Page 26 - Cultures and Organizations

The Rules of the Social Game 11

You learned how much initiative you were supposed to take and how close
you were supposed to be to people, and you learned whether you were a
boy or a girl, who else was also a boy or a girl, and what that implied.
Then when you were a child of perhaps six to twelve, schoolteach-
ers and classmates, sports and TV idols, and national or religious heroes
entered your world as new models. You imitated now one, then another.
Parents, teachers, and others rewarded or punished you for your behavior.
You learned whether it was good or bad to ask questions, to speak up, to

fight, to cry, to work hard, to lie, to be impolite. You learned when to be
proud and when to be ashamed. You also exercised politics, especially with
your age-mates: How does one make friends? Is it possible to rise in the
hierarchy? How? Who owes what to whom?
In your teenage years, your attention shifted to others your age. You
were intensely concerned with your gender identity and with forming rela-
tionships with peers. Depending on the society in which you lived, you
spent your time mainly with your own sex or with mixed sexes. You may
have intensely admired some of your peers.
Later you may have chosen a partner, probably using criteria similar to
that of other young people in your country. You may have had children—
and then the cycle starts again.
There is a powerful stabilizing force in this cycle that biologists call
homeostasis. Parents tend to reproduce the education that they received,
whether they want to or not. And there is only a modest role for tech-
nology. The most salient learning in your tender years is all about the
body and about relationships with people. Not coincidentally, these are also
sources of intense taboos.
Because they were acquired so early in our lives, many values remain
unconscious to those who hold them. Therefore, they cannot be discussed,

nor can they be directly observed by outsiders. They can only be inferred
from the way people act under various circumstances. If one asks people
why they act as they do, they may say they just “know” or “feel” how to do
the right thing. Their heart or their conscience tells them.

No Group Can Escape Culture

There normally is continuity in culture. But if you were caught in a gale at
sea and found yourself stranded on an uninhabited island with twenty-nine
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unknown others, what would you do? If you and your fellow passengers
were from different parts of the world, you would lack a common lan-