Don't Think of an Elephant

George Lakoff, “Don’t Think of an Elephant, Know Your Values and Frame the Debate,” Chelsea Green Publishing, 2004 & 2014 Paperback, 164 pp.

My brother sent me an article written by George Lakoff that led to my interest in reading this book– “Framing to connect with values, not people’s self-interest.”  I have reproduced this article in a post just preceding the post for this book.  I think reading that article first is beneficial.  The book is a reasonable presentation of the left and right positions, each from their respective frames:  The right from the strict father value system and the left from the nurturant parent frame of reference.  The author is an unabashed leftist, much in the genre of Elizabeth Warren.

Although this book, and especially the referenced article, has many interesting concepts, I have to keep Steve Pinker’s, the well-noted Harvard professor and author,  warning in mind:  He states that Lakoff’s “use of cognitive neuroscience goes way beyond any consensus within that field” and that his “way with brain science is even more” of a reach.

My Notes:

Pg. xi:  Frames are mental structures that shape the way we see the world.  As a result, they shape the goals we seek, the plans we make, the way we act, and what counts as good or bad outcomes of our actions.  In politics, our frames shape our social policies and the institutions we forge to carry out policies.  Reframing is social change.

Pg. xiv:  The political divide in America is a moral divide.  We need to understand that moral divide and understand what the progressive and conservative moral systems are.  Also, many people operate on different—and inconsistent—moral systems in different areas of their lives.  The technical term is ‘biconceptuals.’  (Sometimes we are in the strict father mode, other times the nurturant parent).

Pg. 1:  Exercise:  tell someone “Whatever you do, do not think of an elephant.”  Of course, they immediately think of an elephant   How about Richard Nixon standing before the nation on TV stating, “I am not a crook.” (I still think of him as a crook.)  “Tax Relief” casts taxes as an affliction that must be relieved.  (How about “Partial Birth Abortion.”)

Pg. 15:  Myths believed by Progressives and liberals are hurting them.  The myths began with the Enlightenment, and the first one is: The truth will set us free.  If we just tell people the facts, since people are basically rational beings, they’ll all reach the right conclusions.  But people don’t think like that, people think in frames.  The strict father and nurturant parent frames each force a certain logic.  To be accepted, the truth must fit people’s frames.  If the facts do not fit a frame, the frame stays and the facts bounce off.

Pg. 16:  There is another myth that also comes from the Enlightenment, and it goes: It is irrational to go against your self-interest, and therefore a normal person, who is rational, reasons on the basis of self-interest.  Modern economic theory and foreign policy are set up on the basis of that assumption.  Democratic politics is still based on the assumption that people will naturally always think in terms of their self-interest.

Pg. 17:  People do not necessarily vote in their self-interest.  They vote their identity.  They vote their values.  They vote for who they identify with.  If their identity fits their self-interest, they will vote for that.  Biconceptuals, however, are people in the middle who are conservative on some issues and progressive on others. 

Pg. 19:  To get people, especially the middle, to activate your political model you talk to people using frames based on your worldview.  Clinton did this by talking about welfare reform and that the age of big government was over.  Then George W. Bush arrived, and we got ‘compassionate conservatism.’  The Clear Skies Initiative, Healthy Forests, No Child Left Behind.  This is the use of language to mollify people who have nurturant values, while the real policies are strict father policies.  This is the Use of Orwellian language—language that means the opposite of what it says—to appease people in the middle at the same time as you pump up the base.  That is part of the conservative strategy.

Pg. 25:  In the rights hierarchy of moral values, the top value is preserving and defending the moral system itself.  You buy up media in advance, grant fellowships to right-wing law students and get them nice jobs after that.  On the left, the highest value is helping individuals who need help.  So you set up foundations to help as many people as you can.  And the more public budgets get cut, the more people there are who need help.  Soon you do not have any money left for infrastructure or talent development. 

Pg. 41:  The major moral divisions in our politics derive from two opposed models of the family: a progressive (nurturant parent) morality and a conservative (strict father) morality.  This can be expected, your family life has a profound effect on how you understand yourself as a person.  Then there are biconceptuals that have both kinds of moral circuitry in their brain, mutually inhibiting each other and applying to different issues, person by person.  Your sense of what a person should be and do is deeply connected to which of the three moral divisions you fall in related to the issue at hand.

Pg. 150:  The conservative Supreme Court works by slippery slope decisions, one step at a time.  Consider the following progression.  First, the court allowed corporations to contribute to ballot initiatives as a limited form of the First Amendment right of free speech.  Then, their Citizens United decision gave corporations the ability to contribute as much as they want in elections, as a form of free speech.  Then their Hobby Lobby decision extended the First Amendment freedom of religion to corporations so that they do not have to provide contraception to women employees as specified by the Affordable Care Act, opening the door to a wider use of freedom of religion by corporations to avoid various fair treatment laws. 

Pg. 158:  Right-wing ideologues have convinced half of the country that the strict father family model should govern our national morality and politics.  This is the model that the best in American values has defeated over and over from the emancipation of the slaves to women’s suffrage, Social Security, and Medicare, the civil rights and voting rights acts, Brown v. the Board of Education, and Roe v. Wade.