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Cultural Conditioning
We think our minds are free, but, like captured American pilots in Vietnam and
North Korea, we have been thoroughly brainwashed. Collective programming in our
culture, begun in the cradle and reinforced in kindergarten, school and the workplace,
convinces us that we are normal, others eccentric.

What Is Culture?

Geert Hofstede defined culture as “the collective programming of the mind that
distinguishes the members of one category of people from another.” The key
expression in this definition is collective programming. Although not as sinister as
brainwashing, with its connotations of political coercion, it nevertheless describes
a process to which each one of us has been subjected since birth (some people
would say even before birth, but that is a little deep for me). When parents
returning from the hospital carry their baby over the threshold, they have often
already made one of their first culturally based decisions—where the baby will
sleep. A Japanese child is invariably put in the same room as the parents, near the
mother, for at least the first couple of years. British and American children are
often put in a separate room, right away or after a few weeks or months. The
inferences for the child’s dependence or interdependence and problem-solving
abilities are obvious.
Parents and teachers obviously give children the best advice they can to pre-
pare them for successful interactions in their own culture and society, where
good and bad, right and wrong, normal and abnormal are clearly defined. It is
perhaps unfortunate in one sense that each cultural group gives its children a
different set of instructions, each equally valid in their own environment.
As we grow up, these learned national and/or regional concepts become our
core beliefs, which we find almost impossible to discard. We regard others’ be-
liefs and habits (Russian, Chinese, Hungarian…) as strange or eccentric, mainly
because they are unlike our own. There is no doubt about it, the Japanese are not
like Americans!

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