The Political Mind

Rating:	★★★★
Category:	Books
Genre:	Nonfiction
Author:	George Lakoff

"We are neural beings," states Berkeley cognitive scientist George Lakoff. "Our brains take their input from the rest of our bodies. What our bodies are like and how they function in the world thus structures the very concepts we can use to think. We cannot think just anything - only what our embodied brains permit."

"The Political Mind" is a book published last year which seems particularly timely today what with the unruliness, outright lies and scare tactics being practiced by right-wing interest groups like former Texas Congressman Dick Armey "Freedom Works" institute to scare people away from a non-profit-based health care reform plan.


Lakoff writes that people are unaware of 98% of the thinking their brains do. "The main battlefield is the brain", he writes, and the traditional ways that liberals and progressives approach that battlefield is to appeal to reason and logic to win the day for their issues. Progressives believe in the power of logic and empathy--often, in Lakoff's opinion---to their detriment.
He advocates trading in 18th century Old Enlightenment reasoning, which discounts unconscious thought, for a type of 21st century "reasoning" which re-frames arguments not to win by logic or appeals to "common sense" but to control the language and specific words of the debate by exercising the neural transmitters in the brains of potential supporters with certain code words and phrases that cause some people to ignore the more rational centers of the brain and focus on the neural processes that create a sense of unease and danger about issues like health care reform or curbing "national defense" actions by the military that take place halfway around the world for extended periods of time.

Here Lakoff expounds on one of the most important aspects of his theories, the process of "framing" an issue in the subconscious.


"Facts never speak for themselves. They take on their meaning by being embedded in frames, themes which organize thoughts, rendering some facts as relevant and significant and others as irrelevant and trivial. Framing matters and the contest is lost at the outset if one allows ones adversaries to define the terms of the debate. To be self conscious about framing strategy is not being manipulative. It gives coherent meaning to what is happening in the world. One can either do it unconsciously, or with deliberation and conscious thought.

"A frame is a thought organizer. Like a picture frame, it puts a rim around some part of the world, highlighting certain events and facts as important and rendering others invisible. Like a building frame, it holds things together but is covered by insulation and walls. It provides coherence to an array of symbols, images, and arguments, linking them through an underlying organizing idea that suggests what is essential — what consequences and values are at stake. We do not see the frame directly, but infer its presence by its characteristic expressions and language."--from a 2005 interview.

Lakoff's theorizes that conservatives operate much better at framing for example the debate between Americans over the role of government in their lives. One example of this is the myth that "deregulation or privatization of a moral mission of government eliminates government", and by extension presumably gives ordinary people more power over their lives.
"But", he continues, "it doesn't. Large corporations also govern our lives--often making life and death decisions that affect us. Government isn't eliminated. It is just shifted from the public sector, where there is an ethic of protection and public accountability, to the private sector, where there an ethic of profit...The "free market" doesn't free us from government; it just gives us unaccountable government without a moral mission."

Obviously this is a book designed to rub conservatives the wrong way. But, given the dominance of conservative thought since the Reagan Era, the message of Professor Lakoff is a readable counter-weight, and, for some, a new way of thinking about the mind and its control over literally how we view the world and the powers around our lives.