The reach of one’s globalization is defined
by the limit of the pronoun “WE”…
The French culture integrates efficiency and efficacy to achieve results prioritizing the latter. The French Archetype generated a unique way to develop a culture and a country.
France is a country with a very strong technological development. But, even though this strength, France prioritizes science over technology. It can be considered as a benchmark for scientific development both in hard and soft sciences.
In order to understand the French culture, one needs to understand the French Revolution as a detonating element of its assertion, which drives towards its evolution.
The French Archetype
France’s archetype integrates: pragmatism, which is notorious in its international policy, a democracy driven approach that is evident in its non-dissent model, a strong nationality and its characteristic of being a science incubator.
The French archetype includes and will always include a high degree of State intervention in the economy through incentive systems. This is also evident if we analyze the history of France since the industrial revolution.
The French model has always combined a certain degree of Keynesianism and of structuralism with some classic elements.
The employment problem will be a growing one, but one must bear in mind that France has the social perspective of employing people ingrained in the leaders’ minds; therefore, it is not a “struggle” between interests and employment but rather a “conflict” between them.
One should expect a reinforcement of government actions to foster the generation of employment in the country and a conflict with companies that seek to install manufacturing plants in some low wage countries.
The French idiosyncrasy is based on their structured social behavior, which is associated with a notorious individual freedom that drives to the existence of two different behavioral rules for public and private affairs.
Non-dissent as a Model
Conceptually, the French Revolution symbolized the maximum expression of the weight of dissent in a culture.
If we look at France’s later evolution, we shall see that different models, social groups and ideologies coexist in the culture.
But their coexistence is possible due to a very strong national identity that, through respect toward dissent, and only with a few exceptions, manages to avoid larger conflicts. This is what the French Archetype is about.
The May 1968 revolt drove to the acceptance of the need to have a laboratory to monitor social evolution. From a conceptual point of view, the social laboratory is a way to measure society’s dissent and the possibilities to channel it positively to avoid outbursts.
France as the Birthplace of Sciences
France is, at an intellectual level, science driven. Its orientation toward dissent is the basis for the approach to sciences, which naturally drives to integrate foundations with justifications.
France produced notorious contributions in the field of hard sciences like mathematics, physics and chemistry and in soft-sciences like psychology, anthropology, sociology, etc.
France’s development in the scientific field generates a knowledge basis in Europe. This is based on the Universities, which operate as excellence centers per areas and help guarantee that France and Europe count on think-tanks to maintain a worldwide leadership in their fields of specialty.
Public Ethics vs. Private Ethics
The French culture is based on a unique characteristic: the complementation of public and private ethics.
While public ethics is strongly geared toward security, driving toward institutionalization and a sense of communitarian identity, on the other hand, private ethics is geared toward freedom and the quest for the personal ideal beyond those duties that must be complied with in the community.
France’s Growth
Today France appears to be clearly inclined toward a growth based on the development of competitiveness in the culture.
It has to be considered that it is a nationalist culture that complements public and private behaviors. Its State is very strong, which is perceived in its diplomatic action, where the national interest is set above individual needs.
While the organization of the State assures structural stability, governments, like elsewhere, need to win elections and therefore need to be focused on conjunctures.
France’s evolution depends, like all evolution, on the competitors’ actions. The quality and speed at which it moves will depend on whether France maintains its current stage or whether it upgrades to a superior stage.
Absolute Ideology vs. Relative Ideology
France has been harshly criticized from the outside, because of its tendency toward ideological conflicts that appear to be absolute.
These actions, at a given time, may paralyze actions in social or economic sectors.
However, taking a closer look, one will see that these conflicts are relative ones if viewed from an internal standpoint.
That is why we can still expect a larger relativization of the ideologies “wrapped up” in conflicts that appear to be absolute.
Ideologies will become in France what they essentially are: beliefs that use an available technology to satisfy certain interests working within the accepted myths of a culture.
What are Unicist Country Archetypes?
Unicist Country Archetypes are the structure of fundamentals that define the behavior of a culture.
The functionality of the archetype is driven by the structure of the Ontogenetic Intelligence of Nature. Therefore a country archetype has a purpose, an active function and an energy conservation function.
If you study the history of a country you will find a structural behavior that hardly changes, producing the evolution or involution of the culture based on two aspects:
1) The change of the external environment where the culture has to live.
2) The change produced by the members of the culture.
When you enter deeply in the history of a country, which is the way to try to discover the nature of a culture defined by its archetypes, you will see that the majority of the changes happens at an operational level and not at a structural level.
Considering the Roman Empire you will see that it developed extremely slowly from the original tribes to an Empire and then evolved from an Empire to what it is today.
Hundreds of years are necessary for an archetype to evolve if the conditions of evolution are given. Involution is faster than evolution, but it also demands hundreds of years.
The values of cultures are implicit in the values of their elites. Therefore the understanding of the archetype of a culture implies researching the evolution of their establishment and the facts that were produced.
To define an ontological structure of a culture, which describes its fundamentals, it is necessary to find the hypothesis in its past, validate it with the facts of the present and falsify it with future forecasts based on its nature.
To explain this more operationally, some structural patterns for cultural behavior will be found by understanding the establishments of the cultures in the past. These patterns are in fact the operational concepts that are implicit in a country.
Operational concepts describe the myths that rule social behavior and the trade-offs that are made by the utopias that are posed by the participants of a culture.
When the operational concepts have been found the implicit purposes of their actions must be found.
The purposes are never those declaimed by the “actors”, they are those produced by the “actors”.
The purposes we are researching are not the operational objectives of actions but the structural results of the actions considered at a conceptual level.
It has to be considered that the real purposes of a culture are taboos that can only be shared by those who are able to influence them.
For the rest of the society they are mixed up with the operational objectives considering them as the real objectives.
The real objectives of a culture are those that are behind and guide the actions of the whole society. Basically, they are cross-cultural because they respond to the natural basic needs of people.
The active function of a society is materialized by the establishment and represented by the elite. This active function is observable, it can be measured.
The patterns of these actions are limited by the myths of a society. Paradoxically, the myths are implicit in the values of the middle class.
The middle class needs an external structure to be able to ascend socially. The myths are the energy conservation function and sustain the objectives, avoiding that the utopias posed by the elite change the real purpose of a society.
The final purpose of a social organization is the wellbeing of a society. This wellbeing can be considered as the ultimate goal in any society.
But it has to be considered that there are societies that do not include in their structure some of their members. In the ancient Greek democracy, slaves were not part of the social structure.
If you want to access more information about this study please contact
n.i.brown@unicist.org
Peter Belohlavek
NOTE: The Unicist Research Institute was the pioneer in using the unicist logical approach in complexity science research and became a private global decentralized leading research organization in the field of human adaptive systems. It has an academic arm and a business arm. http://www.unicist.org/repo/#Unicist
