Is Barack Obama’s success in the 2008 presidential campaign an indication that we’re on the verge of a new cultural and political paradigm? Are the world’s socially and environmentally conscious citizens—the “cultural creatives”—starting to find a larger political voice? Jim Garrison (president of Wisdom University and cofounder, with Mikhail Gorbachev, of the State of World Forum) thinks so. And he has teamed up with renowned sociologist Paul Ray on a bold international project that he hopes will help catalyze what he calls the biggest cultural emergence since the Renaissance.

In this week’s Unbound interview, WIE’s Joel Pitney speaks with Garrison about why he and Ray believe that the cultural creatives, a demographic that first coalesced around the social, environmental, and consciousness movements of the 1960s, have reached critical mass worldwide—only they don’t know it yet. According to Garrison and Ray, many of the cultural creatives still see themselves as isolated and alone on the cultural fringe, without recognizing the extent to which their values are now becoming mainstream. So in order to help wake these progressive millions up to their own growing presence on the world stage, they are conducting an epic sociological survey to catalog the full shape and reach of this movement internationally.

Tune in to WIE Unbound this week to find out exactly how Garrison and Ray are proposing to take the idealistic vision of the sixties and turn it into concrete, practical change.

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