What do you get if you cross renegade psychoanalyst Carl Jung with lizard-men conspiracist David Icke? It is a question no one in their right mind would ask, but this book represents a kind of answer anyway. Offering a rambling pseudoscientific argument that some countries are better than others at enabling their citizens to flourish, it affects to have uncovered archetypes of the Jungian ‘collective unconscious’ that are characteristic of each nation. Meanwhile, cultures get a gold star if they indulge, rather than repress, the ‘reptilian’ part of our brains, which is mainly interested in food and sex, as opposed to the ‘limbic’ brain (emotions) and the cortex (higher reasoning). As the authors repeatedly insist, ‘The reptilian always wins.’ David Icke would agree, as would fans of Godzilla movies.
What are some of the key revelations here about national differences? I’m glad you asked. Scandinavians, it turns out, are artistically creative and also have a lot of sex ‘in their basements’, but ‘they are not very affectionate’. The Japanese repress the ‘reptilian’ too much and so ‘can […] be very violent’. ‘American men,’ we learn, ‘just want to watch their Sunday night football with a beer in one hand and the remote control in the other.’ Meanwhile, the French are all artists and philosophers who think that ‘having money is bad’.
It’s a good job the authors have uncovered these cultural archetypes through rigorous research — including ‘studying seduction for L’Oréal’ (one of the authors is a ‘marketing expert’), and employing the modestly named ‘Rapaille Discovery Approach’, described in an appendix, which encourages participants to lie down on the floor and free-associate. Otherwise, we might have been fed a ridiculous list of clichéd national stereotypes.
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