56). Vygotsky
views economics as the basis of the whole history of an epoch that includes education.
Vygotsky further explained socioeconomic activity as pivotal to human society and human
nature. In contrast to animal groups where behavior is directly determined by instincts
of feeding, protection, aggression, and reproduction, “economic activity underlies all of
historical development” (Vygotsky, 1997a, p. 211).
Vygotsky (1997a, p. 211), for example, said that legal statutes, moral precepts, and artis-
tic tastes “are permeated through and through with the class structure of society that
generated them and serve as the class organization of production.” Vygotsky (1997a,
p. 212) said: “It is essential to keep in mind the class nature of all ideals, and recall that the
ideals of nationalism, patriotism, and so on are only masked forms of the class trend in
education.” Vygotsky's (1989) essay “Concrete Human Psychology” bears striking simi-
larity to Marcuse's (2005) essay “On Concrete Philosophy.” Both address historical mate-
rialist themes, and both were written in the same year, 1929.
Luria championed historical materialism over other formulations of culture. This led
him to rejecting Wundt’s Volkerpsychologie as part of cultural historical psychology:
“Wundt devoted the second half of his life to his multi-volume Volkerpsychologie (Folk
Psychology), in which he attempted to decipher social phenomena such as religion,
myths, morals, and law from the viewpoint of the psychology of the individual human
being. For Wundt, these aspects of social behavior displayed the same natural laws of
individual association and apperception” (Luria, 1976, p. 4).
Luria then differentiates the Marxist Soviet psychology from the French school of
Durkheim, Mauss, Levy-Bruhl, and Janet. The major difference is that these authors do
not recognize that culture is fundamentally shaped by political economy:

As early as the beginning of the present century, Durkheim assumed that the
basic processes of the mind are not manifestations of the spirit’s inner life or the
result of natural evolution, but rather originated in society. Durkheim’s ideas
 206 macro cultural psychology

formed the basis for a number of other studies, in which the French psychologist
Pierre Janet and others played a prominent part. . . .
With considerable justification the French psychologists asserted that the basic
conceptual categories of space originated not in biology but in society, going back
to the spatial arrangement of the primitive nomad camp. The Frenchmen reasoned
similarly in their search for the origin of the concept of time in the conditions of
primitive society and its means for reckoning time. They also looked for a similar
explanation of the origin of the concept of number.
The French school of sociology, however, had one major shortcoming that invali-
dated its theories. It refused to interpret the influence of society on the individual
mind as the influence of the socioeconomic system and the actual forms of social
activity on individual consciousness. Unlike the approach of historical materialism,
the French school considered this process only as an interaction between “collective
representations” or “social consciousness” and individual consciousness, all the while
paying no attention to particular social systems, histories, or practices. By approach-
ing the relations between labor and production as individual activities, Durkheim
regarded society as the sphere of collective representations and convictions shaping
the mental life of the individual. Such was the point of departure for Durkheim’s
subsequent work, as well as that of the entire French school of sociology.
The French school thus side-tracked both particular forms of work and the
economic conditions forming the basis of all social life. It described the formation
of the individual mind as a purely spiritual event occurring in isolation from con-
crete practice and the particular conditions of its physical milieu. For this reason,
the French school’s attempts to trace the distinctive features of the human mind
at various stages of historical development led to conclusions that held back the
creation of a truly materialistic psychology.
The work of Lucien Levy-Bruhl, a representative of the French school, was highly
influential. From his assumption that human thinking in a primitive culture is pro-
duced by “collective representations” predominant in the society . . . Levy-Bruhl
was the first to point out the qualitative features of primitive thought and the first
to treat logical processes as products of historical development. He had a great
influence on psychologists in the 1920s who tried to go beyond simplistic notions
about the mind as a by-product of natural selection, and to understand human
consciousness as a product of sociohistorical development. Their analysis, however,
cut off human thought in its earlier stages of historical development from actual
activity and cognitive processes, which were then treated as the result of beliefs. . . .
(Luria, 1976, pp. 6–7)

In this statement, Luria forcefully and unambiguously champions historical materialism

as the proper general conception of culture. Socioeconomic activity is the basis of all his-
torical development and actual forms of social activity. Any approach that severs cognition
from socioeconomic activity is essentially invalid, though it may contain truthful elements.
(Luria’s critique would apply to contemporary anthropologists and cultural psychologists
such as Shweder and others who emphasize collective representations, symbols, concepts,
and meanings apart from socioeconomic activity). There is no eclecticism in Luria’s thinking.
 207 Macro Culture and Psychology

He recognized the importance of the French concepts for cultural psychology; however, they
needed to be grounded in socioeconomic activity that explains and concretizes them.
Luria concretizes historical development and culture as grounded in socioeconomic
activity. He does not leave them as open, nebulous concepts that can be filled with any
content anyone prefers.
Other social scientists have echoed this historical materialist model of society that
I have depicted as a cone. For instance, Sombart (1967) said, “It goes without saying that
the ‘spirit of the times’ is but the ‘spirit’ of a certain class” (p. 42).
John Clammer (1997, p. 52), speaking of Japanese culture, makes this point: “The view
that everything that is distinctive about Japan comes from some special attributes of
Japanese culture is often as unhelpful as it is reductionistic. In reality, politico-economic
factors frame culture in numerous subtle ways. ‘Tradition’ as it is now well known, is usu-
ally created by the dictates of political pressures, not because of some inherent dynamic
of culture itself.” Of course, culture reacts back on political economy as well.

Psychological Effects of the Political Economy

We have seen the dominance that economic position has on individual life outcomes.
More systematic evidence demonstrates that the political economy works through insti-
tutions such as family and school to affect psychological phenomena. The following
examples illustrate this.

Socioeconomic Status Structures Educational Psychology/Performance

Evidence appears in a recent report by the Educational Testing Service on factors that
affect educational performance. The study, The Family: America’s Smallest School (www.
ets.org/familyreport), demonstrates that economic factors are critical, and that they work
through the family to affect educational performance (Barton, P.E. & Coley, R.J.,
Educational Testing Service, [ETS], 2007). The family is a proximal cause, but it actually
reflects underlying economic influences.
Four “personal” factors predict each state’s test results on the federal eighth-grade
reading test with impressive accuracy. The four factors are: the percentage of children
living with one parent; the percentage of eighth graders absent from school at least three
times a month; the percentage of children 5 or younger whose parents read to them daily;
and the percentage of eighth graders who watch 5 or more hours of TV a day. “Together,
these four factors account for about two-thirds of the large differences among states,” the
report said. “By the time these children start school at age 5, they are far behind, and tend
to stay behind all through high school. There is no evidence that the gap is being closed.”
These four family factors are determined by, reflect, and represent, social class. The
report included a number of compelling findings:

• The average child in a professional family hears 35 million more words by age 4 than
a child from a poor family.
• The majority of kindergartners in the richest 20 are read to daily outside of school,
while the majority of kindergartners in the poorest 20 are not.
 208 macro cultural psychology

• At the start of kindergarten, black and Hispanic children score 20 lower on average
than white children on reading and math assessments.
• SAT scores improve an average of 10 points for every $10,000 of additional family
income.

The report also describes how much we rely on child care from an early age—half of
2-year-olds are in some kind of nonparental care—and how much worse that care is for
poor and minority children. According to the report, poor children are twice as likely
to be in low-quality care as middle- and upper-class children, black children more than
twice as likely as white children. As co-author of the report Richard Coley was quoted in
the New York Times: “Our day care system may be reinforcing the gap rather than closing
it” (Winerip, 2007).
This study reveals several important aspects of the economic dominance over social
factors. Firstly, it fans out over many domains, such as the family and education. Relations
among family members are structured by economic factors. Micro-level practices are not
the free creations of family members. This means that the economic dominance on social
behavior occurs both directly—through job opportunities and wages—and indirectly,
by permeating the family and education.
Secondly, the overt relationship between family practices and education actually is
mediated by the underlying presence of economic practices and conditions.
Thirdly, relying on family resources to aid educational performance actually permits
economic influences to dominate this performance, because family resources are a func-
tion of economic position. The more that children are expected, or required, to obtain
educational materials and training (homework, preparing for tests, memorizing and
understanding school work) and to complete projects at home, the more the advantages
wealthy students have and the disadvantages poor students have will carry over into edu-
cational performance. Thus, what appears to be a strategy for helping students to gain
additional resources at home to supplement those at school in order to perform better
turns out to be a strategy for reproducing socioeconomic and educational inequality.
What appears to be an attempt to personalize education by including the family turns
out to depersonalize education by permitting the influence of wealth to reign over
education.
Fourthly, the way to overcome socioeconomic inequality in education is to minimize
pupils’ dependence on family resources (privatization) and maximize the time children
spend in (public) school under relatively equal conditions. Schoolwork should be done in
school, where all students have equal access to computers, resources, instruction, and
training. (This was practiced in Chinese education in the 1950s and 1960s. Today, as well,
the high test scores of Chinese students relative to other countries are due to the strength-
ening of public education. Where education is privatized as in the United States, overall
test scores of the population of students plummets.) Public-sector support for educa-
tion dramatically reduces the impact of poverty, race, ethnicity, and gender on educa-
tional performance. The percentage of age-15 math and reading achievement test scores
explained by SES has been found to be twice as great in the United States and United
Kingdom (where the public support system is low) as in Canada or Finland, and nearly
 209 Macro Culture and Psychology

3 times as great as in Japan or Korea, where public support is high (Organization of

Economic Cooperation and Development, 2004).
Fifthly, because educational inequalities ultimately rest upon economic ones, they will
be difficult to overcome as long as the pressure of social class persists. Ultimately, social
class must be challenged by socioeconomic reform in order to equalize the range of
behaviors and conditions that rest upon economic activities.
Schooler emphasizes the powerful effect that the economy (i.e., SES) has on psychology.
She demonstrates that SES is a more powerful determiner of educational performance
than an individual’s cognitive competence. When students’ cognitive performance on
tests is equalized (controlled for), students from higher-SES households attain substan-
tially higher levels of education than low-SES students. “A high-ability student coming
from a family of high SES was approximately 3.5 times more likely to obtain a graduate
degree or professional education than a student with similar cognitive ability who came
from a family with low SES” (Schooler, 2007, p. 377). SES affected educational achieve-
ment through the mediation of parents’ expectations about their children’s achievement.
High-SES parents expected their children to go further in school, and their children per-
ceived their parents as having these expectations for them. High-SES children adopted
their parents’ expectations of them, and they realized them.
Similar data confirm the clear dominance of the political economy over education
and cognition. In 2004, the college attendance rates of upper-class students with the
lowest achievement levels were the same as those of the poorest students with the highest
achievement levels. A 2009 report concluded that higher education is becoming more
stratified, with enrollment growing in institutions with the least resources as more and
more students are pushed out of higher-priced institutions. Higher education reflects and
exacerbates the capitalist political economic class structure (Delbanco, 2009).
“About half of low-income students with a high school grade-point average of at least
3.5 and an SAT score of at least 1,200 do not attend the best college they could have. . . .
Meanwhile, lower-income students—even when they are better qualified—often go to
colleges that excel in producing dropouts” (Leonhardt, 2009).

Between the mid-1970s and mid-1990s, in a sample of eleven prestigious colleges, the
percentage of students from families in the bottom quartile of national family income
remained around 10. During the same period the percentage of students from the
top quartile rose sharply, from a little more than one third to fully half. If the sample
is broadened to include the top 150 colleges, the percentage of students from the
bottom quartile drops to 3. In short, there are very few poor students at America’s
top colleges, and a large and growing number of rich ones. (Delbanco, 2007, p. 42)

The economic divide works through psychological processes: “Students from low-income
families tend early in life to fall behind in cognitive skills, motivation, expectations, and
practical knowledge about the college admissions process. Most lose hope of attending a
top college long before the competition formally begins” (Delbanco, 2007, p. 42). As macro
cultural psychological theory predicts, subjectivity becomes adjusted to social position and
reinforces it, at the low end as well as at the high end.
 210 macro cultural psychology

An important series called “Class Matters” appeared in the New York Times beginning
May 15, 2005. A May 24, 2005, article confirms the dominance of social class over education.
In his examination of higher education, David Leonhardt noted that women and cultural
minorities, who were excluded from universities two generations ago, now fill the class-
rooms. And yet, despite the perception of higher education as the “great equalizer,” gradua-
tion rates among poorer students are low, while at more elite institutions where almost
everyone graduates, students are more likely than two decades ago to come from the higher
end of the nation’s income bracket. (Leonhardt, 2005).

The fact is that America’s colleges—with notable exceptions including community

colleges, historically black colleges, and a few distinctive private institutions such
as Berea College in Kentucky (Berea charges no tuition but requires campus work
from its students, who all come from low-income backgrounds)—have lately
been exacerbating more than ameliorating the widening disparity of wealth and
opportunity in American society. (Delbanco, 2009)

The American dream, in which education helps individuals transcend their social class
position, has been refuted. Boudon (1977) reports research by Thurow and others which
found that decreases in educational inequality in the United States between 1949 and
1969 were accompanied by increases in economic inequality. In addition, expanding edu-
cation did nothing to increase social mobility, which remained stable.
The evidence clearly supports our conical model of society, in which political economy
dominates the other macro cultural factors in a social system. Education is organized in
accordance with the capitalist political economy, and it functions to solidify the capitalist
class structure.
Abstract appeals for “more education” do not consider or correct this social organiza-
tion of education. They extend the existing social organization to more people. This has
the insidious effect of increasing inequality, because the unequal class nature of education
is extended more widely.
Stigler and Perry (1988) found significant pedagogical differences between American
and Asian classrooms. American classrooms are more fragmented and incoherent than
Japanese classes (p. 46). “American teachers shift among topics far more rapidly than
Japanese teachers. Seventy-five percent of all 5-minute instructional segments (of a math
lesson in fifth grade) in Japan focused on only one problem, compared to only 17 of the
segments in Chicago” (p. 47). Japanese teachers frequently devote an entire 40-minute
math lesson to one or two problems; this never happens in American classes. Additionally,
American teachers rarely explain relationships among different math topics and prob-
lems; instead, they concentrate on individual problems discretely. “More time is spent
making sure students have a blue crayon than to conveying the purpose of the three
segments on measurement” (p. 50). Similarly, “In American first grade classrooms, a total
of 21 of all segments contain transitions or irrelevant interruptions [such as handing
out materials, checking on crayons, or chatting] compared to 7 in Japan” (p. 46). Also,
teachers lead student academic activities far less in the United States than in Asia: “No
one was leading the students’ [mathematical] activity 9 of the time in Taiwan, 26 of
the time in Japan, and 51 of the time in the U.S.” (p. 37).
 211 Macro Culture and Psychology

Commerce Affects Family and Learning Styles

The vertical integration of factors on the array with the political economic base is described
in detailed research by Greenfield, Maynard, and Marti (2009). They document the wide-
spread influence of the political economy—commerce—on a wide array of pedagogic and
familial behaviors:

Worldwide global changes have shifted ecocultural environments from a subsis-

tence base toward commercial activity, from rural to urban environments, and
toward increased technology, larger group size, greater heterogeneity, and increas-
ing levels of formal education. These macro changes shift children’s learning envi-
ronments and pathways of development in particular and predictable directions.
Each of the above-mentioned ecological variables moves the learning environment
and development in an identical direction
As communities become more Gesellschaft in nature, female roles move in
the direction of more choice about partners, more independence, and more
freedom.
What are the implications of these changes for everyday family life, the cradle of
socialization and human development? Our cumulative research in the Zinacantec
Maya community of Nabenchauk in the highlands of Chiapas spans 1969 to the pres-
ent as it experienced these global trends. We have demonstrated that as the economy
decreased its basis in subsistence and became more commercial across a period of
two decades, apprenticeship processes became more independent (as opposed to
socially guided), teachers more often were members of the peer (as opposed to older)
generation, and cognitive strategies became both more abstract (vs. detail focused)
and more oriented toward processing novel (as opposed to familiar) stimuli.
These shifts are tied to changes in specific learning environments: Family
participation in commercial activities (compared with subsistence activities)
causes more independent apprenticeship processes in the domain of weaving
and more cognitive abstraction and comprehension of novelty in pattern repre-
sentation tasks. We found more children, especially girls, attending primary
school as well as the introduction of television. School attendance has also moved
cognitive strategies toward more abstract visual representation, and television has
expanded external visual representation in the design of woven and embroidered
textiles.
Family participation in commercial activities (compared with subsistence
activities) causes more independent apprenticeship processes in the domain of
weaving and more cognitive abstraction and comprehension of novelty in pattern
representation tasks. School attendance has also moved cognitive strategies
toward more abstract visual representation, and television has expanded external
visual representation in the design of woven and embroidered textiles.
From 1997 to 2007, our observations indicate movement toward more individ-
ual activity and more privacy, with less family togetherness; toward more special-
ized economic roles; toward more interaction with strangers and less with family;
toward more freedom for young women in their interactions with young men;
 212 macro cultural psychology

and toward more opportunity for girls and women in the academic and economic
realms. (pp. 935–936, 948–950)

Greenfield et al. (2009) cite numerous commercial influences on the culture of the
Mayan community they studied. For instance, commerce has shifted the daily routine. In
1997, family members who were at home went to bed by 9:00 p.m. and arose close to
dawn. In 2007, they often did not sleep at least one night a week because they were pre-
paring commodities for the market.
Commerce also led to shrinking family size. In 2007, parents were having fewer children
than in previous decades. Shrinking family size also affects sibling caretaking interactions.
In 2006, there were girls and boys who were not involved in sibling caretaking, whereas their
same-age counterparts had been involved in caring for younger siblings 9 years before.
By 2007, individual choices in everyday life had increased. For example, as recently as
2003, siblings typically ate together out of one pan around the fire, and individual food
choice was not an issue. By 2007, eating in markets or on the road had entered the family’s
lifestyle.
Before the commercial way of life, visitors at home, usually family members, were
common. Although the number of daily visitors was already much diminished in 1997
compared with earlier years, it was still greater than the number in 2007. With most
adults traveling to markets for their livelihood, many fewer adults, especially males, were
home in the village. During Greenfield et al.’s 10.5 hours of observation in Nabenchauk in
2007, the only social visits to the house under observation were paid by a sister-in-law
and her 3-year-old daughter, who lived next door. This situation contrasts with that of
1997, when a different sister-in-law lived across the courtyard in the same house and
would typically visit on a daily basis. Two decades earlier, visitors arrived several times
per day. One cause for this decrease in social activity is simply that with so much com-
mercial activity in neighboring cities, fewer family members are at home during the day.

Capitalist Development in Sudan and Family Life/Psychology

Institutions, artifacts, and concepts structure psychology by setting out social, conceptual,
spatial, temporal, and physical requirements that psychology must adapt to. This is described
in Katz’s (2004) ethnography of how capitalist economic development transformed the
everyday lives of Sudanese people. Katz followed the people of Howa after the village was
incorporated into a large state-sponsored agricultural development project in 1971.
The agricultural project gave pastoralists land and dwellings in exchange for their con-
verting their output from staple crops such as sorghum to cash crops such as cotton,
which the state purchased for resale on the international market. The new agricultural
lands were ruled off limits to the free grazing of animals. These few, “simple” changes had
extensive, reverberating, implacable effects on the entire social fabric. “The political-
economic changes associated with the project had direct effects on nearly every house-
hold in Howa” (p. 42). They eroded an entire culture of home-based production of
use-values, where production and reproduction were integrated, and changed it into a
specialized production of commodities as a business, separated from the reproductive
role of the family.
 213 Macro Culture and Psychology

“Independent cultivators became farm tenants, no longer producing grain for house-
hold consumption but cultivating cash crops for international exchange. . . . The Ministry
of Agriculture set the schedules, standards, and accounting criteria for the project.
It determined what crops would be grown and which cultivation practices and tools were
appropriate. The Project pioneered the use of an individual account system that effec-
tively put all the economic risk on the tenant” (Katz, 2004, p. 33). Th e accounting system
embodied and imposed individualistic responsibility on the tenants that eroded their
previous collective system.
Rather than producing a variety of goods for its own subsistence, the family became
specialized producers of a single cash crop. This forced it to purchase the goods it formerly
produced for itself, and this meant that the family had to pursue money as the means for
obtaining these goods.
The new form of agricultural production transformed the role of women and children
in the family. “The changes provoked by the project called forth new labor arrangements,
such as women’s fieldwork . . .” (Katz, 2004, p. 49). Children were excluded from produc-
tion, and their nonproductive role required new forms and content of socialization.
“As the village continued to grow, an increasing percentage of its population was com-
pelled to seek work outside the village or as laborers or sharecroppers in the tenancies of
others” (Katz, 2004, p. 42).
These imposing political-economic changes altered the structure and sense of life.
They were reflected in the psychology of children’s play, which was outside the political
economy per se:

Despite the inventive ways children encountered new social forms and made
them their own, it remains that, to the extent that the possibilities of the mimetic
faculty worked, it worked to help the children embrace and become subjects of
capitalism. The possibilities of inventing something else remained only possibili-
ties, rather than actual instances of social transformation in Howa, though of
course the locally ascendant capitalism was certainly calling forth new kinds of
identities that the children were inventing in their play and otherwise. . . . Girls
playing house likewise manipulated objects which they imagined and played with
the practices of their future lives. . . .
The acuity with which socioeconomic of political-ecologic relations were
absorbed in the play was extraordinary. . . . The power of money worked across
games. . . . The children’s mimetic exchanges embodied, and were embodied in,
Howa’s lurch toward the monetization of everything. Cars were most popular
among the many things that children, particularly boys, modeled or constructed
out of mud, clay, metal, or other materials. (Katz, 2004, pp. 104, 106, 108)

This is an important lesson for incorporating such psychological phenomena within

the rubric of macro cultural psychology.viii It is also an important statement about the
function of agency, for Katz found that the active way in which children encountered new
social forms actually worked to help them embrace and become subjects of capitalism.
Agency did not enable the children to resist and transform capitalist development as Katz
had hoped it would.
 214 macro cultural psychology

Katz (2004) looks for ways in which the Howa resisted these changes, but she docu-
ments few. She says, “The conditions that had engendered marginalization and differen-
tiation in Howa were met with active resistance by many tenants. Of most consequence
was the successful popular effort led by the tenants union to allow the cultivation of sor-
ghum on project lands. Another arena of resistance was seen in the relative inattention of
many tenants to cotton cultivation” (p. 47). However, the request to grow sorghum was
met with minimal concessions. The Ministry agreed to allow tenants to use only one
hectare for sorghum. This minimal concession ensured the government of a continual
supply of the cash crops it needed to sell abroad. Other requests to grow additional crops
for personal use were refused for the same reason. This minimal compromise forced the
farmers to remain in the money economy of specialized production (p. 34).
This is hardly active resistance. And slacking on cotton production would result in
lowered income, which could not be endured in an increasingly cash-oriented economy;
therefore, that form of resistance could not be effective. Nor did the expected modulation
and transformation of economic changes by children’s imagination and play impede the
implacable, extensive social and psychological changes that Katz documents.
Katz (2004) admits to the failure of resistance in a telling example regarding destructive
deforestation that resulted from the agricultural transformation of Howa:

No matter how articulate they were in setting forth the problems of local defores-
tation, Howa children neither offered nor seemed to think about solutions to the
problem, nor did they make plans for using forestry resources less destructively. In
this they followed their elders. Virtually all adults in Howa bemoaned eloquently
and often the rapid disappearance of trees from the area. Given the economic and
political-ecologic constraints upon them, most felt it was impossible to do any-
thing to stop the process because wood was the cheapest and most commonly
available source of fuel in the area. . . . Most people in Howa, including children,
recognized their own contributions to deforestation. . . . With no reasonable alter-
natives to woodfuel and no government or international programs encouraging
fuel efficiency via new stove designs or new sources of energy, there was little
alternative but to cut what trees remained. (pp. 127–128)

Capitalism and the Form of Knowledge

Knowledge, has been shown to be affected by the political economy of capitalism. The
form and distribution of knowledge are affected by its use/function in capitalist global-
ized commerce:

Knowledge is and has always been a driving force for creativity, innovation and
development. Within the new framework of global knowledge economies, how-
ever, the strategic use of knowledge as a productive factor for economic develop-
ment and wealth has increasingly turned knowledge into a competitive economic
resource. The organizational strategies of the World Bank and its influential report
on Knowledge for development (1998–1999) have been decisive in this process.
 215 Macro Culture and Psychology

By adapting to the policy approach of the World Bank, multilateral development

organizations have become vital forces in this new economy, to the point that they
may even support the trend of an economisation and privatisation of knowledge
within the competitive environment on a global scale. (Evers, Kaiser, & Muller,
2010, pp. 55–56)

This analysis validates our conical conception of society. First, political economic inter-
ests are concretizing abstract knowledge into a competitive economic resource. Moreover,
a leading institution of the capitalist political economy, the World Bank, sets the tone for
less dominant institutions such as multilateral development organizations. These rein-
force and promulgate the cultural organization of knowledge imposed by the dominant
World Bank. We have a social structure dominated by a political economic institution
that organizes other institutions and the architecture of knowledge itself.
The World Bank initiated the process (and notion) of knowledge management/treat-
ment to serve its macro political-economic interests.

In 1996 the World Bank was among the first to implement the strategic concept of
knowledge management, followed by a wide range of bilateral and multilateral
agencies as well as organisations in the North and gradually in the South.
Positioning itself as the “ultimate knowledge broker”, the World Bank adopted an
ambitious goal. In many ways, the global field of development cooperation today
resembles other market cultures, for instance stock markets and markets for com-
modities or for raw materials. (Evers, Kaiser, & Muller, 2010, p. 59)

Thus, it was the World Bank’s desire to be the ultimate knowledge broker and manager
on the free-market of commodified knowledge that led it to accumulate and distribute
knowledge in a particular manner—its architecture. The social organization of knowl-
edge was structured by political economic interests, as our conical model proposes. To
ensure central control of and profit- taking from knowledge of community development,
the architecture took a specific form: “A novel feature of the global knowledge architec-
ture is not only the fluid exchange between individual experts at the global scale, but the
fact that all shared information is channeled first to the headquarters, where a moderator
distributes the message and in addition collects all the answers given by the experts”
(Evers, Kaiser, & Muller, 2010, p. 61).
The political economy of capitalism has structured the social form of knowledge—
what content is valued, how much is made available, and to whom. Even more insidious
is the commercial shaping of knowledge itself.

But what happens to knowledge itself along the formal structure of codification
and standardisation? Experts gather experience within their particular working
context, that is, health, agriculture and economics. At this level, experience is
already disconnected from local particularities, dynamics and capacities, and
from relevant structures of understanding—in short, from the social organisation
of existing forms of local knowledge. Additional standardised techniques of data
gathering, such as participatory methods (for example, participatory rural
 216 macro cultural psychology

appraisal) predominantly extract elements of knowledge, whether about agricul-

tural practices, teaching methods or water usage. They do not consider social rela-
tions, power structures and translocal interactions, all of which are vital processes
in the construction of local realities. Experts add local information to predefined
concepts. Thus, selected pieces of knowledge are separated out from the respective
historical, cultural and social context of origin and inserted into new forms of
logic and frames for (development) action, even in cases where they were selected
through this prism. The procedure of knowledge selection, explication and digita-
lization destroys the unity of knowledge structure, its content and understanding.
We might pose the provocative statement: how can the poor become knowledge-
able if global knowledge, in terms of content, becomes “poorer” along the chain of
knowledge engineering? (Evers, Kaiser, & Muller, 2010, p. 62)

This statement explains the political economic interest behind the fragmentation and
decontextualization of knowledge (and memory) everywhere. The point of fragmentation
is to decimate local cultural contexts so that they do not interfere with the expropriating
of “facts” for use by capitalistic, imperialistic interests on the free market. The best justifica-
tion for trampling over the local context of resources and knowledge about them is to
simply deny the context altogether. Facts are facts and context does not matter. Facts about
resources can be homogenized on the commodities market. Justice, rights, ecology, cultural
values, and implications are cast aside regarding knowledge of resources, just as they are
cast aside to simplify extraction of the resources themselves. Commodified objects require
commodified knowledge and the elimination of bothersome contexts. Methodology that
extracts facts from contexts and denies contexts altogether is necessary for this end.
Attempts to “localize” global constructs are resisted because the overriding interest is in
removing local contexts in order to free resources and knowledge for appropriation by
central organizations that wish to trade those resources on the open, international market.
The last thing they want is for local considerations to weigh down this process. Neoliberal,
free-market laws, codified in the World Trade Organization, explicitly discount local
values, ecological effects, customs, and local needs.

The Dynamics of the Conical Structure

Political economy structures society in two ways. One is through dominant leaders of
the economy directly intervening in, and administering, macro cultural factors to make
them congruent with the political economy. Capitalist owners of enterprises, for example,
administer the workplace and the behavior of workers during the working day. They con-
trol ubiquitous advertisements that profoundly affect psychology. Capitalists also control
the government by making financial contributions to politicians and by directly staffing
government agencies, such as the Department of State, Department of Defense, Food and
Drug Administration, and Federal Communications Commission. Capitalists also own
and control news media and have a vested interest in steering news away from examining
the political-economic foundation of capitalist society. Capitalists directly dominate higher
education by recruiting university presidents to corporate boards of directors. Giving
presidents enormous perks seduces them into the service of corporate political interests.
 217 Macro Culture and Psychology

The president of Stanford University, John L. Hennessy, sits on three boards, including that
of Google. (Google also has the president of Princeton, Shirley Tilghman, on its board.)
Hennessy earns $846,756 for his participation on the three boards, which is more than his
$702,771 salary from Stanford. Ruth Simmons, the president of Brown University, and the
first African American woman to lead an Ivy League university, sat on the Goldman Sachs
board until she stepped down in 2010. In 2009, she earned $323,539 from her Goldman
directorship, including stock grants and options, as calculated by Goldman, and she left the
board with stock worth, at the time, around $4.3 million. As a director, Dr. Simmons was
partly responsible for approving Goldman’s bonuses during the boom years—including
the $68 million pay package awarded to its chairman, Lloyd Blankein, in 2007, the largest
ever on Wall Street. E. Gordon Gee, the president of Ohio State University, sat on three
corporate boards (including Massy Energy, notorious for mine disasters and mountaintop
removal), which compensated him $472,846. In 2006, 50 of presidents of all doctorate-
granting institutions sat on corporate boards. Such corporate largesse cannot fail to sway
these presidents toward corporate worldviews (Bowley, 2010, p. 1).
Capitalists do not own and control all areas of social life; yet all these areas are largely
congruent with the political economic base of society,. This consistency of many macro
cultural factors with political economy is remarkable because it is not enforced by capi-
talists as work, advertising, government, and the news are. Indeed, capitalists do not care
about social trends in clothing styles, architecture, entertainment, video games, and phi-
losophy of science. The congruence between the political economy and social factors not
directly controlled by capitalists testifies to the greater dominance by political economy,
for it indicates that the political economy is so dominant that it exercises hegemony over
the culture “on its own” (Lukes, 2005). The political economy creates a “sense of life” that
reverberates through the society even outside direct capitalist control. Sense of time, pri-
vacy, speed, novelty, materialism, competition, egoism, impulsiveness, slimness, and sen-
sationalism all reverberate in this manner. Artists, musicians, philosophers, educators,
and family members all resonate with this sense of life that reverberates from the institu-
tions controlled by the socioeconomic elite.
This power of the political economy to shape subjectivity far and wide also testifies to
the fact that subjectivity is sensitive to cultural themes. Subjectivity has “cultural recep-
tors,” or “political economic receptors” (metaphorically akin to cell receptors that are
sensitive to certain biochemical particles) that scan for political economic stimuli and
respond to them. Just as parents are especially sensitive to their children’s cries, so all
humans are especially sensitive to political economic “waves” that travel across social
space. Thus, young adults who feel an urge to compose music are predisposed by their
cultural sensitivity to the political economy to develop a cultural habitus that composes
the music in accordance with the political economy. Bourdieu (1998, p. 8) alluded to this
generative, unifying function of the habitus: “The habitus is this generative and unifying
principle which retranslates the intrinsic and relational characteristics of a [social] posi-
tion into a unitary lifestyle, that is, a unitary set of choices of persons, goods, and prac-
tices.” Bourdieu supports my analysis that subjectivity is a unifying cultural force: it
actively organizes a set of cultural behaviors into a lifestyle that enhances the cultural
organization of macro cultural factors. Subjectivity realizes culture, it does not typically
resist culture.
 218 macro cultural psychology

Ironically, the less that direct control is necessary to maintain cultural coherence, the
more influential and powerful the culture (political economy) is in its ability to direct
behavior. Totalitarianism is a measure of the weakness of a cultural system to maintain
control over people. People believe so little in the system that leaders are forced to coerce
them into accepting it. Where they believe in the system and internalize it in their “own”
subjectivity, direct control is unnecessary.
Political economy shapes the social organization of macro cultural factors as well as the
content of these factors. These factors can be tightly integrated or separated. For instance,
in our political economy, education, family, recreation, and religion are separated from
other social institutions. Education occurs away from work; it has its own physical infra-
structure (school buildings) and its own institution (of administration, laws, pedagogy, and
social roles of specialized teachers and administrators). In traditional societies, education
takes the form of apprenticeship in the course of work; it is not specialized. Religion, recre-
ation, and family are also part of economic activity in traditional societies, whereas they
are specialized, separate domains in ours. The political economy determines the extent of
differentiation and specialization among cultural factors. The separation of religion from
government, for example, is a political notion that is written into our Constitution. The
family became separate from work when capitalist industry made business an exclusively
commercial activity devoted to maximizing profit and dispelling personal, family, and
housing considerations from business activity. This pushed personal issues into the private
family and led to the institutional and psychological separation of family/personal/home
from work.
This means that even when institutions are differentiated from the economy and poli-
tics, they reflect political economy, because it is political economy that determines the
extent of their differentiation. In other words, the family that is highly differentiated from
economic production in capitalism is still a capitalist institution. Its very distinctiveness is
a product of, a feature of, and an embodiment of capitalism. It is only highly differentiated
in capitalist society. A differentiated family is a bourgeois family. Consequently, while the
family has qualities that are different from commodity production (parents do not require
their children to pay for food, the way a shopkeeper does), it also has qualities that reflect
and reinforce the capitalist economy (which we shall examine in Chapters 5 and 6).
The political-economic base of the cone (or funnel) also determines the relative influ-
ence that institutions have, or the relations among the factors. For instance, the political
economy of American capitalism determines that private wealth (e.g., a family’s wealth)
exerts a tremendous influence on all aspects of a family’s (individual’s) life. Health care,
education, neighborhood and living conditions, mentoring, and all resources are deter-
mined by and vary with family wealth in the United States. This is far less true in other
countries such as Canada and Western Europe, where the political economy is more
cooperative and the government funds many health, educational, and other programs
that are publicly available to all people and whose availability does not depend so heavily
on family (personal) income. Thus, political economy can reduce the influence of private
wealth on health care, education, etc. Political economy does not mean that all cultural
and personal issues depend upon how much private wealth one has. Political economy is
the manner in which the economy is socially organized and which social (i.e., class)
interests it represents.
 219 Macro Culture and Psychology

Advantages of the Conical Model of Society for Social Science

The conical model is scientific in that it is parsimonious. It postulates a core of funda-
mental features and principles that explains and organizes a wide diversity of individual
elements. Other models have no ability to explain the totality of individual facts coher-
ently in terms of a small set of principles.ix
The conical model identifies the relative importance of factors within the system. It helps
us avoid the common problems of haphazardly choosing a macro factor in isolation; iden-
tifying a superficial, obvious feature of it; and associating it with a psychological phenom-
enon. The conical model stimulates and directs research into how the concrete cultural
character of cultural factors relates to the form and content of psychological phenomena.
In the conical model, every phenomenon is a complex of three qualities: (1) its “own”
distinctive quality (e.g., the family is a distinctive institution [macro cultural factor] with “its
own” qualities of raising and caring for individuals—medicine treats disease, religion has
distinctive metaphysical concepts), (2) qualities that are imparted from other phenomena
at the array of the cone (e.g., the family is influenced by government laws, by educational
practices/requirements, by entertainment, and by religious doctrines), and (3) qualities that
derive from the political economy (e.g., the family is affected by job opportunities, com-
mercialism, consumerism, the profit motive, and private property).
It is therefore a mistake to consider “1” alone, as an autonomous, universal, natural,
fixed quality. The quality of “1” varies with “2” and “3.” It is imperative to include “2” and
“3” in one’s explanation and description of “1.” We must recognize that beneath the surface
of the loving parent, the concerned teacher or therapist, the dedicated medical researcher
or psychological methodologist, lurk qualities from other cultural phenomena (“2”) and
from the political economy (“3”) which may contravene the qualities of “1.” This is what
makes cultural phenomena and psychological phenomena complex and concrete.x
Applying this analysis to collectivism reveals that it is not a formal, simple, obvious,
fixed, familiar thing. It has a complicated, subtle, variable, concrete cultural content that
is political. For instance, modern Chinese collectivism was formed by the political system
of the 1950s–1980s. In this period, every aspect of life was controlled by the Communist
Party. People were forced to identify with and obey their culture. Chinese citizens who
associated with foreigners were tracked by secret police and informants, and they were
punished and prevented from having further foreign contacts. Citizens were forced to
study Party documents every week, and to use specific political terminology in school
assignments and scientific reports. Foreign travel was restricted to prevent defections.
This concrete collectivism was not a quaint solidarity among a community of friends.
This concrete character of Chinese collectivism must be highlighted in any discussion of
collectivism or Chinese society.
Individualism is similarly concretized by relating it to its political economic base. It
then rises from the abstract, incomplete definition of “self-interest” and takes on concrete
capitalist features including competition, private ownership of property, instability, alien-
ation, utilitarianism, and hedonism (cf. du Gay, 2005).
If we naïvely looked at motherhood in contemporary America, we would be fascinated
by the interpersonal behaviors of affection and feeding without being sensitive to their
unique, specific cultural features. We would perceive mothers giving many gifts to their
 220 macro cultural psychology

children in a fond manner and interpret this as their expressing their great love for their
children. We would not be aware of how much mothers’ love for children is defined by
and constituted by the giving of consumer products; we would only comprehend this if
we first understood the dominance of consumer capitalism that encourages people to
define personal relations, and even self-concept, in terms of consumer products. This
commodification of love would not be obvious from direct inspection of motherhood
itself. Motherhood is not merely expressed in products; it is defined by them. A study of
consumer capitalism is a prerequisite for understanding the concrete, cultural character
of motherhood in modern capitalist society. Motherhood itself does not sensitize us to
consumer capitalism.

The Political Economic Base of Society is the Common, Unifying

Focus (Objective) of the Social Sciences and Political Action
Political economy is at the core of cultural factors and human psychology. Understanding
these requires comprehension of political economy. This means that political economy
unifies all the social sciences around a common objective and stock of knowledge.
Improving social life similarly requires transforming the political economy. Social sci-
ence and political action are thus unified in being geared toward a common object. Social
science apprehends political economy intellectually (in cultural and psychological ele-
ments), and politics apprehends it materially as it exists in practice. Intellectual activity
and practical activity are joined in political economy.
Once the social sciences set their sights on the concrete, they will illuminate the soci-
ety’s core principles and practices and will subject them to evaluation. This will be useful
for political movements working to improve society; they will see the roots of social-
psychological problems in the political economy that social scientists have exposed, and they
will direct their efforts to transform the political economy in order to solve the problems.
This, of course, is a terrifying prospect to the powers that be. The last thing they want to see
is the political economy exposed and restructured. The best way to prevent this is to distract
people from the intellectual quest of apprehending concrete social reality, which implicates
the political economy. In one way or another, the concrete is hidden from view. Even trained
cultural psychologists, whose stated objective is to comprehend culture and its psychological
dimensions, fail to achieve their objective. Their failure is utterly functional for the status
quo, but it is utterly disastrous for civilization, which requires, more than ever, a thorough
analysis and transformation of concrete political economy. This is why failures to apprehend
the concrete must be relentlessly exposed—not to attack particular researchers, but to avoid
repeating their errors, which have serious scientific and political consequences.
Exposing failures to apprehend (and transform) concrete culture and psychology, and
correcting these failures, is the task of the next chapter, which paves the way for our dis-
cussion about apprehending concrete culture and psychology in Chapter 5.

ENDNOTES
i. This kind of reification is the essence of religion as well. People invent a concept of god(s)
but they pretend that it is their god who invented them and guides their behavior.
 221 Macro Culture and Psychology

ii. Vygotsky, L. S. (1987). The Collected works of L.S. Vygotsky (Vol. 1). New York: Plenum.
With kind permission of Springer Science and Business Media.
iii. One’s competence with macro cultural factors is also used to define one’s psychologi-
cal attributes. Intelligence is defined by one’s success on cultural artifacts such as timed
vocabulary tests.
iv. Women are also more similar to men in aggression than is normally recognized. An anno-
tated bibliography of 271 scholarly investigations (211 empirical studies and 60 reviews)
demonstrates that women are as physically aggressive, or more aggressive, than men in
their relationships with their spouses or male partners. The aggregate sample size in the
reviewed studies exceeds 365,000 (Fiebert, 2010). These psychological findings indicate
that women’s roles no longer insulate them from broad cultural pressures toward compe-
tition and aggression.
v. Vygotsky explained that socialization of children follows this principle:. Socialization
occurs by providing external structures which contain psychological elements for
the child to appropriate as his mediational means. “As a rule, the child always masters
eternal forms earlier than the internal structure of any mental operation. The child begins
to count long before he understands what counting is and applies it intelligently. In speech,
the child has such conjunctions as ‘because,’ ‘if,’ and ‘although’ long before the realization
of causality, conditionality, or opposition appears in his thinking. Grammatical develop-
ment in children’s speech precedes the development of logical categories corresponding
to these language structures” (Vygotsky, 1998, p. 66).
vi. Researchers have ruled out psychological explanations for eating disorders because they
are too general and do not account for the specific problem. Psychological (individual)
factors such as childhood sexual abuse, self-directed hostility, guilt, depression, low self-
esteem, and impulsiveness can motivate a vast number of behaviors. Conversely, eating
disorders can be an attempt at coping with all these psychological factors. Consequently,
there is no association between eating disorders and any particular psychological factor.
vii. While government corruption by political economy is well known, the reader may be inter-
ested to see that it extends to the Congressional Black Caucus, a group of Democratic legis-
lators, which claims to be devoted to civil rights for black people. According to a February
14, 2010, article in the New York Times, (Lipton & Lichtbllaun, 2010) federal tax records show
that in 2008, the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation spent more on the caterer for its
signature legislative dinner and conference—nearly $700,000—than it gave out in scholar-
ships. At the gala, lobbyists and executives who give to charities favored by the caucus—
including disreputable cigarette companies; Internet poker operators; beer brewers; and the
rent-to-own industry, which has become a particular focus of consumer advocates for its
practice of charging high monthly fees for appliances, televisions, and computers—get to
mingle with lawmakers. They also get seats on committees the caucus has set up to help
members of Congress decide what positions to take on the issues of the day. The board of
the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation includes executives and lobbyists from main-
stream corporations Boeing, Wal-Mart, Dell, Citigroup, Coca-Cola, Verizon, Heineken, and
Anheuser-Busch and the drug makers GlaxoSmithKline. All are hefty donors to the caucus.
Some of the biggest donors also have seats on the Congressional Black Caucus Political
Education and Leadership Institute, which drafts positions on issues before Congress,
including health care and climate change. For example, Larry Duncan, a Lockheed Martin
lobbyist, served on a caucus institute panel that recommended that the United States form
closer ties with Liberia, even as his company was negotiating a huge airport contract there.
 222 macro cultural psychology

viii. Geertz made a similar analysis of the effects of Dutch forced cultivation systems in
Indonesia in his book Agricultural Involution. As summarized by Elson (2007, p. 254),
the book employed a structural analysis of socioeconomic conditions that explained the
peasants’ poverty and their forms of interaction. “For Geertz, such notions as mutual
assistance and shared access to resources were themselves the creature of the interplay of
larger political and ecological forces. . . . Culture . . . explains the kind, range, and style of
otherwise mystifying involutionary behaviors that Javanese peasants adopted to accom-
modate their worsening plight.” This is a rather unknown aspect of Geertz’s work that
resonates with macro cultural psychology.
ix. The conical model not only applies to the way phenomena themselves are organized; it
also describes the way in which scientific theories about phenomena are organized. In the
Introduction, we noted that scientific theories have a conical structure that is dominated
by a few basic, parsimonious concepts that structure the wide range of individual con-
structs. This is a fascinating isomorphism between social reality and conceptions of it.
x. Social science theories are also complicated by this tripartite quality. Theories and
methodologies that seem to address a particular issue (e.g., psychoanalysis, behaviorism,
micro cultural psychology, cross-cultural psychology, indigenous psychology, exchange
theory, humanistic psychology, evolutionary psychology, positivistic methodology, ratio-
nal choice theory, educational theories, linguistic theories, and psychiatry) are greatly
influenced by other cultural factors and by the political economy of capitalism. These
other factors usually form the inspiration for theories and methodologies, and they are in
turn reinforced by social science theories and methodologies. Social science is no more
autonomous than other cultural factors are. This is depicted in Figure 1.9.
 4
philosophical principles
of concrete macro cultural
psychology

THE SCIENTIFIC AND POLITICAL

IMPORTANCE OF THE CONCRETE
Now that we have explored general features of culture and psychology, we prepare to
explore concrete features in Chapter 5. Concrete culture and psychology are the elusive
Holy Grail that macro cultural psychologists seek to apprehend, for the concrete level (die
konkrete Wirtlichkeit) is essential in order to achieve an adequate scientific understand-
ing of human psychology; moreover, the concrete level is where substantive social and
psychological improvement must take place. We improve society by critiquing and
humanizing specific practices of our financial institutions, government, technology, art,
schools, military, and churches. We would have to change autocratic work rules, peda-
gogical styles, television content, news content, and the profit motive. We cannot improve
society by changing abstract features of education, news, and the media, such as “pro-
vides information.” Nor can we understand or improve society by enumerating abstract
features of work (such as “produces things”) or government (such as “makes rules for
society”).
The same is true for psychological functions. We can improve self-esteem, agency,
problem solving, motivation, and mental illness only by helping people alter the specific
content of these. Improvement cannot come from abstract urging to “express your
agency,” “express your feelings,” “be motivated,” or “get in touch with reality.”
Apprehending concrete culture and psychology requires an understanding of what
concreteness is, so we know what to look for and how to find it. This chapter elucidates
this issue. It also explains various obstacles to apprehending the concrete, the institu-
tional function they play, the institutional support they receive, the difficulty in over-
coming them, and, finally, how they can be overcome. Delving into all of this is a
prerequisite for understanding the concrete and apprehending it in our theories and
methodologies.
A good place to start is with an explanation of the relation between abstract and con-
crete. This will articulate a bridge from abstract discussions of culture and psychology—
which monopolize the field of psychology—to their concrete features. This discussion
will help us to move from the abstract level, which is admittedly important (and which

223
 224 macro cultural psychology

occupied the first three chapters of this book), to the concrete level. It will enable us to
retain and utilize the important aspects of abstraction and extend them to concrete
aspects. In this way we will avoid creating a false dichotomy between the two and throw-
ing out the baby with the bath water. If we simply jumped into the concrete level, we
would commit these errors, and we would have little philosophical justification and
direction for the plunge. Ironically, a patient, philosophical discussion of abstraction and
concreteness will also clarify the nature of abstraction and help us articulate abstract
aspects of culture and psychology more carefully and usefully.

LEVELS OF ABSTRACTION
All phenomena have abstract and concrete features. Psychological and cultural phenom-
ena have abstract and concrete features which must be distinguished and are often con-
fused. Distinguishing the two levels, and also apprehending their interconnection, is vital
for progress in science and politics.
The abstract level concerns generalities such as all humans think in symbolic terms, or
that culture is socially constructed, shared patterns of behavior. The concrete level con-
cerns the particular symbols, thoughts, modes of thinking, artifacts, and institutions that
different people have.
Love, for example, has abstract features in the sense that it is a general caring for people,
and also for animals, objects, nations, and the environment. This general caring is con-
cretized in particular cultures. The modern form of romantic love, for example, has par-
ticular cultural features—including sexual passion, personal intimacy, trust, irrationality,
and uncontrollability—that are unique (as a package) and which contrast with the
Puritanical love practiced by many American colonists.
Similarly, play has abstract qualities such as “spontaneous,” “informal,” and “unreal/
pretend/imaginary.” However, it also has concrete features, such as the kinds of games
that children play in different countries. Play for contemporary children in advanced
countries typically includes numerous commercial toys stocked with programs from the
manufacturer. This contrasts with play in prior epochs that involved creating games with
few toys (e.g., dancing, hopscotch, baseball with a simple stick on the street in front of
one’s home).
In the previous chapter, we noted that politics is the general animation of macro cul-
tural factors, but it has different concrete forms in different social systems.
The Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure, whose lectures before the first World War
were posthumously published in 1916 as the Course in General Linguistics, distinguished
langue, or the synchronic, ahistorical study of language as a total system, from parole, or
the diachronic, historical study of language as it is spoken and temporally evolved.
(Saussure insisted that langue be the study of scientific linguistics, which made him the
founder of structural linguistics.)
Knowledge similarly has abstract features plus concrete cultural ones. “Knowledge is
and has always been a driving force for creativity, innovation and development. Within
the new framework of global knowledge economies, however, the strategic use of knowl-
edge as a productive factor for economic development and wealth has increasingly turned
knowledge into a competitive economic resource” (Evers et al., 2010, p. 55).
 225 Philosophical Principles

Abstract
Schooling
level

Concrete School School School

level system 1 system 2 system 3

fig . 4.1 Abstract and Concrete Levels of Phenomena.

Cultural phenomena such as social class, education, work, and the family also have
both abstract and concrete features. The abstract features of social classes are the expro-
priation of resources and power by one class that subordinates other classes to its eco-
nomic and political dominance. Hierarchy and inequality are concretized in particular
ways such as slavery or the relationship between the capitalist upper class and the prole-
tarian working class.
The relation between the two levels of abstraction may be depicted as in Figure 4.1,
regarding schooling (cf. Ratner, 1991, p. 115, for a more detailed analysis).
Figure 4.1 shows that schooling exists as a general, abstract phenomenon. However,
it exists only in and through particular schools (Tobin, Hseuh, & Karasawa, 2009). These
define what schooling is. People create concrete schools, not schooling. The abstraction
derives from the features of the particulars. New particulars alter the nature of the
abstraction. If all schools divorced academics from practical experience, schooling would
have this character. If some schools were found to integrate academics and practice, it
would require that schooling be reconceptualized to encompass these schools. Schooling
would no longer be defined as separating academics and practice; it would have to be
more general to encompass the different kinds of schools.
Conversely, abstractions define and unify particular examples. Individual schools are
schools because they meet the general criteria of what “school” is. Whales are mammals,
though they do not seem to be at first glance, because they meet the general criteria. As
a result of a new conceptualization of planet, Pluto has been disqualified from this cate-
gory (Soter, 2007).
Empirical evidence similarly leads to a refinement of our understanding of “cancer,”
“autism,” and “schizophrenia,” and these general understandings allow for more precise
identification of whether a dysfunction is a symptom of cancer or whether it represents
another disease.
While the abstract and concrete levels are interdependent—as depicted with the cycli-
cal arrows in Figure 3.5—they are conceptually distinct and must not be conflated
(cf. Marx, 1973, pp. 100–108). The human capacity, and tendency, to love does not explain
the concrete cultural form, nor does the latter stand for “love” in general.
Specific cultural factors cannot be construed as general and abstract. A particular
school system cannot be regarded as schooling in general, although it does incorporate
general features of schooling. Other schools with other characteristics also qualify to be
considered as schools. Conversely, abstractions provide little information about specific
 226 macro cultural psychology

Abstract universal

Class Classless

Hunting &
Capitalism Feudalism Communism
gathering

United
Germany
States

fig . 4.2 Levels of Abstraction of Culture.

social-psychological activities. For example, Piaget and Vygotsky emphasized that social
interaction in general stimulates language, cognitive growth, logical reasoning, and con-
sciousness in general (Ratner, 2006a, pp. 73–74; Ratner, 2007a; Vygotsky, 1978, p. 56).
While these observations are important, they are uninformative about the form or con-
tent of cognition in particular societies.
Concrete and abstract features of social systems admit gradations or levels. Th ese levels
are illustrated in Figure 4.2.
Culture has abstract, general features that are common to all societies. Culture also has
more specific, “formal” features that characterize class societies (since 10,000 years ago)
but not classless societies (which were the first human societies and which persisted for
approximately 100,000 years before social classes were developed). Class societies are
divided into different kinds, such as capitalism or feudalism. The most concrete level of
social abstraction is a particular country’s brand of a given kind of class society (e.g.,
American capitalism and German capitalism).
Each level incarnates features of all the abstract levels above it, as well as constituting
a novel, distinct level with unique features. Each higher, more abstract level explains
important details of the lower, more concrete level. Many features of contemporary
American society derive from its being a capitalist socioeconomic system. Many features
of American capitalism derive from America’s being a class society. And features of class
society have features of all cultural organizations.
 227 Philosophical Principles

Understanding general features of culture helps one analyze certain aspects of American
culture and psychology. For instance, all cultural organizations are emergent holistic
complexes that transcend individual members. This helps one understand that social
classes are not sums of independent individuals; they are consciously organized to pre-
serve their class organization. This aspect of general culture also corrects the individualis-
tic idea that wealthy German capitalists achieved their elite status through independent
effort.
We must understand all four levels in order to understand contemporary American
capitalism, and the cultural psychology of American people (Ratner, 1991, pp. 113–122).
All of this is necessary in order for one to be a cultural psychologist.
While all four social levels are incarnated in contemporary American culture and psy-
chology, it is useful to parse the features of their psychology that derive from concrete
American society, capitalism, class society, and culture in general.
Figure 4.2 shows that concrete factors are necessary to provide a full account of a phe-
nomenon such as schooling. Unfortunately, most psychological research privileges the
abstract level and ignores the concrete level. Some representative research titles from
Psychological Science are “Gaze-Triggered Orienting as a Tool of the Belongingness Self-
Regulation System,” “Transformation Direction Influences Shape-Similarity Judgments,”
“Predictive Eye Movements Are Driven by Goals, Not by the Mirror Neuron System,”
“Panic Search: Fear Produces Efficient Visual Search for Nonthreatening Objects,” and
“Group-Based Trust in Strangers: The Role of Stereotypes and Expectations.” The
Personality & Social Psychology Bulletin contains the same abstractions: “Things Will Get
Better: The Anxiety-Buffering Qualities of Progressive Hope,” “The Impact of Unfair
Treatment on Depressive Mood: The Moderating Role of Self-Esteem Level and Self-
Esteem Instability.”
These topics concern general processes of “human psychology.” They are not concerned
with relating these processes to the concrete social lives of people, or with studying con-
crete psychological functioning/qualities that are organized by concrete macro cultural
factors. Indeed, mainstream research rarely suggests that such concrete psychological
qualities exist.
Cross-cultural psychology also deals with abstract cultural and psychological issues.
The central, predominant construct in the field is individualism/collectivism. It does not
refer to any particular socioeconomic system such as slavery, feudalism, or capitalism.
Individualism/collectivism may be regarded as an inadequate, even specious, pseudocul-
tural construct that displaces and co-opts real, concrete cultural constructs. It allows psy-
chologists to pretend they are addressing culture when they actually are not. It allows
them to recruit interest in culture and divert it into superficial constructs that provide no
scientific or practical information about real culture and psychology.i
Although it is important to distinguish abstract and concrete features, their coexistence
makes this difficult. When we study Japanese elementary schools, it is difficult to parse
abstract features of schooling from the concrete ones. When we observe Western moth-
ers progressively adjusting their linguistic complexity to carefully match and anticipate
the linguistic competencies of their babies (known as scaffolding), how can we know
whether this is a general social requirement of children’s language development or a par-
ticular technique used by this group of mothers?
 228 macro cultural psychology

Abstract features are distilled from concrete features via an analytical process. J. S. Mill
explained this in his System of Logic (1843), where he articulated the method of agree-
ment and the method of difference—called anvaya and vyatireka in the Advaita Indian
system of logic (Ratner, 1997, p. 215 for discussion).
An outstanding application of Mill’s methodology to cultural psychology is Mohanty’s
(1994, 2003, 2006, in press) research on the cognitive effects of bilingualism. Bilingualism
is abstract in the sense that it refers not to particular languages but simply to the knowl-
edge of any two languages. Mohanty conducted a sophisticated natural experiment to
identify the cognitive affects of bilingualism. He compared monolingual (Oriya-speaking)
and bilingual (Oriya + Kui–speaking) children of the same educational level and the
same local culture (religion, occupation, marriage and child-rearing customs) in Orissa,
India. This method of agreement, as Mill called it, isolated monolingualism-bilingualism
from shared cultural factors. Mohanty found a positive relationship between bilingual-
ism and cognitive competencies such as intelligence, simultaneous coding processes, and
metalinguistic-metacommunicative-metacognitive skills.
Mohanty indicated the internal relationship between the macro cultural factor of bilin-
gualism and cognition. In accordance with our discussion of mediational means, he
states that learning two languages demands certain cognitive skills. These include cogni-
tive flexibility, objective analytical orientation, and sensitivity to alternative meanings
and viewpoints. These cognitive requirements of bilingualism translate into the perfor-
mance competencies Mohanty measured.
A study by Kovacs and Mehler (2009) found that bilingualism broadens perceptual
competencies. Whereas both monolinguals and bilinguals learned to respond to a spoken
or visual cue to anticipate a reward on one side of a screen, only bilinguals succeeded in
redirecting their anticipatory looks when the cue began signaling the reward on the
opposite side. Bilingual infants rapidly suppressed their looks to the first location and
learned the new response. These findings show that processing representations from two
languages leads to a domain-general enhancement of the perceptual-cognitive control
system well before the onset of speech.
Finally, Mohanty emphasized that bilingualism is not entirely abstract. Bilingualism is
always embedded in a particular cultural context that affects its quality and its cognitive
effects. Accordingly, “societal bilingualism can be as varied and unique as individual cases
of bilingualism” (Mohanty, 1994, p. 16).
Concrete features of bilingualism are a function of, marker of, and proxy for social
class, educational policies, economic opportunities, immigration, and colonialism. In
India, “[s]ocial, political, educational, and economic conditions conspire to strengthen
the association of the minor and tribal languages with the powerlessness and insuffi-
ciency that springs from the stark reality that the speakers of these languages are invari-
ably disadvantaged to begin with. As a group they are usually poorer, belong to mostly
rural and economically underdeveloped areas, and share many features of the disadvan-
taged populations” (Mohanty, 2006, p. 266).
Of the more than 400 languages in India, the government designates only 22 as consti-
tutionally recognized. Consequently, “[m]ost of the tribal and minority mother tongues
have no place in the educational system of India. The children who enter schools with
these mother tongues are forced into a dominant language ‘submersion’ education with a
 229 Philosophical Principles

subtractive effect on their mother tongues” (Mohanty, 2006, p. 268). In contrast, bilin-
gualism that includes Hindi and English accords the speaker high social status. (English
is accorded the status of an official, constitutional language and is widely taught in ele-
mentary schools.) In such a case there will be little subtractive effect on the mother
tongue, Hindi.
The culturally organized character of bilingualism is depicted in Figures 4.3 and 4.4.
The psycholinguistic properties, dynamics, and competencies of bilingualism vary with
its macro cultural character. Bilingual speakers of tribal languages are more likely to feel
an identity crisis and low self-esteem because of the low social position their mother
language denotes; bilingual speakers of socially valued languages will feel high self-
esteem, and they will not experience an identify crisis over this issue. “Understanding
bilingualism among individuals is incomplete without an analysis of societal bilingual-
ism—the social, political, historical, and other processes involved in it” (Mohanty, 1994,
p. 16).
Embedded in and permeated by macro cultural factors, bilingualism becomes a macro
cultural factor in its own right. It becomes a cultural factor imbued with cultural features
that contributes to, and represents, political, educational, colonial, and socioeconomic
phenomena such as occupational and educational status. Bilingualism is a dialectical
moment in the macro cultural system. It is the system represented in a particular aspect.
It is simultaneously a distinct aspect, and it is also a common aspect that shares the fea-
tures of the others. Bilingualism transmits the entire cultural system to the speaker in the
form of linguistic competence. Bilingualism is a socializer of the system. One becomes

Family language

Government Medium of
recognition instruction in school

Kui +
Oriya

Work rules and Social status

opportunities of languages

Text books

fig . 4.3 Bilingualism as a Concrete Cultural Factor.

 230 macro cultural psychology

Family language

Government Medium of
recognition instruction in school

Hindi +
English

Work rules and Social status

opportunities of languages

Text books

fig . 4.4 Bilingualism as a Concrete Cultural Factor.

positioned in society through the macro cultural character of bilingualism that one learns
(cf. Ratner, 2002, pp. 44–45). This is depicted in Figure 4.5.
The cultural system that is implicitly contained in the technical factor must be eluci-
dated. This is what cultural hermeneutics does—it comprehends bilingualism in relation
to the cultural hermeneutic circle that forms it.
Figures 4.3, 4.4, and 4.5 reveal the structure of concreteness. They show that a phenom-
enon such as bilingualism is concrete because it is a synthesis of interdependent ele-
ments. Marx explained concreteness in the following structural terms: “The concrete is
concrete because it is a synthesis of many particular determinations, i.e., a unity of diverse
elements” (cited in Lukacs, 1971, p. 9). Marx is saying that the concrete content of a thing
derives from a structure of diverse, interrelated elements. It is this integral structure of
elements that culminates in the concrete content of any of them.
For example, the dress of Saudi Arabian women in public is a black robe that covers
their entire body from head to toe, with only small slits for their eyes to peer out. This
dress is concrete in that it synthesizes, represents, and objectifies a number of cultural
factors. These include the strict social segregation of women from men (women cannot
eat in men’s restaurants, they cannot attend fairs and festivals with men, they cannot
attend the same university classes as men, they cannot go to the same bank as men,
instead they must go to the women’s side where they are served exclusively by women
bankers—with a few exceptions such as medical school), the extreme subordination of
women to men (women need men’s permission to leave the country), and extreme taboos
placed on sexual stimulation and display. All of these are totalized in the anonymous,
depersonalizing black robe. They constitute its concrete quality. It is not simply black
 231 Philosophical Principles

Government
recognition
School use

Bilingualism
Social status

Work rules

fig . 4.5 Bilingualism as a Macro Cultural Factor.

clothing; it concretizes social practices and meanings. To be concrete is to participate in

a structure of integrated practices and meanings. Content is a function of structure.
The philosophical notion of concreteness as a structure of determinations indicates
that concrete content of macro cultural factors depends upon the manner in which these
factors are structured together. Therefore, to apprehend their content we must apprehend
their structure utilizing a systemic ontology and epistemology. A major reason for why
their content has eluded social scientists is that scholars have not paid sufficient attention
to understanding the systemic structure of macro cultural factors and psychological fac-
tors. They have dissolved systems into fragmentary variables.ii
Whenever we encounter variables, we must recognize them as compressed, truncated,
incomplete, unreal forms. We must decompress these forms and restore their concrete-
ness in the pregnant forms depicted in Figures 1.2–1.4, 1.6–1.8, 1.10, 1.12, 1.15, and 4.3–4.5.
This is accomplished by cultural hermeneutics, which breathes concreteness into cultural
psychological phenomena and also elucidates them.
Vygotsky (1987, pp. 46–47) explained this hermeneutical epistemology:

A psychology concerned with the study of the complex whole must replace the
method of decomposing the whole into its elements with that of partitioning the
whole into its units . . . in which the characteristics of the whole are present. . . .
In contrast to the term “element,” the term “unit” designates a product of analysis
that possesses all the basic characteristics of the whole. . . . The living cell is the
 232 macro cultural psychology

real unit of biological analysis because it preserves the basic characteristics of life
that are inherent in the living organism.

This structured whole is concreteness.

TRUE ABSTRACTION AND CONCRETENESS

Both abstract and concrete aspects of cultural and psychological phenomena are real and
important. They are interdependent and also different. When they are properly described
as such, we may speak of true abstraction and true concreteness. True abstraction indicates
the existence of concrete features, which must be incorporated into abstractions. Similarly,
true concreteness emphasizes that it is only one form of a more general issue that is also
expressed in other concrete forms. True abstractions and concreteness emphasize their
own incompleteness and the necessity of turning to the other for completeness.
Mohanty emphasized that abstract aspects of bilingualism must be concretized with
specific pairs of languages that are informed by political and cultural features.
Our discussion of abstract features of culture in Chapter 3 called out for specification
of social institutions, artifacts, cultural concepts, social class, politics, and political econ-
omy in particular societies. These true abstractions are “bridge terms” that point to con-
crete forms.

The Politics of the Concrete and the Abstract

While the concrete is vital for scientific completeness and for practical improvements in
social and psychological life, it is also challenging to the status quo. It is challenging
because it examines the real, full character of the status and suggests improvements to it.
Good science goes hand in hand with good politics. Supporters of the status quo need to
exempt it from analysis and evaluation. They therefore marginalize or deny the concrete,
and all theories and methodologies that emphasize and elucidate it. The concrete is politi-
cal, with defenders of the status quo marginalizing or denying it, and challengers to the
status quo emphasizing it in order to improve on it. Entombing or exhuming the con-
crete—exorcising or exercising it—is a political and scientific struggle.
Because politics and social science go hand in hand, entombing the concrete is not only
politically conservative but also antiscientific, for it denies and distorts the real, concrete,
political character of social-psychological phenomena. Conversely, exhuming the con-
crete is scientific and also politically progressive. Exhuming the concrete requires expos-
ing and repudiating the strategies that entomb it. It also requires a political interest in
social reform that will push forward the scientific interest in comprehending the cultural-
political origins, characteristics, and function of psychological phenomena.
A fantastic variety of ideological strategies have been developed to obscure, deny, and
marginalize concrete society and psychology. These strategies largely consist of deny-
ing the four qualitative distinctions I mentioned at the beginning of Chapter 2: the dis-
tinction between animal and human social life-psychology, the distinction between
infantile and adult social life-behavior, the distinction between primitive people’s social
life-psychology and that of modern people, and the distinction between biological
 233 Philosophical Principles

determinism of precultural behavior and biological potentiating of cultural behavior.

Collapsing, or leveling, these distinctions ultimately serves to minimize the cultural for-
mation of human psychology by reducing it to noncultural mechanisms found in animals
and infants. Leveling qualitative distinctions obscures concrete culture and concrete psy-
chology. These strategies have become institutionalized as valid, objective, normative
ways of thinking about society and psychology. They are widely used by social scientists
who do not necessarily have the politically conservative outlook that fomented the strat-
egies. However, the strategies have the same conservative function and effect when used
by anyone. A scholar’s self-proclaimed politics do not counteract the conservative poli-
tics that are built into social science theories and methodologies. What one does is more
important than what one professes.
It is therefore critical to examine how intellectual orientations marginalize, obscure, or
deny concrete society and psychology, and how these can be circumvented or corrected
in order to apprehend the concrete that is so important for science and practical social-
psychological life.
We have seen in the Chapter 3 that what makes a social or psychological element con-
crete is its embeddedness in a system of other elements that has political economy as its
base, or core. Eliminating concreteness requires severing an element from its cultural
complex, in particular from its political economic base.
The simplest way to do this is to simply refuse to mention capitalism. The ensuing dis-
cussion about social and psychological issues treats them as either natural, personal,
technical, or abstract. Their capitalist content is hidden and insulated from understand-
ing and from challenge. This immobilizes the science of social and psychological factors,
and the politics of improving them.
Psychological and social science theories, and methods, are characterized by cutting the
stem off the cultural cone. When this happens, cultural and psychological issues are
deprived of their root causes and explanations; they are left suspended in time and social
space. Cutting off the political-economic root (or stem) of the cultural cone distorts and
impoverishes their concrete existence. Apolitical views of psychology are not neutral and
objective; they are politically driven, biased, and distorting.
Concrete social science examines and improves the status quo and therefore advances
human fulfillment. Consequently, the extent to which concrete social science is prevalent
is a barometer of how democratic and humane a society is; the extent to which it is not
practiced is a barometer of how undemocratic and authoritarian a society is.
We shall now examine a number of strategies that serve to cut the stem off the cultural
system and obscure the concrete character of social and psychological phenomena by
depoliticizing, deculturizing, and neutralizing them.
Because this scientific/academic issue has powerful political/practical consequences
for our social and psychological life, it is important to thoroughly expose and correct it.
My critiques of errors in cultural theory have this dual objective. My critiques will be
severely negative in order to expose the errors, but strongly positive in the later stage of
correcting them, in Chapters 5, 6, and 7. Like any construction project, the positive,
reconstructive phase presupposes the demolition phase. Remodeling a house requires
tearing out old electrical wiring; faulty foundations; leaky plumbing; and rotten wood,
sheet rock, and roofing. Rebuilding over these weaknesses would only lead the house to
 234 macro cultural psychology

succumb to their deterioration. Severe criticism of errors in Psychology is equally neces-

sary before a better structure can be constructed.
Harsh criticisms of psychological theories and methodologies are productive and
cannot be condemned because of their severe tone. Severe criticism is not synonymous
with unfairness. If severe criticism is objective in exposing real, destructive errors, it is
fair criticism. It would be unfair to science and to humanity to overlook errors.
The respected scholar Tulving has assessed the state of Psychology in the harshest of
tones. He went so far as to say, “[M]ost, if not all, of our currently held ideas and theories
about mental processes are wrong and sooner or later in the future they will be replaced
with more adequate concepts, concepts that fit nature better. Our task, therefore, should
be to hasten the arrival of such a future. Among other things, we should be willing to
contemplate the possibility that the ‘memory-is-memory’ view is wrong and look for
a better alternative” (Tulving, 1985, pp. 385–386).
Tulving expresses the destructive/constructive dialectic that I will pursue in critiquing
established figures and concepts in cultural psychology. Established figures and concepts
are the most influential, which makes exposing their errors particularly constructive for
improving the field as a whole.
My critique is rooted in understanding the basis and consequences of an error. As
Hegel said in the Introduction to the Phenomenology of Spirit, “the exposition of untrue
consciousness in its untruth is not a merely negative process.” I do not simply decry error;
I explain why its mistake exists and how it can be corrected.

Obstacles to Apprehending Concrete

Features of Culture and Psychology
A common error in social science is to confuse and conflate levels of abstraction. This
involves two kinds of mistakes.

False Abstraction
One error social scientists make is to misconstrue concrete features as more general and
abstract than they actually are. They make it appear that a particular form of education—
for example, American, urban, middle-class schooling—represents education in general,
or that romantic love is love in general, or that American elections constitute or define
“democracy” and that all democracy involves American-style elections, or that com-
merce is capitalistic commerce. This is the essence of ethnocentrism or one-dimensional
thinking. It makes it seem that the particular is universal. It reduces the potential to the
actual (Ratner, 1991, Chapter 3).
False abstraction also makes it seem that problems in concrete forms testify to problems
with the entire abstraction because the two are equivalent. For instance, problems in
American government are regarded as testaments to difficulties in “democratic govern-
ment,” or problems in American schooling testify to the futility of “public education.” This
assumes that the American form is equivalent to the abstract essence of all democratic
government or public education, and that problems in the former represent problems
with the latter.
 235 Philosophical Principles

There are other examples: when technology is used under our economic system to
ravage the ecology, this is construed as a deficiency with technology in general and leads
to a rejection of technology altogether. When the capitalist system of globalization fails,
it leads to a rejection of global interaction in general (in any form) and a retreat to local
interactions. When male–female relations are made difficult by particular macro cultural
factors, the problem is mistakenly exaggerated as an eternal, natural, universal, general
incompatibility between men and women.

False Concreteness
A second error in treating abstract and concrete levels is to misconstrue an abstraction
as concrete. This is the inverse of false concreteness. It occurs when general, abstract
features are invoked to explain concrete features. For example, the abstract, general phe-
nomenon “social hierarchy” is taken to explain the existence of social classes, a concrete
phenomenon. By this, the reason we have upper and lower classes such as slave and slave
master is that humans tend to construct social hierarchies. The abstract is used to explain
the concrete—social class is really just “social hierarchy.”
Similarly, cities (general) are said to be individualistic (culturally specific) in nature, or
family (general) is said to be intrinsically monogamous or patriarchal (specific). Thus,
the reason we have monogamy is that that’s what family is (therefore polygamous fami-
lies are regarded as aberrations and abominations and are suppressed by missionaries
as incompatible with family). The (general, universal) need for affection or attachment
may be said to generate (culturally relative) romantic love, or the (general, universal) fact
that humans have will or agency may be said to explain the (culturally relative) fact
that Americans feel responsible for their own behavior. According to these explanations,
the fact that humans have agency and make cities and families is taken as inevitably lead-
ing to our particular forms of these. Other forms are inconceivable because anywhere the
general tendency exists to make families or cities, individualistic forms will appear.
Psychologists similarly use abstract terms such as memory, sexuality, love, and anxiety
when referring to contemporary American forms of these. This makes it seem that all
sexuality, love, etc. has the American form.
All reductionism of adult human psychology to animal or human infant behavior is
false concreteness. It takes an abstract attribute that appears in animals and infants, and
then generalizes it to adult humans as the basis for their behavior. For instance, some
3-year-old children manifest a preference for playing with in-group cohorts (e.g., kids
wearing T-shirts similar to their own) over out-group cohorts (kids wearing different
T-shirts). “In-group, out-group differentiation” is then treated as a natural abstraction
that just appears in people, without any consideration of possible social influences that
could easily account for 3-year-old American kids’ preferring in-group cohorts. Then,
this abstraction is said to extend to adolescent behavior in the form of gang violence
against enemy gangs. Finally, this abstraction is said to generate ethnic cleansing in the
world at large. The abstraction that emerges in childhood accounts for all the concrete
behavior of adults.
 236 macro cultural psychology

Absurd extrapolations from abstractions to concrete acts are necessary to bridge obvi-
ous differences in behavior. There is no continuity between 3-year-olds’ informal play
and organized adult ethnic cleansing. In order to pretend that there is continuity between
children’s and adults’ behavior, the specific contrasting characteristics must be expunged
and replaced by vague abstractions that do transcend child and adult behavior. It is true
that some children and some adults differentiate in-group and out-group individuals.
In a reductionist approach, that commonality must then be the instrument that links
suspicion of children wearing different T-shirts with ethnic cleansing. But this is a
specious argument (i.e., a false concreteness), because abstractions do not determine spe-
cific behavior. An in-group, out-group distinction can take many forms, including sym-
pathizing with disadvantaged out-groups, such as earthquake survivors in another
country. Suspicion of an out-group cannot alone explain heinous acts such as ethnic
cleansing.
Reducing human behavior to animal behavior must also invoke false concreteness to
make the claim. The obvious differences between the species must be expunged and
replaced by abstractions such as “territoriality.” Thus territoriality is said to explain World
War II on the same grounds as one dog barking at an intruder onto some grass upon
which the dog had urinated. Using abstractions to explain concrete behavior is what I call
false concreteness.
False abstraction and concreteness collapse the general into the specific, the potential
into the actual. This prevents any alternative forms. This is why they are politically con-
servative and scientifically wrong. An abstraction can take many forms; it is not limited
to one. A tendency toward hierarchy is an abstract phenomenon that can be expressed in
numerous ways. It could take the form of teachers and students, parents and children,
experts and novices. It does not have to culminate in social classes where one oppresses
the other and deprives it of resources and rights. Abstract features do not explain con-
crete features; concrete social processes do.

FALSE ABSTRACTION AND CONCRETENESS DIRECT

REFORMS AT GENERAL ABSTRACTIONS
AND AWAY FROM CONCRETE FEATURES
False abstraction and false concreteness are cultivated by using abstract terms to refer to
concrete events. For example, class structure and exploitation are denoted as hierarchies.
This abstract terminology creates the false impression that hierarchies (i.e., all possible
hierarchies) are fraught with the characteristic problems of contemporary class society.
Or, bourgeois male–female relations are denoted by the abstract term “gender relations,”
which makes is seem that the characteristic problems of bourgeois relations are intrinsic
to any and all gender relations.
To correct this, when we talk about a particular society or social problem, we must
use concrete terms. We should not use abstract terms such as sense of time; we should
rather use concrete terms such as ancient Jewish time, Buddhist time, and medieval Islamic
time. We should avoid terms such as hierarchy or domination, and instead use concrete
terms such as capitalist exploitation, capitalist class structure, and alienation. Commerce
is capitalist commerce; depression and shame are Korean/Buddhist depression
 237 Philosophical Principles

and shame. We should qualify abstractions such as individualism and collectivism with
adjectives such as American, bourgeois individualism and Chinese coerced collectivism.
Vygotsky (1997b, p. 283) emphasized that the terminology we use to depict a phenom-
enon carries an entire theory about it and determines the manner in which we think
about it and research it. “The word that refers to a fact at the same time provides a philoso-
phy of that fact, its theory, its system. When I say: ‘the consciousness of the color’ I have
scientific associations of a certain kind, the fact is included in a certain series of phenom-
ena, I attach a certain meaning to the fact. When I say: ‘the reaction of white’, everything
is wholly different.”

Precluding Concrete Reform

False abstraction and concreteness obfuscate concrete social phenomena and convert
them into abstractions (see Rodseth, 2005, for a related discussion of power and culture
in the field of anthropology). This means that any reforms in problems must occur on the
abstract level. We are directed to condemn “hierarchy,” “gender relations,” “technology,”
commerce,” “big government,” “delusions,” “excessive serotonin,” “too little or too much
emotional expressiveness or concentration,” “expert knowledge,” and “leadership.” This
exculpates concrete, cultural factors and the problems they generate (e.g., capitalist
exploitation, capitalist commerce, the bourgeois self, the free market economy, invest-
ment banks).
Some social scientists construe capitalist values as general, abstract variables, such as
financial well-being, and this obscures their concrete bourgeois features. Conclusions
regarding the negative psychological effects of emphasizing “financial success” make it
seem that any and all financial success is harmful to psychology. “Financial success” strips
away the concrete cultural features that shape psychology, and it strips away the cultural
features that must be reformed in order to enhance psychological functioning. If “finan-
cial success” is construed as a negative factor, then the only solution is to live in poverty!
There is no way to reform capitalism because it is devoid of specific, reformable features.
“Financial success” supercedes capitalism as the problem, with the result being that we
must oppose financial success rather than oppose and transform capitalism; the solution
is poverty, not a postcapitalist, cooperative society. Indeed, a cooperative society that was
materially/financially successful would be condemned as strongly as capitalist society is,
because it would fall within the rubric of financial success! Treating culture as abstract
variables is conservative because it prevents us from transforming concrete cultural fac-
tors/problems.
A more complex example illustrates this problem in more detail, and explains how to
resolve it. Recall our discussion of how cigarette manufacturers introduced cigarettes
into movie scenes to imbue them with cultural meaning so they could be used as cultural
resources for achieving emotional goals. This expanded the use of cigarettes from
a simple inhalation of nicotine to a cultural phenomenon. This pecuniary expansion of
cigarettes to cultural phenomenon occurred on the macro cultural level via macro cul-
tural factors (movies). Individuals imitated this objective, objectified, objectifying, unify-
ing meaning as they utilized cigarettes to express their emotions in many contexts. Now,
there are abstract and concrete aspects of this example. The concrete aspects include the
 238 macro cultural psychology

fact that managers of the cigarette industry concocted the emotional imagery of ciga-
rettes and did so for commercial reasons, to increase the use and sale of their product.
This is all negative. Corporate managers are not elected and do not represent the people,
and they actually act to further their own pecuniary interests. They should not have
the power to construct cultural meanings for artifacts, nor should cultural meanings have
a commercial basis and function. Cultural meanings should be democratically decided
on by the populace to enhance their social and personal fulfillment.
The abstract aspects of this case include the fact that the meaning of an artifact was
constructed at the macro cultural level via macro cultural factors. This meaning was
public, objective, objectified, and objectifying. It was a unifying template that individuals
used to define, explain, and express their emotions. The cultural meaning generated cul-
tural coherence, common understandings, and communication among individuals.
These issues are general aspects of human culture. They are the basis of our civilization.
They are all positive and indispensible.
Thus, we have a contradiction between positive abstract aspects of the example and
negative concrete aspects. We must distinguish these. We must preserve the positive,
abstract aspects and eliminate the negative, concrete aspects. In other words, we must
find different, positive, concrete ways of constructing cultural meaning that utilize the
positive, abstract aspects of cultural-meaning construction. We must be careful not to
repudiate the positive, abstract aspects, for then we will lose the advantageous aspects of
culture that are essential for our humanity.
Yet many psychologists repudiate these aspects along with the negative, concrete ones.
They abjure macro cultural factors as the locus and impetus of the construction of
cultural meaning. They abjure objective, objectified, objectifying cultural meanings
in general. They abjure macro cultural templates for individual psychology. They
replace these with individual, interpersonal interactions as the locus and basis of
cultural meanings. They say, in essence, “Macro cultural meanings are undemocratic,
impersonal, pecuniary, and elitist. We must, therefore, operate at an interpersonal
level where we can democratically construct meanings to advance our own fulfill-
ment.” They try to solve a concrete problem with abstract changes. They bring
down the entire edifice of macro culture when they need to change only its concrete
features.
But it is impossible to renounce macro culture in general. It is the basis of our human-
ity. Consequently, the proposed solution is unworkable. Moreover, it is misguided and
never criticizes the true problem, which is the concrete organization of macro culture. It
never attacks the negative features I just mentioned (e.g., CEOs making decisions to fur-
ther their own private wealth). It overlooks and obfuscates this particular problem
because it mistakenly shifts attention to the abstract level of macro culture in general. All
the discussion about “culture” never indicts concrete processes such as cigarette manag-
ers’ concocting the emotional meaning of cigarettes. This leaves the power of CEOs
to make decisions about culture unscathed. Of course, it would be eliminated if macro
culture were to be dissolved into interpersonal interactions. However, since this is wish-
ful thinking, not only will macro culture in general persist, but its concrete social organi-
zation along corporate lines will persist as well, for it has not been the focus of attention,
analysis, or change. This is the problem with conflating abstract and concrete levels,
 239 Philosophical Principles

minimizing the concrete, and focusing on the abstract level as the source of problems and
the solution to them.
False abstraction and concreteness also promote a false sense of commonality that is
relied on to solve problems. This occurs with the problem of pollution. The primary cause
of pollution during the past centuries has been corporate industrialization and consum-
erism. Yet corporations, and their spokespeople, cannot admit responsibility for this eco-
logical crisis, so they pass the buck upstairs to the abstract level where it becomes
“humans’ role” in making pollution, not the corporations’ role. Pollution is a “human”
problem, one of “advanced civilization” to which all individuals contribute. It’s everyone’s
fault, and “we’re all in this together” and must solve it together.
This obfuscates the specific cause of the problem, and it prevents its solution. The per-
petrators of the problem are embraced for their abstract humanity as allies in the “human”
effort to solve it.

DIVORCING ABSTRACT FROM CONCRETE FEATURES

Even when cultural psychologists distinguish abstract and concrete levels and avoid
conflating them, they often treat them inappropriately. Oftentimes they treat abstract
cultural and psychological features as independent of concrete features. They fail to indi-
cate the existence of concrete features, and they fail to provide a bridge for including
them.
Unfortunately, most abstract formulations of culture and psychology do not imply
or implicate any concrete forms. They provide no bridge to concrete culture and psychol-
ogy. They leave us marooned on the isle of abstraction. It is worth explaining this point
because it is pervasive, and it blocks our awareness of concrete cultural and psychological
factors. It is important for cultural psychologists to be aware of this problem, and to
refine their theories of culture to generate complete research.
This problem appears in Lompscher’s (2006, p. 36) definition of cultural activity from
the perspective of cultural-historical activity theory. “People as societal beings exist
as they themselves create then re-create the conditions of their own life. . . . Activity is the
fundamental, specifically human form of relationships between human beings and the
world, the content of which is the goal-oriented modification and transformation of the
world on the basis of culture as it is appropriated and further developed by people. . . .”
Lompscher acknowledges that this definition is abstract—that is, it never specifies what
conditions of life are, how people transform them, what constitutes a transformation (if
a student thinks about her boyfriend in class, is that transforming the conditions of edu-
cation?), whether all people are involved in transforming conditions, whether people
always necessarily recreate conditions, or what the cultural basis of activity is.
Lompscher concretizes his definition with some additions: “Activity is a unity of
subject-object (person-world) and subject-subject relations. . . . Activity is characterized
by transformation, cognition, communication, value orientation, and development”
(Lompscher, 2006, p. 36). It is difficult to see how these additions provide any clarification.
Lompscher simply lists additional abstract terms. To tell us that activity is characterized
by cognition is not a great advance in knowledge. It is important to know what, specifi-
cally, communication has to do with culture, how it forms and binds culture, how it
 240 macro cultural psychology

facilitates people’s interdependence and mutual support, and how it is pivotal to the
development of symbols, which are the tools of thought. Lompscher never indicates what
kind of unity subject-object and subject-subject are. What is a subject-object unity?
He does mention that “activity has a macrostructure consisting of subjects interacting
with objects (and each other), executing certain actions and operations under concrete
conditions, using certain means in order to put into practice their goals and satisfy their
needs and motives . . .” (Lompscher, 2006, p. 36). However, this is not particularly help-
ful, because he again fails to specify what concrete conditions are, what the means are for
implementing activity, where the means come from, or anything definite about macro-
structure, such as what kinds of actions it consists of and how it differs from microstruc-
ture. Lompscher’s abstract definition of cultural activity does not indicate any constructs
that could lead researchers to study concrete culture.
Although the founders of cultural historical activity theory devoted little research to
concrete cultural factors, they clearly emphasized their importance in theoretical state-
ments I cite in Chapter 2. Vygotsky explicitly condemned abstract formulations that omit
ties to concrete features. He endorsed Blonskii’s comment that “In class society the con-
cept ‘man’ is generally an empty and abstract concept. Man’s social behavior is deter-
mined by the behavior of his class, and each person is inevitably a person from a
particular class” (Vygotsky, 1997a, p. 212).
Eighty years later, under much less social pressure, and with many more resources,
contemporary activity theorists have generally regressed from the (limited) concrete
emphasis in Vygotsky, Luria, and Leontiev’s theory. With few exceptions, contemporary
activity theorists are tethered to millstones of meek abstractions.
A statement by Cole and Engestrom (2007, p. 486) about cultural historical activity
theory illustrates this point: “the analysis of human psychological functions must be situ-
ated in historically accumulated forms of human activity.” This statement is abstract
because it provides no details about history. Where do we go from that statement to
better understand psychology or culture? It does not indicate what the main historical
factors and dynamics are; how this historical accumulation occurs; who controls it; what
its politics are; whether it occurs peacefully or militarily, democratically or autocratically;
whether it occurs on the level of interpersonal discourse or through political movements
acting on macro-level factors such as Congress and courts; or whether it serves the inter-
ests of the populace or oppresses them. The concrete forms of culture and history that
Luria emphasized in chapter one—class structure, new forms of technological, social,
and economic activities, collectivization or privatization of agriculture, other radical
socioeconomic changes, the position of women, the socialist or capitalist economy—are
absent from Cole and Engestrom’s cursory, nondescript mention of history, and the
research it generates.
Eighty years ago, Vygotsky made a similar but more complete statement: “By ideology
we will understand all the social stimuli that have become hardened in the form of legal
statutes, moral precepts, artistic tastes, and so on. These standards are permeated through
and through with the class structure of society that generated them and serve as the class
organization of production. They are responsible for all of human behavior, and in this
sense we are justified in speaking of man’s class behavior” (Vygotsky, 1997a, pp. 211–212,
96, my emphasis). Vygotsky’s statement provides a precise contrast to Cole and Engestrom,
 241 Philosophical Principles

Lompscher, and other activity theorists. Vygotsky mentions the historical codification of
social stimuli and then immediately concretizes this general statement by emphasizing
the class character of these historical objectifications. It is the concrete class structure of
social stimuli, not merely their “historical” accumulation, that generates concrete behav-
ior/psychology that has a class character.
In contrast, Cole and Engestrom confine attention (both their own and the reader’s) to
the first phrase in Vygotsky’s statement (namely, that social stimuli and human behavior
are historically codified) and omit the message of Vygotsky’s second phrase—that the
historical character is concrete class character. They thereby present an incomplete pic-
ture of human activity, and of Vygotsky’s view of activity.
The same contrast between Cole and Engestrom and Vygotsky is discernible in another
of Vygotsky’s statements that I cited earlier: “Once we acknowledge the historical charac-
ter of verbal thought, we must consider it subject to all the premises of historical materi-
alism, which are valid for any historical phenomenon in human society.” In this statement
we see that Vygotsky immediately concretizes the general statement that “we acknowl-
edge the historical character of verbal thought” by explaining that the historical character
of verbal thought consists in its following the premises of Marx’s historical materialism.
He says we must study verbal thought from this particular perspective—which I have
depicted in my conical model of society. Deleting this concretization of the subject matter
and the theoretical framework necessary to elucidate it leaves cultural psychology
abstract, directionless, and apolitical (Ratner, 2011a for additional examples).
Excising concreteness from theory (e.g., activity theory) leads to excising it from research.
This is exemplified in one of Engestrom’s (2001) works. He identifies five principles of activ-
ity theory and then bases research around them. We shall examine how his (one-sidedly)
abstract principles prevent his research from considering important concrete issues.
His five principles of cultural-historical activity theory (CHAT) are as follows:

1. “[A] collective, artifact-mediated and object-oriented activity system, seen in its net-
work relations to other activity systems, is taken as the prime unit of analysis.”
2. “[T]he multi-voicedness of activity systems. An activity system is always a community
of multiple points of view, traditions and interests.”
3. “[H]istoricity. Activity systems take shape and get transformed over lengthy periods
of time.”
4. “[T]he central role of contradictions as sources of change and development.”
5. “[T]he possibility of expansive transformations in activity systems. Activity systems
move through relatively long cycles of qualitative transformations. . . . An expan-
sive transformation is accomplished when the object and motive of the activity are
reconceptualized to embrace a radically wider horizon of possibilities than in the pre-
vious mode of the activity.”1


Engestrom, Y. (2001). Expansive learning at work: Toward an activity theoretical reconceptual-
ization. Journal of Education and Work, 14, 133–156. © Taylor & Francis Group, http://www.
informaworld.com. Reprinted by permission of the publisher.
 242 macro cultural psychology

These principles are inadequate abstractions in that they do not indicate concrete,
cultural-political forms of them. A collective, artifact-mediated and object-oriented activ-
ity system can be anything. It includes everything from idle, insignificant behavior such as
a few boys throwing pieces of candy (artifacts) into the sea (an object at which the activity
is directed), all the way up to complex military invasions. All are equally qualified as activ-
ity systems. None is more important, influential, or deserving of study according to
Engestrom’s definition. This frees activity theorists from having to focus on meaningful
cultural activity. It allows/encourages them to focus on insignificant behavior under the
rubric of cultural historical activity theory. Vygotsky’s conception of CHAT corrects this
problem by building social class, power, and politics into culture, activity, and psychology.
Engestrom’s abstract formulation similarly fails to explain what community means.
Is it a flux of individuals in serial interactions, or is it an emergent, administered structure?
Was slave society a community? Can totalitarian systems be communities? Are American
neighborhoods (or apartment buildings) communities despite the fact that neighbors
may not even know each other? Are all the multiple viewpoints in a “community” equally
influential, or are some dominant? What generates the points of view? Are they individ-
ual constructions, or do they represent positions of social class and power? “Voicedness”
is an empty and abstract term, like “man,” which Vygotsky repudiated. A good, true
abstraction would contain some indication of concrete forms, as Vygotsky’s and Marx’s
abstract terms did.
Engestrom’s abstract definition of history is equally nebulous because it contains no
implication of, or bridge to, concrete issues that would provide substance to it. He fails to
indicate how historicity is formed, who dominates historical processes, or what the
dynamics of history are (when Marx discussed history in general, he indicated that the
key dynamic in historical change is the contradiction between the means and the mode of
production.) Engestrom says that activity systems get transformed over a long period
of time. But coups d’état are rapid transformations of State apparatuses. The U.S. invasion
of Iraq transformed its activity systems and physical infrastructure of artifacts in a few
weeks. Coups, invasions, and other bloody macro cultural factors such as politics, lobby-
ing, predatory financial practices, corruption, structural adjustments imposed on national
governments by the IMF, and discrimination are rendered invisible in Engestrom’s rar-
efied activity theory.
Engestrom’s abstract comments about qualitative transformations in activity systems
also lack any implication of concrete processes or outcomes. We are left wondering what
constitutes an expansive, qualitative transformation of an activity. How do we distinguish
such a change from a limited, incremental change? A proper abstract concept of qualitative
change would include a general conception of social structure and of central and periph-
eral cultural factors that must be transformed in order to achieve qualitative change.
I mention some of these issues in my general discussion of culture in Chapter 2. Engestrom
does not take this step. Consequently, he cannot direct us to transform basic, central
elements, as opposed to peripheral elements. This prevents us from distinguishing fun-
damental change from superficial change.
Engestrom’s, Cole’s, and Lompscher’s formulations of society-culture are open to the
charge that Luria leveled against the French school (cited in Chapter 3): they “had a great
influence on psychologists in the 1920s who tried to go beyond simplistic notions about
 243 Philosophical Principles

the mind as a by-product of natural selection, and to understand human consciousness

as a product of sociohistorical development. Their analysis, however, cut off human
thought in its earlier stages of historical development from actual activity and cognitive
processes, which were then treated as the result of beliefs.”
Engestrom employed his principles of CHAT to guide empirical research on health care
in Finland. We can see that his inadequate abstractions blinded him to important con-
crete issues.
He analyzed a conference attended by hospital practitioners, private physicians, and
parents of patients that addressed shortcomings in health care coordination for children
with multiple diseases. This specialized, fragmented care was called “critical paths.” This
term came to be replaced by “care relationships” through an interesting discussion among
stakeholders. It is instructive to identify ways in which Engestrom’s abstract definition
of activity limited his analysis of the medical problem and the discussion about it.
The first limitation can be seen in Engestrom’s conception of “voicedness” of the par-
ticipants. Engestrom regards them as individuals expressing their “own” voices or view-
points, and freely negotiating them discursively in a mutual give-and-take in a social
vacuum. He does not ground their perspectives in social positions and social values. He
never mentions any structural inducements on hospital doctors that would affect their
viewpoints on health care and their openness to alternative views. Inducements might
include financial incentives, political pressure, the kinds of workloads doctors have, bud-
getary restraints, government rules and policies, medical associations, and social values.
(Other venues that have tried to discuss health care issues, such as the 2009 debate on
health care reform in the U.S. Congress, have been decimated by political manipulations.
Advocates of various positions were dominated by corporate bribes of millions of dollars.
Many of the drafts of the bills were written by corporate lobbyists to promote corporate
political economic interests, not to promote any individual’s voice. Similarly, the 2009
conference on climate change in Copenhagen was decimated by political interests. Wealthy
polluters refused significant, binding, verifiable reductions in emissions because these
threatened their political economy. These nations banished environmental groups from
the congress as disagreements became acrimonious. Peaceful environmental activists
were preemptively arrested to prevent their positions from being promulgated. Thousands
of demonstrators [demanding climate justice and aggressive reductions in emissions]
were arrested, and the entire African delegation walked out of the congress at one point.
Before the conference, the Philippine delegation was slated to include outspoken activists
for climate justice and pollution controls; however, Secretary of State Hilary Clinton went
to the Philippines and convinced the government to remove these activists from the del-
egation a few weeks before the conference began. This political act altered the voice of the
delegation. In the United States, government scientists who testify before Congress must
first submit their reports to the White House, which decides what the scientists finally
report to Congress [i.e., the public]. Engestrom’s personalized notion of voicedness that is
amicably negotiated does not exist in the real world, where politics dominates discourse.)
Instead of exploring these structural influences on voicedness, Engestrom focuses instead
on the mechanisms of the discourse process itself, emphasizing how participants became
open to recognizing the views of others and crossing the border from their own view. He
abstracts narrative from concrete culture and activity systems.
 244 macro cultural psychology

This kind of abstraction carries over into Engestrom’s comments about the history
of the health care problem regarding uncoordinated care. He explains the history as fol-
lows: “Hospitals grew bigger and more complicated in the postwar decades. Fragmentation
by specialties led to complaints and was seen to be partially responsible for the rapidly
rising costs of hospital care. In the late 1980s, hospitals began to design and implement
critical paths or pathways for designated diseases or diagnostic groups” (Engestrom,
2001, p. 143).
In Engestrom’s history, hospitals “grew bigger”; they were not made bigger by anyone
for any particular reason. No social policies, debates, values, social groups, or financial
interests are considered. Similarly, “hospitals” implemented specialized treatments. No
active cultural agents are specified, nor are any reasons/interests/pressures/values given.
No system of profit, wages, or reimbursement is mentioned that might spur medicaliza-
tion specialization. Finally, specialization is said to be partially responsible for rising
costs. No economic system is considered.
The history of specialization and hospital growth has been extirpated from its cultural-
political-economic context, or activity system (which contradicts Engestrom’s own defi-
nition of activity systems as implicated in a network of other systems). This abstract
historicity stems from Engestrom’s indefinite sense of historicity, which appears in his
principles of activity theory.
In contrast to such vagaries, hospitals must be seen as implementing growth and spe-
cialization for specific cultural-political-economic reasons, and this growth is pushed by
people who are tied to and motivated by cultural reasons. Similarly, specialization is not
a thing in itself with natural power to raise costs. Specialization occurs in a political-
economic context, and it is that which makes specialization a costly strategy. In other
economic systems, specialization would have other characteristics and consequences.
(Specialization must be concretized as in Figure 1.8. It must be perceived as expressing
and incarnating cultural, political, economic elements. It is a proxy for these elements; it
does not stand on its own.)
Engestrom (2001) mentions that “[c]are relationships and critical paths were solutions
created in response to particular historical sets of contradictions.” However, his historic-
ity is limited to abstract, decontextualized issues.

Care relationships and critical paths respond to contradictions internal to

the respective institutions. Care relationships are seen as a way to conceptualize,
document and plan long-term interactions with a patient inside primary health
care. . . . Critical paths are constructed to give a normative sequence of procedures
for dealing with a given disease or diagnosis. They do not help in dealing with
patients with unclear and multiple diagnoses, and they tend to impose their dis-
ease-centered world view even on primary care practitioners. (pp. 143–144)

No real historical contradictions are mentioned here. Engestrom simply recounts the
technical aspects of each approach: one is more holistic and long-term, while the other
is more specialized. No political, cultural, or economic struggles are mentioned. Yet these
are precisely the stuff of historical contradictions. Including general references to them
in abstract definitions of historicity would have directed Engestrom to concretize them in
 245 Philosophical Principles

his empirical study in real time. Excising them from abstract definitions desensitized him
to their concrete forms in real life. Engestrom’s abstract sense of historicity severs the
medical activity from its cultural-historical-political context.
The conference discussion produced a solution to fragmented, specialized health care.
The hospital physician and nurse in charge of a child are instructed to draft a care agree-
ment that includes a plan for the patient’s care and the division of labor between the dif-
ferent care providers contributing to the care of the child. The draft agreement is given
to the child’ s family and sent to the child’ s personal health center physician (and, when
appropriate, to the physicians in charge of the child in other hospitals) for their scrutiny.
Next, if one or more of the parties find it necessary, they will have a care negotiation (by
e-mail, by telephone, or face-to-face) to formulate a mutually acceptable care agreement.
Finally, care feedback, in the form of a copy of the patient’s medical record, is automati-
cally and without delay given or sent to the other parties of the care agreement after the
patient’s unplanned visit or changes in diagnoses or care plans.
This approach to care improves on the fragmented critical-pathways approach. However,
it is limited to technical expansion of communication and coordination. This may be suf-
ficient in the context of a well-functioning health care system. However, it is insufficient for
solving serious problems in a deeply flawed system such as the American one. “Care rela-
tionships” does not alter the financing of health care; the cost of health care; the reliance on
high-tech, costly instrumentation and procedures; the staffing of hospitals; the workload of
staff; the power relations among administrators, physicians, and nurses; the manner in
which patients are treated in waiting rooms or exam rooms; the amount of time doctors
spend with patients; how much time patients must wait on hold when calling for appoint-
ments; or the orientation of medicine toward emphasis on biological causes of disease and
technical treatments rather than on broader environmental/social causes such as environ-
mental pollution and lifestyle (eating habits, exercise), and the altering of these.
As such, “care relationships” is an incremental, technical change in health care, not
a qualitative transformation in health care. Qualitative change involves altering the activ-
ity system, especially its central elements. This may not always be necessary in order to
solve every problem. Incremental, technical change may suffice where the system is fun-
damentally sound and beneficial to people. However, qualitative change is necessary
where the system is biased against the needs of the populace.
Engestrom’s abstract conception of change, and his abstract conception of cultural-
psychological phenomena and their history, militates against concrete qualitative change
in the cultural-political-economic basis of social and psychological problems.
This critique of Engestrom’s article is not an evaluation of his entire work. (Indeed, his
earlier work often emphasized concrete cultural issues such as capitalist financial pres-
sures. He earlier criticized analyses that focus on dyadic interaction, attempting to define
contexts as social situations, as spaces of interactive experience, or as fields of discourse—
ideas that he now espouses; cf. Ratner, 1999.) My critique is meant to target abstract for-
mulations of culture and psychology in order to highlight shortcomings and to motivate
concrete analyses instead. Luria and Vygotsky engaged in the same kind of critique (e.g.,
against the French school). Incorporating the concrete level into abstract formulations is
necessary to advance the scientific understanding of cultural psychology, and it is neces-
sary to guide fundamental political improvements in culture and psychology. Accomplishing
 246 macro cultural psychology

this integration of concrete and abstract requires that abstract formulations implicate the
concrete level as something to explore. Unfortunately, most abstract formulations block
consideration of the concrete level.
The result of this, and of other misconceptions, has been a damaging neglect of con-
crete culture and psychology by all psychologists, including cultural psychologists.
It is instructive to illustrate the dimensions of this neglect in order to understand it
better and mobilize against it.

INADEQUATE FORMULATIONS OF CONCRETE

CULTURE IN CULTURAL PSYCHOLOGY
Cultural psychologists rarely explore macro cultural factors in thorough detail. (Hwang’s
work on Chinese Confucianism and its influence on psychological phenomena is excep-
tional in its scholarship and detail.) This would require elucidating them as elements of
an organized, coherent, administered social system that is rooted in political economy.
Such a presentation would expose the capitalist system to scrutiny. Instead, cultural issues
are treated individually and superficially.
Occasionally cultural psychologists will mention a specific cultural factor such as
advertising and note that American advertisements emphasize individuality while
Korean ads emphasize group behavior. This cultural point (dubious as it is, given that
most American ads present products as fostering social popularity) is said to foster inde-
pendent and collective self-concept (Heine, 2007, p. 728). Beyond this kind of superficial
description (akin to noting that ads present slim women), there is no attempt at a deeper
understanding of the political-economic function of advertising in consumer capitalism;
the techniques it uses to get people to buy things; or the complex motivational psychol-
ogy of needs, desires, emotions, and irrational cognition that these generate. Heine never
mentions the basic irrationality of advertising, which is that it induces desire for unneces-
sary (often harmful, expensive) products in order to maximize sales. Instead, he depicts
ads as a neutral, physical stimulus. This apolitical, uncritical standpoint obscures the real,
objective cultural character of advertising and its effects on psychology.
In the same way, Kitayama, Duffy, and Uchida (2007, p. 137) mention that the individu-
alistic ethos originated in the social system of capitalism and the ideology of Protestantism,
as Weber explained. However, they do not explicate the details of individualism embed-
ded in this concrete economy and religion. On the contrary, they immediately depoliti-
cize and dehistoricize the capitalist economy and Protestant religion by dissolving them
into an abstract variable termed independent. Independent is contrasted with its opposite
abstraction, interdependent: Americans live in an independent culture while Asians live
in interdependent cultures. Nothing further is said about capitalist economics, religion,
or politics. The momentary nod to concrete cultural factors is immediately withdrawn.
Instead, the authors lead us further astray by equating independent with Tonnies’ notion
of Gesellschaft, and interdependent with Gemeinschaft. This is false because Tonnies
depicted Gemeinschaft societies as ancient; organized around family, village, and town;
and consisting of agricultural economies, local politics, and common law. These charac-
teristics do not apply to contemporary interdependent societies such as China’s, which is
 247 Philosophical Principles

an industrializing society with centralized, formal political rule. (Momentarily, we shall

see that cultural terms like independent and interdependent are baseless.)
An additional example of culture being treated superficially is Markus and Kitayama’s
(2003) discussion of culture and self-esteem:

Self esteem is created and sustained by dense networks sustaining informal

and formal practices such as complimenting and praising one another, the fre-
quent distribution of awards and honors, situations like job interviews that require
people to focus on their good features . . . and by mundane everyday artifacts such
as mugs, bumper stickers, and advertisements that declare “I’m the best.” (p. 281)

This definition of culture is useful for calling attention to the variety of ways in which
behavior is culturally encouraged. However, it is deficient in specificity and depth.
Markus and Kitayama lack a theory of culture in general, and an understanding of
contemporary culture in particular. They casually identify a number of obvious “cultural
contexts” that encourage people to behave in certain ways. However, there is no depth
to the contexts. They are not grounded in basic principles of society that would enrich
their description beyond common sense. No scholarly understanding of American soci-
ety is necessary or indicated in the authors’ common-sense list of cultural factors. Nor is
the research enriched by any cultural theory that identifies central and peripheral cul-
tural factors that disproportionately affect self-esteem and other psychological topics.
The authors’ research is on the level of observing that redwood trees in Northern
California grow well when the weather is cool and damp. There is nothing to say beyond
obvious observation of scattered factors. There is no science of trees, ecology, and their
interaction, or even of redwood trees themselves. Markus and Kitayama are similarly
unhelpful in advancing a science of culture, psychology, modern American society, or
self-esteem.
Markus and Kitayama (2003) mention that cultural contexts include interpersonal
relations, ideas, social routines, institutions, and artifacts (p. 281). But what are “social
routines”? How do they originate? How do they compare in social influence to institu-
tions? Are bumper stickers as important in affecting psychology as institutions and
advertising are? And how do the authors define an institution? Is it simply normative
behaviors, or does it include politics and power? What is the nature of interpersonal rela-
tions? Are they autonomous or do they reflect broader cultural factors? How do cultural
“contexts” originate, and who controls them? What is a social network? Is it a set of dis-
crete but correlated factors, or is it a system as I defined it in Chapter 1?
We need answers to these questions if we are to have any realistic understanding of
cultural factors and how they organize self-esteem. A simple list of discrete factors is not
scientific scholarship.
Associating scattered “contexts” with psychological expressions is interesting for docu-
menting social patterning of psychological phenomena. It is interesting to know that
Chinese parents discuss and respond to their children’s emotions differently from
American parents. We need to know this if we are to communicate effectively, under-
stand one another, and treat one another respectfully. However, this is not a scientific
 248 macro cultural psychology

understanding of cultural psychology, for there is no coherent direction to follow—no

coherent, parsimonious, unobservable explanatory constructs to unify facts or explain
their diversity.
For example, Kitayama, Duffy, and Uchida (2007) propose contradictory concepts
of culture within the space of one page. On page 138 they construe culture as interperson-
ally negotiated: “Culture is dynamic because cultural ideas and practices have multiple
meanings that are constantly in flux, negotiated, manipulated, and arbitrated for a vari-
ety of reasons by all individuals who participate in a cultural community.” However, on
page 137 they emphasize the power of acculturation to structure people’s psychology:
“once socialized in a given cultural community, individuals will gradually develop a psy-
chological system of regulating their own thoughts, feelings, and actions in attunement
with myriad characteristics of the surrounding sociocultural environment.” This contra-
dicts the statement that culture is freely negotiated by individuals and in flux.
Greenfield similarly reverses her original macro emphasis on how commerce organizes
micro-level interpersonal interactions, later taking the opposite contention that “material
culture and symbolic culture result from processes of cultural co-construction.” Co-
construction involves interpersonal interactions that are independent of macro cultural
factors. An example is how, during an earthquake in Los Angeles, “a contractor showed
his neighbors how to turn off their gas, or a ham radio operator provided news of
the location and magnitude of the earthquake in the absence of electricity. . . . One
shared meaning that developed was the custom of asking people how they fared in the
earthquake; the normative reply was, ‘I was fortunate.’ The example is a model and meta-
phor of culture change provoked by new ecological conditions” (Greenfield & Keller, 2004,
pp. 552). The interactions are presented as spontaneous “co-constructions” by individuals
on the face-to-face level. No external influences are noted on these creative constructions,
and the authors regard these spontaneous, freely invented interpersonal co-constructions
as a model of culture change (see Ratner, 2006a, pp. 26–27, for further discussion of this
problem).
As a commentary, we first reiterate that this notion of free, creative, interpersonal
co-construction reverses the stance taken in Greenfield’s other writings, in which she
emphasizes the constraining power of commerce over interpersonal interactions. Second,
her co-constructionist position cannot be taken seriously as a model of social construc-
tion and change. Societies are not re-formed on the model of someone helping a neigh-
bor turn off the gas. Social meanings are not created on the model of two individuals
asking each other how they are faring. The telecommunications industry does not oper-
ate by individuals broadcasting from their home radios.
Societies are constructed and changed by social movements of organized individuals
who deal with macro cultural factors. Corporate capitalism was forged at the turn of the
twentieth century as follows:

[M]any visible human hands worked together in a conscious effort to establish

and solidify the new social order. The very conditions of its possibility were laid
down by concerted legal and political action, from the mid 1880s through the turn
of the century. . . . Corporate leaders acted purposefully and collaboratively, along
with political allies, to extend their command and negotiate the conflicts over
 249 Philosophical Principles

regulation and trusts that marked the first decade of our century. . . . They fought
in the political arena, not just at factory gates, against unions. They agitated for
American imperial power to enlarge and protect international markets and
investments.
Furthermore, in such matters corporate leaders acted consciously as a class—or
really, as a class-in-formation. . . . They collaborated through such organizations
as the National Association of Manufacturers, the National Civic Federation,
trade associations, and government commissions, as well as in political parties,
especially the Republican. They sat on one another's boards. And, of course, they
mingled in social organizations, cultural circles, private schools, elite suburbs.
The ensemble of their activities amounted to a social movement, one that . . .
produced a new hegemonic class within a transformed social order. (Ohmann,
1996, pp. 60–61; also see Smail, 1994, for additional examples)

“Analysis of links between businesses, charities, foundations, policy-planning organi-

zations, and federal advisory committees reveals a distinct pattern of . . . dense link-
ages . . . and what appears to be the overwhelming structural dominance of corporations
and corporate directors in the network as a whole” (Moore, Sobieraj, Whitt, Mayorova, &
Beaulieu, 2002, p. 741).
Cultural change/formation does not occur according to the interpersonal metaphor
propounded by Greenfield and Keller. In response to the financial meltdown of 2008, the
10 largest financial institutions in the United States increased their share of financial
assets to 60, from 10 in 1990. The 10 largest financial institutions worldwide upped
their control of global banking assets to 70, compared with 59 in 2006. Do Greenfield
and Keller believe that this massive and abrupt monopolization of financial assets by
financial institutions was modeled on one guy showing another guy how to power up his
computer to trade assets?
Additional responses to crises are documented by Naomi Klein in her well-known
book The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism. Klein documents ways in which
powerful corporations take advantage of ecological disasters to disempower and disen-
franchise people in order to generate profitable business opportunities. These structural
readjustments by the powers that be determine the responses and conditions of the
people. Matt Taibbi documented a chilling example of how Wall St. investment bankers
exploited an economic need in a small county in Alabama in a way that decimated the
county government by increasing its debt and resulting in thousands of job losses and
raising the rates for public services (Taibbi, 2010). Rather than heroically stopping the
looting, or reconstructing the county, the people suffered the disastrous effects of corpo-
rate–government corruption.
The response to Hurricane Katrina was structured by business interests using political
leverage to reorganize New Orleans along neoliberal principles in education and health
care. This prevented most of the poor people from returning to their homes, schools, and
jobs. Many homes, schools, and hospitals in the poor districts were not rebuilt. Landlords
raised rents, further depriving the poor of housing. Many of the poor blacks in New
Orleans either fled to relatives or cheap motel rooms outside the area or were relocated
in treacherous trailer camps around New Orleans. These trailers, which housed tens of
 250 macro cultural psychology

thousands of families, were contaminated by toxins. The Centers for Disease Control and
Prevention (CDC) failed to act for at least a year on warnings that trailers housing refu-
gees from Hurricane Katrina contained dangerous levels of formaldehyde, according to
a House subcommittee report released in October 2008. Instead, the CDC’s Agency for
Toxic Substances and Disease Registry demoted the scientist who questioned its initial
assessment that the trailers were safe as long as residents opened a window or another
vent. The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) pressured scientists to water
down a report on the health risks of formaldehyde. FEMA officials instructed the scien-
tists to omit any references to cancer or other long-term health risks from exposure to
formaldehyde in FEMA trailers. (Now that the dangers have been exposed, rendering the
trailers unsalable, leaders of the trailer industry who manufactured the trailers are push-
ing Congress to purchase thousands of the trailers to send to Haiti as emergency relief
stations following the 2010 hurricane!)
The same movement is occurring in the cities devastated by the economic crisis.
Detroit, for example, has hired a financial consultant to run the school system, depriving
elected school boards of much of their authority. Public schools have been replaced by
charter schools that are usually run by large corporations. Private foundations are pour-
ing millions of dollars into educational privatization and corporate control over housing
and other public policy. Interpersonal acts of mutual aid among the poverty-stricken
population are no match for this political-economic power. Some community organizing
has sprung up, with little effectiveness; however, even this involves forming community
groups with material resources—it is not simply a matter of personal interactions like
saying hello, as Greenfield and Keller propose.
The same holds for reconstructing Haiti after the devastating hurricane of January
2010. The commission that is overseeing the reconstruction has more foreign members
than Haitians. Most of the foreign aid circulates through nongovernmental organizations
dominated by foreign interests, not through the elected Haitian government. These struc-
tural facts leave little room for ordinary Haitians to reconstruct their own country.
Haitians who do participate in reconstruction are the wealthy elite and politically con-
nected. Haiti’s top reconstruction-planning official owns part of the country’s largest
concrete company, which stands to reap major gains from the wave of international
rebuilding aid. Ayear after the earthquake, news reports in the New York Times reported
that very little reconstruction had been accomplished. The vast majority of displaced
people were still living in tents with nothing to do and limited food. Rape has been a seri-
ous problem in the tent camps, which refutes Greenfield and Keller’s portrait of sponta-
neous helpfulness and resourcefulness.
To pretend that mutual aid among ordinary individuals is the model of urban and
national reconstruction is intellectually dishonest and politically irresponsible.
Greenfield and Keller’s personalistic notion of culture is stunted and inaccurate. It inverts
and distorts culture. It reduces complex, structural, political-economic, and military issues
to simple, small, personal, casual, apolitical, spontaneous interactions. This approach is not
a helpful step toward comprehending cultural psychology—or even general psychology—
that is merely incomplete and needs to be supplemented with macro cultural consider-
ations. It is a diversion, distraction, and impediment to psychological science; it needs to
be repudiated and replaced.
 251 Philosophical Principles

It is also insulting and devastating to the individuals it seeks to glorify, for it obfuscates
the tragic social dynamics that constrain their lives. It creates the illusion that people can
transform the structural tragedies of their lives by helping each other turn off the gas,
inquiring about others’ well-being, and forming conversational norms such as “I was
fortunate.”
Evidently, the authors’ lack of an alternative political vision to the status quo is the
source of their glorification of mundane, interpersonal, apolitical acts as both socially
useful and the basis for a cultural psychological theory. Because they cannot envision
a political movement with an organization; broad goals; and concrete programs for reor-
ganizing housing, banking, industry, food production, medical care, and education, they
pin their hopes on the idea that mundane, interpersonal acts can represent culture in
a scientific sense and in a political sense. Quiescent politics lead to quiescent social
science.
To demonstrate the seriousness of the difficulty of formulating concrete culture—and
to forestall charges that I am creating a straw man or beating a dead horse—I would like
to consider an extended example by an eminent cross-cultural psychologist, Nisbett.
Knight and Nisbett (2007) attempt to identify cultural reasons for perceptual/cognitive
differences in detecting relationships among things:

These differential perceptual and cognitive tendencies are rooted in the different
social practices of the two regions. East Asians are more dependent on each other
in many respects, and their attention is focused on the social world and hence the
field as a whole. Westerners are less dependent on each other and hence have the
luxury of focusing on a central object and their goals with respect to it. (p. 284)

The authors define culture as social practices. But social practice is a nondescript,
uninformative, uninformed notion of culture; it provides no direction regarding what to
study about culture or psychology. Compared to Vygotsky’s emphasis on social class, it is
empty.
In their statement, the authors provide an example of social practice—being dependent
on or independent of others. That is so nebulous that we cannot understand what it
means. Does it mean that American city dwellers depend less upon farmers for their
food? Do American households generate their own electricity and depend less on utility
companies than East Asians? Do American factory workers depend less upon what other
workers do in a different part of the assembly line? Do American infants depend less
upon caretakers for learning how to walk and talk? Do American students write their
textbooks themselves, without depending on authors and publishers for their textbooks?
Did Nisbett build the psychology building in which he teaches, without depending upon
building contractors? Does he depend on dentists to perform his root canals, or does he
do them himself?
What are “the many respects” in which Americans are less dependent than Chinese?
The authors do not provide a single example, nor have they counted all the ways in which
Americans and Chinese depend on one another in order to prove that there are more
instances of this behavior among the Chinese. Because nobody could measure relative
amounts of dependence, the authors’ proposition is empty and unscientific.
 252 macro cultural psychology

The authors’ propositions about psychological differences that follow from these dic-
hotomized social practices are similarly hollow. Dichotomizing perception of East Asians
and Westerners is not only wrong; it is nonsensical to claim that East Asians focus their
attention on the social world while Americans focus instead on central objects and their
goals. If the social word is a world of interacting human beings, then how could Westerners
not focus on it? Are Americans not cognizant of other people? American students have a
broad sense of their school system and its dynamics, which teachers are strict or lenient,
which pupils are “cool” and should be approached for favors or status enhancement; isn’t
this a focus on the social world?
Has Nisbett failed to notice that his American students are constantly connected to
their social worlds by their ubiquitous cell phones, e-mails, and text messages? American
teenagers sent and received an average of 2,272 text messages per month in the fourth
quarter of 2008, according to the Nielsen Company—almost 80 messages a day.
Experimental social psychological research confirms Americans’ great social sensitiv-
ity. Nolan et al. (2008) conducted an empirical study on motives for practicing environ-
mental conservation. Subjects who had been presented with normative information
about other people’s conservation conserved more electricity than subjects who had been
presented with other reasons for conserving. The strongest predictor of [subjects’] energy
conservation was [subjects’] belief that other people are doing it (r = 0.45, p < 0.01).
Knight and Nisbett are equally vague about other aspects of perception. What can it
mean to say that East Asians focus on the field as a whole while Americans focus on a
central object? Does this mean that Chinese ping pong players do not focus on the ball
and instead watch the spectators during a match? Do Chinese astronomers not focus on
a star when they look through a telescope because they are focusing on the whole
universe?
And if the Chinese focus on the field as a whole, how do the authors explain the notori-
ously widespread corruption in China which benefits the individual official at the expense
of the public? When a government official accepts bribes to approve faulty contracts or
programs, or to not enforce useful policies, he or she is sacrificing the public good for his
or her own personal enrichment. The official is not considering how the social field will
be affected by the behaviors he or she condones; he or she is considering only personal
enrichment. This kind of corruption is individualistic, not collectivistic.
“Focusing on the social field” is an empty term that can mean anything. It could mean
that one perceives the field and uses this knowledge to benefit oneself, escape the law,
and harm others (i.e., corruption, greed, social inequality—which certainly fits China: it
is the second most unequal economy in Asia, trailing only Nepal. Seventy percent of
the country’s private wealth is owned by 0.4 of Chinese families, according to Hart-
Landsberg [2010, p. 26]). Focusing on the social field could mean that authorities surveil
the social landscape to detect social critics and imprison them, or it could mean that
people focus on the social whole to improve it for all. Nisbett never bothers to provide
a specific definition of his central psychological term.iii
In December 2009, Chinese news media reported that 8 students had died and 26 were
hurt in a stampede at Yucai Middle School in south-central China. At 9:10 p.m., students
from 52 classrooms had been heading back to their dormitories after evening study ses-
sions, when, because it was raining, they piled into one narrow staircase. With a few boys
 253 Philosophical Principles

blocking the stairs, students trying to get down to the bottom floor tripped and fell over
one another. According to the Xinhua news agency, 1 girl and 7 boys were killed in the
stampede. (“China Stampede Kills 8 Students,” 2009, p. A12). Does this description make
it sound like the Chinese students focus on the social field as a whole and adjust/direct
their behavior to consider the group as a collective self should?
Nisbett and his colleagues make additional reckless assertions about Westerners and
Asians. “Socially engaged emotions (e.g., friendly or guilty) play a central role in the
emotional life of people in interdependent cultures, whereas social disengaged emotions
(e.g., proud or angry) are central in independent cultures. . . . People with an interdepen-
dent orientation are more sensitive to relational cues such as emotion in daily communi-
cation than people with an independent orientation” (Na et al., 2010, p. 6196). These
claims are fraught with error. First of all, what is the justification for calling anger a
socially disengaged emotion? Angry people are very engaged in attacking the object of
their fury. They are often obsessed and cannot stop thinking about the person. They stalk
them, they confront them, they scream at them, they write letters to the press about
them, they spread rumors to other people about them—if this isn’t social engagement,
what is it?
Second, the claim that friendly emotions do not play a central role in Western (“inde-
pendent”) life is ridiculous and insulting. Americans are extremely concerned with
friendliness. Youngsters, in particular, are constantly worrying whether someone really
likes them, and they are devastated when someone is unfriendly toward them. The
number one question that all young people ask is, “Does she/he like me?” Everyone pays
great attention to whether a superior (a teacher or a boss) is acting friendly. The concern
seems to play a central role in people’s emotional lives. In addition, what in the world
does “play a central role in the emotional life” mean? Does it mean that people wonder
about friendship, anger, guilt, or pride, or that they express these, or that they expend
energy suppressing them, or that they look out for them but do not react to them? All of
these different forms qualify as playing a central role. Nisbett and his colleagues dwell in
ill-defined, reckless generalizations.
This is evident in their second assertion: that Asians from collective societies are more
sensitive to emotion than independent Westerners. Not only is this extremely insulting—
akin to claiming that women are less rational than men—but it is baseless. Do these
psychologists really believe that entire populations are relatively insensitive to “emotion”—
to emotion in general, or to all emotion? Again, what could it possibly mean? What does
“more sensitive” mean? Are they more sensitive to all emotions all the time, or more
sensitive to certain emotions in certain situations? Does it mean that a population of
humans cannot reliably recognize emotions when they are expressed by other people?
Does it mean Americans are less sensitive to expressions of anger toward them than
Japanese are? No culture in the world is more preoccupied about signs of affection, sexual
interest, and disapproval than the United States. It is not clear what these scholars are
talking about.
Nisbett and colleagues would undoubtedly shift the discussion away from any real-life
situations or examples and emphasize some miniscule, statistically significant quantita-
tive differences on some artificial, superficial measure. However, these results have no
bearing on real life. For example, sensitivity to emotions was measured by the vocal
 254 macro cultural psychology

Stroop task: positive and negative events such as “wedding” or “funeral” were expressed
in positive or negative tone. Participants were asked to judge whether each word was
positive or negative. The score was the interference effect of vocal tone: reaction times
for incongruent trials (e.g., “wedding” in a negative tone) minus the congruent trials
(e.g., “wedding” in a positive tone). This test and its measure of reaction time have no
relevance to people’s actual perception of real emotions in everyday life. Such experi-
ments evade the questions rather than answer them (see Ratner, 1997, 2002, pp. 140–144,
2006a, pp. 148–162; and Ratner & Hui, 2003, for discussions of operationalism).
Labeling China as collectivist at this point in history is quite wrong. Collectivism has
been systematically abandoned by the Communist Party. In 1994, government policy
terminated permanent jobs from state-owned enterprises. Unemployment increased rap-
idly from under 6 million in 1993 to about 15 million at the end of 1998. The social safety
net has been dissolved, including pensions, health insurance, and welfare. Class polariza-
tion is wide, and individuals are highly motivated to gain financial success for themselves
and their immediate families. Yan (2009) documents this in The Individualization of
Chinese Society.

A significant change in public life during the postreform era has been the disap-
pearance of frequent mass rallies, voluntary work, collective parties, and other
forms of “organized sociality,” in which the state (through its agents) plays the
central role. In its place are various newly emerged forms of private gatherings in
public yet commercialized venues, such as shopping malls, restaurants, cafes,
bars, and clubs. Unlike the previous “organized sociality,” which emphasized the
centrality of the state, official ideology, and the submission of the individual to an
officially endorsed collectivity, the new sociality in these commercialized, venues
features the celebration of individuality and private desires in unofficial social/
spatial contexts. (Yan, 2000, p. 184)

Pow (2009, p. 383) points out how extensive privatized housing has become with the
introduction of neoliberal economics in cities.

Like gated communities elsewhere, commodity housing enclaves in Shanghai

are designed as an urban fortress protected by surveillance cameras, infrared
detection systems, and high walls and gates. To access their apartments and
houses, residents in Shanghai’s gated communities often have to pass through
three different sets of gates (the front main gate; the secondary gates leading into
their housing complexes and their own house door or gates). . . . The gates are
more than just physical barriers to demarcate boundaries of private property;
they also act as symbolic markers that signify the elite status of the inhabitants. As
one estate manager revealed during an interview: “Gates are important because
they create an identity for the housing project.”

This is a cultural psychology of exclusion and exclusivity, not a description of collectiv-

ism in any form. Fuller discussion of Pow’s and Yan’s important work is presented in
Chapter 6.
 255 Philosophical Principles

Chinese individualism is even manifested in psychopathological symptoms, as Ng

(2009) has demonstrated. Her data suggest that the location of agency has shifted across
generations. Whereas those who grew up in the Maoist era are inclined to use external
circumstances to explain the control over and responsibility for their illness, younger
patients tend to emphasize self-blame and individual responsibility. She argues that these
intergenerational differences in ethnopsychology relate to the multifaceted rise of indi-
vidualism in post-Mao China. These data have been accumulating since 1996.

The growing import of the individual has been documented in psychology. In

a review of psychological studies on motivational characteristics, evaluative-
attitudinal characteristics and temperamental characteristics in Taiwan, Hong
Kong and mainland China, Kuo-Shu Yang (1996) compiles a hefty list of decreas-
ing and increasing psychological characteristics of Chinese individuals under
the impact of what Yang terms “modernization.” Among the characteristics
decreasing with modernization are external-control beliefs, fatalistic-helplessness
attitudes, collectivist relationships, emphasis on social service, emphasis on
national development and social-oriented achievement. Characteristics increas-
ing with modernization include internal-control beliefs, self-assertion, competi-
tive attitudes, individualistic consciousness, autonomy and individual-oriented
achievement.
Studies in the workplace corroborate the ethnographic and psychological
evidence. One study found that employees in China are placing increasing prior-
ity on their desire for wealth and a happy family and decreasing value on contri-
butions to the nation and community (Hui and Chen, 1996). A survey of 869
professionals from regions across China found that the generation of managers
who spent their adolescence in the reform era—popularly dubbed the “Chinese
Me Generation”—was significantly more individualistic, less collectivistic and
less committed to Confucian values than those who grew up in the Maoist era.
(Ng, 2009, p. 436)2

Nisbett—and cross-cultural psychologists in general—manifests no awareness of this

concrete culture or psychology in China. Knight and Nisbett make nebulous, exaggerated
statements about culture and psychology that are uninformed by and uninformative
about the particular cultures they discuss. Nor do Knight and Nisbett utilize any cultural
theory about what culture is, how the factors are organized, who administers culture, or
what the vested interests and power relations are. Reducing Chinese culture to “people
are dependent on each other” eliminates any need to understand history, philosophy,
economics, art, music, and politics in culture and cultural psychology. None of these
plays any role in the authors’ description of Chinese culture or psychology. This is a good


Reprinted with kind permission from Springer Science + Business Media: Culture, Medicine
and Psychiatry, “Heartache of the State, Enemy of the Self, Bipolar Disorder and Cultural Change
in Urban China,” 33, 2009, 436, Emily Ng.
 256 macro cultural psychology

example of how cultural psychologists may depoliticize, deculture, and decontextualize

cultural-psychological phenomena. Stripping away the concrete social system insulates
it from challenge.
Knight and Nisbett (2007, pp. 284–285) manifest a similarly weak understanding
of northern and southern Italian culture. They tell us that around 1,000 AD Norman
conquerors from France dominated the south of Italy and ruled autocratically: “The
South, governed with an iron hand by Norman kings, failed to foster civic involvement,
social responsibility, and mutual assistance.” The north, on the other hand, formed into
“communal republics” with craft guilds. “Networks of civic engagement found in the
North, such as neighborhood associations, cooperatives, sports clubs, etc. were instru-
mental in creating a dense network in communities, which in turn facilitated free coop-
eration between citizens.”
This is an odd context to use to explain contemporary Italian culture and psychology.
The Normans ruled for only 200 years. For the past 800 years, southern Italy has not been
ruled by the Normans; nor has the northern part of the country remained as it was 800
years ago. Thus, the brief, distant Norman period provides no insight into today’s culture
and psychology. Moreover, the authors ignore a recent historical event that is much more
serviceable for explaining the contemporary cultural split between northern and south-
ern Italy: the invasion of Sicily in 1806 by Napoleon’s army. Historian John Davis (2006)
explains that the extensive Napoleonic reforms in Sicily have had lingering effects. A seri-
ous effort at understanding contemporary Italian culture and psychology would explore
these; Knight and Nisbett never mention them. The authors seem to think that their
“historical sketch” of the Norman conquest will suffice as a recognition of culture in the
culturally barren landscape of Psychology. They seem to think that any mere mention
of any historical event qualifies as cultural psychology. They do not bother to seriously
study actual history or connect it in a clear and meaningful way to psychology.
Knight and Nisbett’s minimal discussion of ancient history is made even less relevant
by their transformation of culture into abstract cultural variables: southern Italy was and
is “interdependent,” and the north was and is “independent.” This recapitulates the prob-
lems with these two notions that I noted above. Dissolving Italian society into these
abstractions removes any concrete, variable historical character from culture. It gives the
authors free reign to subsume (collapse) numerous different cultures within broad, nebu-
lous dimensions.
The authors equate “interdependent” southern Italy with “interdependent Asian coun-
tries.” “Southern Italians, and working class people in the West, resemble Asians in that
their social relations are of a relatively interdependent nature” (Knight and Nisbett, 2007,
pp. 289–290). The authors would have us believe that southern Italians of all kinds resem-
ble Asians of all kinds. Interdependence supersedes all concrete differences in wealth,
education, religion, and customs. Our authors would have us believe that male Shanghai
billionaires (living in exclusive, gated housing and flying to Paris to shop for luxury
goods) are culturally and psychologically similar to Catholic, homeless women in Sicily.
This is a preposterous proposition. It eliminates social class, national history, religion,
and social systems in favor of a nebulous abstraction called “relative interdependence.”
The authors’ characterization of Italy is contradicted by their own description. The
authors said that northern Italy was communal and cooperative, while the south failed to
 257 Philosophical Principles

foster civic involvement, social responsibility, and mutual assistance. This description
portrays the north as more interdependent than the south. The authors never explain why
they categorize a communal, cooperative culture as independent.
An additional weakness of this kind of research is that it fails to specifically connect
cultural dimensions to the psychology of a people. Knight and Nisbett (2007) provide
only one casual, speculative, trite, uninformative sentence about the relation between
culture and cognition: “East Asians are more dependent on each other in many respects,
and their attention is focused on the social world and hence the field as a whole” (see
Ratner, 2006a; Ratner, 2011d; Ratner & Hui, 2003, for further critique).
This kind of inadequate treatment of culture imperils the study of cultural psychology.
It pretends to bring a new appreciation of culture into the field of psychology. However,
it actually displaces and distracts from meaningful culture. This is why it needs to be cri-
tically examined and repudiated.
Accordingly, we must observe that cultural psychology is displaced by methodological
procedures used by cross-cultural psychologists. They contort psychological phenomena
and cultural phenomena, and the relationship between the two. Adequate cultural psy-
chology depends upon critiquing these problems.
A recent example by eminent cross-cultural psychologists, published in the leading
journal of cross-cultural psychology, illustrates the problems. Spencer-Rodgers, Peng, and
Wang (2010) studied the cultural basis of emotional complexity (EC)—the co-occurrence
of pleasant and unpleasant emotions. They illustrate EC with an aphorism: “For misery,
happiness is leaning against it; for happiness, misery is hiding in it. Happiness and misery
are interdependent and interpenetrating.”
The authors assert that EC is more prevalent in East Asian than in Western cultures.
Euro-Americans traditionally show an inverse relationship between good and bad feelings;
individuals who report experiencing positive affect frequently or intensely also report
experiencing negative affect less often or intensely. In contrast, “In East Asian representa-
tions, constructs such as happy/sad are viewed as mutually dependent, coevolving, and
existing in a state of balance. East Asians conceptualize the self in a dualistic manner and
are more tolerant of contradiction. Consequently, they may have more complex emotional
reactions to self-relevant experiences” (Spencer-Rodgers et al., 2010, p. 110). The authors
research a cultural factor that generates these psychological differences, which they call
“dialectical thinking”: “In this study, dialectical thinking about salient life events was
manipulated among mainland Chinese and Euro-American participants, and increased
dialectical thinking led to greater emotional complexity. Moreover, Chinese exhibited
greater dialectical thinking and emotional complexity than did Euro-Americans” (p. 109).
Before we examine their cultural explanation for this difference, let us examine the
construct itself as a cultural psychological phenomenon. Real life provides no indication
of greater emotional complexity among Chinese compared with Americans. The authors’
statements about differences among the two populations echo the sweeping generaliza-
tions that Nisbett made.
Americans readily experience the complexity of emotions and the co-presence of
sadness and happiness. Americans frequently experience a mixture of sadness and hap-
piness when an infirm elder relative dies. Although we are sad at the departure of the
loved one, we also feel relieved and happy that his or her (and our) suffering has ended.
 258 macro cultural psychology

Upon marriage, almost all Americans feel a nuanced happiness that contains elements of
worry about whether the marriage will end in divorce, as 50 do. Most people in com-
mitted relationships feel a mixture of love and disappointment for their partners. Hardly
any Americans are deliriously happy about every aspect of their partner and have no
grievances. Even losing a job can provoke a mixed sense of loss combined with excite-
ment at a new opportunity for a different kind of life. Graduation from high school or
college typically provokes a nuanced sense of loss and excitement. Catholicism, which is
adhered to by millions of Westerners, construes death as bittersweet because it is simul-
taneously a passage to salvation and a loss.
Conversely, Chinese often experience single, overriding emotions. During the Nanking
Massacre, Chinese people felt single-minded hatred of the Japanese perpetrators. They
did not feel a balance of fury and love for them. When a student is rejected from an elite
university, his emotion is overwhelmingly sad; there is little tinge of positive elation.
Conversely, when Chinese gymnasts win a gold medal in the Olympics, Chinese citizens
feel elated about their national identity; they do not feel a mixture of elation and depres-
sion. Chairman Mao enacted extreme, one-sided policies such as persecuting officials for
the slightest hint of disagreement with his views. The Cultural Revolution—which was
embraced by millions of ordinary Chinese people (for an entire decade) who beat people
to death for having foreign backgrounds or playing Western classical music or being the
principal of a school—was not exactly a model of balanced compromise among diverse
perspectives coexisting harmoniously. Nor does current government policy in China
accept dissident viewpoints. Given these real historical examples of Chinese thinking and
action, one wonders how cross-cultural psychologists could impute emotional complex-
ity and dialectical thinking to Chinese culture and psychology.
Another issue with EC is the manner in which the term, or label, is constructed. This
is crucial because it defines the psychological phenomena that cultural psychologists
study. If it is misconstrued, then the cultural-psychological study of it is the study of a
phantom.
The appellation “EC” appears to be arbitrary, and could fairly be altered to yield a very
different psychological phenomenon. Experiencing multiple emotions simultaneously
could just as well be pejoratively labeled emotional confusion, or emotional inconsis-
tency. Conversely, the Western separation of positive and negative emotions could be
labeled as emotional consistency or emotional clarity.
Indeed, the authors’ measure of “emotional complexity” did formerly carry an opposite
designation. The authors acknowledge, “In this study, complexity scores are used to mea-
sure the extent to which participants reported experiencing both good and bad feelings
over the past few weeks. Originally developed to measure ambivalence, these scores index
the extent to which individuals hold both positive and negative attitudes or emotions”
(Spencer-Rodgers et al., 2010, p. 110, my emphasis). It is not clear why the authors reversed
the original label of ambivalence into a positive one of emotional complexity. However,
their choice of labels defines very different phenomena and the way we treat the subjects
designated with these terms. This is an important cultural-political issue for psychologi-
cal research.
A related issue of definition concerns the operationalization of EC. For research to adequately
study such a phenomenon, it must be faithful to its concrete cultural-psychological quality.
 259 Philosophical Principles

It must also be conceptually rigorous and consistent. The operationalization used in this study
was neither.
EC was assessed using 20 items adapted from the Positive Affect Negative Affect Scale.
Participants indicated “the extent to which you have felt this way during the past few
weeks” on a unipolar scale ranging from 1 (not at all ) to 9 (very much). They rated 10
positive emotions (confident, content, calm, proud, bold, satisfied, pleased, energetic,
happy, and interested) and 10 negative emotions (sad, tired, bored, upset, disappointed,
nervous, insecure, ashamed, angry, and embarrassed). EC scores were computed using
a formula combining these ratings.
This measure does not appear to fulfill the definition of EC as an experience of posi-
tive and negative emotions intertwined together. The authors’ measure of EC merely
asks subjects to recall positive and negative emotions that were experienced during
several weeks. The experience did not have to include both emotions together, at the
same time, leaning against each other, and interdependent. Subjects who experienced
a positive emotion in one event and a negative emotion in a separate event would receive
scores of 9 and be defined as emotionally complex. However, each emotional experience
would have been simple and one-sided. The authors mistakenly equate a sum of separate
emotions with an integrated, complex emotional experience. Designating the measure as
“emotional complexity” is a misnomer (see Ratner, 2002, pp. 140–144, 2006a, pp. 148–162,
for related discussions of operationalism).
In addition, the operational definition relied on subjects’ memory of their emotions;
it did not tap emotions per se. Because memory is biased in many ways, the study did not
accurately measure emotional experience or complexity. Conclusions about EC are sus-
pect. Certainly, any cultural explanation of it is impeded if we do not have a clear idea
of what it is we are explaining.
Another methodological problem with the research is that it subordinates psychologi-
cal significance of the findings to statistical significance. The difference between Chinese
and American students on EC was 0.06 (M = 0.76 for Chinese and 0.70 for Americans),
which is miniscule and psychologically insignificant; however, it was statistically signifi-
cant at the 0.05 level, and the authors take this as a vindication of their hypothesis. But
statistical significance has nothing to do with psychological significance; it masks the lack
of psychologically significant differences between the groups.
The authors use a nonpsychological criterion of statistical significance to produce
a finding of significance, when the data indicate no significant psychological difference.
Nobody would conclude that a difference of 0.06 on the crude measures used indicates
substantive psychological differences between the groups. The authors can only pretend
their results are significant by using an irrelevant measure of significance. A true assess-
ment falsifies their results, so they use a false (statistical) assessment to validate their
results. The false assessment converts the false results into significant results. The right
assessment produces the wrong conclusion (no difference) for them, so they use a wrong
assessment to produce a right conclusion for them. They use an unscientific criterion to
generate a socially acceptable conclusion because a scientific criterion generates a socially
unacceptable conclusion (of no difference). They subjugate science to serve their social
purpose of generating significant data (that will be socially rewarded by publications,
social prestige and positions, and monetary rewards).
 260 macro cultural psychology

The authors, and all positivists, take the statistical finding of “significant” and transpose
it to the psychological arena, where it does not apply (Ziliak, & McCloskey, 2008). This is
nominalism. It uses a word to imply a reality that does not exist. It misleads us into think-
ing that we are explaining a significant, well-defined issue when we are not.
A final problem with the study is the explanatory cultural construct that the authors
use to account for EC in Asian cultures. This cultural construct is dialectical thinking, as
I quoted earlier. Dialectical thinking is defined as being pluralistic and tolerant of contra-
diction. These features of dialectical thinking are said to generate the corresponding fea-
tures of EC.
The authors operationalize dialectical thinking under the moniker “Dialecticism,”
which they measure using the Dialectical Self Scale (DSS). This consists of items such
as “My outward behaviors reflect my true thoughts and feelings” (reversed); “When two
sides disagree, the truth is always somewhere in the middle”; and “I am constantly chang-
ing and am different from one time to the next.” Although this scale has been widely
used, its items do not represent dialectical thinking. The first item cited above is tanta-
mount to lying; it would make lying the epitome of dialectics. The second item implies
that if one side says the Holocaust occurred and the other side denies it, then believing
something in the middle is dialectical! The third measure makes an unstable, erratic,
deranged personality the epitome of dialectics.
Another scale item is: “My core beliefs don’t change much over time” (reversed). This
means that one is a dialectician if one changes a core belief that racial discrimination
is bad to believing it is good. Another item: “When I hear two sides of an argument,
I often agree with both.” That would mean that someone who believes humans coex-
isted with dinosaurs and also believes humans did not coexist with dinosaurs is a dialec-
tician! Dialecticians such as Plato, Hegel, and Marx were a bit more sophisticated than
this.
DSS scale items do not denote dialectical thinking. By falsely claiming that they do, the
authors create a false cultural explanatory basis for EC. They direct attention at Eastern
dialectical thinking when it is not tapped by the DSS and is therefore not the basis for EC.
Dialectical thinking is a sophisticated philosophy that was developed by Western phi-
losophers such as Plato, Hegel, Marx, Adorno, and Marcuse. The word dialectics was
coined in Ancient Greece, not in Asia. (Ratner and Hui [2003] have pointed out the error
of identifying dialectics as Asian thinking.) There is no evidence that Asian philosophy
or ordinary thinking is dialectical. In his essay “On Contradiction,” Mao recognized that
“Hegel made most important contributions to dialectics.” He embraced Marx’s dialectical
thinking, and distinguished it from Asian philosophy, which he dubbed “metaphysical”
and reactionary.
Dialectics does not accept two sides of an argument, as the DSS item queries. Quite the
opposite: it strives to identify inconsistencies in an argument that refute it as it stands.
Socrates, for example, cross-examines his interlocutor’s claims and premises in order to
draw out inconsistency that warrants abandoning them. For instance, in The Republic
he argued that justice is antithetical to harming someone: “It is not then the function of
the just man to harm either friend or anyone else, but of his opposite, the unjust. . . . If
anyone affirms that it is just to render to each his due and he means by this that injury and
harm is what is due to his enemies . . . he was no truly wise man who said it. For what he
 261 Philosophical Principles

meant was not true. For it has been made clear to us that in no case is it just to harm
anyone.” Socrates’ dialectical argument culminates in a decisive, absolute position—in no
case is it just to harm anyone. He refutes the opposite argument as unwise and untrue.
Nothing could be more false than to claim that dialectical argumentation accepts both
sides, a middle ground, or no truth.
Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit follows (and praises) Socrates’ dialectical procedure
of detecting inadequacies in philosophical positions (which Hegel calls “untrue con-
sciousness”) and correcting them to discover truth. The Introduction to the Phenomenology
announces the subject of dialectical philosophy as “the actual knowledge of what truly is.”
This is achieved by “[t]he dialectic process which consciousness executes on itself, in the
sense that out of it the new and true object arises. . . .”
In contrast, the DSS assumes that dialectics compromises and denies truth. One of
the DSS items is: “When I am solving a problem, I focus on finding the truth (reversed).”
This is the exact opposite of what Hegel says about dialectics.
Similarly, when Marx described class society as the contradiction between classes, he
did not embrace this as some kind of wonderful diversity and complexity that should
persist in balanced harmony. He condemned it as a crime against humanity that must be
terminated by communism so that people can fulfill themselves in peace. Throughout his
work, Peng (and Nisbett) has failed to understand the philosophical, technical meaning
of dialectics and contradiction.
This cross-cultural psychological research pales in comparison with Ritterhouse’s
cultural psychological research on racial etiquette and psychology. That research was
informed by a deep historical understanding of the topic. In addition, Ritterhouse dealt
with a historically concrete, rich cultural factor—the code of racial etiquette—and eluci-
dated the psychological elements that were internalized by Southern whites. It elucidated
the internal relationship between psychological phenomena such as emotions, memory,
perception, self, and reasoning, and the cultural complex of values, strictures, power rela-
tions, property ownership, and legitimating-mystifying ideology. The mutual dependence
and support of psychology and the cultural complex in which it was embedded was made
clear. The richness of the cultural complex clarified and concretized the specific details of
psychological phenomena, including the situations that provoked them and did not pro-
voke them, their quality, their contradictions (e.g., violently attacking a black person who
touched them on the street or called them by their first name, but then allowing black
people to care for their children), and their dynamics and organization.
In contrast, every aspect of the cross-cultural study contorted real issues into unreal
caricatures and misnomers. The authors concocted a realm of constructs, tests, measures,
and indicators that have no connection to the real issues these were said to denote. For
example, the wrong test/criteria generates the wrong empirical conclusion (e.g., signifi-
cant differences), yet it is presented as the right test that generates the right conclusion.
The wrong operational definitions are used, yet they are presented as objectively measur-
ing psychological and cultural phenomena such as emotional complexity and dialectical
thinking. Consequently, conclusions based on the study’s methodology are phantoms.
They are uninformative, and misleading, about actual cultural psychological issues such
as dialectical thinking, EC, and significance. Confucius pointed out the consequences
of this: “If names are not right, words are misused. When words are misused, affairs
 262 macro cultural psychology

go wrong. When affairs go wrong, courtesy and music droop, law and justice fail. And
when law and justice fail them, a people can move neither hand nor foot.”
Cross-cultural psychology has no psychological theory of why culture affects psychol-
ogy or why psychology has a cultural genesis, character, and function. More specifically,
what is the relation between cognition (a belief system, a way of thinking) and emotion?
There is no indication of why “dialecticism” fosters “emotional complexity” or how it
does so.
Not all cross-cultural research is this flawed. However, positivistic methodology gen-
erates errors that are never completely avoided by cross-cultural psychologists (Hwang,
2003). Positivistic methodology is a flawed, limiting methodology that dominates the
best intentions of researchers. Even when positivists have a historical understanding of
significant cultural and psychological factors, their methodology renders these unrecog-
nizable by contorting them into simplistic, superficial, abstract, contrived, misbegotten
definitions and measures (e.g., collectivism, parental control, responsiveness, and expres-
siveness that are devoid of cultural content) which are treated entirely with statistical
procedures having no bearing on psychological significance (Ratner, 1997, Takano and
Osaka, 1999; Ziliak and McCloskey, 2008; Matsumoto, 1999; Oyserman, Coon, and
Kemmelmeier, 2002).
This is why cultural psychologists such as Shweder developed cultural psychology in
opposition to cross-cultural psychology, and why positivistic methodology must be criti-
cized for distorting the study of cultural psychology. This is not polite criticism over small
details within the rubric of cross-cultural psychology; it is fundamental criticism of
flawed and misleading methodological issues. Cross-cultural psychologists attempt to
prevent this kind of principled, direct critique by objecting to its tone. They say that it
is argumentative, inflammatory, biased, and unprofesisonal. Attacking the tone rather
than the substance of the argument is an insidious way to attenuate the critique. This is an
unscientific maneuver that avoids the real scientific issues.
More specific errors in the treatment of culture can be identified under our rubrics of
false abstraction and false concreteness. It is worth clearing away these errors in the treat-
ment of culture so that real and important concrete aspects can be elucidated.

False Abstraction
A study by Greenfield, Keller, Fuligni, and Maynard (2003) on individualism/collectiv-
ism exemplifies both these errors.
In certain passages, the authors treat individualism as an independent cultural vari-
able that explains scientific intelligence: “the goal of scientific intelligence belongs to the
individualistic pathway because it emphasizes the person in relation to the world of
objects” (Greenfield, Keller, et al., p. 472). This statement is a false abstraction because it
asserts that all scientific intelligence (an abstraction) has the culturally specific character
of individualism. This is akin to saying that “the family” (abstraction) belongs to the
patriarchal (culturally specific) pathway.
In addition to this conflation of levels of abstraction, the authors’ statement is unclear.
What does it mean to say that scientific intelligence emphasizes the person in relation
to the world of objects? How does scientific intelligence singularly emphasize the person
 263 Philosophical Principles

in relation to objects? And what does this have to do with individualism? Don’t collec-
tivistic Koreans emphasize people in relation to objects, and aren’t Koreans scientific?
These statements by Greenfield et al. echo Nisbett’s nebulous statements about culture
and psychology.
In fact, scientific intelligence has nothing to do with individualism. Nor does scientific
retardation have anything to do with collectivism.
Great scientific advances have been made in “collectivistic” cultures. Arabic-Muslim
scholars made important, original scientific contributions in natural science theory
and inductive logic from the eighth to the thirteenth centuries in the vast Muslim empire
that stretched from Spain to central Asia to Iran and Afghanistan. Islamic scientists knew
the earth was round in the eleventh century, from mathematical calculations. Luria
(2006, p. 60) observed that “Uzbekistan could boast of an ancient high culture which
included outstanding scientific and poetic achievements . . .” (Islamic science declined,
due largely to social instability and the interference from conservative religious forces
[Lindberg, 1992, pp. 177, 180].)
The Muslim empire that fostered science was not individualistic, nor is Islam an
individualistic Weltanschauung or social practice. The Muslim Empire was ruled by a
caliph who was both king and prophet. He and his kingdom owned all the land.
Individuals could only use the kingdom’s land as a member of society. There was no pri-
vate property or individualism. Individualism was not the path to Islamic science. (And
during certain epochs, “collectivistic” China was accomplished in certain branches of
science.)
Nor was individualism the path to Western science! First of all, Western science relied
on Islamic scientific advances: “the path leading to the scientific revolutions of Europe
was paved most significantly by Arabic-Islamic scholars” (Huff, 2003, p. 240). Second, the
rise of Western science in Greece and Rome had nothing to do with individualism
because those societies were not individualistic (Hall, 1963).
It is a common error in cultural and cross-cultural psychology to equate “Western”
with “individualism,” as though all of Western culture from ancient Greece to modern
capitalism has been equally individualistic. However, ancient Western societies were not
individualistic. (Nor were societies from other important periods in other Western coun-
tries.) A telling example is the fact that the word individual derives from the Latin indi-
viduus, which means “indivisible or inseparable from the community.” It retained this
social denotation even later in Western civilization, when it described indivisibility from
the holy Trinity. Individualization thus meant joining society—becoming indivisible from
it. It was only in the seventeenth century that the word was redefined to mean
a single, indivisible person, complete unto himself, separate from society, possessing
unique (nonsocial) idiosyncrasies.
The reason Western science developed spectacularly after the seventeenth century
is complex. Among many factors, one was political decentralization, which freed com-
munities and universities from religious and political strictures on intellectual innova-
tion. Another factor was commercial development in Europe. Commercial trade and
industrial production stimulated science to produce new materials; labor-saving technol-
ogy; and ways to reckon money, land, produce, and travel. Commercial revolutions in
technology, industrialization, and the market economy also stimulated a new way of
 264 macro cultural psychology

thinking about nature. This included the idea that nature operates according to laws and
mechanisms, like a machine, apart from man and having an objective existence that can
be scientifically analyzed (Huff, 2003, p. 252).
While commerce was important to the profound development of scientific thinking in the
West, it was not the individualistic element of capitalistic commerce that predominated.
Joseph Needham, the preeminent historian of Chinese science, offered similar observa-
tions, comparing social factors that fostered the remarkable Western scientific thinking
that emerged during the Renaissance with the social factors that restricted Chinese sci-
ence during the same period.
Greenfield, Keller, and colleagues’ (2003) attempt to reduce these complex social, eco-
nomic, technological, and conceptual underpinnings of science to truncated, nebulous
abstractions like “individualism/collectivism” or “the person’s relation to objects” is sim-
plistic, uninformed, and wrong.

False Concreteness
Greenfield et al. invoke independent cultural variables to explain individualism. They
mention “the individualistic ways of the city” (Greenfield, Keller, et al., 2003, p. 477).
They state, “commerce and formal schooling are associated with a more individualistic
mode of apprenticeship” (p. 473). They state that “school ecology favors attention to the
individual psyche” (p. 476). They also claim that “the interdependent pathway [i.e., col-
lectivism] appears to be an adaptive response to small face-to-face communities and
a subsistence economy” (p. 465).
These statements assume that urbanization, commerce, and formal schooling are
intrinsically individualistic, and necessarily foster individualistic apprenticeship and
cognition. Subsistence economies and small communities are deemed to be intrinsically
collective. This is false concreteness because it uses abstract features of cities, schooling,
and commerce (e.g., cities are large, dense, administered entities) to explain concrete
behaviors (e.g., individualism).
However, abstractions do not have an intrinsic, natural, fixed, specific character.
Schools do not necessarily cultivate individualistic thinking. Schools cultivate individu-
alism only when they are organized to do so under the influence of other macro cultural
factors such as a capitalist economy (cf. Slaughter & Rhoades, 2004). Collectivistic societ-
ies such as the former Soviet Union and China from 1949 through the mid-1980s struc-
tured school activities around teamwork and social responsibility, which inculcated
collectivistic thinking. Chinese schools in the 1960s did not assign homework because
they did not want individual variations in family resources to override the common, col-
lective education pupils received in class.
Nor are cities intrinsically individualistic. They can have diverse social qualities. Sum-
erian cities of around 3000 BC were clan societies ruled by monarchs. Later Greek city-
states were also communal rather than individualistic (Martin, 1994). Cities developed
individualistic tendencies only with the growth of capitalistic economy and politics.
Commerce also varies with the cultural context. Commerce in contemporary capital-
ism—where everything has been commercialized, including genes, ideas, water, and the
labor power of humans—is very different from commerce in seventeenth and eighteenth
 265 Philosophical Principles

century North and South America, which was subsidiary to subsistence production
within the family, encompassed only a few products, and did not commodify labor power.
This distinction was emphasized by Marx in his analysis of simple commodity produc-
tion and capitalist commodity production.
Bourdieu (2005, p. 4) describes substantial differences between the commerce prac-
ticed by the Kabyles in Algeria and the capitalist market. Kabyle commerce was not
a series of impersonal transactions between strangers in the free market; it consisted of
exchanges of the economy of good faith that were guaranteed by friends or relatives capa-
ble of limiting and averting the risks associated with the market.
Charles Taylor (1985) similarly explained how traditional Japanese commercial bargain-
ing was informed by a principle of collective consensus among interdependent social
members that was antithetical to the capitalistic bargaining: “Our idea of bargaining, with
the assumption of distinct autonomous parties in willed relationship, has no place there;
nor does a series of distinctions, like entering into and leaving negotiation” (p. 33).
Greenfield, Maynard, and Marti (2009) stated that commercialism influenced a wide
array of personal, familial, and pedagogic relations. This implied that commercialism in
general has this influence. This is misleading. The commercialism they studied was capi-
talist commercialism. This is why it had individualizing effects on personal, family, and
educational relationships. (Katz was clear about this in her ethnography on the effects of
capitalist commerce. She explored the concrete details of commerce rather than treating it
as an abstraction.) Commercialism can take other forms. Collective, cooperative forms of
commerce would not have these effects. Collective forms would have collectivizing effects.
However, the authors do not acknowledge this. This has pernicious social and political
implications; it forestalls any other form of commerce besides the capitalist form.
With cultural factors being socially constructed, varying in quality with the context
of related factors, and being politically organized, qualitatively different forms of macro
factors are possible. Cities, schools, commerce, work, government, democracy, and labor
can be socially reconstructed and imbued with new politics and principles.
Psychological phenomena are also opened to qualitative change. Aggression, selfish-
ness, mental illness, fear, irrationality, and insecurity are transformable into qualitatively
new phenomena such as kindness, cooperation, and security if they are encouraged by
new cultural factors. Psychological change is not restricted to quantitative decreases in
aggression, selfishness, or mental illness.
Kagitcibasi (Friedlmeier et al., 2005, pp. 255–272) makes this point. She maintains that
modernization is not a singular variable with intrinsic, fixed, universal content. Rather,
Asian modernization includes different social relations from Western modernization.
Thus, Asians can participate in modernization without adopting Western forms of it: “as
societies modernize (with increased urbanization, education, affluence, etc.) they do not
necessarily demonstrate a shift toward western individualism” (p. 267).
Different forms of modernization generate different psychological effects: “accompany-
ing multifaceted societal modernization, psychological modernization also manifests
multiple outlooks” (Friedlmeier et al., 2005, p. 266). Western modernization generates
autonomy that prizes independence and self-interest. Asian modernization generates
autonomy that utilizes the accomplishments of the individual to further his or her social
relations. Autonomy can be associated with social relatedness instead of social isolation.
 266 macro cultural psychology

Greenfield and her colleagues do not intentionally and consciously advocate this, of
course. However, their oversight leads to obscuring of the particular, historical character
of bourgeois commerce, and to the obstruction of challenges to it. Oversight, obscuran-
tism, and obstructionism go hand in hand.
Similarly, face-to-face, subsistence economy does not necessarily foster collectivism.
Face-to-face, subsistence societies can be individualistic. The Ojibwa Indians of northern
Canada are one such society who practice severe and premature training for indepen-
dence and self-reliance. “Their economic and political institutions demonstrate a strong
individualism” (Parker, 1960, p. 609).
The individualism that Greenfield et al. (2009) refer to is a product of capitalism. The
term itself was first used around 1850 by J. S. Mill, and by Tocqueville in his book
Democracy in America, to describe this new system. Other forms of individualism have
a different cultural-historical character.
Clearly, Chinese collectivism since the 1950s was not engendered by a face-to-face
subsistence economy. It is an attribute of state-controlled, large-scale enterprises (Burke
& Ornstein, 1995, p. 105).
What is disturbing about such inadequate treatments of culture is that they comes after
centuries of deep thinking about the nature of culture by anthropologists, sociologists,
social philosophers, and historians. Yet most cultural psychologists and cross-cultural psy-
chologists fail to utilize these insights (cf. Gjerde, 2001; Ratner, 1997, 2006a, pp. 26–30).

THE ULTIMATE OBFUSCATION:

THE PALL OVER CAPITALISM
The minimization of concrete culture must ultimately operate by obfuscating capitalism,
for capitalism is the concrete form of modern culture. If capitalism appears in social
science, then concrete culture has not been obscured. All the inadequacies in character-
izing culture that we have examined in this chapter boil down to the obscuring of capital-
ism. They are all means to this goal. Unfortunately, this goal has been achieved. Capitalism
has been eradicated from the face of psychology.
Certain of capitalism’s affects have poked through. Poverty, violence, discrimina-
tion, inequality, and “stress” have been recognized by psychologists and other social sci-
entists. However, the political-economic system that produces these affects is never
mentioned.
In the field of psychology, the pall over capitalism is so thorough that in the past
119 years, the word capitalist/capitalism/capitalistic has appeared in only 14 article
abstracts in all the major psychology journals combined, including cross-cultural jour-
nals! (This number does not include articles that discussed capitalism; this is only a count
of those that mention the word once in their abstract. Only 14 articles in 119 years even
mentioned the word! The number of articles that discussed the term in any detail or
depth is probably close to zero, as the absence of capitalist/capitalism/capitalistic from the
abstract indicates that it was not a prominent theme of the article.) Cultural psychologists
similarly refuse to consider neoliberalism, as I have documented in the Preface.
Table 4.1 presents the data on how psychologists have ignored—and obfuscated—
the world’s dominant socioeconomic system for the past 119 years.
 267 Philosophical Principles

Table 4.1 Articles in Major Psychology Journals Whose Abstracts Mention the Word
Capitalist/Capitalism/Capitalistic, 1887–2006

Journal # of Articles

American Psychologist 2
Child Development 0
Developmental Psychology 0
Journal of Abnormal Psychology 0
Journal of Abnormal & Social Psychology 3
Journal of Consulting & Clinical Psychology 1
Journal of Consumer Psychology 0
Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology 1
Journal of Economic Psychology 2
Journal of Personality & 2
Social Psychology
Personality & Social Psychology Bulletin 2
Psychological Bulletin 1
Psychological Inquiry 0
Psychological Review 0

Total 14

Source: Kasser, T., Cohn, S., Kanner, A., and Ryan, R. (2007). Some costs of American corporate capital-
ism: A psychological exploration of value and goal conflicts. Psychological Inquiry, 18, 1–22, 60–71.
Reprinted by permission of the publisher (Taylor & Francis Group, http://www.informaworld.com).

Journals and books that are specifically devoted to exploring culture and psychology
manifest little improvement over these data. The Journal of Cross Cultural Psychology is
already listed in Table 1.1. There is scant mention of capitalism in journals such as the
Asian Journal of Social Psychology; Transcultural Psychology; Ethos; Human Development;
Culture, Medicine, & Psychiatry; and Cross-Cultural Research.
In its 13-year history, the leading journal Culture & Psychology has mentioned capital-
ism only two times a year, and the vast majority of mentions were references to book titles
or other sources containing the word (e.g., “cf. Weber, Protestantism and the Rise of
Capitalism”) rather than uses of the word by an author in a discussion of capitalism and
psychology. The number of authors besides myself who have used the word amounts to
a small handful. The same is true for the journal Mind, Culture, Activity, which mentions
the word capitalism in four articles over its 16-year history but does not discuss capitalism
or its relation to psychology in any article.
The Handbook of Cultural Psychology (Kitayama & Cohen, 2007) mentions the word
capitalism twice in 850 pages.
The Cambridge Handbook of Sociocultural Psychology (Valsiner & Rosa, 2007) does not
list capitalism in its index.
Ignoring the term capitalism is only the tip of the iceberg. These journals and books
also fail to discuss in detail exploitation, alienation, commodification, ideology, mystifi-
cation, hegemony, or social class.
 268 macro cultural psychology

One wonders how one can call oneself a cultural psychologist without mentioning (or
studying) the predominant culture in the entire world for the past 300 years!
This ignoring—or obfuscating—of the concrete in leading psychology publications is
particularly effective in legitimizing the status quo, for when disciplines that specialize in
analyzing social life do not do so in a thorough manner, it exempts social life from a great
potential challenge. It tacitly endorses the status quo—just like when government regula-
tors are corrupted and do not expose misdeeds in the industry they are charged with
regulating, it serves as an official seal of approval by the highest authorities who suppos-
edly are experts in their areas.
Human societies have been organized into social classes for the past 10,000 years. Every
element of social life is affected by one’s class position, including mortality, disease,
opportunities, privileges, health care, literacy, vocabulary, working memory, number
of words exchanged between parents and children, and stress. Yet social class is rarely
mentioned in cultural psychology. This exclusion is as derelict as discussing the psychol-
ogy of Southern whites during Reconstruction and not mentioning the racial code of
etiquette.
Silences are powerful when practiced by powerful people. When an eminent, decorated
psychologist such as Aronson never mentions social class as part of the human social
experience, his silence implicitly but loudly tells all students and teachers of social psychol-
ogy to ignore social class. His silence is forceful; it shapes peoples’ sense of social life and
social psychology. It is far more effective than explicitly enjoining them against thinking
about class. As Lakoff famously said, if you tell someone to not think about something—
for instance, an elephant—that is the surest way to encourage them to think about it.
Another gambit cultural psychologists use is to present data that confirm the centrality
of macro cultural factors for psychology but then ignore these data in their conclusions
about improving psychology. Nisbett employs this in his book on intelligence. The book is
replete with experimental demonstrations of how race and class powerfully affect IQ levels.
The clear implication is that disadvantages of race and class need to be abolished in order
to raise the low IQs of people who occupy disadvantaged social positions. The scientific
data and implications lead to a progressive politics to equalize the social structure. As
I have said, good social science is also progressive politics. However, Nisbett’s suggestions
for enhancing IQ never touch the social structure. Instead, he meekly concludes (in a whis-
per) that “there is much that we can do to increase the intelligence and academic achieve-
ment of ourselves and our children. Everything from the biological (exercise and avoidance
of smoking and drinking for pregnant women, and breast-feeding for newborns) to the
didactic (teaching categorization, following good tutoring principles) can make a differ-
ence to intelligence” (Nisbett, 2009, pp. 198–199). As if we need a psychology professor to
tell us that.
It is pathetic to see these homilies serving as Nisbett’s concluding words of wisdom.
He should be taking the bull by the horns and utilizing his data on IQ to push for a
reorganization of the social structure on more egalitarian, cooperative lines that will
enrich people materially and culturally and will abolish class and racial distinctions.
Nisbett retreats from and obscures these conclusions. The reason is that he has a narrow
political vision that cannot accommodate structural reforms. This forces him to retreat
to homilies about boosting IQ within the narrow confines of the status quo. His timid
 269 Philosophical Principles

politics prevent him from recognizing and pursuing the scientific implications of his
research.
Nisbett’s and Aronson’s silence about class is more insidious than a psychobiologist’s
or sociobiologist’s minimizing it. Aronson is an eminent, decorated social psychologist
who is entrusted with informing us about social life and social influences on psychology.
If a scholar in the field of social psychology does not deem social class worthy of mention,
it lends enormous credence to the silence. The same is true when Valsiner and other
eminent cultural psychologists silently omit major cultural issues such as capitalism,
social class, exploitation, commodification, and alienation from the books and journals
they edit. It is like an eminent biologist writing a textbook (reprinted in over 10 editions)
without mentioning cells! If such a person thinks cells are not worth mentioning, then
why should we novices be concerned with them? Misinformation carries more weight
the more expertise in the field the scholar carries.
The neglect of concrete socioeconomic issues is part of a larger neglect of social issues
in psychology that ultimately exempts the social system from challenge. The statements
from Jarvis and from Savage and Williams that I cited in the Preface make this clear.

THE DIFFICULTY IN CONCEPTUALIZING CULTURE IS

A CULTURAL DIFFICULTY ROOTED IN THE SOCIAL
ORGANIZATION OF CAPITALISM
The concerted, pervasive minimization of concrete culture could not have been better
orchestrated had the Rand Corporation commissioned psychologists to plan this mission.
The fact that no formal administrative (or funding) body was necessary to orchestrate
this pervasive, concerted marginalization of concrete culture within psychology testifies
to the enormous hegemonic power that normal, mundane culture has in narrowing the
outlook of even highly trained social scientists and educators
The field of cultural psychology is about the relationship between culture and psychol-
ogy, yet nobody is talking about the concrete capitalist culture in which we live! And
nobody is talking about the fact that nobody is talking about it.
Ironically, this ignorance about concrete culture is rooted in the social organization
of capitalist society. The cultural reasons for ignoring capitalism—which complement the
political reasons I described at the beginning of this chapter—lie in the fact that capitalist
society is difficult to fathom as a culture. Capitalism disguises itself as a culture, and,
indeed, capitalism undermines itself as a culture. Capitalism is an anticultural culture
that obscures itself and culture in general.
Capitalism is based on individual ownership of resources (materials, buildings, land,
technology), individual decision-making about how to use one’s privately owned
resources, individual goals for using them to advance and enrich oneself, and individual
responsibility for finding a job, house, and spouse. This individualism—which is encoded
and enforced in laws, rights, and duties—obscures the existence of a massive, coordi-
nated culture and the advantages it provides to our humanity.
The social organization of capitalism makes it seem that private ownership and self-
centeredness are basic to our humanity and that social structures, government, and
 270 macro cultural psychology

regulation mitigate our human nature. This makes it very difficult for residents of capital-
ist society to understand the real nature and benefit of culture, and even to understand
the basis of their own individuality. They believe that individuality is naturally individu-
alistic. They do not realize that the reason people in capitalist environments act individu-
alistically and see themselves as individuals is that the social organization of capitalist
society—private ownership, decision making, and interest—creates that behavior.
Capitalism is an anticultural culture. It is a culture in the sense that it is definitely an
organized social system with laws, institutions, and an army to protect its social organiza-
tion. However, the social organization of capitalism privileges the individual to such an
extent that the social organization that promotes and protects this privilege is hidden
from view—and undermined in practice.
Einstein (2009, pp. 58–59) perceptively regarded this contradiction as “the essence of
the crisis of our time. The individual’s position in society is such that the egotistical drives
of his make-up are constantly being accentuated, while his social drives . . . progressively
deteriorate. . . . The economic anarchy of capitalist society, as it exists today is, in my
opinion, the real source of the evil.”
Marx (1973, p. 161) succinctly expressed this as follows: “the general bond and all-round
interdependence in production and consumption increase together with the independence
and indifference of the consumers and producers to one another; this contradiction leads
to crises.”
Foucault (1987, p. 82) similarly stated that in modern capitalism, that is, “social relations
in the form of competition, exploitation, group rivalry, or class struggle . . . the laws of
coexistence that unite one to his fellow men in a common fate, [also] set him in opposi-
tion to them in a struggle.”
The anticultural nature of the capitalist cultural system is starkly revealed in the eco-
nomic collapse of 2008. This collapse is anticultural not only in the sense that it harmed
society, but also because it was caused by the self-centered behavior of financiers who
took huge risks to enrich themselves at the expense of other people. Yet the collapse was
also cultural in the sense that a huge culture of institutions and laws enabled this anticul-
tural behavior to occur. The government abetted this crisis, firstly by deregulating the
financial institutions so as to allow them to engage in highly profitable but speculative
investment practices. Secondly, the government allayed the crisis by giving away trillions
of dollars of public money to corporations to enhance their enrichment. These cultural
acts by cultural institutions promoted the anticultural behavior of bankers, mortgage
brokers, and accounting firms. Capitalism is thus a culture that undermines itself as
a culture and also obscures itself as an organized culture.
Bankers who received trillions of dollars of public bailout money did not feel any obli-
gation to use it to improve the financial situation of the public. A January 18, 2009,
account in the New York Times titled “Bailout Is a Windfall to Banks, if Not to Borrowers”
spells this out. It describes how at the Palm Beach Ritz-Carlton in November 2008,
“John C. Hope III, the chairman of Whitney National Bank in New Orleans, stood before
a ballroom full of Wall Street analysts and explained how his bank intended to use its
$300 million in federal bailout money. ‘Make more loans?’ Mr. Hope said. ‘We’re not
going to change our business model or our credit policies to accommodate the needs of
the public sector as they see it to have us make more loans.’” Banks that received some of
 271 Philosophical Principles

the first $350 billion from the Treasury’s Troubled Asset Relief Program are not required
to disclose what they do with it! (McIntire, 2009).
According to the New York Times, a review of investor presentations and confer-
ence calls by executives of some two dozen banks around the country found that few
cited lending as a priority. An overwhelming majority saw the bailout program as a no-
strings-attached windfall that could be used to pay down debt, acquire other businesses,
or invest for the future (ibid). Indeed, as the economic crisis wears on and the need
to extend credit for investment intensifies, banks are holding on to the money the gov-
ernment has lent them, and they are exacerbating the crisis: “banks’ idle reserves that are
available for lending reached $1 trillion in October, 2009” (Meltzer, 2009, p. A21).
A related example occurred in February 2009: Northern Trust of Chicago, which
received $1.5 billion in public bailout money and then laid off 450 workers, flew hundreds
of clients and employees to Los Angeles and treated them to 4 days of posh hotel rooms,
salmon and filet mignon dinners, music concerts, a PGA golf tournament at the Riviera
Country Club with Mercedes shuttle rides, and Tiffany swag bags.
Northern Trust had a lavish dinner at the Ritz Carlton with a concert by Chicago (at
a $100,000 fee); rented a private hangar at the Santa Monica Airport for another big
dinner with a gig by Earth, Wind & Fire; and closed down the House of Blues on Sunset
Strip (at a cost of $50,000) for a dinner and serenade by Sheryl Crow.
Avoiding taxes is another example of how people undermine the public good to enrich
themselves. The U.S. Treasury loses an estimated $100 billion a year to offshore tax cheats
(not including losses from people cheating on tax returns).
Perhaps the most obvious manifestation of capitalists’ destruction of capitalism is their
continuation of the disastrous financial speculation and cheating that brought the world
economy to its knees in 2008. “Major U.S. banks have masked their risk levels in the past
five quarters by temporarily lowering their debt just before reporting it to the public,
according to data from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. A group of 18 banks—
which includes Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, J.P. Morgan Chase, Bank of America,
and Citigroup—understated the debt levels used to fund securities trades by lowering
them an average of 42 at the end of each of the past five quarterly periods. The banks,
which publicly release debt data each quarter, then boosted the debt levels in the middle
of successive quarters.” (Kelly, McGinty, & Fitzbatrick, April 9, 2010, pp. C1). This legal
practice, gives investors a skewed impression of the level of risk financial firms are taking
the vast majority of the time.
Here we have government data from the financial regulatory institution that shows
banks routinely lie about their risk, and yet the government allows this lying to continue.
The highest levels of government are complicit in capitalist lying and speculation, even
after these very acts plunged the world financial system into a severe crisis that continues
to this day. (Lehman Brothers used deceptive reporting procedures to hide $50 billion
before it collapsed in 2008. “Rather than reducing quarter-end debt, Lehman took steps
to hide it.” [ibid]) The crisis was not an accident that resulted from a few random indi-
viduals. It was coordinated and abetted at the highest levels of culture. It is capitalist
culture decimating culture.
Capitalism not only decimates the culture of the populace, it also weakens the class soli-
darity of capitalists. Moran (2008, pp. 68–69) reports a shifting of class cohesion in Great
 272 macro cultural psychology

Britain: “There has been a sharp decline in the institutional solidarity of business as an
organized interest, but a sharp increase in the extent to which firms, especially big firms,
have mobilized to voice their own narrow interests. Representing the class interests of
business has become increasingly problematic; representing individual big businesses
has become increasingly effective. . . . [P]reliminary data for the late 1980s and early
1990s showed the beginning of the twin impact of financial deregulation and globaliza-
tion on the cohesion of the old system. The century-long trend that had consolidated the
corporate elite into a single nationally-embedded network was reversed. The density of
interlock declined . . .”
Ironically, the more successful capitalism is in acculturating people to act capital-
istically, the more lethal it is to the maintenance of capitalism, for capitalist action is self-
centered, divisive, and anticultural, which are all antithetical to the maintenance of
a cultural system. Capitalism’s success is thus its greatest failure, for the stronger it is, the
weaker it becomes, and the more it undermines its coherence. Patriotic capitalism is thus
a death knell for capitalism. The patriots are its greatest enemies. The financiers and
politicians who created the financial implosion of the early twenty-first century have
foisted greater harm on the United States than all of the country’s enemies.
Capitalism denies its own role in organizing capitalism. Capitalism claims that capital-
ist socioeconomic relations are human nature, not social constructs; therefore capitalism
emerges naturally from people when they are free to express their nature. No social orga-
nization promotes this; social organizations only retard it.
Capitalism is a society that denies it is a society and, furthermore, denies that any soci-
ety is good. The only good and natural state for humans is one that consists of individuals
freely following their own nature without social coordination or regulation.
Consequently, capitalism is a culture that makes culture problematic to perceive and
comprehend. Capitalism does not simply undermine capitalist society; it undermines all
society, because it denies the legitimacy of all systems. All systems are illusions because
the only real things are individuals.
Cultural programs such as reality television enforce this notion. They present social
issues as individual issues:

The emphasis on skills and individual performances flattens social inequalities so

that it is not just class, but also race and gender that are reduced to individualised
self-performances. Racism is reduced to a relationship or personal problem
through televisual techniques of event, structure and interaction and the indi-
vidual display of the (lack of) cultural capital. . . . Emphasis is placed on the psy-
chological journey: participant Paul Edmonson, an airport manager, on Grown
Up Gappers, travels to Africa to “re-connect to the world,” he repeatedly speaks to
the camera about his self-development, how he used to be cowardly and shirked
emotional responsibility but has now through his journey learnt to become more
responsible. (Skeggs, 2009, p. 637)

This culture has made people ignorant and suspicious of culture, thereby depriving
them (intellectually and practically) of the social basis of their own existence and of the
basis for humanity/civilization in toto. The ruling classes of other societies have mystified
 273 Philosophical Principles

the origins of their social order (e.g., legitimizing it as divine right). However, they never
denied the existence of their own social system, or of culture in general. They recognized
that they were part of a society and that society is real and important.
The mystifying power of capitalism to obscure the society in which its people live is
proven by experimental social psychological research. Nolan et al. (2008) experimentally
found that Americans who have been subjected to social influence on their behavior, and
whose behavior has conformed to this influence, nevertheless do not perceive their
behavior as having been socially influenced. Instead, they devise alternative explanations
for their behavior that generally revolve around the cultural ideology of free choice and
self-determination (i.e., agency). “People may have been unable to discern the influence
that the presence of others had on their behavior because they had an existing cultural
theory that provided them with a plausible alternative explanation for their behavior
(e.g., ‘I didn’t help because it’s better to mind your own business’). Thus, people’s naïve
[but culturally conditioned] explanations for their behavior may get in the way of detect-
ing the true cause of behavior” (Nolan et al., 2008, p. 914).
For example, “the strongest predictor of [subjects’] energy conservation was [subjects’]
belief that other people are doing it (r = .45, p < .01), despite the fact that it was rated
as the least important motivating factor. . . . Despite the perception that other people’s
behavior was least influential on their decision to conserve, beliefs of how often their
neighbors tried to conserve showed a strong correlation with respondents’ own reported
conservation efforts” (Nolan et al., 2008, pp. 916, 917).
In a related experiment, California residents were presented with four reasons for con-
serving energy: neighbors were doing it, it protects the environment, it saves money, and
it benefits society. The subjects’ actual use of electricity was measured by reading their
electric meters. Subjects rated the normative reason (others are doing it) as not influen-
tial on their use of energy. However, objective data proved that normative information
about others had the greatest impact on subjects’ electricity conservation. Subjects who
had been presented with normative information about other people’s conservation con-
served more electricity than subjects who had been presented with other reasons for
conserving. In other words, normative information about neighbors’ conservation influ-
enced subjects to conserve electricity even though these subjects believed the informa-
tion had not influenced them. Conversely, subjects who had received personal motivation
to conserve (i.e., the subject should conserve in order to save money, protect the envi-
ronment, and help society) were not motivated to conserve as much electricity as the
subjects who received normative information about their neighbors, yet they rated these
personal motives as having greatly influenced them to conserve electricity.
What individuals believed to be motives for their behavior did not motivate conser-
vation, while motives they believed to have low influence actually had powerful influence
on their behavior. Clearly, the subjects did not understand the reasons for their own
behavior (see Ratner, 2002, pp. 136–137, for additional empirical evidence). This is a par-
ticular kind of ignorance. In contrast to other forms of ignorance that are due to lack of
knowledge about complex subjects that are difficult to fathom, and which are gradually
reduced through accumulation of knowledge and development of cognitive capacities,
social-psychological ignorance is not a natural, existential condition resulting from lim-
ited cognitive capacity and complex subject matter. In the case of social-psychological
 274 macro cultural psychology

ignorance, limited cognitive capacity is not an explanation; it is an outcome that must

be explained. Ignorance is a sociological phenomenon that has social, not natural,
origins.
The macro cultural psychology of ignorance is generated by cultural mediational
means that subjects adopt for interpreting their behavior. Ignorance is not due to natural
limits to human cognition; it is due to social limits to what we can understand (cf. Ratner,
1994). Ignorance is not due to a lack of knowledge; it is due to the wrong kind of knowl-
edge—misguided, mystified, misleading, culturally produced and shared knowledge.
Ignorance is rational and functional within an exploitive system because it legitimates
that system. Rather than striving to diminish social ignorance and gain a fuller compre-
hension of society and its psychological effects, social ignorance is strenuously main-
tained by ideologically challenging critical social viewpoints such as macro cultural
psychology, which can elucidate the full nature of concrete social systems and their effects
on psychology.
The cultural distorting of self-awareness proves that people are not naturally and auto-
matically aware of themselves and the reasons they act as they do. Self-awareness depends
upon appropriate cultural mediational means which emphasize the social construction
of mind and behavior. People must become aware of themselves through social practice
that generates macro cultural factors (cultural concepts, social institutions, cultural arti-
facts) that make the social organization of behavior/psychology obvious.
Because human psychology is cultural, the marginalization of culture in popular cul-
ture and in social science is fatal to attempts at understanding psychology.
Nolan et al. (2008) revealed another disturbing aspect of the cultural psychology of
Americans. They found that normative information about neighbors’ conservation prac-
tices induces subjects to conserve more than appealing to subjects to conserve in order to
protect the environment and help society. This is disturbing because it indicates that
people do not conserve because it is the right thing for them to do; rather, they conserve
more in order to conform to the way others act. Conservation is thus motivated more by
social conformity than by true concern for society and environment. This has important
applications for policy makers who seek to increase conservation among Americans.
They should appeal more to conformity than to objective information about the impor-
tance of conservation for society and the environment.

THE OBFUSCATION OF CONCRETE CULTURE

HINDERS THE DEVELOPMENT OF SCIENTIFIC
CULTURAL PSYCHOLOGY, WHICH REQUIRES
A CRITICAL REALIST PERSPECTIVE
The anticultural character of capitalist culture makes it extremely difficult to develop a
macro cultural psychology. The lifestyle of capitalism makes it easy to believe that society
is illusory and irrelevant (and antithetical) to individual behavior/psychology. It is no
wonder that most psychologists, and even cultural psychologists, have failed to compre-
hend macro culture, and even eschew it.
Psychology as a modern discipline is a product of individualistic society. Individualism
segregates individual behavior from society at large—and is therefore alienation from
 275 Philosophical Principles

society and other people—and it creates the individualistic notion that psychology is
individual, not social. This notion forms the bedrock of Psychology; furthermore, this
notion leads psychologists to distance Psychology from social sciences that study society
(which appears irrelevant to psychologists and to psychology). Thus, the intellectual and
the academic status of Psychology reflect individualistic society and alienation.
But individualism and alienation are only half the story of capitalist life. The other half
is the thoroughly cultural nature of individual behavior and psychology—as we saw in
the case of the financial system. Individualistic life is actually a culture in that it is pro-
moted by social organization, institutions, laws, courts, and police. Accepting individual-
ism and alienation as natural, and missing their cultural basis, is a misunderstanding.
Yet this is exactly what Psychology does. Modern Psychology is thus based on a misun-
derstanding of psychology/behavior. It is a culturally generated misunderstanding, and it
is an understandable misunderstanding because of the cultural reasons for it—it is not
mere stupidity on the part of psychologists; it is a cultural phenomenon, a cultural illu-
sion. However, it is a misunderstanding nonetheless.
This misunderstanding about the nature of its subject matter plagues Psychology to this
day; it is responsible for all of its theoretical and methodological errors, and it has pre-
vented Psychology from becoming a science that objectively apprehends its subject matter.
Scientific Psychology requires overcoming the conditions that spawned modern Psychology.
Vygotsky (1997b, p. 342) said this aptly: “Our science could not and cannot develop in the
old [existing] society. We cannot master the truth about personality and personality itself
so long as mankind has not mastered the truth about society and society itself.”
Vygotsky masterfully observed that Psychology’s limitations are generated by the actual
social-political situation of behavior in capitalist society. It is because individual behavior
is alienated from the behaviors of legally independent others that individuals cannot
master their social life. This, in turn, prevents them from understanding the truth about
their society (they do not know what other independent individuals are doing) and the
ways in which society organizes their own behavior. This lack of understanding is reca-
pitulated in the discipline of Psychology, which exacerbates its deficiency by segregating
itself from social sciences that could shed light on social aspects of psychology.
Vygotsky says that developing a scientific psychology (i.e., a macro cultural psychology)
requires a social organization in which people are truly integrated into their society and
master it as a whole, and thereby come to master the truth of its organization in relation
to their own behavior. Then, Psychology will integrate itself with social sciences that illu-
minate this relationship. Psychology (the discipline) will overcome its estrangement from
social science as people’s psychology overcomes its alienation from society. The tripartite
situation of social life, knowledge, and social science will reverse the way it now exists.
Vygotsky makes it clear that this is all political, because social life must become democ-
ratized and collectivized in order for knowledge (mastery of truth) and social science to
flower.
In the meantime, we can only begin to imagine the outlines of scientific cultural
Psychology while we live under the stultifying conditions of capitalism.
The first step in developing macro cultural psychology is to develop a sense that there
is, in fact, a real, structured, structuring structure out there that is our social life and psy-
chology. Only then can one embark on studying this in a systematic, scientific fashion.
 276 macro cultural psychology

Plus, we must draw extensively on social sciences that have made some headway in
understanding society—however limited it may be because of the material conditions
that we have been discussing.
Because macro culture has been so occluded, it is not perceptible to the naked, unedu-
cated, apolitical eye. The difficulty lies not simply in the complex, specialized nature
of the subject matter; the problem lies in the occlusion of the subject matter by a self-
obscuring culture that distorts its own psychology and behavior. Macro culture and psy-
chology thus require sophisticated methodologies and theories in order to be seen and
understood. These methodologies and theories must be exceptionally discerning in order
to penetrate the occluded, mystified appearance of their subject matter.
Heidegger explained this in his account of activity (which he called Dasein). He saw
everyday activity as a cover-up of its real nature. Hermeneutics that seeks to understand
activity must be geared to this particular character of the subject matter. It requires the
violent wrenching away of public disguises: “Dasein’s kind of being thus demands that any
ontological interpretation which sets itself the goal of exhibiting the phenomena in their
primordiality, should capture the being of the entity in spite of this entity’s own tendency
to cover things up. Existential analysis, therefore, constantly has the character of doing
violence whether to the claims of everyday interpretation, or to is complacency and its
tranquilized obviousness” (cited in Foucault, 1987, p. xxviii). Dreyfus amplifies this state-
ment: “Heidegger’s method is thus an instance of what Paul Ricoeur has called the
‘hermeneutics of suspicion.’ In any such account one understands current conditions to
be the result of a cover-up of the truth” (Foucault, 1987, p. xxviii).
The development of cultural psychology as a scientific endeavor must acknowledge the
peculiar challenges that our subject matter presents. The subject matter is the cultural
organization of psychological phenomena. Psychological science must thoroughly com-
prehend this. I have depicted this in Figures 4.6.
Figure 4.6 represents the real nature of psychological phenomena as formed by cultural
factors and the field of Psychology that studies it. However, this is not a simple, obvious
process of naïve realism., The system depicted in Figure 4.6 is shrouded in superficial,
misleading appearances, which Husserl called Ideenkleid. Thus Figure 4.6 should be rep-
resented as in Figure 4.7.

Culture Psychology

Psychology

fig . 4.6 Psychology Studies Psychology.

 277 Philosophical Principles

Culture psychology

fig . 4.7 Cultural Psychology Obscured by Ideenkleid.

Figure 4.7 depicts the reason for why human psychology is so difficult to understand.
Its origins, features, and function—which are cultural—are obscured by the bourgeois
individualistic Ideenkleid. Even though psychology is constructed and lived and experi-
enced by individuals, it escapes the comprehension of individuals and even social scien-
tists who have been specially trained to understand it. Oddly, scientists understand the
physical universe, the atomic structure of things, how digestion occurs, and what tuber-
culosis is much better than they understand human psychology. The reason is that psy-
chology is mystified by the structure of human practices in a way that natural phenomena
are not.
Consequently, Psychology must penetrate the Ideenkleid in order to objectively appre-
hend the relationship in Figure 4.6 and become a science. It can do this only by utilizing
an appropriate cultural theory as a theoretical guide to understand the Ideenkleid and the
reality of cultural psychology that rests behind it. (Plato held a similar view—that we
normally see shadows and do not realize the reality behind them.) This is depicted in
Figure 4.8.

Culture psychology

Psychology

fig . 4.8 Cultural Psychology Apprehends Cultural Psychology via Appropriate Theory.
 278 macro cultural psychology

Figure 4.8 depicts Psychology as adopting a cultural theory as a set of lenses with
which to view psychology. Like eyeglasses, cultural theory must be suitably constructed
to penetrate the Ideenkleid and accurately perceive the scenario in Figure 4.6. The wrong
lenses/theory, or the absence of lenses/theory, will lead the observer to misperceive
Figure 4.6 and contribute to the Ideenkleid. Social science must combat Ideenkleid within
its boundaries (i.e., its internal Ideenkleid) as well as within society at large. Social science
must be self-critical as much as it is socially critical. This is what motivated Heidegger to
state, “Dasein’s kind of being thus demands that any ontological interpretation which sets
itself the goal of exhibiting the phenomena in their primordiality, should capture the
being of the entity in spite of this entity’s own tendency to cover things up. Existential analy-
sis, therefore, constantly has the character of doing violence whether to the claims of
everyday interpretation, or to is complacency and its tranquilized obviousness” (cited in
Foucault, 1987, p. xxviii).
The objective character of human psychology is cultural and political, and this must be
reflected in Psychological theories and methodologies. They are political in ways that
natural science is not.
Psychological theories and methods are scientific to the extent that they are political in
two senses: (1) their object—culture and psychology—is political (organized by, and
incarnating, a political system of vested interests), and (2) their approach to apprehend-
ing their object is political; it emphasizes that the object is occluded by political ideology
and it challenges this Ideenkleid. This critical political stance against political ideology is
necessary if one is to objectively apprehend cultural psychology.
It is impossible to be scientifically objective if one adopts an apolitical stance or a con-
servative endorsement of the status quo. The reason is that these stances fail to pierce the
mystifying power of the status quo.
Social science has to demystify its subject matter before it can discover how it works.
Political demystification must replace political mystification of the subject matter.
Ironically, political demystification involves explicating the politics of culture and psy-
chology, whereas political mystification involves obscuring their politics and making
them appear apolitical. Emphasizing politics in culture and psychology is an objec-
tive viewpoint. Denying politics in culture and psychology is biased, obscurantist, and
not objective, for it fails to apprehend the objectively political nature of its subject
matter.
The Chinese government, for example, blocks and distorts information about impor-
tant events that reflect critically on the government/society (including the awarding of
the Nobel Peace prize to a Chinese dissident in 2010). Consequently, as long as the cul-
tural psychologist accepts official government ideology, he or she will remain ignorant of
key features of the social system that structure psychology. Only if the cultural psycholo-
gist musters a courageous, critical political perspective that repudiates the government’s
obscurantism and mystifications will he or she develop the resources to understand what
the social system is really like and how it structures Chinese psychology. The same is true
of researchers in Western societies that mystify society and psychology in more subtle—
and therefore more powerful—ways.
Cultural psychological science is thus shot through with politics at every point—the
objective character of psychological phenomena is culturally constructed and political,
 279 Philosophical Principles

the Ideenkleid that mystifies this objective character is culturally constructed and politi-
cal, and the social science that penetrates this veil to objectively apprehend the subject
matter of cultural psychology is culturally constructed and must be political. Politics is
the sine qua non of objective psychological science; it is not a peripheral source of bias
that should be jettisoned.
Psychology must also take account of the Ideenkleid that mystifies psychologists and
social scientists in their professional work. The prevailing ideology of bourgeois indi-
vidualism interferes with the scientific comprehension of culture and its structuring of
psychology. It also interferes with a systemic analysis that is necessary for scientific
advancement. To achieve a scientific comprehension of the (political) cultural content of
its subject matter (psychology), Psychology must comprehend the ideology that impedes
this knowledge, and Psychology must repudiate and circumvent this obscurantist ideol-
ogy and adopt a different philosophy that reveals the cultural subject matter of psychol-
ogy. Psychology must be political in order to apprehend the political nature of its subject
matter, which is obscured by political ideology. Failing to recognize all of these political
issues will render Psychology superficial, misguided, and useless.
This epistemological problem of how to achieve scientific knowledge is relevant to all
disciplines. A major topic in philosophy of science and history of science is the condi-
tions that account for advances and retardations in the natural sciences. For instance,
why did natural science advance so spectacularly in Western capitalist countries in the
eighteenth through twentieth centuries while Chinese science remained inferior during
that period? Joseph Needham, in particular, initiated a productive discussion about the
different social conditions and epistemes that inspired or discouraged scientifi c
advances.
The sociologist of science, Toby Huff, states that scientific abstraction correlates with
economic, political, legal, philosophical, religious, and social factors. Some societies are
more scientifically advanced than others.

If we consider the main fields of scientific inquiry that have traditionally

formed the core of modern science—namely, astronomy, physics, optics, and
mathematics—it is evident that the Chinese lagged behind not only the West
but also the Arabs from about the 11th century. . . . Chinese geometry cannot be
compared with Greek geometry because the Chinese did not have the slightest
conception of deductive systems. . . . Geometry as a systematic deductive sys-
tem of proofs and demonstrations was virtually nonexistent in China, as was
trigonometry. These were the special branches of mathematics needed to advance
astronomical model building. (Huff, 2003, pp. 242–243)

The physicist and historian of Chinese science Nathan Sivin (2005) similarly concluded,
“My studies of mathematical astronomy do not assure me that the Chinese tradition at its
high point in the 14th century had attained the explanatory or predictive science of
Ptolemy a dozen centuries earlier” (p. 300).
Chinese thinking about nature and mathematics was thus not at the same level of
abstraction as that of other cultures. Chinese culture was so antiscientific that it pre-
vented Chinese scholars from absorbing science from Muslim scientists who were
 280 macro cultural psychology

employed by the Chinese Bureau of Astronomy in the thirteenth and fourteenth centu-
ries (Huff, 2003, p. 244). “The main defects of Chinese mathematical and scientific
thought were both substantive and logical. With regard to logic, Chinese thought lacked
the logic of proof as well as the concept of mathematical proof ” (Huff, 2003, p. 290).
Congruent with macro cultural psychology, Huff traces the low level of scientific
abstract thinking in China to the low level of legal abstract thinking. As late as the 1920s,

there was no Chinese system of law based on predetermined, universal, and tran-
scendent rules to be applied by an independent judiciary. Instead, what we find
are systems of discipline in which order, mandates, and edicts are issued by a de
facto authority. . . . Chinese legal thought did not move to that higher level
of abstraction which considers local variation in customs and which simultane-
ously postulates a higher level of sacred order, eternal, and even divine, which is
associated with natural law in the West. . . . It is precisely because it is above these
local variations that it is thought to be natural and imbedded in nature. (Huff,
2003, pp. 263, 265)

It is equally vital to ask this question about social science. The real world does not
display itself for us to grasp through sensory perception. It is complex, and obscured
by social practices and political ideology. Only a particular episteme can comprehend it.
We have seen how Nisbett failed to comprehend the significance of social divisions for IQ
despite its obvious appearance in his data. The reason is that he lacks the appropriate
political-cultural episteme to grasp this fact. Other psychologists are facing the same
dilemma. Given the difficulties and errors in recognizing culture and psychology, we
cannot let our guard down and assume that all researchers are progressing toward a sci-
entific cultural psychology. We must scrupulously assess these efforts in order to con-
structively identify errors and then correct them. Otherwise, we will be doomed to repeat
them and we will never advance. This is why critiques figure heavily in my development
of macro cultural psychology.
Now that we have dispelled many errors that would block our path, we proceed to
deepen our analysis of culture and psychology. We probe deeply into our current social
system, elucidate its core political economy, and examine its imprint in our psychology.

ENDNOTES
i. There is a cultural-political ramification to this preference for abstractions. It retards the
possibility of social change.
ii. Danziger (1997, pp. 162–179) explains the intellectual evolution of the positivistic variable
and its measurement.
The notion of a variable was originally limited to a statistical relation among quantita-
tive measures. Personality was a variable only in the sense of being a correlation among
different scores. It was a statistical construct that described measurement operations.
It did not imply that personality was itself a variable. However, the positivist domination
of psychology in the 1930s (cf. Ratner, 1997, p. 39) led psychologists to confuse their mea-
surement operations with things themselves. They began believing that their statistical
 281 Philosophical Principles

variables simulated the actual nature of psychological and environmental phenomena: “the
representation of situations and actions in terms of discrete logically independent elements
became the model for the conceptualization of all psychological reality” (Danziger, 1997,
p. 168). Positivists converted a statistical construct into a psychological construct. This was
as foolish as believing that temperature exists as columns of mercury rising and falling in
certain degrees, instead of recognizing that temperature is a different phenomenon from
the procedures that measure it.
Confounding statistics/methodology with psychology (known as “methodolotry”) dis-
torted the nature of psychological phenomena (into singular, qualitatively homogeneous
and fixed variables). It also distorted the scientific enterprise. Danziger explains that
initially, the experimental psychology that arose in Germany at the turn of the century
employed analytical research procedures as means for investigating complex, subjective
psychological phenomena that were acknowledged to have cultural origins. Stimuli such
as auditory distances were presented to elicit a sensory judgment or motor response, but
these were regarded as mere signs of deeper, complex psychological processes that were
elucidated via theoretical work and designated by theoretical constructs such as uncon-
scious inference and apperception. Theoretical constructs reach beyond measured data
via rational inference and deduction to approximate the features of phenomena. This is
exemplified in astronomy, where astronomers use reason to reach beyond the measured
light waves recorded on telescopes to determine the existence of galaxies and black holes
that cannot be completely represented by sensory data.
In the 1920s, under the influence of logical positivism, this scientific distinction between
measurement operations and real phenomena had, ironically, been declared nonscientific.
A fictitious notion of science (or scientism) arose that insisted that operational defi nitions
simulated the actual nature of psychological phenomena. Theoretical constructs that pre-
sumed to explicate phenomena beyond methodological procedures were declared meta-
physical and invalid.
iii. Nisbett’s statements examplify a truly dreadful argument as defined by John Searle: “It is
much easier to refute a bad argument than to refute a truly dreadful argument. A bad argu-
ment has enough structure that you can point out its badness. But with a truly dreadful
argument, you have to try to reconstruct it so that it is clear enough that you can state a
refutation” (Searle, 2009, pp. 89–90).
 5
concrete macro culture and
psychology

“We see how the history of industry and the established objective existence of industry are
the open book of man’s essential powers, the perceptibly existing human psychology. . . . We
have before us the objectified essential powers of man in the form of sensuous, alien, useful
objects, in the form of estrangement, displayed in ordinary material industry. . . . A psychol-
ogy for which this book, the part of history existing in the most perceptible and accessible
form, remains a closed book, cannot become a genuine, comprehensive and real science.”
(Marx, 1963, pp. 162–163).

“The wealth of the Wal-Mart founder’s family in 2005 was estimated at about the same
($90 billion) as that of the bottom 40 of the U.S. population (120 million people).”
(Judt, 2010, p. 18).

CONCRETE FEATURES OF CULTURE

AND PSYCHOLOGY
Concrete cultural features of psychology are its culture-bound forms such as the
individualistic self; romantic love; free recall; syllogistic logic; nineteenth-century, mid-
dle-class domestic femininity; schizophrenia; Indians’ cyclical sense of time; and the
sexuality of contemporary Saudi men (who have no contact with women outside of their
immediate families before marriage). The characteristics of concrete cultural psychology
derive from the concrete characteristics of cultural factors. There is no other way to
account for systematic demographic variations in psychology. Apprehending concrete
cultural psychology therefore requires a thorough comprehension of concrete macro
cultural factors. Such an understanding is essential for understanding the full, rich
complexity of psychological phenomena, and for avoiding the trivial, superficial, errone-
ous notions of psychology that are described in the Chapter 4. Cultural psychologists
must be well grounded in research from anthropology, history, sociology, geography,
and even philosophy and literary criticism of the societies they are researching (see
Marcuse, 2005).
From Chapter 1, we know that specific macro cultural factors must be recognized as
organized within a system, with any one factor incarnating others, representing others,
and contributing its distinctive qualities to the others. Each factor is necessary for the

282
 283 Concrete Macro Culture and Psychology

others’ existence. Furthermore, the macro cultural factors are arranged in a conical pat-
tern with the specific political economy of the society dominating other levels and regions
on the cone. The political economy (e.g., capitalism, slavery, feudalism) sets the tone for
other factors such as government, family, education, and religion, and makes them differ-
ent in different societies. The distinctive qualities of these other factors reciprocally con-
tribute to the political economy and to each other. Macro cultural psychologists would
closely look at power relations and hegemonic tendencies, including which groups
occupy positions of power, how their vested interests come to be reflected in the cultural
factors they control, how they attempt to promote their interests—and the cultural factors
that incarnate them—throughout the society in a hegemonic fashion, how they seek to
suppress competing forms of cultural factors, and how dominant groups seek to disguise
the basis of their rule in ideological legitimations such as divine right, free choice, hard
work, and natural competencies such as intelligence.
Macro cultural psychologists would then look for the ways in which psychology is built
into political macro cultural factors (as we saw how the individualistic self is built into
capitalist economic practices) how it is objectified in them, transmitted by them, culti-
vated by them, created by them, refined by them, politicized by them, afforded by them,
constrained by them (i.e., by social class), and necessary and functional for them.
This is a much fuller appreciation of the cultural origins, characteristics, and function
of psychology than any other approach generates. The reason is that macro cultural psy-
chology is the only approach that seeks to expose the full, concrete, cultural reality of
society in order to improve it. The political thrust of macro cultural psychology drives it
to a deeper scientific understanding of concrete macro culture and psychology. We see
psychology as thoroughly laden with concrete macro culture because we want to gain a
deeper understanding of culture through the distinctive window of psychology. We want
to see culture permeate psychology so that we can apprehend it from our position as
psychologists. We are not afraid of too much culture in psychology. On the contrary, the
more pervasive and visible culture is in psychology, the more we can understand it, con-
trol it, and improve it. We realize that the more one seeks to distance psychology from
concrete macro culture (and attribute it to personal or biological mechanisms), and the
more we close our eyes to culture in psychology, the less we understand either one, the
more we will be dominated by culture that we do not apprehend, the less valuable psy-
chology will be for illuminating our culture, and the less we will be able to contribute as
psychologists to the understanding and improvement of our society. Ignorance of reality
is not freedom.
From Chapter 2, we realize that psychology is essential to culture. In fact, psychology
evolved its special characteristics in order to be able to construct distinctively human
cultural products. The reason human culture is so advanced is that the behavioral mech-
anisms that construct cultural behavior and cultural products have distinctive, sophisti-
cated qualities that animal behavioral mechanisms do not have. This is why animals do
not have the advanced culture we have. Culture and psychology go hand in hand. Both
are advanced and unique because they are two sides of the same coin; they facilitate each
other. Absent either one, the other disappears.
Psychology must be imbued with cultural features so it can direct cultural forms of
behavior. If it did not have cultural characteristics, it would be culturally neutral or, what
 284 macro cultural psychology

amounts to the same, culturally irrelevant. There would be no cultural content to our
motives, perceptions, emotions, thinking, and selves that would generate specific shared
(common) cultural behaviors. Without culturally informed/organized psychology, there
would be no cultural behavior and there would be no cultural products. Thus, concrete
cultural content must be built into psychological phenomena. This chapter explains what
this content is and how it gets built into psychological phenomena.

EDUCATIONAL PSYCHOLOGY
The Concrete Character of Educational Psychology
The concrete cultural character of psychology is depicted in Figure 5.1. The figure depicts the
manner in which students’ psychology in school is organized by a web of interrelated cultural
factors. Each macro cultural factor has a political character that represents the culmination
of a struggle among competing interest groups. The dominant group imparts its interest to
the cultural factor that it controls. This is true for textbooks; media content; government
policies and budgets; access to education by girls, ethnic groups, and lower-class populations;
amount and content of consumerism that pupils are exposed to; and the structure of work.
This complex of factors organizes the educational psychology of students. Macro fac-
tors direct attention, memory, and reasoning in certain directions and away from other

Family

Gender/
Consumerism
ethnicity/class

Concentration Government
Work rules and Motivation educational policy
opportunities Memory and budget
Intelligence

School building,
supplies, books, Media
transportation

Value of
education

fig. 5.1 Educational Psychology of Students.

 285 Concrete Macro Culture and Psychology

directions; they require certain kinds of reasoning rather than others (Kipnis, 2011).
Macro cultural factors contain psychology, objectify psychology, and model psychology.
It is incumbent on educators, parents, and the students themselves to realize that stu-
dents’ psychological processes are not culturally neutral, unformed, or empty and just
waiting to be stimulated and filled with academic content. These psychological processes
have a cultural form and content that may interfere with the competencies necessary to
learn academic material. If students have acquired a brief, fragmented, distractible atten-
tion due to consumerism, and if they are fascinated by sensationalistic images and per-
sonal narratives, they will not be interested in, or used to, paying sustained attention to
difficult academic material. This is the sociology of ignorance we have encountered ear-
lier in the book. Students’ ignorance is not simply an absence of knowledge that can be
corrected by supplying information. Their ignorance is culturally substantive with cul-
tural content. This is documented in the book Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on
College Campuses: “Many students come to college not only poorly prepared by prior
schooling for highly demanding academic tasks that ideally lie in front of them, but—
more troubling still—they enter college with attitudes, norms, values, and behaviors that
are often at odds with academic commitment” (Arum & Roksa, 2011, p. 22).
Deleterious cultural content of students’ psychology must be challenged before pupils
can fully absorb academic material. They must be made aware of the deleterious cultural
content of their psychology and its cultural basis to avoid blaming students for their aca-
demic failure and discouraging them. This means tracing their psychology back to fun-
damental macro cultural factors such as consumerism, and ultimately to the political
economy of capitalism. This is what we shall explore in this chapter.

The Political Economy of Education

A major macro cultural factor that organizes psychology is the educational system.
Almost all children in developed societies pass through it, and it is specifically charged
with teaching children psychological functions such as how to reason, remember, become
motivated, study, complete assignments, be punctual, engage in social interaction, and
express and control emotions. It is thus crucial to understand the cultural character of
education in order to understand the cultural content of psychology. This section explores
the political-cultural character of one element of the educational system, the community
college. It explains in detail how the community college was structured to fulfill a politi-
cal-economic function in society. This function was built into gaining social and gov-
ernmental approval for the community college, admissions criteria, pedagogy, advising,
resources allocated to the community college, and costs of attending the college. This
example helps move us toward a concrete understanding of macro cultural factors.
It helps avoid the pitfall of abstract, indefinite descriptions of factors such as education
that ignore their real character and function in society.
Education is touted as a politically neutral institution that functions purely for the
benefit of students and teaches them valuable information. It is presented as a technical
program that is realized by technical procedures of pedagogy. In addition, education is
touted as helping students transcend the political economy of social class by providing
them with technical information and cognitive competencies they can use to advance
 286 macro cultural psychology

themselves out of their class origins. Education is also touted as working in the other
direction, by weeding out wealthy students who lack the mental competencies for suc-
ceeding in a meritocracy. Education is proclaimed to be a cornerstone of meritocracy,
and the antagonist of established social positions, both high and low. This neutral, meri-
tocratic view of education contradicts our political economic view that education is
basically run by and for vested interests that dominate the political economy, and that
education solidifies and legitimizes social positions within the social system by inculcat-
ing a class-based psychology to students belonging to different groups. The true nature of
education is thus a test of competing social theories.
Research has revealed the political economic character of the historical development of
community colleges in the United States from 1920 through 1980. We shall review this
development to show who designed the community college and what their political eco-
nomic interests were. This will serve as a model of the political economic basis, nature,
and function of macro cultural factors that structure the cultural character of psycho-
logical phenomena in various ways.
Two-year community colleges were started in the United States in 1901 as a way for
poorer, educationally disadvantaged high school students to enter the college track and
hopefully transfer to 4-year universities. Today community colleges enroll over 50 of all
college freshmen in the United States. In 1930, community college administrators decided
to alter the focus from academic preparation for universities to terminal vocational train-
ing. This decision directly contradicted the wishes of students and their parents, who
wanted community colleges to prepare the students for university education. Indeed,
from 1948 to 1968, two-thirds of community college students enrolled in college prepara-
tory programs, although fewer than half of those ever transferred to a 4-year institution
(Brint & Karabel, 1989, p. 12).
Students and parents had no voice or negotiation in the administrators’ decision; this
contradicts the free market notion of democratic consumer choice determining social
institutions.
The administrators made their decision to prepare students to enter the labor force.
They believed they were doing the students a favor by helping them adjust to the realistic,
limited opportunities and requirements of their low social position.
Capitalism is a hierarchical pyramid that allows only a very few individuals to achieve
great success. More people believe in success, wish for success, and strive for success than
can be accommodated in a hierarchical system that limits success and seeks to cheapen
the cost of production by deskilling jobs and keeping wages as low as possible. “For large
numbers of people, failure is inevitable and structured” (Brint & Karabel, 1989, p. 10). This
is potentially disruptive, because the unfulfilled individuals will resent the inability of the
system to accommodate their culturally induced desires. The system needs to “cool out”
the aspirations of many citizens. This is exactly what community college administrators
did by vocationalizing their curricula.

The United States was, after all, a class-stratified society, and there was something
potentially threatening to the established order about organizing the educational
system so as to arouse high hopes, only to shatter them later. At the same time,
 287 Concrete Macro Culture and Psychology

however, the political costs of turning back the popular demand for expanded
schooling were prohibitive in a nation placing so much stress on equality of
opportunity. What vocationalism promised to do was to resolve this dilemma by,
on the one hand, accepting the democratic pressure from below to provide access
to new levels of education while, on the other hand, differentiating the curricu-
lum to accommodate the realities of the economic division of labor. The aspira-
tions of the masses for upward mobility through education would not, advocates
of vocationalization claimed, thereby be dashed; instead, they would be rechan-
neled in more “realistic” directions.
At times, junior college leaders were remarkably forthright about the fate that
awaited these students in the labor market. For example, Walter Eells (a Stanford
professor of education) founder of the Junior College Journal and executive secre-
tary of the American Association of Junior Colleges from 1938–1945, noted that
while universities tend to train leaders, democratic societies also needed “educated
followership,” and so proposed junior college terminal education as a particularly
effective vehicle for training such followers. Under Eells’s leadership, by 1940 a
consensus had been reached among key junior college leaders that between two-
thirds and three-fourths of junior college students should be enrolled in terminal
vocational educational programs. . . .
The [administrators of] community colleges chose to vocationalize [by] them-
selves, but they did so under conditions of powerful structural constraints. Foremost
among these constraints was the subordinate position of the community college in
the larger structure of educational and social stratification. . . .
Because of their precarious position in the competition for training markets,
community colleges tried desperately to fit themselves to the needs of business
despite the absence of direct business interest in the colleges. . . . Because of the
structural location of business in the larger political economy—and, in particular, its
control of jobs—community colleges had little choice but to take into account the
interests of their students’ future employers. Thus business exerted a profound
influence over the direction of community college affairs and pushed them in the
direction of vocationalization in the absence of direct action whatsoever. The
capacity to influence in the absence of direct intervention reflects the structural
power of business. . . . The community colleges found themselves in a situation of
structured subordination with respect to both other higher-education institutions
and business. Within the constraints of this dual subordination, the vocalization
project was a means of striking the best available bargain. (Brint & Karabel, 1989,
pp. 11–12, 16, 17, my emphasis)

This is an enormously revealing and nuanced statement about the relationship between
social structure, particular institutions, the agency of social leaders, and the role of ordi-
nary citizens in shaping (negotiating) social institutions. The statement testifies to the
fact that the administrators were agentive in their behavior and decision-making—they
invented a novel curriculum; however, the program they developed was constrained by
and conformed to the class stratification of capitalism.
 288 macro cultural psychology

It took decades for the junior college administrators to achieve their goals of restructur-
ing their educational institutions and molding students to accept it. Students and their
parents initially opposed the new direction. However, the administrators proved stronger
and eventually won the battle for the direction of education. It is worth retelling this com-
pelling story to highlight the political-economic organization of social activities, includ-
ing those such as education, that are touted as enabling people to transcend political
economy.
In the 1920s, working-class students held the ideal that education was a means for
upward mobility. In 1924, 80 of California junior college students declared their inten-
tion to go on to 4-year colleges. Only a small percentage took vocational courses in junior
college; most took courses that prepared them to transfer. When they did enroll in 4-year
colleges, they performed as well as the students who had been there for 2 years already.
University presidents and politicians sought to reverse these numbers through a concerted
social movement. James Conant, President of Harvard from 1933 to 1953 and a renowned
educator, advocated differentiated education to structure students’ aspirations in line with
economic needs. In his book Education and Liberty he advocated that junior colleges be
terminal educational tracks (Brint & Karabel, 1989, pp. 81–82). In this odd conception of
liberty that was molded to the restrictions of the class structure, Conant sought to expand
enrollment in junior colleges to take pressure off elite universities for admitting large num-
bers of (working class) students. Junior colleges afforded these students the glimmer of
higher education while effectively diverting them from significant upward mobility.
In 1932, the governor of California commissioned the Carnegie Commission to research
the advisability of vocationalizing junior colleges. The Commission was hardly neutral
and objective. It was composed of seven university administrators who had sought to
keep junior college graduates from their door by vocationalizing junior college curricula.
Unsurprisingly, the Commission agreed with the American Association of Junior col-
leges (founded in 1920), which had decided to endorse vocationalizing junior college
curricula and making them into terminal degrees. The stated goal was to convince 85
of junior college students to get terminal degrees and not aspire to matriculating with
universities.
The Carnegie Commission decried the fact that the majority of junior college students
were enrolling in university prep courses as “the largest single functional failure of the
junior college system in California” (Brint & Karabel, 1989, p. 52). This is an astounding
statement, for it complains that too much education was being given to junior college
students, rather than too little. To correct this problem, the Commission sought to engi-
neer the students’ goals, values, and needs in a downward direction, rather than encour-
aging them to aspire for more education and advancement.
This report led to policy changes in high schools and community colleges. They hired
guidance counselors to channel students into terminal vocational courses in junior col-
lege. These counselors gave students aptitude tests to convince them of their limited intel-
lectual ability, in order to dissuade them from pursuing university education. Counselors
thus became cultural emissaries of capitalism and played an important conservative
political function in their mundane work with individual students.
“With such pressures on consumer choice [about education] a matter of institutional
policy, vocational enrollments rose dramatically. Whereas in 1926 ‘semi-professional’
 289 Concrete Macro Culture and Psychology

enrollments at Pasadena Junior College were a mere 4, by 1938 they had risen to 67.
As Eells acknowledged ‘Results such as these do not just happen. They are caused’ ” (Brint
& Karabel, 1989, p. 60).
Students at other junior colleges proved more resistant to these efforts to channel
them into dead-end educational programs. Nationwide, through the 1940s and 1950s,
75 enrolled in university-prep transfer programs within their junior colleges, and 33
successfully transferred. This led educational leaders to recruit big guns to their cause.
They enlisted the support of businesses, foundations (e.g., the U.S. Steel Foundation, the
General Electric Foundation), and government agencies to fund more programs to chan-
nel students into vocational curricula. By 1967, the Chamber of Commerce predicted the
increasing vocationalization of community colleges and commended this as a trend that
would be responsive to “the industrial or commercial needs of the locality” (Brint &
Karabel, 1989, p. 98).
The California Master Plan for Higher Education, designed largely by Clark Kerr, the
president of the University of California from 1958 to 1967, appeared in 1960 and lent gov-
ernment support to the establishment of a hierarchically segmented educational system
that would channel working-class students into community colleges and away from the
university. Kerr brazenly admitted that his plan “can make it possible for the elite to become
more elite” (Brint & Karabel, 1989, p. 87). The plan did realize this possibility. By 1964 there
was a clear correlation between family income and enrollment in terms of the type of
higher education. For example, among families earning between $4,000 and $5,000, 16
of children attended junior college, 10 attended state college, and 7.5 attended the
University of California. Conversely, for families earning over $25,000, the pattern was
reversed: 4 of children attended junior college, 4 attended state college, and 12 attended
the university. “The expansion of the junior college in the 1950s and 1960s thus made it
politically possible for state colleges and universities, many of which had traditionally been
open-admission institutions, to become more exclusive” and less egalitarian (Brint &
Karabel, 1989, p. 90). A nationwide study concluded that a disproportionate number of
students who attended a junior college instead of a 4-year institution were of relatively low
socioeconomic status (Brint & Karabel, 1989, p. 91; cf. Karabel, 1977).
This restructuring of higher education was a political act initiated by educational lead-
ers, with support from business and political leaders, to impose a class-segregated educa-
tion on students so that their intellectual and psychological competencies would align
with the economic class structure required by the labor market. Social leaders were not
interested in maximizing the educational level of the populace so that every individual
could reach for the stars and realize his or her potential. On the contrary, these leaders
saw a danger in raising the educational level of the populace, because the occupational
hierarchy could not accommodate a broadly educated population with high aspirations
for job skills and upward mobility. Only 10 of the population was necessary for profes-
sional jobs. The remaining 90 had to be engineered to renounce aspirations and com-
petencies for upward mobility.
Thus, the Carnegie Commission noted that widespread higher education throughout the
population would be counterproductive because it would lead many aspiring graduates to
become resentful and rebellious (Brint & Karabel, 1989, p. 106). Social leaders wanted schools
to be a “negative zone of proximal development” that reduced students’ competencies and
 290 macro cultural psychology

aspirations rather than expanding them. They sought to “cool out” students and divert their
dreams. Social leaders prioritized a pyramidal class structure over individual fulfillment and
realization. They sacrificed the fulfillment and mobility of the youth to the unequal and
undemocratic class pyramid.
The educational structure was an elite top-down invention, not a bottom-up one:

This was not a response to popular demand: on the contrary, the public remained
eager to send its children to four-year institutions. . . . Administrators repeatedly
noted the resistance of junior college students (and their parents) to increased
vocational training. Yet despite this resistance, which persisted from the 1930s
through the 1960s, key junior college administrators and researchers remained
committed to the project. Indeed, much of the discussion about vocational educa-
tion in the junior college literature of this period was devoted precisely to the
issue of how to expand these programs despite the lack of student interest in them.
The students’ preferences—far from being sovereign, as in the consumer-choice
model—thus became social[ly] defined as a problem to be overcome. (Brint &
Karabel, 1989, pp. 88, 209)

Educational restructuring was thus nothing less than class warfare initiated by the ruling
class to subdue the population. And the top-down imposed—not negotiated—reform ulti-
mately did overcome popular interests, although it took half a century.
By the 1970s, 63 of A.A. degrees in community colleges were awarded in occupational
fields rather than in academic subjects that could transfer to a university (Brint & Karabel,
1989, p. 102). “By the late 1970s, community colleges had become predominantly vocational
institutions, with estimates of the proportion of students enrolled in occupation programs
ranging as high as 7 in 10. At the same time, enrollment in college-parallel transfer pro-
grams fell, and the overall rate of transfer to four-year colleges and universities plummeted
to an all-time low, and in some states below 10. . . . Moreover, among the minority of
students who did transfer, those of higher socioeconomic status were overrepresented”
(Brint & Karabel, 1989, pp. 120, 129).
Community colleges became a negative zone of proximal development that effectively
maintained the class structure: “for students who wish to obtain a bachelor’s degree,
attendance at a community college independently lowers their prospect of success” (Brint
& Karabel, 1989, p. 130).

Community colleges which are located at the very point in the structure of educa-
tional and social stratification where cultural aspirations clash head on with the
realities of the class system, developed cooling out as a means not only of allocat-
ing to slots in the occupational structure, but also of legitimizing the process by
which people are sorted. One of its main features is that it causes people to blame
themselves rather than the system for their “failure.”
Having gained access to higher education, the low status student is often cooled
out and made to internalize his structurally induced failure. The tremendous
disjunction between aspirations and their realization, a potentially troublesome
 291 Concrete Macro Culture and Psychology

political problem, is thus mitigated and the ideology of equal opportunity is sus-
tained. That community colleges have a negative impact on persistence, that they
do not increase the number of bachelor’s degrees, that they seem to provide the
greatest opportunity for transfer (and hence mobility) to middle class students—
these are all facts which are unknown to their clientele. The community college
movement, seemingly a promising extension of equal educational opportunity, in
reality marks the extension of a class-based tracking into higher education and
the continuation of a long historical of educational escalation without real change.
(Karabel, 1977, p. 240)

Community colleges do not single-handedly achieve their ideological function of cool-

ing out—or “schooling out”—students with the illusion that these students are responsi-
ble for their own failure to advance. This illusion depends upon educational performance’s
being perceived through the political ideology of individualism. One must be instilled
with the prior belief that an individual’s behavior and status are the result of his or her
own capacities and are not structured by social factors. Only then will the educational
performance of students appear to be the result of their individual deficiencies. If one
utilizes the perspective of macro cultural psychology, one would look behind the stu-
dents’ failure to the structural influences that Karabel documents.
The administrators promulgated the individualistic interpretation (illusion) with spe-
cious, misleading statements that obscured their intentions and function. They declared
that they were establishing a hierarchical educational system to meet the needs and capa-
bilities of students. The dean of education at UC Berkeley said, “The university is primarily
designed for one type of mind and the junior college for another” (Brint & Karabel, 1989,
p. 36). Robert Sproul, the president of the University of California from 1930 to 1958, said
the same thing when he declared that the state’s educational system should allocate students
in accord with the natural distribution of talent in society (Brint & Karabel, 1989, pp. 35–36).
These statements assume that cognitive differences are innate in students and that inferior
minds cannot take advantage of sophisticated education. Consequently, the state should
establish educational institutions to meet the natural capabilities of the students.
The truth was just the opposite. The class structure required different psychological
competencies of people in different strata. The educational system was designed to gener-
ate these unequal competencies by diverting junior college graduates from universities,
where they had succeeded in the past. The administrators’ statements ideologically inverted
the reasons and function of their own actions. They pretended their actions were benevo-
lent attempts to meet students’ needs (competencies), when they were nefarious attempts
to manipulate and suppress students’ needs and competencies in accordance with the
requirements of the class structure.
In so doing, the administrators invoked an inverted psychological theory that construes
psychological competencies as natural rather than as organized by macro cultural factors.
This also inverts the nature of education, from a zone of proximal development that
raises the student to a new level to one that treats the student as equipped with given
psychological limitations. This is a remarkable inversion of the practice of education to
make it reproduce the class structure of capitalist society.
 292 macro cultural psychology

The administrators also invoked an inverted theory of society that attributes social
institutions to the individual needs and competencies of ordinary individuals (the educa-
tional system was based on the needs of students) rather than to structural requirements
of the political economy.
The administrators invoked a whole series of falsifications and mystifications to ratio-
nalize their imposition of a class structure on education. They are all expressions of what
I call “The Individualistic Ideological Inversion of Reality.”
Confirming our model of society as a cone with political economy at the base, we see
that education is not free from class structure and ruling class interests; it promotes them.
Shipps (2006) documents how this has been true for public education in Chicago for the
past century: “To a remarkable degree, Chicago’s corporate leaders have shaped the city’s
schools while constructing its economic downtown development priorities, its response to
racial segregation, and even its urban mythology. The corporate club has led, abetted, or
restrained nearly every attempt to improve the school system in the 20th century” (p. x).
Elite university admissions criteria, crafted by the active agency of administrators, sim-
ilarly reflect and reinforce class structure (Espenshade & Radford, 2009; Karabel, 2005;
Stevens, 2007).
Bowen, et al. (2009). Document that the entire system of American education from pri-
mary school to university, is structured along class lines and promulgate class hierarchy.
All of this concerted activity by social leaders to design a school system in the image of
the economic structure is the politics of the economic structure, or political economy.
The economy is promulgated through politics, and politics implements economic require-
ments (e.g., of class society). Politics is the integral organization of subjectivity/agency
within macro cultural factors for cultural purposes. Politics avoids pure, independent
subjectivity/agency and reified macro cultural factors.
Educators surreptitiously but deliberately conspired to maintain the class system of
capitalism by relegating their students to an inferior system of education that would limit
their competencies and prevent them from becoming upwardly mobile. Community col-
lege administrators acted as representatives of class society to impose structural failure
on their students. Administrators performed a social function in their work as educators.
They did not simply perform an educational function to “educate students”; they struc-
tured education in a particular way that reinforced class hierarchy. Because community
colleges enroll one-half of all college students, they are effectively consigning one-half of
college students to the lower rungs of the social hierarchy. They are impeding upward
mobility among the majority of the student population!
Administrators creatively and actively used their agency to fulfill social requirements of
capitalist class structure. Their agency was not a free invention of their personhood; nor
were the students’ diminished academic competencies and resulting failure to advance
socially and economically a matter of personal choice. These things were determined by
leaders of the educational system who acted at the behest of the class structure to solidify
it and keep people in their places.
The educational macro cultural factor keeps people in social positions within the polit-
ical economy in several ways. One way is to inculcate (socialize) not only knowledge but
cognitive, motivational, attentional, perceptual, emotional, and personality competencies
as well. Occupants of the lower class need a suitable psychology to accept and function
 293 Concrete Macro Culture and Psychology

within it, and to not seek to flood middle- and upper-class schools, jobs, etc., and educa-
tional institutions are a prime socializer of this. We have seen how the behavior of com-
munity college students conformed to class requirements, and this could occur only if
it were directed by a whole spectrum of psychological functions. We would study the
detailed mechanisms by which lower-class psychology is inculcated in educational tracks
for lower-class pupils.
Of course, other macro cultural factors, such as work, shape psychological functions as
well. Indeed, children of different classes enter primary school with vastly different psy-
chological competencies which situate them in different educational levels and elicit dif-
ferent treatment from teachers and administrators. “Durable embodied cognitive schemes,
acquired by children in class environments, are a principal cause of observed class varia-
tion in educational performance” (Nash, 2003, p. 174). As our conical model of society
indicates—and as our review of the community college confirms—the political economy
of class is basic to other social levels such as education.
Education is directly and explicitly charged with teaching youngsters how to think,
perceive, recall, read, speak, pay attention, and interact; consequently, if education is
based in and varies with social class, its socializing function is directly a socialization of
class differences in psychological phenomena.
Another way that the educational macro cultural factor serves the social system—
especially the political economy—is through systematically directing students of differ-
ent classes to different educational tracks. This is done by treating different classes of
students differently within school, through subtle forms of discourse (which we shall see
in Chapter 6) and guidance.
Karabel (1977) points out that as high school became more widespread, tracking devel-
oped within high schools so that upper class students could take advanced placement
courses that would increase their success in being admitted to college. As universities
became more common, tracking was designed to weed out lower-class students by estab-
lishing junior colleges for them. Throughout the twentieth century, “educational expan-
sion seems to lead to some form of tracking which, in turn, distributes people in a manner
which is roughly commensurate with both their class origins and their occupational des-
tination” (Karabel, 1977, p. 235). Thus, the quantitative expansion of education did nothing
to improve social mobility.
This examination of education within our conical model of society reveals that educa-
tion actively promotes the political economy; it is not passively and mechanically deter-
mined by it. Capitalist economic requirements are built into education and are therefore
transferred to students and teachers as they participate in education. Education is an
active socializer of the capitalist political economy. Its financial requirements, admissions
criteria, curricula, funding, and resources all inculcate features of the capitalist political
economy in students and teachers.
It is an illusion to construe education as a cornerstone of democracy and equal oppor-
tunity when it exists in a class society. Education does not enable most people to tran-
scend the capitalist class structure even when it is public and low-cost. Given that the
educational system was carefully crafted to reflect and reinforce the class system, it is
naïve and futile to work within education to help lower-class students achieve upward
social mobility by individual pedagogical assistance. This accepts and perpetuates the
 294 macro cultural psychology

myth that education is the great equalizer that affords opportunities for upward mobility
to everyone who simply works hard.
Well-intentioned pedagogues actually play a damaging political role in promulgating
this false ideology. They ignore the class basis, nature, and function of education, which
are real barriers to social and psychological advancement. Ignoring this traps students in
the very conditions from which the mentors seek to liberate them. It generates false
hopes. “One recent national survey found that about 75 of students enrolling in com-
munity colleges said they hoped to transfer to a 4-year institution, but only 17 of those
who had entered in the mid-1990s made the switch within 5 years. The rest were out
working or still studying toward their 2-year degree” (Leonhardt, 2005). This is the unfor-
tunate consequence of a lack of political perspective on culture and psychology.
Education can only work for the benefit of all citizens and students if it is given a new
social role/function to play in a new political economy that requires a new social role/
function for education.

THE POLITICAL ECONOMY OF ADVANCED CAPITALISM

We have just examined how a macro cultural factor that is directly concerned with social-
izing psychology into young people is stimulated by the political economy, incarnates the
political economy, and reproduces the political economy. The result is that the political
economy will inevitably be inscribed in the psychology that education cultivates in young
people. This is a key hypothesis of macro cultural psychology, and it will inspire research
to investigate the extent of this correspondence and modulations and exceptions to it.
This kind of research hinges on a thorough understanding of the political economy in
order to know the features it imparts to other cultural factors and to psychology. The exam-
ple of community colleges provided many insights into the capitalist political economy, but
it did not lay it out in specific detail. Consequently, we should examine the political eco-
nomic base of society to determine what kind of influence it can be expected to have on
other cultural factors, and ultimately on psychological phenomena. This will be the basis of
macro cultural psychological hypotheses regarding psychology. “Drilling down” to politi-
cal economy does not distract us from explaining psychology; on the contrary, it is the
basis of our explanation of psychology’s concrete qualities, because psychology is rooted in
macro cultural factors that are rooted in political economy. This is a realization of Vygotsky
and Luria’s emphasis on a historical materialist understanding of psychology. It is also the
realization of the following basic principles of cultural psychology:

a. Psychology is part of culture and embodies cultural features.

b. Our culture is capitalism.
c. Therefore, our psychology is capitalist psychology.
d. To understand our psychology we must understand the political economy of capitalism
and how it is incarnated in our psychological functions. Explanatory and descriptive
constructs of psychology must refer to the capitalist political economy (e.g., commodi-
fication, alienation, surplus value, capitalist relations of production, consumerism, capi-
talist class structure, bourgeois individualism [possessive individualism]). We have seen
that Vygotsky mentioned the capitalist class organization of production in his work.
 295 Concrete Macro Culture and Psychology

e. To ignore the political economy of capitalism and how it is incarnated in our psycho-
logical functions is to renounce a complete understanding of our psychology.
f. To ignore the political economy of capitalism and how it is incarnated in our psycho-
logical functions is to impoverish the discipline of cultural psychology and the foun-
dational ideas of Vygotsky, Luria, and Leontiev.

To provide a substantive foundation for macro cultural psychology, we turn now to

examine the political economy of capitalism. Then we will explore how it organizes emo-
tions, perception, motivation, reasoning, self, sexuality, and the senses in contemporary
society.
The deepest elucidation of capitalist political economy is Marx’s. Marx explained the
array of capitalist features—its class structure, power relations, productivity-growth, eco-
nomic crises, alienation, mechanization, mistreatment of workers, and exploitation of the
environment—with a parsimonious construct: the capitalist political economy is exploitive
of the population because capital is generated by capitalists’ employing workers and not
paying them the full value of what they produce. The surplus value that workers produce
(beyond what their bosses pay them) is the profit or capital that the capitalists expropriate.
Marx argued that all class societies—which originated 10,000 years ago—maintain
their wealth and power by exploiting the population. Exploitation is legalized in laws that
protect employers’ rights to extract surplus value from laborers; it is legitimized and nat-
uralized in ideology that obfuscates exploitation and explains existing inequities as natu-
ral or good; and exploitation is enforced by police and military power in order to suppress
insurrections. Exploitation is thus the political economic core of class society. Exploitation
is so fundamental to class society that the form of exploitation defines a society. Capitalism
is defined by a particular form of exploitation that Marx called “wage slavery.”

The specific economic form in which unpaid surplus-labor is pumped out of direct
producers determines the relationship of rulers and ruled, as it grows directly
out of production itself and, in turn, reacts upon it a determining element. Upon
this, however, is founded the entire formation of the economic community which
grows up out of the production relations themselves, thereby simultaneously its
specific political form. It is always the direct relationship of the owners of the con-
ditions of production to the direct producers—a relation always naturally corre-
sponding to a definite stage in the development of the methods of labor and
thereby its social productivity—which reveals the innermost secret, the hidden
basis of the entire social structure, and with it the political form of the relation of
sovereignty and dependence, in short, the corresponding specific form of the state.
This does not prevent the same economic basis—the same from the standpoint of
its main conditions—due to innumerable different empirical circumstances, natu-
ral environment, racial relations, external historical influences, etc., from showing
infinite variations and gradations in appearance. . . . (Marx, 1962a, p. 772)

This is quite a remarkable cultural theory. It defines society by its particular form of
exploitation. The entire superstructure of society is thus laden with its exploitive core in
the political economy.
 296 macro cultural psychology

This reverses the way in which people usually regard capitalism. Most people regard
exploitation as exceptional and marginal to capitalism, which they see as essentially free,
democratic, meritocratic, and individually beneficial. Marx moved exploitation from the
margins to the core of capitalism. His move explains why a seemingly democratic society
has such an entrenched class structure with enormous inequalities in wealth and power;
the highest percentage of children living in poverty in the industrial world (23); the
second-highest infant mortality rate among wealthy countries; a rank third from
the bottom in the percentage of 15- to 19-year-olds in part-time or full-time education; the
second-lowest level of child well-being (20th out of 21 wealthy countries—see UNICEF,
2007); the highest incarceration rate in the world; a corrupt financial and political system;
system failures that triggered the worst economic crisis in the history of capitalism;
engagement in state terrorism that supports the worst dictators and invades harmless
countries; pollution of the natural environment; reductions in peoples’ standard of living;
enormous rates of poverty, inequality, and ignorance—65 of 12th grade pupils don’t read
at that grade level, and 80 of black pupils in the 4th and 8th grades don’t reading at grade
level; and rates of spending three times higher for incarceration than for public education
(per pupil/individual). Marx’s view explains the development of community colleges in
the United States, which we explored earlier. Without Marx’s notion of exploitation, such
diabolical machinations as those involved in community colleges are unintelligible.
Treating exploitation as marginal, mistaken, and anomalous cannot explain the perva-
siveness, simultaneity, and intransigence of social problems. Without a driving force that
accounts for their prevalence, persistence, and simultaneous occurrence, they appear
to be random, independent accidents resulting from innocent lapses in knowledge that
are correctible through technical solutions such as increased knowledge. However, lack
of knowledge at this point in history is not the reason for the myriad social problems that
threaten civilization. Something much more insidious, central, and incorrigible is at
work; this is the exploitive political economy of capitalism.
Construing capitalism as fundamentally exploitive reverses our understanding of its
practices. What we formerly took to be positive is revealed to be destructive. What seems
to be patriotic is often treasonous to the well-being of Americans; what seems to promote
democracy abroad actually promotes tyranny of American imperialism; what seems to
promote jobs actually promotes profit for investors; what seems to be informative news is
really the obscuring of current events; what seems to be trustworthy is actually duplici-
tous; what seems to be healthy food is actually injurious; what seems to be democracy
is really upper-class rule; what seems to be individual responsibility is really individual
alienation and social irresponsibility.
Of course, not every aspect of capitalist social life is exploitive. Many aspects are demo-
cratic and serve people’s needs. However, these are becoming fewer as they are cannibalized
by the capitalist economy.
The political economy is exploitive in the way that capital is generated. In other words,
the very creation of social wealth rests upon depriving the producers of that wealth of their
due. Social wealth rests upon social impoverishment of the population that produces it.
The vast productivity of capitalism is also based on a vast depletion of the natural
resources that sustain it. Commercial agriculture requires about 3 kcal of energy derived
 297 Concrete Macro Culture and Psychology

from fossil fuels for every 1 kcal of human food produced. The energy efficiency of
modern conventional agriculture declined from 1920 to 1973. Modern rice farmers get a
negative 1:10 energy return (they use 10 calories of energy [in the form of pesticides and
of oil to run machines, transport materials, and package products] to produce 1 calorie of
food). In contrast, traditional rice farmers in Bali produce 15 calories of food energy
for every 1 calorie of energy used (Manno, 2002, pp. 88–89, 96). Capitalism is like “a great
vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood
funnel into anything that smells like money,” as Matt Taibbi once characterized Goldman
Sachs (Taibbi, 2010).
The recent history of American capitalism verifies Marx’s analysis. Today, the CEO of
Wal-Mart earns 900 times the wage of his average employee. The wealth of Wal-Mart’s
founding family equals the wealth of the poorest 40 of the U.S. population—120 million
people!
A stark indicator is the wages that corporations pay to third-world workers. Clothing
manufacturers in the third world break down production into ten-thousandths of a
second. They seek to streamline every ten-thousandth of a second in order to extract
maximum profit. For example, the Nike branch in the Dominican Republic has reduced
the labor time required to make a shirt to 6.6 minutes. It pays its employees 70 cents per
hour. This means that Nike labor costs for a shirt are 8 cents! Nike’s labor costs in the
Dominican Republic are 0.3 of the retail price of the clothing! This exploitation of labor
is what generates enormous profits for the company. (This single fact explains the bulk of
American foreign policy. That policy, in the form of trade agreements and military and
political interventions, is designed to protect the corporations’ exploitation of the popu-
lation in order to generate large profits.)
Capitalist exploitation increased during the Great Recession of 2008. As Bob Herbert
wrote in his New York Times editorial of July 31, 2010, “the recession officially started in
December 2007. From the fourth quarter of 2007 to the fourth quarter of 2009, real aggre-
gate output in the United States, as measured by the gross domestic product, fell by about
2.5, but employers cut their payrolls by 6. In many cases, bosses told panicked workers
who were still on the job that they had to take pay cuts or cuts in hours, or both. . . . The
staggering job losses and stagnant wages are central reasons why any real recovery has
been so difficult.” In summary, “corporate employers threw out far more workers and
hours than they lost output.” At the end of the fourth quarter in 2008, corporate profits
began to surge, and they rose to $572 billion in the first quarter of 2010. Over that same
time period, wage and salary payments went down by $122 billion. “That kind of discon-
nect had never been seen before in all the decades since World War II. . . . Worker pro-
ductivity has increased dramatically, but the workers themselves have seen no gains from
their increased production. It has all gone to corporate profits. This is unprecedented in
the postwar years” (Herbert, 2010).
A key indicator of exploitation is labor productivity in relation to wages and profits.
Productivity is a measure of how much laborers produce (output) in relation to labor
costs (wages). If their output exceeds their wages, then this difference is the surplus value
that Marx identified, which capitalists expropriate as their profit. It is therefore a useful
measure of exploitation.
 298 macro cultural psychology

Output per hour Real compensation per hour

3.0%
Annual average percentage rate of change

2.5% 2.5%

2.0% 1.9%
2.0%

1.4% 1.5%
1.5%
1.2%
1.1%
1.0%
0.6%
0.5%

0.0%
1979–90 1990–2000 2000–07 1979–2007
Period

fig. 5.2 Growth Rates in Output Per Hour and Real Compensation Per Hour.

The neoliberal era produced three relatively long expansions in the American econ-
omy: 1982–1990, 1991–2000, and 2001–2007. If output per hour rises faster than real
hourly earnings, it implies a shift of income from labor to capital. Figure 5.2 shows that
productivity growth outpaced real compensation growth per hour (which includes fringe
benefits and covers all employees, including managers) for each subperiod, with the gap
largest in 2000–2007. The same series for 1948–1973 shows productivity growth at 2.8
and compensation growth at 2.7 per year (Fig. 5.3).

2000
Productivity
1800 Real wage

1600

1400

1200

1000

800

600

400

200

0
18 0
18 4
19 8
19 2
1906
19 0
1914
19 8
19 2
19 6
19 0
19 4
19 8
1942
19 6
19 0
19 4
19 8
19 2
19 6
19 0
19 4
19 8
19 2
19 6
19 0
19 4
20 8
20 2
06
9
9
9
0

1
2
2
3
3
3

4
5
5
5
6
6
7
7
7
8
8
9
9
9
0
18

fig. 5.3 Output and Real Wages Per Hour, –.

 299 Concrete Macro Culture and Psychology

This trend has continued unabated during the economic crisis of 2008. While employ-
ers reduced employment 3.4, hours worked 3.9, and compensation 1, they got a
productivity rise of 1.2 from their laborers in 2008 (Murray, 2009. p. A2). Since the
gain in productivity was not passed on to the workers in the form of compensation or
employment, it was expropriated as profit by the capitalists. Trends in 2009 exacerbated
this exploitation of workers. Productivity increased 5.1 in 2009, the largest jump in the
entire decade (Evans, 2010). Again, the worst economic crisis was exploited by capitalists
to garner the largest gains in productivity without offering any gain in employment or
wages. The capitalists could have accepted lower productivity gains (and profit) by
employing more workers at higher pay. However, they chose instead to protect their own
profit.
Figure 5.4 provides a different indicator of the capital–labor relation in the neoliberal
era. It shows the growth rate of real profits and of real compensation for the corporate
business sector. This measure is suggestive of the Marxist concept of the rate of
surplus value. Figure 5.4 shows that profits grew significantly faster than compensation in
1979–1990, a period that includes 3 years of severely depressed profits in the early
1980s. In 1990–2000, profits grew faster than compensation by an even wider margin,
and in 2000–2007 (the Bush presidency) the gap became enormous (Kotz, 2009,
pp. 309–310).
These are telling statistics, for they show that after 1973, productivity and the economy
slowed down (productivity dropped from close to 3 to 2), and the smaller output was
expropriated more in profits to investors than in compensation to the workers who pro-
duced the output. Thus, capitalists exploited the weakened economy for their own benefit
and exploited employees more than during the regulated period after World War II.

Growth rate of profit Growth rate of compensation

9.0%
Annual average percentage rate of change

8.2%
8.0%

7.0%

6.0%

5.0% 4.6%
4.4%
4.0%
2.6% 3.1%
3.0%
1.7% 2.0%
2.0%
1.0% 1.0%

0.0%
1979–1990 1990–2000 2000–2007 1979–2007
Period

fig. 5.4 Growth Rates in Profit and Compensation.

 300 macro cultural psychology

Figure 5.3 shows this dramatically. Productivity and wages rose together up until 1970,
with productivity always greater than wages (2.3 annual increase versus 1.8). Then, wages
stagnated while productivity rose dramatically. The gains from workers’ productivity were
expropriated by the capitalists, not the workers. (Productivity gains were fueled by technol-
ogy that employers bought for workers to use; however, the capital that bought the technol-
ogy was generated by the profit produced by the workers.) Interestingly, as the economy
slowed in the 1970s and exploitation increased, incarcerations jumped apace. In 40 years,
incarcerations increased seven times, or 700. Now 1 of the American adult population is
behind bars.i
Pensions crystallize this trend. While pensions have been eroded and terminated for
employees, the savings have been transferred to the pensions of executives. Executive
pensions rose even as the share prices at their companies declined an average of 37 in
2008. The CEO of ConocoPhillips will receive a pension of $68.2 million; the CEO of
Exxon Mobil will receive $31 million; the CEO of Goodyear Tire & Rubber will receive
$17.5 million; the CEO of Wells Fargo will receive $17.7 million, despite the fact that the
bank was bailed out by taxpayer money (Schultz & McGinty, 2009, pp. C1, C4). Similarly,
the compensation of CEOs over 2000–2009 was obscenely huge: Larry Ellison, $1.84 bil-
lion; Barry Diller (CEO of Expedia.com), $1.14 billion; Steve Jobs, $749 million; Harold
Schultz (CEO of Starbucks), $358 million. Four of the ten highest-earning executives ran
companies whose shareholders lost money over the course of the decade (Thurm, 2010).
These statistics belie the fiction that productivity is necessarily good for workers because
productivity gains translate into higher compensation. That would be true if workers
owned their labor power and the fruits of their labor; however, because the capitalists
own these, productivity gains translate into their profit.
The stagnating economy, lack of opportunities for workers, and increased expropriation
of gains in productivity by the capitalist ruling class led to a dramatic decline in social
mobility. One study by the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston found that fewer families moved
from one quintile, or fifth, of the income ladder to another during the 1980s than during the
1970s, and that still fewer moved in the 1990s than in the 1980s. A study by the Bureau of
Labor Statistics also found that mobility declined from the 1980s to the 1990s. “Because
income inequality is greater here, there is a wider disparity between what rich and poor
parents can invest in their children. Perhaps as a result, a child’s economic background
is a better predictor of school performance in the United States than in Denmark, the
Netherlands, or France, one recent study found” (Scott & Leonhardt, 2005; see Goldthorpe
& Jackson, 2007, p. 540).The stagnation of capitalism that began in the 1970s and has con-
tinued unabated, also brought a massive increase in incarcerating people (Ratner, 2011a),
and stagnation in education. Bowen, et al. (2009, p. 1) report a “dramatic falling off in the
rate of increase in educational attainment since the mid-1970s.”
Wage and salary disbursements as a percentage of GDP declined from 53 in 1970 to
46 in 2005. Real hourly wages of nonagricultural workers peaked in 1972, and by 2006
they had fallen back to their 1967 level (below the high of 1972); yet consumption rose
from 60 of GDP to 70 during this time (Foster & McChesney, 2009). This was made
possible only by extending massive credit to the populace and extracting massive interest
payments from them instead of giving higher wages to them. Household debt is 125 of
people’s after-tax income. Regarding society from the perspective of a ruling class that
 301 Concrete Macro Culture and Psychology

exploits the population, we interpret this fact in diabolical terms: it was not enough that
consumers made money for capitalists by buying their products; they also had to pay
interest for the privilege of doing so. Thus, they had to pay capitalists (in interest) for the
right to make money for them (in sales).
The business cycle of 2000–2007 was the only one of the post–World War II period in
which real median household income actually was lower at the end (in 2007) than it had
been at the beginning (in 2000). Real median household income fell from $50,557 to
$50,233(in 2007 dollars) between 2000 and 2007. Even in 2005, before the recession of
2008 began, more than one in five Americans needed help from family, friends, or outsid-
ers to pay for basic needs such as food or rent, according to the Census Bureau (Lauricella
& Slater 2009, p. 22).
As millions of families struggled to keep their heads above water, it was easy to entice
many of them into borrowing against their home, often at a low initial rate, which
appeared to be the only way to pay their bills. A majority of the subprime mortgage loans
granted in this period were for refinancing rather than the purchase of a new residence.
During the past decade, homeowners extracted 10 of the equity in their houses to cover
their falling wages. Household debt (the sum of mortgage debt and credit card debt) as a
percentage of disposable personal income shot up from 59 in 1982 to 91 in 2000, to
128 in 2007 (Kotz, 2009, pp. 313–314).
This reliance on debt to prop up a stagnating economy was necessary throughout the
economy, not simply in households. By around 2000, GDP growth was only 20 of new
debt. In other words, for every dollar of new debt, there was only 20 cents of new GDP
growth. This had been 60 cents in 1970. According to the Federal Reserve’s Flow of Funds
data, total debt in the U.S. economy rose from 255.3 of GDP in 1997 to 352.6 of GDP
in 2007. Debt growth was strongest in the household and financial sectors. Household
debt grew from 66.1 of GDP to 99.9 of GDP over the decade to 2007. But the most
rapid growth was in the debt taken on by banks and other financial entities, which grew
from 63.8 of GDP in 1997 to 113.8 of GDP in 2007.
This economic dynamic is functional for a ruling class that enriches itself by exploiting
the populace, for capitalists benefit doubly: once by reducing the wages they must pay to
workers, and again by extending credit to workers at high interest rates. Workers suffer
doubly in return: first in falling wages, then in having to pay interest fees to borrow money
to compensate for lower wages. To wit, total private debt (household and business) rose
from 110 of U.S. GDP in 1970 to 293 in 2007, while financial profits ballooned by more
than 300 between 1995 and mid-2007. While long-run equity returns run at about 7,
the return earned by U.S., German, French, and Italian banks in 2006 was around 12,
and UK banks returned 20. These high rates of return reflect leverage, “thin” capitaliza-
tion, and risk-taking.
This evidence demonstrates that the capitalist political economic system was deterio-
rating long before the current “Great Recession.” Stagnation began in the 1970s and has
intensified ever since. Capitalists have been forced by this fact to squeeze profit from
workers’ wages, health benefits, pensions, and housing equity. They have been forced to
demand that governments privatize public services in order to supply corporations with
desperately needed (guaranteed) profit that cannot be generated on the free market. They
have been forced to induce consumers to buy on credit, and they have been forced to
 302 macro cultural psychology

concoct a range of exotic, opaque financial artifices to generate profit. This is why they
were forced to concoct financial and housing bubbles—because the political economy
does not generate real growth. “Such [risky] accounts exploded in number as card com-
panies tried to offset slower growth by extending credit to less-credit-worthy customers”
(Sidel, 2009, p. C1). This strategy was functional to the profit motive of credit card com-
panies: “Risky borrowers usually are a cash cow for credit-card issuers, thanks to hefty
fees and interest rates. Credit card companies are expected to impose $20.5 billion of
penalty fees this year, up from $19.1 billion in 2008” (Sidel, 2009, p. C1).
Bankers’ reckless, exploitive behavior has a material cultural basis in the failure of their
political economic system. Their reckless, exploitive behavior took root in the 1970s as
stagnation began, and it has increased in proportion to economic stagnation. This is why
it intensified in 2000 and led to out-of-control speculation and collapse.
The recession exacerbated long-term, secular suffering, but it did not create it anoma-
lously. The Great Recession was the culmination of a long-term, secular, systemic crisis;
it was not the cause of the crisis. Unemployment, underemployment, poverty, decimation
of retirement pensions and health care insurance, and restructuring of jobs to low-paying
service sector work were all on the rise for decades; they were simply masked by artificial
credit and housing bubbles. Capitalist stagnation since the 1970s means that since the
Great Depression of the 1920s, capitalism has experienced real growth only from 1945 to
1975 (and this brief “Golden Age” was stimulated by World War II and the absence of
competition in its aftermath). A single 35-year period of growth—stimulated by war and
lack of competition—in the course of a century indicates that capitalism is not a robust,
viable political economic system (Foster & Magdoff, 2009; McChesney, Foster, Stole, &
Holleman, 2009).
It may be legitimately argued that capitalism has entered a period of irreversible decline.
Recent trends in job creation prove this dire trend. From Jan. 2008-Jan. 2011, lower-wage
industries accounted for just 23 of job losses, but fully 49 of recent growth. Higher-
wage industries accounted for 40 of job loss, but only 14 of recent growth. The occupa-
tional hierarchy is being skewed downward. Moreover, these trends compare unfavorably
to the last “jobless recovery” after the 2001 recession . In the year after that downturn,
almost half of the jobs lost had returned. By contrast, in the year after the job market’s
trough in the most recent business cycle, only 14 of private payroll jobs have been recov-
ered. And the mix of new jobs created is worse this time around. In the 2001 recession,
higher-wage industries constituted 31) of first-year growth. In the 2008 recession, higher-
wage industries constituted only 14 of first-year growth (National Employment Law
Project, February 23, 2011: http://www.nelp.org/). Not only are capitalists creating worse
jobs and fewer jobs, they are exploiting employees in these jobs more than before.
Employers forced hourly employees in small businesses to work 3 more hours in January
2011 compared with Jan. 2010, for no increase in wages. (Loten, 2011, p. C1)
The failure of the Democrats and Republicans alike to solve the problems, testifies to
the fact that there is no fixing the capitalist system within its parameters. The only way to
solve its endemic problems is to reorganize it into a new socio-economic system, as we
shall discuss in chapter seven.ii Social transformation is a normal social process. All social
systems to date have failed and been reorganized. There is nothing sinister or fanciful
about suggesting that capitalism be reorganized, just as it reorganized its predecessor,
 303 Concrete Macro Culture and Psychology

feudalism (which it accomplished through violent revolution that included decapitating

the heads of state in France and England during bloody civil wars. Given this history, it is
ironic that current leaders of capitalism insist that dissent against their rule be non-violent).
This account of American capitalism explains sweeping developments in terms of
exploiting workers by paying them less than the value of the products they create. This
fundamental fact explains the whole rise of stagnation, credit, speculation, consumerism,
imperialism, militarism, and crisis.
Because capital is generated by exploiting workers in production, it is crucial for capi-
talists to appropriate more areas of social and natural life into the realm of capitalist
production, where they can generate capital. This is what commodification and privatiza-
tion are all about. They convert free, public resources/services into commodities that are
produced in capitalist enterprises and sold at a profit.
Commodity production generates capital; it does not simply exchange capital for prod-
ucts. Capitalist commodity production is quite different from simple commodity pro-
duction, where a craftsman makes a table and sells it for a price. Capitalist commodity
production is unique because it converts labor into a commodity (which it formerly was
not) that the capitalist can buy and then exploit by paying the laborer for only part of its
value. Labor is a unique commodity in that it can be exploited to generate profit. Natural
resources such as metal or coal do not generate capital; only labor does.
Expropriating natural, public resources and services into capitalist production subjects
them to the political, economic rules and decisions of capitalists. It deprives people of the
ability to creatively organize their own lives on their own terms, without purchasing the
ingredients from capitalist owners. Commodification is not simply buying a product for
oneself; it presupposes an entire political-economic production apparatus—and psycho-
logical apparatus— that is dominated by capitalist owners.
Veblen emphasized this in his economic writings (although he was trained as a philoso-
pher and taught philosophy at the University of Chicago with Dewey and George H. Mead).
Veblen said, “The corporation is always a business concern, not an industrial appliance.
It is a means of making money, not of making goods. . . . The rate and volume of output
must be adjusted to the needs and resources of the market, not to the working capacity of
the available resources, equipment and man-power, nor to the community’s need of con-
sumable goods” (cited in McGovern, 2006, p. 141). Veblen distinguished industry from
business: industry was the (abstract) technical production of goods for people, while busi-
ness was the (concrete) capitalist-oriented political economy that often conflicted with
industry. Subjugating industry to business represented a continual sacrifice of the welfare
of the many on the altar of private gain for the very few. For instance, to stave off losses,
“Captains of Industry,” as Veblen dubbed them, routinely cut production rather than prices,
resulting in reduced wages and cycles of depression, idle plants, and unemployment. This
“pecuniary logic” impeded industry and eroded its social benefits (McGovern, 2006,
pp. 140–141; see Melman, 1983, for documentation of how capitalists systematically sacri-
ficed investment in sound production in favor of inexpensive production that yielded
quick returns on investment). This is another example of how capitalism is an anti-cultural
culture.
Even the investors who technically own a corporation are excluded from selecting
the board of directors that runs it. Boards of directors, and the policies they designate,
 304 macro cultural psychology

are selected by previous boards. Investors can only approve or disapprove them; they
cannot nominate them. Outsiders can run for the board at their own expense, which often
amounts to hundreds of thousands of dollars. “Due to the cost of proxy fights, few dissi-
dents bother to make board challenges. Just 75 shareholder contests for board seats have
occurred in 2009” out of all the thousands of director positions in American corporations,
and only 58 of those fights were successful (Lublin, 2009, p. B1). Even outsider policies
that are fortunate enough to be approved by the investors are only advisory to the board;
the board decides whether to adopt them or not. (Ironically, this kind of pseudodemoc-
racy is precisely what capitalists denounce in “socialist” countries, while they practice it
themselves.)
Commodification of labor also destroys social responsibility on the part of the capital-
ist. The capitalist purchases labor for a fixed time and then discards it; there is no social
responsibility on the part of the capitalist to be concerned about the general, long-term
well-being of the worker. When the contract ends, the worker disappears and the capital-
ist has no legal or moral concern for him. It matters not whether the worker is home-
less, sick, or dies. There is no social connection between the worker and the employer, or
ex-employer. Even slave owners had more social responsibility for their slaves than capi-
talists have for workers. Slave owners had to ensure that slaves had enough food and rest
to work efficiently, and most slaves stayed with an owner for an extended period of time.
But capitalists have no such responsibility. It is the worker’s responsibility to show up
for work prepared to work. If he cannot, he is replaced by another. Again we see how
capitalism is an anti-cultural culture.
It is because they are exploitive that production, privatization, commodification, and
capitalization cause social and psychological problems in capitalism.
Marx recognized another distinctive feature of capitalist exploitation—namely, that it
is difficult to perceive, even by the laborers who are the victims of exploitation. He says
(in Section 9 of his pamphlet Wages, Price, and Profit, which was delivered as an address
in 1865) that exploitation is clear in slavery, and also in feudalism, where the serf directly
pays the lord a percentage of his produce (the surplus value). But in capitalism, “the nature
of the whole transaction is completely masked by the intervention of a contract and the pay
received at the end of the work week.” In other words, exploitation is masked and mystified
by the capitalist legal form of labor.
There are two elements to this mystification. One is the fact that the laborer sells his or
her labor power to the capitalist through a contract that appears to be an equal exchange
of wages for labor. The laborer voluntarily agrees to the contract, which obscures coer-
cion. The coercion lies in the fact that the working man is compelled to sell his labor
power in order to live; he sells his labor power to a capitalist who owns the workplace and
sets all the rules and can discharge the worker at will; and the wage earned pays for only
a small portion of the labor expended during this working period. The remainder of the
labor is unpaid and therefore exploited. While the worker has some choice over which
capitalist to sell himself to, he remains within the grip of the capitalist class for his liveli-
hood. His choice occurs within the conditions that have been set by the capitalist class,
and he has no choice over the conditions themselves, especially their exploitive, auto-
cratic nature. The contractual form of wage labor obscures its involuntary, autocratic,
exploitive nature.
 305 Concrete Macro Culture and Psychology

Exploitation of the laborer is further mystified by the wage being paid at the end of the
labor period, which implies that the wage covers the entire period and the value of what
was produced during it. However, the wage covers only part of the time the laborer works,
with the remainder being unpaid. Again, this free labor forms the capitalist’s profit. Marx
observes that division between the paid and unpaid labor during the working period is
not demarcated as it was with the serf. The serf was forced to hand over a percentage of
his crop to the lord for free, and this exploitation was clear. In contrast, the capitalist does
not pay the worker two-thirds of the way through the work week and then say, “O.K., now
the rest of the week you work for free and I won’t pay you any more this week.” Thus, the
free labor time is not objectified in the form of wages; it remains hidden by the wage
system. Marx says, “On the basis of the wage system even the unpaid labor seems to be
paid labor.”
Marx explained another source of mystification in the capitalist political economy:
“The finished pattern of economic relations as seen on the surface in their real existence
and consequently in the ideas with which the agents and bearers of these relations seek to
understand them, is very different from, and indeed quite the reverse of and antagonistic
to their inner, essential but concealed core and the concepts corresponding to it” (cited in
Lukacs, 1971, pp. 7–8).
In addition to this mystification that is produced by the form that capitalist production
takes, the capitalist ruling class diligently tries to obfuscate and deny the fact that they
exploit their workers. They create all kinds of ideological fictions about capitalist free-
dom, meritocracy, social mobility, serving the needs of the people, etc. We shall examine
an example momentarily.
Marx’s great insight into capitalism was to discern exploitation where it is masked by
the legal forms in which capitalist labor is arranged. Not only did Marx apprehend this
feature of capitalism, which contradicts its entire self-presentation, overt appearance, and
legitimating ideology, but he perceived it to be the core of the political economy that
colored the superstructure of macro cultural factors and their subjective, psychological
elements. This was a remarkable scientific breakthrough with profound implications for
the solution of social problems. The solution, of course, is to transform the exploitive,
destructive political economy into a democratic, cooperative one. Maintaining the can-
cerous political economy and regulating some of its most destructive practices (through
liberal reforms) is inadequate because it accepts the cancerous core as a central element
of society. The cancerous core acts like any cancer: it strives to metastasize and attack
healthy elements. Enormous energy is necessary to defend healthy elements in the face of
this constant attack, and many are lost in the battle. The only way to combat a virulent
cancer is to extirpate it. This is the implication of Marx’s analysis.

Social Functionalism and Capitalist Exploitation

Capitalist exploitation is injurious in many ways to the population of capitalism, as well
as to social life in general and to the environment. However, it is the basis of capitalist
productivity, it is institutionalized in laws and rights, it is naturalized by the sense of life
that capitalist macro cultural factors have from the political economy, and it is the corner-
stone of ruling-class wealth and power and is thereby encouraged by it. This means that
 306 macro cultural psychology

the destruction caused by exploitation is functional, or beneficial, to the ruling class and
to the political economy of capitalism. The political economy and the capitalist class profit
by causing the populace to suffer low wages. They profit by outsourcing high-paying local
jobs to low-paid foreign workers and leaving domestic workers destitute. They profit from
polluting the environment and saving on production costs. They profit from a pool of
unemployed people who will work for the lowest wages. They profit from busting union
protections for employees. They profit from low taxes that decimate schools and social
services. They profit from speculative, leveraged investments that return high rates of
interest on small out-of-pocket investments, leveraged by enormous amounts of debt.
Exploitive capitalism also thrives on a mystified, uninformed, complacent, apathetic pop-
ulace that does not understand or challenge its exploitation.
This is why the ruling class encourages these deleterious conditions and resists rectifying
them. It resists pollution controls; it resists government regulation of speculative banking;
it insists on the right to bribe political officials; it resists injunctions to stop investing in
businesses tied to human rights abuses; it resists efforts to improve working conditions
because doing so would raise production costs; it resists raising the minimum wage; it
resists higher taxes that could provide social services to people who need them; it even
resists efforts to list ingredients and nutritional information on food packages that might
frighten people from consuming the products. This is why the exploitative political econ-
omy must be transformed into a democratic, cooperative one in which humane activities
are functional.

Politics and Social Class

Exploitation is the essence, basis, raison d’être, purpose, and function of social class.
Exploitation is the reason the upper class forms the class system. Exploitation is how the
upper class derives its wealth and how the lower class loses its ability to possess wealth.
Exploitation is how the upper class rules, how it dominates the lower class, how it pro-
mulgates the class structure, why it needs, desires, and maintains the class system.
Without the political economy of exploitation, social class appears to be simply a quanti-
tative distribution of wealth, ownership, and lifestyle (longevity, crime, health, education).
Social class appears to be the consequence of separate individual behaviors: poor people
are poor because they act differently (are lazy, don’t study, don’t work hard) than rich
people. There is no relationship between the two classes. They each come to occupy their
class position because of their separate, individual behavior (study, motivation, etc.).
An article in the September 10, 2009, Wall Street Journal (Davis & Frank, 2009) stated
this explicitly. It discussed the enormous inequality in income that grew after 1980.
By 2007, the richest 1 of the population garnered 24 of the nation’s income. “The gains
at the top didn’t necessarily come at the expense of others, because the economy expanded
greatly after 1980, letting incomes grow across the spectrum. But those at the top end rose
more rapidly. In 1980 the income of the top 5 of households was 2.86 times median
income; by 2007, it was 3.52 times the median. In other words, the gap widened by 23”
(p. A4). The authors are so blinded by their individualistic ideology that they cannot see
that this increasing enrichment of the elite did come at the expense of the populace.
Obviously, if the wealthy elite got a disproportionate share of the increased total income,
 307 Concrete Macro Culture and Psychology

it prevented the rest of the populace from garnering more than they did, and as much as
they could have garnered under a more egalitarian distribution system. The elite got richer
because so much income went to them instead of to the rest of the populace. This is clearly
the case with pensions as well. But the authors think that each individual’s income is
independent of any other’s and does not deprive others of a larger share.
Reconceptualizing class as a political phenomenon that is based on oppression/
exploitation brings social classes into an interdependent relationship with one another.
Each feeds off the other and is generated by the other. Neither can exist without the other.
The ruling class requires a lower class in order to rule and to enrich itself. Moreover, the
existence of a ruling class prevents the majority from entering it, because then it would
cease to rule over anyone, and no one would be available to generate its wealth. Not all
individuals can enter the upper class, or it would dissolve. Social class is exclusive and
exclusionary. It cannot admit equality, or it would vanish as a powerful force.
A purely quantitative description of class strips it of its political-economic basis. In this
sense it is not a class analysis at all. It simply aggregates data from individual behavior
(savings, schooling, occupation).
A nonpolitical, empiricist description of social trends also underestimates what is nec-
essary to change these trends. It makes change appear to be a purely technical process of
providing better education and health care to all. It ignores the complicated, protracted
political struggle that is necessary to dislodge the vested interests from controlling social
mechanisms before real change can be effected. For this reason, technical changes based
upon empiricist statistics will never be successful.
We must be mindful not to oppose class simply as a hierarchy of more and less wealth,
for that obscures the political composition of classes. A merely hierarchical, “quantitative”
conception of class leads to an abstract alternative—“equality”—that is “nonhierarchical.”
However, it fails to grasp the political system that is necessary to achieve these goals.
It fails to challenge capitalism (feudalism, slavery, and other specific political economies
of class) per se, and the specific socioeconomic relations therein. It seeks to impose
abstract solutions on a concrete problem. This can never be successful. The problem with
contemporary class society is not simply that some people have more wealth and power
than others, but that they have acquired and maintained it at the expense of others, and
they have acquired and maintained it in a particular manner. It is this particular set of
exploitive socioeconomic relations that must be opposed in order to democratize society;
simply opposing inequality and hierarchy will fail because it fails to attack the specific
mechanisms of inequality and hierarchy in contemporary society. Struggling for equality
per se (e.g., by raising wages or providing universal health care) apart from political
struggle to eliminate the specific exploitive, political-economic relations (of ownership
and control of institutions) is directionless and impractical.
The politics of class emphasizes the fact that class is functional to and beneficial to the
ruling class, and that they desire and require it in order to retain their wealth and power.
They will do everything in their power to maintain unequal classes and prevent their
eradication. They ruthlessly eliminate activists who seek to eradicate poverty through land
reform, raising the minimum wage, or regulating exploitive labor practices and strength-
ening labor unions that protect workers. This is the basis of American foreign policy that
supports elite coups against popular democracies.
 308 macro cultural psychology

Upper-class people do not simply concentrate on working hard to earn money for
themselves; they concentrate on sustaining themselves as a class by making policies that
perpetuate a disenfranchised, impoverished lower class that makes money for them.iii
A sobering, sordid example of how devious and duplicitous the capitalist class is in
controlling the political process while presenting it as open and democratic is the manner
in which presidential and vice presidential debates are conducted among leading presi-
dential candidates in the United States.
The American public is not aware that these “public,” “open,” “democratic” debates are
sponsored by a private organization known as the Commission for Presidential Debates.
The name of this organization (“Commission”) implies that it is a public agency, but it is
not. The co-chairs of the “commission” are two corporate lobbyists: Paul Kirk is a lobbyist
for the large pharmaceutical corporations, and Farenkoff is the president of the American
Gaming Association, which lobbies for gambling casinos! Moreover, large corporations
sponsor this “commission.” The largest contributor to the commission is Anheuser Busch,
the beer maker, whose headquarters are in St. Louis. Coincidentally, at least one debate
every election cycle is held in St. Louis. The commission draws up a contract between
the Republican and Democratic parties concerning the rules of the presidential and vice
presidential debates. No other political parties are allowed to participate—unless the two
major parties agree. Of course, they normally do not agree to have open debates including
all the candidates, because they want to limit presidential politics to two parties. For
example, in 1996, Bob Dole, the Republican candidate, did not want to include Independent
Ross Perot in the debate because he feared Perot would draw votes away from him. Bill
Clinton agreed to ban Perot in exchange for conditions that he wanted. One condition was
that the presidential debates be scheduled during the evenings when the World Series was
to be held! Clinton was 20 points ahead in the polls, and he didn’t want viewers watching
the debates and possibly changing their minds in favor of Dole. Clinton was successful in
his demand; the 1996 presidential debates attracted the lowest debate viewership ever
recorded. Clinton also insisted that, after each candidate spoke his point, no follow-up
questions be allowed. His strategy was to prevent any challenges to what he said. These
were secret deliberations that strongly suppressed the free flow of ideas in the debates.
The 2008 presidential and vice presidential debates were similarly managed by the
ruling political and economic elite through the private Commission for Presidential
Debates. Again, third-party candidates were excluded, and a rule was instituted for the
vice presidential debate that limited counter-responses to a candidate’s statement to
90 seconds in order to limit challenges to those statements. Finally, the Commission has
refused to release the rules governing the “public, democratic” debate to the citizens who
were watching and who would be voting (Farah, 2004; 2008)! (The fact that certain con-
spiracies are exposed—usually after the fact—does not gainsay the fact that conspiracies
are committed.)
This socially imposed ignorance of the American people, and the curtailing of their
democracy, is worsening. Presidential debates were formerly hosted by an independent
group, the League of Women Voters (LWV), who chose impartial moderators and included
third-party candidates. However, the two major parties objected to this independent format
and simply replaced the LWV with their own creation, the Commission for Presidential
Debates.
 309 Concrete Macro Culture and Psychology

Another insidious manifestation of how corporations exert dominance over the culture
while obscuring their influence is corporate dominance of political commentators on
news programs. While the commentators are invited by the programs to present honest,
factual analysis, many of them are actually hired operatives of corporations. Since 2007,
at least 75 registered lobbyists, public relations representatives, and corporate officials—
people paid by companies and trade groups to manage their public image and promote
their financial and political interests—have appeared on MSNBC, Fox News, CNN, CNBC,
and Fox Business Network with no disclosure of the corporate interests that had paid
them. Many have been regulars on more than one of the cable networks, turning up in
dozens—and in some cases hundreds—of appearances. For lobbyists, PR firms, and corpo-
rate officials, going on cable television is a chance to promote clients and their interests on
the most widely cited source of news in the United States. For instance, on December 4,
2009, Tom Ridge, former governor of Pennsylvania and secretary of Homeland Security,
appeared on MSNBC news as a political analyst. He advised the Obama administration to
invest in nuclear energy. But what viewers weren’t told was that since 2005, Ridge has
pocketed $530,659 in executive compensation for serving on the board of Exelon, the
nation’s largest nuclear power company. As of March 2009, he also held an estimated
$248,299 in Exelon stock, according to SEC filings.
Moments earlier, retired general and “NBC Military Analyst” Barry McCaffrey had told
viewers that the war in Afghanistan would require an additional “three- to ten-year
effort” and “a lot of money.” Unmentioned was the fact that DynCorp paid McCaff rey
$182,309 in 2009 alone. “The government had just granted DynCorp a 5-year deal worth
an estimated $5.9 billion to aid American forces in Afghanistan. The first year is locked in
at $644 million, but the additional four options are subject to renewal, contingent on
military needs and political realities” (Jones, 2010).

Caveats
Of course, the ruling class does not anticipate, desire, or control every reaction to and
every consequence of their exploitive actions. Capitalists did not want the banking system
to collapse as it did in September 2008. However, bankers certainly anticipated that their
unscrupulous lending and borrowing practices and selling of high-risk debts ran the risk
of collapsing the system. Top executives at Bear Stearns, Deutsche Bank, and Goldman
Sachs warned about an impending crash in 2005. Top executives even sold their own
stock and the stock of risky companies they were advising their clients to purchase. They
did everything to continue their practices and circumvent any controls that would have
limited the dangers. And they continue to resist controls even after witnessing the finan-
cial disaster that resulted from deregulation (Madrick, 2010).
The dominance of exploitation relegates bourgeois concepts about equality, democracy,
liberty, and concern for people to peripheral features of capitalism, and these concepts
are continually contradicted by their dominant opposite features.
Of course, not every single aspect of class society is directly implicated in exploitation,
depersonalization, or mystification. Some social aspects stand on the periphery and are
relatively free of the major traits. Some are historical vestiges whose structure resists
cooptation, at least for a while. And most individuals believe social ideology about
 310 macro cultural psychology

democracy, equality, and freedom and try to live up to these ideals. Many devoted teach-
ers, doctors, and craftsmen fall into this category; they work honestly and considerately
to help other people.
The underlying and overall inefficiency and irrationality of capitalism does not mean
that every domain of behavior and psychology is irrational in capitalist society. There are
many pockets that escape the brunt of capitalist corruption. (Our conical model of society
recognizes distinctive positions within the cone, some of which are more affected by the
political economic core than others.) Universities provide some buffer from direct politi-
cal economic pressures, although the buffer is replete with holes. Scientific disciplines are
also granted some freedom to pursue intellectual interests; however, this freedom is also
being whittled away.

Mystification
All class societies are based upon exploitation and coercion. This is the only way that an
upper class can rise above lower classes and retain the lower classes in their subordinate
position. Obviously, the lower classes would never voluntarily agree to a class structure
that places them at the bottom. And the history of class societies proves that in every
historical era, upper classes arose by simply expropriating resources, wealth, and power
from the populace. Capitalism, for example, was created when wealthy landowners threw
peasants off their land (known as “enclosing the land”) and forced them to work as
employees in new industrial centers. (This process was called “primitive accumulation of
capital”; Perelman, 2007.)
Ruling classes try to rationalize and legitimize their power and wealth in other terms,
of course. They invent ideologies that paint them as more capable and harder-working
than the lower classes: All wealth (and poverty) is acquired individually; there is no
ruling class as a social formation—class is simply the position of separate individuals that
results from their individual competencies. The ruling class does not need the lower class,
want the lower class, or generate/maintain the lower class; they are benevolent rulers who
protect and help the lower classes; they are fulfilling God’s wishes; they are really promot-
ing freedom and democracy.
All the ideologies of class society are lies that obscure the autocracy of the ruling class.
We have examined plentiful evidence earlier in this chapter and in Chapter 3 that proves
socioeconomic position overrides psychological competence in generating educational per-
formance. Cognitively excellent individuals from the lower classes suffer educational and
cognitive declines in defiance of their original competence. Conversely, cognitively incom-
petent upper-class individuals achieve educational and occupational success despite their
incompetence. Poor children adopted into middle-class families always witness a substan-
tial rise in their IQs. We saw that university presidents and community college presidents
deliberately diverted junior college students away from higher education, in the face of
concerted resistance from the students and their parents, yet they presented their imposed
vocational training programs as reflections of the students’ desires and needs. This is a
perfect example of mystification by the upper class: autocracy, coercion, channeling, and
resistance were inverted into students’ personal desires and choices.
 311 Concrete Macro Culture and Psychology

Exploitation is generally obfuscated by mystifications. Mystification is the barometer

of exploitation. Mystification is a crucial cornerstone of macro cultural factors in class
societies; it preserves their exploitive political economic core by disguising it.
The ruling class does not necessarily invent its ideology by itself. In Chapter 3, I discuss
the complex manner in which the political economy organizes the array of cultural fac-
tors. An important process occurs by reverberating a sense of life throughout society that
people feel and accept. Capitalists do not have to effect this linkage themselves. Commonly,
middle-class individuals absorb the capitalist sense of life and objectify and promulgate
it in philosophical, artistic, and intellectual works. For example, we have seen how com-
munity college presidents—not members of the capitalist elite—initiated college reforms
that reflected and reinforced the capitalist political economy. These ideas and their authors
then become endorsed and promulgated by the elite through grants, research contracts,
media outlets, etc.
Of course, the ruling class does also directly commission institutes that are specifically
charged with developing ideological tools for legitimizing and mystifying capitalist prac-
tices. The Rand Corporation, the Hoover Institute, and the American Enterprise Institute
are prominent examples of upper-class-funded institutes that hire intellectuals to do their
masters’ bidding.
A clear example of this direct construction of mystifying ideology by the ruling capital-
ist class is the development of “rational choice theory” at the RAND Corporation in the
1950s and 1960s. This little-known story is an important cog in a concrete comprehension
of the culture of capitalism. It complements the story of how community colleges were
formed by pressure from the political economy.
Rational choice theory is a mainstay of bourgeois ideology that construes society as
the outcome of interpersonal negotiations. It thereby expunges any sense of exploitation,
oppression, coercion, social class, politics, or power. It is the mother of contemporary
individualistic social theory, one of whose forms is micro cultural psychology, which we
shall examine in Chapter 6.
As Amadae, (2003) explains, social interactions were deemed to consist of two parties who
select strategies that enable them to maximize their expected utilities. Rational choice theory
opposed structures and classes and even large collective organizations with a common pur-
pose. Kenneth Arrow’s Social Choice and Individual Values (1951) claimed that collectively
rational group decisions are logically impossible. It is not rational to cooperate in large-scale
collective projects. It is not in a worker’s interest to join a labor union because any large
group that seeks a collection action must be coercive over individual freedom (Amadae,
2003, p. 179). Of course, this injunction did not apply to ruling-class organizations such as
the Committee for Economic Democracy, the Council on Foreign Relations, or the Chamber
of Commerce.
Rational choice theory was politically motivated and charged. “Arrow’s ‘impossibility
theorem,’ as his result came to be called, struck a deathblow to the tradition of welfare
economics in the United States, and initiated the field of social choice theory in its place.
It defined the underlying tenets for ‘capitalist democracy’ while simultaneously exclud-
ing any philosophical principles derived from Marxism, Kantian moral philosophy,
Rousseau’s general will, or classical utilitarianism” (Amadae, 2003, pp. 83–84).
 312 macro cultural psychology

Rational choice theory and individualistic social philosophy opposed notions of the col-
lective will or collective benefit, as well as of rational planning to comprehend and fulfill
them. All of this was deemed fictitious and in need of replacement by individual decisions
and interactions. This strategy obviates public policy, public regulations, public planning,
and public agencies to administer the social whole and restrict the autonomy of individual
capitalists to own and run their enterprises. This individualistic social philosophy insu-
lates the capitalist system from analysis and change. This is the conservative politics of all
individualistic philosophy. It is unsurprising, therefore, that it was developed in the polit-
ically conservative, militaristic RAND corporation.
RAND Corporation was the nation’s first think tank and was at the center of American
Cold War efforts to generate a science of military strategy and decision making. RAND
was formed in 1946 by General Henry Arnold of the U.S. Air Force and executive leaders
at the Douglas Aircraft Company. It was a division within Douglas and reported to General
Curtis LeMay, future head of the U.S. Strategic Air Command. LeMay gave RAND many
of its early projects to work on. Later, RAND became independent of Douglas through a
grant from Henry Ford (Abella, 2008; Amadae, 2003, pp. 9, 32–35).
This elite institution was the seat of game theory and rational choice theory, as well as
many government policies. Game theory and rational choice theory developed at RAND
were therefore infused with corporate Cold War ideology through and through. “Game
theory developed [in the 1940s and 1950s at RAND] as one branch of the Cold War ratio-
nality project that received its initial funding and prestige, and much of its inspiration,
from its promise to best the Soviets by providing a means to arrive at sound tactical and
strategic decisions” (Amadae, 2003, p. 7).
The political incubation and objectives of rational choice theory dominated its concepts.

Rational choice scholars simultaneously rebuilt the theoretical foundations of

American capitalist democracy and defeated idealist, collectivist, and authoritar-
ian social theories. . . . Rational choice theory was structured to sustain a philo-
sophical foundation for American capitalist democracy. . . . Rational choice theory
had its impetus in the Cold War social drama, and it met America’s acute societal
challenge of providing social science with a methodological basis negating the
organicist or idealist social thought that was feared to support communism.
Rational choice theory and its structuring of American political discourse and
practice can be perceived as a direct response to Marxist social theory. (Amadae,
2003, pp. 13, 185)

For this politically charged legitimation of capitalist political economy, articulated

in the militaristic RAND think tank, Arrow was awarded the Nobel Prize in economics
in 1972.
It is important to understand how the institutionalization of rational choice theory in
elite organizations was central to its development and propagation.
“Game theory was rescued from academic oblivion by its active development at RAND
for its potential relevance to problems of nuclear strategy” (Amadae, 2003, p. 27). Thus,
game theory was not initially a hot intellectual topic that generated interest at RAND.
 313 Concrete Macro Culture and Psychology

On the contrary, it was invigorated by RAND for political uses and then installed as aca-
demic agendas through the leadership of RAND intellectuals who were by then in power-
ful university administrative positions. This recapitulates the designing of community
colleges by academic leaders who installed their design as policy.
Rational choice theory was developed at RAND as a continuation and refinement of
game theory. It was then taken from the drawing boards of RAND and promulgated
throughout society:

Thomas Schelling, one of the key figures in establishing rational choice theory
as mainstay approach to international relations, was one of RAND’s alumni who
formed McNamara’s team of defense analysts in the Pentagon. . . . Subsequently,
he and other RAND alumni helped to establish rational choice theory as part of
the mainstream American intellectual endowment by virtue of their prominent
positions at Harvard University’s professional school of business. . . . It is no exag-
geration to say that virtually all the roads to rational choice theory lead from
RAND. (Amadae, 2003, pp. 10–11)

Institutionalized in such high-level institutions as the Pentagon, the Harvard School of

Business, and Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government—which used the RAND agen-
da—rational choice theory quickly became a model for other fields such as public policy,
social choice, and political theory. The chairman of RAND, Gaither, formed a spin-off
institution that would concentrate on behavioral and social science applications of ratio-
nal choice theory. Gaither convinced the Ford Foundation, which had funded the RAND
Corporation, to offer a grant to Stanford University to found the Center for the Advanced
Study of the Behavioral Sciences. Stanford accepted the offer in 1956. (Thus the Center
was not simply a Ford Foundation offspring, it was a RAND spin-off ). The first-year
scholars were largely RAND people working with other social scientists who then
returned to their home universities to further propagate rational choice theory (Amadae,
2003, pp. 78–79). Congress even held hearings in 1968–1969 on the effects of RAND’s
policy analysis on public policy. This publicly displayed model was systematically culti-
vated through institutional networks. Commissions and societies were organized to pro-
mote it (e.g., the Public Choice Society), and students were invited to summer workshops
held at RAND. The model of game theory and rational choice theory was not a neutral
concept that intellectuals adopted individually. The model was actively pushed by institu-
tional forces.
Ironically, individualistic rhetoric and practice ultimately served the vested interests
of capitalist ownership and control of institutions and wealth. We have seen that this
ownership and control is exploitive of the population. Disproportionate power contra-
dicts the notion of negotiation among individuals of equal power. The notion of rational
choice thus contains a fatal contradiction. The RAND Corporation itself objectified this
contradiction, as it was a ruling-class, militaristic organization that was promoting indi-
vidualistic social philosophy and public policy. True individualism would have the popu-
lation of individuals designing social philosophy and public policy, not elite, exclusive,
private, secret institutions such as RAND.
 314 macro cultural psychology

Amadae (2003) hits on this key contradiction that lies at the heart of capitalist democ-
racy and generates the entire apparatus of mystification, which obscures it:

Since its inception as a social form predating the French and American Revolutions,
and going back to at least the British civil wars, the drama of democratization has
in part been about conveying the appearance of inclusion while designing means
to retain actual control over decision making in the hands of a social elite. . . .
Increasingly, as democracy became recognized as the legitimate form of govern-
ment among Western nation-states and universal franchise of adult citizens became
widespread following World War I, a new form of struggle emerged, evident in the
United States, to retake the reins of authority in order to neutralize the unruly poten-
tial of mass democratic politics. . . . Following World War II, an alliance was forged
between philanthropies (in this case the Ford Foundation), the business community,
and scientific policy analysts. This alliance resulted in the development of rational
policy analysis, which functioned as a means to relocate the authority for policy
decision from elected officials to a supposedly “objective” technocratic elite. (p. 31)

In other words, the ostensible attempt to oppose group decisions that might overwhelm
the autonomy of the individual, and democracy, were surreptitiously designed to legiti-
mize and facilitate elite control of social decisions that would disenfranchise the popu-
lace! The rhetoric of individualism functions to legitimate the capitalists’ private ownership
of resources and their disproportionate control of institutions, without interference from
the populace. Individualism is mystification par excellence—it emphasizes individual
freedom while providing for autocracy by the capitalist elite. And it is crafted and promul-
gated by an elite institution, the RAND Corporation, in conjunction with other elite insti-
tutions. This is how it is made appealing to individual intellectuals, who naïvely believe
that they are adopting it by their own free choice.
This has far-reaching importance for psychology, because rational choice is a theory
of cognition and self, which are psychological topics. Through rational choice theory,
the RAND Corporation created a psychological prototype of the ideal self, cognition, and
emotion (see Solovey, 2001, 2004 for additional examples of the political forming of
social science). The rational-choice self is founded upon, incorporates, bundles, totalizes,
and transmits political concepts about individual freedom and responsibility for one’s
social position, reasoning about success and failure, how we treat successful and unsuc-
cessful people, and how we respond emotionally to successful and unsuccessful people—
including ourselves when we are successful or unsuccessful. The emotional reaction
incarnates the politics, and it leads to behavior that reinforces the politics—namely, anger
and disdain for the unsuccessful individuals rather than the conditions that generate the
failure. Rational choice theory of self and cognition also generates political policy. It dir-
ects us to leave disadvantaged people to their own devices because they are deemed res-
ponsible for their behavior. In other words, rational choice theory bundles political
assumptions, ideals, and implications into psychological phenomena and presents politi-
cized psychological phenomena through doctrines of political science. This is construct-
ing psychology at the macro level. Rational choice theory fits our model in Figure 1.9.
 315 Concrete Macro Culture and Psychology

Once rational choice theory became institutionalized in the halls of governmental and
academic power and prestige, it beckoned individual social scientists to adopt individu-
alistic social theories and methodologies as a research program. They even used rational
choice theory as their mediational means for understanding their own pursuit of individu-
alistic social theories and methodologies. They believed that they rationally chose to pursue
individualistic social theories and methodologies on their own, because they evaluated
them as interesting and important. They thought they were creative, inventive, and anties-
tablishment, when in fact their choice was framed by an institutional apparatus of think
tanks, government agencies, and elite universities to which they conformed. Nor did these
social scientists realize the deep politics (of mystifying capitalism) that were embodied in
this intellectual project. Thus, the mystifying ideology of individualism mystified social
scientists about their own behavior as well as about their society. The next chapter docu-
ments this insidious achievement in the area of micro cultural psychology.
The dominant ideology of capitalism and all class societies is a myth, a denial, an inver-
sion. This is the Ideenkleid that masks social reality, which we discussed in Chapter 4.
Social reality is not simply difficult to perceive in itself; it is obscured, denied, inverted,
dissembled, and mystified by a political ideology.
Mystification is Freudianism on a social scale. It enlists a massive social apparatus to
block the truth and reality of exploitation from being perceived. The truth that is blocked
is outside the individuals, in exploitive social practices. The repressed truth is not buried
inside individuals, waiting for cathartic release through free association. Freud was wrong
to restrict repression and mystification to socially unacceptable sexual impulses. Repres-
sion and mystification are much more devoted to blocking socially inadmissible exploita-
tion from consciousness by a social censor. Freud was right to observe that the social censor
implants itself within the psyche in the form of mystification and false consciousness.
Obscuring exploitation requires a broad attack on all issues that could reveal it. It goes
far beyond simply denying exploitation per se. It additionally denies systemic philosophy
and concrete analyses of the macro origins, characteristics, and function of psychological
phenomena, for all these issues have the potential to trace psychology to exploitation in
class society and capitalism. To admit social systems is to look for their principles, politics,
and administrative power, which are class-based and exploitive. Therefore, social systems
in general have to be denied in order to deny exploitation. Denying social systems implies
that only individuals act. As we have seen, individual, one-on-one interactions cannot
generate oppression, exploitation, wealth, and power. Thus, epistemology and ontology
that either emphasize or deny social systems are political.
Mystification is not all or nothing. To say that people are mystified by the social practices
and ideology of capitalism (as Marx described) does not mean that they are completely
blind to every aspect of society. It only means that they do not fundamentally understand
how their society works. They are ignorant of fundamental issues, power, structure,
dynamics, and socioeconomic relations. Of course, they know about lobbying, corrup-
tion, lying and cheating, inequality, poverty, and discrimination. However, they do not
understand the basis of these, how these problems are interrelated and interdependent,
why they persist, how they are functional to the ruling class, or how they permeate the
social system.
 316 macro cultural psychology

CAPITALISM AND PSYCHOLOGY

Psychology of Oppression
The oppressive, exploitive features of capitalism, including inverted, mystifying ideology,
have serious consequences for psychology, and for Psychology. The central tenet of cultural
psychology is that macro cultural factors require a corresponding psychology to sustain
themselves. It follows that an exploitive society requires a corresponding exploited psy-
chology to maintain itself. Marx emphasized this in his discussion of how capitalist pro-
duction dehumanizes workers: “Production does not only produce man as a commodity,
the human commodity, man in the form of a commodity; in conformity with this situation
it produces him as a mentally and physically dehumanized being” (Marx, 1963, p. 138; see
Kasser, Cohn, Kanner, & Ryan, 2007, for documentation).
But oppressed psychology is not simply the result of social oppression/exploitation; it is
also functional for oppression. Oppressed psychology adjusts people to accept oppression,
to work within it, and therefore to facilitate it. Psychology is the subjective side of objective
macro cultural factors; it animates them. Oppressed psychology animates social oppression
just as the individualistic self animates capitalist commercial activity. Oppressed psychol-
ogy is an active subjectivity for oppression, not simply the passive result of oppression.
Froyum (2010) observes that social inequalities get reproduced through emotions.
Emotions guide behavior, and emotions must therefore be organized to guide appropriate
social behavior for subaltern social positions. Froyum argues that oppressed, deferential
forms of emotions are even socialized within oppressed groups through the interpersonal
interactions of oppressed people themselves.
People must have a psychology of apathy, ignorance, irrationality, fatefulness, and self-
blame if they are to participate in oppressive conditions. If people had a psychology that
consisted of rational, critical thinking, a keen interest in and understanding of political
processes, a historical memory of the genesis of oppressive social conditions, patient
decision-making, a concern for the people of society, and motivation to improve society
through social action, they would challenge oppressive conditions and the power struc-
ture that administers and profits from them.
The principles of macro cultural psychology, enumerated in Chapter 3, explain how psy-
chology becomes oppressed by an oppressive society. Each one of the principles explains
how oppressive macro cultural factors structure, stimulate, and demand appropriate psy-
chology. In that chapter we mentioned Martin-Baro’s important work on the way poverty
generates fatalism in peasants. Momentarily we shall present an extended example of how
consumer capitalism generates consumerist psychology.
Of course, the political economy is not monolithic, and the capitalist class is not all-
powerful. Discrepancies with their objectives and pressures occur. The question is, how
often and how deeply? Do these discrepancies fundamentally challenge the political
economy and the capitalist class? Clearly, very few do. Most protests against the status
quo are directed at allowing a greater variety of groups—genders, ethnicities, and sexual
orientations—into the higher echelons of the system. They do not challenge the exis-
tence of those echelons or the principles of capitalist political economy. Women prime
ministers and black secretaries of state and supreme court justices are among the most
 317 Concrete Macro Culture and Psychology

conservative supporters of the status quo. Civil rights do not transform the capitalist
political economy.
The psychology of oppression demonstrates that psychology is continuous with culture;
it is on the same plane as culture; it is a form of culture. Psychological unawareness is the
other side of the coin of the social disguise of social reality; it is the social disguise in a
psychological form.
False Consciousness
We have seen that mystification is a central part of the psychology of oppression. Mystified
subjectivity does not perceive objective reality, even though it is formed by objective real-
ity. Actually, consciousness does not perceive objective reality because it is formed by an
elusive social reality that disguises itself and the behavior it cultivates. The objective social
disguise functions as distorting glasses. People who wear these glasses misperceive reality
and themselves because of the objective filters, not because their consciousness is defi-
cient. Of course, people do not realize they are wearing the distorting glasses of the mys-
tifying capitalist political economy.
Social forces thus occasion a gap between what people perceive and think and what real-
ity is. This distance between empirically given subjective awareness and the consciousness
that is necessary to apprehend objective reality is known as false consciousness. False con-
sciousness is an objective cultural phenomenon caused by objective cultural forces and
factors that falsify consciousness (Lukacs, 1971, p. 51). It is analogous to the Müller-Lyer
optical illusion in the sense that there is an objective, measurable gap between the percep-
tion of the lines’ length and their actual dimensions (Ratner, 1997, pp. 207–211). This dis-
tance between actual/empirical/mystified consciousness and possible/necessary/objective
consciousness is a gap that must be closed if people are to become aware of and able to
humanize their social world.
Illusions are due to expectations that do not reflect the reality they confront. The illu-
sions filter reality in appropriate ways that distort its appearance. Illusions are overcome by
correcting assumptions and making them consistent with reality. False consciousness is
similarly an illusory view of social reality that is generated by false assumptions (Ideenkleid).
It is overcome by acquiring accurate assumptions about social reality. Macro cultural psy-
chology simply transposes traditional mediational means of perception to a higher octave
and includes such things as political ideology (Jost, Federico, & Napier, 2009). It operates
in exactly the same manner as traditional mediational means do.
Individualistic ideology is a clear example of false consciousness. It obscures itself,
just as capitalism does. Individualistic ideology pretends that your beliefs are your own
and not the product of a cultural ideology that influences you. Individualism is the most
insidious ideology because it denies its own existence. If you believe individualistic
ideology, you cannot know you believe it, or any ideology, because the ideology you
believe in denies that you believe in it. The more you believe it, the less you believe you
believe it.
Leontiev touched on this as a problem of consciousness in class society. In a section by
that title, he states, “A consequence of the ‘alienation’ of human life that has occurred is
the emergent disparity between the objective result of man’s activity on the one hand, and
its motive on the other. In other words, the objective content of the activity is becoming
 318 macro cultural psychology

discrepant with its subjective content. . . . That imparts special psychological features to
his consciousness” (Leontiev, 1981, p. 252).iv
Bhaskar (1989, p. 35) similarly says, “[P]eople in their conscious activity, for the most part
unconsciously reproduce (and occasionally transform) the structures governing their sub-
stantive activities of production. Thus, people do not marry to reproduce the nuclear family
or work to sustain the capitalist economy. Yet it is nevertheless the unintended conse-
quence (and inexorable result) of, as it is also a necessary condition for, their activity. . . .
The problem of how people reproduce any particular society belongs to a linking science
of ‘socio-psychology.’ ”
This means that cultural factors are not in a person’s conscious awareness. They form
an objectiver Geist, a Volkerpsychologie, an objective spirit or mind. They cannot be ascer-
tained by asking people about them. They must be ascertained via objective analysis that
detects their features in the psychological processes of people.
The same kind of objectivist analysis of illusion is critical for identifying and overcom-
ing social exploitation. If we reduce social reality to subjective perception, then we accept
whatever perception a people has as “their reality,” and we are powerless to identify gaps
and weaknesses in their perception that are caused by exploitation and which can be
overcome by eliminating exploitation. Without an objective sense of social reality, we
have no measure of consciousness’s failure to grasp it, and no measure of social reasons
that cause this failure and which must be overcome through social reform.v
The failure of consciousness is a valuable insight into the failures of society, if we regard
consciousness as a social phenomenon, for it leads us to ask about the social reasons for
psychological deficiencies. It leads us to ask why and how social life obscures itself from
its citizens. We can then take steps to reform society to make it more transparent to people
who need to understand and control it.
If we regard perception as a personal phenomenon that expresses personal meanings, we
silence it as a social indicator of social problems and their necessary solution. Subjectivism
denies any psychological deficiency, as there is no gap between consciousness and reality,
because consciousness makes reality. With psychology proclaimed to be supremely in con-
trol of its world, the world is proclaimed to be good as well, for it reflects our conscious
desires. A perfect world that reflects perfect consciousness requires no political transfor-
mation. This is the conservatism of subjectivism.
False consciousness is analogous to the zone of proximal development (ZPD) that Vygotsky
immortalized (but did not invent). Both conceptions regard development as having to occur
by traversing a zone of incomplete development to arrive at fuller development.
The two conceptions of this zone are radically different, however. Vygotsky’s formula-
tion is abstract; it is simply the difference between an individual’s existent psychological
competence and a potential, expanded competence that could be cultivated by social
interaction. (See Lantolf & Thorne, 2006, pp. 262–290, for a thorough explication of this
concept and its history.) This includes learning French cooking, how to jump rope, and
cognitive competencies such as context-independent reasoning. Vygotsky’s concern was
to emphasize the abstract proposition that social interaction spurs cognitive develop-
ment beyond what the individual could accomplish on his or her own. There is no social
oppression or mystification that causes the gap; it is simple ignorance, which is easily
overcome by social facilitation (i.e., others help you, through interpersonal interaction,
 319 Concrete Macro Culture and Psychology

to learn what you do not know). There is no specific or necessary content that must be
learned in the ZPD. There is nothing political about Vygotsky’s ZPD.
In contrast, false consciousness is concretely social and political; its ignorance is caused
by oppressive forces (it is not natural as in ZPD), and it is functional for those forces—
it preserves them by maintaining the individual in a subservient condition that benefits
his or her oppressors. Moreover, false consciousness must be overcome through specific
understanding and transformation of the social reality that oppresses and mystifies
consciousness. False consciousness is a political issue that demands a political solution. It
is a more powerful concept than ZPD for understanding culture and psychology, and for
generating human fulfillment.
False consciousness results from massive mislabeling of the keys of our behavior.
Community college presidents tell students that the system is designed to help students
advance to universities; however, the system was actually designed to inhibit them from
advancing. Capitalists tell workers they are receiving a fair wage for their labor, yet they
are not. Elections commissions tell us that presidential debates are open forums for
democracy, yet they are secretly closed and manipulated to inhibit democracy. News con-
sultants tell us they are presenting factual analyses, yet they are secretly drumming up
business for their corporate employers.
It is as though you sit down to type on your keyboard and you push the keys that you
believe correspond to the letters you wish to type; however, someone has altered the keys
so they produce characters other than the ones that appear on the key labels. The result is
that you believe you are writing one thing (democracy, fair exchange, upward mobility),
but you are actually writing something different.
Social leaders have gotten you to play out their desires through your behavior by misla-
beling the keys of your behavior.
False consciousness is thus a complex ethical issue, for it raises the question of the
extent to which people are responsible for their actions if they have been misinformed
about the entire purpose and character of their actions. Are you then responsible for
what you have written, when you have been misled by the false labels on the keys?
Are American soldiers responsible for the heinous acts of abuse, murder, and torture
they commit in Iraq and Afghanistan if they have been misled by authorities to believe
they are promoting freedom and democracy and peace?
The soldier believes he is typing out democracy and freedom according to the labels on
the keys; however, he is really typing out (producing) carnage and domination. In this
case he has no idea what he is producing because his behavioral keys tell him something
different; his subjectivity is different from the objective causes and products of his own
action.
Mystifying the keys to people’s behavior also introduces complications into the notion
that people enact cultural scripts. That notion construes scripts as relatively straightfor-
ward templates for action that are visible. We all know there are scripts for how to act
at work and in school. Mystified keys of behavior make for an entirely different kind
of “script,” for the script that is displayed on the labels of our behavioral keys is not the
script that actually directs our behavior, nor does it form the outcome of our behavior.
Mystified scripts are unknown to us; we have no idea that our behavioral keys (scripts)
are mislabeled and misleading, and actually obscure entirely different scripts that have
 320 macro cultural psychology

been surreptitiously smuggled into our behavioral scripts. Nor do we realize that what we
produce through our behavioral scripts (behavioral keys) bears no resemblance to the scripts
that are labeled on our keys. What we intend and expect on the basis of our scripts has been
surreptitiously corrupted by alien intentions (of our leaders) and alien results. In this case,
we literally do not know the true scripts that govern our behavior and its outcomes.
This new, political, alienated notion of scripts must replace the simple, straightforward
notion that psychologists hold. The scripts that govern our behavior are as alien to and
alienated from us as the rules that dictate our work for capitalists and the product of our
work that does not belong to us.
None of these important issues appears in the construct, ZPD. Nor do they appear in
abstract formulations by activity theorists. All of these issues are similarly vaporized by
the simplistic notion that individuals create their own meanings and express themselves
in their actions. This eliminates the possibility that anyone could be misled or compelled
to produce a result that was contrary to his or her own, personal intentions. Manipulation,
oppression, mystification, tragedy, and irony are all dispatched by the bourgeois notion
that we all are autonomous agents acting as we please.

The Epistemology of Ignorance

False, mystified, oppressed consciousness is ignorant of the sources, dynamics, and existence
of oppression. Code (2007,) eloquently explains how objective mystification (by social prac-
tices and ideology) translates into subjective mystification (ignorance, apathy, exaggerated
notion of agency) or the psychology of oppression:

The covenant a rigidly stratified class system tacitly makes with its privileged
members accords them a double advantage, both of an affluence that comes as
their unquestioned entitlement and of an ignorance. . . . With the unevenly dis-
tributed advantages it affords, the contract, in effect, generates and thrives, on
a systematic cognitive failure. Its effects are to naturalize myriad “social-epistemic”
patterns and practices of inequality and oppression. . . . [Oppressive] social,
sexual, and racial contracts require, construct, and condone an epistemology, sus-
tained by and sustaining an ecology of ignorance that comes to be essential to
their survival: [it] supports and perpetuates that ecological order, often working
to occlude or override both moral and epistemic considerations what would
unsettle it. (pp. 213–215)

The social “contract” implicitly presupposes an epistemological contract and, by extension,

a psychological contract, of structured knowledge and blindness. In this sense, knowledge
and ignorance are political.
This is not a matter of individual agency. Code (2007) properly questions whether this
culturally enforced structured blindness permits us to hold individuals responsible for
it—the same question I asked earlier: “When such naturalizing [of the social order by
structural blindness] permeates a social fabric, holding people accountable and culpable
for the beliefs it underwrites is a complex process indeed, given the difficulties of deter-
mining whether they could have known otherwise” (p. 214). Certainly, such culturally
 321 Concrete Macro Culture and Psychology

sanctioned ignorance (i.e., politics of ignorance) cannot be dispelled by simply providing

missing data to its victims. Subjective mystification recapitulates the objective mystifying
of social life that social practices and ideology foster.
Of course, the epistemology of ignorance is not limited to oppressors; it applies to the
victims as well, as I have been discussing. They must be complicit in their oppression for
it to be maintained without constant brutality—and it is maintained without constant
brutality in most class societies. Even the destitute homeless in Washington, D.C., close
to the White House, are pacified victims who pose more of a threat to one another than
they do to the center of power.
Interpersonal relations among the oppressed populace are active forces for reproducing
oppressive social conditions. We have seen how family interactions reproduce class and
racial inequalities in cognitive and educational performance. The same is true for other
social-psychological issues.
The epistemology of ignorance has social causes that are elucidated by a sociology of
ignorance. A sociology of ignorance will explain how increases in knowledge are accom-
panied by a persistent undertow of ignorance (Jacoby, 2008; Ungar, 2008) that is cultur-
ally promulgated and functional. It is not ignorance due to cognitive deficiencies of
individuals; rather, these deficiencies are due to exploitation and mystification.
We have seen how community colleges were deliberately reorganized to stifle the intel-
lectual aspirations of working-class students. Macro cultural pressures for ignorance lead
to shocking deficits in citizens’ knowledge of world events, history, current events, and
even basic skills of literacy and numeracy (e.g., college students who cannot calculate the
average of four numbers, or the 60 of California State University freshmen who must take
remedial English and mathematics). The average college graduate today knows little more
about public affairs than did the average high school graduate in the 1940s (Ungar, 2008,
pp. 307–308). A recent poll conducted by the American Association for the Advancement
of Science discovered that one-third of the American population believes that human
beings have existed in their current form since the beginning of time!
This is all functional for a society that is in decline. Labor projections by the U.S. Labor
Department for the period from 2010 to 2016 predict that the most job growth in the
American economy will be among retail salespeople, orderlies in hospitals, food prepar-
ers and servers, personal home care aides, janitors, accounting clerks, nurses, and college
teachers. Clearly, Americans have to be psychologically adjusted to assume these low-
paying, low-class positions that have been created for them by business leaders and poli-
ticians. If oppressed people did not have an oppressed psychology, they would resist their
position and cause social disruption.
Even more troubling is the fact that ignorance has become a cultural norm and even
ideal:

It appears to be a further paradox of the presumed knowledge society that less and
less social standing is accorded those who are broadly knowledgeable. There appears
to have been a cultural leveling process that fosters an egalitarian, anti-elitist con-
versational ethos. Speakers, in other words, are best served by avoiding too many
syllables. There are a host of social factors that induce people to ignore phenomena,
and it is becoming more acceptable to shrug off a lack of knowledge: saying “no” to
 322 macro cultural psychology

the query “did you know” is an ever-diminishing source of embarrassment. (Ungar,

2008, p. 322)

Such widespread, embarrassing ignorance cannot be accidental, personal, or natural.

It must have roots central to the society from which it radiates outward. This central root
of the psychology of oppression is the core of society, which is the exploitive political
economy. Only such a central, influential origin could account for the widespread occur-
rence of a problem. The sociology of ignorance argues that ignorance among the lower
classes is necessary for a ruling class to maintain its power and for people to accept that
power. Not only is knowledge power, but ignorance is power as well—for the ruling
class.
This does not mean that the entire psychology of every single individual is oppressed.
Clearly, there are exceptional pockets and individuals of enlightened subjectivity. Even
oppressive society requires some enlightened individuals, scientists, policy makers, and
intellectuals to invent new things and provide intellectual and artistic stimulation. This was
certainly true of ancient Greece, which was a slave society. It was also true of North American
slave society. Many plantation owners were cultured individuals who graduated from pri-
vate schools in England, played classical music, appreciated science, and wrote books. The
architectural design of Southern plantations was very sophisticated and beautiful, as one
can see when visiting them today in Charleston, South Carolina, and other places. However,
these bright spots do not negate the appalling oppressiveness of slave society and the psy-
chological toll it took on slave owners as well as slaves. Oppressive society casts a pall over
subjectivity and stifles it from perceiving the full reality of social life.
Documenting the psychology of oppression and how it is generated by oppressive soci-
ety is the most fascinating topic in all of social science, for the psychology of oppression
contradicts the rhetoric of equal opportunity and the many programs designed to help
disadvantaged people achieve social mobility. Yet there is a silent conspiracy of factors
that manages to inculcate oppressed psychology underneath all the public messages to
the contrary. That such a vast, interlocking network of factors can produce socially func-
tional outcomes through the subjectivity of individuals who abhor the outcomes, without
the mechanisms being revealed, and in clear contradiction to everyone’s stated ideals, is
clearly the most fascinating topic in all of social science. Unfortunately, it is nowhere to
be found in any of the approaches to cultural psychology, cross-cultural psychology, or
indigenous psychology.
Macro cultural psychology is parsimonious in explaining constructive and destructive
psychology in the same terms. The law of cultural psychology is that psychology functions
to maintain macro cultural factors. This law applies to all societies, good and bad. When
cultural factors are pernicious, psychology functions to maintain pernicious behaviors.

Oppressed Psychology is an Oppressing Psychology

Macro cultural psychology emphasizes that psychology is active subjectivity that enacts
behavior, especially cultural behavior. It is not the mechanical by-product of “culture”
in the form of a dependent variable. Therefore, oppressed psychology does not conclude
the psychology of oppression; it actively generates behavior in its image. Being an active
 323 Concrete Macro Culture and Psychology

force, oppressed psychology imparts its oppressed character to the behavior that it enacts.
In other words, oppressed psychology is oppressing and oppressive; it furthers oppres-
sion by making our behavior oppressive to ourselves and to others. This logically follows
from the nature of psychology: if psychology is active, and if psychology is oppressed,
then psychological activity will be oppressive and oppressing. Oppressed psychology
actively disseminates its oppressed character in the behavior it activates. The ignorance
and irrationality of oppressed psychology will actively generate ignorant, irrational
behavior that is oppressive to the actor and the people he or she interacts with. Froyum’s
observations about black staffers in a school program inadvertently oppressing the psy-
chology of their students illustrate this point.
The psychology of oppression includes ways in which psychology is oppressed by
macro cultural factors and ways in which psychology oppresses individuals.
In fact, psychology’s oppressiveness is the expression and realization of its being
oppressed. For psychology to be oppressed, it must be oppressive to the individual. If it
were not oppressive (i.e., if it were creative and expansive and fulfilling), it could not be
said to be oppressed. Because psychology is active, it must be actively oppressive if it is
oppressed.
Oppressive psychology is the active subjectivity that animates cultural behavior and
cultural factors. Oppressive society requires an oppressing, oppressive psychology to
maintain itself. This cycle may be depicted as in Figure 5.5.
Oppressing/oppressive psychology is an active contributor to social oppression, as all
psychology actively contributes to cultural factors. It galvanizes behavior that sustains
oppression, which means it galvanizes oppressed, oppressive behavior. Individuals con-
tribute to their own oppression by enacting oppressed/oppressive behavior (Ratner, 2011c).
It is a mistake to idealize people as naturally free, creative, and fulfilled.
On the contrary, mystification and false consciousness of a people problematize their
self-understanding. Subjective feelings are not a reliable guide to fulfillment because sub-
jective feelings are not directly tied to objective states of the individual. This is because
human experience is mediated by cultural means. We not only have experience through
cultural means, but we also interpret experience through cultural schemas. If these sche-
mas are misleading, they cause us to misunderstand our own experience—its origins,
features, and functions.
These problems do not exist in animals. Animals’ pleasure is geared to, and reflective of,
their well-being. Consequently, a happy animal is objectively fulfilled in terms of being

1) Oppressive macro 2) Oppressed

cultural psychology factors

3) Oppressing
psychology

fig. 5.5 The Cultural Psychology of Oppression.

 324 macro cultural psychology

well-fed and sheltered. Humans, however, can feel happy when they are injuring them-
selves, if their cultural schemas inform them that such action is really fulfilling. Fromm
aptly called this a “socially patterned defect.” Americans’ consumption of junk food to the
point where they become obese and diabetic is an obvious example. Consumerism is
another example that we shall explore momentarily.
Oppressed and oppressive psychology has ominous consequences for social and psy-
chological improvement. It keeps people ignorant about the causes and solutions to their
problems, and it makes alternatives appear unattractive. For instance, many people reject
collective solutions because they appear burdensome and intrusive to the bourgeois cul-
tural psychology of an individualistic self. Oppressive psychology leads our subjectivity
to entrap us in oppressive social conditions. Moreover, the more oppressive a society is,
the more oppressed people’s psychology will be: the more mystified and apathetic they
will be, and the more indoctrinated and habitualized they will be to conforming to exploi-
tive, debilitating psychology/behavior.

Agency
Oppressed individuals are victims of the macro cultural system, but they are also agents
of social crisis in that they carry forth oppression and ignorance in their subjectivities.
The male ghetto dweller who commits crimes against his neighbors exemplifies this.
Moreover, his behavior oppresses him by placing him at great risk of violence and impris-
onment. The students who bring the cultural psychology of consumerism into the class-
room, where they degrade academic standards, are acting to oppress students, including
themselves, by degrading education, including their own. The adolescent girl who plays
violent video games instead of engaging in personally and socially enriching activities is
oppressing herself by stunting her own growth in addition to neglecting socially respon-
sible action during the time she is playing the games. The consumer who impulsively
bankrupts himself or herself in order to buy unnecessary or harmful advertised products
is also a cultural agent in his or her own oppression, just as the drug addict is. The mis-
guided social scientist who has been bemused by an Ideenkleid compounds mystification
through the social science that he or she practices.
It is not their fault that they are oppressing themselves, and society, because they are
victims of larger social forces that generated their cultural psychology. However, victims
are complicit in oppressing people, including themselves.
We are complicit in our own exploitation and oppression. We exploit and oppress our-
selves and one another because we have internalized exploitive cultural factors that serve
the interests of the ruling class as our mediational means for constructing our psychology
and behavior.
Even slaves perpetrate exploitation in their behaviors. Sarah Boyle (1962, pp. 27–28)
describes how black servants in her Southern aristocratic household acted in ways that
abetted her acceptance of white supremacy and black subordination. The servants’ defer-
ence to her made her feel that whites were indeed superior to blacks, as her parents had
taught her: “This corroboration by Negroes fortified my instruction in the rules of the
Southern way of life. Without the confirmation of these Negroes (usually only implied
but sometimes actually verbally confirmed) I certainly would not have learned the rules
 325 Concrete Macro Culture and Psychology

so well, and probably would have rejected them much sooner.” In this sense, black ser-
vants perpetrated racism through their mundane deferential behavior, even though it
was coerced. Slaves were cultural agents, or cultural ambassadors, of slavery in that they
presented their own enslavement as unquestioned and unquestionable.
A good example is the following interaction among 4-year-old children in a preschool:
Lingmai (Asian) goes to pull a wagon, and Renee (white) admonishes her, “No, no, no.
You can’t pull this wagon. Only white Americans can pull this wagon.” Renee has her
hands on her hips and frowns at Lingmai. Renee clearly asserts her agency and expresses
herself; however, is this her “own” agency and self being expressed? Should we laud this
expression as empowering her and others? Van Ausdale and Feagin (2001) correctly ana-
lyze this expression of Renee’s agency: “We see the dimensions of superior identity, self-
expectations, and active performance at the same time. . . . It may be that she does not yet
have a full understanding of what ‘white American’ means, but she knows enough of its
meaning to use it as an exclusionary tool in play. She is incorporating whiteness as part
of her identity and knows that this identity gives her power over the racial others. . . . She
is an aggressive actor who goes beyond expressing a belief to actually enforcing that belief
to exclude another child” (pp. 104–105). This example and analysis demonstrates that
agency is neither inherently personal nor fulfilling. This 4-year-old is a social agent who
perpetrates and enforces destructive social values and roles (Van Ausdale and Feagin,
2001, p. 2)! “Renee exercised authority as a white American and maintained control of
the play, not only with comments but also with her bodily stance and facial expressions”
(p. 105, my emphasis; see Ratner, 2011c, for additional examples).
Renee’s behavior/psychology is lost if one “zooms in” on her as an individual, disre-
gards her cultural context and its imprint on her behavior/psychology, and miscon-
strues her agentive behavior as a personal intentionality that expresses, enriches, and
empowers her individuality. It is obvious that Renee is internalizing, conforming to, and
reproducing her culture. She is not introducing unique personal meanings into it; she is not
co-constructing, negotiating, resisting, or transforming it by externalizing her agency.
Agency is central to the social dynamics of institutions. Consider how the educational
institution is related to consumer capitalism. Consumer capitalism requires and encourages
young people to spend impulsively on the basis of superficial, sensationalistic appearances of
products, without carefully thinking about what they are purchasing (as we shall document
momentarily). This behavioral and psychological orientation contradicts the requirements
of education, which demand patient, diligent study to understand issues. Education demands
a long-term perspective of accumulating knowledge to prepare for final exams and projects.
Students are agents of this cultural contradiction. Their behavior contributes to the
changing of education to bring it in line with consumer capitalism. Students contribute to
the consolidation of the hegemony of consumer capitalism over education, and beyond.
Students have internalized the cultural psychology of consumerism through its omni-
present display throughout the culture. They bring this cultural psychology into the class-
room and utilize it as their operating mechanism in class. It clashes with the teacher’s
educational philosophy. However, the students’ cultural psychology is supported by an
entire culture of entertainment, recreation, and family activities that provide justification
for it. Students argue that the strict teachers are unreasonable and inconsiderate of their
lifestyles—they don’t accept students’ opinions; they are rigid and conceited. Students fail
 326 macro cultural psychology

to prepare properly; they are late with assignments; they find the material too difficult; they
don’t have time. In all this, they reflect the cultural psychology of consumer capitalism that
emphasizes, as we shall see, superficial, sensational, light, and easy entertainment and
impulsive choices. Wave after wave of students act in this way; they are presenting a new
norm against the traditional norm of education. And, given the massive cultural support
for the new norm, the teachers back off; they loosen up their standards, and in doing so
they become “cool” and liked by students.
In this way, the students’ cultural psychology and behavior adjusts school in line with
consumerism. Students are active agents in this cultural shift in education.
We emphasize that the students’ push for educational change is a reflection of contra-
dictory cultural factors. Students effect change as a mass of individuals who simultane-
ously resist academic standards through an integrated set of behaviors. This is why they
generate a new norm that is implacable because of its massiveness, unity, and correspon-
dence with the culture at large. Although students do not consciously act collectively,
they are cultural individuals who are implicitly unified by a common indoctrination by a
massive social institution: marketing. This forms the common, cultural character of their
individual psychologies and behaviors. Although they act individually, they are not
enacting individual psychology and behavior. Their individual actions are surreptitiously
enacting a common cultural psychology/behavior, namely, consumerism. This is what
gives unity, implacableness, and obdurateness to their behavior.
Culture is so insidious that it can hide itself within individual psychology and behavior
and still achieve cultural goals. Individuals—and the psychologists who observe them—
honestly believe they are acting individually when they are actually acting culturally.
Culture is the unseen distal sun in Plato’s cave, which is the source of the proximal shad-
ows that the cave dwellers perceive.
Culture is also what Hegel (1956) called the “cunning of reason”: “in a simple act, some-
thing farther may be implicated than lies in the intention and consciousness of the agent”
(p. 28). People act on the basis of their needs, interests, aims, passions, and thoughts to
achieve their own satisfaction. However, behind these subjective processes lies a certain
logic that unwittingly patterns them in particular ways. This cunning of reason is that
“[t]hose manifestations of vitality on the part of individuals and peoples, in which they
seek and satisfy their own purposes, are, at the same time, the means and instruments of
a higher and broader purpose of which they know nothing” (pp. 25, 33).
Students act as cultural agents (emissaries) of consumer capitalism. They are bringing
the antithetical values of consumerism into the classroom, where they challenge teachers,
the cultural agents (emissaries) of the educational institution. Students are the unwitting
shock troops of consumer capitalism who contribute to the adjusting of education to con-
sumerism. This is not their fault, invention (construction), intention, or responsibility.
They are unaware of their role, which was inculcated into them by the advertising indus-
try. But they are, in fact, cultural agents acting on behalf and behest of a cultural institu-
tion (consumerism) to effect institutional change in another cultural factor (education).
They are not acting on their own behalf at their own behest.
Social leaders do not have to directly intervene in an institution in order to bend it to
their will. They can achieve hegemony indirectly, by inculcating groups of individuals
with an appropriate cultural psychology that reflects leaders’ interests, and then watching
 327 Concrete Macro Culture and Psychology

these groups act as their shock troops within social institutions. These troops simply enact
their culturally organized psychology in their individual behavior, unaware that their
psychology is culturally organized and that it is the secret agent of social change on behalf
of social leaders. Social leaders do not engage in a vast, diabolical conspiracy to achieve
this affect; they simply play out the principles of macro cultural psychology: they organize
macro cultural factors and allow these factors to organize the psychology of people and
play out in the various social roles that the people occupy throughout society.
This example demonstrates how structural aspects of culture include psychology, and
vice versa. We began by examining the structural relationship among cultural factors,
and we were led to examine the role that psychology/subjectivity plays in this relation-
ship. We were led to examine how psychology/subjectivity is organized by, embodies, and
promulgates macro cultural factors such as consumerism. This organic synthesis of cul-
ture and psychology is the gist of macro cultural psychology.
It is important to explain to people how they may be cultural agents of oppression who
promulgate oppressive social practices, conditions, and institutions via their mundane,
banal acts. As Arendt brilliantly observed, people can commit evil, and be agents of
oppression, without being perverted, sadistic, or psychotic. In fact, they can be oppres-
sive through being “terrifyingly normal.” Fromm called this a “socially patterned defect.”
Identifying the psychology of oppression is necessary if people are to repudiate it in their
own behavior and in society at large.
This is also an important issue for people who are involved in advancing psychological
development. Such people need to realize that the deficiencies they are fighting—as edu-
cators, therapists, mentors, and policy makers—are part of the psychology of oppression
that is socially encouraged and socially functional. The deficiencies are not individual
problems, and they cannot be overcome by focusing on individual attributes (e.g., study
hard, reflect on your behavior, practice a lot, be expressive and assertive). Particular psy-
chological deficiencies must be treated as part of the psychology of oppression. They must be
attacked through their root causes of exploitive aspects of society that promulgate these
deficiencies; and they must be attacked as perpetuators of social oppression, not simply
as elements that impede individual development. This will link individual improvement
with the improvement of many individuals through social reform. Personal psychological
issues must be recognized as cultural psychological issues.
The psychology of oppression means that people’s extant psychology is untrustworthy
as a guide to well-being. On the contrary, the psychology of oppression needs to be eval-
uated and altered independently if people are to be fulfilled. This has serious implications
for parenting and educating. It means that parents and educators should not adjust their
behavior to what appeals to children. The fact that children like something is no indica-
tion that it is good for them and should be pursued, because their interests and desires
have been shaped by oppressive society. An obvious example is food. Children have been
conditioned to like harmful food. It does them a disservice to give them food that they
like. It does them a service to give them nutritious food that they do not like. The fact that
people’s extant psychology finds something uncomfortable does not mean it is truly bad.
In the psychology of oppression—where what is normal is often harmful—discomfort
may be good because what people like may be bad. The psychology of oppression (i.e.,
false consciousness) cannot be used as a guide for what is good and bad.
 328 macro cultural psychology

The same is true in other areas such as entertainment, news, and education. Educators
should not necessarily adjust pedagogy to what appeals to their pupils. They should not,
for example, make it “fun and games” so children will become involved in it. The reason
children like that kind of pedagogy is that they are bringing consumerist psychology into
the classroom, as I have explained. What appeals to children is not what is intrinsically
good for them—as we know from the unhealthy food they have been conditioned to like.
Making pedagogy appealing to students may be just as harmful as making food that
appeals to them after they have been culturally conditioned. Even pedagogy that raises
children’s interest in school and success on tests may be catering to base desires that are
ultimately harmful. This is the case when parents use reinforcements such as candy to
bribe children to do homework or housework. The fact that a technique “works” does not
mean it is ultimately good for people.
Idealizing pedagogy that appeals to students overlooks the fact that their interests
and desires have been culturally organized. The best pedagogy may be what confronts
students’ extant interests and desires and changes them to more serious, intellectual ones.
It may need to disturb the comfort zone of students rather than cater to it. Good pedagogy,
like good nutrition, may require an initial distastefulness on the road to advancement.

The Psychology of Oppression

Cultural psychology measures up to its name only if it comprehends the full, concrete
character of culture and psychology. In class society, culture is political and exploitive,
and psychology is oppressed and oppressive. Only cultural psychology that emphasizes
this in its theory and methodology deserves the name of cultural psychology. Neglecting
the political, exploitive nature of culture and psychology neglects what culture and psy-
chology are in reality. Acknowledging culture in a general, nebulous way, or focusing
on a small fragment of culture, does not apprehend the full, real character of culture or
psychology.
The psychology of oppression must become a vital topic for psychologists to study. The
psychology of oppression must be comprehended by a Psychology of oppression (Ratner,
2011c).
While psychologists typically speak of cultural amplifiers of psychological functions,
we must also speak of cultural stultifiers and blinders that promulgate the psychology of
oppression.
This has important implications for the notion of “zone of proximal development.” ZPD
is usually discussed as eliciting positive advances in children’s development. However, this
is an abstract sense of development. Concrete features of a ZPD are often stultifying.
A good example is the ZPD of racist norms that parents socialize to their children.
Ritterhouse’s research demonstrates that racial socialization is a ZPD that parents con-
struct for their children to teach them behavioral rules concerning race. The ZPD of white
children teaches them to have perfunctory interactions with blacks; never eat meals with
blacks in the dining room; always call blacks by their given names; and never address
blacks as Mr., Miss, or Mrs. The ZPD of black children teaches them to be subservient to
and attentive to whites, and to always speak and act respectfully.
 329 Concrete Macro Culture and Psychology

Ritterhouse concludes that the ZPDs of both groups teach them to become black or white,
with all the negative features associated with both roles. This etiquette is limiting because it
is regarded as natural and taken for granted. It thus blinds children to the political and
economic basis, features, and functions of racial interactions (Ritterhouse, 2006, p. 12).
Racial etiquette is additionally limiting in that it blots out alternative possibilities of
interaction. Racial etiquette limits memory, imagination, cognition, self-concept, percep-
tion, and emotions; it does not expand them to limitless possibilities for improvement and
fulfillment.
Many other cultural mediational means stultify our cognition, perception, emotions,
self-concept, motivation, and memory. These limitations are due to the fact that the
mediational means contain exploitive, oppressive elements that are preparing us to live in
an exploitive society. Corporate news in the United States is a prime example of an
oppressive, stultifying mediational means. It is heavily biased in the stories it covers and
ignores; it is biased through choosing mainstream spokespeople and ignoring social crit-
ics; it emphasizes sensationalistic events over important issues; it reduces news to sound
bites and sensationalistic photos; it is fragmented into disconnected segments by adver-
tising; its content is influenced by corporate owners and advertisers; it engages in little
critical, investigative reporting; and it asks simplistic, superficial questions in interviews
of news makers. Corporate news is the mediational means through which the vast major-
ity of the population learns not only about events but how to think about those events as
a series of brief, superficial fragments that come and go for no apparent reason.
Contemporary entertainment and art are other cultural mediational means that limit
our psychological sensibilities. Most popular art, including music, is superficial, sensa-
tionalistic, repetitive, and crude. This dulls aesthetic sensibility. The same is true of most
entertainment in movies and TV; these contain little depth or richness that could amplify
people’s psychological competencies.
Psychologists need to reach a deeper level of analysis than simply identifying neutral
psychological phenomena in neutral cultural conditions. This means examining how psy-
chological phenomena contribute to our oppression or fulfillment in a particular social
system. For example, it is insufficient to note that most Americans have a more individu-
alistic self-concept than North Koreans. It is necessary to analyze the political character
of the individualistic self-concept (as well as the North Korean self-concept). Is it part of
the mystifying Ideenkleid that misrepresents social reality and the individual within it? If
Americans’ self-concept is fictitious and misleading, it has ominous implications for self-
awareness and agency. Americans may seriously misunderstand themselves if their self-
concept is an ideological distortion of the real social character of their selves. They may
believe they are more autonomous than they actually are. They may underestimate the
extent to which they are socially influenced and constrained. They may blame themselves
for failures that are structural (e.g., unemployment). They may misunderstand what is
necessary for fulfillment—they may believe that greater autonomy is necessary when, in
fact, greater social involvement, critique, and transformation may be necessary for fulfill-
ment. They may shun social involvement as burdensome and suffer loneliness as a result.
Their individualistic self-concept may oppress them in these ways, and be part of the
psychology of oppression.
 330 macro cultural psychology

The same questions apply to other official ideologies, religions, and philosophies. Indian
psychologists and philosophers often glorify Hindu conceptions of a self integrated with
the cosmos. This is offered as an alternative to Western egoism and rationalism. However,
before this philosophy is accepted, it must be subjected to a political analysis to answer
the questions I raised about the individualistic self. It also must be subjected to a scientific
analysis that ascertains whether its propositions are true. The Indian scholar Babasaheb
Ambedkar scathingly criticized Hinduism as politically conservative in that it supported
the caste system.
The oppressive, self-obscuring nature of capitalism sets the parameters of objective social
science: it mandates a rejection of capitalism’s self-presentation and overt appearances—
through official statements and legal forms such as contracts—and it mandates penetrating
to the hidden principles of macro cultural factors. Scientific Psychology can understand the
psychology of oppression only if it pierces cultural ideologies that obscure oppression.
Psychology can be objective only if it politically challenges the political ideology of society.
Contrary to the popular and social scientific belief that politicizing culture and psychol-
ogy imposes an ideological-political bias on understanding them, a political analysis of
culture is key to an objective, scientific account of factors that affect psychology. A neutral
description of cultural and psychological phenomena is not a faithful recording of their
objective nature. It is an active depoliticization and distortion of them that is politically
motivated and functional. Neutral descriptions are anything but; they are equally far from
objective.vi
In an exploitive society, critique and transformation are part of objective description.
To describe cultural factors objectively is to describe them as alienating and oppressive.
Objective description acknowledges this deleterious character and is therefore critique.
If reality is deleterious, then description of it must be negative, critical, and transforma-
tive. Social reality determines whether objective description is critical or positive. If social
reality were beneficent, then objective description would be positive and laudatory.
Insisting that description be a priori neutral and apolitical is to sever it from the political
reality that is its subject matter. This obfuscates the subject matter that it pretends to
describe. Neutral, apolitical description is thus the antithesis of objective social science.
Macro cultural psychology strives to be the fullest view of culture and psychology,
including their politics, social function, and oppressive cultural origins. It thus integrates
objectivity and subjectivity, as Marcuse (1987, pp. 19–20) eloquently explained: “Only a
knowing subject which knows itself to be the totality of being, which knows itself as
objectivity and which at the same time is the subjectivity of this objectivity, only such a
knowing fulfills simultaneously and originally the ontological meaning of subjectivity
and objectivity as their absolute unity.”

The Oppression of Psychology

Unfortunately, Psychology—including cultural Psychology—rarely engages in any analy-
sis of concrete society, political economy, and psychology. We have seen the avoidance of
these issues in Chapter 4.
The attention that psychologists pay to exploitation is inversely proportional to the
important role that exploitation plays in our culture and psychology. There is a virtual
 331 Concrete Macro Culture and Psychology

conspiracy of silence about this central cultural psychological factor. Exploitation is the
elephant in the room of Psychology. It is the ogre that everyone refuses to acknowledge
even while they erect elaborate defenses to extirpate it from consciousness.
Psychologists and most social scientists are willing to acknowledge the effects of exploi-
tation—stress, anxiety, inequality, poverty, discrimination, prejudice—but they attribute
them to factors other than an exploitive political economy. These include a host of psy-
chological factors such as low motivation, low intelligence, genetic tendencies toward
behavioral problems, and insufficient time spent together by children and parents.
Oppressive society mystifies not only our psychology, but also the study of our psychology,
or Psychology. The crisis in Psychology is the same as the crisis in psychology and the
crisis in society. All three are interdependent and mutually reinforcing (I explain this in
Chapter 7). Psychologists do not escape the mystifying Ideenkleid of capitalism any more
than the populace at large does. We have seen examples of this in Chapter 4

Oppressive/Oppressing Psychology
The limits of academic Psychology to apprehend social reality and psychological reality
turn into a mystifying cultural factor that contributes to further mystification of this real-
ity. It distracts people from apprehending social and psychological reality. As oppressed
psychology is oppressing psychology, mystified Psychology is mystifying Psychology. It is
a conservative cultural-political force that obscures and insulates the deleterious core
cultural factors from examination and change.
The discipline of Psychology under oppressive cultural conditions actively mystifies the
social conditions as well as the nature of human psychology. It affects a tectonic shift to
move psychology away from culture and onto the biological and personal planes. Psychology
is not simply a neutral, uninformed field that diligently strives to fill in the knowledge gaps
with sound theory and methodology. On the contrary, in order to obfuscate oppressive
macro cultural factors, Psychology must deliberately avoid serious study of the origins,
characteristics, and function of psychology, which are cultural. Psychology must remove
psychology as reflections of, and windows into, society that can lead to the identification
and transformation of oppressive macro cultural factors; This is depicted in Figure 5.6.
The Psychology of madness illustrates the way oppressed, stunted Psychology is actively
oppressive in obscuring the reasons for madness and viable solutions to it.
Foucault (1987) observed that before the mid-seventeenth century, madness was a poly-
morphic part of everyday life. Later on, psychologists and psychiatrists began to sever it

1) Oppressive macro cultural 2) Mystified psychological

factors factors

3) Mystifying
Psychology

fig. 5.6 Oppressive Macro Cultural Factors, Mystified Psychology, and Mystifying Psychology.
 332 macro cultural psychology

from the everyday, both conceptually and physically. They began isolating mad people
in prison-like institutions, and they reconceptualized madness as a purely psychological
phenomenon, separate from social life and attributable to psychological deficits.
Psychologization was a double-edged sword: it generated more focused attention of the
psychological details of madness, but it also distorted madness by overlooking its social
causes and experiences (pp. 64–75).
Capitalist alienation of the person from society generated the field of Psychology, which
focused on psychology as an internal, individual phenomenon independent of society.
“Alienation turns man into Homo psychologicus” (Foucault, 1987, p. 74). Treating psychol-
ogy as an internal, individual phenomenon thus reflected capitalist society. Psychology
was not a neutral, objective understanding of psychology. Foucault (1987) concludes that
the modern treatment of madness “is not the gradual discovery of the true nature of mad-
ness, but simply the sedimentation of what the history of the West has made of it” (p. 69).
Moreover, the focus on individual psychology—psychologization—reinforced the alien-
ation of the individual from society because psychologists, psychiatrists, and lay people
regarded the person’s psychology as severed from social influence and control, which is
the definition of alienation.
Psychological phenomena are reflections of and windows into macro cultural factors if
they are approached properly. The discipline of Psychology acts to convert psychology
into noncultural processes, thereby obfuscating cultural issues from the standpoint of
psychology. Whenever people think about psychology, they avoid thinking about society
in any serious way. The discipline of Psychology thus denies an important window to
understanding, evaluating, and reforming society.
Scientific errors in Psychology are thus naïve gaps in knowledge due to the inherent
complexity and subtlety of psychological phenomena. We cannot correct these errors by
simply plugging away and doing more research; they require a new social-political out-
look and a new social-political environment.

Caveat
My discussion of oppressed psychology and Psychology is a general description of preva-
lent, worrisome trends. Mystification in psychology, and in social science, is not mono-
lithic and total. I certainly do not blame the victims or impugn their intentions. My
discussion describes objective deficiencies that exist despite many good intentions. These
tendencies and their causes have rarely been exposed; this is why I delve into them so
intently and emphasize them so strongly. I am trying to articulate a systematic under-
standing that links disparate elements together in a coherent pattern. It is insufficient to
simply identify a few issues. I also believe that the mystifying tendencies in psychology
and Psychology are central because they are rooted in exploitive practices at the core of
our society. The articulation of central, broad, systemic, worrisome tendencies in psy-
chology and Psychology tends to eclipse exceptions, complications, and contradictions.
This is a necessary stage in understanding any subject matter. One has to focus on essen-
tial issues to establish them and comprehend their origins. One cannot constantly vacil-
late, saying, “This is important, but that contrary example is also important.” This would
lead to an incoherent eclecticism. Once we have established a systematic understanding
 333 Concrete Macro Culture and Psychology

of Psychology and psychology, including their (common) origins and essential features,
we can stand back and examine complications, contradictions, and exceptions. We will
be able to understand these in relation to a model instead of as scattered, pluralistic
examples. (This is exactly the problem that Marx confronted in articulating his systemic
theory of society, which was rooted in the mode of production. He focused on the eco-
nomic essence in order to establish its importance and centrality to the entire society.
However, he also acknowledged the existence of complications and reciprocal interac-
tions within social elements that he did not have time to explore.)
In view of this caveat, I emphasize that mystification does not mean that social scientists
know nothing about psychology. On the contrary, even people who do not thoroughly and
deeply understand society and psychology can have valuable knowledge of certain aspects.
A great deal of useful information has been unearthed by social scientists. Significant con-
tributions are especially prevalent concerning abstract aspects of society and psychology—
for these do not threaten the concrete social status quo; there is little pressure to distort
them, although I have explained in Chapter 4 that there is great pressure to treat abstract
issues on their own, without linking them to concrete issues that do threaten the status
quo. The kind of research I cite in Chapter 2 exemplifies the contribution of research into
abstract issues in culture and psychology. Some empirical research on the concrete level
also contributes to an understanding of society and psychology. Especially important is
research on the effects of social class and race on psychology. Although such research
rarely mentions capitalism—and therefore appears to indict poverty and discrimination
and point to more “antipoverty,” “antidiscrimination” funding without identifying the root
causes of poverty and discrimination—its findings are a useful bridge to discussions of the
capitalist political economy.
As useful as all of this research is, I wish to point out its incompleteness, and to deepen
it. Of course, other research is misguided and misleading and deserves stringent criticism
if we are to avoid falling into its errors.
This indicates that mystification is subject to degrees ranging from more to less. The
less mystified social science must be distinguished from the more mystified and treated
more positively—just as more progressive political programs must be treated more posi-
tively than less progressive programs, even though the former are incomplete.
Similarly, the psychology of oppression does not mean that all psychology is debilitat-
ing. It means that we must be sensitive to debilitation where it occurs, and we must be on
the lookout for it, because it is a mainstay of destructive culture. We recognize that within
an exploitive society there are pockets of rationality, benevolence, intimacy, and fulfill-
ment. My emphasis on oppression is designed to remove it from the shadows of aware-
ness, especially in social science. It is not designed to present oppression as monolithic.

Progressive Relativism Versus Pluralistic Relativism

The psychology of oppression and the Psychology of oppression highlight the fact that
oppressed psychologies are stunted relative to fulfilling psychologies, and certain Psy-
chologies are more adequate approaches than others. I shall call this kind of relativism
“progressive relativism.” The term indicates a qualitative superiority or debilitation from
one psychology and Psychology to another. It is not simply the case that psychologies and
 334 macro cultural psychology

Psychologies are different; some are better and some are worse. I call the notion of relative
differences “pluralistic relativism” because it posits many different forms of psychology and
Psychology, but it does not rank them. This is the essence of American multiculturalism: it
highlights multiple viewpoints and customs and respects all of them. Pluralistic relativism
forbids “invidious comparisons” among cultures or peoples because they denigrate some
in relation to others. Pluralistic relativism seeks to level differences in superiority/adequacy,
as I mentioned in the Introduction.
The problem with pluralistic relativism is that it fails to identify problems in psychology
and Psychology. It has no tools for identifying the psychology of oppression. Oppressed
people simply have their own, distinctive customs and psychology according to this view;
they cannot be said to be oppressed or oppressing, because that would denigrate them.
The same holds for multiple Psychologies. They are happily entertained as diversity that
enriches our understanding of psychology by allowing us to view it from different per-
spectives. Again, however, this denies inadequacies in Psychology. True science strives
to highlight problems and advance the discipline. Accepting any and all psychological
perspectives is fatal to science. It is also fatal to the development of a useful, practical
Psychology that can help people solve their problems and reform their societies, for
patently inadequate Psychologies must be accepted on principle just because they exist
and offer a novel perspective—however misguided this may be. We shall return to this
issue in Chapters 6 and 7.
If a student has weak study skills, weak cognitive skills, and/or weak communication
skills, these must be corrected. It is wrong to accept them as “cultural differences.” Of
course, they should be constructively criticized with appropriate remediation. However,
their inadequacy must be denounced and transformed. It is a good thing to expose infe-
riority and improve it. If we deny inferiority and inadequacy by calling them “cultural
differences,” we are assuming equal levels that need no improvement. If no one is inferior
to another, then no one needs to improve. People holding this view form the group
I reject as “Levellers” in the Introduction. Epistemological relativism appears to be a rad-
ical humanism, but it really entraps victims in inferior conditions by denying their infe-
riority and denying any need for improvement. Postulating equality when it does not
exist precludes attempts at bringing it into existence.
Acknowledging psychological advances does not imply that an entire society is advanced
compared to another society. It is possible that psychological advances are confined to par-
ticular activities within a society. Thus, one society may be advanced in one way of thinking
involved in one activity, and it may be inferior in another mode of thinking involved in
another activity . The extent of superiority/inferiority is an empirical question. A culture
may be advanced in a wide number or a small number of psychological competencies.
Relative positions in progressive dialectics may be due to oppression, but they may also
be due to historical ignorance and knowledge that are not grounded in oppression per se.
Vygotsky and Luria (1993, pp. 92–97, 108–109) compared “primitive people” to “cultural
man.” While the authors recognized feats of literal memory among “primitives” who can
recall amazing amounts of detailed information, they nevertheless concluded, “[I]n many
respects primitive man’s memory is profoundly inferior to that of cultural man. . . .
A European child who completed just one class in geography can assimilate more than
any adult primitive man can ever assimilate in his entire lifetime. . . . A primitive man
 335 Concrete Macro Culture and Psychology

must rely only on his direct memory—he has no written language.” In addition, primitive
people do not employ sophisticated logic and abstract concepts as modern people do,
and their prelogical thinking is limited to direct experience.
The authors emphasize that these psychological differences in achievement (progress) are
due to cultural, not natural, causes. They “attribute that backwardness, observable in the
area of a primitive’s psychological functions, to cultural underdevelopment. . . . Technology
and social organization, which stem from a definite stage in the development of this tech-
nology, are the basic factors in the development of the psychology of primitive life” (Vygotsky
and Luria (1993). Being politically progressive, Vygotsky emphasized progressive dialectics.
He unabashedly explained the limitations and backwardness of primitive cultural psychol-
ogy. He endorsed social change in order to help primitive people advance. Denying back-
wardness obviates social change because there is no reason for it. That is why pluralistic
relativism is acceptable to the status quo, while progressive relativism is bothersome.

THE MACRO CULTURAL PSYCHOLOGY

OF CONSUMER PSYCHOLOGY: COMMODIFYING
SUBJECTIVITY/AGENCY/PSYCHOLOGY
Now that we have outlined some of the principles of macro cultural psychology, an
extended example that illustrates the principles is in order. No better example can be found
than consumer psychology, for it embodies the principles of macro cultural psychology
and possesses the following attributes:

• It is a distinctive historical-cultural form of psychology.

• It is a macro-level psychological phenomenon.
• It is required by and functional for the political economy of capitalism.
• It is instigated and administered by the economic leaders of capitalism.
• It is political.
• It is inscribed in artifacts, social institutions, and cultural concepts.
• It is organized and stimulated by macro cultural factors.
• It is socialized by macro cultural factors.
• It is shared by masses of people.
• It is an objective, objectified, objectifying, unifying macro cultural factor that charac-
terizes, or defines, a society: American society is a consumerist society.
• It is accepted and utilized by ordinary people as their mediational means for navigating
social-psychological tasks such as self-definition and interpreting the behavior of others.
• It encompasses myriad psychological processes such as emotions, perceptions, self-
concept, sexuality, motivation, needs, memory, concentration, reasoning, and mental
illness.
• It is an example of the psychology of oppression: it is oppressed and oppressive psy-
chology that leads to human injuries of various kinds.
• Originators and promoters of consumer psychology mystify its true origins, charac-
teristics, and implications; its social roots in political economy are falsely attributed to
individual desires and choices, as in rational choice theory.
• It is not natural; it is not explainable in terms of natural/biological mechanisms.
 336 macro cultural psychology

We shall begin our macro cultural psychological analysis of consumer psychology with
a brief discussion of how radically different consumer psychology is from more tradi-
tional systems of psychology, and how consumer psychology has a culturally concrete
character that is generated by the political economic core of capitalist society.

Political Economy
Consumerism is a vital part of the political economy of capitalism because it generates
market demand for increased production that generates capital in the form of profit. We
have seen that capital is made by producing commodities, using labor that has become
commodified to generate surplus value. To spur commodity production, consumerism
must convince people that everything is more appealing in a commodified form (i.e.,
adorned with worked-up features that are produced using profit-generating labor). “The
personal,” “the social,” and “the natural” must all become commodified in this sense.
Then, the personal, the social, and the natural will generate sales—which they do not in
their original form—and become converted into cash cows. Consumerism is the psycho-
logical reengineering that accomplishes this socioeconomic transformation.
This political-economic basis and objective of consumerism is the key to its character-
istics. The whole point of consumerism is to artificially generate increased sales of unnec-
essary products that profit a small class of wealthy investors. Investors use consumers
to generate profit just as they use workers. They design and control the consumption
process just as they do the work process—for their own benefit and at the expense of the
populace. Consumers do not need the quantities and kinds of products that profit inves-
tors. Therefore, social leaders have to reengineer our psychology to induce us to buy
them. If the political economy were designed to benefit and fulfill the populace, it would
produce the quantities and qualities of products that people truly needed and wanted.
It would not need to induce consumption through a multibillion-dollar industry of
advertising; it could simply inform people of new useful products and let them decide
whether they want to buy them. It is only because the political economy is harmful to the
populace that it has to induce people to do things (e.g., purchase products) they do not
truly desire to do—and this can be done only by obscuring the irrational, injurious things
that people are induced to do. An entire psychological system of interrelated elements is
cultivated to produce behavior that is blind to social reality, blind to the full quality of
behavior itself (i.e., the full reasons, characteristics, and ramifications of behavior), and
irrational and deleterious for people, but which is profitable for investors. Irrationality is
a necessary prop for oppression.
To understand the features of consumer psychology, it is crucial to understand its irra-
tional, exploitive political-economic basis and function. Consumerism must be viewed
within the rubric of the psychology of oppression. To describe consumer psychology
without emphasizing these features is to distort it.
Irrationality and oppression are scientific terms that describe the objective reality of
American capitalism and consumer psychology. They are also political, critical terms.
Social science is political. Here we see that politics can be objective; it is not necessarily
biasing and distorting. Given the irreversible, failing state of American capitalism and the
exploitive processes that created it (described earlier in this chapter), there is no question
 337 Concrete Macro Culture and Psychology

that the political economy is irrational and unsustainable (in human and environmen-
tal terms) and has artificially propped itself up with exploitive, dishonest, unworkable
schemes in recent decades. The State of California spends more on prisons than it does
on education. If that isn’t irrational in human terms, what is it? Isn’t it irrational that the
400 wealthiest people in the world own as much wealth as the poorest 400 million people
in the world? Isn’t it irrational that “a year and a half after the near collapse of the global
financial system, the US Congress still has adopted no new rules to reregulate fi nancial
institutions” (Madrick, 2010, p. 54). Isn’t the “war on drugs” policy of the US government
irrational when it does nothing to stem the use of drugs in the US yet costs billions of
dollars a year? Is the following political fact not irrational: The highest-paid individual in
Senator John McCain’s presidential campaign during the first half of October 2008, just
4 weeks before the election, was Amy Strozzi, who was VP candidate Sarah Palin’s traveling
makeup artist,. Ms. Strozzi was paid $22,800 for the first 2 weeks of October alone, accord-
ing to the records. Her salary in October was higher than those of Randy Scheunemann,
Mr. McCain’s chief foreign policy adviser, and Nicolle Wallace, his senior communications
staff member (Luo, 2008).
To avoid using political terms such as irrational and oppressive is to deny the objective
character of the social system (culture) and consumer psychology. Avoiding political terms
is biasing and distorting, not neutral and objective. It would be equivalent to describing
slavery or fascism without referring to exploitation.
Consumerism does not simply offer things for sale; it reengineers people to prefer
worked-up, adorned, commodified forms of personal interactions, social relations, and
natural objects over the unadorned versions of those things. Consumerism convinces
people that their own bodies are more beautiful and sexy when adorned with commodi-
ties than in their natural state; commemorative social events such as birthdays, anniver-
saries, and national holidays are more noteworthy when adorned with commodities
(presents) compared with simple interpersonal interactions; personal interactions such
as teaching your kids to swim or talking to them about their problems are better left to a
paid professional intermediary. Being alone, or even with other people, in nature has to
feel boring and requires spicing up by commercial accoutrements such as music, games,
and videos. This is part of what consumerism accomplishes psychologically.
Consumerism has not simply provided you with products to buy; it has provided you
with the psychology necessary to animate your buying behavior.
The way you want things has changed, in addition to the things you want having changed.
You want telephones and sneakers in an irrational, impulsive manner. Previously your
desire for them was rational—you needed new sneakers because the old ones wore out.
Now, your desire itself is different. You do not want sneakers rationally; you want them
irrationally and impulsively—that is, you want them because you have the impulse to have
new and more sneakers of a certain style, and because sneakers are now “necessary” to
your sense of self, attractiveness, popularity, success, confidence, and pleasure. You literally
need sneakers and phones to satisfy these psychological states. Psychological states have
been organized around sneakers and phones, and, conversely, sneakers and phones have
become psychologized in ways they never were when they were utilitarian products.
Commodities have become psychologized. This is how psychology has become commod-
itized: it absorbs the commodity form of psychology that is embedded in commodities.
 338 macro cultural psychology

The psychology of the macro cultural factor is transferred to the user of the cultural factor.
To be a mediating means of psychology, commodities must contain the psychology they
transmit to users. Commodities must become psychologized in order to commodify the
psychology of the user.
Consumer spending accounts for 70 of the U.S. GDP. Thus, production and profit
depend upon people’s consuming a great deal, often and quickly. This is consistent with
our psychological theory that macro cultural factors depend upon subjectivity to ener-
gize them. Subjective, psychological desires must be continuous with, on the same plane
as, and recapitulations of the political economy. People must need what the political
economy needs. Subjective need for large quantities of goods delivered often and quickly
is exactly what the political economy needs. As we have seen throughout this volume, the
macro cultural factor requires psychology, and it is also the impetus of psychology that
directs the concrete organization of psychology to serve it.
Consumer capitalism requires that consumerism be an ongoing activity that knows no
bounds. It cannot be allowed to ebb and flow on its own. “In the modern world the pro-
duction of consumption becomes more important than the consumption of production”
(Campbell, 1987, p. 36).
The following analysis will demonstrate how consumerism commodifies the consumer as
well as the object. The consumer does not stand apart from commodity production as an
independent purchaser of commodities; he or she is outfitted to take on a historically unique
psychology that facilitates the new political economy of consumer capitalism. (Rational
choice theory is a wrongheaded, acultural psychological theory because it posits the con-
sumer as possessing a natural rationality that is independent of the irrationality of consumer
capitalism.) Marxism has also generally overlooked the cultural psychology of commodifi-
cation. It usually states that capitalists treat people as commodities by commodifying labor,
for example. Marx discusses the mental and physical impoverishment of the exploited
worker in terms of his alienation from his species being, and his regarding commodity rela-
tions as natural; however, Marx never explored the full cultural psychology of the worker.
Lukacs introduced the important notion of false consciousness; however, it was limited to
notions of reification. It did not extend to the full range of psychological processes such as
perception, emotions, self-concept, sensations, reasoning, memory, needs, desires, sexual-
ity, child psychology, romantic relations, and mental illness. I shall work on filling this gap.
I shall explain that treating people as commodities encompasses reengineering their psy-
chology to make it compatible with commodity production. I will also concentrate on the
psychology of the consumer rather than of the worker. I hope that future research will
examine the cultural psychology of the commodified worker that not only is the result of
commodity production, but also facilitates it by aligning the workers’ perception, reasoning,
memory, emotions, self-concept, sensations, needs, desires, sexuality, romantic relations,
and mental illness to the specific conditions of commodity production.
In keeping with our distinction between abstract and concrete levels, we should empha-
size that reengineering psychology to meet the needs of new macro cultural factors in
general (in the abstract) is a universal cultural necessity; it is not unusual or unethical.
The problem is the concrete nature of those cultural factors and the psychology they
require. We must look to the concrete content of macro cultural factors in order to under-
stand and solve psychological problems.
 339 Concrete Macro Culture and Psychology

The essence of consumer capitalism—to stimulate frequent, rapid, large consump-

tion—lies in overcoming the antagonism between the capitalist’s need to produce and sell
products at a fast rate in order to maximize profit, and people’s practical needs for dura-
ble, high-quality goods at low cost. Practical purchasing is not good enough for the capi-
talists’ profit motive. Hence, capitalists must entice people to accept an entirely different
basis for purchasing, one that will generate more consumption, sales, production, and
profit. At the outset, then, consumerism represents a contradiction between people’s
needs and capitalists’ needs. Capitalists are in no sense trying to satisfy people’s needs.
Quite the opposite: they are trying to establish a new basis for consumption that displaces
people’s needs with behavior that meets the capitalists’ needs for profit.
Consumer psychology is interesting because it is not simply a desire for particular
products. It is an entire psychological system of perception, sensation, motivation, rea-
soning, emotions, needs, self, and memory that animates a certain kind of buying in
response to particular kinds of sales pitches. To be effective, consumer psychology must
be a system of mutually reinforcing elements. The more extensive and consistent the
system of elements is, the more effective consumer psychology will be.vii
Consumer psychology qua cultural psychology includes stages of consumption motives
and values comparable to Piaget’s stages of cognitive and moral development. Studies
reveal that children collect consumer products for different reasons at different ages.
“First graders often compared their possessions to those of others in terms of quantity.
Collecting appeared to be simply a way of getting more than someone else. Among fifth
graders, however, the motivations for collecting had more social connotations. Collecting
was appreciated as a way of socially expressing one’s uniqueness and attaining a sense of
personal achievement by having things that others do not” (John, 2008, p. 229). Children
define personal identity in terms of commodities as early as fifth grade (10 years old). The
identity of other people is similarly expressed in terms of possessions. Children have
better impressions of people who own expensive products than of people with cheap
ones. Sixth graders believe that the owner of Nike shoes is more popular and smarter
than the owner of Kmart shoes, whereas second graders see no difference in people as a
function of their possessions. Similarly, second graders manifest some understanding
that expensive cars and houses are owned by professionals such as doctors, and this
understanding is fully developed in sixth graders (John, 2008, p. 230).
The new developmental psychology must include these kinds of stages.
Consumerism is not a natural response to the increased availability of products from
wider networks of trade and a disposable income. When farmers accumulated money,
they did not spend it on consumer products. They reduced their work, sometimes by
hiring laborers, sometimes by simply not working (Campbell, 1987). Even after World
War II, employees did not spend their disposable income on consumer products; they
reduced their working hours. Businessmen engaged in a fierce struggle to convince them
to work more and buy products (Cross, 1993; see Ratner, 2006a, pp. 187–188, for further
discussion).
Lee (1993) explains that consumerism was a deliberate solution, involving psycho-
logical reengineering, that capitalists devised to solve the problem of overproduction-
underconsumption, as well as the problem of labor resistance to exploitation at the turn
of the century.
 340 macro cultural psychology

The potential solutions to these problems were, broadly speaking, very similar:
a wholesale resocialization of the labor force and their familial and community
structures in favor of a mass-consumption norm. . . . The process of “producing
consumers” would involve the. . . implementation of a wide range of initiatives
which fell initially under the auspices of both corporate capital and the nation
state. These were to evolve an economic and cultural environment in which a
widespread access to the means of commodity consumption could be wedded to
a new social consciousness of consumption.
The early years of the new productive regime had been marked by the attempts
of private capital to forge a social and economic environment supportive of mass
production.
The emergence of Fordism [after 1913] saw the most systematic attempts to date
to develop a mode of regulation in which the cultural dimensions of consumption
and commodity relations could be adapted and stabilized according to the
requirements of production. In Fordism there is established a complex of regulat-
ing networks, the aim of which is to couple changes to the mode of production
to a series of changes held to be appropriate within the cultural sphere. In short,
Fordism saw the first attempt to establish a social consciousness based upon mass
commodity consumption and which, it was hoped, would soon become inscribed
throughout everyday life and its practices. (pp. 79, 80, 88)

Lee (1993) explains how business leaders targeted the family as the site for plying
consumerism. They sought to transform family relations to make consumerism central
to family interactions.

It became important for an emergent Fordist regime not only to establish a new
norm of family relations which could provide for the steady and sustainable
supply of labor-power, but also to find a way of allowing the spirit of modernity to
penetrate everyday culture and so isolate and disperse the old values and practices
of traditional life.
The passage of the new economic order into the domestic lifeworlds of ordinary
people, the erosion of old and traditional practices, and the breaking of long-held
communal bonds was assured by a systematic process of social planning on the
part of corporate organization in general and advertising in particular.
The strategic dissolution of traditional cultures found its principal focus in the
household. Here the household was to be transformed from a domestic space of
general self-sufficiency into a modern consumption unit. This would involve the
dramatic reorganization of the household in all its dimensions: physical, economic,
demographic, and cultural.
Nowhere was this more apparent than in a reorganized kitchen. Continuous
working surfaces, new forms of storage space, and integrated appliances and equip-
ment such as multi-functional cooking ranges, refrigerators, and food processors
were all the effective product of a systematic policy of domestic restructuring, on
the part of industrial planners and architects alike, to develop the home along the
same principles of the factory and the office. Such changes were motivated by the
 341 Concrete Macro Culture and Psychology

urgent requirement to establish commodity consumption as the natural means to

need satisfaction. This was a process in which traditional handicraft and home-
production techniques (especially in the areas of food and clothing) were not to
be presented as outdated and profoundly anti-progress (pp. 90–91, 93; Jacobson,
2004).

This is a telling description of how the leaders of mass production and mass consump-
tion explicitly targeted the family as an institution to change in order to spur consumer-
ism. Moreover, the assault on the family was broad and aggressive; it encompassed a
systematic policy to dramatically reorganize the physical infrastructure of the house
(kitchen counters), artifacts (appliances), and values such as self-sufficiency, frugality, tra-
dition, and home-based family life. This example demonstrates the fundamental power of
political economy, led by the ruling class, to extend its hegemony over the array of cultural
factors.
Indeed, this top-down approach is the only way to explain the rapid, simultaneous,
widespread adoption of certain needs, desires, self-concepts, emotions, and reasoning
processes across a country. Certainly, such systemic, rapid, simultaneous changes in psy-
chology/behavior cannot result from individual, independent, spontaneous, coincidental
changes among masses of people spread out across a country. These changes can be
explained only by systemic, directed forces such as ruling-class hegemonic practices.
The whole point of advertising was to create a market for manufacturers. The market was
the consumer who had been engineered to respond to advertisements by craving prod-
ucts. People were transformed into a market that advertisers delivered to manufacturers.
“The push to sell markets led advertisers in effect to invent ‘the consumer’ ” (McGovern,
2006, p. 32). This is a pregnant statement, for it says that the social-psychological being
known as “the consumer” was invented by advertisers. It was not a personal construction
by individuals at the micro level; it was a top-down, imposed, structured system. The con-
sumer was a novel social-psychological being that served the purpose of enriching manu-
facturers. The consumer had a necessary social, political-economic function built into his
or her psychology.
Capitalists not only strive to sell products to us; they strive to sell us as products to
corporations in the form of psychologically reengineered consumers. Consumerism sells
quantities of consumers to corporations, in addition to selling quantities of products to
consumers. Newspapers, Web sites, and television and radio stations openly “deliver us”
as branded entities to their advertisers as potential customers for their products. Programs
are designed to attract well-defined groups of us as audiences that can be delivered to
advertisers. Clearly, they treat us as cash cows to be sold to bidders for our purchasing
power. Thorstein Veblen observed that consumers themselves are the foremost products
of business (McGovern, 2006, p. 146).
The process of speeding up consumption and production is analogous to, and comple-
mentary to, the modus operandi by which capitalism produces food. Natural cycles are
far too slow for the profit motive, so they must be overridden or bypassed entirely to
produce food more quickly. Cows are fed hormones to speed their production of milk,
pigs and chickens are fed hormones to speed their growth. Even fish are farmed in condi-
tions that speed their growth. Plants are sprouted from genetically altered seeds and grow
 342 macro cultural psychology

rapidly in adverse conditions of pesticide and insecticide use. Nature must be overcome
in order to speed up production and make it more efficient, more profitable, and less
costly. Natural organisms have to be reengineered in line with the capitalist imperative of
profit maximization.
The same is true with regard to humans. Our normal needs for usable amounts of
objects that help us improve our lives (a rather nebulous definition, I realize, but one that
can serve as a rough baseline against which to measure consumerism) are too limited to
generate the incessant buying that capitalism requires. Consequently, normal needs have
to be reengineered as infinite needs for an unlimited, unusable amount of products whose
sheer amount and symbolic value make us feel good. These needs can be manipulated
according to the capitalist business cycle.
Eating is a prototype of consumer psychology. Capitalists do not want people to eat
according to hunger, which takes hours to peak; they want us to eat all the time so we will
purchase more food. Eating has to be decoupled from hunger and coupled with fun, indul-
gence, social popularity, and self-expression/agency. This social conditioning of eating is
accomplished through advertisements and role models in entertainment programs.
Overeating is the prototype of consumer behavior. It literally fills one with a consumer
product over and over, all of the time. No other consumer activity can be performed so
continuously. One cannot wear new shoes all the time (e.g., a new pair every hour), and
one cannot use a new computer or car every hour, but one can eat food every hour—when
watching TV, at the movies, walking on the street, talking on the phone, driving the car,
and even while working. This is a marketer’s dream—to have you buying and consuming
a product all the time.
An essential ingredient in food consumerism is that food has to be redesigned. Real,
wholesome food (that is consumed in usable amounts to provide wholesome nutrition)
takes a long time to digest, during which the person is sated and has no desire to eat more.
In addition, wholesome food is cheap to buy and generates low profits. Consequently,
wholesome food must be replaced with junk food that is digested quickly and is rich in
stimulating flavors such as salt and sugar that provide instant gratification without real
satiation and then quickly stimulate new cravings for more stimulation. In addition, pro-
cessed food has to be worked up, which requires labor that generates capital. Junk food is
much more profitable than wholesome food—which is why it is advertised and whole-
some food is not. Junk food is also made artificially appealing by the addition of color.
This is another “hook” that is built in to allure us away from natural food. We come to like
and crave the titillating colors of junk food as well as its artificial taste. We have to come
to prefer the quick, superficial, unfulfilling, recurring stimulation of salt and sugar over
the wholesome, long-lasting, sating tastes of wholesome food. We have to prefer the
bright, sensational, artificial colors over the earthy colors of real food. We even have come
to enjoy tearing open the colorful packaging of processed foods, while we find paper bags
containing apples and vegetables “plain” and “boring.”
Our system of tastes and needs must become aligned with all the diverse details of profit-
able junk food. Any of these details is then a hook for drawing us into the junk food busi-
ness and away from natural, wholesome foods. Our reengineered psychological system will
lead us to eat when we are not hungry just to get the stimulation of the artificial flavors and
colors. This reengineered eating is amenable to manipulation and speed-up, just as animal
 343 Concrete Macro Culture and Psychology

growth, milk production, egg production, and crop growth are amenable to manipulation
and speed-up through chemical means that override natural processes.viii
Our psychology is reengineered in part through the objects we are presented with.
Cultural objects are engineered to generate appropriate psychological emotions, desires,
needs, perceptions, thinking, and motivations that will animate appropriate cultural behav-
ior. Capitalists provide us with the kind of food (and other objects) that will intensify (not
satisfy) our craving to eat often and rapidly so we will buy more product. Similarly, throw-
away products are deliberately designed to be used for a short time, wear out, be unrepair-
able, and then be replaced by new purchases. The obsolescence built into the product
makes us dispose of it and replace it. The built-in obsolescence does not meet our normal
need for a usable product that helps us improve our lives; it generates a new need for new
disposable, replaceable products. Through product design, we come to believe that things
must be, and should be, discarded and replaced.
Consumer goods cannot be sold on the basis of quality and functionality, because that
would limit the amount of goods that people would purchase. Goods have to be marketed
on the basis of needs, perceptions, emotions, and identity that can be manipulated at will
and are not limited by practical considerations such as quality, usefulness, and durability
of goods. Thus, the psychology of consumerism is one of impracticality, nonfunctionality,
ethereality, ephemerality, symbolism, superficiality, immediacy, impulsiveness, and nov-
elty (Gil-Juarez, 2009). A new way of thinking, feeling, and perceiving must be generated,
akin to religious faith, that suspends a concern with empirical reality, reason, critical ques-
tioning, and logic and is fascinated with illogical imagery.
The body, the mind, needs, emotions, motivation, self-concept, attention, memory, per-
ception, and sex are reengineered via a vast, complex, subtle, fascinating network of diverse
macro cultural (political) factors in the capitalist image we have been discussing. Natural,
slow, deep, rich, maturing, enduring qualities and processes are anathema to manipulation
and exploitation, which are necessary for profit maximization. Consequently, they must be
replaced by artificial, shallow, sensational, immediate, rapid, transient, insistent processes
and qualities.
This aligns consumer psychology with political economy. Psychology is congruent
with, continuous with, and on the same plane as the political economy of consumer cap-
italism. Psychological phenomena have the features of consumer capitalism—rapid turn-
over, short-term and immediate profit/satisfaction, externalization of costs and problems.
Consumer psychology is the subjective side of consumer capitalism. They are two sides
of the same thing, just as the racist psychology of Southern whites during Jim Crow was
congruent with, was on the same plane as, and had the same features as the political
economy of white supremacy.
Macro cultural psychology explains how marketers have exploited human’s cultural-
psychological plasticity to perversely make us into cash cows for accumulating capital.
Humans are the most profitable cash cows because our psychology is malleable and can
be manipulated enormously. Whereas a genetically modified organism can generate only
a limited number of profitable reactions—more milk, more enzyme, etc.—the human
being can generate an infinite number of profitable reactions by developing an infinite
variety of needs. No other organism is capable of generating so many profitable activities.
This is one of the motivations for researching all aspects of the human being—every new
 344 macro cultural psychology

discovery is another aspect of our being that can be used to develop a need in us for a
profitable product. Our infinite needs are a source of infinite profit.
Macro cultural psychology fruitfully applies its functionalist perspective to explain
why consumer psychology persists despite its deleterious human and ecological conse-
quences. It persists because it is vital for the capitalist political economy that is the core
of our entire society. This is why consumer psychology can be solved only by transform-
ing its social core.
Consumerism has been central to capitalist production (and vice versa) from the
beginning.

In Nicholas Barbon’s 1690 Discourses of Trade, or Dudley North’s 1691 Discourses on

Trade, we already have the idea that luxury and excessive materialistic desires rep-
resent the best incentive for commerce and economic growth. . . . From Bernard
Mandeville, 1741, onward, luxury was, so to speak, de-moralized: it was possible to
conceive of something which simply favors commerce and productivity and which
cannot be easily judged on transcendental moral grounds. . . . For Mandeville,
desires are not objective or given, but mutable and undefined, always linked to the
relative social position of who is doing the desiring. It is for this reason that in his
view objectively and universally defining luxury would be impossible. . . . (Sassatelli,
2007, pp. 21–22, 35, 36)

This is known as the marginal utility theory. It says that the value of an item is a func-
tion of its subjective utility, or the satisfaction one derives from possessing it. Value is not
objectively measurable, in the way that classical economists defined value as the amount
of labor time necessary to produce the good; value is a subjective unit of satisfaction.
The commercial, capitalist, commodity basis of consumer psychology must always be cen-
tral to any discussion of consumer psychology. One of the best discussions is Jules Henry’s
pioneering and inspirational book Culture Against Man, where he used the adjective “pecu-
niary” to describe various aspects of consumer psychology. Pecuniary is synonymous with
commodified. I shall expand Henry’s treatment of consumer psychology to include pecuni-
ary needs, pecuniary desires, pecuniary sensationalism, pecuniary superficiality, pecuniary
bodies, and pecuniary sexuality. These are all interrelated and interdependent in a system
that strives for consistency among the elements in order to provide maximum support for
each one. Cultural factors are not run by single psychological elements; they require a system
of interlocking supportive elements. That is what consumer psychology is.
To build on the foregoing discussion and construct the (interrelated) elements of
consumer psychology, I will utilize a good deal of research in the field that empirically
documents the effectiveness of advertising campaigns. This research also documents the
intentions and efforts of marketers and capitalists to induce consumer psychology in
people. I go beyond their stated intentions to extrapolate unstated intentions, needs, and
efforts to inculcate additional aspects of consumer psychology. This extrapolation is
based on deductions from the logic of consumer capitalism regarding the kind of psy-
chology it requires in order to maintain itself. Macro cultural psychology encourages this
kind of deduction because it recognizes that particular kinds of subjectivity are necessary
to maintain concrete kinds of macro cultural factors organized in a conical system.
 345 Concrete Macro Culture and Psychology

I also emphasize that deductions must be treated as hypotheses in need of empirical

confirmation. The reason for this is that people are subject to many cultural influences,
and they select from among them, which means that the final shape of their psychology
may contain variations that are not entirely predictable from a structural knowledge
of the society. Psychological research is necessary to discover what cultural psychology
is actually like among people of a certain society. After identifying the actual cultural
psychology of a people, cultural-psychological research will be able to trace it to macro
cultural factors in ways that were not predictable from structural knowledge alone.
The methodology of macro cultural psychology can be summarized in three steps:

1. Predict/deduce cultural psychology of people from a thorough understanding of soci-

ety and cultural-psychological theory. This step ensures that hypotheses will concern
concrete cultural factors and concrete psychology.
2. Empirically investigate the cultural psychology of people to test the predictions in
Step 1.
3. Trace actual psychology of Step 2 to cultural factors according to the principles of
macro cultural psychology. This will refine the predictions and deductions of Step 1.
It will refine our understanding of the balance of cultural factors and the dynamics
among them, thereby generating more accurate predictions about cultural psychology
in the future.

The elements of consumer psychology that I enumerate below fall within Steps 1 and 2
of our methodology. It goes without saying that more research in Steps 2 and 3 is neces-
sary before we can thoroughly understand consumer psychology as concrete cultural
psychology.

Top-Down Consumer Psychology

Consumer psychology is macro cultural psychology because it is initiated by social lead-
ers in social institutions to further the political economic basis of those institutions. The
symbols, meanings, and psychological processes that form consumer psychology are
determined by and for social leaders to maintain the power structure of capitalism; they
are not determined by and for the populace. In this sense, consumer psychology is a top-
down psychology, not a bottom-up psychology (Dawson, 2005).
For example, Marlboro systematically cultivated meanings for its cigarette that included
freedom, the glory of the outdoors, release from urban stresses, the satisfaction of physical
challenge, and the true grit of male activity. “These meanings have been developed and
consolidated through the years since the 1955 launch. The Marlboro brand now carries clear
and compelling meanings. It does so because advertising put them there” (Batey, 2008,
p. 209). While consumers may occasionally reject brand meanings, “[i]n truth, it is rare
for such blatant discrepancy to arise between intended brand meaning and consumer-
perceived brand meaning” (Batey, 2008, p. 209). These are telling statements from an adver-
tising consultant who believes in the sovereignty of the consumer.
Of course, it sometimes happens that a cultural group takes a liking to a product (e.g.,
a bar, restaurant, singer, health food, motorcycle) and this act drives the market, from
 346 macro cultural psychology

below, for a while. The motorcycle group Hells Angels adopted Harley Davidson motor-
cycles as their icon. Harley Davidson then used this popular act as a marketing tool to
imply that the motorcycle was a symbol of freedom and independence. This helped sell
the product to a broader market.
The same is true for Red Bull energy drink. Focus groups disliked the drink, but it was
adopted by clubbers to drink during their raves. The drink was banned in France and
Denmark because it is unhealthy, yet Austrian clubbers brought it to their frenetic raves
after it was approved in Germany. Then marketers used this alternative cultural image to
promote it. The company used its Web site, paid for parties at which Red Bull was pro-
moted, and paid university students to serve as grassroots brand supporters.
Allen, Fournier, and Miller (2008, pp. 784–800) present this case as proof that consumers
actively “co-construct” their behavior: they assign their own alternative personal meanings
to brands—and actually reconstruct brands in their image—and make their own decisions
in response to advertising messages. Consumers are deemed active meaning-makers, not
passive recipients of marketing images. They contest received meanings and negotiate their
own. Cultural images are resources for the consumer to use rather than blueprints that
induce behavior. Sometimes this notion of the active consumer is extended beyond the
individual consumer to include a small, interpersonal network called a micro consumption
subculture. Hells Angels and German clubbers are examples. These subcultures are glorified
by researchers as “re-gathering the collective force to [sic] required to resist the atomizing
and self-expression-crushing capabilities of large corporations” (Allen et al., 2008, p. 801).
Yet, when we look at the activity in detail, we can see that this person-centered, agentive
formulation is exaggerated. Indeed, if this formulation were true, it would undermine the
entire industry of advertising. Advertisers would have no way to appeal to consumers if
each individual or small cohort developed their own personal meanings about products.
There would be no point in spending billions of dollars to contrive certain images for
products if these images were going to be ignored or rebranded or negotiated. In 2003,
the cigarette industry spent $45 million a day on advertising and promotion. This would
be wasted money if all its messages were contested. Advertising would be reduced to
simply a list of names of products that consumers could select from on the basis of what-
ever meaning they attributed to any of them. All the glitz, images, endorsements, emo-
tional appeals, status appeals, and packaging would disappear because they would have
no power to influence consumer choices.
Detailed studies prove that advertisements do in fact influence consumer choice. Of
course, they work in concert with broader cultural practices and meanings, and they har-
ness these through marketing strategies. However, there is no doubt that advertisements
exercise a powerful influence over consumers’ psychology and behavior.
This is documented by Brandt (2007), a medical historian, in his history of the cigarette
industry:

As recently as 1900, the cigarette had been a stigmatized and little-used product. . . .
Its rise to cultural dominance by mid-century [when one-half of adults were regu-
lar smokers] marked a remarkable historical shift that brought together develop-
ments in business organization and consumer behavior as well as deeper changes in
the morals and mores of American society. . . . The tobacco industry both utilized
 347 Concrete Macro Culture and Psychology

and helped to foment deeper changes in the culture that served to promote ciga-
rette use. (pp. 2, 5)

On the strength of the Joe Camel advertisement pitched to adolescents, “Camel’s share
of the underage market had gone from 0.5 to 32.8” (Brandt, 2007, p. 8).
This manufacturing of the cigarette as a cultural icon in the space of several decades
required enormous psychological engineering that overcame strenuous opposition by
dominant cultural traditions. The antitobacco movement rightly perceived the cigarette
as incarnating a seismic cultural shift—as all new cultural phenomena incarnate and pro-
mote cultural systems—that warranted an all-out defense of precapitalist cultural values
and practices. These included self-abnegation; humility; morality; abstinence; and an
antipathy to hedonistic pleasure, material possessions, and leisure. The antitobacco move-
ment sought to protect an entire way of life that was being undermined by the capitalist
economy. Many state legislatures banned cigarette sales around 1900. Henry Ford became
an ardent supporter of the crusade and refused to employ anyone who smoked. In 1916,
Ford wrote a pamphlet, The Case Against The Little White Slaver, in which he said, “We
made a study of the effect upon the morals and the efficiency of men in our employ
addicted to this habit and found that cigarette smokers were loose in their morals, very
apt to be untruthful.” He recruited Ty Cobb to the campaign (Brandt, 2007, pp. 46–47).
By World War I, a combination of cultural changes (consumerism) and intensive
cigarette advertising had turned the tide decisively in favor of the cigarette. Social-
psychological engineering was an important part of the transformation: “The triumph of
the cigarette did not occur by serendipity. Even as smoking seemed to fit with a modern
consumer age, the very development of consumption was carefully and artfully constructed
by powerful corporations. . . . Certainly the industry would position itself as an advocate
of ‘choice’ in the marketplace, but even more significantly it would purposely move to
reorient the culture on behalf of its product” (Brandt, 2007, p. 67, my emphasis). “Thus,
advertisers created a new means to construct and manage markets while appearing
simply to serve them” (McGovern, 2006, p. 271).
Many government reports documented the effect of cigarette advertising leading to an
increase in smoking behavior (Goldberg, 2008, p. 951).
Studies on food advertising have shown a direct link between exposure to advertising
and children’s actual consumption behavior. In one study set in a summer camp, every
day for 2 weeks, children were exposed to TV commercials for either candy or fruit
and either Kool-Aid or orange juice in the course of a cartoon program. When subse-
quently offered choices between fruit or candy and between the two beverages for daily
afternoon snacks, their selections reflected the advertising to which they had been
exposed (Mindlin, 2009, p. B3).
In a recent experiment, conducted by researchers from the Rudd Center for Food
Policy and Obesity at Yale, 118 children, ages 7 to 11, were each given bowls of Goldfish
crackers and then left to watch a 14-minute cartoon. During the commercial breaks, some
of the children saw ads for games and entertainment, and others watched four spots for
unhealthy snacks such as waffle sticks with syrup, Fruit Roll-Ups, and potato chips. The
children who saw the food spots ate 45 more Goldfish than those who watched the game
commercials (28.5 g versus 19.7 g). According to the authors, the experiment suggests
 348 macro cultural psychology

“a direct causal link between food advertising and greater snack consumption.” This runs
counter to the industry line, which has long held that food ads merely promote competi-
tion among similar brands, rather than inspiring extra food consumption or inducing
unhealthier food preferences (Mindlin, 2009, p. B3).

A meta-analysis that combined 50 different econometric studies (about half

domestic and half foreign) concluded that advertising for cigarettes does build
aggregate demand over time: the greater the level of advertising expenditures, the
greater the level of tobacco consumption.
The analysis revealed a significant relationship between level of exposure to
tobacco advertising on TV for the 12 months prior to measurement and the likeli-
hood of the teen being a current smoker at that point. Holding all other factors
constant, for every 10 hours per week they watched TV in the previous year, they
were 11 more likely to be a current smoker.
At the brand level, separate econometric analyses of adolescent and adult cigarette
purchases/preferences indicate that adolescent smokers’ brand preferences are much
more closely related to the levels of cigarette advertising expenditures over time.
Teens' sensitivity to advertising levels are 3 times that of adults. . . . R. J. Reynolds’ Joe
Camel’s campaign succeeded in increasing demand for the Camel brand among
(mainly male) adolescents from below 4 in 1987 to 13 by 1993.
Evidence from broad studies of sharp reductions in the level of tobacco advertis-
ing due to advertising bans reveals reductions in cigarette consumption. (Goldberg,
2008, pp. 936–938)

Clearly, individuals are directly influenced by this macro cultural factor. And far from
individuals’ imposing their own meanings on advertisements, advertisements structure
consumers’ perceptions of truth and reality (Korczynski, & Ott, 2004). It is well known
that heavy exposure to cigarette advertisements creates a perception that smoking is
more prevalent than it actually is. False advertisements are accepted as a barometer of
real social behavior. This is an insidious influence because the more that adolescents
believe that others smoke, the more likely they are to regard smoking as normative and
acceptable, and the more likely they are to smoke themselves (Goldberg, 2008, p. 941).
Advertising also primes adolescents to view smoking by peers as familiar and fashionable;
therefore, peers who smoke have more influence to start their friends on the path to smok-
ing than they would if the friends had not been primed by ads. Advertising even primes
adolescents to select peers who smoke as friends and to then follow their lead. In other
words, individual adolescents have internalized the value of smoking from advertisements,
and this motivates them to seek out peers who smoke as friends and models. In this case,
peer selection is stronger than peer pressure, but that peer selection is culturally directed by
macro cultural factors. The individual agent makes his or her interpersonal choices, as well
as his or her purchasing choices, on the basis of cultural practices and values.
This is an important point because it demonstrates that an impersonal macro cultural
factor determines individual behavior and interpersonal relationships more than inter-
personal relationships (peer pressure) determine individual behavior (Goldberg, 2008,
p. 942). The macro level mediates our micro relationships.
 349 Concrete Macro Culture and Psychology

Advertisement
Behavior

Macro cultural factors:

Institutions
Artifacts Interpretation
Cultural concepts

fig. 5.7 Behavior is a Function of a Culturally Based Interpretation to Cultural Stimuli.

Another demonstration of advertising’s effectiveness in altering shopping behavior is

the intrusion of Pepsi-Cola into Mexico. “Thanks to a particular retail and packaging
strategy, Pepsi-Cola was able to establish itself as a leading brand in Mexico, a country
with a deep affection for Coca-Cola. Pepsi increased its sales by 36 by using colored
display units to be positioned in sales outlets, containing both the drink itself and snacks”
(Sassatelli, 2007, p. 132).
Cultural models are not mere resources to be used, revised, or discarded at will. They
have coercive power over psychology/behavior. Even when consumers make limited
choices, selecting between very similar products, they do so on the basis of cultural influ-
ences, not personal meanings. The pattern is depicted in Figure 5.7.
Advertisers now strive to customize their appeals to narrow market niches. This may
appear to be catering to individuals; however, it is actually the reverse. It is simply a more
effective way of making the brand more appealing and acceptable to individuals. Th e
impetus comes from the advertiser, not the consumer. Customization is designed to bring
more individuals into the orbit of the brand; it is not designed to take account of indi-
vidual needs and enable people to truly fulfill those needs.
Marketers often claim that they are informing consumers about products and leaving it
up to us to decide which products we want. This is simply a lie. The whole point of adver-
tising is to create needs and demands for products. Even if people have certain needs for
security, popularity, success, wealth, and intimacy, it is fraudulent to tell consumers that
a product will meet these needs when it will not and cannot. Marketers do not satisfy
people’s needs; they exploit them by pretending to satisfy them with consumer products
and services. An executive of Harley Davidson said, “What we sell is the ability for a
43-year old [sic] accountant to dress in black leather, ride through small towns, and have
people be afraid of him” (Brandt, 2007, p. 77).
During moments of honesty, advertisers acknowledge that they are manipulating
consumers, not satisfying their intrinsic needs. One advertising analyst wrote,

A large part of the public really doesn’t know what it wants. Our big task in recent
years has been to dig up new likes or dislikes which we think might strike the
public’s fancy, and sell them to the public. . . . The public must be given ideas as to
what it should like, and it is quite surprising sometimes how the public is sold on
what might look, in [a] sales conference, like the brainchild of a demented person.
 350 macro cultural psychology

The old sales bywords, “know your customer’s needs” have been remolded to
“know what your customer should need and then educate him on those needs.”
(Brandt, 2007, pp. 77–78)

While capitalists may occasionally tap into practical needs, they always do so in order
to co-opt them for the purposes of consumer capitalism. More often, capitalists generate
entirely different, impractical needs—defined as insatiable needs for new, often harmful
products on the basis of stylized, superficial qualities that provide for intense stimulation
that is quickly sated and demands regeneration through new products.
Far from supporting consumers’ right to satisfy their needs through judicious purchases,
capitalists attack consumer advocates who encourage and help shoppers to critically ana-
lyze the real qualities of products. They smeared Ralph Nader in the 1960s for his efforts
in this regard. They continue to demean consumer advocacy, and they sought to squelch
the consumer movement when it arose in the 1930s. In the 1930s, conservative business-
men attacked New Deal regulations on business’s “right to manage” as a communist plot.
They attacked these programs by encouraging the formation of a House Un-American
Activities Committee (HUAC) in the House of Representatives. HUAC included consum-
erism in its sweep: “In 1939 the House Un-American Activities Committee charged 14
consumer organizations, including the Consumers’ Union, with being part of a ‘Consumers’
Red Network’ of Communist ‘transmission belts’ ” (Nyland & McLeod, 2007). The politi-
cal conservatism of McCarthyism was based in an economic struggle against New Deal
economics and social policy.

Brands as Mediational Means of Perception

Marketers are so successful at branding products and imbuing them with symbolic, social
meaning that consumers find it difficult to give up products’ and brands’ primary mean-
ings and attach additional meanings to them. For instance, when Bic, best known as a
maker of disposable pens and cigarette lighters, attempted to expand into the perfume
market, in 1989, by selling perfume in bottles shaped like cigarette lighters, they failed
because their primary brand meaning (convenient, disposable, and inexpensive) contra-
dicted the association consumers had with perfume as being personal and intimate
(Batey, 2008, p. 127). Similarly, when Levi’s sought to extend its primary brand of jeans to
suits (called Lev Tailored Classics), it failed because the primary concept consumers
attached to Levi’s could not accommodate a qualitatively different image of tailored suits
(Batey, 2008, p. 167).
Similarly, 7UP introduced its brand extension 7UP Gold in 1988, and it failed because
7UP’s primary meaning was a drink clear and without caffeine, while 7UP Gold was amber-
colored, spicy, and caffeinated. The extension was discontinuous with the brand’s primary
meaning (Batey, 2008, p. 170).
This difficulty in extending brands to new markets actually testifies to the great efficiency
that brands have in positioning themselves in people’s minds, so much so that people have
difficulty reconceptualizing the brand in a new form. Thus, new-product failures testify
more to the effectiveness of marketing than to its failure. Consumers reject products not
because they are freely evaluating the products rationally, but because they have become
 351 Concrete Macro Culture and Psychology

indoctrinated by brands’ primary meanings. Consumers did not reject 7UP Gold because
they applied creative agency to making a rational refusal; they rejected it because it did not
appeal to their existing, culturally formed impression of the 7UP brand.
The same happened when Coca-Cola sought to replace its traditional, culturally iconic
soda with New Coke. Customers rejected the New Coke because it deviated too radically
from their culturally cultivated image of Coke, not because they were generating personal
meanings from within their souls about what kind of drink they wanted. Their “choice” was
certainly not an emancipatory act of agency. It was simply a utilization of existing cultural
images as the mediational means for choosing drinks. Consumer behavior testifies to the
fact that “[b]y helping to shape brand meaning, advertising develops the relationship
consumer[s] have with the brand. . . . Advertising works by framing, consolidating, and
modifying the meanings attached to a brand” (Batey, 2008, pp. 211, 212). This contradicts
the belief that the consumer is the arbiter of the market.
Consumer rejection of the bovine growth hormone produced by Monsanto (to increase
milk production a gallon a day per cow) largely centered around the image of milk as a
nutritious product for defenseless children that should remain pure. Adulterating milk
with a questionable hormone violated the image of safe and protected children. Americans
are much less opposed to other forms of genetically engineered food that do not directly
concern young children, yet which pose the same dangers to health.
Successful new products are successful because marketers carefully extend their pri-
mary brand meaning into new products. Honda was able to extend from motorcycles to
cars to garden tools in this manner. This is yet another instance of social leaders engi-
neering the meanings that things have for people.
An empirical verification of this point compared the brand extension of two toothpastes
into new markets. Close-Up was a less preferred toothpaste than Crest because it was seen
as inferior at preventing decay and connoted as more of a breath freshener. Researchers
predicted that Close-Up would therefore be more successful as a mouthwash and breath
mint than Crest because these products were assumed to be more related to breath fresh-
ening than preventing decay. On the other hand, Crest was predicted to be more successful
at extending into dental floss and toothbrushes than Close-Up would be, because these
were assumed to be associated with preventing decay. The predictions were confirmed in
three of the four extensions. Crest was perceived more favorably in the mouthwash cate-
gory because consumers associated mouthwash in general with preventing decay more
than with breath freshening (Batey, 2008, p. 172). Thus, culturally cultivated brand mean-
ings are the source of consumers’ acceptance in new product categories.

Pecuniary Desire/Enjoyment
Consumerism emphasizes purchasing more than using and enjoying for an extended
time. The whole point is to limit use and regenerate spending for more products—through
planned obsolescence, styling changes, dissatisfaction, and the desire for novelty. The less
people use their products and the more quickly they replace them, the more production
and profit grow. Enjoyment and desire have to be shifted from use to acquisition. The psy-
chology of pleasure has to take on this new cultural form. The act of shopping has to
become more enjoyable than using the product, so the consumer will quickly shop again.
 352 macro cultural psychology

“A recent study of consumption patterns in contemporary ‘liberal market’ societies

indeed shows that expensive goods (sophisticated cameras, camping equipment, sport
accessories, etc.) are purchased by time-pressured high-income earners and are often left
unused, remaining in storage at home as symbols of a potential future and wished-for
self-identify” (Sassatelli, 2007, p. 105).
Compulsive consumerism is not about the objects themselves. Compulsive consumers
are not addicted to acquiring objects in themselves. They are not excessively materialis-
tic in this sense. Rather, they desire objects as forms of self-fulfillment and affirmation/
validation. Many compulsive consumers never use the products they buy. Rather, the
objects make them feel good about themselves, just as the advertisements indicate. People
feel attractive, stylish, free, manly, rebellious, powerful, etc. by deriving these feelings
from the mere presence of products in their homes. They do not care about using or
consuming the products; simply having them around is sufficient to derive a sense of
oneself from them. It is not a matter of showing the products off to other people to earn
their adulation; it is more a matter of deriving one’s own identity through the products,
even if no one else ever sees them (Faber & O’Guinn, 2008, pp. 1046–1047, 1052–1053).
This self-absorption in products generates quicker sales than waiting for people to use the
products would.

Pecuniary Need
What is distinctive about bourgeois consumerism is that it is not a craving for a particular
product, such as gold. The essence of consumerism is a generalized craving for any and
all products (Campbell, 1987, p. 37). It is a restructuring of “need” itself, in general. The
focus is on creating need or desire as an insatiable psychological phenomenon; it is not to
create desires for particular products. Need itself has been transformed away from particu-
lar products to products in general. This is necessary if consumption is to be an unlimited,
insatiable need that is always available to be attracted to new products. If need were
attached to particular products—not simply to the ones one owns, but also to particular
categories of products—this would curtail its universal availability to be harnessed by
new types of products. Need has to be a universal need for any and all new products that
capitalists produce.
We do not need/desire particular products such as milk, vegetables, clothes, and furni-
ture. We desire “things,” more, novel things, regardless of what they are. Need takes on a
life of its own as a recurring, regenerating phenomenon; it is not generated by a particular
lack. We “need” without needing anything in particular. We go window-shopping and
browse catalogues and ads without any particular object in mind. We have an open-ended
need for anything that strikes our fancy. Our open need leads to our opening our wallets
frequently. Open need makes us constantly available for marketers to entice us. We are
not directing our needy behavior to overcome a particular lack that is setting us back.
Our open need invites capitalists to prod us with products they produce.
This objectless need, this need that does not depend upon an object and persists even
in the presence of objects we already possess, is historically unique. A peasant who is sur-
rounded by plentiful harvests does not continue to feel the need for other harvests; his
need is satisfied by the objects he has. His need is directly related to the presence or
 353 Concrete Macro Culture and Psychology

absence of particular objects. It arises when his supply of the object is low, and it subsides
when his supply of the object is plentiful. It is not an infinite, insatiable need for more
objects in general (Campbell, 1987, p. 39).
Abstract, generalized need/desire is a subjective correlate of abstract, generalized labor
and money, which are characteristic of capitalist production. The psychological character
of consumerism is specific to the political-economic basis and function it has. In the early
days of capitalism, consumerism was a more rational process based upon factual features
of products. In the second half of the seventeenth century, advertisements were factual
descriptions of products that served simply to communicate between producers and con-
sumers who were separated by different positions in the market (Sassatelli, 2007, p. 126).
The generalized, continual quest for more is a form of compulsion or addiction.
Compulsive shopping afflicts 25 or more of young people (Dittmar, 2008, pp. 98–101).
Dittmar (2005) found that compulsive shoppers (90 of whom are women) have a larger
discrepancy between their present self and their ideal self (i.e., they are less satisfied with
their current self) than ordinary shoppers, and they use products to improve their mood
and self-concept more than ordinary shoppers; finally, they are less satisfied with their
purchases than other shoppers, because these objects do not successfully help them over-
come their strong psychological needs.
An addiction is an insatiable desire for more of a deleterious object. Addictions are
profitable for capitalism because they lead to intense needs for more products to satisfy
the addictions. The more intense the need for more products is, the more goods will be
sold. Ten percent of young adults report consumerist tendencies strong enough to indi-
cate dysfunctional behavior: irresistible urges to buy, loss of control, and continuing to
buy despite adverse consequences.
The general need for more goes far beyond shopping. The culture approves of infinite
desires and impulse release in general. This spills over into a variety of compulsions. It is
why Americans, in particular, are addicted to so many things.

Pecuniary Instant Gratification

Consumer capitalist political economy demands rapid turnover of products to generate
maximal profit. This requires that consumers rapidly purchase products, which in turn
requires a psychology that craves immediate, rapid gratification. This craving for rapid,
instant gratification translates into quick purchasing, which translates into quick profits.
(A transportation system must expedite the delivery of products in order to realize instant
gratification.) Instant gratification of superficial, sensationalistic needs requires superfi-
cial, sensationalistic, disposable, inexpensively redesigned products. Deep, serious, endur-
ing, complex, expensive products that demand long-term attention and devotion cannot
provide instant gratification. Thus, the subjective need for instant gratification resonates
with the economic requirements of consumer capitalism.
Rapid consumption and production depend upon a generalized psychology that is
devoted to immediate gratification and expedited delivery of products. This psychology
is stimulated by the design of products. Electric switches turn on immediately so the
subject receives instant gratification. The radio, television, stereo, and car must turn on
at the slightest touch in order to provide instant gratification. As instant gratification
 354 macro cultural psychology

becomes normative throughout all products, it becomes expected and demanded. The
demand shifts from producers to consumers, who now demand more sensationalistic,
superficial products that can provide instant gratification. The subjective demand from
consumers then drives rapid, glitzy, profitable production—and becomes a convenient
legitimation of consumer capitalism (“we’re just providing them with what they want”).

Pecuniary Superficiality
Consumer spending demands constantly changing, superficial sensory stimulation that
catches our attention and entices us to purchase goods (Haug, 1986). Marketers do not
want us to seriously think about products because it would slow down our purchasing. Nor
do marketers want us to develop long-term satisfaction with, and commitment to, prod-
ucts, for this would also curtail new purchases. Similarly, they do not want us to develop
serious, absorbing interests that take time to digest and satisfy. If we spent 2 years studying
Hegel’s Logic, for instance, we would purchase few commodities. And if we inquired deeply
into the nature, production, and disposal of consumer products, we would buy far fewer of
them.
To act as good consumers, we need to develop superficial tastes that are quickly sated
and distracted by new products. Superficiality is central to consumer capitalism because
it facilitates irrational, impulsive, driven, fickle consumption of unnecessary, harmful,
expensive products. A deep, serious, rational person would not be attracted by the glitzy,
sensationalistic, shallow, unnecessary, destructive products that the economy requires us
to consume. Only superficial needs, desires, sensations, emotions, self-concept, atten-
tion, and reasoning are amenable enough to manipulation by fleeting advertising images
that they will generate sales.
Marketers want us to be concerned with superficial attributes such as beauty because
they are the most readily commodified. Deeper, personal attributes cannot be commodi-
fied. You can’t change your intelligence or concern for people by buying a disposable prod-
uct, so marketers don’t want us to be concerned with our intelligence or concern for people,
because they cannot make money off those concerns. They want us to be concerned with
attributes that are readily commodified, and these are necessarily superficial attributes.
External appearance that conforms to ideals of beauty and style is an example.
A good example of this conversion is parental love for children. True, deep parental
love for children would not be expressed through presents; it would be expressed through
personal interactions. This love has to be trivialized into something that can be expressed
through trinkets. Deep desires such as parental love for children are transformed into
superficial feelings that can be “satisfied” with trinkets. A parent will feel that he or she
has expressed love in this way only if the love has been trivialized beforehand. Otherwise,
the parent will feel that the trinket is an inadequate expression of true, deep, enduring,
personal love.
In order to prepare us to accept superficiality in marketing, a broader culture of super-
ficiality is necessary to normalize it and make it acceptable. It is difficult to find an area of
culture that is not permeated by vacuity and viciousness presented as virtues. American
television news programs are notoriously superficial, even compared to European net-
work news. Sports commentators are noteworthy agents of “superficialization” (to coin
 355 Concrete Macro Culture and Psychology

a phrase) because they possess a wealth of information about the game (being ex-coaches
or star athletes), yet they generally tell viewers nothing substantive about the game. Pre-
and postgame commentaries are ludicrous platitudes (“team X has a great offense, so the
only way team Y can win is with a strong defense”; “it’s important to play hard every
minute of the game”; “an injury to their star player will really hurt them”; “they couldn’t
score when they needed to, so they lost”; “Coach, how does it feel to win the champion-
ship?”). Jocular interactions among the commentators are snippets and sound bites with
little information. However, “These ‘soft’ facades conceal a terrible violence” (Dufour,
2008, p. 6). They withhold information from us; they deprive us of knowledge. They con-
dition us to enjoy superficiality and to stop asking about important, interesting issues.
This primes us to be consumers who accept superficial, titillating images and do not ask
about important, interesting aspects of products, their production, and their disposal.

Pecuniary Sensationalism
We have seen that consumerism is based on superficial appearances of things that titillate
consumerist urges, are cheap to produce, are easy to vary, attract new urges, and conceal
deleterious aspects of things that producers push on us. Superficial appearances are sen-
sational in the sense that they stimulate only the senses, not reason or considerateness.
Sensationalism is exemplified in the frenzied, noisy, blinding images of contemporary
advertisements. It is also exemplified in the emphasis on sensory styling of consumer
products (Aho, 2007).
For this marketing to be successful, consumers need to have an appropriate psychology
that accepts sensationalism as appealing rather than as noisy, cheap, distracting, and
unimportant. And this psychology must be normalized via surrounding people with a
climate of extreme sounds and colors separated from a meaningful structure or context.
A few instances of sensationalism would be rejected as anomalous and unappealing. This
is true for all the elements of consumer psychology; each of them must be cultivated by a
wide horizon of examples throughout the array of cultural life.
Sensationalism is rampant in modern culture. It exists in unmelodic, cacophonous
popular music; entertainment programs with sensationalistic car crashes, murders, sus-
pense, and special technical effects with minimal, trivial content; and sex with no char-
acter development or substantive plot. For instance, the sensationalistic car chase is all
noise and colors in an utterly implausible scenario where the car skids all over, bounces
off walls, has bullet holes shot in the windshield, and still escapes with the passengers
unscathed. The sensation of the chase is devoid of meaningful content. Most entertain-
ment programs about crime show the perpetrator committing the crime at the begin-
ning; this eliminates any intellectual challenge and converts the program into a series of
sensationalistic actions that the viewer passively (though passionately) watches.
Sensationalistic news programs devoted to scandals, crimes, and personal melodramas
also do not have a broader significance or require any serious thought. Noisy “music” at
many restaurants similarly drowns out meaningful conversation.
Once people have accepted sensationalism as exciting—despite its harmful meaning-
lessness—these superficial sensations can be harnessed to unnecessary, harmful con-
sumer products. People will accept these products because of their glitzy noises and
 356 macro cultural psychology

colors; they will not look beneath the surface to inquire about substance and structure.
And marketers want this, and require it, because they know that if people did search
beneath the sounds, shapes, and colors, they would not like what they found.
Politicians also benefit from sensationalism. They, too, can send out trite, stylized
images of themselves without fear that voters will probe too deeply into serious issues.
Sensationalism is a new cultural form of sensation. It is a cultural sensory system; it is
not merely the quantitative stimulation of “natural” sensations (Jacoby, 2008).
Sensationalism has become a ubiquitous cultural phenomenon. It is an important topic
for psychologists to study with regard to its distinctive cultural features, as opposed to the
way in which psychobiologists study it (as a product of nerve endings), which distorts
and distracts from the psychological features of sensations.
An impulsive, irrational, superficial, distracted, insatiable psychology recapitulates
childishness in capitalist societies. American society glorifies childishness because it is
basic to the political economy (Barber, 2007).

Pecuniary Listening
Adorno (1945) suggests that the act of listening to music has become sensationalized
under the influence of consumerism and commodification. He begins his analysis by
noting that in capitalist society, commodity production “affects the form of the product
as well as the human interrelationships” (p. 210). Music is produced as a commodity:
“music has ceased to be a human force and is consumed like other consumers’ goods. . . .
The commodity character of music tends radically to alter it” (p. 210). It produces “com-
modity listening,” a listening whose ideal it is to dispense as far as possible with any effort
on the part of the recipient—even if such an effort on the part of the recipient is the nec-
essary condition of grasping the sense of the music. It is the ideal of Aunt Jemima’s ready-
mix for pancakes extended to the field of music. The listener suspends all intellectual
activity when dealing with music and is content to consume and evaluate its gustatory
qualities—just as if the music that “tasted” best were also the best music possible.
An illustration: A symphony of the Beethoven type (so-called classical music) is one of
the most highly integrated musical forms. The whole is everything; the part—that is to
say, what the layman calls the melody—is relatively unimportant. Retrogressive listening
to a symphony is listening that, instead of grasping the whole, dwells upon those melo-
dies, just as if the symphony were structurally the same as a ballad. There exists today a
tendency to listen to Beethoven’s Fifth as if it were a set of quotations from Beethoven’s
Fifth. We have developed a larger framework of concepts such as atomistic listening and
quotation listening, which lead us to the hypothesis that something like musical chil-
dren’s language is taking shape (Adorno, 1945, pp. 211, 213–214).
Adorno extends Vygotsky and Luria’s concept that the mechanisms of psychology
change historically. He describes a concrete, macro cultural mechanism of listening to
serious music in consumer capitalism. He argues that consumerism has organized our
listening process/experience in line with superficial, fragmented, “easy,” sensationalistic
consumption of commodities. His phrases “commodity listening” and “atomistic listen-
ing” are useful, concrete cultural descriptions of the perception process in consumer
capitalism.
 357 Concrete Macro Culture and Psychology

Moreover, Adorno applies this analysis to psychological research. He criticizes research

that benevolently seeks to bring good music to the masses of people. While the intention
is praiseworthy, the theory and methodology are shortsighted. They overlook the concrete
cultural quality of listening to music. Adorno argues that “good music” is abstract without
this analysis. We can bring good music to people only if we understand how they experi-
ence music, and if we help them to appreciate its richness. If people’s musical sensitivity
has been stunted by sensationalism, for example, then we will never be able to bring them
good music in a meaningful way that would allow them to actually experience its good-
ness. No matter how much we make the music available to them, they will not experience
its richness if their psychological sensitivity has been deadened. It is therefore crucial to
investigate psychology in order to help people actually experience good music without
fragmenting and trivializing it. The same analysis applies to other positive social condi-
tions. Good education will not be received if students’ consciousness has been turned
away from it. Movements for social change will also be undermined by individualistic
consciousness. Capitalism works from inside our minds as well as through outside pres-
sure. This, of course, is a central theme of macro cultural psychology—namely, compre-
hending the cultural quality of psychological processes. Adorno (1945) raises the practical
implications of this kind of investigation (pp. 209–210).
An additional practical implication he raises is the social effect that commoditized lis-
tening has on the listener. He says that this reduces the general sensitivity of the listener
and his or her intellectual level and critical sense. Commoditized listening suspends
intellectual concentration, as was mentioned earlier, and this has a weakening affect on
intellectual sensitivity in general. It is just another of many influences that create the
impression that critical intellectual sensitivity is unnecessary. Commoditized listening
“has a soporific effect upon social consciousness” (Adorno, 1945, p. 212).
This, of course, is functional for consumer capitalism, for it further exempts it from
analysis and challenge. Commoditized listening is thus political not only in the sense that
it reflects the political economy of consumer capitalism, but also insofar as it supports
consumer capitalism. As I have frequently observed, psychology is functional for the
social system that organizes it. Psychology is a macro cultural factor with political conse-
quences as well as origins. This is why it is so important to comprehend the cultural
aspects of psychology, and to help change them so as to be functional for a democratic,
cooperative society rather than the status quo.

Pecuniary Detachment and Dissatisfaction

Consumer psychology must consist of superficial attachments that are easily renounced
and replaced by attachments to new products. Enduring attachments would retard the
quest for new products. Marketers want us to become easily dissatisfied with what we
have. They even want us to become dissatisfied with ourselves, for we will then seek a
new image/identity through a new set of products. Simmel (2007) called this superficial
accumulation of products “sterile ownership.” The consumer owns something without
possessing it. It is often the product of compulsive consumerism rather than genuine
need and desire. It is a token display of one’s social acceptability rather than of personal
usefulness.
 358 macro cultural psychology

Pecuniary Hyperactivity and Attention Deficit

The constant quest for newer and greater stimulation through new products—which
temporarily overcomes the boredom brought on by superficial sensationalism—leads to
the distraction of attention from the here and now and leaves consumers always on the
move for more sensation through more products. This is hyperactivity par excellence.
Peace and quiet and stability are the enemies of consumer capitalism and consumer psy-
chology. Hyperactivity and attention disorder are historical products of consumer capi-
talism. People are always elsewhere; instead of being immediately in their present activity,
they are always looking for more outside of the activity. It is in the interest of consumer
capitalism to have people not wholly committed to their current activity and always look-
ing for additional stimulation outside of it. Marketers want us distracted, on the lookout
for more and different input, compliantly shifting attention from the program to the
advertisement, or, analogously, from the conversation to the cell phone, or the classroom
assignment to the e-mail—in short, they want us hyperactive and deficient in concen-
trated attention. Hyperactivity and attention deficit are normal states of advanced con-
sumer capitalism.
Superficial interests that are easily sated and digested lead to people’s searching for new
material forms of stimulation.

Pecuniary Boredom
Superficial attachments and easy dissatisfaction lead to rapid boredom with what one
has. Sensationalism, superficiality, and brief, transitory experiences fail to provide mean-
ingful satisfaction; they lead to boredom. But rather than boredom leading to resentment
of the system that created it, it leads to cravings for new stimulation through consumer
products.
Marketers create boredom by ensuring that what is novel and exciting today is
quickly replaced by new gimmicks and needs. Yesterday’s pleasures become boring
and uninteresting.

Pecuniary Disillusionment and Fantasy Maintenance

Consumer capitalism utilizes frustration to create economic demand for consumer prod-
ucts. Consumer capitalism fosters frustration, disillusionment, and anxiety in order to
palliate these feelings with consumer products. It realizes that attainable goals and means
would lead to need-fulfillment, satiety, security, contentment, and peacefulness. People
would not need more; they would take respites from work and consumption. This would
be harmful to profits.
Consumer capitalism makes people frustrated in several ways. It creates false feelings
of inadequacy—too fat, too smelly, unpopular, at risk for disease, old fashioned in rela-
tion to kids. Consumer capitalism also creates frustration and disillusionment by holding
out unrealistic, unachievable goals of beauty and success. They display fashion models,
for example, who weigh only 75 of what the average woman weighs. Hardly any woman
can attain that body size. Capitalists know this, yet they dangle it as a goal anyway.
 359 Concrete Macro Culture and Psychology

They tease people and dare them to measure up to the model. People try and try (by
buying products) and fail and fail.
Capitalists also create frustration by proffering illusory benefits to products (e.g., that
they will make you happy, successful, popular, or beautiful). This places citizens in a con-
tinual state of desire that is perpetually frustrated. Consumers can never buy all the tanta-
lizing products they desire, nor can the products produce the satisfaction (of success and
happiness) that they promise. Frustrated desire is a normative psychological condition of
modern people.
Oddly, though, this does not cause resentment. The frustration-aggression hypothesis
is violated in capitalism. Frustration and disillusionment become expected and accept-
able. People implicitly know the promises they see are not real; they implicitly know they
will never become popular or sexy or successful by using the commercial product. Yet
they keep on buying it and hoping. It is akin to religious devotees’ witnessing abject suf-
fering and still believing that God is good and protective. Carrying around a set of unre-
alized (unrealizable) desires, wishes, and dreams is reinterpreted as a romantic part of
life, something that “keeps one going,” a sign of motivated activity (“At least I’m looking
for something better; I’m not just passively settling for what I’ve got.”). Aanstoos (1997)
perceptively describes this cultural psychology.
The average consumer is not surprised that the commodity does not redeem the prom-
ise of the advertisement, for this is what he is used to in life: the individual pursuit of
happiness and success is usually in vain. But the fantasy is his to keep; in his dreamworld,
he enjoys a “future endlessly deferred.” As depth psychologists have long understood, the
motivational power of a fantasy lies not in its coming true, but precisely in the value that
comes from holding on to the fantasy—and that comes from the way the fantasy relieves
anxiety, and so seems to make one feel better about oneself.
Being confronted by unrealizable consumerist goals leaves people frustrated at them-
selves rather than at the marketers who frustrate them: “A meta-analysis of 25 experimen-
tal studies demonstrated that, on average, young women feel worse about their bodies
after exposure to thin images than other types of images” (Dittmar, 2008, p. 126; Strahan
et al., 2008).
This culturally induced reaction to frustration of blaming oneself for failing to achieve
the social standard drives people to strive harder to achieve that standard by buying more
products. Frustration ties people to the frustrating system; it does not lead them to reject
it. This is a remarkable achievement for consumer capitalism. It is a rare society that can
earn the loyalty of its citizens by continually frustrating them. This testifies to the culturally
organized response to frustration, rather than to any natural response (cf. Slater, 2007).
If a feudal lord demanded that his serfs produce triple their normal output or he would
punish them, they would turn on him for demanding the impossible and unreasonable.
If your parents demanded that you do three times your usual amount of housework or
homework before you could play, you would accuse them of demanding the impossible
and being unreasonable. But capitalists do essentially the same thing, and consumers
struggle to meet their cynical demands, often ruining themselves psychologically and
financially in the process.
This is a fascinating and intricate cultural motivational system. It makes people loyal to
the system that causes them to fail.
 360 macro cultural psychology

Pecuniary Body Adornment

The natural body is anathema and must be converted into a commodified zone to be mined.
Every toenail must be painted; every eyebrow plucked; every hair on the head teased and
colored; every fingernail manicured and painted; every neck, wrist, and ankle adorned;
every inch of skin creamed and perfumed; every leg and arm shaved and tattooed; every
eyelash and eyelid painted; every belly button pierced. A natural, unadorned, uncommodi-
fied body (or body part) is a source of irritation and challenge to businesspeople; admira-
tion of the body must be transformed into admiration of a stylized, commoditized body.
Actually, the body becomes central to consumer capitalism because it can be adorned
with commodities. This is why psychological-personal attributes are increasingly defi ned
in terms of the body: they are more easily commodified that way. The self, love, and sex
are examples of psychological-personal-intimate attributes that are defined physically so
they can be commodified.

Pecuniary Love
Love is commodified by expressing it in consumer products. It is also commodified by
defining it in terms of physical attributes such as beauty, which are easily commodi-
fied through beauty products. A case in point is advertisements for beauty products aimed
at black women in the 1920s. A 1928 advertisement for Hi-Ja hair dressing asked, “Why do
Men Fall in Love? Because of beauty of course. Beauty is the only charm that never fails.”
Another ad for the same product featured a famous vaudeville star and record artist pro-
claiming, “Beauty is priceless because with beauty there will come everything else you desire
in life—friends, admirers, social leadership, and great success” (Walker, 2007, pp. 35–36).
Of course, the beauty that is necessary for these successes is obtained through beauty
products. This is evident in the ad depicted in Figure 5.8. Here love is defined as beauty
that consists of a new hairstyle, which is achievable by purchasing the hair dressing. Women
are instructed to switch from a short hairstyle to a long one in order to better use the prod-
uct that will make them beautiful and therefore lovable.
These ads are not responding to women’s “individual desires.” On the contrary, they are
engineering these desires and harnessing them to commercial products. Ads are making
feminine beauty central to all of women’s successes. They do so because they can sell
products to enhance beauty. They would not tout intelligence as central to success because
there is no single, simple product that could enhance something as complex and deep as
intelligence. Since no intelligence product can be marketed, intelligence is not touted.
Beauty is superficial and amenable to superficial manipulation through commercial
products. This is why beauty is promoted as central to success.

The Pecuniary Self

Consumer capitalism transforms the nature of the self/identity. Identity is commodifi ed
because it is purchased through consumer products. As Schrum (2004, p. 70) tells us,
“when girls in the nineteenth century discussed identity or improving themselves, they
did not focus on their bodies. In contrast, by the late twentieth century, girls saw the body
as a central focus, something to cultivate and shape, often through purchasing clothing
fig. 5.8 Advertisement. Reprinted from Walker, S. (2007). Style and status: Selling beauty
to African American women, –. Lexington, KY: University Press of Kentucky. Used
with the permission of the Chicago Defender.

361
 362 macro cultural psychology

or commercial beauty products. . . . Identity increasingly became a purchasable style.”

As early as 1945, three-fourths of high school girls said the right clothes were required for
happiness (Schrum, 2004, p. 28). Identity and happiness were defined in terms of con-
sumer products. Products were the basis of identity and happiness. Products had pene-
trated subjectivity and become its operating mechanism and organizing principle.
This transformation involved a two-step process of destruction and reconstruction.
The first step depersonalized and denaturalized identity. Identity had to be severed from
personal attributes such as character, and also from natural, physical characteristics that
individuals were born with. Traditional forms of identity had to be destroyed because
they were noncommodified. In order for businesses to commodify identity and profit off
it, people had to be convinced to look elsewhere for the constituents of their identity,
namely, to consumer products. Traditional forms of identity were destroyed by capitalist
alienation and competition. This left people lonely, insecure, and in a state of anomie.
There was little community life left that could provide identity. This led people to turn to
consumer products as a source of identity. Ironically, people turned to the products of
commodity production to solve the identity problems that commodity had created in the
first place. Clearly this was an untenable solution.
Capitalists dispossessed people of their means of identity formation and then sold
them these means at a price. This exactly recapitulates the way in which labor became
commodified. Landowners and manufacturers expelled peasants from the lands on
which they formerly lived under inalienable tenancy; these dispossessed laborers then
were forced to buy the right to work for capitalists—that is, they had to sell their labor for
a wage that allowed them to work at the discretion of the capitalist.
Of course, in accordance with the basis of all this—namely, profit maximization—
capitalists did not make it easy to purchase identity, for that would have generated only
minimal profit. Maximal profit required making identity formation into a ceaseless exer-
cise that continuously required more purchases. This was done by (a) holding out unach-
ievable ideals that people would continue to strive for and (b) constantly changing the
ideal so that people would have to buy new constituents. Unachievable ideals take the
form of fashion models, movie stars, or professional athletes whom the ordinary person
can never imitate in terms of looks or skill. Changing ideals take the form of constantly
changing styles of commercial products such as clothing and cars. These constituents of
identity must be repurchased as they become obsolete.
This constant, unsuccessful struggle to achieve identity makes identity precarious. This
is the reason people are insecure about their identities and abilities.
The more the self becomes commodified, the more superficial it becomes, because it is
reduced to external styles that can be instantly purchased. Personal and natural charac-
teristics—character, intelligence, dedication, altruism, generosity, and natural beauty—
become displaced. People crave superficial style and appearance more than deep personal
or natural attributes.

Pecuniary Agency
Identifying oneself with commodities draws the consumer to psychologically invest him-
self or herself, as an individual, in products. This is pecuniary agency. It actively searches
 363 Concrete Macro Culture and Psychology

out commercial products as means of acquiring an identity. One takes an interest in

products as a form of self-definition and self-expression. They are not simply products
to be used for utilitarian ends (e.g., to keep warm, provide nutrition, or make a system
operate faster). Consumerism is therefore a form of agency.
One method for cultivating this sense of agency is to offer consumers small choices
about style. This forces them to think and decide—to have a preference. Through this
activity, a telephone becomes something the consumer has selected; it is something he
or she wants. The individual does not simply accept the standard phone that the com-
pany supplies; he or she has go out and shop for the one he or she “wants.” This limited,
uncreative activity generates a sham feeling of agency. Other examples are television
programs, from news to sports, that invite viewers to write in and inform the station
about whether one agrees with some policy or who one thinks is the best player in a
sport. This “exercise in democracy” has no impact on anything, but it makes the responder
feel that he or she is doing something and expressing himself or herself (i.e., being an
agent).
This pecuniary agency is functional for marketers because the psychological invest-
ment is an ongoing involvement with consumerism. In contrast, utilitarian use of prod-
ucts is sporadic involvement—you think about the object only when you use it. Pecuniary
agency is truncated, sham agency. Certainly, choosing a hair spray that helps you look
good is not the highest form of thinking, nor is it the fullest way to control your social life.
The buyer believes he or she is expressing and fulfilling himself or herself through the
quest for products. However, the reverse is closer to the truth: the consumer is deperson-
alizing and alienating himself or herself while generating a larger market for the producer
(Cook, 2007; Korczynski & Ott, 2004).
Psychological involvement with products as forms of individual identity additionally
spurs purchases of many products to fit our variable moods. This would not be true if we
utilized artifacts instrumentally instead of as forms of agency. If we express ourselves
through products, then we need many products to express our many moods/identities. We
need different clothes, beauty products, hair styles, and even cars and furniture as our
mood changes. This is why marketers encourage the notion of an expansive, changing,
growing self—the more it changes, the more products it will need to express itself. Marketers
encourage pecuniary personal change/growth.
Marketers want us to believe that superficial mood changes are true growth so that we
will have a positive association with superficial, quick mood changes. Thus, the concep-
tion of continuous psychological change has a commercial function that determines its
quality as superficial and quick.
Personal growth is adjusted to fit commodifications of the self. Personal growth must
grow in directions that are amenable to adornment with commodities. Growth that is
inhospitable to commodification is not encouraged. Deeper growth to understand some
scientific or philosophical concept is not easily commodified—all it takes are books and
concentration.
Pecuniary agency testifies to the fact that “consumption is a socially and culturally
standardized activity inasmuch as the ongoing constitution of a personal style draws on
commodities whose trajectories consumers can never fully control . . .” (Sassatelli, 2007,
p. 106). This confirms a major tenet of macro cultural psychology.
 364 macro cultural psychology

Pecuniary Sex
Sex is commodified by defining it through consumer products, like other aspects of iden-
tity are. Sexual arousal is stimulated by clothing; lingerie; bodily adornments such as per-
fumes, jewelry, tattoos, waxing, tanning, cosmetic surgery, and make-up; and pornography.
To be sexy is to purchase these products. As with other aspects of the commodified self,
this transforms the nature of sex. Sex must be something that is aroused (arousable) by
physical products. To be so, sex must be made into a predominantly physical experience
that is stimulated by physical appearances (i.e., the appearance of physical objects).
As with love, sex must be divorced from personal issues and shifted to physical issues
that can be commodified. As with love, if sex were primarily personal and intimate,
people would not need physical accoutrements to stimulate and intensify it; sex would be
aroused by the personal features of the lover.
For sex to become commodified, it must become physicalized (i.e., defined in terms of
physical appearance and stimulation). This leads to the emphasis on body form as central
to sexiness. Emphasizing body form as sexy is part of reducing sex to physical stimula-
tion. This is necessary if sex is to be commodified with products. Eroticizing the body is
part of the broader process of making sex a physical experience that can be commodified
with products. If sex were personal and intimate, the shape of the body, and its physical
adornments, would be far less important. One would be sexually aroused by the personal
qualities of the individual more than by the size of a breast or bicep, or a dangling belly
ring, or a pink thong panty, or a finely manicured, painted toenail.
This is not to deny that clothing and artifacts are attractive and enhance the attractive-
ness of the body. It is one thing for artifacts to complement personal traits, and another
thing for artifacts to supersede personal traits as means of attraction. The latter is clearly
what has happened in modern times. People attract and are attracted to one another
more on the basis of physical appearance (of the body and of artifacts) than on the basis
of personal qualities. People spend far more time and money shopping for products and
shaping their bodies than they do cultivating personal qualities such as considerateness,
devotion, and intelligence. The reason is that personal qualities are not commodifiable,
whereas body-altering products are.
Another important reason for commodifying sex is the commercial function that sex
plays in consumerism. Sex is used to sell products. Marketers use the arousing quality of
sex to stimulate consumerism. Since products cannot be marketed for their real, practical
qualities, which are either marginal or indistinguishable from those of other brands,
consumers must be conditioned to appreciate other things that generate excitement.
Marketers discovered that the excitement from sex could be transferred to unexciting
products. The association is made via the use of a physically appealing model. The physi-
cal sexuality of the model is transferred to the product, and the product elicits sexual
anticipation in the consumer.
However, a certain kind of sex is necessary for this to work. Not all sex is easily linked to
consumer products. In order for sex to be elicited by a physically attractive, impersonal
model and transferred to a beer or a car, sex had to be engineered. If sex were a deeply
personal act that was aroused only by an intimate relationship based upon love and admi-
ration, it could never be associated with beer or cars or even clothes. People would be
 365 Concrete Macro Culture and Psychology

repulsed by such associations and would view them as cheapening sex. In order for sex to
be aroused by a purely physical, impersonal pose, performed in the presence of beer or
cars, it had to be divested of its personal, intimate quality and reconstructed as a superficial,
sensationalistic, physical quality/act. Sex had to be transformed from a deeply meaningful,
slowly aroused, patiently engaged-in, long-lasting act to a superficial, sensationalistic,
quickly aroused, and quickly satisfied physical act. Only this kind of sex could be stimu-
lated by brief, physical, impersonal poses that could eroticize unnecessary or harmful
products.
It is important to understand the antithetical aspects of these two kinds of sex. They are
not complementary in their modern form. The point of physicalized sex today is to dep-
ersonalize it and make it serviceable for the sale of commercial products. Sex has to be a
general currency that could be plugged into any product. It had to be freed from local,
personal restrictions. This cultural quality is far more than complementing personal, inti-
mate sex with erotic accoutrements. It revamps sex in the service of profit. Retaining
intimate and personal aspects of love as its primary features would render sex unservice-
able for commercial use. Consequently, these features had to be minimized and margin-
alized—and this is what has happened. The hyperstimulation of sex by physical means
distracts lovers from personal qualities. Men are so aroused by the physical stimulation
of women’s perfume, clothing, lingerie, jewelry, make-up, and body form that they easily
lose sight of their lover’s personal qualities. These accessories do not simply enhance and
complement personal qualities.
Therefore, marketers must work to construct commodified, physicalized sexuality that
ultimately serves consumerism. (The classical conditioning model of associating prod-
ucts with sex is misleading because it assumes that natural sex is associated with prod-
ucts. This is not true. A specifically formed cultural sexuality is the only kind that can be
associated with products.) Marketers have done this by modeling impersonal, casual,
fast, sensationalistic sex wherever possible—for example, in movies, television programs,
and video games. They have also done it by enhancing sexuality with consumer products.
This association does not sell only those products directly related to sex; more profoundly,
it commodifies sex as a commercial means to sell all kinds of products.
Capitalism diminishes personal, caring sex in other ways as well:

a. It glorifies individual experience and sensory gratification rather than deep care for
others.
b. It stresses and exhausts people to the point where they have little time and energy to
devote to others (e.g., pressures from competitive, impersonal, demeaning work and
long working hours that include commuting to work, and pressures from financial
and occupational insecurity).
c. It leads to a breakdown of the community and interpersonal closeness so that strangers
must meet through impersonal, superficial encounters (“pickups”) and sexy signals.
Strangers have little to say to each other, as they know little about each other and have
little in common; instead they must attract each other on the basis of impersonal, super-
ficial images such as clothing, cars, tattoos, and sexual appearance. The breakdown of
community leads to the depersonalization of sex as a way of meeting potential partners
in impersonal encounters. A personalized sexuality would not work because strangers
 366 macro cultural psychology

do not have a personal relation that would subsume sexuality. Sexuality must become
divorced from personal relations if one is to attract partners with whom one has no
personal relations.

Evidence supports this hypothesis that impersonal sex (sexual sensationalism) is

displacing personal relations. This appears in the phenomenon known as “hooking up”
among young people. Approximately 80 of undergraduate college students, sampled in
numerous, extensive surveys covering tens of thousands of undergrads, report having
hooked up; half said they started their evenings planning to have some form of sex with
no particular person in mind. Hooking up is primarily a casual kind of “hanging out”
with someone that is devoid of commitment or even serious personal interest; it often
includes casual sex on a variety of levels from “making out” to oral sex to intercourse.
Two people may hook up more than once, although this does not imply any special rela-
tionship. One freshman college student described it this way: “I see a lot of girls that will
go to a party, go home with someone, not talk to them the whole week, go to the party,
see them again, and go home with them.” Interviewer: “No phone calls, no emails, no
contact during the week?” Student: “Correct” (Bogle, 2008, p. 40).
Hooking up reverses the pattern known as dating. In dating, a couple would go out
together for dinner or to a movie, talk, get to know each other at least a bit, and then pos-
sibly have sex. Hooking up is a casual, impersonal meeting of people at a party, bar, or
large gathering, usually fuelled by a good deal of alcohol or drugs; feeling an attraction for
someone; having some sexual relationship, either at the party or at one of the partner’s
room; and then sometimes agreeing to get to know each other. Whereas dating (generally,
but certainly not always) built sex into a growing personal intimacy, and thus made sex
personal and intimate, hooking up divorces sex from personal intimacy and depersonal-
izes it—in accordance with commercial sex displayed in advertisements and movies. “The
hooking-up script does not require a correlation between sexual intimacy and relation-
ship commitment. A hookup can include anything from kissing to sexual intercourse
even on the first encounter” (Bogle, 2008, p. 48).
Hooking up is more than horny teenagers and young adults satisfying sexual urges. That
would be neither new nor remarkable nor troubling. Hooking up is not expressing natural
sexual urges; it is revamping them in accordance with consumer capitalism. Attributing
hooking up to “sex” is false concreteness; it utterly fails to recognize the particular cultural
character of hooking up and instead attributes it to general phenomena such as “sex.”
Hooking up seems to be using sex to replace personal relations because personal relations
are viewed as problematic, encumbering, and not worth the effort. One university coed
expressed this clearly: “Sex is more tangible than love. And it is much, much easier than
taking the time to know someone. Real relationships must be integrated into a much more
complex set of goals and life objectives. It’s safer to get your sex and acceptance through
something short-term and unserious” (Stepp, 2007, pp. 39–40). Clearly, personal relations
have been redefined in physical terms.
Another college sophomore coed said: “I’m scared of loving him because what does
that say about me . . . I’m just a weepy girl who relies on someone . . . I want to be inde-
pendent and I think it is important for women of our generation but saying I love some-
one and need him it’s like contradictory . . . hypocritical . . . but I also don’t want to give
 367 Concrete Macro Culture and Psychology

in to love because I am scared he won’t call me and I will be heartbroken and then feel like
a stupid girl that should have known better” (Stepp, 2007, p. 39). A tenth grade high
school girl said, “Hooking up is saying ‘I can have you whenever I want you and I can
have whoever I want’ ” (Stepp, 2007, p. 82). Some girls call guys “my toy” and “my bitch.”
These statements reveal how individualism and independence undermine love. They
make love appear to be encumbering, restrictive, dependent, and a risky investment. The
statements also indicate that hooking up is a cultural-psychological sexual relation, and not
simply raw sexual desire. It is sex replete with (sublimated by, or mediated by) psychological
and cultural objectives, strategies, and values. It is a tool that girls use to achieve cultural-
psychological objectives of power, conquest, success, self-protection, risk avoidance, sensa-
tionalistic pleasure, self-interest, and independence that were once the province of males.
Hooking up does not express the idiosyncratic individuality of a particular coed; it embodies
cultural features such as independence, self-interest, and power that are culturally valued.
Hooking up is a creative activity that girls actively and inventively orchestrate. They try
to fulfill desires and avoid problems, they intentionally scheme and maneuver, they seek
to achieve social and psychological objectives. At the same time, their activity and inven-
tiveness has a cultural form. It incarnates and achieves cultural ends. Girls “hit upon”
hooking up as an innovative way to jettison traditional female roles and demeanors and
participate in modern consumer capitalism. What they hit upon incarnates modern cap-
italist values and practices in a personal, sexual form (cf. Ratner, 2006a, p. 98). It is not an
internal, free, idiosyncratic construction.
This is clear from Stepp’s description: “The prize from high school on is the feeling of
power girls get from setting their sights on a boy, seducing him, and walking away at will,
the better to avoid commitment, distractions, and being hurt. . . . In both high school and
college, the hallmark of hooking up is that the boy, once recruited, is disposable” (Stepp,
2007, pp. 61–62, emphasis added). In fact, what is most notable about hookup culture is
its disposability: “Hooking up’s defining characteristic is the ability to unhook from a
partner at any time, just as they might delete an old song on the iPod. . . . The freedom to
unhook from someone—ostensibly without repercussions—gives them maximum flexi-
bility” (Stepp, 2007, p. 5).ix
In hooking up, we see the unmistakable intrusion of consumer capitalist practices and
values into personal relations. Of course, related influences are also present: “One can see
this same impermanence in some of their other commitments—to their jobs and life
plans, for example” (Stepp, 2007, p. 5). School and work pressures also contribute to the
replacing of intimate, time-consuming, involving personal relations with hookups, as
does the value of individualism. Many girls initially turn to hooking up because it incar-
nates individualism, independence, and power, which are culturally valued. Many girls
(and boys) turn to hooking up secondarily after they have been hurt in more intimate
relationships by hedonistic, self-centered, individualistic partners. They try to avoid a
repetition of the hurt and vulnerability by avoiding serious relationships and renouncing
love—at least for a time. (In other words, they adopt individualism to protect themselves
from being hurt by individualistic partners. They use the very practice that hurt them as
a weapon to avoid being hurt.)
I am not claiming that hooking up has become universal. It still remains mainly confined
to a growing number of young people, it often struggles with traditional values for intimate
 368 macro cultural psychology

love (among girls more than boys, generally speaking), and it is replaced by love and inti-
macy as young adults mature. Many young people have intimate, loving relationships. I am
claiming that consumer capitalism is intruding into personal lives, and this is one example.
This is as it must be, and it will predictably expand, because for consumer capitalism to
prevail it must be supported by a vast network of psychological and interpersonal activi-
ties. We must have a sense of life and social relations as being disposable, transient, replace-
able, and materialistic if we are to fulfill ourselves as consumers. Stability, security, and
intimacy are anathema to consumerism and are displaced by it on an expanding scale.
In keeping with the principles of macro cultural psychology, sexuality not only embodies
consumer capitalism, but it also has a cultural function. Sexuality is a cultural phenomenon
that perpetrates a political economy in its sphere of operation. Sex is a socializing agent,
a cultural ambassador, just as the individualistic self is. Just as certain kinds of emotions,
reasoning, memory, self-concept, and motivation are necessary to construct and maintain a
particular social system, so sexual relations are a complementary psychology and behavior
that play the same role. The culture must be reinforced as extensively as possible to ensure
maximal compliance and coherence. Culture insidiously permeates multiple crevices of life
in order to shore itself up.
Physical, commodified sexuality stimulates us to desire view physical, sensationalized
commodities as attractive and sensual. Commodified sex eroticizes sensationalism and
makes it more appealing in nonerotic forms.
In addition, the commodified form of sexuality steers interpersonal relations in a capi-
talistic direction. Commoditized sexuality leads to impersonal, indiscriminate, numer-
ous, superficial interpersonal relations—which will provide one with an immediate release
of superficial, impersonal sexual desire. These kinds of interpersonal relations accommo-
date the capitalist job market’s rapid turnover, minimal commitment and involvement,
treatment of people as objects, arbitrary and unpredictable conditions, and relishing of
material/physical rewards (money) rather than meaningful fulfillment.
Sexuality (like all psychological phenomena) does not simply reflect macro cultural
factors; it also perpetrates them.
Our analysis of the macro cultural origins of objectified sexuality demonstrates that
women’s objectified sexuality is spawned by the political-economic needs of capitalism; it
is not created by “women” or by “men” per se. Gender is the locus of sexual relations, but
it is not their basis. Political economy, not gender, is the basis of sexuality and gender
relations.

Pecuniary Sex and Commercial Sex

Depersonalized normal sex makes commercialized sex more acceptable because the
latter increasingly resonates with normal sensationalized, superficial sex. Commercialized
sex no longer seems unusual as normal social relations become increasingly sensational-
ized and superficial. This is not because sensationalistic sex is naturally more stimulating;
it is stimulating because it resonates with the ubiquity of consumer culture. Commercial
sex is not corrupting normal sex; it is simply drawing out its qualities. Normal sex is cor-
rupting itself by becoming more like commercial sex. Normal sex is normalizing com-
mercial sex.
 369 Concrete Macro Culture and Psychology

Pecuniary Symbolism: Fabricating Illusions to Mask Exploitation

An additional, important way that marketers induce us to purchase goods we do not need
is by imbuing them with false “personalities” (Gil-Juarez, 2009). Products are imbued
with symbolic significance that appeals to people in ways that real qualities do not because
people either do not need or do not want them. Marketers knowingly concoct extraneous
images for products in order to sell them under false pretenses.
One reason for this is to stimulate sales in general, but another reason is to gain a com-
petitive advantage over other producers and products. In the competitive capitalist econ-
omy, producers jump into the fray and carve out a market position. There is usually little
substantive difference between the products of different manufacturers, so capturing a
market share requires concocting symbolic images that appeal to people.
In the words of one historian of advertising, “advances in manufacturing capabilities
meant it became increasingly difficult to gain competitive advantage through functional
product performance attributes. Marketers sought differentiation along more emotional
lines. They began to build brands, endowing them with personalities and symbolic qual-
ities. . . . In the 1980s, marketers gradually became aware of the enormous value of the
brand as distinct from the product or service” (Batey, 2008, p. xv, my emphasis).
It is important to emphasize that the entire move to symbolize products and make them
into brands was motivated (required) by the nefarious desire to obfuscate the objective
parity of the goods. This is proof positive that marketers are not trying to meet our needs.
This is epitomized in the cigarette industry. As early as the 1920s, experiments proved
that smokers could not discern differences in the taste of cigarette brands, despite smok-
ers’ insistence that they could. In 1942, Reader’s Digest reported the results of many exper-
iments that concluded “the differences between brands are, practically speaking, small”
and “it makes no earthly difference which of the leading cigarettes you buy” (Brandt, 2007,
p. 79). The real lack of distinction among cigarettes forced companies to sell illusory
images in order to attract consumers to their brand. Advertisers were forced to sell images,
not products, because the real features of the products were indistinguishable or unpalat-
able. An entirely ephemeral, illusory world was constructed to sell products that would
not sell based on their real properties. Lucky Strike cigarettes epitomized this: “A relatively
undifferentiated product, it traded on identities fashioned not through any intrinsic qual-
ities but through advertising, public relations, and design” (Brandt, 2007, p. 89). In other
words, commercial marketers fabricated a fictitious culture that displaced all concern for
truth about objective properties of things.
This phantom culture of deceptive images was allowed to become predominant, knock-
ing down objective standards of truth. “The manipulation of public opinion, values, and
beliefs would, in the 1920s, become a dominant aspect of the consumer culture” (Brandt,
2007, p. 81).
This culture of illusion and deception has so obliterated reality and objectivity that
people live for illusory symbols rather than the real qualities of the objects they use: “The
habitual smoker buys brands rather than cigarettes,” as one advertising journal said in
1941 (Brandt, 2007, p. 78).
This is confirmed by the reasons smokers gave for smoking. In a 1929 survey, smokers
overwhelmingly cited sociability as an essential attraction of the cigarette. Only 5 cited
 370 macro cultural psychology

taste as one of the cigarette’s pleasures (Brandt, 2007, p. 98). Cigarettes also connoted a
brief, pleasurable respite from onerous work—a connotation that was induced by adver-
tising campaigns such as “Build Yourself a Camel Smoke Screen” (Brandt, 2007, p. 99).
Marketers were so unscrupulous as to associate cigarettes with a healthy life! In 1946,
R. J. Reynolds initiated a major new advertising campaign for Camels, claiming, “More
doctors smoke Camels than any other cigarette.” The ads claimed that every doctor in a
private practice was asked about brand preference, and the highest choice was Camels.
This associated Camels with individual doctors, such as the viewer’s own, and also with
health.
This deceptive connotation was not invented by the smokers, nor did it meet their
demand for quality cigarettes. In fact, epidemiological reports in 1946 concluded that
lung cancer deaths had tripled in the past three decades. Yet cigarette manufacturers
spent fortunes to deny the proven links—which they knew about—between smoking and
lung cancer. Again, this contradicts, rather than serves, the consumers’ interest. Now that
tobacco has become an undisputed health issue, like global warming, and lawsuits and
regulations have diminished tobacco companies’ strength in the United States, they have
vastly increased marketing and sales in developing countries, where smoking-related
deaths are soaring.

Pecuniary Inversion of the Function of Symbols

Symbols are commodified as well. Advertisers have made symbols misleading by spuri-
ously associating them with products. Associating a symbol with an object no longer
expresses the true nature of the object; on the contrary, the symbol lends a misleading sense
to the object. Advertisers have reversed the relation between symbol and reality. Symbols
traditionally have expressed reality. For example, after a person has fulfilled the require-
ments of graduate study, a university will bestow the letters “PhD” on the individual to
express his or her accomplishment. The letters are arbitrary, of course, because any other
letters could have been used. But the point is that the symbol, whatever it is, expresses some
real accomplishment. Similarly, the presidential seal can be used only by the person who
has succeeded to the office of president; it represents his or her achievement. Symbols
represent a real event with particular properties.
Advertisers have essentially inverted this. They have taken cultural symbols that have
acquired significance and represent some real property or properties, and they have asso-
ciated them with objects that possess none of these properties. They pay Michael Jordan
millions of dollars to hold up a box of Wheaties cereal, thereby lending star status to a
cereal that has no star status, has no useful properties, and is not necessarily used by
Jordan. The associated symbol does not express the qualities of Wheaties; on the contrary,
it defines them. This is a gross transformation of the use of symbols. Symbols now endow
things with spurious significance; they no longer represent something real. Jordan does
not endorse Wheaties because they are good and have helped him to improve his nutri-
tion and diet and thus his basketball skills. On the contrary, Jordan endorses Wheaties
because he has been paid to do so, and he disingenuously imparts his celebrity status onto
them (when they have nothing real that qualifies them for celebrity status), rather than
owing his celebrity to their real, beneficial qualities. Pecuniary symbolism relies on money
 371 Concrete Macro Culture and Psychology

to link artifacts to symbols (e.g., Wheaties to Jordan); objective symbolism relies on con-
gruence between the real properties of the artifact and its symbolic significance (e.g., the
real nutritional value of Wheaties that is appreciated by a star athlete who has eaten them,
and who associates his star status with Wheaties because of this real congruence).
The seismic inversion of symbols from representing reality to concocting reality has
become a cultural phenomenon. People adorn themselves with symbols that they pur-
chase, or steal, to supplant real qualifications and skills (“It’s the piece of paper that I’m
after”). The symbol confers value on the possessor, rather than the other way around (i.e.,
the possessor’s real skills are the basis for the symbol’s value).
Goldman (1992) has explored this concrete, political economic change in symbolism in
great depth. He calls the new symbols or signs “commodity-signs” to objectify their polit-
ical-economic basis, character, and function. Signs have become commodity-signs to add
value to products by misleading consumers with phony appearances that promise all
kinds of psychological and social satisfactions they cannot deliver.
The pecuniary transformation of symbols into purveyors of illusory signification is the
basis of postmodernism and social constructionism. These two social philosophies endorse
the notion that there is no true reality, and that reality is whatever people make it by assign-
ing symbolic meaning to things. Postmodernism and social constructionism emphasize
the linguistic creation of meaning; they repudiate linguistic denotation of real qualities.
They construe language as an arbitrary attributer of meaning rather than as an expression
of realistic meanings that represent properties of things. This is why they emphasize plu-
ralism of meanings: anybody can assign any meaning to an object, because there is no
particular objective quality that can guide people to a common perception of the thing.
Reality is reduced to an arbitrary symbolic meaning.
Postmodernism and social constructionism unwittingly endorse the transformation of
symbols that consumer capitalism produced. By championing this transformation and
not realizing that it was produced by consumer capitalism in order to exploit consumers,
academics in these fields promulgate its pecuniary, debilitating features and consequences.
The academics facilitate the arbitrary and specious designation of value by symbols. This
facilitates greater deception by propagandists such as marketers and politicians. All they
have to do is cloak themselves in symbolic flags to earn the respect of the people. All their
nefarious qualities are obscured by duplicitous symbols. The idea that symbols create
reality convinces people that it is acceptable for politicians and products to cloak them-
selves in symbols and that people should not look for an objective reality beyond the
symbols because there is none. However, this is a lie. There is reality behind symbols, and
it comes back to bite people who are fooled by symbols that postmodernists and social
constructionists adulate.

Pecuniary Irrationality
Consumerism demands that people become irrational and impulsive in their needs and
desires. Rational, serious, deliberate desires (i.e., desires and needs that have been sub-
jected to serious, rational analysis and control) would slow economic growth and profit.
“In order for our economy to continue in its present form, people must learn to be fuzzy-
minded and impulsive, for if they were clear-headed and deliberate . . . if we were all
 372 macro cultural psychology

logicians, the economy could not survive. Herein lies a terrifying paradox: in order to
exist economically as we are we must try by might and main to remain stupid” (Henry,
1963, p. 48).
Irrationality takes on a culturally unique form in consumer capitalism. Whereas it was
disguised as truth in other times, it is now openly acknowledged and promoted as irra-
tionality. For instance, believing in reincarnation (that a person’s soul lives on after the
body dies and then somehow enters another body at a later time) or that Jesus Christ was
born via a virgin birth and is now floating around in space, body and soul, and is capable
of listening to every single individual on earth pray in any language and making things
happen to help them is ludicrous; yet these ideas are presented by religious leaders as
truths, and devotees believe they are true despite their defiance of all established laws of
biology, physics, and logic.
The contemporary irrationality of consumer capitalism is different in that viewers know
that the crazy things they see are untrue, yet they enjoy and accept them anyway. When
we see the “good guy” escape from five armed attackers who shoot at him as he flees on
foot, we know this is ridiculous, yet we still find it entertaining. When we see a celebrity
promote a consumer product, we know he or she does not necessarily like it and that he
or she is getting paid to promote it, yet we still accept the endorsement and buy it. Henry
(1963, p. 47) is correct to state “a new kind of truth has emerged—pecuniary pseudo-
truth”—which may be defined as a knowingly false statement or association (between a
product and an event or celebrity) that is so absurd that it cannot be taken literally, yet it
is made as if it were true, and it is accepted as if it were true. People accept as true some-
thing that they know (in the back of their mind) is not true.
Pecuniary pseudo-logic complements pseudo-truth:

Most people are not obsessive truth seekers; they do not yearn to get to the bottom
of things; they are willing to let absurd or merely ambiguous statements pass. And
this undemandingness that does not insist that the world stand up and prove that
it is real, this air of relaxed wooly-mindedness . . . are important to the American
economy, for they make possible an enormous amount of selling that could not
otherwise take place. . . . This kind of thinking—which accepts proof that is not
proof—is an essential intellectual factor in our economy, for if people were careful
thinkers it would be difficult to sell anything. (Henry, 1963, pp. 49, 48)

This is a new cultural form of irrationality. Other forms of irrationality propose that
untrue statements are true—for example, the statement that Jesus was born from a virgin
birth, or that Jesus is floating around in the sky listening to everything that everyone says
in any language and answering these diverse prayers, or that a dead person becomes
reincarnated in a new body, is absurd, yet devotees actually believe that such statements
are true. Contemporary consumers recognize that they accept and enjoy things they
know are ridiculous. They are repudiating and discounting truth as irrelevant. The previ-
ous irrationality did not go this far; rather, it misconstrued myth as truth. It was wrong
about what truth and reality are, but it still supported them. It never discounted them as
irrelevant. This relates to the way that consumers retain unrealized, frustrated ideals, as
we discussed in the section on disillusionment.
 373 Concrete Macro Culture and Psychology

Most third graders realize that advertisements present false images of products in order
to get people to buy them. Yet this general belief about advertising does not provide a
“cognitive defense” against the influence of advertising. Children continue to value and
desire products that are advertised (John, 2008, pp. 229–230). This is because they have
learned to suspend their rational knowledge about ads and to cultivate desires, feelings,
perceptions, and cognitions (values) based upon appealing, glitzy images. They give reign
to these irrational desires, feelings, perceptions, and cognitions because they have sus-
pended their knowledge about the untrustworthiness of ads. Rational knowledge is no
argument (or defense) against misleading ads once people have been socialized to ignore
it—and the media conspire diligently to induce this suspension.
Consumerist irrationality openly says, “It’s bad for you (e.g., it’s expensive, fattening,
unnecessary, silly, misleading), but do it (i.e., buy it) anyway.” This is probably the first time
in history that people have openly disdained truth and reality as a basis for their actions. The
consequences are obviously dangerous, for people will knowingly do the most irrational,
dangerous things simply because they want to. They agree with you that it’s crazy, but they do
it in spite of this. They do not try to rationalize it. Rationalization has been expunged. People
do not need to justify their action; they simply do what they want. Clearly, “the human condi-
tion is undergoing a historic mutation before our very eyes” (Dufour, 2008, p. 13).
This new cultural form of irrationality has commercial value. It allows marketers to
intensify their boisterous images, appeals, and claims in order to spur consumerist behav-
ior to unlimited heights. They can make the most outrageous appeals with the most sensa-
tionalistic imagery and still have an effect on purchasing behavior. Marketers do not have
to pretend that their appeals are true or realistic. Nobody expects them to be true or real.
Marketers have free hand to use any gimmick to seduce us to buy. The more irrational
consumer psychology becomes, the more compliant it is, for it has no basis for rejecting
consumerist appeals. It cannot reject them for being ridiculous or harmful, because these
criteria have been eliminated. People will reject products only because they are not appeal-
ing—but then other appealing ones will come along, and people will buy them on this
basis. (This is what causes many personal bankruptcies.) Absurdity that is unhinged from
any claim to truth is free to expand upon itself. It keeps driving toward ever more absurdity.
It never has to justify anything.
Accordingly, the more absurd and outlandish images are, the more functional they are
in inducing people to buy unnecessary, harmful things without question. Marketers have
a vested interest in promoting absurdity to the greatest extent possible. The more absurd
movies and video games are, and the more titillating people find them, the better, for they
are cultivating an acceptance of absurdity that is economically profitable. Thus, rather
than being rejected for their absurdity, these programs are promoted.
Junk food producers want you to purchase junk food on the basis of irrational appeals
because rational appeals about nutritional quality would lead to rejection of the pro-
duct. Therefore, rationality has to be eliminated as a thought process and a basis for
consumption. A new mentality has to be reengineered to get you purchase unnecessary
and harmful products. That mentality is as bad for you as the products are. Indeed, only
if you adopt a bad mentality will you imbibe bad products. Psychology must be adjusted
to macro cultural factors, and when the latter are bad for you, your psychology will be
also. It is arguably the case that consumer psychology is more mystified, manipulated,
 374 macro cultural psychology

and irrational than previous forms were, because consumerism is such a ubiquitous cul-
tural pressure. Other societies required irrationality to support particular purposes and
activities; for example, faith in religious myths was necessary to foster acquiescence to
religious authority, but this did not require a generalized, constant irrationality outside
the Church. However, because consumerism is ubiquitous and constant (in order to gen-
erate continuous sales and profit), irrationality must be ubiquitous and constant. Because
consumerism is a more insistent cultural pressure than most other forms, the psychology
it promotes must be more insistent and general as well.
Because irrationality is functional for consumerism, the more prevalent that consum-
erism is, the more that irrationality must be cultivated. Since virtually everything nowa-
days is commodified as a consumer product, it is necessary to expand irrationality into
virtually every corner of life so as to induce consumption everywhere. Just as our needs
had to be converted from needs for particular things to infinite, general need, so irratio-
nality is converted from a particular oversight to a general state of mind that is constantly
open to manipulation. To accomplish this, marketers inundate us with myths, exaggera-
tions, distortions, illogic, and lies at every turn.
Capitalism thrives on the degradation of people not just at production (at work) but in
consumption as well. In fact, the degradation of human capacities may be more extensive
during leisure time when people are having fun than when they are working. At the very
time when people think they are most free from capitalist exploitation, they are actually
most dominated by it. They are rendered more irrational, compliant, and lacking in voli-
tion and self-control by consumerism in their leisure, when they believe they are most in
control of their lives, than when they are working for a boss in conditions where they
know they have no control.

Pecuniary Cognitive Associations

Social psychological research into consumer psychology found an important cognitive
principle that is exploited by marketers to sell unnecessary, harmful products. Consumer
psychologists have documented that when either processing capacity or processing moti-
vation decreases, the impact of prior categorical knowledge in the form of stereotypes
increases. This is particularly important in the case of brand names and images. “If con-
sumers were either unable or unwilling to elaborate on the product information, their
judgments and decisions were based on the implications of the brand” (Bless & Greifeneder,
2009, p. 115). In addition, knowledge/expertise about a product is inversely related to reli-
ance on categorical stereotypes. Consequently, ignorance is helpful for selling products
through extraneous images. One study found that naïve consumers were more swayed by
images such as a product’s country of origin or brand membership in a stated category
(e.g., “reliable car” or “sporty car”) than were consumers who were informed about the
product (Bless & Greifeneder, 2009, p. 117).
Thus, it is in marketers’ interest to dampen consumers’ knowledge, processing capacity,
and motivation to scrutinize products and make careful purchasing decision. The lazier
consumers are about scrutinizing products, the more they will be swayed to buy them by
contrived images, associations, proclamations, and brand stereotypes. Marketers thus
want us passive and lazy in the area of cognition.
 375 Concrete Macro Culture and Psychology

Marketing studies have demonstrated an additional, pernicious cognitive principle

regarding truth. Advertising claims that are repeated over and over and rendered more
familiar are perceived as more truthful than they would be in the absence of repetition.
In other words, truth is identified with familiarity, rather than with objectivity and criti-
cal analysis (Goldberg, 2008, p. 941). Here we see that truth has been reengineered by
corporate leaders to be compatible with propagandistic advertisements used to market
products. This is functional for the powers that be, which control levers of information
such as advertising budgets and commercial media that are dependent on these budgets,
for they have the power to reiterate messages favorable to them, and these will be accepted
as truthful because they have been reiterated so many times.
Another cognitive principle that is exploited for marketing is that happy moods increase
the likelihood that individuals will rely on prior categorical knowledge, whereas sad
moods increase the impact of individuating exemplar-specific information (Bless &
Greifeneder, 2009, p. 116). This is why marketers constantly seek to put us in a happy,
excited mood through music, images, smiling models, and fun scenarios.

Pecuniary Maternal Love and Child Psychology

Marketers not only sought to reengineer the operation, or form, of our emotions, percep-
tions, cognition, and memory by making them impulsive, insatiable, superficial, transient,
easily sated and distracted, and mediated by commodities. Marketers also sought to incul-
cate specific emotions, perceptions, thinking, etc. that could facilitate the consumerist
imperative. Elsewhere (Ratner, 2007a) I have used the research of sociologist Daniel Cook
(2004) to document how a new maternal love was cultivated in the 1920s and 1930s by
clothing manufacturers and marketers in order to induce people to consume quantities of
expensive clothing.

Caveats
While consumerism is a powerful economic, ideological, and psychological force, it by
no means is universal. The fact that people adopt consumerist psychology does not mean
that the entirety of their psychology—cognition, emotions, motivation, self—is consum-
erist. Consumerism is only one macro cultural influence on psychology, and it affects
only a portion of psychology. In other domains, a consumer may think rationally, control
his or her emotions, and have rational motives. It is an empirical question for macro
cultural psychology to explore how extensive consumer psychology is in the social and
psychological lives of people. We need to research the extent to which people’s emotions,
reasoning, motivation, and self-concept take the form of consumer psychology. We need
to document just how deeply consumer psychology affects psychological phenomena in
different social domains (e.g., in school, at the mall, in interpersonal relations with family
and friends, at work, in church).
A critique of consumerism should not be construed as a condemnation of the produc-
tion and purchase of all products under capitalism. Many products are useful, elegant,
and beautiful, and many make life easier. I am criticizing consumerism, which is the pro-
duction of indistinguishable, sometimes unnecessary and harmful goods and services
 376 macro cultural psychology

coupled with attempts to induce people to buy them by creating illusory images and
engineering deleterious forms of need, desire, thinking, motivation, and self-concept.
To solve this problem, we need to articulate a postcapitalist, democratic-cooperative
kind of consumerism.
To solve the problem of consumerism, we must distinguish abstract and concrete issues.
The abstract issue is that people are turning to external social, material, and conceptual
matters as forms of identity. This is not problematic. People always identify with external
things such as social groups, artifacts (the flag, the Constitution, their house), and cultural
concepts (justice, truth). People always compare themselves to others and regard them-
selves in terms of social criteria (the generalized “other”). This is necessary for cultural
preservation and all the advantages culture offers. The problem with consumer psychology
is the concrete content of the things we identify with and the concrete cultural psychology
that we are induced to develop in order to eagerly consume those things. We identify with
the superficial mannerisms and physical appearances of cultural icons; we do not identify
with their altruism or honesty. We should not oppose consumerism by opposing all social,
material, and conceptual sources of our psychology and identity, For this would make us
self-centered and antisocial. We should, rather, oppose the concrete cultural content of
consumerism—the unnecessary, harmful products that we are expected to consume, and
the accompanying psychology that animates us to consume them.

Psychology of Oppression
Consumer psychology is a vivid example of the psychology of oppression. This must be
reflected in a Psychology of oppression that regards consumer capitalism and consumer
psychology as exploitive. This leads to an inversion of the conventional view of consumer-
ism, from an activity that sells goods and products to benefit the individual to an activity
that finds more and more features of the individual to exploit and stultify, thereby depriv-
ing him or her of fulfillment and advancement. Selling us goods and services captures
more of our competencies in the service of alien political-economic interests of consump-
tion. It denigrates them to impulsive, superficial, distracted, insatiable, and irrational pro-
cesses that clearly disempower the populace by mystifying it and inducing it to accept the
exploitive system. Consumerism generates sales that drive the exploitive production pro-
cess. Consumerism ultimately leads to greater exploitation of the working class. We have
seen that consumerism is funded by consumer debt, which always impoverishes people
by adding interest to costs.
The more we rely on commodities for our identity, the less we are interested in cultivat-
ing social intimacy and psychological development—and the less capable we become of
cultivating them. Consumerism makes us less curious about others, more self-absorbed,
more superficial, distracted, bored, and more interested in sensations and novelty. We fail
to develop genuine social relationships and psychological competencies because we rely
instead on consumer products for our identity. Consumerism thus undermines genuine
cultural and psychological development. In this way, it creates the social psychology nec-
essary for its success. The more people feel insecure, lonely, empty, and meaningless, the
more they will turn to consumerism, which then decimates their cultural and psycho-
logical development further.
 377 Concrete Macro Culture and Psychology

We must recognize that oppressed, oppressive psychology affects our agency. Consumers
actively accept and perpetuate consumerism through their consumer psychology. They
identify themselves with sneakers, they love to shop, they feel good buying on impulse,
they feel excited by sensationalistic images, they eschew serious study of issues, and they
feel empowered making the small purchasing decisions that are made available to them.
This is a reason that social critique and reform are so difficult to achieve—because people
feel agentive, and they feel agentive because they have truncated their sense of agency to
fit the constraints of shopping choices.
The Psychology of oppression, rooted in a critical analysis of political economy, leads to
novel insights into psychology. It leads to a reevaluation of psychological phenomena. For
example, American children (“tweens” and adolescents) are normally expected to express
their agency/individuality, and are respected for doing so, because it is regarded as an
action that will naturally develop their self-esteem, confidence, and social skills. However,
if we contextualize (historicize) this behavior within the capitalist political economy, we
reframe it as tainted by consumerism. As we have seen, consumer capitalism encourages
children to assert themselves vis-à-vis parental authority in order to demand freedom to
consume consumer products. Children’s self-assertion, then, is not an expression of their
own desires or developmental trajectory; it has been manipulated by marketers to express
consumerist desires for products. Children’s self-expression is part of the bourgeois indi-
vidualism that alienates people from collective involvement.
This cultural-political analysis adds important insights into the full nature of children’s
self-expression. It corrects the apolitical, decontextualized view that children are simply
developing their competencies. Whereas such a view construes this behavior positively,
macro cultural psychology illuminates negative features that escape the attention of
culturally-politically naïve viewpoints.
It is alarming that social scientists accept truncated agency as true agency that resists
and renegotiates macro cultural factors and the powerful ruling class. Sassatelli con-
tends that consumerism involves decommoditization as consumers adapt mass-produced
commodities for their own personal uses. Thus, customers decommoditize a prefabri-
cated bookshelf by taking it home, putting it in the appropriate room, unpacking it, assem-
bling it, and deciding what objects to put on it. The trivial nature of these acts (unpacking
the shelf and placing it in the proper room) demonstrates how limited personal action/
meaning is, and how impotent decommoditization is relative to the massive presence of
commoditization. Far from displacing commoditization, personal acts and meanings in
capitalism are truncated, impotent responses that function well within the parameters of
capitalism (Korczynski & Ott, 2004). To glorify the unpacking of a commodity as an act
of decommoditization is as absurd as glorifying a good-night prayer said by a prisoner as
a weakening of the institution of incarceration.
Consumer products function as alienated mediational means. “Normal” mediational
means structure our individual efforts to become a certain kind of person. Consumer
products, on the other hand, provide a ready-made identity that absolves us of the need to
expend effort to form ourselves. We do define ourselves through our products, but this is
a more passive, compliant self-definition than that of the hardworking student who assid-
uously hones his or her psychological competencies in order to measure up to academic
criteria for intelligence.
 378 macro cultural psychology

Consumer psychology has created one of the most destructive psychologies in history.
The marginalization of rationality, voluntary control over our needs and desires, and the
cultivation of deep, personal attributes, combined with an increase in superficial, distract-
ible, rapidly sated and waning interests and attention, is inimical to genuine fulfillment
and freedom. It distracts us from important pursuits such as political activism and inter-
personal relations. People spend far more time shopping for, adorning themselves with,
and talking about consumer products than they do struggling to comprehend and control
their social systems. Consumerism is widely recognized to interfere with family interac-
tions, as families watch television while eating instead of conversing, or children rush to
their computers immediately after eating rather than socializing with their parents.

Consumer Psychology and Mainstream Psychology,

Cross-Cultural Psychology, Activity Theory
Consumerism contains a psychology, but it is not derived from internal psychology as
an independent realm. Consumerism is not explainable in terms of abstract, contentless
psychological phenomena such as insecurity or low self-esteem. Abstract psychological
phenomena such as insecurity do not instigate particular behaviors such as irrational,
uncontrollable consumerism. An insecure woman could compensate for insecurity in
any number of ways. She could become a model employee or community leader in order
to be liked and to feel more secure about herself. She could meditate to achieve the same
goal.
Just as a given general psychological phenomenon can be expressed via multiple behav-
iors, so a given behavior—such as consumerism—can be instigated by multiple general
psychological phenomena. Secure individuals may engage in consumerism just as inse-
cure people do. A secure man might use consumerism to express just how capable he is
of participating in social norms. He might pride himself on displaying his success rather
than feeling insecure in some way.
Likewise, consumer psychology is not derivable from or reducible to the general
psychological tendency to emulate wealthy people. That hardly captures the concrete
consumer psychology that we have explored above.
The same problem befuddles cognitive psychological approaches that postulate certain
“laws of thinking” to account for consumer choices—e.g., the existence of heuristic algo-
rithms about decision making under conditions of risk and incomplete information. All
the politics and economics of consumerism are swept away by the focus on internal, heu-
ristic cognitive strategies. Concrete, capitalist consumerism is dissolved into an abstract
“risk taking” situation that is handled by abstract, natural cognitive strategies for handling
“risk.”
Nor can the panoply of biological explanations of behavior that psychobiologists
propound account for the concrete features of consumer psychology.
Rather than deriving from general psychological constructs, consumerism structures spe-
cific psychological phenomena that facilitate and reinforce its specific cultural character.
Mainstream psychology, including psychobiology, has nothing to say about these vital
aspects of our psychology. Therefore, the conventional approach of mainstream psychol-
ogy would lead us away from attending to and comprehending them. Because mainstream
 379 Concrete Macro Culture and Psychology

psychology does not address concrete, cultural aspects of psychology, it would interfere
with the study of them if we were to use it as a theoretical and methodological tool. This is
why it is important to reject this in our field of work. We cannot eclectically use main-
stream psychology along with sociology, history, anthropology, and political economy to
form the study of cultural psychology. Including psychobiology would distract and divert
us from our goal.
It is also unclear how other approaches within cultural psychology would analyze con-
sumer psychology. It is unclear how cross-cultural psychologists and activity theorists
would analyze it. Would their theories lead to probing its political-economic basis and
function? Would their theories lead them to discern the mystification and oppression at
the heart of consumer advertising? Would it lead to discerning the concrete cultural
character of consumer psychology—the irrationality, superficiality, impulsiveness, insa-
tiability, and commodification? Would it help discern how oppressed and oppressive this
psychology is? Would they discern that this culturally formed psychology constitutes the
active agency of people that promulgates consumerism?

ENDNOTES
i. While the prison system is notoriously broken (e.g., 70 of released prisoners return to
jail, most within 3 months of being released), it is functional for maintaining the politics
of exploitation. For instance, most prisoners are poor blacks and Latinos (imprisoned for
drug offenses). Most prisons are located in rural areas in predominantly white communi-
ties. Prisoners are counted as residing in the locale of their prison, not in their hometowns.
This inflates the populations of the white communities containing prisons, and this gains
them more congressional representatives (allocated according to population), while black
communities lose representation in Congress. This means that white communities have
increased voting strength in Congress through their greater number of Congressmen. And
the cruel irony is that the black prisoners in the white communities, who are the basis
of this increased electoral power, are prohibited from voting! Thus, the prisoners’ voting
power is expropriated from them and used to increase the voting power of whites. This is
one functional benefit the prison system offers to the exploitive status quo.
ii. Compare the difference in impact on the public between organizing a community/
cooperative electrical utility and running a corporation that generates electricity and sells
it to the public. In the first case, electricity is owned by the community, which provides it
at the lowest price because that is best for the community that owns it. In the second case,
a private corporation owns the electricity, produces it at a profit, and sells it to people at
the highest rate possible because that is best for the investors in the corporation. In the
first case, control and creativity in designing and operating the electrical system are in the
hands of the community. The community decides on water policies by voting for represen-
tatives on the board of directors of the electrical utility. The community also sets working
conditions and wages of their members who work in the utility. With corporate ownership,
the control and creativity in designing and operating the electrical system are in the hands
of the corporate executives, with no input from the community. Working conditions and
wages of the employees are autocratically set by the managers. The workers have no control
over their working conditions, just as the purchasers of electricity have no control over the
utility that provides them with electricity. The people have been excluded from control
over the goods and services they use.
 380 macro cultural psychology

iii. The ruling class maintains its elite position through a web of social, economic, political,
philanthropic, educational, and recreational networks. These serve not only to domi-
nate the population, but also to solidify the networks’ own cohesion, which is necessary
to their social survival. For example, the Committee for Economic Development (CED)
was founded by executives of the Ford Foundation and Ford Motor Company during
World War II. It was an elite group of social leaders that included Republican financiers,
the top management of over 100 leading industrial corporations, the chair of the RAND
Corporation, the dean of the University of Chicago’s school of business, and the director of
the Center for the Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences. The CED had a subcommit-
tee of Economic Policy for National Security. The CED demonstrates cooperation among
the upper class to ensure their class rule. It also attests to the broad range of concerns the
upper class has, including national security (Amadae, 2003, p. 55).
The Council on Foreign Relations is another exclusive organization whose 4,500 mem-
bers include the political and economic elite: David Rockefeller; Henry Kissinger; Bill
Clinton; Zbigniew Brzezinski; Paul Wolfowitz; Colin Powell; Condoleeza Rice; Richard
Perle; Robert Gates; James Baker III; Stephen Hadley; Douglas Feith; L. Paul Bremer III;
John Bolton; John Negroponte; former secretary of state Madeleine Albright; George
Soros; supreme court justice Stephen Breyer; Lowes/CBS CEO Laurence A. Tisch; former
General Electric Co. CEO Jack Welsh; CNN CEO W. Thomas Johnson; former chair-
man and CEO of the Washington Post/Newsweek/International Herald Tribune Katherine
Graham (and today her successor son); Dick Cheney; George H. W. Bush; former national
security advisor to President Clinton Samuel “Sandy” Berger; former CIA director George
Tenet; former Federal Reserve Bank governor Alan Greenspan; present Federal Reserve
Bank governor Benjamin Bernanke; former World Bank president James D. Wolfensohn;
CS First Boston Bank CEO and former Federal Reserve Bank governor Paul Volcker; top
CitiGroup directors John Reed, William Rhodes, Stanford Weill, and Stanley Fischer (who
was in turn formerly No. 2 at the International Monetary Fund); economists Jeffrey Sachs
and Lester Thurow; former treasury secretary, Goldman Sachs CEO, and CitiGroup direc-
tor Robert E. Rubin; Newt Gingrich; former national security advisor to George H. W.
Bush, Brent Scowcroft; and Kenneth Lay, the recently deceased Enron CEO and member
of the Trilateral Commission.
These members of the political and corporate elite—both Democrats and Republicans—
meet together in closed sessions to discuss mutually agreeable policies. The public is
excluded from these powerful decisions. Moreover, CFR’s “Rule of Non-attribution” specifi-
cally bans its members from ever publicly invoking the CFR in any way or manner or even
disclosing matters discussed behind closed doors at its private meetings.
iv. Leontiev goes on to say that this alienation between objective and subjective conscious-
ness is the concrete historical form that meaning and sense take. Vygotsky defined meaning
as objective social meaning, while sense is a personal accent that is different from mean-
ing (see Levitin, 1982, p. 81). Leontiev usefully identifies concrete cultural forms that this
distinction takes.
v. This fact—that emotions and all psychological phenomena reflect cultural values and
practices—invalidates the usefulness of measures of subjective well-being that ask people
whether they are happy or not about certain issues. Because people’s happiness is culturally
organized and mediated, it reflects only cultural norms, not whether the happiness is fulfill-
ing or beneficial. People may feel happy engaging in all kinds of sensationalistic, superficial,
stultifying activities simply because these are socially valued and encouraged.
 381 Concrete Macro Culture and Psychology

vi. The ideology of bourgeois individualism loves scandals. Scandals are extreme individual
behavior that highlights the individual as an extreme actor and overshadows structural
factors. The question is always a personal one: “How did they do it?” The locus is in the
individual. Individualism loves this because it preserves the myth of individual action.
This is why when Paul Wolfowitz was forced to resign from the presidency of the World
Bank in 2008 because he had had an affair with an employee, it was headline news; how-
ever, the conservative, corporate business policies he implemented at the World Bank
were never discussed in the corporate-owned news media.
vii. This is true for all kinds of psychology: a rational psychology committed to critically
understanding social life, for example, so that it can analyze and improve it also requires
an extensive, consistent system of elements that contribute to this character.
viii. Diabetes and obesity are inevitable results of the deliberate social reengineering of
eating and food. Diabetes and obesity are directly and deliberately caused by the exploi-
tive, profit-driven political economy of capitalism, and they remain economically func-
tional to it. It is because they are rooted in the core of society that diabetes and obesity
are intractable problems. Diabetes and obesity are crystallizations of the political
economy; they can never be treated on their own through individual acts of dieting and
self-control.
ix. This cultural psychology of hooking up is only elucidated by an analysis that employs
qualitative methodology. Quantitative measures of overt sexual behavior do not capture
this cultural psychology, and may easily be misinterpreted to indicate that young adults
simply crave sex.
 6
macro cultural psychological
analysis of micro-level psychology
versus micro cultural psychology

The word psychology is polysemous. It denotes the phenomenon of psychology (e.g., your
psychology, your emotions) as well as the discipline that studies psychological phenom-
ena. Micro and macro cultural psychology have the same polysemous meanings. Thus,
micro psychology refers to a level of psychological phenomena—micro-level phenomena
that occur on the interpersonal level of interaction—as well as an approach to studying
psychology that emphasizes individual and interpersonal processes as the basis of all
psychological phenomena and as the basis of society.
These two meanings of micro and macro psychology are orthogonal. In other words,
micro-level psychological phenomena can be explained by both approaches. This may be
diagrammed as in Figure 6.1.
The field of macro cultural psychology can explain both levels, the field of micro
cultural psychology can explain both levels, micro phenomena can be explained by
both approaches, and macro phenomena can be explained by both approaches.
It is important to emphasize this orthogonality to correct the mistaken impression
that each discipline pertains to only one level of phenomena (i.e., the misimpression
that micro phenomena are the province of micro cultural psychology and that macro
cultural psychology cannot address them). Orthogonality leaves open the possibility
that the discipline of micro cultural psychology does not comprise the sole and best
analysis of micro-level phenomena. They may be explained, and may even be explained
better, by the discipline of macro cultural psychology. Similarly, macro cultural
psychological phenomena can be (and are) explained by both approaches. Macro cultur-
al psychology does not have a monopoly on the study of macro cultural psycho-
logical phenomena such as macro emotions (e.g., patriotism, fear of an economic
depression). The discipline of micro cultural psychology claims to explain macro cultural
phenomena also, as emanating from interpersonal negotiations of psychological
processes.
Figures 3.3 and 3.4 in Chapter 3 depict the different emphases of macro and micro
cultural psychology. Macro cultural psychology emphasizes emergent, structured, objec-
tified, objective, enduring cultural factors that structure our lives in accordance with regu-
larized, shared behavioral norms—including psychological norms. The interaction among
individuals occurs within these parameters. Micro cultural psychology emphasizes

382
 383 Micro-Level Psychology versus Micro Cultural Psychology

The field of macro cultural psychology

Micro phenomena Macro phenomena

The field of micro cultural psychology

fig. 6.1 The Orthogonal Relation Between Phenomena and Disciplines.

interpersonal interactions among individuals as the basis of culture. Culture is the end
product, or by-product, of interpersonal interactions. Cultural principles and dynamics
are reduced to individual negotiations and constructions. Verbal dialogue is important to
micro cultural psychologists because it typifies face-to-face interactions. Dialogues are
valued for how they express personal interests.
This chapter begins with an explanation of how macro cultural psychology may account
for micro cultural psychological phenomena. The second part of the chapter explains
how micro cultural psychologists articulate micro cultural psychological phenomena and
macro cultural psychological phenomena. Finally, we shall evaluate the two treatments of
micro and macro cultural phenomena.

MACRO CULTURAL PSYCHOLOGY’S

EXPLANATION OF MICRO
PSYCHOLOGICAL PHENOMENA
Macro cultural psychology emphasizes the fact that micro psychological phenomena that
occur within interpersonal relations are actually structured in various ways by macro
cultural factors.

The everyday is for certain authors, what people do in the interstices of time and
space—walking down the street, riding the subway, daydreaming—when not
occupied at labor or leisure. . . . Still others employ the everyday almost mystically,
characterizing it as the residuum of life, that which escapes from relations of
production and from political institutions. Some scholars invoking this definition
of the everyday see it as perhaps the only space of freedom in a capitalist world
and search within its boundaries for evidence of resistance, for signs that even
when inhabiting seemingly totalizing systems, people nonetheless fought back in
small but crucial ways. . . . The most interesting and important observations to
emerge from this literature is that it is in the everyday world that politics and
the polity, economics and the economy, aesthetics and beauty, are concretized,
 384 macro cultural psychology

experienced, and perhaps transformed—in short, lived. The everyday is historical

and contextual.
The challenge, therefore, is to grasp the manifestations of the very large and
abstract structures and transformations of the world within the small details of
life. . . . (Auslander, 1996, pp. 2–4)

This statement by a historian is a clear articulation of macro cultural psychology. As

I have mentioned, historians’ research into psychology is the best example of and guide
for cultural psychology.
The structuring of micro interactions by macro factors can occur directly, as when
social institutions issue rules of acceptable and unacceptable behavior. Micro-level inter-
actions within a family, or between a church member and a priest, or between a resident
and his or her congressman, or between a customer and a sales agent, are interactions
within a social institution and are structured by the organization of the institution. When
you are in a theater or classical concert hall, your interactions with your companion
during the performance are limited by social norms of comportment. You are not free to
speak to each other loudly, or belch loudly, or talk on your cell phone. Ritterhouse clearly
demonstrated how interpersonal interactions in the Jim Crow South were directly struc-
tured by the racial code of etiquette. Parents of white and black children socialized them
in strict conformity to the racial code, lest they violate it and receive punishment.
Interpersonal interactions also occur outside of direct institutional control, in the inter-
stices or spaces between institutions. Friendships, romance, sex, recreation, and telecom-
munications are examples. I call these “interstitial interpersonal interactions.” As Auslander
said, even these are structured indirectly by general models, mediational means, and pres-
sures emanating from sources outside the immediate context of interactions.

Socialization Practices
For instance, parents in different social classes interact with their children at home in
corresponding ways.

Working class mothers tended to contradict their children in a direct and matter-
of-fact manner and that narrative conflict continued until the child produced
or agreed to the expected answer or the mother got the last word. Mothers did
not soften their oppositions or give in quickly, requiring children to present and
defend their claims in the face of quite resolute opposition. By contrast, although
conflicts occurred at similar rates in Longwood, the middle-class mothers
were more likely to mitigate their oppositions to child narrators, so that the
conflictual nature of the interaction became quite muted. Correct responses were
either not required, or the mothers discreetly provided correct answers. When
the children contributed obviously incorrect information, mothers either pro-
vided gentle, indirect cues as to the correct response or allowed the topic to
end after wryly marking the situation as odd or humorous. (Miller et al., 2005,
pp. 130–131)
 385 Micro-Level Psychology versus Micro Cultural Psychology

Play
Play is surely an interstitial micro-level behavior, yet it is socially structured and variable.
In the Preface, we encounter the phenomenon of black and white children playing
together in the Jim Crow south. This would be an example of behavior at the interstices of
racist culture. It seems to contradict the racism that permeated all adult institutions at the
time—even children’s institutions such as school which were segregated. However, the
institutions that formed the boundaries of this interstitial play permeated it. The very
restriction of interracial play to zones apart from normal, segregated institutions gave
play an artificial, unreal, temporary quality that was different from normal, racially segre-
gated interactions: “Their play was almost always limited to the interstitial spaces of white
supremacy—yards, fields, creeks, kitchens, and sidewalks—because white sensibilities
insisted on keeping black children out of parks, playgrounds, and all but the service-
oriented areas of white homes” (Ritterhouse, 2006, p. 164).
Furthermore, impending racism always tempered the freedom of interracial play for
black children. Ritterhouse (2006) explains this as follows:

Black and white children interacted often, some every day, their encounters
unfolding in yards, on streets, and in other spaces between the high segregated
zones of school and church and parlor. Because they faced exclusion or subordi-
nation or abuse, blacks seem to have understood the lessons—and the limita-
tions—of interracial contact much more clearly and at an earlier age than whites
did, usually well before puberty. To them, friendly play was not meaningless, but
it was an exception to the workings of a society structured around white domi-
nance. Inevitably the day would come when black and white could no longer play
together at all, much less as equals. . . .
Interracial play was hardly a golden moment. There were almost always restric-
tions both on play and in play. . . . Plus, the pain of separation or discrimination
would always come. The limitations on play were many. Black children could play
with some white children and not others, in some neighborhoods and not others.
(pp. 146, 164)

Interracial play was also a temporary exception to racist culture for white children. We
mention in the Preface that it quickly became a forgotten alternative for whites as they
entered adolescence, and that it had virtually no affect on moderating white mistreat-
ment of blacks.
Cross-cultural psychological research confirms the macro cultural structuring of play.
Mejía-Arauz et al. (2007, p. 1001) examined how 31 triads of 6- to 10-year-old children
from 3 cultural backgrounds organized their interactions while folding Origami figures.
Triads of children whose families had immigrated to the United States from indigenous
heritage regions of México (and whose mothers averaged only 7 grades of schooling)
coordinated more often as an ensemble, whereas triads of European heritage U.S. chil-
dren whose mothers had extensive schooling more often engaged dyadically or individu-
ally. When the European heritage children did engage as an ensemble, this often involved
chatting rather than nonverbal conversation regarding folding, which was more common
 386 macro cultural psychology

among the Mexican heritage children. Mexican heritage U.S. triads whose mothers had
extensive schooling showed an intermediate pattern or resembled the European heritage
children.
A coordinated ensemble is defined as follows: The three children engage with one
another, building on one another’s contributions in a shared agenda in which the partici-
pants are “on the same page,” with correspondence in their actions or coordinated fol-
low-up across the children’s speech and/or actions. Contributions build on the previous
move of another child—not just on taking turns, “collective monologue,” or doing the
same activity independently,]. Engagement as a coordinated ensemble includes children’s
observing one another, showing keen involvement, and keeping pace with the interac-
tion. The interaction is the predominant form of engagement across the segment, with
more than a single initiation and response.
The Mexican-heritage (MexHerit) Pueblo children engaged in coordinated ensembles in
more segments than European-heritage (EurHerit) children [t(18)53.04, p5.007]. In fact,
they did so twice as much. This was the most frequent form of social organization of the
MexHerit Pueblo triads, and the least frequent structure for the EurHerit MoSchool triads.
Furthermore, the MexHerit Pueblo triads coordinated in a very flowing and smooth, fine-
tuned manner—with markedly similar rhythm and pace—and all three children adapted
their contributions together seamlessly more than four times as often as the EurHerit
MoSchool triads. The EurHerit MoSchool triads engaged dyadically more often than the
MexHerit Pueblo triads; in fact, this was the most frequent form of social organization of
the EurHerit MoSchool triads. The number of segments in which none of the EurHerit
children engaged together was not significantly more than that among the MexHerit
Pueblo children.
More group-oriented societies such as Mexico produce children who learn how to
cooperate smoothly. More individualistic societies such as Western Europe and the
United States produce children who learn how to interact less integrally with others—
the Western children formed dyads out of triads by excluding the third member of the
triad, and they did not learn sophisticated, fine-grained, smooth, cooperative, collective
interaction. Behavior in groups is determined not simply by the different number of indi-
viduals that children interact with, but also by their manner of interaction.
This is an important confirmation of macro cultural psychology, because it demon-
strates that even informal play among young children is organized by macro cultural
practices and values. Informal, interpersonal behavior is not random, personal, or natu-
ral; it is structured by macro cultural factors and bears their imprint at early childhood.
This is as it should be, because macro cultural factors need to be supported by an exten-
sive network of diverse behaviors that are cultivated from birth. Childhood is functional
in the sense that it socializes children to prepare them to participate in cultural life.
Childhood behavior must and does embody macro cultural elements. Caretakers func-
tion as cultural agents who transmit macro cultural requirements to children at a young
age and in diverse settings. Play is a cultural behavior that reinforces macro cultural fac-
tors; it is not a self-expression of personal idiosyncrasies. Again, this is necessary if chil-
dren are to grow up as cultural members.i
A more specific analysis of family interactions in the United States reveals that the
rise of commerce and industry in the 1930s forced parents to change their treatment
 387 Micro-Level Psychology versus Micro Cultural Psychology

of their children. For their children, especially sons, to succeed in the new economy, they
would need far more formal education than previous children had had. This meant that
parents did not prepare their sons for immediate adult farm work; instead they sheltered
them from adult work throughout an extended period of adolescence. Thus, the com-
mercial-industrial economy radically transformed childhood and created adolescence as
a developmental stage. The protected child who was removed from the cash nexus was
also bestowed with more fantasy, play, and emotional involvement than was the child
who was treated as an incipient adult oriented toward work and possessing market value.
The protected child was also more naïve and vulnerable than the child who was prepared
for adult work early on (Ritterhouse, 2006, p. 58). Here, micro-level interpersonal inter-
actions between parents and children were structured by, reflected, and reinforced the
broader commercial-industrial capitalist economy. These interactions were then codified
in laws that pertained to parents and children (e.g., laws prohibited children from work-
ing and required them to attend school, and made parents responsible for enforcing these
behaviors).
Throughout the twentieth century, play for most Americans underwent systematic
change that reflected changes in macro cultural factors, especially consumer capitalism.
Thus, while play was the quintessential interstitial, interpersonal interaction not directly
conducted within capitalist institutions such as factories, it was nevertheless decisively
structured by them. Explaining how will extend the scope of macro cultural psychology
to encompass interstitial micro-level behavior that might be thought to escape influence
from macro cultural factors.
Kline (1998) explains the macro structuring of play across twentieth-century America.
He observes that in the late nineteenth century, children’s play in the middle class became
institutionalized in the domestic family outside the sphere of work and public life. Play
took on the escapist quality of the domestic family, protected from adult, real-world con-
cerns. Play was regarded and practiced as the free exercising of children’s natural capaci-
ties, including imagination. This is the origin of the German word kindergarten—
a garden for children in which they could grow naturally before entering into social
artifices and artifacts. Children’s play was imaginative, self-constructed, and creative,
with lots of singing, dancing, tag, fishing, etc. It used props from the home as tools for
play (e.g., sticks, cooking utensils, and boxes were incorporated into children’s own play
and imaginatively transformed to serve the children’s purposes).
(It is important to note that there was a definite social basis to this form of “free play.”
Working-class children did not experience it much because they did not grow up in pro-
tected, domestic families; their family life and childhood were integrated into work.)
Specialized toys were uncommon at the turn of the century. However, this changed as
play began to be targeted by commercial interests as a fertile market. Toy manufacturers
sprang up, and they organized themselves into the American Toy Manufacturers
Association in 1916 to promote commercial toys in school. They did so, of course, to
increase their profit, and this objective led to the promotion of toys in family play as well.
It is crucial to understand that this process was not simply a technical one of supplying
useful artifacts to awaiting needs, like supplying food to hungry people. It was quite the
opposite: toy promotion and manufacture were primarily an economic process for gen-
erating profit by creating a need for toys for which there was little intrinsic interest.
 388 macro cultural psychology

The aim of generating profit meant that toys could not be left as neutral objects for
children to utilize whenever, however, and as often as they liked, for this could result in
minimal sales if children chose to use the same toys over and over in innovative, imagi-
nary ways, as they had formerly used sticks and boxes. Generating profit from toys
required that enjoyment and excitement come from the toy itself rather than from the
children’s imagination. That way, children would have to purchase more toys to obtain
more excitement. Whereas in the past excitement came from children’s imaginatively
modifying a few objects in multiple ways to generate multiple uses of the same few
objects, consumerism required a reversal of this pattern: namely, that the child’s imagina-
tion be limited to using a toy in a given manner and not modifying it, so that new forms
and uses of objects must come from a quantity of new objects, which would have to be
purchased. Whereas the original pattern expanded the children’s imagination with regard
to a small number of objects, consumerism expanded the number of objects and limited
the children’s imagination. Innovation came from the manufacturers, who designed
novel objects for children who no longer had to exercise their imagination. An inverse
relationship exists between imagination and quantity of objects. The older pattern maxi-
mized imagination and minimized the number of objects necessary for novelty and stim-
ulation; the new pattern maximized the number of objects and minimized the exercising
of the children’s imagination.
New excitement, imagination, and changes in objects had to be purchased from the
outside in the form of more toys, rather than generated in the free exercise of children’s
internal imagination. Stimulation and change had to come from external commodities,
not from internal creativity. In this way, imagination, creativity, and agency became com-
modified: they had to be purchased in the form of commodities, namely, quantities of
diverse toys that could provide the novelty and excitement that the children’s own mind
formerly provided. Conversely, the mind had to be pacified in order for it to accept and
depend upon the externally provided novelty and stimulation. If the mind remained
active and creative, it would find the standardized, stylized consumer products superfi-
cial and boring. The mind had to be pacified to prevent it from resisting its own com-
modification in substitute forms of consumer products. The mind had to believe that
genuine excitement, novelty, and creativity were found in externally manufactured con-
sumer products rather than in its own capacities. It had to learn to feel bored with itself
and to crave more commodities in order to become really excited. The mind had to learn
to renounce its capacities and turn to commodities as truer forms of creativity and excite-
ment. This is the same kind of mental engineering we have noted throughout this book
as creating cultural sensations, cultural perceptions, cultural memories, cultural motiva-
tion, cultural needs, and cultural emotions.
The Barbie doll typified this process. Barbie was extended by manufacturers into a wide
range of auxiliary ensembles such as friends, clothing, home furnishings, cars, bedding,
and curtains. This displaced creative innovation and imagination from the minds of chil-
dren and institutionalized it in the toy manufacturers. Consequently, when children
looked for new ways to play with Barbie, they looked outward to store displays to buy
new ensembles rather than inward into how they could use their imagination to recreate
Barbie in their image. Prolific imagination was replaced by prolific purchasing. The child
 389 Micro-Level Psychology versus Micro Cultural Psychology

is not expressing power through the object but rather receiving it from the object. This
world is animated as much by agentive goods (magical, fetishized) as by active kids. The
toys are agentive in the sense that they are packaged by the manufacturer with characters
and characteristics and personality. Manufacturers’ agency, incarnated in artifacts to
maximize the manufacturers’ commercial interest, displaces children’s agency. True, chil-
dren can manipulate these in simple ways such as changing Barbie’s clothing, but the
choices are prepackaged in the form of outfits that children purchase; children do not
design them artistically.
The commodification of excitement required expropriating it from the creative
endeavor of individuals and making it the property of capitalists who could then sell it to
the people in a profitable form.
This is exactly what happens to natural resources such as water that become privatized.
They are expropriated and then sold back to people. It is what happens to personal activ-
ities such as learning how to swim or applying to college, which are now purchased from
consultants. And it happened in exactly the same way to human labor. Labor was for-
merly the creative product of working individuals. However, it was expropriated by capi-
talists by their controlling resources and workplaces, which are needed in order for
people to engage in labor. People then had to purchase the right to work in the form that
the capitalist desired (and that benefited the capitalist). The purchase price is the surplus
value that the capitalists extract from the workers’ labor. Ownership and creativity are
expropriated from the people and turned over to the capitalists, who then design the
labor in their interests. People then purchase this capitalistically structured labor-right.
Capitalists have replaced the workers’ former creativity, which was inherent in work
when the workers owned it, with the capitalists’ design and creativity.
It is striking that the capitalist labor process was reproduced in children’s play with toys.
The political-economic character of toys imparted a new social character into play and
imagination that was incarnated in the production and distribution of toys. “In the con-
sumer society, play has in fact become a significant mode of consumption and nowhere
more so than in the lives of children” (Kline, 1998, p. 358).
Although play occurred in the interstices of formal capitalist organizations, it was
nevertheless penetrated by consumer capitalism. Play was an activity that therefore con-
tributed to the commodification of consciousness. Play lost its innocent, protected, imag-
inative quality and took on the new, concrete qualities of consumer capitalism. These
included relentless consumption of goods, demands for higher allowances and for indi-
vidual autonomy to spend as much money as possible on whatever the child desired,
commercial-style bargaining between children and parents, insatiable needs, impulsive
emotions/desires, attraction to superficial styling and sensationalism, and the dampen-
ing down of critical thinking. Capitalism hates innocence because it is personal, leisurely,
free, and uninvolved in commercialism.
From this point of view, as commodity production expands it does not simply offer us
more goods to enjoy; on the contrary, it expropriates our subjectivity by selling it to us in
the form of commodities. Far from capitalism’s meeting our desires, it expropriates them,
refashions them in its image, and sells them to us. Commodities not only provide us with
goods; they provide us with a psychology.
 390 macro cultural psychology

Family Interactions
Bishop (2009) documents how interstitial, interpersonal interactions have changed sys-
tematically—and predictably—in the late twentieth century under the pressure of corpo-
rate capitalism. Many forms of family togetherness have faded. These include regularly
eating dinner together, vacationing together, and even watching television together. Most
people report having only two close friends. We spend more time alone in cars driving
individually to socially and physically segregated residential areas. Children between the
ages of 3 and 11 lost 12 hours of free play a week between 1981 and 1997. Moreover, the
remaining free play is occupied mostly by watching television and playing video games—
commercial, impersonal activities. Nowadays, even interpersonal play among children
involves watching an externally provided commercial medium such as television or video
games, with a minimum of spontaneous, creative “making fun” or making up fun, as kids
used to engage in.
Children’s interpersonal relationships (with peers and family members) vary enor-
mously among countries. A compilation of measures that include single-parent house-
holds, the number of times the family eats together and talks together per week, and
how kind and helpful peers are to children among OECD (Organization for Economic
Cooperation and Development) countries found that Italy had the best interpersonal
relations (score of 115) while the United States and United Kingdom had the lowest score,
of 80. Only 40 of German 15-year-olds spend time chatting with their parents several
times a week, while 90 of Hungarian children do so. Only 60 of Finnish 15-year-olds
eat the main meal with their parents several times a week, in contrast to 93 of Italians.
Other personal eating habits are equally structured by society. Whereas 80 of Portuguese
11- to 15-year-olds eat breakfast every school day, only 46 of American children do.
Where 25 of American 13- to 15-year-olds report being overweight, only 6 of their
Polish peers do (UNICEF, 2007). The demographic distribution of personal behaviors
demonstrates that they are structured by different pressures. No personal explanation
can account for the systemic cultural differences in psychology.
Personal relations are not freely chosen, nor are they idiosyncratic in substance, nor are
they truly personal. Of course, if by “personal meanings” one means that a particular
woman bakes peach cobbler on Thursday evenings because she liked the way her Aunt
Sally did this when she was a child, then we can accept this. However, this has nothing to
do with cultural psychology or scientific psychology of any kind.

Home Identification
An additional, powerful example of the macro cultural basis, character, and function of
personal and interpersonal acts comes from Pow’s (2009) detailed analysis of how the
Chinese nouveau riche identify with their exclusive, manicured landscapes as their class
identity: “The seemingly innocent pleasure in the aesthetic appreciation of landscapes
and the desire to protect the beauty and serenity of landscape can act as a subtle yet
highly effective mechanism of/for social exclusion and the reaffirmation of elite class
identities” (p. 373). The aestheticization of residential landscapes is not a neutral, pure
enjoyment of beauty for its own sake, in line with Kant’s notion of aesthetic judgment as
 391 Micro-Level Psychology versus Micro Cultural Psychology

pure taste that is disinterested; it is saturated with social class significance that derives
from its position within exclusive, expensive gated communities. It thus serves as a proxy
for the social class of which it is a material part. It is one of the material manifestations of
social class.
Individual Chinese do not recognize this class character of landscape aestheticization,
as they enjoy the beauty “for its own sake.” “By being thoroughly aestheticized, class rela-
tions are depoliticized and reduced to questions of lifestyle choices, consumption pat-
terns, visual pleasures and ‘good taste’ ” (Pow, 2009, p. 373).
However, a cultural hermeneutics reveals the definite class character of this aesthetic
appreciation that is dialectically, or internally, linked to exclusiveness and expensiveness.
Indeed, “the aestheticization of urban space is cultivated and maintained through spatial
exclusion that acts to protect the pristine and beautiful landscape from the urban poor
in the city” (Pow, 2009, p. 373). Thus, class is built into the production of aestheticized
landscapes. They exist as they do only because they are exclusive zones, separated from
the poor spatially and out of their economic range. One’s identification with the land-
scape surreptitiously bundles its class character into the content of one’s identity. As Pow
(2009) aptly says, “As didactic landscapes targeted explicitly at the cultivation of middle
class aesthetic sensibilities, the emergence of gated communities is thus accompanied by
a spatial/class politics framed by aesthetic concerns and appeals” (p. 375).
Identifying with the landscape is thus the reverse of a personal construction of mean-
ing; it is the surreptitious internalization of social class that has been built into the
aesthetic form of the landscape. The resident actively pursues this lifestyle, and he or
she swells with pride at his or her exclusive, expensive, beautiful landscape. The indi-
vidual likes being middle class because that is success in that person’s society. And
in order to become successfully middle class, the person adopts the accoutrements of
that class, which include exclusivity and privacy. One builds one’s middle-class identity in
and through these accoutrements, through appearing “cultured” and “refined,” not
through explicitly proclaiming oneself “middle class.” The landscape is didactic, as Pow
explains.
The resident does not invent the tools and content by which he or she develops class
identity. The individual is driven to embrace them by the entire structure of the society
and its ideology. In China, these were largely articulated by the Communist Party and
private developers, not by the citizens who took up positions within these entities. Federal
laws that instituted new wage policies and economic stratification were promulgated by
the Central Committee of the Communist Party.

Alongside the rapidly changing economic and social structure, the Chinese gov-
ernment also enacted a series of housing reform policies starting with the “rolling
back” of the state in public housing provision accompanied by the “rolling out” of
neoliberal policies aimed ultimately at privatizing the housing market and the
creation of a full-scale real-estate market economy, partly to alleviate the state
work units from the heavy burden of housing provision as well as to promote
homeownership and urban consumption. Essentially, the Housing Monetarization
Policy . . . entails the restructuring of the urban housing market and welfare state
and the transformation of the built environment. . . .
 392 macro cultural psychology

Overall, neoliberal urbanization has succeeded in carving out a new urban

China fragmented by the continued destruction of old neighborhoods and com-
munities and the creation of new urban enclaves in the form of luxurious new
condominium apartments (gated communities). For the first time in the socialist
regime, the Chinese leadership has begun to embrace the benefits of commercial-
izing real estate, authorized rent increases in public housing, allowed the sale of
use rights to sitting tenants and even approved the creation of the first real estate
development company. . . . [Exclusive, gated] commercial housing estates are
built entirely by real estate developers and run by property management compa-
nies often adopting the so-called “enclosed property management” style. . . .
The Party also promoted a new ideology “to be rich is good,” and within the
hierarchical wage system this meant that not everyone could be rich together.
Thus, the ideology led (forced) people to be rich separately in exclusive classes
and enclaves. The ideology identified the good (beautiful) life with privilege and
wealth and separateness from the masses who cannot afford it in class society.
“Behind all the churning of aesthetic codes and fashions lurked a certain ‘imperi-
alism of taste’ that stood to recreate in new ways the very hierarchy of values and
significations.” (Pow, 2009, pp. 376, 378, 379).

This kind of cultural analysis of psychology requires a thorough grasp of the social
system in order to identify the initiators of social policy that formed the new identity.
“Fundamentally, the emergence of private gated communities in China needs to be
understood within the context of China’s economic reform and urban restructuring,
more specifically the housing commodification polices, intensification of social stratifica-
tion and class differentiation, as well as the liberation of urban consumption forces” (Pow,
2009, p. 379).
This detailed analysis of concrete culture and psychology by a geographer is a model for
cultural psychological research that remains silent about government policies; political
economy; vested interests; power brokers; captains of industry/finance/development/
media; popular social movements; and structural issues regarding shifting balances bet-
ween cities and the countryside, as well as between social classes or cultural ideologies.
The invention of the American private home-as-sanctuary was also the creation of
deliberate government policy. It is not the creation of the individuals who occupy
and utilize that private space. Privacy was publicly created and bestowed in the form of
the family home, and it was created and bestowed for definite political purposes that
would garner home owners’ support for capitalist private property. “The story of how the
dream became a reality is not one of independence, self-sufficiency, and entrepreneurial
pluck. It’s not the story of the inexorable march of the free market. It’s a different kind
of American story, of government, financial regulation, and taxation” (Sugrue, 2009,
p. W1). To wit, Franklin Roosevelt created the Home Owners’ Loan Corporation to pro-
vide low interest loans to help foreclosed home owners in the Depression. In 1934,
Roosevelt created the Federal Housing Administration, which instituted 25- and 30-year
mortgages and cut interest rates. In 1944, the federal government extended generous
mortgage assistance to returning veterans, most of whom could not have otherwise
afforded a house. Easy credit, underwritten by federal housing programs, boosted the
 393 Micro-Level Psychology versus Micro Cultural Psychology

rates of home ownership quickly. It was now cheaper to buy a house than to rent. Federal
intervention also unleashed vast amounts of capital that turned home construction and
real estate into critical economic sectors. In the 1960s, the newly created Department of
Housing and Urban Development expanded home ownership programs for excluded
minorities.
Not only did public policy create private, personal spaces for interstitial, interpersonal
interaction, but private homes were politically promulgated to garner support for capitalist
private property. William Levitt, the developer of suburban houses (called Levittown), said,
“No man who owns his own house can be a communist.” George W. Bush similarly touted
“an ownership society where more Americans than ever will be able to open up their door
where they live and say ‘welcome to my piece of property’ (Sugrue, 2009, p. W1).”
Nothing could be clearer testimony to the dominance of macro cultural factors over
micro factors than the fact that political-economic interests created the private, intimate
interstitial space for interpersonal interactions.

Cell Phones
Even such private acts as speaking on a cell phone while driving a car have institutional
roots: For years, the automobile industry has marketed the virtues of cell phones to driv-
ers. “Indeed, the industry originally called them car phones and extolled them as useful
status symbols in ads, like one from 1984 showing an executive behind the wheel that
asked: ‘Can your secretary take dictation at 55 MPH?’ ” (Richtel, 2009, p. A1).
“Wireless companies ‘designed everything to keep people talking in their cars.’ They
succeeded. The federal government estimated in 2007 that 11 percent of drivers were talk-
ing on their phones at any given time.” Industry pioneers were aware of the risks of mul-
titasking behind the wheel long before cell phones became common.

Their hunches have been validated by many scientific studies showing the dangers
of talking while driving and, more recently, of texting . . . [S]tudies show that
a driver talking on a cellphone is four times likelier to crash and that using
a hands-free device does not eliminate the risk. . . . One researcher who spoke
up about his concerns was quickly shut down. In 1990, David Strayer, a junior
researcher at GTE, which later became part of Verizon, noticed more drivers who
seemed to be distracted by their phones, and it scared him. He asked a supervisor
if the company should research the risks. “Why would we want to know that?”
Mr. Strayer recalled being told. He said the message was clear: “Learning about
distraction would not be very helpful to the overall business model” (Richtel,
2009, p. A1).

Macro Cultural Psychological Discourse Analysis

Interpersonal conversations in school similarly reflect class and race in modern society,
just as interpersonal conversations among races in the Jim Crow South did. This is illus-
trated in the following narratives from a first grade classroom (Michaels, 1986). The first
presents a white, middle-class girl talking with her middle-class teacher, and the second
 394 macro cultural psychology

presents a black girl talking with the same teacher. Class differences in the conversational
styles immediately stand out.

1.

Mindy: When I was in day camp we made these candles.

Mrs. Jones: You made them?
M: And I tried it with different colors, with both of them but one just
came out; this one just came out blue, and I don’t know what this
color is.
T: That’s neat-o. Tell the kids how you do it from the very start. Pretend
we don’t know a thing about candles. OK, What did you do first?
What did you use? Flour?
M: Um, here’s some hot wax, some real hot wax that you just take a
string and tie a knot in it and dip the string in the um wax.
T: What makes it have a shape?
M: Um, you just shape it.
T: Oh, you shaped it with your hand, mmm.
M: But you have, first you have to stick it into the wax and then water,
and then keep doing that until it gets to the size you want it.
T: OK. Who knows what the string is for?

2.

Deena: Um, I went to the beach Sunday and to MacDonalds [sic], and to the
park, and I got this for my birthday. My mother bought it for me, and
um I had um two dollars for my birthday and I put it in here, and
I went to where my friend named Gigi. I went over to my grand-
mother’s house with her and um she was on my back and I and we
was walkin around, by my house and um she was heavy. She was in
the sixth or seventh grade.
Mrs. Jones: OK I’m going to stop you. I want to talk about things that are really,
really very important. That’s important to you but tell us things that
are sort of different. Can you do that? And tell us what beach you
went to.

The pupils express themselves differently, and Mrs. Jones reacts to them differently, and
these differences are clearly based in social class and race. Mindy’s discourse remains
consistently centered on a topic which she describes by using general descriptors that
make it clear to others what has transpired. Mrs. Jones follows her train of speech and
guides her to enhance its explicitness and consistency. There is a give-and-take between
the two interlocutors, with each interceding appropriately and building on the other’s
comments.
Deena’s discourse rambles across diverse topics without making their connection
clear. Moreover, she fails to develop her thoughts and words, and instead jumps to new
 395 Micro-Level Psychology versus Micro Cultural Psychology

topics, leaving the listener unsure about the significance of each one. Mrs. Jones obvi-
ously does not follow what Deena is saying, and makes no effort to join her conversation
and guide her. Instead, she lets her get into difficulty and then rudely cuts her off and
insults her by implying that her conversation was not important.
While these differences in the two dialogues need to be confirmed over additional
cases, in order to establish patterns of class discourse and their interactions with middle-
class teachers, we can heuristically treat Mindy’s and Deena’s conversational styles as
typical and representative of their respective classes and races. The two girls are not spon-
taneously creating personal styles of speaking. Their styles are not personal performances
as much as they are performing class and racial cultures. They are acting as social agents
representing and reproducing their classes and races.
Mrs. Jones is similarly representing and reproducing her class and race. She expresses
her middle-class understandings, expectations, and sympathies. She is not resisting, con-
testing, negotiating, or reorganizing her class any more than the pupils are. She has not
introduced personal meanings that “co-construct” the social world. On the contrary, she
has unwittingly and unerringly reproduced the class and racial structure. Affirming
Auslander’s perceptive comment about quotidian life reflecting cultural factors, we may
say that the entire class-racial structure of the United States is crystallized in the class-
room dialogues of Mrs. Jones, Deena, and Mindy (this is depicted in Figure 6.2).
Mrs. Jones helps Mindy and Deena to realize their class and racial positions. She helps
Mindy—and all the Mindys/middle-class white girls in her classrooms over the years—
cultivate her middle-class conversational style, and she helps Deena—and all the Deenas/
lower-class black girls in her classrooms—maintain her lower-class, black conversational
style by not helping her alter it. In fact, she prevents her from altering it by impugning her
intelligence, social consideration, and motivation. She thus deprives Deena of the psy-
chological resources necessary to improve her conversational style and advance out of
her class position (e.g., through presenting herself well to college recruiters or human
resources managers). Mrs. Jones thus has an enormous social effect on her pupils. She
acts as a social agent to enforce and enact class differences in her pupils (Ratner, 2006a,
p. 55). She could not be more effective if she had been paid by social leaders to institution-
alize a class system in her classroom. Her behavior achieves the same social tracking/
classification as community college administrators achieved (see Chapter 4).
What is fascinating and insidious is that Mrs. Jones is selectively fashioning class dif-
ferences within her single group of children. She is taking children in the same time and
place and shunting them into different life trajectories. She is a creating inequalities
within her cohort, instead of utilizing their togetherness in a common space to integrate
and equalize their competencies. She actively works against the affordance of a common
classroom to segregate her pupils according to class. She proves that class differences
need not be physically objectified in different classrooms, teachers, and schools. They can
be constructed in one classroom by a single teacher who simply reacts differently to her
pupils. This is quite an awesome social function that one person’s agency can have.
Thus, school integration does not necessarily overcome discrimination. Discrimination
works through individual teachers on their micro, interpersonal interactions with pupils.
It is thus necessary to root out discrimination on the micro level as well as on the macro
level.
 396 macro cultural psychology

Cultural Cultural
Deena Teacher
system system

fig. 6.2 Individuals as Cultural Agents.

In our classroom example, the discourses serve a performative function; however, it is

a class function, not a personal one. The three individuals exercise their agency in ways
that reproduce class and race, not their personal meanings. As Vygotsky (1997a) said, “the
aggregate of stimuli that forms the aggregate of the child’s behavior compromises class
stimuli” (p. 212).
Bourdieu explained this point in the following words:

To describe the process of objectification and orchestration in the language of

interaction and mutual adjustment is to forget that the interaction itself owes
its form to the objective structures which have produced the dispositions of
the interacting agents and which allot them their relative positions in the interac-
tion and elsewhere. Every confrontation between agents in fact brings together in
an interaction defined by the objective structure of the relation between the
groups they belong to (e.g., a boss giving orders to a subordinate, colleagues dis-
cussing their pupils, academics taking part in a symposium), systems of dispo-
sitions . . . and through these habitus all the objective structures of which they
are the product. . . . Interpersonal relations are never, except in appearance,
individual-to-individual relationships and the truth of the interaction is never
entirely contained in the interaction. (Bourdieu, 1977, p. 81)

Macro cultural psychology treats Deena’s discourse as organized by, and embodying,
her lower social class and ethnic social position in society. We regard it as the psychology
of oppression—an oppressed and oppressing psychology formed by oppressive cultural
factors. We follow Ogbus’s argument, cited in Chapter 3, that low levels of literacy are due
to social conditions and historical and ongoing social practices such as discrimination.
Deena’s conversational style is fragmented and personalized because it is geared toward
these features of her conditions. Lower-class life is stultified, unstable, transient, uncon-
trollable, unpredictable, and punctuated by crises such as unemployment, poverty, home-
lessness, disease, crime, domestic violence, and imprisonment. Life is encountered in the
here and now, in its immediacy, with little ability to plan for the future, because people
have little control over the conditions to which they are subjected. This is why Deena’s
discourse shifts rapidly among different topics, with little continuity. It is also why her
discourse refers to things that are immediately present rather than to abstractions that
transcend her immediate situation. Middle-class teachers cannot follow her because they
have no familiarity with the immediacy of her experience. Deena cannot use abstract
terms to communicate with an outsider such as Mrs. Jones.
Deena’s discourse is functional to the class structure that oppresses her. It is not her own
invention, and it does not represent her transcendence of her class; rather, it represents
 397 Micro-Level Psychology versus Micro Cultural Psychology

her submission to it. Exploitation requires a psychology of oppression that does not strive
to analyze, critique, or transcend oppression. Exploitation stunts logical, materialistic
analyses of causes and solutions to problems. It stunts intellectual growth, abstract rea-
soning, and far-sighted goals. Emphasizing the concrete cultural conditions of lower-
class life should make us critical of behaviors that reflect them (see Ratner, 2011c).
The foregoing classroom dialogue illustrates how speech is a concrete mediational means
that incorporates class features, transmits them to users of these means, and structures
psychology and behavior to perpetuate social class. Mediational means are the means by
which society inculcates appropriate behavior in individuals. They are not means that
individuals freely use for their own personal purposes to express, expand, and realize
themselves. Speech incorporates concrete features of social class, and when it is used, it
imparts those features to the users. This is the case as Deena and Mindy use the speech that
is current in their respective social spheres. As the girls use speech, they are molded by it,
and they are marked by it as representatives of different classes. This triggers specific social
treatments by teachers and social authorities that confirm and reinforce the girls’ class
status. Speech is a cultural mediational means that has a social function: to perpetuate the
social structure. Mediational means must be seen from the perspective of society.
Deena’s subaltern psychology/behavior needs to be transformed so that she can com-
municate with a broader group of people and also think more logically to better under-
stand and overcome her oppression. Oppression is difficult to understand because it is
mystified. It requires sophisticated, serious analysis. It is therefore in Deena’s best interest
to adopt logical, systematic, abstract thinking. It is just as beneficent as teaching Deena
math or computer skills or health care.
Construing Deena’s cognitive and discourse styles as the psychology of oppression has
powerful implications not only for enhancing her individual psychology but for linking
this improvement to cultural change (these are spelled out in Chapter 7).
My cultural-political analysis of the limits of Deena’s conversational style and grammar
continues my discussion of progressive dialectics in Chapters 2 and 3. It echoes Luria’s
(1976) analysis of peasant psychology during the 1930s in the Soviet Union. He noted
limitations to the peasants’ logical reasoning in comparison to the reasoning of teachers
living on State collective farms. Peasants were unable to follow syllogistic arguments and
instead drew conclusions on the basis of their personal experience. Luria sympathetically
related the limits of their logical reasoning to the circumscribed, small-scale, geographi-
cally limited life activities that they engaged in. He sympathetically observed that if the
peasants were to participate in the modern Soviet social system, they would need to learn
abstract syllogistic reasoning that would enable them to draw conclusions from abstract
premises, rather than from immediate personal experiences that others in far-flung posi-
tions would not share.
Luria was certainly not oppressing the peasants by discrediting and suppressing their
reasoning processes. He was trying to aid the peasants to share in the advantages of the
new society that could enhance their lives, materially and psychologically. Luria (1976)
indicated this by stating, “A person capable of abstract thought reflects the external world
more profoundly . . . schemes of logical thinking objectively take shape in a fairly
advanced stage of development of cognitive activity” (p. 101). These are positive advances
of abstract syllogistic reasoning. They are not oppressive stultifications.
 398 macro cultural psychology

Changes in the basic structure of cognitive processes result in an enormous

expansion of experience and in the construction of a vastly broader world in
which human beings begin to live. In addition to the sphere of personal experi-
ence, we see the appearance of the sphere of abstract general human experience as
established in language and in the operations of discursive thinking. Human
thought begins to rest on broad logical reasoning; the sphere of creative imagina-
tion takes shape, and this in turn vastly expands man’s subjective world. (Luria,
1976, p. 163)

Luria’s observations recapitulate Vygotsky’s comparison of everyday, prescientific con-

cepts and scientific concepts (Vygotsky, 1987, Chapters 5 and 6). Vygotsky notes limita-
tions of everyday concepts that are corrected by more logical, comprehensive, profound
scientific concepts. His distinction is generally applauded by child psychologists, and it
applies equally well to historical differences in thinking between premodern and modern
people. In fact, Vygotsky explicitly equates these groups. He says that children’s thinking
and primitive people’s thinking are both carried out in terms of superficial similarities
and associations (thinking in complexes or associations), whereas scientific, modern
thinking in many adults is characterized by Vygotsky (1987, pp. 148–151) as abstract con-
cepts that identify abstract, essential characteristics. Vygotsky regards the distinction as
so important that he criticizes Levy Bruhl’s interpretation of the concepts of the Borora
people (a Northern Brazilian tribe) for overlooking the distinction:

In his analysis of the [Borora’s] assertion that the Borora are red parrots, he
consistently operates on the basis of the concepts that are characteristic of our
own logic. . . . A more profound mistake in the interpretation of this phenomenon
is, in our view, impossible. . . . Since for the Borora the word is not the carrier of
a concept [that designates essential substance] but a formal designation for con-
crete objects, the assertion that they are parrots has an entirely different signifi-
cance for them. The word “arara” which designates the red parrot that they relate
themselves to is a general name for a complex to which both the bird and the tribe
are related. Thus, the assertion does not imply an identification of parrot and
people any more than identification is implied by the fact that two people related
by kinship have the same family name. (Vygotsky, 1987, p. 151)

In the same ways, the child understands himself differently through speech than does
the adult through the same speech. . . . The child and adult understand each other with
the pronunciation of the word “dog” because they relate the word to the same object. . . .
However, one thinks of the concrete complex “dog” and the other of the abstract concept
“dog”. . . . Therefore, the child’s very early use of words that represent the most abstract
forms of thinking in adult speech does not indicate the presence of abstract thinking in
the child. (Vygotsky, 1987, pp. 155, 163)
Vygotsky goes on to explain the limitations of childhood complexes vis-à-vis true con-
cepts: “The child’s incapacity to rise above the situational meaning of this word, his
inability to approach the concept ‘brother’ as an abstract concept, and his incapacity
to avoid logical contradictions while operating with it, are the dangers present in the
 399 Micro-Level Psychology versus Micro Cultural Psychology

development of everyday concepts” (Vygotsky, 1987, p. 218). True concepts, in contrast,

allow for a more thorough, essential understanding of the nature of things and how to
utilize them volitionally.
These comments apply to Deena’s and Mindy’s sentence structures and use of words.
Mindy’s (middle-class) use of logical, abstract language reflects logical, abstract thought
that expands imagination and subjectivity, in comparison to Deena’s (lower-class) per-
sonalized, circumscribed thinking and language.

Structural Racism
The classroom dialogues we have examined reveal an important principle of cultural psy-
chology: the content their social interactions have is not a conscious product of their
individual intentions (or inventions). Mrs. Jones does not intend to be racist or demean-
ing of Deena, and certainly does not intend to “track” her by keeping her in a lower-class
position. Mrs. Jones regards herself as a liberal person who is genuinely trying to help her
students. The content of her behavior is an example of what is called structural racism,
which is a set of behavioral scripts that emanates from structural properties of society,
and not from individual intentions of the practitioners.
The structural racism of Mrs. Jones’s interactions with Deena is incarnated in peda-
gogical assumptions and practices that Mrs. Jones adopts in order to be a good teacher.
The racism lies in punishing her low-achieving students for their failures rather than
helping them with extra effort. This behavior on the part of the teacher undoubtedly
reflects the individualistic belief that students who do not perform up to par manifest
a personal deficit in either motivation or capacity. This is the reason Mrs. Jones quickly
becomes impatient with Deena. (We have seen in preceding chapters that human anger
rests upon the cultural belief that misbehavior is the fault/responsibility of the perpetra-
tor.) Mrs. Jones’s individualistic assumption about Deena’s deficiencies prevents her from
perceiving them as socially caused and socially remediable. If she did, she would undoubt-
edly be more sympathetic and patient, as she would be if a student were known to be
abused. If external obstacles are known to impede progress, a teacher does not blame the
student and become impatient.
In fact, Deena’s poor performance does reflect her social (ethnic, class) position.
Consequently, the teacher’s impatience with Deena blames the victim, leaves her to solve
“her own” problem on her own, and leaves her trapped in her social condition, which
escapes attention. This is structural racism, or structural blindness/misperception, that is
caused by the ideology of individualism acting as a perceptual and cognitive blinder.
Ideological biases become the biases of psychological phenomena, consciousness, and
subjectivity, and then lead people to misunderstand their own feelings.
Mrs. Jones is simply doing her job of utilizing the cultural concepts of the educational
system that were taught to her during her training. It is these cultural concepts and prac-
tices of pedagogy that do the work of ignoring Deena’s deprived circumstances, and
therefore reinforcing (compounding) them. It is the individualistic ideology that is racist,
not Mrs. Jones. Mrs. Jones did not originate the ideology in a creative act of agency, nor
is she responsible for its existence. She is not to blame for it, even though she actively
carries it out.
 400 macro cultural psychology

Individualistic ideology construes behavior as being constructed by individuals; conse-

quently, it naturally appears that Deena’s failure is her own construction and responsibil-
ity. Under this ideology, there is no reason for Mrs. Jones to look beyond Deena. Nor
is there any reason for Mrs. Jones to look beyond her own personal irritation at this
“recalcitrant,” “underachieving” student to perceive its social effects on Deena. She does
not look at her social class values, or the social values that generate her annoyance, or the
social effects her treatment has on Deena’s position in society.
Mrs. Jones probably takes her irritation as a sign of her good will toward motivating
Deena to improve; she does not perceive it as a devious way to trap Deena in her bad
conditions. The social character and consequences of her emotion entirely escape her and
are diametrically opposite to her personal sense of her emotion.
This macro cultural psychology is equivalent to the manner in which the Jim Crow
racial code structured Southern whites’ perceptions, emotions, and behaviors. In both
cases, social concepts formed the operating system of these phenomena that limited and
distorted individuals’ awareness of their own psychology and the psychology/experience
of other people.
Like Mrs. Jones, Southern whites regarded themselves as genuinely caring for blacks
and were blind to the arrogance their caring embodied and expressed; they were also
blind to the suffering they had imposed on the blacks through practicing their racially
loaded caring. Their ideology blinded them to the true character of their emotions and
perceptions, and it also blinded them to the fact that it was responsible for their blind-
ness—instead, the ideology made them believe that their caring was a natural, empathic
response to the blacks.
Individualistic ideology recasts Mrs. Jones’s debilitating social feelings about Deena
and debilitating social treatment of her as benevolent personal feelings. This recasting
function of cultural ideology is depicted in Table 6.1.

Table 6.1 Mystification that Individualistic Ideology Introduces into Perception of Behavior

Objective social nature of, reasons for, Recast as Mrs. Jones’s subjective self-understanding
and effects of Mrs. Jones’s anger at of her anger at Deena’s deficiencies
Deena’s deficiencies

Abandons Deena by failing to Embraces Deena in an effort to

foster social support
Leaves Deena to rely on her
own resources
Injures Deena’s self-confidence
and makes her feel incapable of
improvement
Traps Deena in her conditions
Irritation at Deena is socially based
on her blaming Deena for her
failure as an individual
encourage her self-reliance and
motivation
Positive motivation through critical
feedback and instructions
Helps Deena to escape her conditions
Irritation is a natural, caring response to
Deena’s failure
 401 Micro-Level Psychology versus Micro Cultural Psychology

Hegel called this “the cunning of reason” in his Philosophy of History (1956, p. 33). He
said, “[I]n a simple act, something farther may be implicated than lies in the intention
and consciousness of the agent” (p. 28). “Those manifestations of vitality on the part of
individuals and peoples, in which they seek and satisfy their own purposes, are, at the
same time, the means and instruments of a higher and broader purpose of which they
know nothing” (p. 25).
Consequently, the solution to racism (and other negative behaviors) is to deconstruct
the ideology, not to blame Mrs. Jones or retrain her within the existing ideology—for she
will be incapable of changing as long as she adopts the mystifying operating system or
mediational means of individualistic ideology. Blaming her simply condones individual-
istic ideology and entraps her, just as she entraps Deena by blaming her.
Mrs. Jones is like the sheriff ’s deputy who evicts families from their houses when they
cannot afford their house payments. He is the person who most visibly implements the
laws, but he is not to blame for the laws or for his own action of evicting families. The
blame lies with the politicians who invented the laws, as well as with the economic system
that provides too few jobs at wages too low for the homeowners to afford their payments,
and also with the sheriff ’s office, which is charged with evicting people and would punish
the deputy if he failed to do his job.
Much oppressive behavior takes this unintentional form. This makes it difficult to uproot,
because perpetrators do not realize they are oppressing others. Many members of the ruling
class act as “institutional oppressors” without intending to oppress people. Many CEOs
believe that free-market principles will lift all people to prosperity. They seem genuinely
perplexed when poverty and inequality persist. Alan Greenspan seemed distraught to dis-
cover that his neoliberal financial policies as chairman of the Federal Reserve led to the
crash of 2008. “Institutional oppression” occurs through the logic of economic principles, not
through the intentions of the rich and powerful. There is a logic of oppression that is implicit
in social organization without necessarily being explicit in the consciousness of its perpetra-
tors. Free-market economic principles lead to financial crashes, poverty, inequality, and
exploitation whether or not advocates intend for these things to happen. Of course, many
oppressors are intentional oppressors, not institutional oppressors; they deliberately set out to
conquer and exploit people. However, many other oppressors do not have these intentions.
Institutional oppression, racism, and imperialism make people oppressors, racists, and impe-
rialists through the logic of their behavior, not through their explicit, intentional conscious-
ness. This is a powerful sense in which macro cultural factors structure behavior. The logic of
oppression lies in the structural organization of macro cultural factors—economic principles,
forms of property ownership, ways of generating profit, rights and obligations. Anybody who
acts within this structure according to its principles will oppress others. (Personal character-
istics such as gender or ethnicity are subsumed within and shaped by the structural organiza-
tion of macro cultural factors. Black, female presidents, secretaries of state, prime ministers,
and Supreme Court justices are no different from white males.)
Institutional oppression/racism is more insidious than intentional oppression/racism
because it is invisible to the perpetrators. They don’t feel consumed by hatred, so they do
not perceive how injurious their behavior is to others and to themselves. As I mention in
Chapter 5, this is one reason that measures of subjective well-being are faulty, and why
objective analysis of behavior, its origins, and its consequences is necessary.
 402 macro cultural psychology

The same is true for most inconsiderate, injurious behavior. It must be seen as a struc-
tural phenomenon, not a personal one. Consider the service one receives on airplanes
these days. The service is inadequate, the pillows and blankets provided are never suffi-
cient, the seats are cramped, the planes are crowded, and charges are levied for every
action from checking bags to eating a sandwich to selecting a seat. This is “structural dep-
ersonalization and inefficiency” that was carefully calculated and implemented by corpo-
rate executives. It is not the personal fault of flight attendants. The depersonalization and
inefficiency do not originate in the individual behavior of the attendants, despite the fact
that they are the face of the system who charge us for things we should not have to pay for
and who do not provide us with the pillows and blankets we need. Depersonalization and
inefficiency do not originate within the phenomenological experience of the attendants.
They do not intentionally try to depersonalize customers; they do not feel or think or
desire to depersonalize customers. In fact, they often commiserate with the customers and
despise the management. Depersonalization is the result of their behavior because the
behavior has been structured by corporate rules. It would be superficial and wrong to
blame attendants for the problem. We must look past the person we are dealing with to the
structure of rules that govern his or her behavior. The solution does not consist of training
attendants to be more personal, to reflect on their “own” feelings and adopt more personal
attitudes toward passengers. The solution consists in changing the corporate rules about
how many pillows, blankets, and sandwiches to provide; whether to charge for checking
bags and for food; and how large and close together the seats are. Blaming individuals
exculpates the structural causes of behavior and prevents their correction.
Similarly, when American shoppers see a sign in a store window that says, “going out of
business sale,” they enthusiastically rush in to eagerly buy up the bargains; they never
think about the owners and employees who have lost their livelihoods. This inconsider-
ateness is structural; it is built into the system, which encourages people to jump at bar-
gains without asking questions. It would be a gross misinterpretation to interpret the
shoppers’ callous attitude as a personal failing (see Ratner, 2006a, pp. 46–47, for a similar
example of erroneously blaming American soldiers for the imperialism of the wars they
engage in).

Structural Infidelity
If racism and inconsiderateness can be cultural-psychological rather than rooted in per-
sonal, intentional animosity, then I propose that marital infidelity can be also. A hetero-
sexual married man who has an affair with a younger woman does not necessarily, or
even usually, disavow his wife. His affair is no more the result of personal animosity
toward his wife than Mrs. Jones’s mistreatment of Deena reflected a personal animosity
toward blacks. The affair is usually motivated by broad macro cultural factors. These
include (a) the hypersexual culture in which men live, which arouses them to always
want more sex; (b) the cultural connotation of male sex as proving the prowess of the
conqueror; (c) the cultural stereotype of feminine beauty as associated with youth, so that
the man finds younger women sensual; (d) the cultural emphasis on experiencing new
sensual stimulation as a form of excitement—and the converse, which is that habitual,
routine experience is not as stimulating; and (e) the midlife crisis that men experience in
 403 Micro-Level Psychology versus Micro Cultural Psychology

a society that encourages people to look for new sources of fun and validation, such as
sexual conquests. These culturally organized emotions, perceptions, cognitions, motiva-
tion, and self-concept are the psychology that motivates the man’s sexual exploration
with younger women. The wife fails to recognize the cultural organization of her hus-
band’s psychology, and she misinterprets it as a personal one directed against her. He is
truthful when he insists that he does love her and wants to stay with her. We may say that
his infidelity was a “structural infidelity”—to coin a phrase—just as Mrs. Jones’s racism
was structural racism.
In both cases, the causes of the psychology are cultural, not personal. Analysis should
focus on cultural psychology, not personal psychology. As with the racism of Mrs. Jones,
a cultural analysis of the adulterous husband’s psychology is both more objective and
more humane than blaming him for being personally reprehensible.

A MACRO CULTURAL PSYCHOLOGICAL

ACCOUNT OF AGENCY
If agency is simply the theoretical potential that people have for changing their behavior,
then this is common knowledge, and agency does not add information value to it. If
agency denotes an intrinsic creativity that always moves individuals toward social justice
and personal growth, then it is a dangerous myth that lulls us into false complacency and
inaction. Either way, agency is an unhelpful concept.
Agency is a true concept, as everyone has agency. However, agency is an abstract,
empty, tautological concept. Everything we do is some form of agency. But that tells us
nothing. It does not tell us what people will do, how they will do it, why they will do it, or
when they will do it. It does not tell us why someone is a prince or a pauper. It is akin to
saying that all humans think. This is another true but abstract, empty, and tautological
concept that provides no information, except to differentiate us from animals. What’s
crucial is what people think about, how they think, why they think about certain things,
and the approach that most helpfully expands their understanding so they can enrich
their lives. These all depend upon culture for their specificity. All of the important details
of agency are also culturally dependent.
The concept of agency adds nothing to our understanding of the problem and its solu-
tion. In fact, it may detract from our understanding. It may lull us into a false compla-
cency with the notion that individuals will always eventually do the right thing just
because they have agency. Believing in agency can thus lead us to become less analytical
of the problem and the solution, and less involved in collective problem solving, educa-
tion, and action.
Agency certainly makes culture, and it makes culture part of psychology—in a collec-
tive process. Individual agents also struggle to understand and select from social possi-
bilities. The point is that all of this activity is part of a cultural collective process, full
of influences and compromises. The outcome of this process is what defines and consti-
tutes agency. Agency is only as intelligent as the socially formed intelligence it can acquire;
it is only as free as the social society allows it to be. Agency always has a particular form
and content. To know people is to know the cultural character of their mind, including
the activity that selects and internalizes the culture. We cannot know them by simply
 404 macro cultural psychology

knowing that “people have a mind.” It is not the mere exercise of agency that makes us
feel fulfilled; only the exercise of a particular kind of agency does this. We must know
agency as the outcome of a complex cultural process, not as the potential to engage in this
process, for the potential tells us nothing about what actually will be. We cannot glorify
the potential of agency, we cannot pin our hopes for a better world on it, for it does not
have any inherent content that will necessarily fulfill us when it is expressed.
Agency is hopeful only to the extent that it has achieved a certain content—a content
that is dissatisfied with and open to questioning the status quo, and which is able to tran-
sition from given practices and values to fulfilling alternatives. Agency that is complacent
or blinded to alternatives to the status quo is no cause for hope. Agency does not guaran-
tee our concrete humanity, for agency can easily work toward inhuman ends. Nazis, slave
owners, and the Bush administration all had agency and were active and creative in the
sense of developing and maintaining a complex social system with new practices, but
their agency was a cause for alarm, not hope.
Thus, political urgings for people to express their voices and to become active are
meaningless because they do not specify a particular content to the voice. It is not merely
self-expression in the abstract that is liberating. Self-expression requires a particular con-
tent, a particular social system, in order to be liberating. Nondescript appeals to “express
oneself ” assume abstract agency per se is liberating.

MICRO CULTURAL PSYCHOLOGY

As mentioned earlier in this chapter, micro cultural psychology considers interpersonal
interactions to be the basis of society. All of the macro cultural factors we have examined
in this book are nothing more than sums or sequences of interpersonal negotiations.
Cultural structures work through individuals’ communicating with one another, so these
processes are construed as the basis of structures. Valsiner and Litvinovic (1996, p. 61)
claim that individuals continuously change culture through the simple act of dialoguing
with it. Wikan (1996) similarly insists that individuals resist and transform culture in
their everyday actions.
Micro cultural psychologists consider any talk of structures as such to be reified notions
that overlook the individual dynamics that constitute the working operations of “institu-
tions.” Harre (2009) endorses this position as follows: “The prime source for the root
models of scientific explanations in the domain of social phenomena is the conversation”
(p. 140). “Structural concepts in human sciences are heuristic models only—there are no
structures” (p. 138). Conversations are more real than imaginary structures because con-
versations are interpersonal interactions that can be readily shaped by and to the interests
of the interlocutors.
Wetherell, Stiven, and Potter (1987, pp. 62, 63. emphasis added) go so far as to reduce
cultural ideology to personal expression. They state, “[I]deology is not simply a set of
propositions but is primarily a method of accounting or managing a [self] representation.”
An egalitarian belief system (ideology) “establishes implicitly or by explicit contrast with
non-believers, a certain kind of identity and within that clearly structures a positive self-
presentation.” The authors would have it that egalitarianism is primarily a way to make
oneself appear positive to others. It has nothing, or little, to do with politics, economics, or
 405 Micro-Level Psychology versus Micro Cultural Psychology

any real cultural factors that we have discussed in this book. They would discount the
entire social-political history and basis of rational choice theory, which we explored in
detail, and reduce it to some sort of personal identity and self-presentation of the found-
ers. Their interpretation is decisively refuted by the historical record, which explains the
reasons that, and the process by which, rational choice ideology was developed. It is also
refuted by its utter inability to account for the specific content of rational choice theory.
There are infinite ways in which individuals can present themselves positively. This vague
generality does not account for the details of rational choice theory; cultural, political-
economic forces do.
Lave and Wenger (1991) situate interpersonal interactions in “communities of practice.”
Examples are study groups in school or informal meetings of sales reps or technicians
within a company. Government, ruling class, transnational corporations, armies, and
assembly lines are excluded from this conception of culture and psychology.
A few additional, brief examples convey the emphasis of this approach. Even some
cross-cultural psychologists adopt it, although it flatly contradicts their emphasis on cul-
tural variables. Kitayama, Duffy, and Uchida (2007, p. 138) state that “Culture is dynamic
because cultural ideas and practices have multiple meanings that are constantly in flux,
negotiated, manipulated, and arbitrated for a variety of reasons by all individuals who
participate in a cultural community.”
Everyone is involved in contributing his or her own personal meanings to culture so
that culture is always in flux, unstable, and unpredictable. Structures are anathema to this
account of individual freedom because they are stable, organized, shared behaviors that
contradict individual autonomy and spontaneity.
Treichler et al. (1984, pp. 83–84) attempted to study power relationships (in a medical
encounter) not as governed by differential positions of individuals within the social
structure (because this treats power as a static property of things outside individuals that
they cannot alter), but as “negotiated within the context of face-to-face interaction.
Though we acknowledge that such ‘preconditions’ as status, gender, and race influence
participants’ attitudes and expectations, we suggest that it is also important to examine
the interactive behavior of the participant. . . . Power becomes the negotiated product of
a mutually constituted and mutually administered interaction system.”
The authors nominally acknowledge background conditions; however, power is ulti-
mately a mutual, negotiated product. The emphasis on mutuality and participation builds
democracy into the definition of power. It excludes autocratic power by definition. This
general conception is a political statement about society—that society is an egalitarian
democracy that allows individuals to express their own interests in mutual negotiations
with other individuals and to mutually administer the power in a joint collaboration.
Nobody has any more power than anyone else.
Sawyer construes linguistic systems in individualistic terms. He claims that “language
shift [i.e., radical changes in vocabulary and grammar] is an emergent phenomenon, aris-
ing out of uncountable everyday conversations in small groups scattered throughout the
society” (Sawyer, 2005, p. 3).
Wikan (1996) espouses this individualistic orientation in an ethnography of poor
people in Egypt. She explicitly disregards the socioeconomic context of her subjects,
saying, “I do not attempt to analyze the macroforces that determine the economic and
 406 macro cultural psychology

social inequities that create poverty. Instead, I am trying to show how the particular
forms of poverty and misery are experienced, and how they are actively shaped and
transformed by the people who suffer them.” Wikan’s statement expresses the essence of
the individualistic orientation to cultural psychology—namely, that individuals create
their own cultural psychology out of conditions, and that their cultural psychology can
be comprehended through the self-expressions of subjects without any additional analy-
sis of the sociocultural system. Wikan acknowledges that external obstacles constrain
people, thwart their opportunities, and corrode their social relationships. However, she
paradoxically believes that individual actions transcend this context. She repeatedly
states that her subjects are resilient, energetic, resourceful, and successful. She empha-
sizes individual transcendence of social conditions to such an extent that she subtitles her
book “Self-Made Destinies in Cairo” (Ratner, 1993, 1999). It seems that external obstacles
are not really obstacles after all.
Micro cultural psychologists reject the idea that macro cultural factors organize psy-
chology. In fact, they denounce this idea as reification that denies humanity and agency.
This is why Wikan and others exclude them from their social science. For example, in her
analysis of Balinese emotions, Wikan (1990) rejected the idea of trying to understand
Balinese emotions as reflections of social categories. She sought instead to elucidate the
personal experience of emotions, saying, “[W]ere we to make sense of Suriati’s endeavor
by appealing to a Balinese ‘culture’ endorsing ‘grace’ we would come close to reducing her
to an automaton: a mere embodiment of ‘her culture.’ . . . People do not live and embody
culture. That would be too much of a reification.” (pp. 13–14). Wikan goes so far as to say,
“In my account, people occupy center stage, while my concern with ‘culture’ is incidental
(p. 19).” This may seem like an odd statement for an anthropologist to make; however, it
testifies to the pervasiveness of micro cultural psychology in social science that has tradi-
tionally studied cultural factors.
Wikan’s statements reveal that micro cultural psychology clashes with macro cultural
psychology. Micro psychologists disparage macro cultural analyses. They regard them as
not only wrong but demeaning to the agency of individuals. This is why they convert
ideology from a cultural issue to a personal form of self-presentation.
Valsiner expresses this antipathy to macro cultural factors. He goes so far as to repu-
diate, reverse, and replace sociohistorical psychology with a new formulation called
“co-constructionism.” In contrast to sociohistorical psychology, which construes the
individual as profoundly affected by culture, co-constructionism grants primacy to the
individual’s decision about how to deal with culture (Ratner, 2002, pp. 80–81). Branco
and Valsiner (1997) state, “The logic of the argument supporting the relevance of the
social environment in human development is reversed in the co-constructionist para-
digm” (p. 37). According to the new paradigm, “most of human development takes place
through active ignoring and neutralization of most of the social suggestions to which the
person is subjected in everyday life” (Valsiner, 1998, p. 393, emphasis in original).
Valsiner does not eclectically compromise with the sociocultural psychology of
Vygotsky. He seeks to transform it into its opposite, namely, a belief that distrusts, deni-
grates, ignores, resists, denies, decomposes, and neutralizes culture and its effects on psy-
chology. Organized, enduring, obdurate culture is denounced as a form of reification,
domination, mechanism, depersonalization, and dehumanization.
 407 Micro-Level Psychology versus Micro Cultural Psychology

In order to guarantee relative stability of the personality system, it has to be well

buffered against immediate social suggestions. The latter may be filled with dra-
matisms, hurtful efforts, or declarations of love or hate (or both), yet the likeli-
hood of such single episodes having “long-term effects” of any direct kind need
not be taken for granted. Hence, what is usually viewed as “socialization efforts”
(by social institutions or parents) [is] necessarily counteracted by the active recip-
ients of such efforts who can neutralize or ignore a large number of such episodes,
aside from single particularly dramatic ones. (Valsiner, 1998, p. 393)

Rather than regarding culture as the source of our humanity and psychology, as
Vygotsky, Luria, and Leontiev did, Valsiner regards social influences as “collective cul-
tural viruses” which are “affect-laden meanings meant to infect or penetrate personal
belief systems (systems of personal sense)” (Lightfoot & Valsiner, 1992, p. 396).
The negotiation these psychologists speak of is animated by the objective of reducing
the influence of culture on people. These psychologists do not mention any benefits to
culture. They seek to insulate people from culture. Micro cultural psychology appears to
be more culture-phobic than cultural psychology.
Micro cultural psychologists stake out their position in opposition to macro cultural
psychology. There is no sense of compromise or eclecticism with it. They reject and
reduce macro cultural factors; they counterpoise personal psychology to them. Micro
cultural psychologists counterpoise and dichotomize micro and macro levels. In con-
trast, macro cultural psychology integrates individual psychology and cultural factors.
This corrects the popular misimpression that macro cultural psychology is responsible
for false dichotomies.
With the clash of the two perspectives openly acknowledged, it is incumbent on us to
engage in scientific analysis to decide which is more valid. Eclecticism and integration
have been ruled out because the two are acknowledged to be incompatible. If one is
wrong and demeaning, it cannot be merrily accepted alongside the other that is deemed
to be valid and empowering.
It is noteworthy that micro cultural psychologists never engage in a scientific process
to validate their predilection for individual, interpersonal interactions, and to invalidate
the existence of macro cultural factors. Micro cultural psychologists present no argument,
no logic, and no evidence. They simply assert their position repeatedly. They do not dis-
prove the influence of cultural factors on psychology; rather, they ignore it and insist that
psychology/behavior is the product of personal constructs and interpersonal negotiation
and resistance. However, in every instance, a culturally informed analysis readily detects
important and clear-cut cultural influences on psychology/behavior (Ratner, 1993a).
For instance, where Sawyer insists that language shift arises out of the uncountable
everyday conversations that take place in small groups scattered throughout society,
a detailed study of language shift conducted by Kulick in a small community, Gapun, in
Papua New Guinea found clear evidence of macro cultural structuring of language shift
(Ratner, 2002, pp. 44–45). Until recently, Gapuners spoke a language called Taiap. They
were the only people in the world to speak it. In recent decades, Taiap has been replaced
by Tok Pisin, which is a form of pidgin English. The language shift in Gapun began during
World War I, when several men temporarily migrated out to work in other areas where
 408 macro cultural psychology

Tok Pisin was spoken. The shift intensified during the 1950s, when virtually every unmar-
ried male spent at least a year working in other villages. Another reason for the language
shift was the introduction of Tok Pisin into the village by Christian missionaries. Finally,
in the late 1950s, Gapuners relocated their village closer to Wongan, a Tok Pisin–speaking
village. Commercial contact expanded, children attended Wongan schools, and inter-
marriage between the two villages became commonplace. These macro changes in social
activities led Gapuners to shift their language.
Kulick studied every member of Gapun, and he found that the language shift was
related to the contact that an individual had with the new economic, educational, reli-
gious, and family activities. Tok Pisin was spoken only by males during the first decades
of its absorption into the village’s verbal repertoire. The reason for this is that men learned
it in the course of their migratory work, which women did not engage in. The language
shift also varied with people’s age. All Gapuners older than 10 are currently bilingual
because they have participated in a combination of traditional and modern activities.
However, none of the 1- to 9-year-olds speaks Taiap; all are monolingual speakers of Tok
Pisin, and most do not even understand Taiap. The reason for this is that conversations
with children are primarily in Tok Pisin, especially those about important topics that
elders want a child to attend to.
The strong, demographic association of language shift with gender and age groups
indicates that linguistic symbols rest upon macro cultural processes for their formation
and distribution. Gapuners did not individually or interpersonally create Tok Pisin and
disseminate it in pair-wise conversations. Quite the contrary, the individuals adopted the
new language because macro cultural processes such as Christianity, commerce, and
work drove them to. In fact, parents do not even understand why they and their children
have shifted from Taiap to Tok Pisin. This would not be true if they had initiated the
renunciation of Taiap and the adoption of Tok Pisin.
We can perform this kind of evaluation on Treichler’s notion that power is a negotiated
product of a mutually constituted and mutually administered interaction system. Just
consider whether it applies to the ways in which pensions have been reduced, jobs have
been outsourced, how one is rejected for admission by a university, or how one is rejected
for a job. Everyone knows that none of these processes is a negotiated product of a mutu-
ally constituted and mutually administered interaction system. University admissions
committees have complete, unilateral power to accept or deny a person entry, as do cor-
porate managers; corporate managers have complete, unilateral power to close a factory
and outsource all the jobs. Employees have absolutely no voice in this. There is no nego-
tiation, no mutual constitution and administration of any interaction system. There is no
interaction system. The executives announce their decision after private, internal discus-
sions. Business owners can similarly declare to their employees that their pensions will be
reduced—even after those employees have retired and are living on their pensions.
Health insurance companies unilaterally determine who is eligible for coverage and
what their premiums will be. Credit companies determine people’s credit-worthiness and
ability to take loans. Airlines ceased providing meals on domestic flights in the United
States, with no discussion with customers or employees. Television stations and newspa-
pers unilaterally refuse to broadcast stories or advertisements that they deem offensive to
their owners and sponsors.
 409 Micro-Level Psychology versus Micro Cultural Psychology

A detailed case in point is the Baltimore Sun, which was transformed from a local,
family-run paper into a Wall Street corporation when it was purchased by the Times
Mirror Corporation in 1992. Testimony from former Sun reporters (Democracy Now,
2009) reveals that the new investors were dissatisfied with a 15 profit margin and sought
to increase the profit rate. They brought in an outside team of editors who had little
knowledge of Baltimore, and little interest in it because their jobs were temporary step-
ping stones in their corporate careers. Combining their lack of interest in the community
and their imposed goal of turning the Sun into a money machine, the new editors reduced
the staff of 500 reporters to 140. In particular, they eliminated the labor, poverty, and
social issues reporters, even though poverty in Baltimore is widespread, in part because
50 of black men have no gainful employment. Baltimore is also one of the most violent
American cities, yet the Sun provided no coverage of the criminal courts for over a year.
This transformation of the news was unilaterally and internally imposed by the corporate
owners of the Sun. There was no community participation, nor was there any staff
participation, in the decision. Yet the corporate decision to eliminate professional report-
ers with valuable contacts and presence in the community deprived thousands of citizens
of important news about their community. The corporate managers decimated the paper
to make money; they did not cut costs in response to a failing enterprise.
Contemporary racial discrimination is a condition that similarly denies negotiation
and resistance because it operates silently. Bertrand and Mullainathan (2004, p. 991)
reported on

a field experiment to measure racial discrimination in the labor market. We

respond with fictitious resumes to help-wanted ads in Boston and Chicago news-
papers. To manipulate perception of race, each resume is assigned either a very
African American sounding name or a very White sounding name. The results
show significant discrimination against African-American names: White names
receive 50 percent more callbacks for interviews. We also find that race affects
the benefits of a better resume. For White names, a higher quality resume elicits
30 percent more callbacks whereas for African Americans, it elicits a far smaller
increase. . . . The amount of discrimination is uniform across occupations and
industries. Federal contractors and employers who list Equal Opportunity
Employer’ in their ad discriminate as much as other employers. We find little
evidence that our results are driven by employers inferring something other than
race, such as social class, from the names. These results suggest that racial dis-
crimination is still a prominent feature of the labor market.

This experiment demonstrates how conditions work impersonally to exclude people

from opportunities such as employment, where the black unemployment rate is double
that of whites. The exclusion is effected by not replying to applications. There was no inter-
action, no dialogue, no negotiation, no explanation, because managers refused to allow it.
The absence of action, or the silence, effected the exclusion. This refutes the popular notion
that social life is personal discourse in which interlocutors negotiate their desires.
The only sense in which it is acceptable to use terms such as negotiation and social
contract in reference to class societies of the past 10,000 years is to emphasize that the
 410 macro cultural psychology

contracts are written by and for the ruling classes and imposed on subaltern classes. This
is how Mills (1997) employs the term “racial contract.” Of course, within this racial con-
tract, blacks and whites “negotiate” to derive small additional advantages. For example,
black slaves used subterfuges to perform less work than their masters demanded—they
pretended to be sick, etc. But such minimal adjustments to the contract do nothing to
equalize or democratize it. Black slaves were still slaves after all the “negotiation” tactics
they used.
Actually, Treichler et al. (1984) found that real medical practice contradicts their notion
of negotiated, mutually administered interactions. The power differentials between
doctors and patients that Treichler described in micro-level terms actually reflect dif-
ferences in social position and social capital. Treichler et al. (1984) confirm this in their
summary of medical interactions: “The physician’s emphasis on biomedical aspects of
the case, together with his style of interviewing and method of recording data, hindered
a full expression of the patient’s [social-psychological] concerns [i.e., the fact that his
disability insurance checks had been terminated and he was left destitute] and the possi-
bility of a mutually agreed-upon agenda for the visit” (pp. 76, 78, my emphasis). This con-
clusion, unfortunately, did nothing to alter the authors’ advocacy of micro cultural
psychology.
Our critique of this false and misleading notion of interpersonal negotiation as the
basis of culture encompasses Valsiner’s romantic notion of individual freedom from cul-
tural pressures. Typically, he provides no evidence for his notion. Cross-cultural research
clearly debunks it. Vast, systematic psychological differences in different social systems
prove that individual psychology is structured by cultural factors, as I enumerate in
Chapter 3. If individuals were the final arbiters of how culture is used, there would be no
cultural consistency or systematic variation in their psychologies or behavior. Everyone
would be different.
Far from free, idiosyncratic behavior that ignores culture, resists culture, and makes
up its own trajectories, we find behavior to be ruthlessly channeled in social pathways.
These constraints actually increase with age, rather than decrease as we would expect if
individuals achieved greater autonomy with maturity, knowledge, and competencies.
Research on social mobility, presented in Chapter 5, proves that people’s ability to
change social position is constrained by socioeconomic factors. Racial demographics
similarly testify to the structural shaping of behavior and the impossibility of individuals’
freely shaping their behaviors. Blacks are many times more likely than whites to experi-
ence poverty while never achieving affluence, less likely to purchase a home at an early
age and build up significant levels of home equity, and more likely to experience asset
poverty across the stages of the life course. Moreover, the differences in the economic
trajectories of whites and blacks across the American life course widen over an individu-
al’s life.
Blacks do not catch up to whites, hard as they wish to and as much as they should be
able to if they are able to create their own trajectories. The increased racial disparities are
striking. A representative, longitudinal sample of 18,000 individuals over 40 years yielded
the results presented in Tables 6.2 and 6.3.
Racial disparities in wealth increase over an individual’s lifetime.
 411 Micro-Level Psychology versus Micro Cultural Psychology

Table 6.2 Cumulative Percentages of Encountering at Least 1 Year of Affluence/Poverty

for Whites and Blacks across Adulthood (Rank, 2009, p. 60)

Affluence

Age Whites Blacks Difference

25 2.2 0.3 1.9

75 54.8 13.1 41.7
Poverty

25 3.3 19.9 16.6

75 45.5 88.2 42.7

Table 6.3 Percentage of Group Achieving at Least 1 Year of Affluence with No

Poverty/Poverty with No Affluence during the Lifetime (Rank, 2009, p. 62)

Affluence with No Poverty

Whites Blacks

33 3.7
Poverty with No Affluence

Whites Blacks

25 80

For blacks, the American experience is captured by a staggering likelihood of encoun-

tering poverty during adulthood with little chance of attaining significant economic
affluence. Only 3.7 of blacks will encounter a year of affluence with no risk of poverty
during their entire adulthood. On the other hand, nearly 80 of black Americans will
encounter poverty in their lives with no chance of ever achieving affluence (Rank, 2009,
pp. 60, 62).
Since blacks obviously do not want to become poorer over their life course, structural
forces are clearly preventing them from realizing their own aspirations. Rank explains
this in terms of cumulative advantage/disadvantage: “The argument here is that race
exerts a differential impact upon a wide variety of life chances across the individual
lifespan, resulting in widening inequalities. These advantages or disadvantages cumulate
over time, producing an ever expanding racial divide as individuals age across the life
course” (Rank, 2009, p. 58; cf. Ratner, 2006a, pp. 125–126, 128).
Robert Merton introduced this concept in an analysis of scientific productivity. He
argued that early recognition and advantage in the career of a young scientist often led to
exponential gains and rewards over time, which in turn further solidified the status and
reputation of the scientist. Scientists who did not experience these key early advantages
(even though they were quite capable) often saw their careers stall and plateau.
 412 macro cultural psychology

Even enrichment programs that are designed to close the socioeconomic gap between
groups result in increasing the gap between advantaged and disadvantaged individuals
(Ratner, 2006a, p. 130).
These data also flatly contradict Valsiner’s claim that “the actual course of development
is not predictable” (Valsiner, Branco, & Dantas, 1997, p. 284) because free choices ultimately
determine the actual course. The actual course of development of blacks vis-à-vis whites is
very predictable from knowledge of an individual’s race and class (Lareau, 2003).
Valsiner’s notion of individual autonomy does not even mesh with individual experi-
ences. Personal aspirations are frequently dashed by social conditions. We have seen
how social mobility has declined with the stagnation of the capitalist economy. This obvi-
ously crushes many personal aspirations. Even aspirations for personal family life are
dashed by social conditions. Poor adolescent girls fervently aspire to form stable families
with their boyfriends, yet these hopes are dashed by the compelling social pressures of
lower-class life: “Surveys show that few of these couples stay together long enough to
watch their children enter preschool. Twelve months after the birth, half will have split,
and by the time the child turns three, fully two-thirds will have done so” (Edin & Kefalas,
2005, p. 74).
Even eating behavior is more a function of macro pressures than of personal choice.
One-third of all American men and women are obese (not simply overweight). These
individuals do not want to be obese; they are often distraught about it and go to great
lengths to overcome it. Yet pressure from food advertising, fattening food in restaurants
and schools, and a sedentary lifestyle lead them to this unhealthy and unattractive condi-
tion. If people cannot control the amount of food they, themselves, put into their own
mouths, it testifies to the lack of agency they have in other domains where social pres-
sures are more direct and intense.
Additional testimony to social influences on eating is the fact that obesity varies with
class and ethnicity. Sixty-one percent of black women age 60 and older are obese, com-
pared with 32 of white women and 37 of Mexican American women (Kolata, 2007).
Members of different social groups do not randomly and coincidentally decide to become
obese at varying rates. As with all demographic distributions of behavior, the demo-
graphics of obesity demonstrate cultural influences on behavior.
The most personal behaviors are demographically distributed (see Gladwell, 2009
for fascinating examples). Marriage patterns are a case in point. Slightly more than half
of men and women over 18 are married and living with their spouse. Among people
making $100,000 or more, though, 82 of men and 65 of women are living with a
spouse. Among black men and women over 18, only 33 are living with a spouse. Among
women age 45 to 49, 79 of Asians, 69 of white non-Hispanics, 62 of Hispanics, and
43 of blacks are married (Roberts, 2009). Eighty-five percent of Asian children live with
two parents, as do 78 of white non-Hispanic children, 70 of Hispanic children, and
38 of black children (Roberts, 2009). These data prove that personal living arrange-
ments are socially structured, not freely chosen on an individual level.
Sex is demographically distributed along class and gender lines, testifying it is not
a purely personal choice. Among 22–44 year old women, 10 of college graduates have
had same-sex experience, while 15 of high school only graduates have. Six percent of
college graduates have had oral sex with same-sex partner while 13 of high school only
 413 Micro-Level Psychology versus Micro Cultural Psychology

graduates have. Interestingly, while 13 of young women have had same-sex experience,
only 1 identify themselves as homosexual; 4 as bisexual. (This fact demonstrates that
sex does not define sexual identity. People define sexual activity, sexual activity does not
define people.) Twice as many women as men reported same-sex behavior. (Levin, 2011,
p. A18). Class and gender vary sexual experience by a factor of 50 to 100.
Valsiner’s ideal of ignoring, neutralizing, and resisting culture by an agentive self is
further refuted by research on the effects of movies on psychology/behavior. Studies on
the effects of movies on psychology/behavior have established that youngsters con-
sciously imitate movie models in order to make their own behaviors socially appropriate
and attractive. Jowett (1996) found that several of the students reported their conscious
attempts to imitate postures and to learn modes of behavior and forms of relationships
from the movies.
One of the boys wrote: “In acting and talking to a girl I often use the knowledge
I gained from the screen and the actors.” He went to movies “to learn to imitate the
actors,” and later, to learn to French kiss. One of the male students reported: “As I got into
high school and into my sixteenth and seventeenth year I began to use the movies as a
school of etiquette. I began to observe the table manners of the actors in the eating scenes.
I watched for the proper way in which to conduct oneself at a night club. The technique
of making love to a girl received considerable of my attention, and it was directly through
the movies that I learned to kiss a girl on her ears, neck and cheeks, as well as on the
mouth, in a close huddle” (Jowett, 1996, p. 121).
A female student believed that her flirting techniques were all borrowed from movie
heroines. Another described how she practiced movie stars’ behavior before the mirror
in the hope of attaining attractive facial expressions and movements (Jowett, 1996).
Research on teenage girls found that many girls explicitly read romance fiction in
order to learn the scripts and conventions of heterosexual relationships (Jackson, 1993,
p. 215). They seek to conform to these scripts, not convert them into their own meanings.
This is necessary if they are to succeed in attracting mates who also operate on the basis
of cultural scripts. Even pre-school girls and boys have been so inculcated into traditional
romantic roles that they express disappointment and dislike for test stories that violate
these conventions (e.g., if a princess rejects a prince and walks off into the sunset alone)
(Jackson, 1993, p. 214).
The coercive power of macro cultural factors to re-engineer subjectivity, agency, and
behavior is revealed in the manner in which psychiatric practice has been utterly trans-
formed by the single act of medical insurance companies to change their policy of reim-
bursing psychiatrists for treating patients. This single unilateral act has radically
transformed the behavior and subjectivity of psychiatrists and patients. A 2005 govern-
ment survey found that just 11 percent of psychiatrists provided talk therapy to all patients,
a share that had been falling for years. Insurance company reimbursement rates and pol-
icies that discourage talk therapy are part of the reason. A psychiatrist can earn $150 for
three 15-minute medication visits compared with $90 for a 45-minute talk therapy ses-
sion. As reported in detail by Harris (2011).

Like many of the nation’s 48,000 psychiatrists, Dr. Levin, in large part because of
changes in how much insurance will pay, no longer provides talk therapy, the
 414 macro cultural psychology

form of psychiatry popularized by Freud that dominated the profession for

decades. Instead, he prescribes medication, usually after a brief consultation with
each patient.
Dr. Levin first established a private practice in 1972, when talk therapy was in its
heyday. Then, like many psychiatrists, he treated 50 to 60 patients in once- or
twice-weekly talk-therapy sessions of 45 minutes each. Now, like many of his
peers, he treats 1,200 people in mostly 15-minute visits for prescription adjust-
ments that are sometimes months apart. Then, he knew his patients’ inner lives
better than he knew his wife’s; now, he often cannot remember their names. Then,
his goal was to help his patients become happy and fulfilled; now, it is just to keep
them functional.
Dr. Levin has found the transition difficult. He now resists helping patients to
manage their lives better. “I had to train myself not to get too interested in their
problems,” he said, “and not to get sidetracked trying to be a semi-therapist.”

Harris (2011) elucidates the irresistible, wrenching change that the reimbursement
policy had on Dr. Levin’s subjectivity and practice.

“At first, all of us held steadfast, saying we spent years learning the craft of psycho-
therapy and weren’t relinquishing it because of parsimonious policies by managed
care,” Dr. Levin said. “But one by one, we accepted that that craft was no longer
economically viable. Most of us had kids in college. And to have your income
reduced that dramatically was a shock to all of us. It took me at least five years to
emotionally accept that I was never going back to doing what I did before and
what I loved.”
Dr. Levin said that the quality of treatment he offers was poorer than when he
was younger. For instance, he was trained to adopt an unhurried analytic calm
during treatment sessions. “But my office is like a bus station now,” he said. “How
can I have an analytic calm?”
And years ago, he often saw patients 10 or more times before arriving at a diag-
nosis. Now, he makes that decision in the first 45-minute visit. “You have to have
a diagnosis to get paid,” he said with a shrug. “I play the game.”

This vignette testifies that the dehumanizing of psychiatric care was initiated by the cor-
porate insurance companies to generate higher profit margins for their investors. It was not
initiated by individual psychiatrists, it was not desired or welcomed by individual psychia-
trists, it was not due to individual psychiatrists independently developing new personal
meanings about their work, nor was it successfully resisted by psychiatrists. It was imposed
on the doctors and forced them to re-engineer their own thinking/meanings about their
work despite their desire to maintain old practices. They had to learn to avoid entangling
personal understanding of their patients. They were forced to develop new meanings about
their work that was imposed by their “employer,” the insurance company. Involvement with
the patient changed its meaning from necessary, therapeutic, and humane, to “side track,”
frivolous, irrelevant, useless, and inefficient, and many psychiatrists were distraught over
this externally-imposed, politically motivated, economically coerced change in meaning.
 415 Micro-Level Psychology versus Micro Cultural Psychology

Their resistance was quickly and easily crushed by the implacable force of a single, distant,
impersonal, financial corporate change in reimbursement policy. Such is the power of
macro cultural factors over subjectivity in a “democratic,” “free” country.
The extent of the mental engineering exacted by capitalist psychiatry on the doctors
is revealed in the hopes Dr. Levin has for his son who is studying psychiatry: “Dr. Levin said
he hoped that his son would not feel his ambivalence about their profession since he will
not have experienced an era when psychiatrists lavished time on every patient” (Harris,
2011). Social pressure of corporate psychiatry has made Dr. Levin regret his ambivalence
about the dehumanizing treatment he is forced to offer. He wishes that his son would not
feel any hesitation about accepting it. He wants his son to accept a practice that he knows
is bad. Peace of mind is prioritized over social conscience and good medical practice.
Dr. Levin has now become a dutiful agent of corporate capitalism, encouraging his son to
embrace corporate medicine with a free conscience, free, that is, of contradictory ethical,
humanitarian, and even medical concerns (for effective medical treatment of mental disor-
ders). Dr. Levin feels bad about himself that he has not been able to shrug off his ethical,
social, and medical training/concerns which weigh on him and make him despondent
about his treatment of patients. Although his training has prevented him from fully embrac-
ing corporate medicine, he has embraced the ideals of this medicine—which is why he
bemoans his ambivalence and why he hopes psychiatrists-in-training are free of it.
The single corporate change in reimbursement policy also summarily transformed the
definition of psychological disturbance into a naturalistic, physiological one. For the
policy required psychiatrists to treat disturbance entirely by medication, which implies it
has a physical cause just like a cold.(While this top-down corporate pressure was impor-
tant in moving psychiatry toward a non-cultural, biologistic conception of disturbance,
it wasn’t the only influence. Psychiatrists have traditionally embraced this direction and
have cooperated with pharmaceutical companies to biologize and medicalize distur-
bance. The example of Dr. Levin demonstrates that top-down corporate pressure forces a
re-engineering of consciousness and practice, and that consciousness is not free to disre-
gard macro cultural factors when they are exerted).
This top-down macro cultural change in the concept of mental disturbance was a polit-
ical act: it obfuscated cultural origins of mental disturbance, and precludes critiquing
such deleterious cultural factors. The change in medical reimbursements was thus not
simply economic, it was political as well—it was political-economic. At the very moment
that the economic system was exercising its heavy hand to degrade psychiatric care and
human relations, it was mystifying this fact by promoting the myth that behavior/psy-
chology is caused by biochemical processes. This is the genius of capitalism, it determines
behavior and obscures this cultural determination so that lay people and social scientists
alike fail to perceive it and challenge it.
This is a double determination of consciousness: 1) consciousness is culturally deter-
mined to think, remember, perceive, feel, desire, and identify in certain ways, 2) conscious-
ness is determined by macro cultural factors to be unaware of its cultural determination.
For example, Westerners believe we are autonomous individuals. This belief is pro-
moted by capitalist macro cultural factors. But we don’t realize that our belief in free
agency is a cultural product; we believe free agency is natural and our concept of free
agency naturally reflects this natural existence.
 416 macro cultural psychology

Nor do we realize that our concept of free agency is a myth which does not reflect the
true nature of the self. (The fact that macro cultural factors promote this ideology does
not make it valid – any more than religious institutions promoting the belief in god or
reincarnation make those valid.) This is double mystification of consciousness: it is not
aware of its origins or of its erroneous view.
In mystified society, consciousness cannot be said to be in possession of itself— i.e., to
understand and control itself; to be authentic. Proclaiming oneself to be authentic is
inauthentic because it ignores its real sources and characteristics, its stultification and
cultural organization. Proclaiming oneself to be an authentic agent recapitulates the
double mystification of consciousness we have described.
The way to break the mystification of consciousness/psychology is to recognize its exis-
tence and its cultural sources, and work through them. It cannot be achieved by ignoring
or denying the mystification and determination of consciousness. Since freedom is the
recognition of necessity, macro cultural psychology’s elucidating the cultural structuring
of psychology is the path to freedom (by altering this cultural structuring). Micro cul-
tural psychology’s denial of cultural structuring of psychology dooms us to perpetual
determinism by our culture, because we do not know it to change it. The dialectic of
culture and psychology, and necessity and freedom, make our dialectical conclusions
valid and liberating.

Personal Meaning
Individuals certainly invest activities with meanings. But the meanings usually come
from objective, objectified cultural practices and concepts (Geist). As we have repeatedly
documented, people apply cultural meanings to personal activities, memory, perception,
emotions, self, eating, and cognition. When Americans invest personal activities with the
significance of personal achievement, personal willfulness, control, and renunciation of
competing interests, this is, paradoxically, an objectiver Geist.
For example, many joggers become compulsive about jogging every day. They disre-
gard painful injuries in order to maintain their regimen. They push their bodies to the
limit and pride themselves on their dedication, focus, self-control, self-denial, overcom-
ing pain, perfection, and purity. Anorectics employ similar terminology when describing
their refusal to eat.
While these attributes are employed by individuals to define their experience, they can
be seen to have been adopted from the cultural Geist of modern middle-class society.
This Geist emphasizes the individual’s freedom to achieve any goal to which he or she
puts his or her mind. The individual can overcome any obstacle through sheer will. The
individual transcends conditions, is not phased by them, is independent of them.
The individual conquers all, is supreme, powerful, immune to diffi culties. The individual
is master of his or her body and bends it to his or her will, continually enacting perfec-
tions. The individual abstains from worldly temptations to perfect his or her individuality.
The individual needs nothing, is dependent on nobody, is in total control of his or her
activity; he or she is not controlled by any outside force or the need for external things
(e.g., sustenance). The individual lies in opposition to conditions. These notions are all
prevalent objective, objectified, objectifying cultural concepts on the macro cultural level.
 417 Micro-Level Psychology versus Micro Cultural Psychology

Individuals who utilize them to direct and define their experiences appropriate them;
they do not invent them. Individuals are cultural agents disseminating the Geist through
their personal meanings and experiences, and this is necessary if cultural coherence is to
be maintained.
Experimental research in consumer psychology proves the direct power of advertising
to influence choices. In one study, children at a summer camp were presented with adver-
tisements during cartoon programs every day for 2 weeks. One set of ads showed candy
and Kool-Aid, while the other set showed fruit and orange juice. When subsequently
offered choices from among these products, the children’s selection refl ected the advertis-
ing to which they had been exposed. Similarly, when children are exposed to tobacco
advertisements, they indicate a favorable impression of cigarettes and an inclination to
smoke—although researchers are prohibited from providing children with cigarettes to
see whether they actually will smoke them (Goldberg, 2008).
Far from resisting macro cultural factors and transforming them into personal mean-
ings, humans adopt cultural factors as models for how to conduct themselves.
False notions of individual autonomy characterize micro cultural psychology. It is
instructive to identify additional aspects of this notion in order to illustrate and correct
their errors.
Rogoff ’s work offers additional insights into subjective individualism. Oddly, these
aspects of her work contradict her macro cultural psychological research. Her work with
Mejía-Arauz, which I cited earlier in this chapter, fruitfully identifies cultural patterns in
psychology. However, she contradicts this with theoretical constructs that emphasize
individualistic-subjectivistic processes.
Rogoff et al. (2007) go so far as to redefine society in novel, abstract terms that make it
easy to believe in individual autonomy. The authors replace meaningful, concrete terms
such as role, institutions, social class, power structure, politics, hegemony, and exploitation
to a list of scattered, abstract “community routines,” “traditions of previous generations,”
and “repertoires of cultural practices—the formats of (inter)action with which individu-
als have experience and may take up, resist, and transform” (p. 490).
Rogoff et al.’s (2007) culture is a merry mix of bedtime stories, going to school, show-
and-tell narratives, caring for an infant sibling, working around the house or on the farm,
playing outside with neighborhood children, and learning through observation and
eavesdropping or via verbal explanation (pp. 491–492, 495). There is no order or organi-
zation to this list; there is no structure into primary and secondary “formats.” There is no
politics, power brokers, vested interests, police, prisons, social class, social struggle, social
requirements, or social contradictions. Nor is there exploitation, alienation, market
forces, profit motive, commodification, bureaucracy, or ideology.
The new social vocabulary paves the way for micro cultural psychology because it elim-
inates any coercive, oppressive, debilitating social influences on people. People are able to
choose from among repertoires and routines in ways they cannot among politically con-
trolled social institutions. Rogoff et al. leave it up to the participants as to whether they
wish to accept them, resist them, or transform them. Individuals “may” do any of these
actions.
For instance, “repertoires of practice” are disparate routines (which can be anything)
across which individuals move, accumulating diverse experiences which they add to
 418 macro cultural psychology

their tool kit of competencies. This freewheeling diversity of experience allows the indi-
vidual to decide how to use those experiences. Cultural coherence, structure, and stabil-
ity are replaced with diverse experiences to enable the exercise of agency. Cultural
coherence, structure, and stability do not allow for the idiosyncratic choices that the
authors privilege, and so they must be theoretically transformed into more flexible, per-
sonal experience that people “own”: “Individuals (and communities) may expand, refine,
prune, and transform their repertoires of practices” (Rogoff et al., 2007, p. 509). This is the
real reason that culture is defined as repertoires of practice—it makes them accessible to
individual control.
Valsiner engaged in this conceptual softening-up of social reality by renaming cultural
factors as “social suggestions.” A suggestion is something one can take or leave, just like a
repertoire of practice. There is nothing definite or constraining out there that would
direct us to act in ways we did not voluntarily decide on. So if we just rename being ter-
minated from your job, having your country invaded, being imprisoned, having your
pension cancelled, and having the president of your country shot or kidnapped as “social
suggestions,” it automatically grants us the freedom to act as we please—at least in the
imagination of micro cultural psychologists.
Rather than mention social class, Rogoff et al. (2007) mention culturally sanitized and
depoliticized terms such as “participation status,” which is “the particular relation that
any one person has with what is being said (e.g., animator, author, and principal).” Thus,
one readily becomes an author and principal in life by simply assuming a conversational
position (i.e., by initiating a sentence). With a sweep of her magic wand, Rogoff has
replaced social, legal, and material differences in status (that differentiate the president of
the Exxon Mobil corporation from the migrant peasant) with positions in a conversa-
tional exchange!
With social life reduced to interpersonal conversations, the working class that is subor-
dinate to the principles of corporate capitalism becomes cheerfully transformed into a
collection of individual interlocutors who are now free to take up or resist their participa-
tion statuses in discourse.
It is important to note that Rogoff et al. are unconcerned with the content of conversa-
tions. It is simply the mechanics of the conversational interaction that constitute one’s
participation status. If you author a sentence, you have a high participation status, regard-
less of what you say. Thus, if you begin a sentence that says, “I agree to work longer hours
for less pay rather than be terminated,” you have been elevated into the position of “an
author” even though your sentence meekly acquiesces to what your boss has insisted you
do. The conversational turn magically converts you into an empowered interlocutor from
a subservient, exploited worker.
Conversation replaces and transforms social relations. We have all been anointed by fiat
to be members of the ownership society where we own our sentences, if not our jobs and
health care. Instead of “Let them eat cake,” Rogoff espouses, “Let them author sentences.”
The authors’ social terminology is deliberately abstract to maximize personal activity.
The authors judiciously sever interpersonal interactions that constitute cultural routines
and practices from macro cultural factors. Different peoples just have quaint, different
traditions that are handed down across generations via friendly, interpersonal interac-
tions. There is no macro origin, character, or function to these routines. There is no
 419 Micro-Level Psychology versus Micro Cultural Psychology

explanation or prediction of them, either. Indeed, cultural factors are reduced to personal
interactions such as practices of interlocution, working with Mother around the house,
or having teachers test you with questions to which they already know the answers.
For example, Rogoff et al. (2007) speak of “mothers from communities who are newly
adopting Western schooling” (p. 501). No reason is given for why communities suddenly
adopt Western schooling. No economic or political forces are considered. No job oppor-
tunities affect the decision. No media images of success are involved. No power brokers or
lobbying affect the decision. It appears as though “communities” just “decide” what kind
of schooling they wish to embrace—and this is what the authors hope. They are intent on
emphasizing individual agency in social and psychological life. They insist that “the
agency of individuals is key. Individuals choose (with or without reflection) among the
formats with which they are familiar and they may actively transform or reject engage-
ment in particular formats as they navigate the different settings of their lives” (p. 505).
To gloss these macro cultural factors with a neutral, abstract term such as “formats” is
to eviscerate them of their substance. Calling life imprisonment “a format,” or coal mining
“a format,” or working in a slaughterhouse “a format,” or the obliteration of one’s country
by an invading army “a format,” or seeing one’s father sold as a slave and taken away in
shackles “a format,” or arriving at work to be handed a pink slip “a format,” is not simply
misleading; it is insulting and trivializing insofar as it disrespects the onerousness of real
life conditions.
Of course, this is the whole point of micro cultural psychology—to nominally create a
fictitious social vocabulary that minimizes the objectivity and obdurateness of macro
cultural factors. That is the justification for individualism-subjectivism. Once society has
been reduced to formats and repertoires, it opens the way for asserting that individuals
have freedom within this fantasy world. If society were obdurate macro cultural factors,
it would falsify any pretense of individualistic-subjectivistic action—it would be incon-
ceivable and dismissed. (Indeed, Rogoff ’s glorification of agency that transforms and
prunes formats is contradicted by her macro cultural psychological work, which demon-
strates consistent cultural differences in psychology such as play. Children of different
cultures do not freely choose any style of play they wish.) Illusory freedom has to be
justified by concocting an illusory, soft, buttery social environment that tolerates it. This
is why social coherence, structure, objectification, regularity, and predictability are all
dismissed by micro cultural psychologists. Everything beyond the individual has to be
denied and redefined as nothing but the individual. This, of course, eliminates social sci-
ence, which studies these aspects of culture and psychology that micro cultural psycholo-
gists deny (Yoshida, 2007). Social science has to be redefined as casual impressions of
people’s spontaneous behavior, primarily conversation. If society is redefined, then the
science of society must also be redefined to correspond to its new subject matter. Micro
cultural psychologists favor informal qualitative methodology (Ratner, 2008a).
Bakhurst (2007) counterpoises personal autonomy to Vygotsky’s cultural-historical
psychology:

There are constraints on how far [Vygotsky’s] ideas can be taken. They cannot be
allowed to undermine the very idea of the autonomous self; that is, a self that is
the subject of an integral mental life and the author of its own utterances. . . . Even
 420 macro cultural psychology

if the words I speak are the product of numerous influences, the voice in which
I speak is nonetheless mine. I speak these words, they do not speak me . . . . In an
encounter between persons, mediated by language, the assumption is that the
encounter is one between autonomous, integral selves. . . . You and I are, and
remain, ourselves. (p. 73).

Bakhurst suggests that Vygotsky’s ideas tend to undermine the autonomous self and
should be resisted.ii
Bakhurst’s notion that individuals author their own utterances and that individuals
remain themselves despite social interaction is scientifically false and politically retro-
grade. Bakhurst reaches for the same gambit that Rogoff and micro psychological dis-
course analysts do: Authoring utterances transforms one into an autonomous person
regardless of social status, material wealth, or educational background. Social distinc-
tions, social conditions, social structure, and social reality all dissolve before the all-
powerful (and empowering) “authorship of utterances.”
This is a mythical reality and a mythical ideal. In fact, people are not necessarily the
authors of their words. All kinds of social pressures influence what people say, and what
they cannot say. Under Jim Crow, blacks were coerced to utter all kinds of polite words to
whites that they did not author. Chinese censors curtail what millions of Chinese can say
and display on the Internet and in movies. Political correctness in the United States places
similar constraints on what can and cannot be said publicly. Millions of people rehearse
what is socially acceptable/advantageous to say before going to job or college interviews
or beauty contests, or even before going on a date. They studiously conform to social
norms of speech. What they utter is not in the least theirs.
A study of a boy’s speech toward his grandmother found “Most of his responses were of
two sorts: he repeated words, pre-selected for him by his grandmother, or he assented
verbally or non-verbally to her guidance” (Miller, Fung, & Koven, 2007, p. 602).
When a bank teller is trained to tell every customer “Have a nice day”—and is under
constant surveillance by supervisors to ensure compliance under threat of being fired—is
he or she the author of the utterance because he or she said it? When the American ado-
lescent boy sees thousands of advertisements for Nike sneakers and announces to his
parents, “I want Nike sneakers,” is he the author of his utterances? When a philosophy
professor prosaically propounds popular propaganda (e.g., individualistic ideology) that
has been the Zeitgeist for centuries and is the daily fare of right-wing talk shows, is he or
she authoring these utterances?
All the empirical research on social class and socialization proves that parent–child
utterances are structured by class conditions, values, and demands.
All the research demonstrates that middle-class parents utter more words, and more
different kinds of words, to their children than lower-class parents do. If everyone is the
author of his or her own utterances, why don’t middle-class parents just decide to speak
to their children in ways that approximate lower-class utterances? And why don’t lower-
class parents just decide to speak “middle class-ese” to their children?
Similarly, Bakhurst’s assertion that individuals remain themselves despite social inter-
action is false. It denies all the evidence from cultural psychology on how all psychologi-
cal processes are historically formed.
 421 Micro-Level Psychology versus Micro Cultural Psychology

Not only is Bakhurst’s individualistic notion of autonomy unreal, it is also a bad ideal.
It is a stunted form of freedom. It implies that whatever one says is autonomous if one
authors it oneself. But that means that any thoughtless, idiotic, false, hurtful, slanderous
utterance qualifies as autonomy. Bakhurst’s notion of autonomy disregards content and
social effects. If I spout nonsense syllables, he would dub me an autonomous person
simply because I authored them myself!
Miller, Fung, and Koven (2007, pp. 596, 597) similarly opine that “to speak is to act—to
create, perform, and transform social realities.” As with Bakhurst, it doesn’t matter what
you say; mere speaking is action that creates and transforms social realities. So if you say
“frog chair the,” it creates and transforms society. Again we see the elevation of speech
itself into a magical power that dissolves and transcends social reality.
Bakhurst would have it that a prisoner who is allowed to say whatever he wishes in his
cell is an autonomous individual because he is the author of his utterances. The fact that
he has no control over his actions does not impugn his autonomy, according to Bakhurst.
This is an ivory-tower notion that pretends to be humanistic because it nominally glori-
fies the self in splendid isolation, expressing itself no matter what. In reality, this condi-
tion oppresses the self by callously disregarding social reality and the substantive
improvements necessary to realize creativity and freedom.
Vygotsky recognized the limitations of personal, individual autonomy and rejected
them in favor of societal reform. He said, “Life becomes creation only when it is finally
freed of all the social forms that distort and disfigure it. . . . Not in the narrow confines of
his own personal life and his own personal affairs will one become a true creator in the
future” (Vygotsky, 1997a, p. 350).
An example from academia testifies to the insufficiency of Bakhurst’s notion of auton-
omy. At Humboldt State University, in California, the Academic Senate in 2009 passed a
resolution of no confidence in the university president (for numerous acts of autocratic,
arbitrary management) and demanded his resignation. The university president ignored
the resolution; to this day, the faculty continues to work under his arbitrary, autocratic
supervision. Does the fact that the faculty authored their own utterance in the resolution
make them autonomous from the hated administration? Of course not; authoring one’s
utterances is not a measure of autonomy, even in the ivory tower of academia.

CRITIQUE: THE FALSE DICHOTOMIZING

OF PSYCHOLOGY AND CULTURE IN
MICRO CULTURAL PSYCHOLOGY UNDER
THE PRETENSE OF INTEGRATING THEM
The errors in micro cultural psychology rest upon the misconception that activity/subjec-
tivity/psychology is dichotomous with and antithetical to culture. This is fundamentally a
political value that glorifies the private individual in opposition to all external influences.
Bourgeois individualism is at the heart of micro cultural psychology. Yet micro cultural
psychologists present themselves as integrating psychology and culture. They use terms
such as co-constructionism, in which agency and cultural traditions reciprocally constitute
each other. But this co-constructionism is a disingenuous fig leaf of pluralism and bal-
ance. In fact, individual agency is always privileged over cultural factors. If individuals
 422 macro cultural psychology

can ignore and neutralize social suggestions, and if they have total control over their
speech and repertoires, as the previous quotations state, then culture really has no influ-
ence. Rogoff et al. (2007) make this clear in their statement that “Hybridity can be viewed
as a process of using particular interactional formats as cultural tools for accomplishing
participants’ current purposes” (p. 509). This statement reveals the sleight of hand behind
hybridity and co-constructionism. Culture is just a tool that the individual decides how
and when to use. Culture no more determines behavior than a hammer determines what
you build with it.
“For example, faced with home/school discontinuities, children (and parents) often
adjust their ways of participating: they may adopt school ways, or they may develop
hybrid forms that allow children to engage in the classroom in ways that are new for both
the children and the school” (Rogoff et al., 2007, p. 509). According to this description,
children are free to act any way they choose in relation to the school “format” or “reper-
toire.” No constraints are mentioned.
This echoes Valsiner’s statement in almost the same words. The current purposes of
participants always trump established cultural patterns. Cultural patterns are simply
tools for individual use. They do not constrain this use in any substantive manner.
“Children (and adults) determine when to apply what approach, as they choose and
modify standing patterns of interaction” (Rogoff et al., 2007, pp. 509–510).
Rather than integrating culture and the individual, micro cultural psychology displaces
culture with the individual. The individual always reigns supreme over culture. Micro
cultural psychology is not co-construction; it is subjective individualism, pure and
simple. The entire emphasis is on the individual authoring his or her own words, inter-
pretations, meanings, and actions. Micro cultural psychologists do not consider trans-
forming social institutions in order to enhance psychological functioning and social
relations; they do not consider advantages that culture provides to people, how psychol-
ogy is necessary and functional for culture, how cultural coherence is important to main-
tain, how individuals must partake of shared cultural practices in order to fulfill
themselves and maintain the advantages that culture offers, how culture enhances
psychology, and how culture influences psychology. The individual is always the center
and locus of action, the author of speech and behavior, and the arbiter of culture. The
individual is always seeking to form and express himself or herself as an individual, in
personal terms. Individuals’ utterances and actions are never judged in terms of their
social relevance (e.g., insightful understanding of social issues and viable strategies for
improving it, or ways in which actions reflect and reinforce society). The individual is
never discussed in terms of becoming a better member of society; the emphasis is always
on becoming the author of one’s own acts. It is always individualistic activity, never a
social activity; it is always apolitical activity, never political activity. This leaves society
intact, insulated from analysis and change. Agency/subjectivity is politically quiescent
and irrelevant.
Micro cultural Psychology is culture-phobic; it repels culture from psychology. Its indi-
vidual activity and intentionality are egocentric, individualistic. They have a presumed
orientation, which is away from culture. They are not neutral energy that can be integrated
with culture and imbued with cultural content. Cultural content is never identified in
psychology by micro cultural psychologists. Micro cultural psychology denies cultural
 423 Micro-Level Psychology versus Micro Cultural Psychology

psychology and undermines cultural Psychology, all under the name of cultural psychol-
ogy. It is a Trojan horse that cannot be admitted into cultural Psychology as a useful
emphasis that advances the discipline. Micro cultural psychologists often insist that they
are simply emphasizing the micro level as a part of culture, as an element that must be
included within culture and cultural psychology. However, this is disingenuous. Their
words, and my analysis, indisputably show that their conception of the micro level is anti-
thetical to culture. The true integration of micro and macro levels is accomplished by
macro cultural Psychology, as I outline in the first part of this chapter. The micro level is
not the exclusive province of micro cultural Psychology. It is best understood by macro
cultural Psychology.
Micro cultural psychologists assume that all decisions and choices are personal and
free, and should be so. Whenever a person makes a choice or decision, they proclaim it
to confirm their hypothesis that individuals are constantly negotiating with and resisting
culture, exercising their autonomy. They especially trumpet this interpretation when an
individual goes against some particular social pressure. When an individual succeeds
amid risk factors, or when an adolescent girl rejects her parents’ desire for her to become
a philosopher and instead chooses to become an investment banker, it appears to be
individual resistance to cultural influence. However, this is a superficial, self-serving
interpretation. The adolescent’s choice, for instance, does not mean she is free of social
influence and is creating her own social reality. She is simply pursuing a different social
influence—namely, the prevalent social influence of business careers in a capitalist econ-
omy. Survivors of bad environments also often do so because alternative cultural factors
intrude into the environments (one example is after-school programs). Of course, some
personal factors, such as motivation and support from hardworking friends or relatives,
play a role also. The point is simply that the vast majority of the behavior of the vast
majority of the population is formed by macro cultural factors. Individual exceptions do
not refute this fact; nor do they refute the need to transform cultural factors in order to
improve the vast majority of the behavior of the vast majority of the population.
All of the individualistic-subjectivistic examples of agency and autonomy are either false
or trivial. Either individual freedoms do not exist because cultural factors are dominant,
or, when they do exist, they do so in truncated forms that are trivial and demeaning. This
is clear in the case of Bakhurst’s autonomous speech. We saw that (a) most speech is not
autonomous; it is culturally structured and distributed; and (b) where free speech occurs,
it can be so random—devoid of any particular content, insight, truth value, or even social
effect and personal effect—as to be useless for achieving real liberty (Ratner, 2012).

False
Ritterhouse’s description of racial psychology demonstrates the cultural shaping of psy-
chology and the error of construing it as a collection of individual choices. While indi-
vidual differences in the behavior of Southern whites occurred, they occurred within the
parameters of the cultural codes, embodied these parameters (though in certain idiosyn-
cratic ways), and never challenged them. “Although many white parents went beyond the
core curriculum of racial etiquette to encourage moderation, almost none taught racial
equality” (Ritterhouse, 2006, p. 81).
 424 macro cultural psychology

The glorification of individual agency is insensitive to the ways in which behavior is

formed by cultural limits, which are extremely difficult to escape. Micro cultural psychol-
ogy proclaims individual choice to be a simple, natural matter in a social life that com-
prises abstract, personal routines. In fact, social life is so constraining that people struggle
arduously and poignantly to come to terms with social norms. Smith (1961, p. 39)
expresses the pathos of this:

Something was wrong with a world that tells you that love is good and people are
important and then forces you to deny love and to humiliate people. . . . What
cruelly shapes and cripples the personality of the Negro is as cruelly shaping and
crippling the personality of the white. Though we may, as we acquire new knowl-
edge, live through new experiences, examine old memories, gain the strength to
tear the frame from us, yet we are stunted and warped and in our lifetime cannot
grow straight again any more than can a tree, put in a steel-like twisting frame
when young, grow tall and straight when the frame is torn away at maturity.

This most poignant statement of the psychology of oppression is foreign to micro cul-
tural psychology.
Nor can the notion of personal, free agency explain the inability of sensitive, caring
people such as Sarah Boyle to see through the barriers of social/racial ideology and rec-
ognize the torment that blacks experienced during Jim Crow. She tells us in her own
words that she just never saw the reality of their suffering, even though she genuinely
cared about them and interacted with them daily (Boyle, 1962, p. 48). She describes how
shocked and guilt-ridden she was when she was later awakened to racism, including her
own “caring racism,” by the activism of blacks—particularly a black man who sued the
University of Virginia after being refused admission on racial grounds in 1950.
Why couldn’t this sensitive Southern woman negotiate or “co-construct” her emotions
and perceptions with her culture to alter the racial code of etiquette? No matter how
much she cared for blacks, she could not alter the racist, superior quality of her caring
that kept her apart from blacks and kept them in their place, nor could she perceive their
social and psychological reality. Her failure confirms Volosinov’s (1973, p. 34) point that
“[t]he content of the individual psyche is by its very nature just as social as is ideology,
and the very degree of consciousness of one’s individuality and its inner rights and privi-
leges is ideological, historical, and wholly conditioned by sociological factors”.
Boyle’s blindness was not hers alone. “ ‘Not seeing’ racial discrimination is, of course,
an important element of white privilege. And it is one that most white southerners
learned to exercise at some point in their childhoods and that relatively few gave up of
their own accord” (Ritterhouse, 2006, p. 161).
Even when certain whites felt twinges of guilt over the way they and others treated
blacks, these disruptive feelings were generated by the contradiction between the conflict-
ing social values that all whites lived with: democracy and Christianity versus slavery.
Clearly the former would lead sensitive people to doubt their participation in slavery. This
doubt is not some personal, noncultural construction; it is the subjective reflection of an
objective social contradiction. What is remarkable is that more Southerners did not sense
this social contradiction and feel guilty about their racism. The social, psychological, and
 425 Micro-Level Psychology versus Micro Cultural Psychology

material privileges racism offered them, along with the justification by Jim Crow ideol-
ogy, were able to prevent guilt and/or blot it out. In other words, one social ideology was
more powerful than another in the sense that it represented political-economic interests
and power that had not yet been supplanted by an alternative social movement (of the
1960s). The dominance of ideologies is a political phenomenon of political-economic
struggle and power; it is not a personal choice to express one’s individuality—as the his-
torically mystified and mystifying comments of micro cultural psychological discourse
analysts claim.
Common sense is sufficient to discredit Valsiner’s and Rogoff ’s cavalier notion of free
choice. Where Rogoff opines that school children may develop hybrid forms that allow
them to engage in the classroom in ways that are new for both the children and the
school, everyone knows that children cannot waltz into class and decide to develop some
idiosyncratic behavior that is new for the child or the school, modifies standing patterns,
and accomplishes a pupil’s “current purposes.” Pupils cannot choose to blare music from
their radios, talk with their friends on their cell phones, put their feet up on their desks,
pass out porn, or sell drugs. In fact, everyone knows that schools are becoming more
rule-based and intolerant of code violations. Zero tolerance of infractions is the norm;
metal detectors, surveillance cameras, and campus security guards monitor students and
keep them in line.
A few statistics show just how out of touch with reality Rogoff ’s bourgeois individualism
is: American schools routinely use suspensions “not just for weapons or drugs but also for
profanity, defiant behavior, pushing matches and other acts that used to be handled with a
visit to the principal’s office or detention. Such lesser violations now account for most of
the 3.3 million annual suspensions of public school students. . . . Some 15 percent of the
nation’s black students in grades K–12 are suspended at least briefly each year, compared
with 4.8 percent of white students” (Eckholm, 2010, p. 14). “In Baltimore, around 10,000
students, about 12 percent of the city’s enrollment, were suspended during the 2006–7
school year, mostly for disruption and insubordination. . . . In Milwaukee . . . school offi-
cials reported that 40 percent of ninth graders had been suspended at least once in the 2006–7
school year. . . . The Christina school district . . . expelled a seventh-grade girl [in 2007]
who had used a utility knife to cut windows out of a paper house for a class project”
(Urbina, 2009, p. A1, emphasis mine). The intensified social control over all facets of life
does not stop at suspending children from school for minor infractions. School authorities
call police to arrest six-year-olds for temper tantrums at school. In one case, “The student
became violent,” said Frank Mercurio, the no-nonsense chief of the Avon Park police. “She
was yelling, screaming — just being uncontrollable. Defiant.” “But she was 6,” the reporter
said. The chief ’s reply: “Do you think this is the first 6-year-old we’ve arrested?”
The 6-year old was handcuffed, taken to the police station in a squad car, fingerprinted
and a mug shot was taken. Desre’e was charged with battery on a school official, which is
a felony, and two misdemeanors: disruption of a school function and resisting a law
enforcement officer.
“The arrest of this child, who should have been placed in the care of competent, com-
forting professionals rather than being hauled off to jail, is part of an outlandish trend of
criminalizing very young children that has spread to many school districts and law
enforcement agencies across the country” (Herbert, 2007).
 426 macro cultural psychology

Further contradicting Rogoff ’s individualistic fantasy about schools, students and

teachers are afraid to express opinions that may be politically incorrect—even jokes are
castigated—and federal educational policy mandates frequent standardized testing that
encourages rote learning and discourages creative activities. Agency fares no better in the
workplace where anti-fraternization policies prohibit co-workers from dating.
Further disproof of the micro cultural voluntaristic fantasy that individuals make
their own worlds as they please is the fact that a person’s “own” cognitive skill does not
enable him or her to resist social class forces. In a longitudinal study of 9,000 individuals,
children who scored in the top quartile on cognitive competence when they were 5 had
a 65 chance of remaining at that level when they were 10 if they were of upper socio-
economic status (SES). Only 10 of these high-SES children fell below the median at
10 years. For low-SES children, on the other hand, only 27 of the top quartile at 5 years
of age remained at that level at 10 years, and 37 of high-scoring low-SES children fell
below the mean by 10 years of age. More of these children fell below the mean than
remained at their original, high cognitive level.
For children who score in the bottom quartile of cognitive competence when they are 5,
only 34 remain there when they are 10 if they are of high SES. However, 67 remain at
the bottom if they are from the lower class. In addition, only 3 of low cognitive achievers
at 5 reach the top quartile by 10 years of age; however, 14 of high-SES children reach the
top (Ratner, 2002, p. 19; Ratner, 2006a, pp. 125–126).
In Chapter 3, we we noted that a high-ability student coming from a family of high SES
is approximately 3.5 times more likely to obtain a graduate degree or professional educa-
tion than a student with similar cognitive ability who comes from a family of low SES.
Stability and change in children’s cognitive levels are a function of their social class, not
of individual expressions of agency.
These findings are dramatic evidence that children’s cognitive skill does not enable
them to prune social repertoires in line with their mental proficiency; on the contrary,
social class forces prune their mental proficiency and their agency to control their social
position.
These facts refute micro cultural psychology. They refute the notion that individ-
uals stand apart from society and imperiously select from it whatever they please, and
use it any way they wish to fulfill their own wishes. The facts decisively demonstrate
that individuals are bound by cultural factors in powerful and profound ways. Their
cognitive levels are more affected by their class position than by their own cognitive com-
petence.
Because individuals cannot control their own cognitive levels, these levels are not their
own. They are cultural phenomena. If underprivileged children cannot alter their own
cognitive level, they obviously have no power to alter the institutions that form their
social environment, such as the World Bank and transnational corporations.
In Chapter 3, p. 207 we discussed the study The Family: America’s Smallest School, which
documented that children’s test scores in school are greatly determined by their coming
from a single-parent family, watching lots of TV, being absent from school a lot, and/
or being read to regularly. These social factors not only accounted for test scores, but
they also solidified children’s level of cognitive development into an enduring charac-
ter trait that became immutable. Recall the report’s observation about underprivileged
 427 Micro-Level Psychology versus Micro Cultural Psychology

children: “By the time these children start school at age 5, they are far behind, and tend
to stay behind all through high school. There is no evidence that the gap is being
closed.”
These solemn facts rebut the notion that individuals contest, negotiate, or co-construct
social influences in accordance with their personal meanings and motives, or that they
reorganize cultural factors. If they did, psychological competencies would be randomly
distributed because they would depend on the personal characteristics of the individual
negotiators. If psychology were individually formed, it would bear no social patterning.
People’s life activity would not follow social factors; impoverished backgrounds would
hold no sway over cognitive and behavioral achievements. The fact that social patterning
is so strong, and that it becomes stronger, not weaker, over a person’s development, indi-
cates that individuals do not form their psychology on a personal level; rather, their psy-
chology is greatly organized and constrained by their social position.
All demographic research on educational performance and mental illness finds that psy-
chological phenomena conform to environmental risk factors (Ratner, 1991, Chapter 6).

Personal Decisions
Seemingly personal decisions to act are, in fact, constrained by social conditions
and resources (Ratner, 2011a, b). An important example is the responses of residents of
New Orleans to Hurricane Katrina in November 2005. The decision to flee before the
hurricane hit, or to stay and wait out the hurricane, was demographically patterned by
the resources of the residents. Table 6.4 summarizes this demographic patterning of the
decision among a diverse sample (Stephens, Hamedani, Markus, Bergsieker, & Eloul,
2009, p. 882).
Stephens et al. point out the implications of this social structuring of choices and deci-
sions. First of all, the decision about whether to leave or stay was shaped by social class
and race. Leaving required resources including vehicles and money to travel and relocate
into motels. Second, it is wrong to blame those who stayed for their “wrong” decision as
though it were a free choice and a matter of pure intelligence and foresight that they
lacked.

Table 6.4 Demographic Characteristics of Leavers and Stayers during Hurricane Katrina
(Stephens, et al., 2009, p. 882)

Variable Leavers Stayers

Female gender 71 73

Age (average) 40 45
White race 78 29
Black race 22 71
Middle class 90 39
Personal income $35,000 $19,500
Born in New Orleans 49 78
Owns a vehicle 100 54
 428 macro cultural psychology

Questions about choice, which locate agency as the private property of individual
actors, are the wrong place to start. Rather than ask what was wrong with stayers,
relief workers should perhaps have asked, “What actions were possible in the
resource-limited contexts of stayers?” This alternate question acknowledges that
all action is—and should be understood as—a product of what the individual can
do given the resources of the sociocultural context. Understanding that many
people who stayed in the hurricane-affected area could not simply choose to evac-
uate could have promoted a more timely and effective disaster prevention and
relief effort. (Stephens et al., 2009, p. 885)

This is sage counsel for micro cultural psychologists.

Body image and self-esteem are also more a function of macro models than they are
constructed by individuals. The plethora of slim female body images modeled in Western
culture become models and mediational means for females to evaluate their own indi-
vidual bodies. Thus, in Fiji, the ideal female shape was full-bodied until the arrival of
Western media, whose slim feminine images quickly led women to subscribe to a thin
ideal form (Dittmar, 2008, p. 195).
Ninety-nine percent of 3- to 10-year-old girls in the United States own Barbie dolls
whose waist is 39 smaller than the waist of an anorexic woman. The result of women’s
viewing their own bodies through the lenses of the cultural model is that girls as young
as 6 years old prefer slim body forms and are dissatisfied with their own body shapes. By
8 years of age, 40 of girls wish to be thinner than they are, and this percentage doubles
in only 3 years, as 79 of 11-year-old girls wish to be thinner than they are (Dittmar, 2008,
p. 126; Dittmar, Halliwell, & Ive, 2006, p. 284).
A meta-analysis of research on media images and bodily dissatisfaction among
young women demonstrated that media images of thin female bodies do indeed serve as
standards (mediational means) for young women to evaluate their own bodies. These
women do not freely invent their own standards as personal meanings. Grabe, Ward, and
Hyde (2008) analyzed 77 studies, with 141 effects. These studies all utilized very brief
exposure to media images, yet they still yielded significant effects on women’s internaliza-
tion of the thin ideal, as well as effects on their body image satisfaction and eating disor-
ders. “The results show consistent associations across both experimental and correlational
designs and across multiple measures of women’s body image and eating behaviors and
beliefs. Thus, these findings provide strong support for the notion that exposure to mass
media depicting the thin-ideal body is related to women’s vulnerability to disturbances
related to body image” (Grabe et al., 2008, p. 470).
These results indicate that girls comply with cultural models far more than they negoti-
ate them in an equal give-and-take between their “own, inner” desires and their external
models. What is happening is that girls are viewing their body from the generalized per-
spective of the cultural other (e.g., other models, other adults and peers who extol the
thin cultural ideal and tease them about exceeding it). Girls’ own, inner desires are
becoming socialized to embody cultural models—as Vygotsky and G. H. Mead empha-
sized. This example reveals that the generalized other is an image created by social leaders
to show individuals how they should see themselves. The generalized other is not a simple
sum of autonomous, ordinary individuals who form the image of how we should behave
 429 Micro-Level Psychology versus Micro Cultural Psychology

and think. Rather, this image is crafted by social leaders who dominate the images that
are current through their control of the media. The generalized other is a political-
economic phenomenon, just like mediational means are; it is not a mundane construction
that is spontaneously formed by ordinary people. The generalized other of body image,
for example, is crafted by leaders of the media and promulgated through the vast network
of media intrusions in our lives. The generalized other that presents an ideal body image
to us is not simply our peers, for they are heavily influenced by macro cultural factors that
are political and economic in essence.iii
In fact, social comparison (and conformity) figures more prominently in the percep-
tions, emotions, reasoning, and motivation of children as they mature. Thus, the influ-
ence of cultural factors on psychology increases as a person ages; it is not resisted or
superseded by a growing personal agency. This increasing influence may not be mono-
tonic; it may be stronger or weaker at particular moments, with some girls rejecting
the Barbie image at times. However, the overall result is increased identification with the
cultural ideal and dissatisfaction with oneself for failing to achieve it.
Contrary to micro cultural psychologists’ wish that personal meanings be the individ-
ual’s own, the reality is that “ideological themes make their way into the individual con-
sciousness (which as we know, is ideological through and through) and there take on
the semblance of individual accents, since the individual consciousness assimilates them
as its own” (Volosinov, 1973, p. 22, my emphasis). In other words, these psychologists
misconstrue personal meanings to be individual constructions, when, in fact, they are
social constructions that individual consciousness assimilates and imbues with the sem-
blance of individuality.
Leontiev stated the opposition between the macro psychological approach and the
micro psychological approach, which regards cultural practices and meanings as external
to an awaiting subject who exercises his or her agency in selecting from among them:

[T]he individual does not simply “stand” before a certain “window” displaying
meanings among which he has but to make a choice; these meanings—represen-
tations, concepts, ideas—do not passively wait for his choice but energetically dig
themselves into his connections with people forming the circle of his real contacts.
If the individual in given life circumstances is forced to make a choice, then that
choice is not between meanings but between colliding social positions that are
expressed and recognized through these meanings. (Leontiev, 1978, Section 4.4)

Even people’s autobiographical recollections are socially skewed by cultural values and
concepts. Memory is not one’s own; it is organized by cultural templates, as we discussed
in Chapter 3. Cultural templates direct people to mis-recall their personal experiences
and their consequences, just as they are often mistaken about perpetrators of crimes in
eye witness testimony. For instance, many white Southerners who belatedly rejected Jim
Crow attributed their political change to interpersonal contact with blacks during child-
hood free play. However, Ritterhouse demonstrates that their dissenting views usually
emerged only in adulthood, and not as a direct outcome of the events of their early years.
Their political change was often spurred by the protest of the black civil rights movement,
not by their own personal experiences (Ritterhouse, 2006, p. 150). Their interpretation
 430 macro cultural psychology

was skewed by an interpersonal, individualistic social theory that attributes social rela-
tions to interpersonal contacts. (This is an important example of the psychology of
oppression and how it cannot be trusted to accurately describe itself, and how an objec-
tive, external description is more valid; cf. Ratner, 2002, Chapter 4.)
In many cases, early individual experience is blotted out by adult social routines. This
was particularly tragic in the case of Southern whites whose lives led them to forget the
intimate, free childhood play they engaged in with black children. For most white
Southerners, the relatively open world of childhood interaction remained forgotten as
they matured into exclusively white social circles by the time they reached adolescence
(Ritterhouse, 2006, p. 150).
Macro cultural factors such as social class and race are far stronger predictors of psy-
chology than the personal characteristics of individuals or their caretakers (Ratner, 1991,
Chapter 4; 2002, pp. 28–31; 2006a, pp. 87–97, 124–126).

Trivial, Truncated, Demeaning

The individualistic-subjectivistic standpoint reduces freedom, autonomy, and empower-
ment to trivial, impotent, circumscribed acts, such as saying one wishes for something
regardless of its content or value, telling bedtime stories to one’s child, going to school,
relating show-and-tell narratives, playing outside with neighborhood children, or adding
personal meanings to cultural events.
For example, Valsiner, Branco, and Dantas (1997, pp. 287–292) are concerned with
parental authority over children—because authority violates the autonomy of the self—
and they advise that children can mentally distance themselves from parental guidance;
they can co-construct their culture by imagining their own goals, which they may imple-
ment at a later time. Social asymmetry, like other social problems, is dissolved by an
individual thought. There is no recognition that changes in real social relations, laws, and
cultural values are necessary in order to equalize interactions. Valsiner’s proposal is an
impotent, nonthreatening, conciliatory accommodation to the status quo. It leaves every-
thing intact and exempt from challenge, and only timidly suggests some slight mental
rotation about a situation. It is akin to the superficial, circumscribed, phony choices
offered by consumerism among existing products.
Sociologist Daniel Cook explains the stifling nature of such personal choices in the
realm of consumerism. Marketers equate choice with empowerment and enfranchise-
ment. They continuously incite choice by inviting customers to enter contests or express
their opinion. This is equated to voting. “The campaign, of course, was not ‘all about’
empowerment. It also was about corporate profit, about agitating ‘buzz’ around the prod-
uct and about building brand equity. Claims to empowerment regularly function to pro-
vide a veneer or moral worth to practices which otherwise might be seen as suspect to
parents and others. Campaigns which enjoin children to vote interweave the language
and surface behavior of democratic participation with the organization and calculated
self-interest of commercial enterprise” (Cook, 2007, pp. 45–46). Of course, consumerist
“enfranchisement” has no carryover to political enfranchisement; “after a several decades
of marketers cajoling children to vote for their ‘favorite’ characters and products, and
now offering youth and adults the ability to ‘vote’ for their favorite singing and dancing
 431 Micro-Level Psychology versus Micro Cultural Psychology

stars on television competitions like American Idol, American electoral participation

remains the lowest of any democracy” (Cook, 2007, p. 46).
The choices of micro cultural psychology are equally subservient, disempowering,
and demeaning. Marcuse (1972, p. 174) described this individualistic, subjectivistic free-
dom: “this freedom has shrunk to a point where it is wholly irrelevant and thus cancels
itself.” This is where they have been driven by the exploitive, alienated social systems of
the world today. We have little freedom to control the important aspects of our social
lives (government, industry, occupational opportunities); we are granted only circum-
scribed personal freedom and decision-making, such as shopping, which never chal-
lenges the cornerstones of our social existence. And this is precisely what Bakhurst,
Valsiner, Rogoff, Greenfield, Keller, and the micro cultural psychologists accept—and
celebrate—as “autonomy.” Marcuse (1972, p. 174) described this shameful complicity with
oppression as follows: “However adverse the conditions, man must ‘take it’ and make
compulsion his self-realization.” (See Adorno, 2006, pp. 5–6, for similar statements.)
As is demonstrated in Chapter 5 and earlier in this chapter, our agency—defined as
controlling the factors that organize our life—has been expropriated along with our labor
power. Rather than trying to restore it by analyzing its limitations and their causes and
then correcting them by proposing social reforms such as instating communitarian,
democratic forms of ownership and distribution, micro cultural psychologists content
themselves with accepting the current social form of agency as natural and sufficient.
They manifest no recognition of its stunted forms in exploitive society. As Marcuse (1964)
said, they accept compulsion as self-realization. They accept trivial, superficial, truncated
agency as meaningful self-realization. Whenever they speak about meaningful behavior,
they are referring to meaningless, oppressed, oppressive behavior. They have no concept
about what a historically and culturally meaningful activity would be. By championing a
form of agency that is created by and functional to the status quo, micro cultural psy-
chologists champion the status quo. They retard the development of a truer form of
agency that comprehends and controls macro cultural factors in a democratic, coopera-
tive system. Micro cultural psychologists function as apologists of capitalism: they regard
its oppressive, truncated aspects as fulfilling.
Action is irrelevant to all of these notions of nominal freedom (which places them in
opposition to activity theory).
Genuine autonomy requires much more than the feeble fallacies of micro cultural psy-
chologists. Marcuse (1972, p. 183) said this magnificently in his denunciation of Sartre’s
existential freedom: “Human freedom is the very negation of that transcendental liberty
in which Sartre sees its realization.”
Thus, individualistic-subjectivistic autonomy/freedom is false in two ways: (1) it is
truncated and unfulfilling because it operates within the interstices of the status quo, and
(2) because it is so weak and limited, it rarely can achieve even its limited goal of subjec-
tivistic freedom. Most behavior is organized by the real, dominant macro cultural factors,
as we have seen in countless examples. Most behavior is not idiosyncratic except in tan-
gential ways that do not alter the essential cultural organization.
Micro cultural psychology thus resonates with oppression and illusion; it does not illu-
minate and transform oppression. These are all antithetical to true science. Micro cul-
tural psychology is an oppressed and oppressive Psychology; it is not a Psychology of
 432 macro cultural psychology

oppression that explains, critiques, and transforms oppression. Instead of developing

realistic ways of empowering people, it touts illusory ways. Maintaining illusions is the
most effective way to entrap people in the status quo, for it obscures the reality that must
be transformed.
More effective means of fulfillment require our comprehending and transforming the
political, obdurate macro cultural factors that are the cornerstones of society. Far from
precluding social and psychological change, realistic, objective macro cultural psychol-
ogy is the only effective path to change. Durkheim (1978) explained that “sociology in
no way imposes upon man a passively conservative attitude”; on the contrary, “sociology,
by discovering the laws of social reality, will permit us to direct historical evolution with
greater reflection than in the past” (p. 75).
Micro cultural psychologists err in four ways in their conception of agency (Ratner,
2011a). First, they believe agency has a specific form when, in fact, agency is an abstract
term that can take many forms. Agency includes getting into bed, obeying prison rules,
and organizing a cooperative. Yet micro cultural psychologists assume that agency is
inherently a personal act of constructing personal meanings or making personal
choices.
The second error is to insist that personal acts of agency are the basis of culture (i.e.,
that cultural institutions are built up from interpersonal negotiations), when, in fact,
institutions are emergent cultural, political phenomena that organize interpersonal acts.
The third error is to misconstrue personal acts of agency as meaningful, creative, lib-
eratory activity, when, in fact, they are alienated, mundane, circumscribed, timid activity
that shrinks from social analysis and social transformation.
The fourth error is to regard the personal form of agency as natural when, in fact, it is
a cultural product of an alienated social system that prevents individuals from exercising
democratic control over their social environment.

DISCOURSE AND DISCOURSE ANALYSIS

ACCORDING TO MICRO CULTURAL PSYCHOLOGY
Narrative is an interpersonal, micro-level activity. As such, it is glorified by micro cultural
psychologists as a key form of psychological activity. The rationale is that “[i]t is the
forum aspect of a culture [in which meanings are negotiated and renegotiated] that gives
its participants a role in constantly making and remaking the culture—their active role as
participants rather than as performing spectators who play out canonical roles according
to rule when the appropriate cues occur” (Bruner, 1982, p. 839). In other words, individu-
als can change their words voluntarily in face-to-face interactions with others, so there-
fore narrative is the most democratic, flexible, controllable, and active area of social life.
We cannot remake the Federal Reserve Bank by altering a few words, but we can remake
our discourse, so let us emphasize discourse as the most important social activity.
Harre (2009, p. 140) gives the same rationale Bruner does for emphasizing narrative:

Human beings can come to realise that they are people and so active agents trying
to realise their projects with others. As such they can come to realise that the con-
straints that society seems to place upon their pursuit of worth are grammatical,
 433 Micro-Level Psychology versus Micro Cultural Psychology

in the sense that Ludwig Wittgenstein gave to that term. The story-lines and con-
ventions in accordance with which people live could be different and new gram-
mars can be created and adopted. All we have to do is to show people that they are
trapped in the silken but fragile shrouds of a pattern of discourse conventions.

Harre (2009) explains the political implications of this linguistic turn: “Where is the
place for political action, activities which are aimed at such social goods as the emancipa-
tion of some category of persons, the relief of the tyranny of bureaucracies, and so on? If
social life is constituted grammatically then it must be transformed grammatically. . . .
Should anyone want to make changes in a form of life, the focus of their efforts must
be on rendering implicit grammars explicit” (p. 140). Reducing society to individual
acts leads to the comforting vision of improving society through nothing more than
mundane individual acts that freely alter “story lines” and make grammar explicit (Ratner,
2009b).
This exemplifies the acceptance of truncated forms of agency that individualism pro-
motes. Imagine telling slaves that the way to change their lives is to render implicit gram-
mar explicit, or to ignore and neutralize it by constructing personal meanings, or to prune
it! Nothing could be more conciliatory and ineffective—and demeaning and insulting.
Micro cultural psychological discourse analysts do not define the cornerstones of soci-
ety according to their objective importance in determining social life; they defined them
as whatever area of social life appears to be within our personal control. This is like look-
ing for the lost key where the streetlight is. Individualistic political values form the con-
ception of culture, psychology, and agency. In reality, the social domains that exert the
most influence on our psychology—the class structure, the financial system, the produc-
tive process—are those over which we have the least control. This is why we must study
them, to understand how to achieve democratic control over them. Micro cultural psy-
chology studiously ignores them.
Insisting on the idiosyncrasy of discourse leads to interpreting the conversation
between Deena and Mrs. Jones in a way that contrasts with my cultural interpretation of
it, presented earlier in this chapter.
Micro cultural psychologists would not regard Deena’s speech as the psychology
of oppression. They would construe her discourse style as being a personal expression of
her agency, a creative way in which she has chosen to present herself to others. “Identity
in talk is a construction, an achievement, an accomplishment” (Wetherell & Potter, 1992,
p. 78). Speech is predefined as inherently creative and emancipatory. Individuals con-
struct themselves through speech; they achieve their identity; they do not suffer an iden-
tity that is imparted to them by social influences. Speech is a mechanism for self-formation
and transformation and self-expression. It does not express forms of self that have been
fashioned by cultural influences. As Miller et al. (2007) said, “speech” even transforms
society. Potter (2003) insists, “Discourse work is not designed to answer questions of the
kind, ‘What is the influence of X on Y’ (of social class on education success, and so on)”
(pp. 78–79).
Potter clearly states the dichotomization of individual speech from culture that is typi-
cal of micro cultural psychology. He is interested not in social influences on discourse,
but only in personal expressions in discourse.
 434 macro cultural psychology

With speech being a personal product, and with micro cultural psychology validating
the individual, micro cultural psychologists validate individuals’ speech acts. Criticism
of speech is tantamount to denying the author’s personhood, creativity, and/or achieve-
ment. This contrasts with macro cultural psychological discourse analysis, which regards
speech as a window into society and therefore encourages the criticism of deficient
speech as a window into criticizing the deficient social conditions that foster it (see the
work of Shirley Heath and Sara Michaels, as well as of Gee; Fairclough, 2005; Miller et al.,
2007, p. 601; Graham & Luke, 2011; Ratner, 1997; 2002, pp. 19–20, 70–71, Chapter 5; 2006a,
p. 119).
Relating this to Deena’s discourse style would lead to construing it as self-authored
and self-expressive. Deena’s speech is praiseworthy because it is her achievement, her
authorship, her agency, her way of transforming the world. We would be remiss to ana-
lyze the form and content of her speech in terms of some prior influence (X influences Y).
We would be oppressive if we tried to help her change her personal creation. Our goal
should rather be to encourage her and to suspend our critical judgment and our “mis-
guided” efforts to “help” her. Criticizing her speech would be tantamount to criticizing
her agency; it would not be a window into cultural critique, because there is no culture in
her words.iv
Validating Deena’s speech as an individual choice invalidates any critique of her cul-
tural conditions. Validating the individual validates her conditions as enabling her auton-
omy. Validating individual agency, or group agency, opposes the notion of psychological
or cultural deficits. The problem is said to be that dominant power simply labels subal-
tern culture and psychology as deficient as a way of legitimizing dominant power. While
this is true, it overlooks the fact that class structure also generates real psychological
deficits as a way of maintaining power. Deficits are not mere labels; they are real effects of
oppression. Oppressed people do not flourish psychologically. If they did, they would not
be oppressed. Idealizing their psychology and denying that it is deficient only masks the
problem of psychological oppression; it does not solve it. Oppression works through real,
subjugating pressures, not simply through language. Changing the words we use to
describe people does not eliminate real, subjugating pressures.
Failing to acknowledge the psychology of oppression simply plunges Deena back into
oppressive social conditions and psychological phenomena. The individualistic perspec-
tive simply masks oppression; it does not eliminate it. It contributes to the grand illusion
that people are free in their oppression, simply because they speak, because speech (and
psychology and agency) is inherently a free act, regardless of any conditions. Once again,
we witness the maddening imperiousness of micro cultural psychology to simply pro-
claim, without any justification, the most naïve, far-fetched notions.

MICRO CULTURAL PSYCHOLOGICAL RESEARCH

We have seen how micro cultural psychologists ignore the cultural basis, character, and
function of psychology in their concepts, constructs, and theories. They do so in their
research as well.
For example, Goh and Kuczynski (2009) researched ways in which Chinese parents are
becoming more child-centered, and in which children are consequently becoming more
 435 Micro-Level Psychology versus Micro Cultural Psychology

demanding and assertive. They vaguely mention that there have been macro changes that
have affected the family; however, they do not mention one specific example except for
the one-child policy that led parents to spoil their single child, in contrast to having to
spread their largesse among several children as in the past. Their language is revealing:
“As the number of children in each household has decreased, traditional children as old
age insurance, i.e. economic value, has been replaced by the emotional and psychological
value of children” (p. 507). This statement implies that the number of children has an
intrinsic affect on child rearing. The authors never mention consumerism, corporations,
media (e.g., Western), advertising, government policies, private property ownership, or
the free market in labor that requires people to secure their own jobs and domiciles and
be prepared to make decisions instead of accepting assigned housing and jobs—which
Pow (2009) described, and which we discussed earlier in this chapter.
The authors assume that the number of children has an intrinsic, natural affect on child
rearing apart from cultural institutions, concepts, and artifacts. “Children are few in
number—in contrast to the larger families of previous generations—allowing the child to
have one-on-one personal relationships with caregivers. Each adult caregiver has an
emotional stake with the child” (Goh & Kuczynski, 2009, p. 525). It is akin to an animal
instinct that drives parents of a single child to develop strong emotional ties with him or
her, which, in turn, naturally leads to their being receptive to the child’s demands and
spoiling him or her, and even naturally, by itself, displaces the authority of grandparents.
For instance, “Some parents were even resigned to the fact that the position of the grand-
parents has declined as compared to the single children, recognizing this as an inevitable
consequence of the one-child policy” (Goh & Kuczynski, 2009, p. 509). Of course, none
of the parts of the sequence are naturally related. Single-childhood does not necessarily
generate strong emotional ties with a child, nor does a strong emotional tie necessarily
lead to spoiling a child and being permissive with him or her, nor does any of this neces-
sarily lead to reducing the authority of elders in the family. Omitting any cultural factors
that might contribute to parents’ permissive child-rearing of single children makes it
appear to be a natural impulse that would lead even hunter-gatherer parents to have the
same psychology if they were left with only one child.
The authors’ decontextualized thinking about childhood also leads to their positing
natural tendencies to children. The emotional tie that parents have with single children
“means that the child’s relationships with multiple caregivers increase the child’s relational
resources, which can be exploited to meet the child’s goals” (Goh & Kuczynski, 2009,
p. 525, my emphasis). No reasons are given for children’s desire to exploit their parents’
emotional tie to them. Evidently, all children do this, even hunter-gatherer children. It is
natural, akin to evolutionary psychology’s notion of the naturalistic expenditure of
resources that govern behavior (e.g., the evolutionary account of male jealousy I men-
tioned in the Introduction, which is based on males’ conserving their resources by refus-
ing to raise another male’s child). Attributing child-centered socialization to having only
one child is a naturalistic explanation, not a cultural one.
The authors obtained reports from family members about obedience (e.g., which adult
the child obeyed more). From these mundane accounts, the authors conclude that “the
little emperor was found to be an agentic child. . . . Agency was displayed in sometimes
subtle and creative ways, in overt resistance that exploited weaknesses in each of their
 436 macro cultural psychology

different relationships, in behavioral compliance accompanied by private rejection of

parental messages, in creative attempts at evasion and delay, and in strategically using
relationships with some adults to offset the influence of others” (Goh & Kuczynski, 2009,
pp. 504, 525).
This conclusion is taken to confirm “social relational theory,” which claims: “Bidirectional
influence comes about as parents and young or adult children acting as agents interpret or
construct meanings from each other’s behaviors and anticipate, resist, negotiate and accom-
modate each other’s perspectives during interactions” (Goh & Kuczynski, 2009, p. 508).
This is the familiar mantra of individualistic cultural psychology. It glorifies individual,
personal agency as creative, fulfilling, and self-expressive. It insists on bilateral negotiation
among individuals, no matter what, as an inherent principle of human sociality.
However, this theory contradicts any cultural explanation of psychology—for if indi-
viduals freely negotiate their personal interests in a mutual give-and-take, how can there
be any cultural organization of behavior? Free negotiation of personal interests is anti-
thetical to cultural organization. This is clear from free-market ideology—which is the
basis of micro cultural psychology—that denounces social regulation of the “free market.”
Micro cultural psychologists give lip service to the “contextual embeddedness” of interac-
tions; however, they never explain how this is compatible with free, bilateral negotiation
among agents. Nor do they include cultural issues within the negotiation process; cul-
tural issues remain extraneous and indefinite, as in Goh and Kuczinsky’s (2009) conclu-
sion that children are agentic and creative. The authors vacillate between claiming some
indefinite cultural influence that generates agency and natural, subjectivist, individualis-
tic agency that exists regardless of and in opposition to culture. Because micro cultural
psychologists seek to promote absolute, universal free agency, they rarely mention cul-
tural factors in relation to agency, and when they do, they construe culture in vague,
superficial ways that cannot interfere with free agency. Goh and Kuczinsky manifest both
of these errors.
Social relational theory, like all micro cultural psychology, is an absolute, ahistorical
universal of human nature. This makes all people the same everywhere. All children are
agentic in the sense of constructing meanings, negotiating, and resisting. It doesn’t matter
what social system they live in; they will always be this way. This eliminates, marginalizes,
or trivializes cultural features and variations in agency and psychology. Micro cultural
psychology presumes that agency already exists in people and requires no particular
social organization. This is the whole point of micro cultural psychology—to emphasize
individual freedom from culture.
When cultural issues are mentioned, they contradict the notion of agentic negotiation.
For instance, when Goh and Kuczinsky (2009) mention that the traditional Chinese
family exercised authority over children, it contravenes the absolute insistence that chil-
dren and parents engage in bilateral negotiation and that children resist parental author-
ity. Social relational theory even contradicts the authors’ claim that the one-child policy
allowed for more childhood agency than previous customs had allowed. According to the
theory, children have always been agents; consequently, no policies affect this.
The individualism of micro cultural psychology is either wrong or stultified/stultifying,
depending upon how it is invoked. When it is invoked to describe the substance of social
relations, it is wrong. Social relations do not consist of bilateral, free negotiations among
 437 Micro-Level Psychology versus Micro Cultural Psychology

individuals of equal status and power. Rather, personal behavior is culturally organized,
as myriad examples in this book have proven.
When individualism is invoked as a process that operates within cultural constraints, it
is stultified and stultifying. It is reduced to purely subjective, impotent acts such as men-
tally repudiating hierarchical social relations that remain intact. This is akin to claiming
that slaves negotiated with their masters by mentally contesting their enslavement—
which had absolutely no effect on their actual exploitation. We examined the futility and
obsequiousness of this subjectivistic individualism earlier. The mechanisms of agency
that the authors attribute to contemporary children—mentally resisting, delaying
compliance, pitting one authority figure against another—exemplify this truncated, per-
sonal agency. It is part of the psychology of oppression: it operates within the status quo,
exonerates the status quo as extraneous to personal agency/empowerment/freedom, and
does nothing to change it. Subjectivistic individualism is oppressed and oppressive,
impotent and disempowering. It is the opposite of true agency, which controls its social
environment.
Subjectivistic individualism is anti cultural psychology because it excises culture from
psychology. When it wrongly reduces culture to subjective individual processes, it ignores
macro culture. And when it unwittingly reduces agency/psychology to impotent, disem-
powering, subjective acts within the social hierarchy, it also ignores the surrounding
social hierarchy and focuses on subjective mental processes. This is what allows micro
cultural psychologists to idealize these acts as true agency. The thrust of micro cultural
psychology is to reject and marginalize substantive culture in an effort to free the indi-
vidual as an independent agent. Notice that the description of agency by Goh and
Kuczinsky (2009) uses terms such as resist, avoid, and offset social influence; they never
construe agency as embracing, benefitting from, and contributing to culture. This echoes
Valsiner’s characterization of culture as a set of viruses that must be resisted.
The increased individualism in China, as in the United States, is rooted in and pro-
moted by top-down decisions by leaders of social institutions such as the government.
Chapter 4 cited Yan’s research on the decline of organized sociality in China such as mass
rallies, collective parties, and volunteer work for the public good, and on the dissolution
of the social safety net that guaranteed jobs and housing for all. This individualization of
social policy fostered a popular sense of individualism in a wide range of social activities,
including finding a job, a house, and a spouse.
For instance, the Chinese Sports Federation used to pay for athletes’ training and there-
fore set the rules for training, arranged for athletes’ travel, and also kept most of athletes’
monetary winnings. The Federation recently changed its official policy and now allows
athletes such as tennis players to keep 88 of their earnings, hire their own coaches, train
on their own, and plan their own trips to international competitions. This official policy
changes the collective sense of personhood into an individualistic sense.
In addition, consumerism has fostered a strong sense of individualism. Government
policy encouraged individuals to consume as a way of stimulating the economy, fostering
social content, and distracting people from social injustice and autocracy. Government
policy encouraged banks to make consumer loans at low interests with low down pay-
ments. The media praised consumerism. “Chinese consumers’ enthusiastic embrace of
commercial opportunities and products has accentuated the role of individual choice and
 438 macro cultural psychology

diversified the venues in which individuals from a broad spectrum of urban society
socialize. . . . The ideology of consumerism, which simply encourages people to indulge
themselves in the pursuit of personal happiness, effectively dilutes the influence of com-
munist ideology” (Yan, 2000, p. 185).
Individualism did not spring out of spontaneous personal wishes that magically coin-
cided throughout the urban areas of China; nor did it spring out of one child in the
family. It was rooted in concrete cultural institutions (banking, media, ideology, advertis-
ing, employment practices) and normative activities that were encouraged by social lead-
ers for political and economic purposes. It is these concrete cultural institutions and
norms that are the crucible for particular psychological phenomena: “Mundane and
commercialized activities of consumption provide the concrete content, the specific
form, and the particular space that make this new kind of [individuality] possible” (Yan,
2000, p. 185). All of this was deliberately cultivated by the government to regain social
stability after the Tiananmen uprising in 1989: “The triumph of consumerism has drawn
the public’s attention away from the political and ideological issues, overshadowed
the increased social inequality and widespread corruption, and eased the legitimacy
crisis of the CCP after 1989” (Yan, 2000, p. 188.)
Far from being a personal construct, Yan (2010, p. 489) demonstrates that “the rise of
the individual and the consequential individualization of society should be viewed as
a reflexive part of China’s state-sponsored quest for modernity.” “China and Western
Europe were both forced into the current round of individualization through the impact
of globalization, especially due to the global triumph of neoliberalism and the capitalist
mode of production.” (p. 507).

whenever individualization and privatization became necessary, the party-state

did not hesitate to use its power to launch institutional changes . . . the three major
reform projects since the late 1990s, namely, the privatization of housing, the mar-
ketization of education, and the marketization of medical care, are all institutional
changes launched by the state to force individuals to shoulder more responsibility,
to more actively engage in market-based competition, and to assume more risks
and to become more reflexive. (One blunt way that the State forced individualiza-
tion was to fire millions of State employees and force them to fend for themselves
in market activities.) Chinese official data recognize that between 1998 and 2003
more than 30 million workers were laid off from the SOEs, representing a 40 per
cent cut in the state owned enterprise workforce. (Foreign data double this figure.)
The lifestyle of the laid-off workers changed immediately once they lost both their
jobs and their sense of security. (Yan, 2010, pp. 498, 499).

In keeping with Bourdieu and macro cultural psychology, Yan illustrates Vygotsky’s
statement that psychology is a product of historical forces:

While experiencing the radical changes in her/his life situation and biographic
pattern over the last three decades, the Chinese individual has also gone through
an equally radical breakthrough in the subjective domain, that is, a re-formation
of the self and a search for individual identity. The institutionalized changes in the
 439 Micro-Level Psychology versus Micro Cultural Psychology

labour market, education, and career development, for example, have led to the
rise of what Nicolas Rose calls the ‘enterprising self ’, meaning the calculating,
proactive, and self-disciplined self that is commonly found among the younger
generations of Chinese labourers. (Yan, 2010, p. 504).

This culturally induced change in self concept brings the same psychological pressures
as in the West.

The pressure to remake the self in one way or another created not only an addi-
tional responsibility but also a new psychological burden for the Chinese indi-
vidual. Squeezed between the increasing market competition on the one hand
and the decreasing support from family, kinship, and state institutions on the
other, many Chinese individuals suffer from various degrees of mental illness.
According to a recent report, doctors at the National Center for Mental Health
quote the startling figure of 100 million Chinese suffering from mental illness (see
Moore 2009). Another noteworthy trend is that many individuals have turned to
telephone hotlines, talk therapies, and psychological counseling for professional
help instead of seeking support from relatives, friends, and family members as
most people did in the past (Yan, 2010, 505–506).

The Chinese government created the individualistic middle class by planning and
legally and financially supporting privatized, commodified housing projects. The first
one was completed in 1997 in Peking. The construction and design were tailored for indi-
vidualized, well-off individuals. Government banks issued mortgages to individuals. This
social engineering promoted an (engineered) individualistic, exclusive self-concept.
Tomba (2004) explains this in detail:

“The state's social engineering to enlarge the ranks of a consuming middle class
has had the most visible effects in housing policies. The continued involvement
in housing distribution by the state and its agents is affecting the patterns of class
formation in two fundamental ways: 1) the patterns of residential segregation
determined by the commercialization of housing are shaping the urban environ-
ment around gated communities, whose residents enjoy a relative autonomy from
traditional workplace relations and engage in new forms of autonomous and
interest-based collective activities; 2) state intervention to subsidize home owner-
ship favored public employees and provided them with easier access to status-
enhancing home ownership” (p. 11).

The criteria for issuing mortgages were political in the sense of favoring certain social
categories of people: “Also stimulated by government policy, a commercial mortgage
market emerged rapidly after 1998. In China as much as anywhere else, mortgages typi-
cally reward those with stable incomes and pre-existing property” (p. 19).
Tomba explains how the government created a class hierarchy: “The idea that, in tran-
sitional China, wealth is not for everyone at the same time has been engraved in the
reform policies since Deng Xiaoping formulated the target of a "well-off society" and the
 440 macro cultural psychology

strategy of allowing some to "get rich first" (xian fuqilai) in 1979” (p. 4). The rejection of
equality, and the deliberate creation of a distinct middle social stratum (“jieceng”) led
participants to see themselves as individuals distinct from other people.
“The emergence of a professional middle class was also the consequence of intensive,
ideologically justified and coordinated policy making, which manifested itself in a steep
rise in public sector salaries and a protection of the welfare privileges of the skilled, pub-
licly employed urban population” (p. 6).
The 16th Party Congress in November 2002 institutionalized these policies and pro-
moted consumerism. It strove to increase consumption as proportion of GDP. This encour-
aged individuals to purchase individualized products to enhance their individuality.
“Another indication of a state commitment to increase consumption is the post-1995
policy to provide additional leisure-time. With the declared aim of increasing consumer
spending, in May 1995 a compulsory 5-day working week was introduced that suddenly
brought the number of non-working days in a year among urban employees to 115, while
major national festivities were progressively extended to week-long holidays. This jump-
started both domestic and international tourism” (p. 10).
Tomba’s account demonstrates the truth of the macro cultural model, that psychologi-
cal phenomena are overdetermined by a massive, coordinated, administered, coherent
structure of macro cultural factors.
Ng (2009, pp. 424–425, my emphasis) clearly describes the macro cultural-political
changes that replaced Chinese style collectivism with modern individualism.

In Maoist China, personal problems were moralized and politicized rather than
medicalized and psychologized as in the West. Time outside of work became
highly regulated. Leisure took place in group settings, and failure to participate in
state-sanctioned leisure activities provided grounds to criticize individuals for
“cutting themselves off from the masses” and “lacking collective spirit.”
In the 1980s, the new leadership under Deng loosened state control over most
domains of social, cultural and personal life. New urban sites including billiard
parlors, bars and beauty shops have shaped patterns of consumption and city
culture. Economic and sociopolitical decentralization have opened new physical and
social spaces for personal autonomy and subjective experience. Parallel changes in
the socioemotional landscape have also been documented in rural areas in
China. . . . Broadly speaking, social life in both urban and rural areas has become
increasingly depoliticized, and public discourse on mood and emotion has
become less dangerous and more commonplace. Ordinary citizens could now
openly express opinions, hopes and fears on an individual level. Popular media
and professional literature have begun to utilize terms such as psychological
(xinli), stress (yali), mood (xinqing) and depressed (youyu) more regularly.

An important macro cultural factor in the individualizing of Chinese psychology

has been the psychobiologizing of experiences such as depression under the direction
of capitalist pharmaceutical corporations: “With the influence of foreign pharmaceutical
companies, availability of glossy psychology magazines at newsstands, popularization
of psychology talk shows on television and radio, increased mental health education
 441 Micro-Level Psychology versus Micro Cultural Psychology

campaigns by the government and easy access to pirated foreign films and soap operas,
many Chinese in Shenzhen are well aware of the concept of depression” (Ng, 2009,
p. 426).v
Goh and Kuczynski know about some of these cultural developments (historical forces),
yet they refrain from mentioning these in their study of family relations. Rather than
explaining how media-supported corporatization and economic and sociopolitical
decentralization and depoliticization have organized new physical and social spaces for
personal autonomy and subjective experience—which cultural psychologists should
do—the authors extirpate them from analysis and zoom in on the family unto itself in
order to create the impression that Chinese parents and children are active agents. The
notion of free agency drives the authors—and the publishing journal’s editor and review-
ers—to decontextualize, deculture, and depoliticize family and personal relations (see
Kurki & Sinclair, 2010, for a similar critique of constructivism in international politics).
Contextualizing family changes within broader, political macro factors would reveal
that Chinese individuals are conforming to imposed cultural parameters, which they do
not create through negotiation with the powers that be, and which they rarely resist,
ignore, or prune effectively. Ng (2009, pp. 438–439) refers to this macro cultural forming
of psychology as a way of comprehending the psychology expressed in psychiatric narra-
tives. Her macro cultural psychological discourse analysis is as follows:

To better understand the four interviewees’ narratives of distress, it might be

helpful to note the changing relationships between individuals and work in China
across the decades. Major structural changes to the workplace in the reform era
have led to increased flexibility and mobility for both employers and employees,
in contrast with the stability and rigidity of Maoist-era work units (danwei). For
workers of the Maoist era, one’s work unit was not individually chosen, and it
defined one’s identity for all legal and bureaucratic purposes, as well as many
aspects of one’s social life. Although some may not have been too satisfied with
their allocations, the posts were seen as “iron rice bowls” one could count on, usu-
ally for life. Thus, the relationship to the workplace was one of restraint, yet also
one of reliability and support. The obligation was mutual.
The transition toward a market economy in the reform era has seen the disman-
tling of this model.

While the work unit still exists, its influence has been diminished due to the increasing
influence of privatization. Workers and employers can now “negotiate” employment, par-
ticularly in the private sector. Fewer promises are made from both ends. “This has led to
a related shift of attitude in younger workers, who prioritize the well-being of their per-
sonal and (often nuclear) family lives over that of the greater community and workplace.
In this context, Mr. Tian’s narrative of frustration toward national policies and younger
employees can be seen as a response to the changes in both workplace structure and
worker psychology in the post-Mao era” (Ng, 2009, pp. 438–439).
Shifts since the 1990s toward a neoliberal model of funding have led to many reductions
in or outright termination of pension benefits in China, leaving some older workers and
retirees nostalgic and bitter about promises made in the Maoist past. Across the country,
 442 macro cultural psychology

workers and retirees have organized public protests over the depletion or denial of
benefits. “Lacking reliable safety nets in the socioeconomic domain, many younger work-
ers and students such as Mr. Zhong and Mr. Lu feel that they must indeed ‘rely on them-
selves’ for their own welfare and livelihood, as the availability of employment and benefits
remains in constant flux, particularly for migrant laborers like Mr. Zhong. Thus, in expe-
rience of bipolar disorder, ‘the contents of complaints are very much in step with the
socioeconomic atmosphere of their times’ ” (Ng, 2009, pp. 438–439).
Ng’s anthropological perspective, and Yan’s sociological perspective explore cultural
influences on psychology that Goh and Kuczynski overlook (see Ratner, 2011a; Zhang,
2010; Zhang & Ong, 2008 for further discussion of macro cultural research on Chinese
individualism).
Zooming out from the family to society would additionally reveal that

markets are indispensable to the making of social persons in the ongoing con-
sumer culture of childhood. . . . These persons in turn use markets to remake
themselves.
It is not useful to think of children—or persons generally—along the lines posed
by neoclassical economic thought, as initially independent, encapsulated beings
who confront an equally identifiable “market sphere” and who thereby make dis-
crete choices within it or become merely socialized into it. Consumption has
become a necessary and indispensable context—though not sufficient in itself—
in which the person’s self develops because commerce produces most of the mate-
rial world with which a child comes into contact. . . . It is around consumption
and display—in the interaction with the material world—that personhood and
agency tend to crystallize. (Cook, 2004, pp. 144, 145)
“Markets and market mechanisms are inseparable from the historical process
of elevating the child to more inclusive levels of personhood” (ibid., p. 68). As the
advertising director of Child Life magazine said in 1938, “An important factor in
the growth and development of the juvenile market is the trend toward stimulat-
ing greater self-expression in children” (Cook, 2004, p. 77).

This advertiser perceived what micro cultural psychologists do not: the stimulating
of greater self-expression in the form of personal choices, meanings, and speech acts is
permeated with cultural factors—often debilitating, disempowering ones; it is not a gen-
uine development or expression of the autonomous person.vi

MICRO CULTURAL PSYCHOLOGY VERSUS

MACRO CULTURAL PSYCHOLOGY: SCIENCE,
POLITICS, AND ETHICS
The contrast between micro and macro approaches to interpersonal (micro-level) experi-
ences can be stated in terms of video technology. Micro cultural psychologists “zoom in”
on individuals so much that they lose sight of contextual conditions. Consequently, the
individual appears to be acting on his or her own because contextual conditions have
been cut out of the picture. However, as we “zoom out” from the subject and include
 443 Micro-Level Psychology versus Micro Cultural Psychology

a wider range of conditions, we can see how the individual’s actions have been influenced
by these conditions.
Micro cultural psychology thus rests upon an ideological narrowing and distorting
of the true causes of behavior/psychology, not upon an objective, full comprehension of
behavior/psychology.
The “individual-near” focus of micro cultural psychology overstates the individual’s
responsibility for positive and negative acts. Moreover, it converts many negative social
acts into positive individual acts. For instance, a person who conforms to others appears
to be independent from a “zoom in” perspective that excludes others from sight. Micro
cultural psychology thus transforms conformity into independence by simply obscuring
(and denying) social influences as it zooms in on the individual. Micro cultural psychol-
ogy also praises the individual for his or her successes, without recognizing the social
support that was invaluable to the success. It also blames the individual for failures, with-
out recognizing their social causes.
A recent example is the torturing that occurred in Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. Zooming
in on the torturers makes them appear to have been acting on their own; they were a few
rotten apples in the barrel. This is because any social influence has been expunged from
view by the theory of individualistic action. However, if we reject this theory and
zoom out, we can see that an entire chain of command encouraged the guards to commit
torture. The barrel, or the system hierarchy, was rotten, not only the individuals at the
bottom. Indeed, this must have been the unifying force that induced more than
600 military and civilian (Blackwater) personnel to abuse more than 460 Iraqi detainees.
This common activity could not have been a spontaneous personal decision on the part
of 600+ autonomous individuals.
In the case of Abu Ghraib, the micro cultural view exonerates the officials who insti-
gated the system of torture and blames only the individual guards. This is exactly the
position that the military and the Bush administration took in explaining the tortures—
and no senior administration official was prosecuted for these crimes. American news
typically zooms in on individual behavior while neglecting the political-economic con-
text. We can see that micro cultural psychology falls right in line with the prevalent indi-
vidualistic, anticultural thrust of capitalist culture. It is part of the Ideenkleid of capitalism
that mystifies it.
A macro cultural perspective is clearly superior scientifically and politically, for it
blames the chain of command beyond and above the individual guards. This is what
makes their behavior interesting and intelligible. It is vitally interesting and important to
understand how torture reflects “the military,” and why the highest levels of the military
and the Bush administration authorized torture in violation of international law. Why
did they need to use torture, in terms of failed policies, etc.? Reducing the torture to the
act of mentally unstable guards makes it less interesting and important; it becomes merely
an individual problem of some unbalanced people who need treatment and punish-
ment—and then the problem disappears. Again, this is just what the administration
hoped for.
Micro cultural psychology also eliminates the tragedy and irony of oppressed and
oppressive psychology/behavior. Oppression and mystification mislead people to misun-
derstand the basis and the nature of their own behavior. For instance, the young American
 444 macro cultural psychology

soldiers who were sent to Iraq were told they were fighting for freedom and democracy,
and to protect people against terrorism. Most of them earnestly believed this. Yet the real
reason for the invasion was to control and dominate Iraq’s oil resources and its strategic
geopolitical position in the Middle East, with no concern for helping the people or the
society. This is why the soldiers were commanded to act in criminal, destructive ways
that have decimated the country and its people. The tragedy and irony is that the soldiers
believed they were acting for good when they were acting for bad. This becomes bewil-
dering to them, as they cannot comprehend how their good intentions have resulted in
such carnage and hatred. The soldiers’ actions realized the objectives of the leaders more
than they realized the objectives of the soldiers! The soldiers were unwitting cogs in
the military machine, acting against their very own objectives and ideals. Their “own”
objectives and ideals had been fabricated as inducements by the political and military
leaders. But these inducements were bogus. They obfuscated the real objectives of the
invasion and of the soldiers’ behavior. The soldiers were acting under a false understand-
ing of their own actions. This is an enormously complex, ironic, and tragic cultural
psychological situation that has been provoked by oppression and mystification. It is all
obfuscated by romantic, individualistic-subjectivistic views of human agency/subjectiv-
ity/psychology.
In this book, we have seen that the individual is really a proxy for macro cultural factors
such as class. Whenever the individual is emphasized (in policy or ideology or social sci-
ence), the real effect is to support the macro factors that shape individual behavior.
Individualism simply masks social influence; it does not eliminate it. When policies leave
individuals to their own devices to select schools, insurance plans, health plans, retire-
ment plans, school preparation, or any of the myriad other privatization schemes that
have been attempted, the result is inevitably an exacerbation of individual differences
that are structured by social class. Individualistic, privatized programs sort out individu-
als according to social class. These programs act as effectively as a command of “you
lower-class people, over here; you upper-class people, over there.”
Individualism does not equalize and democratize behavior. On the contrary, it allows
disparate, unequal macro factors to exert more influence over behavior. Individualism is
the most insidious legitimation of class disparities and autocracy. Other ideologies
frankly admit and justify autocracy. Catholicism, for example, tells its devotees how weak
they are and how they need priests’ help to work through their sinfulness. Feudal aristoc-
racies justified their autocratic rule as a divine right that common people did not possess.
However, bourgeois individualism brilliantly enshrines social oppression and inequality
in the doctrine of personal autonomy and free choice. This disguises oppression and
inequality in ways that other ideologies do not do. Individualism is thus the most mysti-
fying of all ideologies. Never before have so many oppressed people been so unaware of
the details of their oppression, to such an extent that they do not even realize they are
oppressed.
Genuine liberation and fulfillment require abandoning the individualistic myth of
existing freedom, and working to construct real freedom through social transformation.
“Freedom can only be understood as the determinate negation of any given concrete
expression of unfreedom, not, however, as a constant of the sort envisaged by Kant. . . .
 445 Micro-Level Psychology versus Micro Cultural Psychology

We must abandon the illusion that freedom is a reality so as to salvage the possibility
that freedom might one day become a reality after all” (Adorno, 2006, pp. 243, 203).
Freedom is not an exclusively subjective act; it is dependent on objective realities and the
extent to which we are capable of influencing the real world and its overpowering, struc-
tural institutions (Adorno, 2006, p. 204).
The way to democratize and equalize behavior is to socially reorganize macro cultural
factors, not to cast individuals onto their own resources. The reason for this is that indi-
vidual behavior is not individually constructed; it reflects social influences. Those social
influences need to be democratized if individual behavior is to be democratized. Opposing
individualism and working to humanize macro cultural factors is the way to enhance broad
individual expression and participation, because all individuals would then be given a
chance to participate and express themselves in democratic social structures. This is the
subject of our final chapter.

ENDNOTES
i. We should note a caveat about the Mejía-Arauz et al. (2007) study: The authors do not
mention any specific macro cultural factors in Pueblo society or Western society that
might account for the observed behavioral differences. They describe psychological/
behavioral differences of children in different cultures, but they do not discuss culture in
psychology—that is, the cultural factors that are embedded in the children’s psychology/
behavior. They seem to assume that it is sufficient to regard the two societies as collectiv-
istic and individualistic, which warrants dispensing with any concrete analysis of macro
cultural factors that organize psychology/behavior.
ii. Bakhurst then seems to contradict this concern by stating that Vygotsky actually endorsed
the notion of an autonomous self. He says, “What Vygotsky seeks to explain is the devel-
opment of the individual human mind, conceived, in its mature form, as conscious, self-
aware, rational, creative, and autonomous” (p. 73). The statement would seem to imply
that Vygotsky endorsed the same kind of autonomous self that Bakhurst does, namely,
one that authors its own utterances and remains a self-defined, separate individual
regardless of social interaction. This, we have seen, is false. Everything we have seen about
Vygotsky’s thought emphasizes that the individual is a social creature whose psychology
is formed by cultural-historical events and conditions. Vygotsky did regard humans as
conscious, self-aware, and potentially rational and creative, but not as autonomous in
Bakhurst’s individualistic sense. Emphasizing individual autonomy would contradict the
whole endeavor of cultural psychology. Thus, Bakhurst’s first comment, that Vygotsky
undermines the autonomous self, is correct.
iii. This fact does not require that a large percentage of the population adopt one cultural
practice or value. Even if only 5 of the population were Evangelicals, compulsive con-
sumers, or anorexics, their psychology would still be shaped by macro cultural factors.
The task is to investigate what its cultural origins, content, and function are.
iv. Micro cultural psychologists implement their individualistic politics of validating indi-
viduals in procedures for interviewing and analyzing. Their procedures are designed
to validate subjects by (a) allowing them to speak freely; (b) accepting their point of view;
(c) renouncing systematic interview and analytical methods that constrain the sponta-
neous subjectivity of subject and researcher—by challenging, probing, interpreting, or
 446 macro cultural psychology

assessing interviewees; and (d) ignoring cultural pressures that constrain the spontaneous
subjectivity of the subject. Any interview or analytical procedures that are not the sub-
ject’s own construction are repudiated (Wetherell & Potter, 1992, p. 81).
v. Ng describes the unscrupulous influence that Western pharmaceutical corporations
have played in this process, encouraged by official Chinese policy: “In the 1980s, foreign
pharmaceutical companies that were previously banned in Maoist China were allowed
to enter the country and influence mental health professionals and the general public
through advertisements, educational seminars and academic conferences. (For instance,
during my research, Kangning Hospital regularly hosted public education seminars on
various mental health topics funded by Eli Lilly.) In an attempt to encourage the use
of new selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI) antidepressants in China, one drug
company has strategically used Kleinman’s research to advertise neurasthenia as a phar-
macoresponsive form of biological depression. While pharmaceutical companies employ
comparable marketing tactics in the United States, the scarce access to new scientific
literature, the lack of consumer activism for psychiatric patients’ rights and a peculiar
power differential between pharmaceutical salespeople and psychiatrists (the sales staff
income is considerably higher than that of the doctors) make the marketers’ impact
particularly salient. Pharmaceutical companies have also manipulated the notion of ren-
qing—a humanistic exchange of favors—to request leading academic psychiatrists to give
promotional lectures after funding their costly travels to international conferences” (Ng,
2009, pp. 425–426).
vi. A related example of cultural psychological research that minimizes real culture is
Gladkova’s (2010) comparison of linguistic connotations in Russian and English. She con-
cluded that words such as “sympathy” are used differentially toward in-groups but not
toward members of out-groups in Russian; however, these words are used equally toward
both groups in English. A cultural explanation was proposed: “These differences in mean-
ings can be attributed to the prevalence of different models of social interaction in these
two cultures” (p. 280). Specifically, Americans do not distinguish in-group and out-group
as dramatically as Russians do. This cultural explanation is faulty in several ways.
First, it is dubious. Americans segregate in-group from out-group quite strongly. Every
American child is taught “do not talk to strangers”; cliques are rampant in schools, and
the cause of considerable anxiety among outsiders who cannot break into an in-group;
American residences are protected against outsiders by gates and guards; employees treat
supervisors at work completely differently than they would a friend or spouse.
Second, Gladkova offers not a single example of these purported cultural models. She
particularly fails to mention examples in public, objectified laws, moral precepts, histori-
cal records, philosophical concepts, entertainment programs, and child-rearing literature,
where they would be true cultural factors, subject to politics and other features of cultural
factors I have enumerated throughout this book. These features are necessary for models
to be shared, intelligible across a society, and useful for achieving cultural purposes. To
casually mention some vague “cultural model” as the cultural explanatory construct of
semantic meaning, without any specification or documentation, is alarming—especially
for an article titled “A Cultural Analysis” that is published in a journal called Culture &
Psychology.
A third weakness in the author’s treatment of the social model as cultural explanation
is that it is isolated from any other cultural factors. The model of social interaction is
ungrounded in cultural factors, structures, conditions, ideology, or politics. It ignores the
 447 Micro-Level Psychology versus Micro Cultural Psychology

horizontal and vertical “hermeneutic circles” that form the social structure. Gladkova’s
“social model” is suspended in time and space; it is deculturated and depoliticized. (This
abstractness is what makes it vague.) This is again alarming for a “cultural analysis.” In
fact, it is insidious; the analysis pretends to be a cultural one when it is not. The unwary
reader will be led to believe that the casual, abbreviated mention of some vague, undocu-
mented, ungrounded—and dubious—cultural phenomenon suffices as a cultural analy-
sis. This is a dangerous model of cultural analysis that impedes serious interest in culture
as a substantial, organized, administered, meaningful, concrete, consequential influence
on psychology.
 7
the politics of macro cultural
psychology

Macro cultural psychology is political in many ways. These enhance its scientific status.
It is political in apprehending the politics of macro cultural factors, which permeate the
psychological elements of these factors. Macro cultural psychology is also political in
critiquing deleterious aspects of culture and seeking political alternatives that incorpo-
rate constructive aspects of the existing social system. Finally, macro cultural psychology
is political in examining political assumptions and implications of psychological theo-
ries, methodologies, and techniques such as therapy and pedagogy. Political assumptions
are assertions about the origins, characteristics, and functions of social behavior and
society. As such, they are empirically testable; they are not simply preferences and values.
Their validity or invalidity with regard to social behavior bears on the validity of psycho-
logical theories, methods, and procedures. We can understand the mistakes and insights
of social science approaches by understanding their politics.
A central political issue in capitalist society, and in all class societies, is exploitation.
Exploitation is central to society, psychology, and Psychology. It accounts for many fea-
tures of the social structure (as Marx presciently explained), most of the social problems,
much of people’s psychology (e.g., consumer psychology), and the manner in which
Psychology construes psychology. The specific nature of exploitation also forms the basis
for eliminating it. Knowing the specific principles of a specific kind of oppression gener-
ates insights into what its negation should consist of. Disregarding the details of oppres-
sion prevents concrete, viable alternatives. It leaves us with abstract formulations such as
“work for justice.”
Exploitation constitutes an important part of culture’s concrete quality and psycholo-
gy’s concrete quality. Consequently, the battle to comprehend and improve the concrete
is the battle to apprehend and eliminate exploitation. This is why concrete culture and
psychology are threatening to the status quo and the ruling class. Because the concrete is
exploitive, the way to obscure exploitation is to obscure the concrete. The ruling class and
the populace thus have antithetical epistemological and political goals. The ruling class
seeks to epistemologically obscure the concrete. The populace, on the other hand, needs
to comprehend the concrete, because that is the locus of its exploitation, which must be
exposed and transformed. The battle over the concrete is nothing less than the battle to
continue or terminate the exploitation of the populace by the ruling class.

448
 449 The Politics of Macro Cultural Psychology

The concrete is obscured in a number of very creative ways. Because culture is concrete,
one way to obscure the concrete is to obscure culture. This is done either by marginalizing
it, as mainstream psychology has done, or by eviscerating it in various ways. These include
reducing it to personal meanings, interpersonal negotiations, discourse, symbols, and/
or abstractions (such as “goal-directed activity,” “collectivism,” or “neuroticism”); or frag-
menting it into variables. Obscuring concrete culture and exploitation requires ultimately
obscuring the political economy, where exploitation originates. This occurs by simply
ignoring political economy in analyses of culture, or by misconstruing it as a free market
in which people of equal power negotiate their demands. Epistemology figures promi-
nently in obscuring the concrete nature of social life. Subjectivism, for example, claims
that reality is whatever we think it is. Therefore, exploitation is merely a problem of inter-
pretation; it is in your mind. If you just change your subjective view, exploitation will
disappear. There is really nothing to worry about. Epistemological pluralism leads to the
same conclusion. Accepting all viewpoints leaves reality a matter of how one chooses to
perceive it. No substantive comments can be made about reality, problems, or solutions.
All these ways of mystifying and distorting culture marginalize concrete culture, not by
directly denying it, but by reconceptualizing it and the nature of epistemology. In this
way, psychologists can claim that they are indeed addressing culture. However, the way
they do so marginalizes concrete culture and prevents its improvement. We have seen
many examples of this throughout this book. This is why the details of (cultural) psycho-
logical theories and methods must be scrupulously scrutinized. They exemplify Joseph
de Maistre’s remark, “La Contre-Révolution ne sera pas une révolution contraire, mais le
contraire de la Révolution.”
The mystification and distortion of concrete culture are necessary to keep the secret
that culture rests upon an exploitive political economy. Therefore, mystification is not
simply an intellectual issue that can be overcome through cognitive effort.
Mystification will be abolished only when the political economy has been transformed
into a democratically cooperative enterprise run by and for the people. Then, culture, the
concrete, and political economy would be open books for the people to see and improve.
There would be no vested interest in distorting and obscuring them the way there is now.
Distorting and obscuring the concrete political base of culture serves only to harm people
by keeping them ignorant of deep issues and problems that affect them. This is beneficial
to an exploitive ruling class. In the absence of such a class, people would take a deep inter-
est in their concrete culture and political economy in order to ensure that exploitation is
not occurring. As the “epistemology of ignorance” emphasizes, exploitation requires an
epistemological compact that supports it. This support is offered by the social sciences
and the humanities. The epistemology of ignorance will evaporate when its exploitive
basis is eliminated. The entire culture of mystification, irrationality, unreality, deceit, and
ignorance will vanish. Macro cultural psychology contributes to this epistemological and
political-economic transformation.
The mystification of capitalist society is responsible for oppressed/mystified Psychology
in social science and for the oppressed psychology of the populace. Deficiencies in psy-
chology and Psychology stem from the same social cause. They are both political—rooted
in and functional for the political economy of capitalism. The crisis of psychology and
Psychology is the crisis of exploitive capitalist society.
 450 macro cultural psychology

Psychology psychology

Society
(System of
macro cultural
factors)

fig. 7.1 The Triadic Relationship Between Society, psychology, and Psychology.

The three elements—society, psychology, and Psychology—are interrelated as in

Figure 7.1. The common foundation to all these issues mandates a common solution to
their common crises. This solution is to transform the exploitive, capitalist, political
economy into a democratic, cooperative one. Because Psychology and psychology are
rooted in society, and society is rooted in political economy, Psychology and psychology
are rooted in political economy. Crises in Psychology and psychology must be resolved
by transforming the political economy to a nonexploitive, democratic, cooperative one.
This fundamental social transformation will improve the full range of social elements
arrayed at the mouth of the social cone/funnel. Macro cultural psychology helps to
improve social life in general. It recognizes that the crisis in people’s psychology is part
of a general crisis in society that is rooted in the social core. Transforming this core will
improve the entire society. This is the political value of macro cultural psychology.
It develops a cultural analysis of psychology that regards psychology as rooted in the
concrete core of society. Consequently, psychological issues are windows into society.
Psychological solutions require social solutions reaching to the political-economic core
of society. By virtue of the conical structure of society, social solutions to psychology,
which reform the social core, will reverberate throughout the society and reform a wide
array of social issues. Macro cultural psychological analyses thus contribute to wide-
spread social improvement.
These analyses are possible only if Psychology and other social sciences marshal their
creative energies to apprehend The Concrete—that is, the concrete characters of culture
and psychology that are rooted in the political-economic core of society. Macro cultural
psychology seeks to reform Psychology to enlist it in the struggle for a better world.
Reforming Psychology requires exposing its current flaws, which is why I devote so much
attention to doing this. Without Psychological reform, Psychology will continue to be an
impediment to social improvement. Psychology must be transformed with the same
completeness that society must be transformed. Its core, fundamental concepts and prin-
ciples must change, just as the social cone must change. Small, superficial changes will
not suffice in either case.
The deep, structural analysis of society and social reform can be diagrammed as in
Figure 7.2. Each social problem at Step 1 is part of an interrelated system of problems.
Each problem has its particular causes (Step 2) that must be attacked.
Anorexia is caused, in part, by media images that glorify slim bodies for women, and by
a less powerful social position for women, which causes low self-esteem. Low educational
 Cultural level Cultural level

1) Problematical Anorexia Low educational level Poverty War 7) Improved Health High educational level Prosperity Peace
behavior behavior

2) Proximal/ 6) Proximal/
direct direct
social social
causes causes

4) Transformation
3) Underlying Commodity production 5) Alternative social relations and principles
fundamental Private ownership of resources
social Extracting surplus value Collective ownership of resources
causes Unequal social classes Egalitarian distribution of wealth
(Political Undemocratic control Democratic control
economy) Competition Cooperation

fig. 7.2 Deep Structural Social-Psychological Reform.

 452 macro cultural psychology

level is caused, in part, by a lack of family support for educational achievement. Poverty
is caused, in part, by low government spending on job training and quality housing. War
is caused, in part, by imperialist desires to control a country. Of course, each problem
(Step 1) has several proximal causes (Step 2). The array of problems at Steps 1 and 2 have a
common root in political economy.
Political economy does not directly cause problems as diverse as anorexia and war;
it works through representatives and proxies, at Steps 2 and 6. This model forestalls the
error of mechanistic economic determinism. Not all problems and accomplishments
have the same character and color; they come in different hues. However, they are unified
at a basic level by the underlying political economy. Our seven-part model thus recog-
nizes real differences, but also real integration and commonalities. It is a genuine dialecti-
cal unity of differences, in Hegel’s terms.
It may appear far-fetched to attribute anorexia and war to a common cause; however, this
is exactly the conceptual integration that characterizes all important scientific advances.
Newton discovered that the behaviors of falling apples, orbiting planets, and ocean tides
are all explained by a common, parsimonious factor—gravitation. That is no more far-
fetched than explaining anorexia and war in terms of capitalist political economy. Newton’s
explanatory model resembles our conical structural analysis. Falling apples, orbiting plan-
ets, and ocean tides occupy Step 1. Gravitation occupies the bottom of the cone, or Step 3,
and explains and unifies the diverse phenomena at Step 1, which seem to have nothing to
do with one another. (The wind blowing apples off a tree may be the proximal, immediate
cause of apples falling [Step 2].) Figure 7.2 depicts the cone on the left being transformed
into the cone on the right.
Identifying Steps 3, 4, and 5 is not a simple, straightforward process. The deep, basic
political economy that generates and unifies Steps 1, 2, 5, and 6 is not evident or transpar-
ent in them. We cannot simply look at anorexia and see its connection to poverty and
war, or to the political economy of capitalism. A conceptual leap is required to grasp
these connections. Similarly, we cannot casually look at apples falling off a tree, and then
look at ocean tides, and see a common gravitational law working on both of them. An
imaginative, conceptual leap is necessary before one can reach the deeper, basic, unifying
level of explanation. These concepts must be worked out from the observable data. They
are not intuitively obvious within data. Einstein (1954) explained this process succinctly,
as I cite in the Introduction: “There is no logical path to these laws; only intuition, resting
on sympathetic understanding of experience, can reach them.”

CULTURAL-POLITICAL REFORM ENHANCES

PSYCHOLOGY AND PSYCHOLOGY
The deep structural model of social change is an important element of macro cultural
psychology. Our theory emphasizes that psychology is rooted in macro cultural factors,
which are organized in a conical structure. It follows that macro cultural factors must be
humanized if psychology is to be enhanced. Psychological improvement cannot take
place on its own, apart from its formative macro cultural factors.
We have seen many ways in which psychology depends on macro cultural factors for its
stimulation, support, structure, and content. It follows that changes in psychology depend
 453 The Politics of Macro Cultural Psychology

upon changing macro cultural factors to form a new impetus, structure, content, and
mediational means of psychological phenomena.
In addition, the ideal of reformed macro cultural factors acts as an impetus for psycho-
logical change. Psychological change does not wait until social reform has become estab-
lished as new structures. Psychological change adjusts to new ideals of macro factors that
have not yet been established. This was true for the individualistic self, which pushed to
take on more responsibility for business decisions before capitalism was established. Th e
individualistic self was a powerful subjective force that animated capitalist development.
The individualistic self was inspired by the ideal of capitalist development. However, it
reciprocally was the subjective force that strove to implement this ideal (this is pointed
out in Chapter 3 under the heading “Macro cultural factors are the impetus or telos of
psychology in that they inspire psychology and call for it to construct them.”) This is an
important point because it emphasizes that psychological change is necessary for cultural
change; psychology is the subjectivity of cultural change, not the post hoc result of estab-
lished cultural patterns.
Social reform is also necessary in order for Psychology to become scientific. A demo-
cratic, cooperative society will emphasize people’s social interdependence and support.
People will discuss this, plan for it, and make it central to their activity. Cultural life will be
manifest to people in their interactions. Collective, mutually supportive action will dis-
place the alienated, individualistic action that obfuscates culture. This will eliminate the
individualistic Ideenkleid of capitalism that makes culture difficult to fathom, despite its
powerful existence. People will also be in control of their macro cultural factors. Culture
will no longer be a distant mystery manipulated secretly by an elite ruling class. This makes
people cognizant of culture and its centrality to their psychological functioning.
This lived social reality will become reflected in Psychological theories and methodolo-
gies. Psychology grows in society and absorbs its sense of life. Where social life is open to
people’s decision making, it becomes a meaningful open book in which people take an
interest. Their ability to direct culture makes it central to their activity. It is not an alien,
opaque, unintelligible context not worth thinking about. This new character of social life
is key to directing psychologists’ attention to culture in relation to psychology.
The interdependence of society and science is clear in the case of capitalism and natural
science. As we saw at the end of Chapter 4, capitalism required and inspired natural sci-
ence for its advances in production and industrialization. Natural science was facilitated
by social forms of thinking that were emphasized in capitalism. This is why science devel-
oped with incomparable speed and depth and breadth with the emergence of capitalism.
Capitalism helped natural science throw off the Catholic Ideenkleid that had retarded it.
Science did not advance by the empiricist notion of accumulating information, for that
does not explain why this accumulation, along with new, imaginative constructs and
theories, accelerated during capitalism. The history of natural science demonstrates that
objectivity about particular subjects depends upon social thinking that is fostered by the
content of macro cultural factors.
The same is true for social science. Social forms of thinking are necessary to understand
the social nature of behavior/psychology. These are developed in certain social formations.
While capitalism facilitates natural science, it retards social science through its Ideenkleid.
Postcapitalist social reform is thus necessary for (prerequisite to) the development of
 454 macro cultural psychology

psychological science—and all social science—just as feudalism had to be transformed

into capitalism, and Catholicism had to be transformed into secular, naturalistic thinking
in order for natural science to develop.
Vygotsky recognized the interdependence of capitalism, psychology, and Psychology.
In an essay titled “The Socialist Alteration of Man,” he says, “The source of the degrada-
tion of the personality [lies] in the capitalist form of manufacturing” (Vygotsky, 1994a,
p. 180). This social fact requires social reform, specifically, replacing capitalism with
socialism: the “internal contradiction of the capitalist system cannot be resolved without
the destruction of the capitalist system of organization of industry” (Vygotsky, 1994a,
p. 180). Transforming capitalism into socialism was key, in Vygotsky’s view, to enhancing
psychological functioning. “Along with the withering away of the capitalist order, all the
forces which oppress man and which… interfere with his free development will also fall
away. Along with the liberation of the many millions of human beings from suppression,
will come the liberation of the human personality from its fetters which curb its develop-
ment” (Vygotsky, 1994a, p. 181).
Vygotsky also recognized that transforming capitalism into socialism was necessary for
developing the science of Psychology. He said, “Our science could not and cannot develop
in the old [existing] society. We cannot master the truth about personality and personal-
ity itself so long as mankind has not mastered the truth about society and society itself ”
(1997b, p. 342) Here Vygotsky expresses the interdependence of human psychology and
the discipline of Psychology on the transformation of capitalism (Ratner, 2011c).
Central to these three interdependent transformations is Marxism. Vygotsky clearly
agreed with Marx’s critique of capitalism (capital, really) as socially and psychologically
injurious. Vygotsky clearly agreed with Marx’s analysis that socialism must replace capi-
talism in order for people to achieve a fulfilling social and psychological life. Socialism is
also necessary to achieve a scientific Psychology. Finally, Vygotsky (agreeing with Blonsky
and Kornilov in Soviet Psychology) argued that Marxism is the necessary perspective of
Psychology (and social science). We have cited Vygotsky’s use of Marxist dialectics, his-
torical materialism, social class, and exploitation in his scientific work (cf. Elhammoumi,
2006). He said, “Psychology is in need of its own Das Kapital—its own concepts of class,
basis, value, etc.—in which it might express, describe, and study its object. . . . I want to
learn from Marx’s whole method how to build a science, how to approach the investiga-
tion of mind. . . . Marxist psychology is not a school amidst schools, but the only genu-
ine psychology as a science. A psychology other than this cannot exist” (Vygotsky, 1997b,
pp. 330, 331, 341).
Marxism is a concrete solution to concrete problems. Because the concrete is threaten-
ing to the status quo, Marxism is also. This is why the concrete and Marxism are assidu-
ously obscured by the status quo. The concrete is threatening to oppression and liberating
to the oppressed because it is comprehensive and fundamental. Our conical model of
society (which is the same conical model of scientific thinking) pulls together the diverse
elements of society in a coherent model based upon fundamental principles and prac-
tices. Our model makes society comprehensible; it enables us to put our finger on the
nerve of society. It makes transformative action identifiable and effective. It becomes
crystal clear from looking at the conical model where to look to identify the causes of
social problems and their solutions. It directs us right to the root of society, and it reveals
 455 The Politics of Macro Cultural Psychology

that transforming the root will effectively transform the entirety of society. This clarity
and effectiveness strikes fear in the heart of the power structure of the status quo. And
clarity and effectiveness are empowering to victims of oppression.
The different subject matter of natural science and social science presents distinct chal-
lenges to the two disciplines. The objects of natural science remain the same regardless of
society, and are equally difficult to fathom. Natural science advances entirely through the
development of scientists’ prowess. In contrast, the object of social science changes dra-
matically with history. Its transparency varies with different social systems. Capitalist
society is self-obscuring through its individualistic practices and Ideenkleid. This histori-
cal form of social life and psychology is difficult to fathom. This makes it exceptionally
difficult to be a good psychologist (social scientist).i Social life and psychology in other
societies—especially democratic, collective, nonexploitive ones—are more transparent
than they are under capitalism. Humanized society and psychology make it easier to
become a good psychologist.
Advances in social science can be due to the increasing clarity with which social life
and psychology present themselves to psychologists. The advance in social science lies
not entirely in the prowess of the scientist, as it does in natural science.
(Of course, even within capitalism, it is possible for certain people to see beyond social
blinders and to apprehend the cultural character of psychology. This requires a new cul-
tural-political perspective. It can be stitched together from a confl uence of social experi-
ences including social protests against injustices, deprivations, and social contradictions
that are informed by social analyses of the causes and solutions.)
The science of Psychology varies with society. This variation can be more or less objec-
tive. It is a progressive relativism, not a pluralistic one. In other words, different societies
do not have different Psychological disciplines simply because of different cultural per-
spectives, in the multicultural sense. In addition, different Psychologies can be more or less
objective for understanding general principles of human psychology/behavior, and for
understanding a particular, concrete psychology such as American psychology. (Vygotsky
clearly believed that Marxism offered the best basis of Psychology compared to other, less
appropriate ways of thinking.) We have seen how cross-cultural psychologists and micro
cultural psychologists fail to apprehend the full origins, features, and functions of American
psychology as well as of other psychologies. I have tried to develop macro cultural psy-
chology as a more comprehensive and objective approach. This kind of progress must be
emphasized and sought. It would be counterproductive to accept any and all approaches to
cultural psychology, such as cross-cultural psychology and micro cultural psychology as
they now stand.

THE PSYCHOLOGY OF OPPRESSION SPURS SOCIAL REFORM

Cultural psychology can contribute to social change through its analysis of psychological
phenomena as windows into macro culture. Beneficent psychological phenomena point
toward beneficent cultural factors that should be expanded and promoted. Conversely,
the psychology of oppression points toward the reforming of deleterious cultural factors.
The Psychology of oppression draws victims of oppression into the struggle to reform
oppressive conditions. It does so by explaining their psychology and personal experiences
 456 macro cultural psychology

as oppressed and oppressing. Oppressed people must see how the system affects them
personally, limits their opportunities, generates alienated interpersonal relations, limits
their job prospects, robs them of the wealth they create, makes them sick with environ-
mental diseases, causes anxiety, and stunts their psychology. All the tragedies and injuri-
ous aspects of their life activity lead to their denouncing the cultural system.
Macro cultural psychology makes the strongest case for social reform because it ties all
aspects of psychology to cultural factors. Deleterious aspects of psychology directly indict
cultural factors. Explaining psychology in terms of mechanisms extraneous to culture—
that is, in personal and natural terms—diminishes the culpability of cultural factors with
regard to both psychological deficits and psychological successes. This detracts from to
the importance of considering social improvement as relevant to psychological function-
ing. Social improvement is diminished in proportion to the weight given to noncultural
explanatory constructs of psychology. If culture is less important for explaining psychol-
ogy, its particular character becomes less important for enhancing psychology.
The Psychology of oppression directs victims to regard their psychology as reflecting
oppression, and also as benefiting oppression. The Psychology of oppression explains
how exploitation requires a stultified, mystified psychology—the kind of psychology that
the victims have. This is the most powerful incentive for improving one’s numeracy, lit-
eracy, logical reasoning, and abstract thinking. The incentive is not simply to enrich and
empower oneself, but rather to stop the political-economic exploitation that affects the
entire populace and preys upon the psychology of oppression. Victims will renounce the
oppressive social system that generates and feeds on the psychology of oppression. This is
the objective of macro cultural psychology in the form of the Psychology of oppression.
The way that the Psychology of oppression contributes to this understanding and to
social reform may be seen in relation to Deena’s cognitive and discourse style, as presented
in Chapter 6. We would trace Deena’s discourse style to the conditions and psychology of
oppression. It is a response to the unstable, transient, unpredictable, immediate condi-
tions of limited intellectual and occupational opportunities. Macro cultural psychology
would explain how lower-class cognitive and discourse styles trap students in these condi-
tions of exploitation. This is a powerful inducement to improve their behavior. It generates
resentment of this behavior, not because it reflects poorly on the individual, but because it
is an element in keeping the individual—and the entire group—under the oppressive
thumb of the ruling class. Macro cultural psychology unifies the psychology/behavior and
the system as joint, interdependent targets of analysis and critique. Each draws the other
into the light of critical analysis.
A macro cultural Psychology of oppression will enable victims of oppression to utilize
the tragedies of their personal experiences and their oppressed/oppressive psychology as
the linchpin to critique the social hierarchy. The cultural critique would extend to the
upper echelon of the social hierarchy that is the root of exploitation. The cultural critique
would dissuade people from climbing into that echelon, where they would likely exploit
their friends and neighbors and many other people. It would orient people to cast about
for a democratic, cooperative environment where nobody is exploited. The focus of the
critique would be on the evils of oppression, not simply the personal failures of individu-
als. The solution would be to eliminate exploitation, not to enrich and empower oneself
personally. This is the thrust of a systemic macro cultural psychology.
 457 The Politics of Macro Cultural Psychology

It does not encourage Deena to trade her neighborhood dialogue for consumer psy-
chology. It encourages people to reject and transform the social system and psychology
that oppress them and others. Macro cultural psychology builds solidarity among people
to oppose oppression and enrich their psychology through a more humane social system.
It does not encourage individuals to think of their own well-being by moving upward
within the exploitive status quo. (In contrast, individualistic perspectives that urge indi-
viduals to study hard on their own in order to succeed on their own implicitly support
the status quo as holding out benefits to successful individuals. The hard-work ethic is
entirely oriented toward individuals’ succeeding within the system; there is no critique of
the system.)
The Psychology of oppression encourages victims to develop a fulfilling psychology in
the context of creating a fulfilling society. It explains that psychology is based on macro
cultural factors (as outlined in Chapter 3) and that a fulfilling psychology requires the
construction of a humane society—just as oppressed/oppressive psychology is tied to
oppressive society. People must understand that a fulfilling psychology is not an abstrac-
tion that is acquired on its own. Nor does fulfilling psychology exist, ready-made, in the
status quo. Even the psychology of upper-echelon people is not truly fulfilling/fulfilled; it
is wracked by tension, anxiety, insecurity, egoism, aggressiveness, insensitivity, and the
insatiable need for wealth and power. (Of course, some members of the upper class fruit-
fully enjoy the luxury and time their wealth affords.)
A truly fulfilling psychology is impossible for the populace at large to achieve within the
status quo. (A certain number of individuals can be fulfilled; however, the populace in
general cannot, because they suffer the effects of exploitation in one form or another.) It
must be constructed rather than consumed. The guide should be a democratic, coopera-
tive society as is indicated in Step 5 of Figure 7.2. One needs to base psychology on concrete
macro cultural factors that are a viable alternative to the status quo. These factors need to
be envisioned after serious study of the causes of the collapse of the status quo, and after
carefully constructing an alternative that utilizes progressive aspects of the status quo.
The visionary good society and a fulfilling psychology ratchet each other to achieve
both.ii
Conceptualizing a new social organization that overcomes the problems of the status quo
does not eschew every element of the present society. There are many useful, advanced ele-
ments that must be incorporated into a new society and psychology (science is one exam-
ple). A new social system is necessary to eliminate the corrosive problems of the status quo,
by eliminating their deep causes in the stem of the social cone. Advanced, useful elements
of the current society must be judiciously retained, and they will be enhanced by the sup-
portive structure of the humane, new society. Social reform thus illustrates the truth of
Hegelian dialectics—namely, the given is perfected in its supersession.
This is different from an unprincipled pluralism that uncritically accepts any and all
perspectives and practices. It accepts only the elements of the current society that are
compatible with the principles of the new one. All of the elements consistently build the
new system.
The fact that the new society and psychology incorporate elements of the old means that
participants in the movement to reform society will develop social behaviors and psycho-
logical features that enhance their success in the present. This is ironic in that the given
 458 macro cultural psychology

society does not aid victims of oppression to develop social behaviors and psychological
features that enhance their success; the given society, rather, contributes to the stultifying
of the behavior/psychology of lower-class people. The movement for social reform inspires
people to develop competencies more than the status quo does. It does so in a different
framework than the status quo. The reform movement encourages the acquisition of com-
petencies in order to transform/improve the status quo, not, primarily, to succeed within
it. Therefore, participants in the movement to transform the status quo ironically develop
competencies that enable them to succeed in the society they are trying to transform. This
scenario is confirmed by the example of lower-class black youth who joined black libera-
tion movements. They were inspired by these liberation movements to apply themselves
to education so as to become competent social activists. This activity improved their edu-
cational performance above what it had been when the individuals were studying in order
to join the system.
These competencies will be removed from their current social context and function
and incorporated into a broader psychological system of other competencies that are
designed to function in a democratic, cooperative society. These include a more collec-
tive self-concept (concretely organized to participate in a democratic society, rather than
the autocratic collectivism of most contemporary collective selves), along with comple-
mentary new forms and content of emotions, perception, reasoning, memory, motiva-
tion, and child development. All of these will be adjusted to support a new kind of social
system, just as our current psychological phenomena were radically reengineered to
support consumer capitalist society.
People’s culturally formed psychology is geared to maintain the cultural status quo.
Unless it is altered, it will inhibit the formation of new cultural behaviors. People will find
new behaviors unintelligible and unacceptable. Social movements must therefore devote
as much attention to convincing people to develop a new psychology as they do to new
social principles.

SOCIAL REFORM AS THE TRUE ZONE

OF PROXIMAL DEVELOPMENT
This example reveals a new kind of zone of proximal development (ZPD). The ZPD is the
distance between the status quo and a humane, democratic, cooperative society. Working
to traverse this zone to arrive at a more cultured, civilized society promotes maximal,
real social-psychological development. This is a more concrete ZPD, with more concrete
developmental results, than the conventional sense of ZPD as indefinite social interac-
tions between “caretakers” and children within the status quo. The weakness of abstract
notions of ZPD is that they erroneously imply that any and all social interactions stimu-
late development. They ignore the concrete system that determines the specific social
interactions and outcomes. They are apolitical and acultural, really, because they ignore
the concrete cultural character of ZPD. Abstract notions of ZPD would endorse sending
lower-class youth to community colleges as a way of stimulating their academic compe-
tencies via their “interacting” with professors. Their abstract naïvety would ignore the
political objectives and structure of community colleges, which contradict development.
In an oppressive society, true development for the populace at large can occur through
 459 The Politics of Macro Cultural Psychology

the transformation of macro cultural factors. (Vygotsky mentioned this point in his dis-
cussions of the new socialist society he hoped to see in the Soviet Union.) Social reform
is the true zone of proximal development.

OBJECTIVISM
The deep structural model is an objective (objectivist) analysis of the causes of social-
psychological issues. It is also an objective analysis of how to enhance social-psychologi-
cal phenomena. Such an analysis utilizes advances in specialized knowledge, as all science
does. In the social division of labor, certain scholars possess advanced knowledge that is
not available to the populace in general. Engineers, astrophysicists, entomologists, and
oncologists all possess specialized, advanced knowledge, which they use to help people
solve problems. This kind of objectivism is particularly necessary where the reality that
one studies is mystified by an Ideenkleid.
This concrete social reality requires a suitable methodology to apprehend it. Method-
ology always must be suited to its subject matter, and this requires particular principles
and procedures that can see through the mystifying Ideenkleid.
Because people use mystifying cultural mediational means to interpret their own expe-
rience, they will often mystify their own experience by attributing it to unreal phenom-
ena that are emphasized in ideology. The ideology of the individualistic self and agency
leads people to interpret their own experience in terms of free choices and responsibility,
and to overlook objectively real social pressures. (We saw an important example of this in
the work of Nolan, in Chapter 4.) Religious devotees will explain their actions in terms of
god’s will. Therefore, asking people about the reasons for their actions may reveal more
about ideology, such as religion or rational choice theory, than it does about the true
reasons for their psychology.
The psychology of oppression problematizes social reform and democracy. As long as
one sees through one’s mystifying culture, one cannot “see through” it to apprehend real
culture and psychology.iii
Apprehending the true reasons for psychology requires a theory and methodology that
objectively examine behavior in relation to its cultural origins and functions, as opposed
to taking subjective impressions and ideological rationalizations at face value (Ratner,
2002, pp. 138–140).
Sass’s analysis of mental illness as a reflection of cultural factors is one example. Condon’s
analysis of adolescence is another example. My analysis of Deena’s and Mindy’s and Mrs.
Jones’s discourse is another example. My analysis of consumer psychology, including its
pecuniary manifestations, is yet another example. All of these treat individuals’ state-
ments and behaviors as real, but also as having origins, features, and functions that the
subjects are not fully aware of. All these analyses partake of cultural theory regarding the
definition of culture, its most important elements, their concrete characteristics, and their
relation to psychological phenomena. This kind of objective analysis is akin to that of
physicians. They similarly take patients’ experienced symptoms as symptoms of condi-
tions and processes that the patients are unaware of. A cultural-psychological objective
analysis is just as helpful as medical diagnoses are. They both bring expert knowledge to
people in order to help them overcome problems.
 460 macro cultural psychology

This is quite valuable in the case of Deena and Mrs. Jones. It is important for Deena to
realize that her cognitive and discourse style is part of a psychology of oppression that
keeps her oppressed and enriches and empowers the capitalist ruling class. Without this
analysis, Deena is likely to adopt individualistic ideology and blame herself for her aca-
demic and occupational failures. Either she will become fatalistic, or she will strive to
succeed in the social system by living up to its many destructive requirements. Mrs. Jones
will also benefit from an objectivist class analysis so that she ceases to blame Deena and
also ceases to place the responsibility for improvement on Deena herself. It is important
for Mrs. Jones to learn how she perpetuates the class structure through her treatment of
Deena. None of these issues is available to Deena or Mrs. Jones. Macro cultural psycholo-
gists can perform an invaluable service by explaining the issues to them.
Objectivity and objectivism are thus key to a scientific understanding of behavior, and
to politically enhancing it. Objectivity/objectivism is thus political in apprehending the
concrete social system underneath the obfuscations and mystifications that are perpetu-
ated by cultural ideology and by subjective mystifications.

ANTI-OBJECTIVISM
Objectivity and objectivism have been condemned by many micro cultural psycholo-
gists and multiculturalists, who insist on glorifying subjects’ subjective experience as the
subject matter of Psychology. Any objectivist interpretation that supersedes this and
critically evaluates subjective experience/expression is condemned as elitist and coercive
because it does not emanate from the individuals themselves.
The most extreme example of this view is that of Gergen and Gergen (2002, p. 51),
which I cite in the Introduction.

There is no particular configuration of words or phrases that is uniquely matched to

what it is we call either the world “out there” or “in here.” We may wish to agree that
“something exists,” but whatever “is” makes no demands on the configuration of pho-
nemes or phrases used by humans in communicating about it. Thus, we remove the
privilege of any person or group to claim superior knowledge of what there is. With
respect to truth (a match of word and world) or reason (the arrangement of words
themselves), no science, religion, philosophy, political party or other group can claim
ultimate superiority. More positively, the world does not control what we make of it.

While this view (which is expressed by many in more moderate words) sounds empow-
ering and respectful of the people and seems to break down epistemological and political
hierarchies, this is not actually the case. It is an abstract claim that takes no account of
reality. It takes no account of whether people have the requisite knowledge, motivation,
perception, reasoning, and self-concept to know and change their social-psychological
activities. The view imposes an abstract political ideal to “trust the people” without any
concern for whether it is realistic. It fails to address concrete solutions to concrete prob-
lems—yet this is what is necessary in order to truly empower people.
A denial of objectivity traps people within the objective status quo. If people believe they
are free, equal, and agentive, they are. There is no basis for criticizing or transforming society.
 461 The Politics of Macro Cultural Psychology

There is also no basis for social science, because people are deemed to be fully knowledgeable
of their social world without any need for expert investigation (see Kurki, 2009, for the poli-
tics of the philosophy of science).
There is no way to define or critique objective states of alienation, commodification,
mystification, stupefication, conformity, addiction, superficiality, and irrationality unless
one has an external, objective standard for doing so. Denying such standards and accept-
ing subjective feelings of well-being enables mystification and stultification. It implies
that as long as people do not see or feel any problems, there are none. Mystified, stultified
people are thereby defined as problem-free! They are trapped in their mystification and
stultification.
This antirealist viewpoint is incapacitating. On its face, the proclamation means that
the knowledge of scientists is not superior to the knowledge of “other groups” such as
kindergarten children. Gergen and Gergen’s statement means that the knowledge claim
(and the spoken phrases used to convey it) that the authors are alive is not superior to the
opposite claim that they are dead, for neither of these claims can be matched against
a world out there such as whether their hearts are beating. Gergen and Gergen would also
deny that the evidence for global warming is epistemologically superior to, or more tell-
ing about the “world out there” than, the denial of global warming. One can see how
Gergen and Gergen’s epistemological egalitarianism (equivalence or equivocation) is spe-
cious, and supportive of dangerous, conservative ideas. It exonerates theirs as just another
interesting outlook that is no more dangerous or specious than any other.
Zagorin (1999, pp. 15–16) explains the history of this mistake. He cites Bertrand Russell’s
precious observation that “it is the essential function of words to have a connection of one
sort or another with facts, which are in general non-linguistic. Some modem philoso-
phers… tell us that the attempt to confront language with fact is ‘metaphysics’ and is on
this ground to be condemned. This is one of those views which are so absurd that only
very learned men could possibly adopt them” (see Boghossian, 2007; Sokal, 2008; Koertge,
1998, Chapters 1–3; Niiniluoto, 1999). for a critique of anti-realism, anti-objectivity).
An objective, external, rational evaluation of subjective feelings in terms of how they
reflect the political-economic culture and how they fall short of fulfi llment enables us to
comprehend and improve culture and psychology. Objectivism enhances subjectivity
and agency by bringing objective conditions to people’s awareness so they can analyze
and transform them. Objectivism heightens people’s consciousness, understanding, and
ability to evaluate and change. A good psychotherapist plays the role of an external,
objective analyst who clarifies the patient’s understanding of his or her own experience,
feelings, and desires.
This analysis applies to the working-class experience. It is erroneous to glorify members
of the working class as agents of social reform simply because they experience exploitation
directly and intensely. Mere experience with exploitation is no assurance that workers
understand its causes or solutions. When Marx spoke of a working-class perspective as the
guide for social change, he was not referring to contemporary views of workers as compos-
ing such a guide. He was referring to an objective, theoretical perspective that had workers’
interests at its core. It was a perspective that comprehended the political-economic basis of
the exploitation of workers, and the need for a new socialist political economy that would
solve this problem that afflicts workers. The Marxist perspective is working class in that it
 462 macro cultural psychology

takes working-class oppression as its target of analysis and solution, for the oppression
of workers is at the core of capitalism’s problems and evils. We may say that the working-
class perspective is not the perspective of the working class. The working-class perspective is
an objective, theoretical perspective about the exploitation of workers that has workers’
objective interests as its core. The working-class perspective is not the subjective opinions
of contemporary workers, for subjective, naïve experience is no guide to understanding,
explanation, or solution. Marx’s complex analysis of capitalism and socialism was not
based on workers’ subjective impressions; it was a complex, theoretical, objective analysis
based upon history, political economy, and ethics. It took working-class oppression as its
target, but it did not take working-class subjectivity as its guide.
If common sense and historical examples are insufficient to convince us that people’s
knowledge and choices are often untrustworthy, behavioral economics has proven this
experimentally. Behavioral economics arose, in the 1990s, to oppose the free-market eco-
nomic notion of the rational consumer. Behavioral economists base their work on that of
Tversky and Kahneman, two Israeli psychologists who wrote a pioneering article in 1974
that initiated behavioral economics (Kahneman received the Nobel Prize in economics in
2002). Experimental research in economic psychology proves that the notion of the
rational consumer is false. Faced with even simple sets of options to pick from, humans
make decisions that are inconsistent, suboptimal, and sometimes plain stupid. Rather
than thinking things through logically, people typically rely on misleading rules of thumb
(or “heuristics,” e.g., seeing patterns where none exist, anchoring judgments in inappro-
priate frames of reference, using salient examples rather than statistical probabilities),
inertia, overconfidence, and “loss aversion,” and they leap to inappropriate conclusions.
Moreover, they are heavily influenced by how the choices are presented to them, and
sometimes by irrelevant information. Tversky and Kahneman attributed these mental
mistakes to natural propensities to take mental shortcuts and economize mental energy.
They do not acknowledge a sociology of ignorance at play in the psychology of oppres-
sion. Regardless, their research on irrationality demonstrates that glorifying people’s
decisions and knowledge entraps them within irrationality, rather than empowering
them to transcend it. (Their research also discredits the neoliberal policy of privatization,
which forces individuals to be more responsible for their own social acts such as purchas-
ing pension plans, health plans, etc. Given people’s culturally induced irrationality, they
will inevitably make many mistakes in making these choices.)
In an experiment, women were asked to keep a diary for 2 months, recording their
mood each day along with several possible causes of that mood, including, the amount of
sleep they had the night before, the day of the week, the weather, etc. At the end of the
2 months of diary keeping, the women were asked for their perceptions as to how impor-
tant each factor was in determining their mood. There were great discrepancies between
the day-to-day factors that actually precipitated their daily mood and what the women felt
were important predictors. For example, from the daily data, “day of the week” tended to
be a significant influence, while sleep did not. However, when asked, the women generally
felt that the opposite was true (Goldberg, 2008, p. 940).
Americans are similarly unaware of how influential advertising is on their consumer
behavior. “Smokers tend to attribute their smoking uptake to the influence of their peers
who smoke, given how proximate and obvious these peers are, yet fail to recognize the
 463 The Politics of Macro Cultural Psychology

more distal and subtle, yet powerful influence of tobacco advertising” (Goldberg, 2008,
p. 940). This misperception is mediated by Western ideology, which emphasizes personal
interactions as being more influential on behavior than distal, impersonal macro cultural
factors.
All of this research impugns the reliability of subjective impressions about experience
for articulating and solving social and psychological issues.
A popular form of subjectivism (anti-objectivism) in cultural psychology is indigenous
Psychology. This view is also called “psychology of liberation” (Ratner, 2009c; Ratner
2011c). It insists that people define their own psychology, and their own solutions to
problems. This form of subjectivism is a radical relativism, for it insists that each group
defines itself, its social reality, and its social solutions. Key is the rejection of external
standards, theories, methodologies, epistemologies, or social arrangements. A people has
the “right” to perceive/define its psychology in its own terms (i.e., subjectively, any way it
wishes). No external assessment of their subjectivity is allowed.
There is a nationalistic pride to indigenous psychology. This emphasis on “national iden-
tity proposes that non-Western psychologists, aware of European and American domina-
tion in politics and science and the extent to which their work is ignored in the West, seek
to establish an identity independent of Western ideas and dominance” (Gabrenya, Kung, &
Chen, 2006, p. 604). Indigenous psychology prides itself on giving an indigenous people a
voice that foreign psychologies have suppressed. Indigenous psychology is “psychological
knowledge that is native, that is not transplanted from another region, and that is designed
for its people” (Kim, Yang, & Hwang, 2006, pp. 112, 232). Enriquez regarded indigenous
psychology as “cultural revalidation” (Kim et al., 2006, p. 111).
Indigenous Psychology is essentially a nationalistic critique of Western psychological the-
ories and methodologies. It valorizes marginalized people’s identity and agency by accepting
their own psychological understanding. This political goal underlies many details of indig-
enous psychology. It underlies a tendency in indigenous psychology to eschew rigorous sci-
entific theories and methodologies. This antipathy is glorified as avoiding the ethnocentric
imposition of preconceived theories on local people’s self-understanding. The jettisoning of
theory and methodology is valuable because it enables “an exploration into cultural, social
or psychological data without the chains of overriding theoretical frameworks borrowed
from observations outside the focus of investigation” (Kim et al., 2006, p. 111).
Indigenous Psychology and the psychology of liberation are subject to the same cri-
tique I leveled against subjectivism earlier. It idealizes people on political grounds (i.e.,
they should be respected as people). But this is an abstract, contentless respect that is
based on no particular achievement of the people in question. They are to be respected
simply because they are people, not because they are people who have done something
praiseworthy. This is an impersonal, thoughtless respect. It doesn’t matter who you are or
what you have done; you automatically get respect because you exist. This is another form
of leveling out differences by fiat to create nominal equality.
The problem is that people are oppressed and have acquired a psychology of oppression
that is stunted, mystified, and oppressive. Adulating this entraps people in oppression; it
simply calls oppression liberation and agency, which further mystifies it and distracts
people from challenging it. Indigenous Psychology includes oppressive forms of consumer
psychology, the racial psychology of Jim Crow, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of
 464 macro cultural psychology

Mental Disorders, behaviorism, electroshock therapy, and lobotomy, because all of these
are ways in which Americans have described their psychology. Indigenous psychology has
no basis for critiquing its oppressive aspects and class basis.
Shweder (2008) glorifies indigenous psychology as a form of liberation:

When troubled Hindus in Orissa, India, consult with a poothi (oracle) to “recover
information” about their prior reincarnated lives, they invariably discover some
fault of their own. First they are informed about some sin or transgression they com-
mitted in the distant past. Then they are given several prescriptions (make a sacrifice
to the Goddess, ingest the five products of the cow) to offset their spiritual debts with
some acts of virtue. In other words, they are empowered by their local metaphysical
picture of the world to take charge of their life and they have a profound sense of per-
sonal efficacy as they strive to alleviate their suffering (p. 76, my emphasis).

Shweder is saying that relying on one’s indigenous cultural concepts automatically

empowers one. If Indians obey the religious ideology that blames them for their troubles
by attributing them to sins they committed in a former life, and if they eat some desig-
nated cow product, they are empowered to take charge of their life.
To define empowerment in these terms is preposterous and irresponsible. Under the
banner of cultural relativism and validating indigenous people, it accepts mystical, myth-
ical, mystifying ideas (that people are reincarnated, and that one’s current troubles are
just retribution for sins one committed in one’s former lives, and that eating something
absolves one’s social-psychological troubles) as true empowerment that allows people to
take charge of their lives.
All of this obscures the real causes of troubles, which ultimately are rooted in political
and economic exploitation by the economic and social ruling class. Shweder never men-
tions the real problems. In fact, he obscures them by accepting indigenous, mystifying
myths about people’s problems. He is also distracting attention from real solutions—
which require the social, economic, and political transformation of a terribly inequitable,
squalid society—by accepting the ludicrous indigenous counsel to eat some cow product.
(Would he applaud sacrificing one’s daughter by throwing her onto a fire to appease the
gods as an act of empowerment? Does he believe that the indigenous American meta-
physic “shop till you drop” is empowering? How about Catholic damnation for using
birth control or having an abortion? Are these quaint, indigenous beliefs that are truly
empowering?) Indians may subjectively feel a sense of personal efficacy as they ingest
traditional mythology; however, they are not effectively taking charge of their lives. On
the contrary, their local metaphysical picture prevents them from doing so. It directs them
away from analyzing and gaining control over their society. Their local metaphysics keeps
them mired in squalid poverty, socially and politically disenfranchised, while believing
they will somehow be reincarnated in a better way in their next lives. (Dr. Ambedkar, the
leader of the untouchables in India, rejected the doctrine of Karma for precisely this
reason.) It is unconscionable that Shweder would support such oppression under the
banner of liberal humanism. This is the danger of indigenous psychology.
Shweder knows about the class and caste structure of India, and he knows that it is
the cause of widespread personal troubles among the population. However, he refuses to
 465 The Politics of Macro Cultural Psychology

include this in his theory of cultural psychology. He willfully depoliticizes a political-

economic issue. This is scientifically and politically irresponsible. He glamorizes mystify-
ing concepts that entrap people within the political economic status quo by calling them
empowering. He thus functions as a political legitimizer of the status quo by calling
entrapment “empowerment.” This Orwellian inversion is the inexorable result of uncriti-
cally accepting oppressed/oppressing customs as agentive, self-determining, validating,
and liberating.
All attempts at glorifying people as they currently are, glorifying their current construc-
tions, encouraging them to express their “own” current voices, and eschewing outside
experts as ignorant and oppressive have the contradictory result of entrapping people in
their ignorance (Ratner, 2009a, 2009b, 2009c).iv
The situation is akin to that of traditional Indians whose religious custom construes a
river as a holy cleansing place, and who therefore throw their dead people and cows into the
river as a last rite of absolution. Because the river is holy, the people also drink its water and
bathe in it. They become terribly sick as a result of drinking their own polluted water, but
they have no idea why they are sick. The only solution to their illness is for an expert scien-
tist to test the water by external methods and then trace the contamination to the custom of
dumping dead bodies in the river. The people must learn to change their own custom and
stop polluting the river (see Hwang, 2005 for a related critique of indigenous psychology).
Exactly the same approach is necessary to understand and solve social and psychologi-
cal problems. People are no more aware of the causes of their social and psychological
problems than they are of the causes of their illnesses. Indigenous behaviors may be just
as destructive to social and psychological well-being as they are to the ecology of rivers
and to bodily health. Experts who employ external constructs to analyze the structure of
society and social psychology are just as useful and helpful in understanding and solving
social and psychological problems as experts who understand water quality and disease
are. Eschewing their expertise is as destructive to indigenous people as eschewing water
scientists’ expertise is (Ratner, 2011c).

AVOIDING CONCRETE CULTURAL CHANGE

IN PSYCHOLOGICAL THEORY
Psychologists are generally progressive in supporting social reform; however, they are
content with reforming Levels 1 and 2 of Figure 7.2. They seek to move from Level 1
directly to Level 7, or from Level 2 to Level 6. They do not consider transforming the
concrete political-economic core of society. This makes their reforms incomplete and
piecemeal. It also impoverishes their scientific understanding of cultural psychology,
because they overlook the basis of cultural factors and psychological phenomena. To
explain these weaknesses, it is helpful to consider a few examples of reform outside of
psychology, which are readily apparent.
During the economic crisis of late 2008–2009 there was a call for “transparency” and
honesty among banks. But this only makes conventional accounting procedures available
for inspection. There is no change in the principles that guide the institutions, or in their
ownership. Transparency might enable observers to spot highly risky business activities,
but this is not a structural change in the ownership and principles of the businesses.
 466 macro cultural psychology

Trying to eradicate problems at Step 1 by directly moving to Step 7 involves chang-

ing the behavior of individuals. For instance, if there is crime, we enforce strict punish-
ment for criminal behavior, thereby changing the behaviors of individuals to be law
abiding. If there is discrimination, we punish it, thereby frightening people to desist from
discrimination. Civil rights laws are examples of moving from Step 1 to Step 7 by chang-
ing the behaviors of individuals. If students talk too much in class, or if they skip class, we
punish them to get them to attend class and listen silently.
This strategy pays no attention to the causes of problems. It changes behavior on the
individual level.
One example of going from Step 1 directly to Step 7 is medicine. Doctors and pharma-
ceutical companies find that people are suffering from a disease (e.g., cancer), so they
look for a medical cure or inoculation for the disease. Occasionally, they tell people to eat
more vegetables and fiber. However, this remains an individual-level approach. It does
not look to social causes of the disease such as pollution and the economics that foster
pollution (Steps 2 and 3).
Similarly, hyperactivity and depression are treated directly by medicine, to move from
Step 1 to Step 7 in Figure 7.2. (The number of children who take medicine for attention-
deficit/hyperactivity disorder rose 41 from 2002 to 2005 (Cox, 2008). No attempt is
made to consider or ameliorate the precipitating social causes of hyperactivity such as
hyperstimulation, distraction, superficiality, sensationalism, the pressure to act impul-
sively, the drive to excel, and the requirements for faster performance and multitasking
that are pervasive in modern capitalism.
Similarly, 7 of the American adult population (15 million people) suffer from depres-
sion, and at least 15 of college students suffer from depression, according to surveys
(compared to 10 7 years ago). (Simon, 2011). The solution has been to coach professors
about identifying troublesome behavior in students; the professors then advise students
to seek treatment. Additional programs publicize the widespread prevalence of psycho-
logical problems among students and rock stars, in order to relieve the stigma around
students’ seeking treatment. The entire approach simply pushes more individuals into
individualistic treatment. No changes in any social conditions are included in this pro-
gram; even simple changes in campus culture are outside its realm. For example, simple
changes such as more group activities inside classes, as well as outside, would overcome
the social isolation that is central to students’ adjustment problems. Even these kinds of
“Step 2” changes are ignored so that the existing system is preserved.
Liberal solutions do not work when Step 1 problems are generated by deep, pervasive
social causes. This is why most problems remain unsolved. Discrimination laws did not
eradicate segregation. Black people today are more segregated in housing and schools
than they were 30 years ago. Inequities between blacks and whites remain unabated. The
reason for this is that segregation is generated by deep-seated economic and ideological
causes. Simply banning it on the individual level does nothing to eradicate those genera-
tive causes. If we look deeply, we will see that problems at Step 1 are quite profitable for
the political economic system (Step 3). Despite the misfortunes they create, and despite
the calls from social leaders to desist from these behaviors, they are meant to be. This is
why Steps 3, 4, and 5 are necessary to solve problems at Step 1.
 467 The Politics of Macro Cultural Psychology

Most psychological theories of behavior postulate Step 1 problems (emanating from

psychological tendencies) and Step 7 solutions. Macro factors, especially the political
economy, are rarely considered as causes or solutions of the problems. This is illustrated
in Michael Tomasello’s theory of intergroup hostility and his proposal for reducing it. In
an article in the New York Times Magazine (May 25, 2008, p. 15), he discusses the origins
and solutions of group conflict:

Of course, humans [sic] beings are not cooperating angels; they also put their
heads together to do all kinds of heinous deeds. But such deeds are not usually
done to those inside “the group.” Recent evolutionary models have demonstrated
what politicians have long known: the best way to get people to collaborate and to
think like a group is to identify an enemy and charge that “they” threaten “us.” The
remarkable human capacity for cooperation thus seems to have evolved mainly
for interactions within the group. Such group-mindedness is a major cause of
strife and suffering in the world today. The solution—more easily said than
done—is to find new ways to define the group.

In other words, we are psychologically programmed to treat fellow in-group members

amicably and out-group members hostilely. Hostility is thus a function of regarding others
as outsiders. The solution is to embrace outsiders as part of us; then we will cease our
hostility. Tomasello’s cause and solution to hostility circle entirely around abstract, natural
social-psychological tendencies. Concrete macro cultural features such as religious intol-
erance, economic competition, and imperialism are never mentioned. The whole discus-
sion is on the level of Steps 1–7 at the individual psychological level: individuals act bad,
so find some behavioral technique to make them to act better.

Tomasello’s Errors
Tomasello’s claim that we have evolved to cooperate with in-group members is refuted
by widespread prevalence of domestic violence to family members. Child, spousal, and
elder abuse are widespread within in-groups. In fact, the family is one of the most dan-
gerous places to be. Similarly, the vast majority of rapes are perpetrated by acquaintances
of the victim (i.e., members of the victim’s in-group). The vast majority of crime against
black Americans is committed by fellow blacks, not by perpetrators of other races.
Residents of poor areas engage in exponentially more homicide against each other (i.e.,
against fellow, poor in-group members) than against residents of more affluent areas
(Hannon, 2005).
In-group solidarity is a myth. In-group membership is an abstract construct. It simply
means that people belong to a group. But groups can be of all different kinds. Their spe-
cific characteristics determine interpersonal relations among members. It is simplistic to
believe that mere presence in a group—“group-mindedness”—has some specific deter-
mination of behavior. This is false concreteness. A hierarchical, autocratic, competitive
group will foster intragroup hostility, not cooperation. Competitive groups composed of
medical students or stock traders are known to foster sabotage among in-group members.
 468 macro cultural psychology

Sherif et al. (1988) empirically proved this variation in group-mindedness with varying
social relations and activities (see Ratner, 2002, pp. 25–26 for summary).
Expanding an in-group to include outsiders (e.g., the “social contact” hypothesis of
social psychology) cannot solve social problems by itself because it ignores the concrete
structure and interrelationships within the group. This has occurred on the geopolitical
stage when imperialistic countries such as Great Britain disrespected historical differ-
ences and forged nation-states out of incompatible ethnic groups. This redefined the in-
group as Tomasello advocates, yet it led to no group harmony because of the concrete
way in which the new in-group was created. (The “social contact” hypothesis is an apo-
litical, acultural, ahistorical, abstract, mythical assumption that direct, personal interac-
tion circumvents concrete social life.)
Tomasello is also wrong to claim that in-group solidarity depends upon excluding
outsiders and regarding them as a threat. It is perfectly possible for group members to
support one another because this is the most efficient way to survive, without demoniz-
ing outsiders. Theatrical actors often form tight-knit groups without demonizing nonac-
tors as a threat. Band members feel solidarity without demonizing everyone who is not in
a band. Quilt makers do not form cohesiveness by condemning users of electric blankets
as a threat. It is perfectly possible for groups to be expansive and welcome outsiders, and
to help outsiders. American Indians were initially helpful to the white settlers, before the
settlers began to steal their land and slaughter them.
Tomasello’s notion of a natural tendency to demonize outsiders is a fiction. It privileges
intergroup animosity as the default (natural) tendency of humans, which makes har-
mony an unusual state that is difficult to achieve because it has to overcome the natural
prohibition.
Of course, some groups do demonize others; however, this has no natural basis as
Tomasello asserts. The explanation of intergroup hostility and cooperation lies in macro
cultural factors, which Tomasello willfully ignores. We have seen evidence of this in
Ritterhouse’s examination of racial psychology. Racial identity is formed by a socially
constructed racial contract such as the racial code of etiquette. This cultural factor (which
was incarnated in socially institutionalized norms; artifacts such as buses, drinking foun-
tains, and kitchen tables; and cultural concepts) generates racial identity by imposing
standards, models, concepts, sanctions, and injunctions for perceiving, feeling, thinking
about, and treating members of a racial group. It was the law/Social Contract that brought
the races into conflict—as Charles Mills was quoted as saying in Chapter 3—and it is the
law/Contract that must be abolished in order to bring about harmony.
Tomasello would ignore these powerful historical forces and attribute racial hostility to
natural, psychological “group-mindedness.” He would propose that the reason the United
States invaded Iraq was because “we” perceived Iraqis as different from us. This is pre-
sumably natural; it is how our psychology has evolved. Moreover, the hostility emanates
from group-mindedness that is buried in every individual’s psyche. Thus, hostility is a
diffuse, individual problem. It is individual psychology diffused among millions of people
that causes hostility. The people are responsible for hostility because it is their nature.
This scenario excludes concrete cultural factors. It assumes that political and economic
interests had nothing to do with the Iraq invasion and have nothing to do with ending it.
It is that damned group-mindedness that is the stickler.
 469 The Politics of Macro Cultural Psychology

When concrete cultural conditions (e.g., politics, economics, military) change, national
leaders promulgate different impressions about countries/groups. This is why Americans’
impressions of Saddam Hussein and Iraq as a country changed from favorable to unfa-
vorable before the invasion. (This is why Americans’ impression of Noriega in Panama
changed from positive, when he was on the payroll of the CIA, to negative, when he
sought to achieve some nationalistic independence from Washington and had to be
demonized.) The Bush administration demonstrated masterfully how to alter these
impressions. As the invasion was launched, a majority of Americans believed the psycho-
logical manipulations and supported war.
It’s as simple as that. There is no natural psychological tendency toward intergroup
hostility, no mystery about how to overcome it. It is not a diffuse psychological issue
operating on the individual level that causes Americans to be suspicious of Hussein or
Noriega. People’s perceptions of out-groups depend upon the cultural context in which
the groups interact and the specific activities they engage in.
The reason many forms of prejudice persist, despite strenuous educational efforts to
overcome them, is that social conditions exacerbate them. Competition, limited oppor-
tunities for certain groups, and low competence levels generate distance and suspicion.
These cannot be overcome by simple education about the inherent dignity and equality
of all humans. And part of the reason social conditions persist in fostering hostility is that
psychologists like Tomasello distract attention away from analyzing and transforming
them.
Tomasello shifts the enduring hostility between groups from enduring, functional,
political-economic, and ideological factors (some of which are enumerated in Chapter 6
regarding discrimination and different opportunities) to a naturally inscribed psycho-
logical tendency. Tomasello depoliticizes the problem of hostility as well as the solution
to it. He converts a straightforward cultural process with straightforward resolution into
a troublesome psychological process with no resolution—except to trick our natural
group-mindedness to accept outsiders as our own. We are plunged into metaphysical
questions about existential problems such as, “How can people get along, given our psy-
chobiological wiring?”
If hostility is a psychological natural/universal that has nothing to do with concrete
macro cultural incentives, then it logically follows that a solution must take the form of
an abstract psychological counter-current. Psychology has to be manipulated per se, for
that is the origin of the problem. Some kind of psychological stratagem for reframing
outsiders must be developed.
All we have to do to stop the war is think of Iraqis as our brothers and sisters—redefine
our group as more inclusive. This psychological shift will move Bush, Cheney, Rice,
Obama, soldiers, neoconservatives, and military contractors to embrace Iraq.
This implies that there is no need to engage in political action for military disarma-
ment, no need to change political leaders, no need to change economic principles of
social systems, no need to combat religious mythology and intolerance, no need to reform
geopolitics.
Tomasello’s psychologism has obvious conservative political implications. It removes
antisocial behavior from reflecting on the social system and tectonically shifts it onto the
natural plane. This obfuscates and exonerates negative aspects of the social system.
 470 macro cultural psychology

Antisocial behavior has to be made to appear natural, like animal behavior is. Thus, the
orientation of using animal behavior as an analogy to human behavior allows the latter to
be explained in natural terms comparable to the former. The more analogous human and
animal behavior can be made to appear, the more that biological mechanisms can be
extrapolated from animal behavior to human behavior—and the more that culture can be
obfuscated.
The psychological approach to reducing hostility will be ineffective because it ignores
real changes that must be made to improve group relations. Tomasello and other psycholo-
gists will attribute this failure to human nature: “it’s difficult to counteract the natural ten-
dency of group-mindedness; we can’t expect big changes.” The failure of the psychological
approach will be misinterpreted (“spun”) to indicate the validity of the theory! The correct
interpretation of the failure of the psychological approach is that there are no psychological
principles of group interaction (i.e., group relations cannot be improved by focusing on
psychological principles per se).
Where Tomasello’s psychologism leaves us in limbo regarding group relations, macro
cultural psychology makes it clear that harmonious relations among groups depend upon
concrete practices that draw two groups together in practice. Ideally, these practices
should be based upon cooperation and equal opportunity for mutual development. In
the world of realpolitik, these practices are imposed by dominant groups on weaker
groups (e.g., the United States’ imposing conditions on Iraq and Panama). In either case,
intergroup relations depend upon real, concrete cultural conditions. They do not depend
upon psychological processes operating on their own. Psychology is the subjective ele-
ment of macro cultural factors and depends upon their characteristics. Psychology is not
an independent set of natural mechanisms that stymies cultural life. Psychology facili-
tates cultural life—whether good (democratic, cooperative) or bad (imperialistic).
Tomasello inverts the relation between psychology and culture and moves psychology off
the cultural plane. Macro cultural psychology inverts this inversion; it realigns psychology
with the cultural plane. This is how psychology, Psychology, and society will be humanized.
Tomasello’s error lies in conflating abstract and concrete levels of psychology. He does
excellent research on general aspects of psychology and culture, which I cite in Chap-
ter 2. He explains how general aspects of culture elicit general aspects of psychology,
such as communication and joint intentionality. But all this has no explanatory value for
concrete aspects of psychology such as bigotry and hostility in concrete social conditions.
Concrete explanatory constructs are necessary for this level. Tomasello does not realize
this, and he seeks to extend abstract issues to explain concrete ones. This is doomed to
fail. It is a common error. Sociobiologists such as Wilson also do excellent research on the
behavior of lower organisms, and they err in trying to apply principles of this level to
concrete human culture and psychology. In order to make the leap from the lower to the
higher, and from the abstract to the concrete, a whole new corpus of sociological and
historical information must be acquired.
Another of the ways in which cultural psychologists discount concrete cultural analysis
and transformation is to actively ignore conceptual tools that emphasize them. In particu-
lar, cultural psychologists actively ignore Marxism, the most thorough analysis of capital-
ist society and the most coherent and revolutionary program for transforming/improving
it. Cultural psychologists ignore Marxism despite the fact that Vygotsky explicitly called
 471 The Politics of Macro Cultural Psychology

for cultural psychology, and all psychological science, to become Marxist (I have cited his
statements in previous sections).
In the 80 years since Vygotsky called for Psychology to create its own Das Kapital; to
learn from Marx’s whole method how to build a science, how to approach the investiga-
tion of mind; and to recognize that Marxist psychology is not a school amid schools but
the only genuine psychology as a science, not a single cultural psychologist has publicly
explored what that statement meant to him, how his writings contain numerous elements
of Marxist psychology (not simply the idea of mediation), or how Marxist psychology
could be developed now in all its fullness, particularly with regard to a concrete analysis
of capitalist society and psychology.
Where can one find any reference to Vygotsky’s statement that “we must consider
verbal thought subject to all the premises of historical materialism”? Where are the pub-
lications and presentations by cultural psychologists, Vygotskyans, or activity theorists
on the principles of Marx’s historical materialism and their application to verbal thought,
and to other psychological phenomena?
Not a single conference on activity theory or sociocultural psychology or Vygotsky’s
work has made Marxist psychology a conference theme. Nor have journals such as
Culture & Psychology or Mind, Culture, and Activity devoted special issues to any aspect
of Marxism and cultural psychology. Indeed, only one article on Vygotsky and Marxism
has ever appeared in these journals. Mind, Culture, and Activity published one article on
this theme in its 14-year history. In its 13-year history, Culture & Psychology has published
no articles exploring Marxism and cultural psychology or Marxism and Vygotsky. This is
akin to writing about Darwin and holding conferences about his ideas, yet never explor-
ing his concept of evolution.
Not only have cultural psychologists unavailed themselves of Marxist tools for
understanding society, psychology, and social improvement, but they have minimized
the Marxist orientation of Vygotsky himself. For example, Valsiner and Rosa’s (2007)
Cambridge Handbook of Sociocultural Psychology indicates how indebted this approach is
to Vygotsky; yet it does not mention Vygotsky’s Marxist vision for sociocultural psychol-
ogy—and for psychology in general. Nor does the book respect this vision by devoting
chapters to its development. The book mentions the word Marxism only twice in passing
in 729 pages. This makes it seem that Vygotsky was not interested in Marxism.
Van der Veer and Valsiner’s (1991) impressive intellectual biography of Vygotsky creates
the same misimpression. They devote three pages to Marxism in Vygotsky’s theory, and
their entire discussion focuses on Marx and Engels’s distinction between humans and
animals. Some additional pages refer to Vygotsky’s argument with Luria about the possi-
bility of integrating Freud’s and Marx’s concepts. However, the discussion never explores
Marx’s specific social theory, analysis of capitalism, and conception of socialism, or how
these were part of Vygotsky’s theory. Understanding Vygotsky merely whispers to us in an
aside at the end of the book, buried in a discussion of criticisms of Vygotsky, that “he
attempted to incorporate the communist world-view in his research” (p. 374). What this
worldview consisted of, and how it figured in Vygotsky’s thinking, are never considered.
This single, cursory, nebulous comment does not do justice to the importance that
Marxism played in Vygotsky’s theory: He believed Marxism constituted the only genuine
Psychology, and he called for all psychologists to become Marxists. He and Luria criticized
 472 macro cultural psychology

non-Marxist theory such as the French school of sociology, and also Piaget, for disre-
garding concrete cultural forces in relation to psychology; they frequently called for ana-
lyzing particular psychological phenomena in terms of historical materialism (although
they did not have time to conduct this analysis themselves). Their Marxist view of society
and psychology was linked to their political ideal of socialism, and socialism for them
was pivotal to the psychological enrichment of man, because capitalism stunted human
psychology.
Van der Veer and Valsiner fortify their political neutering of Vygotsky by excising his
emphasis on social class in psychology. Because social class is central to Marx’s social
theory and his analysis of capitalism, omitting social class reinforces the sense that
Vygotsky was not interested in Marxism, or in exploitation or concrete society.
Vygotsky wrote: “Social stimuli have been established in the course of historical devel-
opment and have become hardened in the form of legal statutes, moral precepts, artistic
tastes, and so on. These standards are permeated through and through with the class
structure of society that generated them and serve as the class organization of produc-
tion. They are responsible for all of human behavior and in this sense we are justified in
speaking of man’s class behavior” (Vygotsky, 1997a, pp. 96, 211, my emphasis).
Vygotsky regarded social class as fundamental to all of our cultural mediational means,
which form our psychology and behavior. Social class, objectified in social stimuli, is
responsible for all of human behavior. Vygotsky went even further and argued that our
physiology is organized by social class: “the social environment is class-based in its very
structure insofar as, obviously, all new relations are imprinted by the class basis of the
environment. This is why certain investigators have decided to speak not only of class
psychology, but also of class physiology” (Vygotsky, 1997a, p. 211).
According to Vygotsky, nothing could be more important than social class for psychol-
ogy, and for Psychology. A book about synthesizing the major ideas of Vygotsky, which
are the words Van der Veer and Valsiner (1991, p. viii) use to describe their book, would
discuss the importance of social class to Vygotsky. Yet Van der Veer and Valsiner’s book
does not even mention the term social class. Omitting this key concept distorts Vygotsky’s
scientific and political viewpoint. It gives the reader the impression that social class does
not figure among the major ideas of Vygotsky. This is unconscionable because Van der
Veer and Valsiner are relied on as major interpreters of Vygotsky, trusted and respected
scholars who help us to understand him better. Thus, their extirpating of social class (and
Marxism) from Vygotsky’s ideas is a powerful force contributing to people’s misunder-
standing him (just as Aronson’s using his respected status as social psychologist to exclude
social class from social psychology is a powerful force in obfuscating it).v
Depoliticizing Vygotsky serves a conservative political function of legitimizing the
status quo by eliminating revolutionary structural political change—which Vygotsky and
Luria firmly supported (see Luria’s comments in chapter one)— from consideration in
cultural psychology.
I am not suggesting that most articles in cultural psychology thoroughly and exclu-
sively explore Marxism. I am complaining about the opposite pattern, which is to never
explore Marxism directly and thoroughly. Even if cultural psychologists attempted to
dispute Vygotsky’s call for a Marxist psychology, it would be welcome, because at least it
would address the issue of Marxism that Vygotsky advocated and perhaps use a critique
 473 The Politics of Macro Cultural Psychology

to forge a new direction. At least it would take Vygotsky’s proposal for advancing cultural
psychology seriously. Yet nobody has even critiqued his proposal. His followers simply
ignore their founder’s central definition of cultural psychology, and psychology in gen-
eral. They thereby marginalize concrete culture and its improvement, which is central to
Marxism.
Disregarding concrete society and social change deprives us of any meaningful way to
enhance psychology and Psychology. Quiescent, naïve, inadequate political viewpoints
have disastrous effects on psychology and Psychology. Conversely, inadequate Psycho-
logical theory, methodology, and therapy have disastrous effects on society and psychol-
ogy. The battle for the concrete—to hermeneutically unseal it versus hermetically seal it,
exhume it versus entomb it, exercise it versus exorcise it—is the battle for a humane soci-
ety, psychology, and Psychology. Eric Fromm (1980, p. 4) explained this eloquently:

We cannot find the truth as long as social contradictions and force require ideo-
logical falsification, as long as man's reason is damaged by irrational passions
which have their root in the disharmony and irrationality of social life. Only in a
society in which there is no exploitation, hence which does not need irrational
assumptions in order to cover up or justify exploitation, in a society in which the
basic contradictions have been solved and in which social reality can be recog-
nized without distortion, can man make full use of his reason, and at that point he
can recognize reality in an undistorted form—that is to say, the truth. To put it
differently, the truth is historically conditioned: it is dependent on the degree of
rationality and the absence of contradictions within the society.

Macro cultural psychology seeks to realize this idea, in all of its fullness, through
psychological theory, methodology, and practice.

ENDNOTES
i. Another important reason for the dearth of good psychologists today, along with the
obfuscation of capitalism, is that psychologists refuse to avail themselves of the sophisti-
cated thinking that has been developed to apprehend the difficult-to-discern society and
psychology of capitalism. As Vygotsky said, this thinking is Marxism. We discuss this self-
inflicted ignorance elsewhere in this chapter.
ii. We would employ the same analysis to educate people about consumer psychology. We
would aid them to understand the system that underlies it, as depicted in Figures 4.3, 4.4,
and 4.5. The point is to hermeneutically expose the entire system that underlies consum-
erism and to subject it to evaluation and reform. The point is not simply to help people
resist one focal point of the system as expressed in advertisements. It is not a simple exhor-
tation to “buy less” by utilizing some cognitive gimmick such as altering attention pat-
terns. The point is to examine the system that has reengineered us, body and mind, to
become consumers and act against our own health, safety, security, and development. We
cannot avoid this system by simply resisting inducements to consume. We must look at
the broader picture and see the numerous ways in which the system exploits us.
Consumerism is simply one expression of the general exploitive system, as Figures 1.8 and
1.10 depict. Consumerism should lead to a critique of the system that allows consumerism
 474 macro cultural psychology

to proliferate. Consumerism should lead people to look outside of consumer capitalism for
models of fulfilling psychology.
iii. The psychology of oppression hinders the possibility of practicing democracy, for democ-
racy requires informed choices by voters that represent their best interests. But if voters
have been mystified and co-opted by a controlling upper class, their opinions will be mis-
informed about society, the roots of their own behavior, and the need for and possibility of
transforming society and behavior. What voters express in their opinions and votes is not
their own, considered opinion. It is, rather, opinions that have been manipulated by the
ruling class. Votes will not exercise people’s control over policies and will not reflect what is
in voters’ best interests. Voting will be a formality, an overt behavior, and a sham formality
that appears to be democratic but is not. The reality of the psychology of oppression must
be considered in relation to issues such as agency and democracy. One cannot ignore the
psychology of oppression and pretend that ideals such as self-expression, creativity, and
democracy are readily (spontaneously) practiced.
iv. This is true for popular forms of resistance to oppression, which generally fall short of the
analysis I am advocating. Resistance efforts such as pressuring business owners to keep a
local business open in the face of corporate intentions to relocate it, pressuring the gov-
ernment to keep welfare payments coming in the face of efforts to curtail them, families’
sharing food with each other during a strike or unemployment, helping slaves escape plan-
tations, or hiding Jews from the Nazis, important as they are, do not entail or suggest a
substantive social reorganization toward a democratic, cooperative political economy.
v. This is the same kind of silencing that E. G. Boring performed on Wundt, when his History
of Experimental Psychology omitted Wundt’s abiding interest in and voluminous writings
on folk psychology. In 1862, Wundt had made it clear that he conceived of psychology in
the widest possible fashion. At the lowest levels, it consisted of the study of sensory phe-
nomena in relation to physical stimuli, or psychophysics; at the highest levels it included
the investigation of cultural history, morality, and language, or “folk psychology.” In keep-
ing with this broad perspective, he had argued that a variety of methods—developmental,
comparative, introspective, deductive, statistical, and experimental—could and should
be brought to bear on the analysis of psychological phenomena. And he made it clear
that experimental methods, though of great potential importance, were of relatively lim-
ited applicability. Boring excluded the highest, cultural levels of psychology and non-
experimental research methods. Danziger has criticized this misrepresentation. If Boring
had slipped in one sentence at the end of his History mentioning that Wundt also worked
in the area of folk psychology—without explaining anything about this or how impor-
tant it was to his entire conception of psychology and Psychology—this would not correct
Boring’s marginalizing of the topic and his biased presentation of Wundt’s work.
 appendix a

A Curriculum of Courses in Cultural Psychology

1. Introduction to Cultural Psychology

Historical and Philosophical Origins
Relation to Mainstream Psychology
Vygotsky’s Cultural-Historical Psychology
Bronfenbrenner’s Ecological Psychology
James Mark Baldwin’s Psychological Theory
Psychological Anthropology: Shweder, Geertz, Mauss, Mead, Boas
History of Mentalities
French Cultural Psychology-Philosophy: Wallon, Seve, Politzert, Moscovici
Sociology: Durkheim, Marx, Bourdieu
Activity Theory
Symbolic Interactionism
Approaches to Cultural Psychology
Macro Cultural Psychology
Micro Cultural Psychology
Cross-Cultural Psychology
Indigenous Psychology

2. Levels of Culture and Their Corresponding Psychology

General Features of Culture and Psychology – Cooperation, Language, and Psychology
Macro Culture and Psychology
Concrete Macro Culture and Psychology: Individualistic Self and Capitalism
Psychology of Oppression
Sociology of ignorance
Epistemology of ignorance
Psychology of Concrete Cultural Factors: Consumer Psychology

3. Cultural Psychology of:

Emotions
Perception
Cognition
Memory
Personality/Self
Needs
Mental Illness
Sexuality

475
 476 appendix a

4. Cultural Psychology of Developmental Processes

Natural Infantile Processes and Higher, Cultural, Psychological Processes
Socialization/Acculturation of Psychological Phenomena: Family and Macro Cultural
Factors (Social Class, Immigration)

5. Comparative Psychology of Animal and Human Behavior from The Perspective of Cultural
Psychology
Biological Processes that underlie the differences between human and animal behavior

6. Humans’ Social Biology

Culture, Biology, Psychology
Cortical Plasticity versus Cortical Localization
Genes, Hormones, Neurotransmitters, and Psychology
Evolutionary Psychology

7. Research Methods and Philosophy of Science (One or Two Courses)

Epistemological and Ontological Assumptions of Research Methods
Qualitative methodology
Hermeneutics
Grounded Theory
Phenomenology
Ethnography
Discourse Analysis
Interviewing
Experimentation
Selective utilization of positivistic methodology within qualitative methodology
Eclecticism
Dialectical Systems Theory
Critical Realism, objectivism
Naïve Realism
Empiricism-Positivism
Subjectivism
Postmodernism

8. Psychological Intervention from The Perspective of Cultural Psychology

Counseling
Education
Mediation

9. Politics of Psychological Theories and Methods

Political assumptions of psychological theories and methods
Political implications of psychological theories and methods for social policy and psycho-
logical improvement
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 index
Aanstoos, C., 359
Abbott Laboratories, 20
abnormal psychology, politics of, 197–8.
See also mental illness
absence of action, 409–10
abstraction and cultural development,
96–101
abstract syllogistic reasoning, 153–4
Abu Ghraib prison torture, 443
Academically Adrift (Arum and Roksa), 285
academic psychology, 173–4
action potentials, nerve signals, 111
activity theory, 77, 239–46, 320
addictions, 353
adolescent psychology, 50, 167–8, 178, 252
Adorno, T., 356–7
advertising. See also consumer capitalism
brands as mediational means, 350–1,
369, 374
children, impact on, 347–8, 373, 417
and cigarette smoking, 186–7, 417, 462–3
consumer behavior, influence on,
345–50, 349
cult of personality in, 186
emotions, fragmenting of due to, 168–70
historical changes in, 353
invention of consumers, 341
irrationality of in consumer capitalism, 246
repetitiveness of, 375
uncritical standpoint toward, 246
agency
commodification of, 362–3
and cultural objectives, 183–8
as cultural phenomenon, 185–7
and free-market ideology, 184
and functionalism, 69, 80 n. iv
and individual experience, 188
micro-level psychology vs. micro cultural
psychology, 403–4, 432
499
operating mechanism of, 183–4
and psychology of oppression, 324–8
socialization and cultural objectives, 183–8
aggression and gender, 221 n. iv
agriculture, profit maximization in, 341–2
Al-Biruni, Abu, 44
Algeria, Kabyle people, 170
Allen, C., 346
Amadae, S., 311, 314
Ambedkar, Babasaheb, 330
American Association for the Advancement
of Science, 321
American Association of Junior
Colleges, 288
American capitalism. See United States
American Enterprise Institute, 311
American Psychiatric Association, 20
American Toy Manufacturers Association, 387
Anheuser Busch, 308
animal behavioral mechanisms. See also
biological determinism; genetics
limits on comparison to humans, 81–3,
84, 86, 87
antisocial behavior as natural, 469–70
Darwinian argument, 88–9
differences in biology, 128, 129–34, 131
as false concreteness, 235–6
Annales School, 47
anorexia, 193, 194
anthropoid apes, 133–4
anti-objectivism, politics of macro cultural
psychology, 460–5
antirealism, 36
antitobacco movement, 347. See also cigarette
smoking
Arendt, H., 327
Arnold, Henry, 312
Aronson, E., 268–9, 472
Arrow, Kenneth, 311, 312
 500 index

artifacts, 139. See also specific cultural body image, 156, 193–4. See also slenderness,
artifacts tyranny of
atomistic philosophy, 53, 54, 67 Boring, E. G., 474 n. v
attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder, 20, Borora people (Brazil), 398
358, 466 Boudon, R., 210
Auslander, L., 384 Bourdieu, P., 159–60, 166, 168, 195, 217,
Australia, homicide rate in, 164 265, 396
autocratic systems, 72, 310–1 bourgeois ideology. See also consumer
capitalism; rational choice theory
“Bailout Is a Windfall to Banks, if Not to bourgeois individualism, 236–7, 320, 324,
Borrowers,” New York Times, 377, 381 n. vi
270–1 and capitalism, 155, 218
Bakhurst, D., 419–21, 423, 431, 445 n. ii evolutionary psychology on, 25
Baltimore Sun, profit maximization of, 409 mystification of individualism, 236–7, 277
banking system, 85. See also Great Recession and psychology of oppression, 444–5
(2008) bourgeois individualism, use of term, 236–7
Barbie dolls, 156, 388–9, 428 Bowen, W., 300
behavioral economics, 462 Boyle, Sarah, 13–5, 18, 157, 324–5, 424. See also
behaviorism, 8–9, 32, 42 n. viii. See also racial etiquette, in U.S. culture of
specific theorists slavery
Behne, T., 81 brain localization. See cortical localization,
Ben-Gurion, David, 165 conceptual errors in
Berger, P., 181 Branco, A., 430
Bernays, Edward, 186 brands, 350–1, 369, 374. See also advertising
Bertrand, M., 409–10 Brandt, A., 186, 346–7
Bhaskar, R., 318 Brazil, Borora people, 398
Bic (company), 350 Broca-Wernicke language model, 112–3, 116
bilingualism, abstract and concrete features Bronfenbrenner, U., 198
of, 228–30, 229–31 Bruhl, Levy, 398
biological determinism. See also animal Bruner, J., 29–30, 35
behavioral mechanisms Buddhist culture norms, 162
and cultural psychology refutation of, bulimia, 193
107–8, 124–34 Buller, D., 25
capacities for behavior, 128–9 Bureau of Labor Statistics, U.S., 300
differences in biology, 128, 129–34, 131 Bush, George W., 393, 404, 443, 469
fallacy of genetic determinism and
depression, 125–7 California, community colleges and class,
indirect impacts, 127 288–91
requirements of social change, 125–6 Call, J., 81
definition of, 107 Cambridge Handbook of Sociocultural
bipolar disorder, use of term, 20 Psychology (Valsiner and Rosa), 471
Bishop, R., 390 Canada
black liberation movements, 458 cooperative nature of political
Blankein, Lloyd, 217 economy, 218
Bloch, Marc, 47 education system, 208–9
Boas, Franz, 109, 110 Ojibwa Indians, 266
body adornment, pecuniary, 360, 361 surveys on SES and health, 203–4
 501 index
capitalism. See also concrete macro culture
and psychology, overview;
corporations; United States
abstract values of, 237
and advancement of science, 453–5
advertising. See advertising
anticultural nature of, 270–2
and bourgeoise ideology, 155, 218
in class societies, 226
commodification of knowledge, 214–6
commodification of resources/people, 187
commodity production, 303
conceptual comparison to schizophrenia,
189–91
conceptualization of culture in social
organization of, 269–74
consumer capitalism. See consumer
capitalism
corporate construction of cultural
meanings, 237–8
and Darwin’s tenets, 42 n. vii
and depletion of natural resources, 296–7
and destructive psychology/behavior, 197
and eating disorders, 193, 201
education, impact on, 72–3, 286–93, 300,
325–6, 328
and individualism, 142–3, 145–6, 167, 188,
219, 266, 415
as limited hierarchical pyramid, 286
literacy and numeracy, 150
obfuscation of concrete macro cultural
features by, 266–9, 448–9
as anticultural culture, 269–74, 303–4
and individualism, 274–80
lack of journal articles on, 266–7, 267
patriotic capitalism, 272
as political economy, 202–4
commodity production, 203–7
in conical model of culture, 216–7
government corruption, 221 n. vii
and sense of life/subjectivity, 217
profit maximization, 362, 409, 413–5
and social reform. See politics of macro
cultural psychology
speed as cultural value, 173
stagnation of, 297–302
state of anomie due to, 362
Sudanese family life, impact on, 212–4
and tyranny of slenderness, 200–1, 358–9
Carnegie Commission, 288–90
Carpenter, M., 81
Caspi, A., 22–3, 126–7
castration, 122–3
cell phones, 200, 201, 393
Census Bureau, U.S., 301
Center for Addiction and Mental Health
(CAMH) (University of Toronto), 20
Center for Consumer Freedom (CCF), 172
Center for the Advanced Study of the
Behavioral Sciences (Stanford
University), 313
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention,
U.S., 172, 250
Chakkarath, P., 64
Chamber of Commerce, 289
chemical industry, 34
Chiang, C., 147
children. See also family
advertising, impact on, 347–8, 373, 417
Barbie dolls, 156, 388–9, 428
childrearing changes in China, 434–7
and commercial-industrial economy in
U.S., 386–7
commodification of play/toys, 388–9
and consumer products, 339
hemispherectomies, 115–6
home signers and spatial analogies, 98
intentions of caretakers, 104–5
interpersonal relations study on, 390
language acquisition, 103
maintenance of cognitive competence, 426–7
memory development, 108
neotony, 110
psychology of oppression, 377
school district criminalization of, 425
social comparison among, 429
socialization of parental control, 64
structuring of child play, study on, 385–6,
445 n. i
television consumption by, 50
trivialization of parental love, 354
tyranny of slenderness, 194, 428–9
Vygotsky's principles of socialization,
221 n. v
 502 index
chimpanzees, 4, 82, 110, 131
China
childrearing changes, 434–7
and collectivism label, 219, 254–5
consumerism, impact on, 437–40
development as well-off society, 390–2,
439–40
education system, 208
historical antiscientism, 279–80
individualism, 255, 437–42
influence of foreign pharmaceutical
companies, 440–1, 446 n. v
pension benefits, 441–2
Chinese Sports Federation, 437
Chomsky, N., 34–5
Christian right creationism, 180
Christie, S., 98
churches. See religion and religious
orthodoxy
cigarette smoking
corporate construction of cultural
meanings, 178, 237–8, 345, 346–8
impact of advertising on, 186–7, 417, 462–3
symbolism as masking exploitation, 369–70
by women, 185–7
civil rights, and compatibility with status
quo, 187
Clammer, John, 207
classical conditioning (Pavlov), 149
classless societies, 226
class psychology, 111
class societies. See also ruling classes
abstract and concrete features of, 226
principle of exploitation in, 295–7, 310–1
Clinton, Bill, 308
Clinton, Hilary, 243
Close-Up, 351
Coca-Cola, 351
Code, L., 320–1
coherent self vs. fragmented self, 146
Cole, M., 240–1
Coley, Richard, 208
collateral issues of psychological theories,
25–7
collective activity
explanation of, 87–8
and intentionality, 104–5
and shared symbolic artifacts, 81
social coordination, 93–4
superorganic collective institutions, 90
collective memory, 157, 165–6
color perception
acculturation of, 152
philosophical/systemic analysis of cortical
localization, 121
and semantic structures, 100–1
commerce. See also capitalism
cultural context, 264–5
family, influence on, 211–4, 386–7
and numeracy skills, 150–1
Commission for Presidential Debates, 308
Committee for Economic Development
(CED), 380 n. iii
commodity fetishism, 33
commodity-signs, 370–1
communication, origin of term, 94. See also
language
Communist Party (China), 219, 254
community colleges and class, 286–93
competition. See also capitalism;
individualism
and Darwin’s tenets, 42 n. vii
diagram of deep structure of
social change, 451
and gender, 221 n. iv
and inferiority complex, 189, 209
violence due to, 163–4
compulsive consumerism, 352–3
Conant, James, 288
Concept Therapies, 20
concrete macro cultural psychology,
philosophical principles, 223–80
abstraction and concrete overview, 223–32,
225–6
bilingualism as concrete factor, 228–30,
229–31
false abstraction, 234–9, 262–4
false concreteness, 235–9, 264–6
integration of, 239–45
political nature of, 232–4
capitalism
conceptualization difficulties rooted in,
269–74
obfuscation by, 266–9, 274–80
 503 index
inadequacies of cross-cultural psychology,
246–62
concrete macro culture and psychology,
overview, 282–379
capitalism and psychology
psychology of oppression, 316–35, 323,
331, 376–8, 380 n. v, 381 n. vi
concrete features of, 282–4
consumer psychology, 335–79. See also
consumer capitalism
attributes of, 335–6
behavior model, 349
body adornment, 360
boredom, 358
brands as mediational means of
perception, 350–1, 369, 374
cognitive associations, 374–5
vs. consumerism, 375–6, 473 n. ii
detachment/dissatisfaction, 357
disillusionment/fantasy maintenance,
358–9
hyperactivity/attention deficit, 358, 466
insatiable needs, 352–3
instant gratification, 353–4
irrationality/impulsivity, 371–4, 462
love, commodification of, 360
mainstream psychology, 378–9
political economy, 336–45
psychology of oppression, 376–8
psychology of pleasure, 351–2
self/identity, 360–2
sensationalism, 355–7
sense of agency, 362–3
sex, commodification of, 364–8, 381
n. ix
superficial sensory stimulation, 354–5
symbolism as masking exploitation,
369–70
symbols, commodification of, 370–1
top-down psychology, 345–50
educational psychology, 284–94
concrete cultural character of, 284–5
political economy of education, 285–94
political economy of advanced capitalism,
294–315
cultural psychology, principles of, 294–5
labor, commodification of, 295–305
Marx on, 295–7
social functionalism and exploitation,
305–15
conditioning theory, limitations of, 13–4
Condon, R., 167
Confucius, 252 n. iii, 261–2
Congressional Black Caucus, U.S., 221 n. vii
conical model of culture, 202–4, 202, 210,
216–20, 222 n. ix, 454–5
consumer capitalism. See also capitalism
acculturation of, 50, 64, 182
advertising. See advertising
and American motherhood, 219–20
consumerist enfranchisement, 430–1
and consumer psychology, 69
consumer psychology. See concrete macro
culture and psychology, overview
education, influence on, 325–6, 328
food consumerism, 381 n. viii, 412
play/toys, commodification of, 388–9
sex, pecuniary, 381 n. ix
consumer psychology. See concrete macro
culture and psychology, overview
Cook, Daniel, 430–1
corporations. See also specific corporations
as class-in-formation, 248–9
construction of cultural meanings, 178,
237–8, 345, 346–8
exploitation during Great Recession,
297–302, 298–9
exploitation of disasters for profit, 249–50
extreme wealth of, 282
and false sense of commonality, 239
horizontal integration, 50
influence on Congressional Black Caucus,
221 n. vii
news media, influence on, 309, 329,
354, 409
pharmaceutical corporations, 19–22, 154,
173, 440–1, 446 n. v
profit maximization, 362, 409, 413–5
profits/compensation growth rates,
299, 300
as sponsors of political debates, 308
strategic board member selection, 217,
303–4
third-world worker wages, 297
 504 index
cortical localization, conceptual errors in
and cultural psychology, 111–8
numerical information, 118
risk-taking behavior, 114–5
philosophical/systemic analysis of cortical
localization, 119–28
color perception, 121
emotions, 83, 120–1
and older age neural activity, 126
pleasure, 121–2
sexual desire, 122–4
Council on Foreign Relations, 380 n. iii
counterculture and change, 178–9
Course in General Linguistics (Saussure), 224
Cousin, Victor, 155
credit card companies, 302
credit companies, 408
Crest, 351
Crick, F., 4
critical hermeneutics. See hermeneutic
analysis
cross-cultural psychology. See also specific
theorists
individualism/collectivism, 227, 262–6
levels of analysis, 76
limitations of, 257–62
cult of personality in advertising, 186
cultural coherence, 106
cultural coordination. See social
coordination
cultural hermeneutics. See hermeneutic
analysis
cultural-historical activity theory (CHAT),
241–6
cultural-historical psychology, 6, 47–9
cultural mechanisms, 91
cultural psychology, principles of, 81–137
behavioral processes, 81–3
and biological determinism
refutation of, 107–8, 124–34, 131
Darwinian argument, 88–9
and definition of culture, 83–8, 85
dialectical interdependence, 89–91
general vs. specific capacities, 102–5
intentionality, 104–5
language acquisition, 102–4
and human anatomy, 109–24, 137 n. ii
cortical localization of psychological
functions, 111–24
neurotransmitters, 110–1, 127, 128–9,
130–1
participation as generative of psychology,
91–102
progressive vs. pluralistic dialectics, 134–7
psychological theories of culture, 105–6
scientific development stage of, 6
social biology, 108–9
cultural sexuality, 364–8
culture
within cultural psychology, 83–8, 85
as cunning of reason, 326, 401
definitions of, 28, 30, 35
as determinable determinism, 86
as dialectical system, 53–5, 55
as emergent system, 85
as national Geist, 44
origins of concept, 46
Culture Against Man (Henry), 344
Culture and Depression (Kleinman and
Good), 51
Culture Theory (Shweder and LeVine), 51
Curaçao, eating disorders in, 193, 194
Curtiss, Susan, 115–6
Dantas, C., 430
Danziger, K., 280 n. ii, 474 n. v
Darwin, Charles, 3–5, 7, 42 n. vii, 69–70,
88–9. See also genetics
Davis, B., 123
de Bode, S., 115–6
defense mechanisms, 54–5
democracy, voting behavior in, 474 n. iii
Democracy in America (Tocqueville), 266
Deng Xiaoping, 439–40
dentition, 110
depression
lack of association with genetics, 125–7
prevalence of, 466
sadness, and cultural differences, 162
and social stressors, 24, 127
desire/enjoyment, pecuniary, 351–2. See also
pleasure
destructive psychology/behavior, 195–7, 196
diabetes, and social reengineering, 381 n. viii
 505 index
Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental
Disorders (DSM-III)
conflicts of interest by authors of, 19
madness, definition of, 21–2
mental disorder, definition of, 21–2
pathologizing of common behaviors,
20, 25
politicization of research, 19–22, 25
on socially caused behavior, 21–2
Dialectical Self Scale (DSS), 260–1
dialectical systemic philosophy, elements of, 54
as applicable to theories and phenomena,
75–7, 76
vs. atomistic model of causation, 67
change and status quo resistance, 75
concrete characteristics of, 64–6
congruency, 54
culture as subsystem, 53–5, 55
and disparate approaches, 77–8
ethics, nonguarantee of, 72–3
functionalism, 67–73
hermeneutic analysis, 64–6, 74
impact of changes to, 73–5
vs. interactionism, 56–7
internal relations, 53–4
overdetermination by multiple factors, 64
psychology as subsystem, 54, 55
qualitative distinctness, 57
qualitative hegemony of dominant
elements, 57–8
ranking of influences, 66–7
research, functionalist-systems approach,
71–2
socially emergent dimensions of emotion,
79–80
superiority of, 78–9
transmission of cultural system to
individual, 58–63, 59–61, 63
as windows into system, 67
dialectics
origins of, 260–1
progressive vs. pluralistic, 134–7
Diller, Barry, 300
discourse analysis approach, 76–7
dissociation, 55
Dole, Bob, 308
domestic violence, 164, 195–6
Dominican Republic, Nike’s exploitation of
labor in, 297
Donald, M., 101
Douglas Aircraft Company, 312
Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (Stevenson), 189
Duffy, S., 246, 248, 405
Dufour, D.-R., 34
Durkheim, E., 205–6, 432
DynCorp, 309
Earhart, Amelia, 186
eating, social conditioning of, 342–3, 381 n.
viii, 412
eating disorders and objectified ideals, 156,
193, 201, 221 n. vi, 450, 451, 452
ecological disasters, corporate exploitation
of, 249–50
economic crisis (2008). See Great Recession
(2008)
economics
logic of oppression within, 401
of manufacturing industry, 203
scientific attempts of, 37–8
economic systems, 84, 142–3. See also
capitalism
education
abstract and concrete features of, 225
and American capitalism, 72–3, 286–93
apprenticeship, 218
comparison among countries, 208–12
consumer capitalism, influence on,
325–6, 328
and macro social systems, 184
SES, impact on, 207–12, 286–93
stagnation of capitalism, 300
structural racism, 399–402, 400
suspension of students, 425
teachers as cultural agents, 393–9, 396,
434–5
tests and testing
as artifactual, 181
ETS study on SES influence on, 207–9
intelligence tests, 221 n. iii
as pedagogical instrument, 158–9
rote memorization, 152, 154
speed as criterion of success, 173–4
Educational Testing Service, 207–9
 506 index

Education and Liberty (Conant), 288 Exelon, 309

Education Department, U.S., 73 exploitation. See also capitalism;
education psychology corporations; Marx, Karl
concrete cultural character of, 284–5 in class societies, 295–7, 306–10, 448–9
curricula as macro cultural factor, 179 during Great Recession (2008), 250,
free recall, 152 297–302, 298–9
and legal codes, 152 neoliberal exploitation of crises, 249–50,
political economy of education, 285–94 295–7
of students, 284–5, 284 by ruling classes, 306–10, 448–9
Eells, Walter, 287, 289 and social functionalism, 305–15
Einstein, Albert, 6, 7, 8, 29, 52, 79, 270 symbolism as masking of, 369–70
Elias, N., 62, 94
Eli Lilly, 20 facial expressions, cultural interpretations of,
Eliot, T. S., 188–9 113–4
Ellison, Larry, 300 false consciousness, 317–20, 380 n. v
emotional complexity (ED), 257–62 family. See also children
emotions consumerism, impact on, 377, 390
and abstract rules, 91–2 evolutionary psychology on nuclear
cultural codes as mechanism of, 10–8 family, 25
expression of anger through political influence of political economy on
action, 93 as embodiment of capitalism, 218
expression of via cigarette smoking in in Mexico, 211–2
movies, 178, 237–8 in Sudan, 212–4
expression of via cultural artifacts, 180–1 instability within lower classes, 412
feeling rules, 83, 181 and media acculturation, 50, 64
fragmenting of via television advertising, and mental illness, 198
168–70 and objectiver Geist, 180
internal relations vs. singular entity, 60, 66 as place of nonwork, 146
operating mechanism of, 161–3 reflection on patterns of, 74–5
of oppressed groups, 316 SES, impact of, 204, 207–10
philosophical/systemic analysis of cortical socialization of parental control, 64
localization, 83, 120–1 socialization practices, 384
socially emergent dimensions of, 79–80, Family: America’s Smallest School, The
91–2 (ETS report), 207, 426–7
Engels, F., 205 fatalism, 168
Engestrom, Y., 240–6 Febvre, Lucien, 47
epistemology of ignorance, 448–9 Federal Emergency Management Agency
erectile dysfunction, 154 (FEMA), 250
Essay on the Origins of Language Federal Housing Administration, U.S.,
(Herder), 46 392–3
ethnicity and marriage patterns, 412 Federal Reserve Bank of Boston, 300
ethnopsychopharmacology, 123 Federal Reserve Bank of New York, 271
eunuchs, 122–3 feeling rules, 83, 181
evolution, theory of, 3–5, 6, 7, 89. See also feminism, on romantic love, 163
genetics feudalism, 226, 302–3, 444
evolutionary psychology, 25, 89. See also film industry and corporate product
specific theorists placement, 178, 237–8
 507 index

Finland lack of association with depression, 125–7

childrens’ interpersonal relations, study lack of association with physical diseases,
on, 390 137 n. iii
education system, 208–9 neoliberal genetics, 25
Engestrom’s abstraction in study on health and structure of scientific thinking, 4–5, 5
care, 243–5 and universal grammar, 117
food consumerism, 342–3, 347–8, 373, 381 n. Gentner, D., 98, 102
viii, 412 Gergen, K., 35–6, 461
food industry, 170, 172 Gergen, M., 35–6, 461
food supply, 84 Germany
Ford, Henry, 347 capitalism, 226–7
Ford Foundation, 312, 313, 380 n. iii childrens’ interpersonal relations, study
forgetting. See memory, acculturation of on, 390
Foucault, M., 23, 24–5, 160, 191, 198, 270, human sciences movement
331–2 (Geisteswissenschaften), 44–6
Fournier, S., 346 Gianotti, L., 114–5
France Giles, J., 122–3
cultural conceptions of self, 155 Gilligan, Carol, 174–5
sociological theories, 205–6 Gladkova, A., 446 n. vi
free-market ideology and social agency, 184 globalization and individualization, 438–9
free recall, 152 Goh, E., 434–7, 441
French Revolution, 155 Goldberg, Elkhonin, 117–8
Freud, Sigmund, 54–5, 315 Goldberg, M., 157
Friedlmeier, W., 64 Goldman, R., 371
Fromm, E., 24, 324, 473 Goldman Sachs, 217
Froyum, C., 316, 323 Goldstein, J., 155
frustration-aggression hypothesis, 359 Goldstein, Kurt, 112–3
functionalism, 68 Google, 217
and capitalist exploitation, 305–15 Gordon, S., 80
and mystification, 310–5 Gottingen School, 44–6, 47
politics and social class, 306–10 Great Recession (2008)
dialectic aspects of, 67–73 anticultural nature of capitalism, 270–2
purpose of, 68 banking system
in research, 71–2 debt, rise in, 301
and social activity/agency, 69, 80 n. iv and functionalism, 72
increase in assets during, 249
game theory, 312–3 risk-taking behavior, 143, 270–2,
Gazzaniga, M., 124–6 302, 309
Gee, E. Gordon, 217 subprime mortgage loans, 301
Geertz, C., 109, 159, 222 n. viii capitalist exploitation during, 297–302,
Geist. See objectiver Geist 298–9
gender, 175, 221 n. iv. See also women job recovery rate, 302
generalization and social interaction, 96–7 neoliberal exploitation of, 250
generalized other, 428, 445 n. iii transparency, 465–6
genetics. See also animal behavioral Greenfield, P., 211–2, 248, 249–50,
mechanisms; Darwin, Charles 262–6, 431
discovery/unseen genes, 7 Greenspan, Alan, 401
 508 index

habitus, use of term, 159–60, 217 Housing and Urban Development

Haiti, post-hurricane reconstruction Department, U.S., 393
corruption, 250 “How Economists Got It So Wrong”
Hanson, Norwood Russell, 70 (Krugman), 37–8
Harley Davidson, 346 Huff, Toby, 279–80
Harre, R., 35, 77, 404, 432–3 Human Genome Project, 137 n. iii
Harris, G., 413–4 human sciences movement
Hart-Landsberg, M., 252 (Geisteswissenschaften), 44–6
Harvey, William, 70 Humboldt, Wilhelm, 46
Haven Trust, 72 Humboldt State University, 421
health and socioeconomic status impact on, Hurricane Katrina
203–4 demographics of leavers/stayers,
health insurance companies, 408, 413–4 427–8, 427
Healy, David, 19–20 neoliberal exploitation of, 249–50
Hegel, G.W.F., 53, 62, 134, 234, 260, 261, 326, Husserl, E., 65, 276–8
401, 452 Hyde, J., 174
Heidegger, M., 276–8 hyperactivity/attention deficit, pecuniary,
Heinze, A., 146 154, 358, 466
hemispherectomy, 115–6 hypoactive RPFC, 114–5
Hennessy, John L., 217
Henry, Jules, 344, 372 Ideenkleid (Husserl), 276–9
Herbert, Bob, 297 ignorance, social-psychological, 273–4, 285,
hermeneutic analysis 308, 321–2
of bilingualism, 229–30, 230 India
of class character in Chinese landscape bilingualism, 228–30, 229–30
aestheticization, 390–1 Hindu self-concept, 330
and consumer psychology, 473 n. ii indigenous behaviors/psychology, 464–5
and dialectical systemic philosophy, 64–6 origin of Hindu codes, 177
centrifugal sweep, 65 Saora tribe, 150–1
and social change, 74 indigenous psychology, 76, 463–5, 474 n. iv
Heidegger on Dasein, 276 individual autonomy theories, 420–1, 423,
in macro cultural psychology, 33, 37, 433–4, 445 n. iv. See also rational
276, 473 choice theory; specific theorists
and tyranny of slenderness, 199–202 individualism
higher-order relations, 99–100 and capitalism, 142–3, 145–6, 167, 188, 219,
Hinduism, self-concept in, 330 266, 415
historical materialism, 47, 49, 107–8, 153, in China, 255, 437–42
204–7, 241, 471–2 concretization of, 219
History of Experimental Psychology (Boring), in cross-cultural psychology, 227
474 n. v cultural nature of, 274–80
Hochschild, A., 83 in eighteenth-century France, 154–5
Holmes, Oliver Wendell, 32 as false concreteness, 317
Home Owners’ Loan Corporation, 392 as legitimation of class disparities, 44
Homo sapiens sapiens, 95 and rational choice theory, 311–5, 405
homosexuality, 176 and tenets of Protestantism, 177–8
Hoover Institute, 311 use of false abstractions/concreteness,
hostility, Tomasello’s theoretical errors on, 262–6
467–73 use of term, 236–7
 509 index

individualistic self, as cultural state of being, Jackson, S., 177, 183

175–7 Janet, Pierre, 205–6
Individualization of Chinese Society, The Japan
(Yan), 254 education system, 208–9, 210
Indonesia, influence of political economy on, political economy, 207
222 n. viii rise in eating disorders, 193
industry vs. business, 303 Jim Crow racist belief systems. See racial
inferiority complex, 189, 209 etiquette, in U.S. culture of slavery
instant gratification, pecuniary, 353–4 Jobs, Steve, 300
institutionalization of cultural factors, 49 joint intentionality, 90
institutions. See also corporations; Jordan, Michael, 370–1
education Jowett, G., 413
and definition of culture, 139
internal relatedness of, 140 Kabyle people (Algeria), 170
and social agency, 184 Kahneman, D., 462
unintentional oppressive Karabel, J., 290–1, 293
behavior of, 401 Katz, C., 212–4
insurance companies, 34 Kay, P., 121
intelligence quotient (IQ) Keller, H., 249–50, 262–6, 431
and cultural ideology, 161 Kempton, W., 121
errors in methodologies, 268–9, 280 Kerr, Clark, 289
impact of institutionalization on, 110 Kim, U., 64
and SES, 24 King, A., 157, 165
speed as factor in testing, 173–4 Kirk, Paul, 308
intentionality, 104–5 Kitayama, S., 246–8, 405
interactionist model Klein, Naomi, 249
constraints on culture, 133 Kline, S., 387
critique of, 107–8 Knight, N., 105–6, 251, 255–7
vs. dialectical system, 56–7 knowledge
politics of, 22–3 abstract and concrete features of, 224
intersect, use of term, 89–90 commodification of in capitalism, 214–6
interstitial interpersonal interactions, Korea, education system, 208–9
definition of, 384 Kovacs, A., 228
intimidation via culturally appropriate Kraeplin, E., 188–9
artifacts, 181 Kroeber, A., 89
Inuit Eskimos, 167 Krugman, Paul, 37–8, 143
Iraq, U.S. invasion Kuczynski, L., 434–7, 441
Abu Ghraib prison torture, 443
contradiction between means/mode, 242 Labor Department, U.S., 321
cultural politics of, 165 Laing, R. D., 23, 197–8
and false consciousness, 319 Lane, C., 19
mystification of rationale for U.S. language. See also speech; universal
invasion, 443–4, 469 grammar
psychology of violence, 92–3, 195–6 as abstraction, 113
irrationality/impulsivity, 336–7, 371–4, 462 Broca-Wernicke model, 112–3, 116
Israel, Mapai Party, 165–6 and congenital blindness, 112–3
Italy, childrens’ interpersonal relations cultural purpose of, 45
study, 390 cultural variability of, 102–3
 510 index

language. See also speech; universal grammar trivialization of parental love, 354
(Contd.) Luckmann, T., 181
dependency of thought on, 47–9 Lucky Strike, 369
general potentiation, 102–4 Lukacs, G., 338
Gottingen School on, 46, 47 Luria, A., 6, 47, 48, 89, 93, 100–1, 112, 133–4,
and hemispherectomies, 115–6 137 n. ii, 182, 205–7, 242–3, 263,
and social coordination, 94–102 334–5, 397–8, 471–2
color perception, 100–1
generalization, 96–7 macro cultural psychology, overview, 3–41,
historical emergence of speech, 95 44–80. See also micro-level
symbolic representation, 96–101 psychology vs. micro cultural
language shift, studies on, 407–8 psychology; specific theorists
laptop computers, 200, 201 levels of analysis, 76–7, 76
Latin America, attitude of fatalism in, 168 and macro cultural factors, 9–17
Lave, J., 405 methodology, 345
Lazarus, Moritz, 46 philosophical issues, 51–3
League of Women Voters (LWV), 308 as philosophy of mind, 25–32
Lebel, U., 165 collateral issues, 25–7
Lee, M., 339–41 and impact of errors, 32
LeMay, Curtis, 312 internal relationships, 25–6
Leonhardt, David, 210 premise of, 27–8
Leontiev, A. N., 6, 47, 62, 194, 205, 317–8, 380 reconceptualization of psychology, 28–9
n. iv, 429 political nature of
Levellers, 36, 334 abstractions vs. concrete aspects, 40–1
Levi, 350 critical hermeneutics, 33, 37, 276
Levinson, S., 102–3 individual impact on, 34–6
Levitt, William, 393 objectivity, 38–41
Levy-Bruhl, Lucien, 205–6 philosophy of mind, 33–41
Lewontin, R., 38 power relations. See power relations
Lieberman, P., 112 psychological phenomena, 17–8
listening processes, commodification of, study of psychological phenomena,
356–7 18–25, 42 n. vi
literacy, 150, 168. See also education as scientific endeavor, 3–9
Litvinovic, G., 404 as syncretic methodology, 65
Locke, John, 155 systemic philosophy. See dialectical
Lockheed Martin, 221 n. vii systemic philosophy, elements of
locusts, study of serotonin and, 129–31, tenets of
138 n. iv animosity toward, 38
logical reasoning, acculturation of, 153–4 applicable in societies, 40
logic of oppression, 401 historical background, 44–51
Lompscher, J., 239–40 interpersonal levels, 49–50
love macro culture, and psychology, 139–222. See
commodification of, 360, 361 also concrete macro cultural
romantic love psychology, philosophical principles
abstract and concrete features of, 224 dialectical relationship between, 142–220
as artifactual, 177 conical model of culture, 202–4, 202,
operating mechanism of, 163, 175 210, 216–20, 222 n. x
 511 index
cultural hermeneutics, 144, 199–202
cultural psychology as ideal type, 199
dominance of macro cultural factors,
145–50
expression of psychological states, 180–2
factors as impetus of psychology, 167
factors as structure, 167–70
formation of psychological phenomena,
150–4
historical materialism, 153, 204–7
impact of political economy, 202–4,
207–22, 222 n. ix
interdependency, 142–5, 144–5
logical reasoning, 153–4
mental illness, 188–98
objectified ideals, 156–9
as operating mechanism, 159–64
political nature of macro cultural
factors, 170–5
political nature of psychological
phenomena, 165–6, 177
psychological phenomena as collective
representations, 154–5
psychological phenomena as macro
cultural factors, 177
senses, 147–50
social agency, 183–8
and socialization, 177–80, 180
as social order, 175–7
macro culture, definition of, 139–42
madness, 21–2, 331–2
Maistre, Joseph de, 449
male sexuality and objectified ideals, 156–7
Malley, B., 105–6
Maner, J., 123–4
manic-depression, use of term, 20
Mao Zedong, 260
Mapai Party (Israel), 165–6
Marcuse, H., 134, 260, 330, 431
marginal utility theory, 344
Markus, H., 247–8
Marlboro, 345
marriage
customs, 86–7
SES and patterns of, 412
structural infidelity in, 402–3
Martin-Baro, I., 168
Marx, Karl, 33, 53, 134–5, 188, 204–5, 230, 260,
261, 270, 295–7, 304–5, 316, 338,
454–5, 461–2, 470–3. See also specific
concepts
mass media
corporatism in news media, 309, 329,
354, 409
entertainment/art, limits on psychological
sensibilities, 329, 355
imitation of movie actors, 413
and interpersonal violence, 164
as oppressive mediational means, 179
reality television, 272
role in acculturation
in consumer capitalism, 50, 64, 182
in teen sexuality, 178
and thin-ideal body, 428–9
sensationalism, 355–7
superficiality in news, 354–5, 443
mathematics, acculturation of, 150–2, 160
McCaffrey, Barry, 309
McCarthyism, 350
McKinnon, S., 25
Mead, Margaret, 109
media. See mass media
mediational means, 158–9, 161, 166, 179.
See also specific aspects
medicine as artifactual, 154
Mehler, J., 228
Mejia-Arauz, R., 140, 385–6, 417, 445 n. i
memory, acculturation of
and forgetting, 16–7, 165–6
free recall, 152
rote vs. contextual, 152–3, 154
Mendel, G., 7
menopause, 123
mental activity
development of due to historical
materialism, 153
as social relations of social structure, 159
mental energy, 105–6
mental engineering, 179–80
mental illness. See also specific disorders
biochemical theories of, 19–22, 42 n. v
refutation of, 191–2, 198
and demographic variations, 192–3
due to macro cultural factors, 188–91
 512 index
mental illness. See also specific disorders
(Contd.)
lack of association between genes and, 127
and micro processes of family, 198
normative basis of abnormal behavior, 194–7
politics of abnormal psychology, 197–8
and religion, 193
and social stressors, 21–4, 191–4, 192
mental rotation tasks, 114
mental space, 93–4
Merton, Robert, 411
methodology. See also hermeneutic analysis;
specific methodologies
of macro cultural psychology, 345
as theoretical constraint, 8–9
Mexico
consumer advertising in, 349
education system in Chiapas, 211–2
structuring of child play, study on, 385–6,
445 n. i
micro cultural psychology, overview. See also
specific theorists
explanation of, 51
levels of analysis, 76–7, 76
use of term, 382
micro-level psychology vs. micro cultural
psychology, 76, 180, 382–445, 383
agency, 403–4
micro cultural psychology
critique of, 404–21, 411, 445 n. ii
discourse analysis, 432–4, 445 n. iv
false dichotomizing of psychology under
pretense of integration, 421–32, 445
n. iii
personal meaning, 416–21
research, 434–42, 446 n. vi
micro psychological phenomena, 383–403
cell phones, 393
discourse analysis, 393–9, 434–5, 460
home identification, 390–3
socialization practices, 384–90
structural marital infidelity, 402–3
structural racism, 399–402, 400
science/politics/ethics, 442–5
Military, U.S., 195–6, 443–4
Mill, J. S., 228, 266
Miller, F., 346
Miller, P., 421, 433
Miller, S., 123–4
Mills, Charles, 150, 409–10, 468
Mistry, J., 152
modernization, cultural context, 265–6
Mohanty, A. K., 228, 232
Moll, H., 81
monoamine oxidase A (MAOA), 22–3,
111–2, 127
Monsanto, 351
Moran, M., 271–2
motherhood, in American culture, 219–20
Mullainathan, S., 409–10
Muller-Lyer illusion, 137 n. ii
music, commodification of, 356–7
mystification of concrete culture, 448–9. See
also specific examples
Nader, Ralph, 350
National Association to Advance Fat
Acceptance (NAAFA), 172
naturalism. See biological determinism
natural resources, privatization of, 389
natural sciences, 39
natural selection, 4–5, 42 n. vii, 69–70
nature and culture, 84–5, 85
Nazis, 404
Needham, Joseph, 264
needs, pecuniary, 352–3
neoliberal genetics, 25
neoliberalism
era of economic expansion, 298–9, 298
exploitation during crises, 249–50
neoliberal genetics, 25
unintentional oppressive behavior of, 401
neotony, 110
neurotransmitters and cultural psychology,
110–1, 127–31
Ng, E., 125, 255, 440, 441–2, 446 n. v
Nigeria, economic system, 84
Nike, 297
Nisbett, R., 251–4, 252 n. iii, 255–7, 268–9
Nolan, J., 252, 273–4
norepinephrine, 111
Northern Trust of Chicago, 271
numeracy, acculturation of, 150–2, 160
numerical information, 118
 513 index
Obama, Michelle, 34
obesity, and social conditions, 172–3, 381 n.
viii, 412
objectified ideals, 156–9, 193, 201, 221 n. vi,
450, 451, 452. See also slenderness,
tyranny of
objectiver Geist, 180, 181–2, 318, 416
objectivity/objectivism
politics of macro cultural psychology,
459–60, 474 n. iii
anti-objectivism, 460–5
and social science doctrines, 38–41
odors, acculturation of, 147–9
Ogbu, J., 152, 168, 396
Ojibwa Indians (Canada), 266
older age and neural activity, 126
operating systems of psychological
phenomena, 12–8, 42 n. iv
oppression, psychology of, 323. See also
politics of macro cultural psychology
active behavior generation due to, 322–4
agency, 324–8
bourgeois ideology, 444–5
capitalism and psychology, 316–35, 323,
331, 376–8, 380 n. v, 381 n. vi
children, 377
epistemology of ignorance, 320–2
false consciousness, 317–20, 380 n. v
need for research, 328–33, 375
progressive vs. pluralistic relativism, 333–5
and social reform, 455–8, 473 n. ii
optical illusions, 137 n. ii
Ozgen, E., 152
Panda, M., 151
panic disorder, 154
Papua New Guinea, language shift, 407–8
Park, D., 126
Park, Y., 64
patriarchy, 133
patriotic capitalism, 272
Pavlov, I., 149
pecuniary, use of term, 344
Peng, K., 257–60
pensions, 300
Pepsi-Cola, 349
perception, use of term, 135
Perot, Ross, 308
Perry, M., 210
personal decisions, social conditioning of,
427–30, 427
personality, origin of term, 146
personal responsibility, concept of, 162
Peter, J., 157
pharmaceutical corporations
financial inducements to DSM-III
authors, 19
invention of psychological constructs
for commercial purposes, 154, 173,
440–1, 446 n. v
politicization of research, 19–22
Phenomenology of Spirit (Hegel), 134, 234, 261
Philosophy of History (Hegel), 401
philosophy of mind. See macro cultural
psychology, overview
Piaget, J., 160, 226, 472
Plassmann, H., 121–2
Plato, 260
play
abstract and concrete features of, 224
as micro psychological phenomena, 385–90
pleasure
as artifactual, 175
in consumer psychology, 351–2
philosophical/systemic analysis of cortical
localization, 121–2
pluralistic relativism, 333–5
PMS, social conditioning of, 123
Poland, childrens’ interpersonal relations
study, 390
political demystification, 278
political economy. See also specific aspects
in conical model of culture, 202–4, 202,
210, 216–20, 222 n. ix
cooperative forms of, 218
psychological effects of, 207–16
capitalist development in Sudan, 212–4
commerce and family, 211–2
and knowledge, 214–6
socioeconomic status and education,
207–10
social sciences and political action, 220,
222 n. x
political interests, 171
 514 index
political philosophy of mind. See macro
cultural psychology, overview
politics, definition of, 170–5
politics of macro cultural psychology,
448–73, 450
anti-objectivism, 460–5
concrete cultural change, avoidance of in
psychological theory
lack of research, 471
Tomasello’s theoretical errors, 467–73
cultural-political reform and capitalism,
452–5
objectivity/objectivism, 459–60, 474 n. iii
social reform
diagram of deep structure of, 450, 451, 452
and psychology of oppression, 455–8,
473 n. ii
as true zone of proximal development,
458–9
pollution and false sense of commonality,
239
pornography, 156–7
Portugal, childrens’ interpersonal relations
study, 390
Positive Affect Negative Affect Scale, 259
positivistic ideology, 7–8
positivistic methodology, 262, 280 n. ii
postmodernism, 371
Potter, J., 404–5, 433
poverty. See also socioeconomic status (SES)
of black Americans, 410–2, 411
and capitalist exploitation, 295–6
diagram of deep structure of
social change, 451
functionalism of, 72
and interpersonal violence, 164
in Nigeria, 84
perception of through cultural ideology,
160–1
in privatized market economies, 64
research on, 168
Pow, C.-P., 254, 390–1, 435
power relations
and collective memory, 165
in macro cultural psychology, 33–4
as negotiated product theory, 405, 408–12
political nature of macro cultural factors,
171–5, 177
ruling classes, 170, 179, 272–3
use of silences by, 268–9, 409–10
and workplace managers, 184
powers of reflection (Besonnenheit), 46
prison population, in U.S., 300, 379 n. i
productivity, 297–300, 298
progressive relativism, 333–5
Protestantism and individualism, 177–8, 193
proximal processes, 198
pseudo-logic, pecuniary, 372
pseudo-truth, pecuniary, 372
psychiatric practice, social reengineering of,
413–5
psychiatric research, politicization of, 19–22
psychic thermodynamics, 105–7
psychological amplifiers, 152
Psychology, discipline of
cultural secrecy, 37
politics of, 17–25
abnormal psychology, 197–8
DSM-III authors with financial ties to
drug companies, 19
objectivity, 391
and psychological phenomena, 17–8
and study of psychological phenomena,
18–25, 42 n. vi
as product of individualistic society, 274–7
reform of. See politics of macro cultural
psychology
scope of, 37, 38
as study of traces, 65–6
Tulving on conceptual errors in, 234
psychology as cultural specimen, 37
psychology of liberation. See indigenous
psychology
racial contract, 409–10
racial discrimination
based on false science, 31–2
exclusion via silence, 409–10
limits on social mobility, 410–2, 411
micro psychological phenomena, 393–9,
434–5
and social reform, 466–7
structural racism, 399–402, 400
racial etiquette, in U.S. culture of slavery,
9–18, 39, 40, 41 n. iii, 54–7, 141–2, 150,
157–8, 171, 328–9, 385, 423–5, 429–30
 515 index
Rand Corporation, 311–5
rational choice theory, 311–5, 405
rationalization, as defense mechanism, 54–5
Ratner, C., 123
realism, 36
recession. See Great Recession (2008)
Red Bull, 346
reductionism, falseness of, 26
reification, 69, 148
religion and religious orthodoxy
autocracy in Catholic Church, 444
creationism in Texas schools, 180
as impediment to scientific discovery, 3, 5, 7
individualism within Protestantism,
177–8, 193
irrationality in, 372, 374
and mental illness symptomatology, 193
Republic, The (Socrates), 260–1
research. See also specific studies
on capitalism, absence of in psychological
journals, 266–7, 267
DSM content, politicization of research
for, 19–22, 25
functionalist-systems approach, 71–2
micro cultural psychological research,
errors in, 434–42, 446 n. vi
need for additional
on concrete cultural change, 471
on psychology of oppression, 328–33, 375
on poverty, 168
psychiatric/pharmaceutical research,
politicization of, 19–22
resistance to oppression, 474 n. iv
Reuter, S., 20–1
Reuter-Lorenz, P., 126
Ridge, Tom, 309
Risch, Neil, 24, 126–7
Ritterhouse, J., 10, 18, 39, 158, 171, 261, 328–9,
385, 423, 429–30, 468
R. J. Reynolds, 347–8, 370
Rock, Gregory, 137 n. ii
Rogoff, B., 152, 417–9, 422, 425–6, 431
romantic love. See love
Roosevelt, Franklin, 392–3
rote memory. See memory, acculturation of
Rudd Center for Food Policy (Yale
University), 347–8
Rudy, J., 185–6
Rule of Non-attribution (CFR), 380 n. iii
ruling classes. See also corporations; power
relations
autocratic ideologies of, 310–1
exploitation by, 306–10, 448–9
and Hindu codes of conduct, 177
maintenance of status quo, 308, 380 n. iii
unintentional oppressive behavior of, 401
voting behavior of populace, 474 n. iii
Sacks, Oliver, 117
Saddam Hussein, 469
sadness, acculturation of, 162
Saora tribe (India), 150–1
Sapir, E., 128
Sartre, J.-P., 201, 431
Sass, L., 189–91, 198
Sassatelli, R., 377
Saudi Arabia, women’s dress in public,
230–1
Saussure, Ferdinand de, 224
Sawyer, R., 53, 405, 407
scandals and bourgeois individualism,
381 n. vi
Schatzberg, Alan, 20
schizophrenia, 129, 188–91, 198
Schooler, C., 209
schools, 50, 180, 286–93. See also education
Schrum, K., 360–1
Schultz, Harold, 300
Schwarz, B., 64
scientific thinking
political nature of, 42 n. vii
structure of, 3–6, 5, 41 n. i
Searle, John, 252 n. iii
self/identity, pecuniary, 360, 362
self-in-group, 94
self-reflection, 46, 74–5, 94
sensationalism, pecuniary, 355–7
senses, acculturation of, 147–50
serotonin, 111, 126–7, 129, 130
7UP, 350–1
sex, pecuniary, 364–8, 381 n. ix
sexual appeal, as artifactual, 175–7
sexual desire
as artifactual, 176–7
effect of pornography on, 156–7
hooking up, 366–8, 381 n. ix
 516 index
sexual desire (Contd.)
philosophical/systemic analysis of cortical
localization, 122–4
and castration, 122–3
and suppression of desire, 123–4
and women’s olfactory signals, 123–4
structural marital infidelity, 402–3
sexual relations
as culturally defined physical interaction,
175–6
and social class, 412–3
sexual selection, 70
shame, acculturation of, 162–3
Sharon, Ariel, 92
Sherif, M., 468
Shipps, D., 292
Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster
Capitalism, The (Klein), 249
Shweder, R., 262, 464–5
silence, in power relations, 268–9, 409–10
Simmons, Ruth, 217
Sivin, Nathan, 279–80
slave/serf owners, 304–5, 322, 404
slenderness, tyranny of, 193–4, 199–202,
358–9, 428–9
Smith, Lillian, 17, 424
Smith, M., 148–9
smoking. See cigarette smoking
social agency. See agency
Social Choice and Individual Values
(Arrow), 311
social choice theory, 311
social classes. See also socioeconomic
status (SES)
abstract and concrete features of, 225
exploitation of, 306–10
and home identification in China, 390–2
and marriage patterns, 412
obfuscation of, 268, 472, 474 n. v
and sexual behavior, 412–3
socialization practices, 384, 387
social conflict, 182
social conformity, 273–4
social constructionism, 35–6, 77, 371
Social Construction of Reality, The (Berger
and Luckmann), 181
social coordination, 93–4
social functionalism and exploitation, 305–15
and mystification, 310–5
politics and social class, 306–10
socialism, 454
socialization
by impersonal media, 168–70
interpersonal model, 180
as mental engineering, 179–80
as micro psychological phenomena,
384–90
play, 385–9
and social classes, 384
social agency and cultural objectives, 183–8
of students via curricula, 179, 180
via corporate media, 50, 64
Vygotsky’s principles of, 221 n. v
socially patterned defects, 324
social order, psychology as, 175–7
social ordering vs. individual defects, 21
social-psychological ignorance, 273–4
social reform. See politics of macro cultural
psychology
social relational theory, 434–7
social sciences
and conical model of culture, 219–20, 222
n. x, 454–5
and objectivity, 38–41
as self-critical, 276–8
social stressors
economic pressure as, 204
and mental illness, 21–4, 191–4, 192
social systems, abstract and concrete features
of, 226
socioeconomic status (SES). See also poverty
and access to higher education, 286–93
and educational performance, 207–12
health, impact on, 203–4
historical materialism, 204–7
and IQ of adoptees, 24
and maintenance of cognitive
competence, 426–7
and marriage patterns, 412
Socrates, 260–1
Sombart, W., 207
“Some Cognitive Origins of Cultural Order”
(Malley and Knight), 105–6
sounds, acculturation of, 148
 517 index
Soviet Union (former), peasant psychology
study, 397–8
species, explanatory construct of, 5
speech. See also language
as cultural mediational means, 397
historical emergence of, 95
and human anatomy, 128
and individual autonomy theories, 420–1,
423, 433–4, 445 n. iv
as operating mechanism of thinking, 160
speed, in testing, 173–4
Spencer-Rodgers, J., 257–60
Spitzer, Robert, 19
Sproul, Robert, 291
stagnation of capitalism, 297–302
State Board of Education (Texas), 180
status quo, 73, 75, 187, 308, 380 n. iii. See also
politics of macro cultural
psychology; specific aspects
Steinthal, Heymann, 46
Stephens, N., 427–8, 427
Stepp, L., 367
sterile ownership, 357
Stevenson, Robert Louis, 189
Stigler, J., 210
Stiven, H., 404–5
structural blindness/misperception,
399–402, 400
structural racism, 399–402, 400. See also
racial discrimination
subcontracting, 50
subjectivism. See anti-objectivism
subjectivistic individualism, 265–6, 329,
417–21, 431, 434–7, 445 n. ii, 445 n. iv.
See also micro-level psychology vs.
micro cultural psychology; rational
choice theory
Sudan, political economy, 212–4
suicide, within U.S. military, 196
superficiality, pecuniary, 354–5
superorganic collective institutions, 90
supersession (Aufhebung), 134–5
Supreme Court, U.S., on sterilization of
blacks, 31–2
Sutton, John, 49–50
symbolic representation, 96
symbols, commodification of, 370–1
systemization, viewpoints on, 29–30
System of Logic (Mill), 228
Taibbi, Matt, 249, 297
Taiwan, education system, 210
Taoist concepts, on shame as socially shared,
162–3
Taylor, Charles, 265
technologies of self, 159–60, 179
television programming, 50, 168–70
terminology, false abstraction and
concreteness, 236–7
terrorism, politics of fear, 170
tests and testing. See also education
as artifactual, 181
ETS study on SES influence on, 207–9
intelligence tests, 173–4, 221 n. iii
as pedagogical instrument, 158–9
rote memorization, 152, 154
speed as criterion of success, 173–4
text messaging, 169, 252
Thailand, olfactory dualism in, 148
theory of mind, 104
thermopsychology, 105–7
thought, dependency on language, 47–9
time, cultural sense of
expiration of cultural artifacts and
penalty, 178
Kabyle people’s reaction to clocks, 170
workplace punctuality, 177
Times Mirror Corporation, 409
tobacco industry, 178, 186. See also cigarette
smoking
Tocqueville, A. de, 266
Tomasello, M., 81, 90, 94–5, 97–8, 101, 103,
116, 467–73
Tomba, L., 439–40
“Tool and Sign in The Development of The
Child” (Vygotsky), 86
totalitarianism, as weakness of culture, 218
toy manufacturing, 387–9
transmutation (Darwin), 3–6, 69
Treasury, U.S., 270–1
Treichler, P., 405, 408, 410
Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP),
270–1
true abstractions, 232
 518 index

true concreteness, 232 universal grammar, 34–5, 102–3, 112–3, 115–7.

Tuana, N., 52 See also language
Tulving, E., 234 University of Toronto, 20
Tversky, A., 462 Unnatural Emotions (Lutz), 51
Upjohn, 19
Uchida, Y., 246, 248, 405
United Kingdom Valkenburg, P., 157
banking system, 301 Valsiner, J., 30–1, 42 n. viii, 269, 404, 406–7,
childrens’ interpersonal relations, study 410, 412, 413, 418, 422, 430, 431,
on, 390 471, 472
education system, 208–9, 210 Van der Veer, R., 471, 472
shift in class cohesion, 271–2 Veblen, T., 303
United States Veblen, Thorstein, 341
capitalism. See also capitalism Victorian culture, 146–7, 163, 185–6, 192
and deterioration of education, 72–3 violence, psychology of
principle of exploitation in, 295–7, 448–9 based on geo-political viewpoints, 92–3,
and social classes, 226–7 163–4
childrens’ interpersonal relations, study in economic systems, 195
on, 390 interpersonal violence, 164
commercial-industrial economy and mass killings, 195–6, 196
children, 386–7 vocationalism, 286–93
consumer spending, 338 Volkerpsychologie (Wundt), 205
corporate influence on news media, Volosinov, V., 149, 424
309, 329 von Irwing, Karl Franz, 46
corporatism in presidential politics, 308–9 Vygotsky, L. S., 6, 7, 26, 29, 32, 86, 221 n. v,
crime reduction, analysis of, 66–7 470–3, 474 n. v. See also specific
debt, rise in, 300–1 concepts
education system, 208–9, 286–93
foreign policy of support for elites, 307 wages, exploitive contractual nature of,
government corruption, 221 n. vii 304–5
Great Recession (2008), 72, 143, 249, 250, wage slavery, 295–7
270–2, 297–302, 298–9, 300–2, 309, Wal-Mart, 282, 297
465–6 Wang, L., 257–60
home-as-sanctuary, 392–3 war, and political economy, 92, 157, 164–5,
homicide rate, 164 302, 451, 452, 469. See also Iraq, U.S.
impact of private wealth on family, 218 invasion
motherhood characteristics, 219–20 Watson, J. D., 4
personality and cultural change, 146–7 Weber, Max, 177–8
poverty and structural limits for blacks, Wenger, E., 405
410–2, 411 Wertsch, J., 166
prison population, 300, 379 n. i Western Europe, cooperative nature of
racial etiquette in culture of slavery, 9–18, political economy, 218
39, 40, 41 n. iii, 54–5, 56–7, 141–2, 150, Wetherell, M., 404–5
157–8, 171, 328–9, 385, 423, 424–5, Wheaties, 370–1
429–30 white ruling caste, in U.S., 39. See also racial
wages/household incomes, decline in, etiquette, in U.S. culture of slavery
300–1, 306–7 Whitney National Bank (New Orleans), 270
 519 index

Wikan, U., 404, 405–6 World Trade Organization, 216

women Wundt,W., 205, 474 n. v
and cigarette smoking, 185–7
dress codes in Saudi Arabia, 230–1 Yan, Y., 254, 437, 438–9, 442
and eating disorders, 193, 201, 221 n. vi Yerkes, R. M., 31–2
expression of aggression, 221 n. iv
olfactory signals, 123–4 Zagorin, P., 461
tyranny of slenderness, 193–4, 358–9, 428 zone of proximal development (ZPD),
World Bank, 214–5 318–20, 328–9, 458–9