An interview with George Lakoff

George Lakoff is an American linguist and philosopher.

I don’t know, I’ve never used iTunes, for example, I’ve never , you know, I use, you know, basically, I use it as a typewriter and email reader and occasionally to surf the web, but I don’t use it for anything real.
Right, well you could.
I know, I just, this program is a free program, it’s called Audio Recorder, you download it , you look it up on Google Audio Recorder Mac, you download it, you install it like you’d install anything else, and if your Mac has a built-in microphone, as many of them do, you just start recording.
Audio Recorder, how do you just ? That’s it, I mean, and you can see it’s like a tiny little window.
And you just record any conversation? Yeah, basically, that’s all, I mean, I only like to use tools that are, you know, very basic tools that almost anybody could use, because that’s the technology that I’m most interested in, because I want everybody to be able to do this stuff.
So why don’t we just go into it , and this was originally going to be just a test recording, but my name is Dave Winer, and I’m coming to you from Script ing. com, and I’m sitting here with George Lakoff, and why don’t you tell us who you are? I’m George Lakoff, we’re at the Rockbridge Institute, I’m a senior fellow here, I also teach at the University of California at Berkeley, where I ’m in my 36th year as a faculty, and I teach cognitive science and linguistics, and I apply all of that to politics, and I teach courses on that as well.
Right, that’s why I’m here today, because I’ve heard you talk a number of times, I’ve read a couple of your books and articles about you, and found the way you characterize how politics works at a human level has helped me understand a lot, how stuff works, and so I thought that now that everybody is so interested in politics, that now would be a really good time to sort of talk about current events in the context of framing, which is sort of, I’ll let you explain what framing is.
Alright, are we on now? Yeah, we’re on.
We’re on? Okay, let’s go.
Terrific.
Well, first of all, I want to talk a little bit about what the idea behind framing is, coming out of cognitive science .
We think in terms of structures called frames, and we don’t know that because most of our thought is unconscious, probably 98% of our thought is below the level of consciousness, and framing is the most normal thing you could possibly do when you’re using language.
Every word evokes a cognitive structure that has certain properties, which are called framing properties.
For example, if I’m sitting here with a bottle of water in front of me, and the word bottle has a frame associated with it, it is a container.
It usually contains liquids, and you can pour things in and drink things out and pour them out, and you usually pick them up with one or both hands.
They’re about that size, and they form a certain shape, which you can easily pick them up and drink out of them or pour things out of them, and that’s it.
That’s what you know about a bottle, and there are mental images, you have particular bottles and things you do with bottles, like drink out of them or pour things in the glasses or whatever, but in general, you have in every bottle a container, something you can The bottle itself is a container.
The bottle is a container, that ’s right, it is a container.
It has what we’ll call a portal , something you pour into or drink out of.
It has a certain size, that is certain properties of it, and there are things you do with it , that call them scenarios.
That’s it, and it turns out that we know thousands of these frames, that every word is defined with respect to them, and often , a bunches of related words are defined with respect to them.
Take an institution like the hospital.
In a hospital, you know that there are certain roles that are played.
There are doctors and nurses and patients and orderlies and people and receptionists, and there are places there in the hospital.
There are operating rooms and reception desk, and there are tools that people use, you know , scalpels or defibrillators or whatever, and then there are scenarios, you know, it’s the doctors who do the operations, they have to prep beforehand when you come into the hospital , you go to the reception desk.
There are a whole bunch of scenarios that different people do, that’s what you know about a hospital.
It’s true of every institution, but words like doctor and patient and nurse and so on are partially defined in terms of the institutions where those folks function.
And so, you know.
Could you have another word for a nurse that might give you a different sense of what a nurse is? You could have another word for a nurse, a healthcare provider or a doctor’s assistant, or you could make up things, but that would mean something quite different than a nurse.
And you know, so that you have understandings, and there are understandings of doctors outside of hospitals and nurses who might be at your home and so on , there are functions that they provide, and there are things that doctors do in general, whether they’re in hospitals or not, but any word is defined relative to a frame, and then sometimes these frames are metaphorical.
But you haven’t said what a frame is, I mean you said that.
A frame is a cognitive structure, part of your brain, it’s physically instantiated in your brain, and those of us who work in neural computation at the international computer science institute at Berkeley, at the Neural Theory of Language program there, have some idea of what the kinds of neural computation are that will compute frames, and what kinds of brain circuitry will do that, fairly simple circuitry.
So anytime you have a frame, a word will evoke a frame, you don’t necessarily have to have a word to have a frame, but you think in terms of it, and every frame has a bunch of roles, like for example just as a bottle has roles, like it is a container, it has a portal, and then it has scenarios, things that you do with it, over time perhaps or not, and certain relationships between the roles, very, very simple thing, and then they can get as complicated as you like, like a hospital, very complicated framing for understanding a hospital.
But how does this relate to politics? Well, it relates to politics everywhere, for a number of reasons.
In the simplest case, it has to do with the fact that political actors use language that fits their frames, and that frames are common systems that are part of political ide ologies.
So you have conservative and progressive ideologies, and we ’ll talk about what they are with an ideology is in a minute, but those ideologies come with systems of frames for understanding certain concepts.
So the understanding of what freedom is is very different for conservatives and for progressives, and you have different frames.
The understanding of what the market is is very different for conservatives and progressives.
The understanding of what equality is is very different, and depending on what views you have in your ideology of these ideas, you’re going to frame things very differently using language.
So for example, if you talk about, you say, cut and run from Iraq, what you’re doing is evoking a frame of war, victory , heroism, honor, versus coward ice.
The opposite of that, actually, is honor, yes.
So part of a frame is the opposite frame.
You use the word “progressive” but not “liberal. " You don’t like the word “liber al”? Well, the word “liberal,” let me just mention a little bit of the history.
Because I’ve noticed that when you talk about this stuff, you tend to use the word “progress ive. " Is that because the right has made the word “liberal” sort of a dirty word? And the left has as well.
The left has.
Really? Both.
There’s like Barack Obama, for example, doesn’t run away from the word “liberal,” or at least has said that he doesn’t.
I don’t see him standing up in speeches saying “liberal. " Or he doesn’t use the word “pro gressive” either, for reasons that can tell you in a minute.
Right.
I’m anxious to get to that because I think that’s what people are interested in, is understanding.
Sure.
But starting in the late 1960s, the right tried to frame liberals.
And they framed liberals in terms of tax and spend liberals .
Yeah.
You hear that all the time.
Tax and spend, tax and spend liberals.
That’s one thing.
But also the liberal elite, the idea that they look down on common people and that they don’t know any, they don’t know very, very well, they just want to spend people’s money and waste it.
They’re not too smart, right? They’re not too smart.
They’re an elite.
They think they’re smart, but they’re not really that smart.
You got it.
And so they have framed the word “liberal” in that way.
At the same time, during the Vietnam War, you had Cold War liberals who were supporting the military establishment and so on.
And you also have neoliberalism , which is where people who support, let’s say, the Clinton trade policies were seen as the neoliberals.
And those are neoliberal policies.
So the word “liberal” has gotten it from the left and the right.
When the Center for American Progress had not yet chosen a name and they were looking around, they did a survey and they asked about the words “li beral” versus “progressive. " They found that about 25% of the people thought liberal was positive and about 80% or more thought progressive was positive.
So they chose Center for American Progress.
And Hillary will say she’s a progressive, not a liberal, because she knows that poll very well.
So there are uses of the word now.
So is it beyond hope? Can we ever recover that word or do we just have to leave it alone and move on? I think we have to recover the word, but it’s not easy.
It seems that way to me, too.
In other words, you’re living a loss, stay out there, and it’s sort of on everybody’s mind.
It’s kind of like the way the Republicans are changing the name of the Democratic Party to the Democrat Party.
This is a very nasty thing that they’re doing, isn’t it? It softens our whole idea of what… I mean, I’m not a Democrat myself, but I don’t like nasty people, though.
Well, that’s exactly what they ’re doing.
They’re saying that what they ’re doing by using that is saying that the Democratic Party is not… The Democratic Party is not Democratic.
Are you sure it’s that specific ? Yes, it’s absolutely.
When you say that, what you’re saying is it is not a Democratic Party.
You’re contrasting it, because everybody knows when they hear Democrat Party that it’s the opposite of Democratic Party, that it’s another name for it, and it says that the word Democratic Party is not appropriate.
That is part of the message.
You see, I just noticed that John McCain started doing this.
It’s almost like he received some instructions from IUP in the last two weeks, since he’s become the presumptive nominee of the Republican Party, or I call it the Republic Party.
Yes.
And I do that in writing very consistently, because I would like to devalue their name as much as they maybe get that point across somehow.
Yeah.
But it’s very important that they do that, and McCain, I’m sure, is getting instructions from people like Frank Luntz.
His member, Mark McKinnon, is his advisor, and I’m sure McK innon is right in there on that.
You know, so Luntz and McKinnon would certainly have told them things of this sort.
And that is part of showing that you’re a conservative.
Yeah.
Right? That is, as a conservative, you are denigrating the Democratic Party in that way.
The nasty, basically.
Yes.
It’s just, you know, you’re cheating in a way, or cutting corners, that’s the way I see it.
Well, what you Now, should Democrats cut corners that way, too? Should we come back at them with a fight, fire, with fire? I mean I think they’re that’s should we have a should we have a swift boating of John McCain? Should we be looking out, knowing out there, looking for people who will say that in Vietnam he was a coward, and he cut and run, and all that kind of stuff ? I think the main thing is to tell the truth, to always tell the truth.
Because if you don’t, it will out you, and not only that, if you’re progressive, that’s one of your values.
But hasn’t that always been how

And the question is, can you tell the truth effectively? Can you win by telling the truth? And I think the answer is yes, absolutely.
But you have to really know what it is you’re telling the truth about.
But isn’t that what they’re always painting progressives or liberals as, is being sort of naive, goody, two-shoes, that it’s a dangerous world out there, and, you know, you can’t fight the Islamic Islamofascists with, you know, with those kind of tactics, because they’ll take advantage, that’s why they hate us, right, is because we ’re free, you know.
Let’s go right into it, then.
I first got into working on American politics deeply with a book called Moral Politics.
And what I did in that book was ask a certain question from the point of view of a cognitive scientist, which is, why should conservatives, radical conservatives, have certain positions coming together? Why should they be, you know, against abortion and for the flat tax? What does abortion have to do with taxation? Why should they be, you know, against environmental regulations? But what does that have to do with taxation or abortion? Why should they be for tort reform and why should they want to, you know, cut taxes and so on? What are all of these positions ? What do they want to make sure that everybody can buy a machine gun? I mean, you know, why is what do these things have to do with each other? Did you mention abortion in there? Abortion was the first one.
Right.
Yeah.
Because most Republicans, I don ’t think actually are pro I think they are pro-choice.
I think most Republicans are pro-choice, which is one of the weird things, you know.
Well, it’s the but they can’t say it in one thing, but if you take the official position, the official conservative position, they’re against it, right? And why should they be? Why should they fit together in that way? And why should a progressive’s positions be the opposite on all these dimensions and many others? Because what do they have to do with each other? What I discovered was that it had to do with metaphor, oddly enough, and that’s one of the things I have worked on in cognitive science and cognitive linguistics.
We think metaphorically, we and it’s largely unconscious.
We don’t know that we do.
And we have thousands of metaph ors we think in terms of without knowing it.
And we learn them without even language, even before we have language.
We have metaphorical thought.
And we learn them in a particular way.
And for example, of the metaphor that more is up and less is down.
We have prices go up, prices go down, and then nothing is literally going up or down.
Right.
Or So how did that happen? How did we get that sense about the The reason is this.
Every time you pour water into a glass, the level goes up.
You pour more water in, the level goes up.
Interesting.
You take it out, the level goes down.
You pour more put more things on your desk, the level goes up .
Every day there is a correlation in your experience between quantity and vertical ity.
Now what does that do to your brain? In your brain, you register verticality whenever you see it or experience it physically.
And you register quantity in a different part of your brain.
And we know there are different parts of the brain that register these two things.
Now when you but when they come together every day, over and over, you activate them simultaneously.
What happens then is activation spreads from those two centers throughout the brain.
And as it spreads outward, you know, even as a child, you get synapses, synapses changing along the paths until the paths meet.
They meet in the shortest possible connection.
And they form a circuit.
And that circuit is the metaphor that more is up and less is down.
It computes that metaphor automatically.
And the more you use it, the more the synapses are strengthened.
That’s what synapses do.
The more you use them, the more they’re strengthened.
And so that metaphor is there permanently.
And this is true around the world.
It is not only true in this culture, et cetera.
Now it is take another example.
Well, go back to the question you raised at the beginning of this, is that how is gun control and abortion and all these things are they related in that way that you sort of associated them with each other? Here’s how they’re related in a very indirect way.
But there’s a metaphor plays a role.
What is your earliest experience with governance in your family? Of course.
Okay? Now what you do is you learn that governance involves people telling you what to do and setting rules and so on for carrying out your life.
And then there are people in your family who you relate to.
And those are in different parts of your brain again.
So what you Which two are in different parts of your brain? Governance.
Governance.
And the members of your family.
And the members of your family that you’re interacting with.
But you start associating governance and family, right? Because they’re active together .
And therefore, you’re going to, again, just with more is up, you’re going to learn connections between them.
And you’re going to learn that a governing institution is a family.
That’s a metaphor.
And it’s a metaphor we’ll learn .
And around the world, people have things like Mother Russia, Mother India, the Fatherland and so on, in which the nation, which is the major governing institution is a family.
But also something like the church is seen as a family where you have the Pope as the Holy Father and nuns or sisters and so on.
So what you have is governing institutions or families as a metaphor.
Now it turns out we have two very different kinds of families in this country as ideal models.
Whether you’re raised by that or not, you learn the ideal models.
One of them is a strict father family.
The other is a nurturing parent family.
I see.
This is something I hadn’t understood before from listening to you, is that, you know, because I always, I mean, my whole family is democratic all the way back, right? But I don’t think of my family as nurturing.
But you’ve always said that nurturing and democratic is the female image versus the male strict father.
It’s not female.
Nurturing that, right? Nurturing could be male as though.
But isn’t it generally the female image now? No, not necessarily.
So for some people, it depends on their experience and so on.
But male nurturance goes way back.
But the idea here is that you have two very different understandings of what a family is about and what governance in that family is.
And if you’re brought up in a culture, you know both of them.
You learn both of them as models, but you may take one as ideal and one as not ideal but there.
And the, but you’re going to learn them both.
And they have, these models have certain properties.
And when you map them onto governance, you get two different ideas of what governance is, strict or nurturing governance.
And it can be anything from the church group, a little league team, a business seen as a family or the nation seen as a family or a local community seen as a family.
But you’re going to have a mode of reasoning that occurs in both of these families.
And we all have the experience with both.
We all know both modes of reasoning.
But in general, we use one or the other for our politics and for thinking about politics.
But some people use both in different areas of life.
These are called biconceptuals or moderates.
A moderate is somebody who has both.
There is no moderate worldview, no moderate, no single ideology of a moderate.
You can have moderates of moderate Republicans are people who are largely conservative but have some progressive views and moderate Democrats are people who are largely progressive but have some conservative views in certain areas.
They may be totally different.
You know, consider Joe Lieber man and Chuck Hagel, who are almost opposites and have almost nothing in common, but they’re both called moderates, right? So the idea is you have, you have strict and nurtured modes of reasoning.
And let me try to give you a sense of what they are.
Because when they project it onto, onto a political domain, they characterize modes of political reasoning.
In a strict father family, the father is the moral authority and his role is to protect the family because there’s evil in the world and there’s a right and wrong and a good and a bad and he knows right from wrong.
And he’s the strong person who can win the competition to support the family, protect the family.
Mommy can’t do that.
And it’s assumed there that children are born bad.
They don’t know right from wrong, they just do what they want to do.
So the strict father is required to teach kids right from wrong by punishing them.
And punishing them painfully enough so that they will avoid doing wrong and do right and mommy is supposedly too kind hearted to do that.
So you need a strict father to do that.
And then if the, and the assumption is this is the only way kids learn to be moral.
They have to have that punishment and learn internal discipline to follow the rules.
And if they do that, then they can go out into the world, into the free market and use that discipline to become prosperous.
There’s a logic which says if they’re not prosperous, then they’re not disciplined.
Therefore, they can’t be moral if they’re not disciplined so they deserve their property.
Okay? That’s part of it.
Certainly heard this plenty of times, right? Over and over.
And our current president uses that exact model, that’s exactly how he relates to people.
You’ve got it.
Right.
Not only that, he is the moral authority.
Yeah.
So the strict father is the moral authority, he’s the dec ider.
Right.
Not many people believe that nowadays, right? Isn’t that what the 19% approval rating means or where is that what it brings? Well, we’ll come back to that.
Okay.
I want to return to approval ratings and so on, but let’s get the motive for it.
I just want to say that 40 minutes is a pretty good amount of time, so we’re at 24 right now.
Okay, well let’s get through it .
So the moral authority knows what’s right and wrong and then that’s what Bush says.
He says that in international affairs, the US is the moral authority and he’s the moral authority for the country, so he knows what’s right and wrong in the world and other countries should follow suit.
And our government, he’s the decider and tells people in the government what they should and shouldn’t do and the Republican Party, he tells people what they should and shouldn’t do and then you have other applications.
Conservative religion says God is a strict father as opposed to progressive religion which says that God is an urgent parent to opposite views of what God is.
The market is very different.
The market is a governing institution and so there is a view of let’s call it a strict father market.
What does that say? It says that the market, let the market decide, the market is the decider, the market imp oses a discipline on people and rewards the people who are disciplined and punishes the people who are not and that’s natural and moral and that’s how it should be.
And that since the market is the decider, it’s the ultimate authority and so the government shouldn’t come in and interfere with the market and there are four kinds of government interference.
One is regulation, two is taxation, three is worker rights and four is tort cases.
They say well got to be rid of all those because those are interference.
So you begin to see how this metaphor of a governing institution is a family and there are two kinds of families.
It’s a strict father family, gives you conservatism in many different domains of various kinds.
And then for progressive, and this is a mode of thought, it may not be, people who call themselves conservatives may not reason this way on every issue.
Maybe there are people who might be progressive on certain issues and what does it mean to be progressive? In a progressive nurturing family, the parent’s job is to nurture their children, that is to care about them, to empath ize with them and to be act responsibly, both taking care of them responsibly for themselves, taking care of themselves and taking care of their kids, and they raise their kids to be nurturers of others, that is they raise their kids to care about other people, to take care of themselves and to care for others and this is like the opposite of an indulgent parent model.
Now, if when you apply that to government, certain things happen.
So if you apply that to government, what is the role of government? Well there are two roles, protection and empowerment, just as you would have in a family, the parents have to protect their kids and try to empower them to fulfill themselves in life.
In a government, protection is not just military or police protection, it’s environmental protection, worker protection, consumer protection, safety nets, social security, presumably healthcare would be part of that.
And in empowerment, you build, let’s say business, empowerment of both business and individuals, you build roads so businesses can transport goods, you have the government develop the internet and communication systems, the satellite systems, it does education so people can be fulfilled and get jobs and companies can hire educated workers, it supports a banking system so that the people can keep their money in a safe place and get loans and companies can get loans, it supports a court system to adjudicate mostly business cases and it supports the SEC for the stock market, that is so that you have a stock market that you can be reasonably confident in.
So the result of that is no business can make any money at all without the empowerment of government and the protection of government.
And what taxes are is what you pay to live in a country that has protection and empowerment whereas many countries in the world, most third world countries don’t have that.
And that’s a very simple account of what government is.
And then there are other ideas that is in a nurturing parent family, the parents talk openly with their children and respect their kids as well as insist on them being respected and they get their respect from what they do, from their actions.
And that’s the way that government is supposed to work for a progressive government, it’s supposed to be open and honest and the people in government are supposed to do what they say they’re going to do and so on and get respect from the population because of that.
As a result of these two modes of thought you have totally different ideas about what constitutes freedom, what constitutes equality, what constitutes accountability, completely different.
They go in totally different directions.
Now and then you have people who are, who call themselves conservatives but love the land, they don’t feel nurtured toward the land, toward the earth.
There are people who call themselves conservatives but are progressive Christians, believe God is a nurturing parent that we should take care of the poor and heal the sick and so on.
You have people who are honest business people who want to be progressive, like progressive business people, they’re honest , they would never screw their employees, they would never hurt the population and so on.
Plenty of people call themselves conservatives and are conservative in certain ways but are progressive in other ways.
Now given that, that matters enormously for politics because of, consider the question within progressives.
Should a progressive candidate or office holder move to the right? Okay, well, those who say you move to the right assume that there’s a linear order from left to right and it’s just false, there is no such linear order because you can have this every which way.
But what for example the Clint ons have usually done was assume a triangulation, they assume that there’s a center and they have to move to the right to get there and they will take adopt positions that they consider bipartisan.
Bipartisanship means making accommodations with conservatives so that you adopt some of their principles.
Some of the votes that Hillary Clinton’s made are positively Republican, voted to authorize the war to declare Iran a terrorist state, those kinds of things.
And the bankruptcy bill, things like that.
Now Obama has, this is just an analysis of the two candidates, but Obama has the opposite view.
He understands that conservatives, there are people who are conservative in certain ways and identify themselves that way, have lots of progressive views.
So his way of dealing, his notion of bipartisanship is to find out where conservatives have views that agree with them and then to work with them on those.
I’ve seen an absolutely fascinating thing with Obama that there are people that I know who I relate with professionally and get along with, find, think highly of, but who are very right wing, you know, they’re Republicans and vote Republican all the time, who say that they might vote for Obama and I’m puzzled by this, why would they vote for him? And so I asked and he said, “Oh , well it seems like he has integrity. " And that’s good.
And that’s the big thing, right ? I mean.
Yeah.
That’s exactly what I was coming to.
Okay, fair enough.
That’s what I want to understand.
I want to, you know, know how, where we’re going.
Okay.
Well, this is what I learned a couple of years ago when I met Richard Worthlin, who is a legendary figure.
He was Ronald Reagan’s chief strategist.
Oh, right.
Sure.
And I happened to find myself sitting next to him at a conference and he was just a retired, a lovely gentleman who seemed to, you know, say a lot of sensible things at this conference.
So we went off to lunch together and I asked him a simple question, which is, " What was your experience with Reagan like?” And he told me a remarkable story.
He said, “Look, I was trained at Berkeley and to be a poll ster and an economist.
And what I learned there was that people vote for a candidate on the basis of their positions on issues.
I took my first poll for Reagan , found that nobody liked this position on issues, but people wanted to vote for Reagan.
And he said, “I didn’t understand this.
Here I was chief strategist.
I didn’t know why people wanted to vote for my candidate. " So I did more polls and focus groups and interviews.
And here’s what I found.
I found that Reagan talked about values and issues would illustrate values, but he’s mainly talking about values, and people cared about values, that Reagan connected with people.
People felt a genuine connection with them, and they felt he had integrity, that he told the truth, that he was authentic, that he said what he believed.
And if he had values and said what he believed, you could trust him.
You may not agree with him, but you knew where he stood.
And that was what was important .
That was what was important.
For which model? For the nurturing? It didn’t matter.
It didn’t matter.
It worked for both models.
It worked for both models.
That’s what’s important.
It doesn’t matter.
It’s neutral.
Everybody buys the integrity, trust, straight shooter.
You got it.
I’d like to have a beer with the guy.
Is that the… Well, the beer with the guy… Because that was George Bush’s thing, right? Yeah, well, it was not just… That was different.
Bush didn’t get as many votes as Reagan did.
Right.
Exactly.
That was more… That was more he’s like me.
See, there’s another part of it , which is identity.
Yeah.
See, identity is the next part.
You identify with the person.
They would identify with Bush in that way.
But then… So what does it… What do they get from Obama? Do they identify with the person? All of those things.
All of them.
All of them.
What they get is a sense of trust, a sense of values, a sense of authenticity, and so on.
But there’s another very… I want to ask you also about Kerry, to… I’ll get… Okay.
But there’s another very important piece, which has to do with emotions.
We know from the study of the brain that there are two different emotional pathways, a positive and a negative one, dopamine and norepinephrine pathways, positive for feelings of satisfaction and hope and so on, and happiness, and others, the negative pathway for fear, anxiety and anger.
And the question, it turns out, that the fear pathway activates a strict father model.
They want people on protection and so on.
That the satisfaction/happiness pathway activates a nurturing model.
So that’s another very much part of it.
Obama makes people feel good.
He activates the positive pathway, not the negative pathway.
And Bush was activating the negative pathway for fear to activate the strict father model.
Now, how does this have to do with framing? If you have, and by the way, your brain accommodates both of these at once because it was called neural inhibition.
That is, mutual inhibition says if you have two things that contradict each other, the activation of one deactivates the other, inhibits the other.
But you may not notice that you ’re going back and forth.
You may just think that’s who you are.
You don’t notice these things.
It’s just a neural fact.
And so that if you are activating strict father model, then certain ideas are more natural, like not, you know, insisting on victory, insisting on winning.
Competition is taken as natural and you’re supposed to win them .
The market is going to be seen as natural and moral and the decider and so on.
That is, a lot of views will come together and that’s why that happens that way.
And when that happens that way, then you can frame an argument more easily.
You can use language that ev okes that model.
So when they say tax relief, which then has the frame of relief with an affliction and an afflicted party, a hero takes it away and so on, then you have taxation as an affl iction that fits the strict father model of the market.
It doesn’t fit a nurtured parent model of the market, which says a market is there to help people.
A market is there to help people and regulation is part of the definition of what a market is to guarantee that it will help and not harm.
Very, very different idea about what the market is in these two accounts.
Now what the conservatives have been doing for the last 35 to 40 years through their think tanks and through their communication system, which is very elaborate, they have hundreds of millions of dollars a year put into these things, is getting those deep ideas out there, getting the strict father mode of thought into the public discourse and getting language out there that evokes it so that it’s easier to evoke it.
And progressives have ignored it.
Now this is what I call… What is it that they’ve ignored ? They’ve ignored getting their ideas out into public.
The idea that morality is about empathy and responsibility.
The idea that government is about protection and empowerment.
They have not gotten those ideas out there.
The idea that taxation is what you pay to have protection and empowerment and for business to make any money at all.
These ideas are not gotten out there.
And there are many, many others like them.
And if those ideas are not in the public discourse, then it’s easy to get other ideas out there.
Now there’s another very important piece to this puzzle that then that has to do with a folk theory of what reason is .
And this is a folk theory that goes back to at least the Enlightenment.
It says that reason has the following properties.
That it is conscious, that you know what you’re thinking, that it is literal, it can fit the world, that you can reason about the world, your concepts fit it, that it’s logical, that being rational is to be logical , that it’s unemotional, that emotion gets in the way of reason, that it’s disembod ied, that it’s separate from perception and action.
It’s its own thing.
That it’s universal, that everybody reasons the same way, you’re all human beings, so we all think the same way with the same idea of reason.
And it’s based on self-interest , it’s… And this is the progressive view, right? This is… Basically, if we give you all the facts, you’ll arrive at the correct decision.
It’s what I’ll call the neol iberal view.
And some progressives have it and some progressives don’t.
But it’s wrong.
It’s desperately wrong, right? Every part of it has been shown to be false by cognitive science.
Every single part of it.
And yet, the neoliberals use defined policy as doing that.
You can see it in the Puzz lement of the Hillary Clinton campaign, and she has approached it as all I have to do is show you how I follow these things through, and I’m going to do all the correct things, and ready on day one, and all this, and then you just vote for me, right? And it doesn’t seem to be working.
It’s not working, because she believes that, she believes in the neoliberal view.
Well, she seems to be going back and forth, too.
Some moments, she understands that it’s her, she connects with people the way Obama connects with people at times.
At times.
At times.
It’s intended to be when she does well, too, right? That’s exactly right.
But she believes, her active belief, her conscious belief, is that this is how it should go, and that has a consequence.
It says, the neoliberal view says, you should do interest group politics, that you find a group of people whose interests are not being served, and then you have a government program to serve them, you know ? And you get their votes.
And you get the, and the assumption is you will get their votes, which of course you won’t.
But, but the assumption.
That’s what the Republicans have proven over America.
They prove it.
You don’t need to do anything for anybody to get their votes.
You just need to make them feel good about their country.
No, you know, they need, you need to activate the strict father model in them.
Right, right.
If you activate their strict, their strict father model.
Now Reagan was a Republican, too, though, he activated some other models, too, right? He’s activated, well, he activated, basically, a strict father model in lots of, well, you said he activated both, right? No, no.
I didn’t say activated both.
The idea is he would appeal to both.
Right.
I see what you’re saying.
Even if they disagreed with them.
And that’s why he got Democratic votes.
Yeah.
So he activated the strict father model in poor Democrats, who very, you know, many working class Democrats.
So the Obama act, is he a strict father? No.
He hasn’t shown any of that yet .
Or do you think he will? He shows some of it when he says, “I will do what is necessary to defend America. " Didn’t he do it when he said, " This is silly season,” in the last debate with Hillary? Hillary was doing all the, uh, uh, yeah.
That’s right.
Plagiarism thing.
And he goes, “Oh, this is silly . " He said it twice.
That’s right.
Things like that don’t happen by accident.
Right.
Exactly.
But that is, what he’s doing there is framing Hillary, who is misrationalism as silly, right? It’s exactly what she doesn’t want to be.
Exactly what she doesn’t want to be.
He’s even, at points, implied that she gets emotional and then she lashes out when she does that.
People are giving him a lot of heat for that.
Right.
He knows what he’s doing.
Do you think? Absolutely.
That goes against everything she’s saying about herself.
Right.
So that’s why he does it? It’s one of the reasons he does it.
Why does he do it? Explain it.
Well, you see, if she, if she is the model of rationality and of policy expertise, which means a rational actor model in international relations and elsewhere, she wouldn’t be getting emotional, right? She wouldn’t be getting emotional about it.
Right? But she wasn’t, actually.
When he said that, that wasn’t what was happening.
But she has been.
In many cases.
I mean, if you looked at the, you know, many parts of that last debate where she would cut him off and insist on talking about, you know, that he didn’t have a universal plan and she got very excited about that.
So that was really Hillary right there, huh? That’s really, that’s, well, it ’s part of Hillary.
Hillary is a very complicated and interesting person.
Personally, I find her very warm when she’s not, when she’s , when you’re talking to her one-on-one, you know, in a, without any press or aides around and it’s not a contested issue and you’re not trying to argue with her.
Just talking with her, she’s a very warm person, personally.
But she feels she has to come off as strong and competent and , and rational in this way.
And she really does believe in interest group politics and she really does believe in this rational actor model of, and she believes in incremental government.
And there are various ways in which Obama has the opposite views.
As Obama generally thinks in terms of his experiences as a community organizer, why does he refer to that? Because he’s interested in empathy.
He talks about the empathy deficit.
And so he’s interested in having the government do what will actually help people in the streets rather than do interest group politics.
And interest group politics tends to be incremental.
A little thing here, a little thing there, and it doesn’t tend to, tend to add up to much.
And he wants to do major things that will really help lots of people.
And those are very, very different ideas about how to govern.
Their foreign policy views are very different.
She has the, you know, a typical rational actor model view of the world, that is, there’s a national interest, which is basically economically the GDP, militarily military strength, and then political influence.
And it’s, and then every country assumes, assumed to have the same rational actor model.
And they’re all trying to get to maximize their self-interest .
And that if everybody maximizes their self-interest, that’s the best situation.
So we should be out there maxim izing ours and seeing that they ’re maximizing theirs.
And that’s, foreign policy at the level of the state.
Obama looks at the level of the person.
He talks of people who are poor around the world, people are un educated around the world, people who don’t have water around the world, and so on.
He’s thinking about other countries in terms of people, not states.
So they’re thinking about foreign policy in opposite ways , and they’re thinking about governing in opposite ways.
Yeah, I think that’s so much more intelligent to approach it that way, or brought Obama away.
And if we did approach it that way, we would be concerned about how many people are dying in Iraq, not just our own people, but we would be thinking, not just from a pragmatic standpoint that these people are all going to hate us, that’s pragmatic.
Their relatives who survive are not going to be happy with us for, that’s not even the reason.
It’s just bad karma to kill that many people, it’s not a good thing to do.
And it’s not what the United States does, and if a lot of people were focused on that, they wouldn’t want us to do that.
That’s another part of this, where there’s a big difference.
Hillary calls herself a progressive, Obama doesn’t really call himself anything but an American.
Right, and that’s beautiful, actually.
It is, separately, I’ve concluded after watching all of this wedge politics that’s been going on, is that we forgot that we ’re one country, and that we do have some shared values, that we’re not that divided.
And what are called progressive values, that is, empathy and responsibility are American values.
Absolutely.
And he says this out now in the audacity of hope, and it’s very clear that that’s how he thinks about this, and that ’s how he functions.
And that’s what people are responding to, and there’s something else that’s very important.
A lot of the people who are responding to Obama are sick of the Democrats giving in to the Republicans.
They’re sick of progressives giving in to conservative framing.
Now one thing about framing, coming back to framing, is this , words and expressions activate frames which in turn activate whole world views and systems of thought.
And if you negate a frame, you still activate a frame.
That’s why I wrote a book called Don’t Think of an Ele phant.
You have to think of the elephant.
Right? He can’t help it, right? Right, exactly.
So it doesn’t matter if you’re for or against, if you frame it that way, and Obama is very good about that.
He understands that you have to change frames and reframe issues from your perspective, and from a nurturing perspective.
But if you believe in the rational actor model, if you believe that thought is neutral , then it follows that language must be neutral, because if thought can just fit the world.
Whose point of view is this? The rational actor.
The idea of rationalism there, that false view of reason that I was mentioning.
If you believe that, and many people in the Democratic Party do, then you’ll just tell people the facts and they should reason to the right conclusion, but also they assume language is neutral and that they can accept conservative words without accepting conservative ideas.
And that can’t work that way.
If you accept their words, what you’re doing is framing the issue in their way, which in turn activates their values.
For example, the surge, is it working? Yes.
Right.
And if we’re going to debate whether the surge is working, we’re ignoring all the other questions that are swirling all around Iraq.
It’s not whether or not the surge is working, it’s this whole thing, a good thing to be doing.
Right.
And are we at war or is this an occupation? It’s obviously an occupation.
Right.
But they don’t want to use the words.
If they did use that word, you would understand why the Republicans want to be there.
And they don’t want us to be talking about why they want to be there.
Exactly right.
And so it goes back to, as I was listening to you describe the whole Republican, not nurturing but discern discipl inary father view of things, that while they’re busy discipl ining everybody, they’re stealing all over the place.
The money is being shoveled from our pockets into their pockets.
All of the people from Texas that Cheney and Bush came to town with, these are both defense contractors.
Cheney especially, was the president, CEO of a big defense contractor before he became it.
And he’ll go back to being a defense contractor.
I don’t make huge amounts of money.
Their bank account, no doubt, is sitting there waiting for them.
And so then this brings us to the question, so we’re clearly going to go up to an hour.
I just want to, maybe we could do another one of these, I don ’t know if you’re open to it, but because I’m thinking that we’re just almost, in a way, just getting started, is well what do you do about this, okay? So we’re coming up to a campaign, presumably the Republicans are not going to concede, okay fine, we lose, you win, there’s going to be a battle going on here, and how do we get, or will we get past the usual problems that we get? Well this is, because you, first of all, you need to know what a conservative infrastructure is.
Conservatives have a group of think tanks, right? And their think tanks work the opposite of the way progressive think tanks work.
And that’s a very important thing to know.
Their think tanks start with the idea of conservatism, and apply it in every way.
And usually, you know, sometimes 50% of their budget is about communication, and communicating the general ideas, and then special cases.
Progressives, when they have think tanks like the Center for American Progress, start with individual issue areas, and they try to, you know, look at individual issue areas, and their policy think tanks, they go issue by issue policies , and they never get to the general ideas.
They don’t go across the policies, across the issue areas.
And the reason is that they’re using this notion of rational ism, that is they’re assuming that, you know, people reason according to logic, that they go according to the facts.
If you just give people the facts, they’ll reason to the right conclusion.
And then of course, the facts about one issue area are different from the facts about another, so you have to separate them off, and you don’t see the general principles.
So we need a whole theory then, that encompasses our goals, and also positions the Republicans, the way the Republicans position liberals.
We have to put some ideas into people’s heads that the equivalent of tax and spend.
They need to have something like that to go with them.
Well, that’s part of the story.
Yes, but part only, it’s only, it’s only part of the story.
We have to be honest at all times, because we’re not fighting honesty.
I think we better off being honest, and then we don’t give them the equivalent of a tax and spend that.
Because though, it’s an honest thing.
No, what you’d say is there are honest things to say.
How about rape and pillage? Is that like… Not a good idea.
No, not a good idea.
Not a good idea, for a number of reasons.
I think it’s very important to understand, first, you have to get your ideas out there first, and that you’re positively in many forms, and that’s a long-term thing.
And you have to have a communication system to do it, and you have to have think tanks to do it.
What Rockbridge Institute does is we specialize in what is called cognitive policy.
And let me explain the difference between cognitive and material policy.
Material policy is the nuts and bolts.
What happens in the world? What does your health plan exactly look like, and what does it exactly do? Cognitive policy has two parts.
One of it is, what do you need to get popular support for whatever you’re going to do, and how do you conceptualize what it is you’re going to do? How do you, for example, do you distinguish between health insurance and health care? One of the things we learned from SICO is health care is not health insurance.
Health insurance is there to deny people care.
Is that a truth? Is that out there? We don’t hear it discussed, but it’s true.
How does that affect your health plans? What should they be if they’re not health insurance, and how do you do it? But the question is, why should you have a health care system? Why should people have health care? It has to do with empathy, caring about people, and acting responsibly, and understanding that government is about protection and empowerment.
Once you have those ideas, it’s pretty clear why you should have a health care system.
And once you understand what health insurance is like as opposed to health care, it’s pretty sure it shouldn’t be a health insurance system.
Now, those ideas have to be out there in order to have a sane health care system.
And the question is, how do you get those ideas out there? Let’s take other questions.
You brought up, as long as some people are asking, is the surge working? You’re in conservative territory, because that says what is at issue is the surge.
That’s the question.
And if it’s working, you’re right, and if it’s not working, you’re wrong.
And then the working has to do with the number of casualties.
If you’re in that frame, that’s it.
You have to have a very different frame.
And one of the questions that will happen in this campaign is , what will happen if there is an attack on American soil, or if the Bush administration attacks Iran or does something like that to provoke an attack on Iran? And at that point, fear will come in.
And in fact, conservatives are already saying, this is the biggest thing we should be afraid of is the Islamovashism and so on.
The ads are already on TV right now.
We have fear, fear, fear, fear.
Now what you need to do if you ’re progressive is come out positively.
You say, America’s not afraid.
Fear weakens us.
Courage strengthens us.
We are not afraid.
And conservatives are fear mong ers.
They have worked by bringing fear, and that has been a disaster to our country.
And when you talk about that, you also link the recession to the war, and you talk about the Iraq recession, which already has begun to be done.
And then you explain.
You go through the details of what that means and how that once you have it as an idea, you can do it.
But it has to be tied into other ideas.
And you need to have a campaign that goes about saying positively the ideas that you have that evoke and activate the positive neural pathways and not the negative neural pathways.
And there’s a reason why Obama talks about hope, because that is what he’s doing.
And that makes people feel good about him.
And he also has the idea of integrity and so on and trust that’s built in.
So the Obama campaign is interesting in that regard.
Now, the McCain campaign is also interesting in that regard .
McCain is coming across as a straight shooter and so on.
And then the question is, is he really? And you can begin to see that progressives are saying no, he isn’t really.
He has lied.
His campaign is run by lobby ists, and he says he’s never taken a dime from lobbyists, et cetera.
And in short, what’s going on here is that there is a question of who really has integrity, who really is a person you can trust, who is authentic.
That’s a major issue there.
And then the question of whether there’s going to be fear or hope in this election.
And therefore, what issues are going to come up and whether there’s going to be a linkage between the use of the military and the recession.
And whether the economic issues .
In other words, the Iraq recession.
The Iraq recession.
Yeah.
So you can sort of see that happening and about to happen.
But what’s crucial for progress ives right now Do you think that Obama was going to do that linkage between Iraq and the recession? I can’t say for sure, but it would be silly if he didn’t.
He’s already said it.
I mean As you haven’t heard that.
He has already said it, but not in those words.
He has said it in terms of the lost opportunities because of this.
Why we have to end Iraq in order to bring the country back economically and so on.
He hasn’t used the words, but he has used the logic of it.
And he hasn’t put it up front as a major position, but it’s there in what he says.
It hasn’t been the important issue of the primary campaign.
Obviously, that’s what he’s going to use against the Republicans.
I would suspect that that will come in there.
I suspect that Can already see McCain, by the way, pulling back from his hundred Iraq base, which was an out-and-out mistake.
Sure.
What did you say? It was a major mistake, but it is the position of the Bush administration and it’s the position that he wants It’s too honest, though.
It’s too honest.
It’s way too honest for him to have said that.
It’s very clearly what the current government and the vector that they’re on.
It’s what the United States wants to do, honestly.
Just in terms of we’ve had a history in the Middle East, and it’s very consistent with the other things that we’ve done and stuff.
Sure.
I think that that’s easy.
You’re going to see all of that .
But what I’m scared of is this.
I’m afraid that the Democrats are not going to be able to counter the conservative fram ings and that they’re not going to understand that they have to do that.
For example, if you’re trying to get the Democrats in the Senate and the House all to come together under the leadership to oppose not only the Bush administration’s ideas, but generally the conservative ideas and to hold firm on it, you’ve got to deal with the three-way split in the Democratic Party.
What is the three-way split? You have the progressives, you have the DLC, which is the people who believe in the neol iberals, and then you have the blue dogs , who are progressive, basically , but they’re biconceptual.
They have some conservative ideas, and they come from districts where there are a lot of conservatives and where people in their districts are accepting the right-wing frames .
What you have to do is address that, because you have to change what people in their districts are accepting.
That’s important, unless they ’re in districts that are safe.
In the Senate races, like Mary Landro, let’s say, in Louisiana , places like that, it’s clear that a lot of conservatives in Louisiana, in the Democratic Party or not, who have strict father ideas.
The question is, what can she say to those? What is her strategy for dealing with Louisiana when she ’s running for reelection to the Senate? What is her strategy for winning those votes, given what has happened in the wake of Katrina? I just saw an interview with the Republican governor of Louisiana, and he sounded very much like a Democrat, because he has those needs, presumably.
Because I went to college in New Orleans, so I went back after Katrina to get a sense of what it was like and what had happened there, because I knew the city, and I understood , God, it was unbelievable what had happened to that city.
That changed politics in Louisiana, probably forever, or at least for the foreseeable future.
That may be a special case.
It also is a fantastic story, not a wonderful story, but certainly one that addresses the issue of whether we were ever prepared for a major terrorist attack, like the Republicans say we have been, because clearly we were not.
Well, we clearly are not, and that’s another issue.
I think we should wind this up, because people’s attention span , I mean, we got to the good stuff at the end, I think, but I think you should be on the talk shows, when they have these, they’re often never, never land a lot of talks.
Yeah, they usually are.
And I’m wondering if there’s in some way we could create a round table that would include yourself and maybe a few other people to try to have, I mean, we have this fantastic communication medium that doesn’t have any regulation, there are no limits , we can do really whatever we want.
I talked before, we were on a microphone about Flickr and about Twitter, there’s also all these fantastic video services that have popped up nowadays, beyond YouTube.
And YouTube’s been, you know, it’s great, but there’s live video streaming stuff, I’m sure.
So, you know, something to think about.
I’m happy to do that.
In fact, The New York Times is moving in that direction.
Is that right? They’re about to fire a hundred people.
Yes, I heard about that, yeah.
Yeah, I mean, this is, and to move more toward the internet.
And how they’re going to do that, you know? They won’t get it at any time soon, George.
I can’t imagine.
I’ve done a lot of work with The New York Times in various contexts.
I can’t conceive of them getting it.
They’ll be the last ones.
I mean, they’ve got the, you know, those hundred people that they’re letting go, I mean, I ’ve toured the newsroom in the new building, I mean, they’ve got a lot of insulation, a lot of, you know, they’re not living very close to the pavement, like the other newspapers are.
You know, they can see the world rushing by them, The New York Times, you know, it sort of has, can go at a slower pace .
They have done some innovating, but it’s, you know.
I think the innovating is going to happen outside the context of mainstream media.
And in an election year where people are so interested, so activated, presents some, I think, some incredible opportunities.
Yeah, I think so too.
I hope that we’ll get a conversation going around this piece.
I’m not sure, you know, what the response is going to be, but when there are comments, if you don’t mind, I’ll forward them to you and, you know, you can see what people think.
Sure.
That’s the way.
I mean, you know, at Rockbridge , we try to answer people’s questions.
That’s, you know, www. rockrig ination. org.
Yeah, I’ll put it all over the place, don’t worry.
Sure.
We have, we have.
They have a blog.
We have a, we have a blog and, and if you write in questions, we try to deal with them.
Awesome.
Well, thank you, George.
My pleasure, Dave.
You’re welcome.
They can’t see us.
We should.
We just should can’t.
Right off.
But, yeah.
Okay, cool.
Let me just.