ABSTRACT
The idea of culture and the role it plays in the design of social policy is critical to the central focus of this book. Have you ever considered how we humans make sense of the world around us every minute of the day? Certainly, we do not analyze each event or activity that we constantly encounter as we navigate through everyday activities. Much of our actions are governed by rote. That is, we are preprogrammed to conduct our everyday affairs without thinking about them in minute detail, but act through habit. Much of this preprogramming is a result of generations of our forbearers building up knowledge as they encountered their environment and passed on their interactions with it to us through cultural practices. This has worked well for us in the past, but we are entering a new, drastically changed world, and many of those practices do not fit our present or future conditions, but they remain comfortable to us nonetheless. This makes culture slow and hard to change. Over the last century or more, many, if not all, of our behaviours and beliefs have been manufactured or preserved by those who have a stake in the present system, and particularly by those who want to shape human relations to their advantage. They are a small but wealthy group of people who profit from the way things are and appear to be willing to sacrifice the future to maintain their present position. As a consequence they maintain and attempt to perpetuate an elaborate set of beliefs and myths about how the world should operate and employ sophisticated mechanisms for the transmission and maintenance of those ideas.
