I couldn't agree more!
AMERICANS ON THE COUCH!

Paul Hoej, Santa Fe From Across the Atlantic

He has become a multi-millionaire by teaching the largest corporations about the Americans' cultural subconscious.

Americans love chaos, the psychologist says, and therefore they have created a chaos in Iraq.

A good American friend has bought a new car. He has bought one of those urban assault vehicles with 4 wheel drive.

He has just moved out here West, a business man who has worked his way through five strokes, and who now from his large house has started his new life as a cowboy. He has acquired the hat and the boots and he is also talking about buying a ranch, where he can keep horses and split logs. And if the Indians now and then would stage an attack - well, that would probably be ideal.

When I meet up with him, he is a friendly and intelligent man, then I understand the situation in Iraq, and also why it has gone so wrong.

The Americans is at heart and in their cultural subconscious, teenagers, and teenagers would never dream of reading the manual, they don't plan, they act instead. They fall in love with the thought of invading Iraq, without the big plan for the after-invasion, and they get baffled when they find themselves in total chaos.

EASY NOW - this is not home spun theories.

The idea of a people's cultural subconscious has been developed by the French psychologist Clotaire Rapaille, who since 1983 has lived in the US. He bought himself a castle North of NY, he has filled the garage with a smaller car collection of Rolls Royce, Bugatti, Ferrari and modern American cars, and he has the demeanor of a lesser aristocrat from the years between the world wars. Rapaille has became a millionaire many times over by telling the Americans who they are. He has worked with 50 of the Fortune 100 corporations, and was the "Idea Man" behind Chrysler's PT Cruiser - the gangster car.

Like other consultants, Rapaille conducts Focus Groups, in which he asks consumers questions about their habits and opinions, but contrary to other consultants, he doesn't believe their answers.

If you ask people if they will be willing to drive small cars, they answer "yes", even though they would never dream about driving smaller cars, and the real answer has to be found behind the answers - that is the cultural subconscious.

The consumers in one of his groups said, that the taste of coffee was important, but he found, that that was just something they said and believed to be true. The signal of coffee was more important than the actual taste. The smell of coffee is one of the first childhood memories, the smell reminds us about mother in the kitchen, about the safety of home, and he told one of the US's largest coffee producers, that they could forget all about the taste. The signal - the smell, the feeling of 'home', mom in the kitchen - was more important, and that has become the coffee producer's marketing strategy for the past 10 years.

Rapaille also is of the opinion, that his theory about the cultural subconscious can be used in politics. He was in the past hired by the republicans to analyze the electorate, and he has formed a clear idea about what the Americans do and think, and why. I listened to him on a radio program the other day, where a panel of experts discussed, what the Americans had learned from last autumn's hurricanes, and the Frenchman raised a furor by answering: "nothing, the Americans have learned nothing".

He was not at all surprised that the aide, assistance and saving actions (my awkward language) in New Orleans had gone so wrong, because neither the local authorities, nor FEMA, or the country's other involved authorities had read the existing guidelines and evacuation plans etc., etc Instead they acted instinctively and opportunistically, he said, and that is the trademark for American history - chaos and opportunism.

Subconsciously Americans love chaos, an almost neurotic love affair, and more often than not, Americans develop situations into chaos. Totally opposite in Germany and Japan, he stated, because the Germans and the Japanese hate chaos, and the Germans have developed a system of order, which contravenes chaos, while the Japanese operates with harmony and respect to avoid chaos. To the contrary, chaos is the central part of the American subconscious, Americans solve problems by letting them sink into chaos and take it from there.

That is also what happened in Iraq, if you ask that psychologist. Americans have drowned that country in chaos, because they didn't plan for the after invasion, and with opportunism per instinct, by that they lead Iraq forward to what in their opinion will be a better day.

"That is the way in which teenagers would invade a country" he says, and that is a good reason for why other countries don't want to participate. They want to be lead by grownups, not teenagers.He recently arranged a symposium for international corporate leaders, and gave them an assignment which was getting over a wall without touching the wall. If they touched the wall, they were out.

He gave them written instructions on how to solve the assignment. The American execs. stormed the wall and were out, and enraged None of them had read the written instructions as it turned out. However, they stayed up all of the following night and devised their own system to get over the wall without touching it.

That could of course be seen as innovative, but they could have gotten over the wall in the first place by simply reading the instructions, and the same is the case with Iraq. Rapaille thinks that the Americans will find a solution, but the obvious would have been making a plan for Iraq for after the war from the start, he says.

The other day I met up with my friend again.It had been some degrees under the freezing point during the night, but he hadn't noticed that. He staggered out in the world with his cowboy boots and hat to an imaginary soundtrack of "High Noon". He slipped and fell squarely on his ass. As I said, he reminds me about Iraq!

Translated from an article printed in Berlingske Tidende, Copenhagen, Denmark.
It appeared on December 14, 2005.