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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Brian Dean
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April 10 - July 16, 2024
Take, for example, newspaper headlines. Often, they consist of a mixture of metaphor and abstraction (as in the example illustration – an “establishment” [abstraction] “on the rack” [metaphor]). From these we construct a representational “reality” of sorts – courtesy of frames in our brains. But we’re generally not aware of our own creative role in this.
Metaphor isn’t just about language; it’s how we think. We are constantly importing inferential structure from one conceptual “domain” to another – without being aware of the process. Without this metaphorical mapping, our thinking on any given topic would be practically non-existent.
Self-discipline is also needed for prosperity in a dangerous, competitive world. It follows, in this worldview, that people who prosper financially are self-disciplined and therefore morally good.
Note that these views are all metaphorically conceived – instead of a force, evil could (outside the strictness frame) be viewed as an effect, eg of ignorance or greed – in which case strength wouldn’t make quite as much sense as a primary moral value.
“LAZINESS IS BAD” Under strictness morality, self-indulgence (eg idleness) is seen as moral weakness, ie emergent evil. It represents a failure to develop the ‘moral strengths’ of self-control and self-discipline (which are primary values in this worldview). At this point you might want to reflect on how much the Puritan work ethic has affected your life in terms of hours spent in “productive employment” (or “pointless drudgery”).
Thus, welfare is seen as doubly immoral in this system of moral metaphors. Of course, others would argue that the “disincentive” to work is provided not by welfare but by work itself – or rather by its long hours, soul-crippling tedium and low pay. But that’s a different kind of framing.
Immorality is regarded as “contagious”. Thus, immoral ideas must be avoided or censored, and immoral people have to be isolated or removed, forcibly if necessary. Otherwise they could “infect” the morally healthy/strong. Does this way of thinking sound familiar?
“One crucial consequence of this metaphor is that immorality, as moral disease, is a plague that, if left unchecked, can spread throughout society, infecting everyone. This requires strong measures of moral hygiene, such as quarantine and strict observance of measures to ensure moral purity. Since diseases can spread through contact, it follows that immoral people must be kept away from moral people, lest they become immoral, too. This logic often underlies guilt-by-association arguments … and strong sentencing guidelines even for nonviolent offenders.” — Lakoff & Johnson, Philosophy in the
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So, there’s much for you to fear if you routinely see things from the perspective of Strictness Morality: the world’s a dangerous place, there’s immorality (and indeed “evil”) all over the place, lurking everywhere, ready to jump out at you. And any weakness that you manifest will be punished. Even the good, decent people are competing ruthlessly with you, judging you for any failure.
news. But this regular, repeated stimulation of our fears affects us at the synaptic level, physically altering our brains. The fear/alarm framing receives continual reinforcement, and pretty soon that’s how we start to think.
Consider, for example, the notion of a corporation or big firm. It’s an entity that features often in stories on jobs, in which the frame is perhaps “job creation” or “job loss”. The corporation is the creator of jobs, the “engine of productivity”, etc, within that frame. Now consider the frame favoured by, say, Noam Chomsky: corporations as unaccountable private tyrannies. Both frames (corporations as job creators and corporations as private tyrannies) might be more or less “supported by the facts” – they’re both “true” in that sense. But, of course, they invoke two very different sets of
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News framing ensures, through repetition, that one set of “meanings” becomes prominent and “normal” in our minds, while others fade and disappear – since we never think “along those lines”.
Looking at it from a framing perspective, we see that “laziness” is the key aspect, as it’s a moral frame. It taps into (and reinforces) existing political themes which equate financial difficulty (or poverty) with laziness or “lack of enterprise”. Poverty as moral failure is a very old, well-established and darkly depressing frame.
The “lazy consumers” framing completely excludes one possibility – which is that many people are too busy, too overworked, too burdened with more pressing problems, to sit down and change their energy suppliers on a regular basis (regular enough to keep up with the fast-changing market).
The editors of the Express (and it’s not just the Express) presumably know they would get into trouble with a “KILLER BLACK”, “KILLER GAY” or “KILLER JEW” headline. But they also presumably know they can get away with “KILLER MIGRANT”, just as they know they’ll get few complaints when portraying the class of “welfare recipients” in terms of the “vile” “cheat” salient exemplar.
We generally weren’t educated to think in terms of frames, metaphors and different moral reality tunnels. We tend to acquire, instead, the idea that there is a sort of universal “common sense”, which at root is pretty much the same for every reasonably sane person. It’s like a variation of the old philosophical notion of naïve realism, although we might think of it as a more sophisticated form of representational realism.
The financial institutions that, following the 2008 crash, were (in terms of total sums) more dependent on state handouts than all “benefit scroungers” put together seem to exist in a different compartment of media and political debate; one not subject to austerity framing. After all, they are framed as respectable wealth-creators, job-creators (even if they don’t fulfil those roles) – which means they have the right kind of discipline; they don’t need the strict father moral discipline of austerity.
Although we can’t help using metaphors and frames to think about issues as complex as “international relations”, we can distinguish what is metaphorical from what is not. Death, dismemberment, pain and starvation are not metaphorical. In war, those who suffer these realities usually have no say in the cost-benefit calculations which decide their fate.
So, of course: we have different worldviews – not universal reason. It seems obvious, but needs repeating: We don’t all think the same – only a part of our conceptual systems can be considered universal. So-called “conservatives” and “progressives” don’t see the world in the same way; they have different forms of reason on moral issues. But they both see themselves as right, in a moral sense (with perhaps a few “amoral” exceptions).
What concerns me is the success (if we believe the surveys) of the mass media in promoting certain “plain truths” to millions by framing issues in ways which resonate with people’s fears and insecurities – and which tend to activate the more intolerant, or “strict-authoritarian”, aspects of cognition, en masse.
Employers benefit if workers fear losing their jobs – fearful people are less likely to complain, and tend to be more suggestible and compliant. Politicians cite “public fears” as justification for freedom-eroding legislation; insecure populations show a tendency to favour the authoritarian rhetoric of “strong leaders”. In a word, governments and corporations gladly reap the harvests of high public anxiety – as long as it doesn’t boil over into mass panic, rioting and revolution.
“Fear triggers the strict father model”. In Lakoff’s thesis, the “strict father model” refers to the cognitive frames that form the moral worldview of “conservatives”.32 In effect he is saying that people tend to think in more conservative (less progressive) terms to the extent they are being frightened. The politics of authority (discipline, obedience, etc) thus tends to dominate in circumstances where fear and anxiety are induced.
A vast amount of research has been conducted into the effects of the big A.I. algorithm platforms (Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, etc), and the consensus emerging among researchers paints a dystopian picture. Jaron Lanier’s influential book, Ten Arguments For Deleting Your Social Media Accounts, summarises the research and what it means for us. Lanier argues that these new media forms statistically boost negative aspects of human neurology: “society has darkened a few shades as a result”.
This has everything to do with framing, of course. We make sense of the world with cognitive frames. Our very idea of “real” and “normal” is defined in terms of situational frames. Our social worlds are navigated with semantic framing. Our political and moral categories are expressed in terms of metaphorical frames.
Rhetoric like this works best if it contains at least a small element of truth. Who can possibly refute the claim that some “metropolitan” types mock Daily Mail readers? With repetition and reinforcement, the irrefutable small “truth” becomes the main focus – the primary frame through which we perceive the larger issue. But it’s not an accurate or honest representation of the issue. It’s like a small stain on the corner of a large carpet – you don’t even notice the stain unless somebody points it out. But if you repeatedly focus on the stain, it may become an obsession – your primary mental
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Where I’ve mostly lived and roamed in the UK (Northwest England and North Wales), the “liberal media” seems relatively invisible, eclipsed by the tabloids. Not only is there no mass backlash against “the liberal media”, but there also seems to be no common or shared awareness of it at all – it doesn’t appear to be on the radar of most people in an “ordinary”, everyday sense.
If Glenn Greenwald’s sweeping attribution of views to UK/US voters appeared unsupported, his claim of a UK media “united against Brexit” was demonstrably wrong. Here’s what he wrote: “Though there were some exceptions, establishment political and media elites in the U.K. were vehemently united against Brexit, but their decreed wisdom was ignored, even scorned.” — Glenn Greenwald, The Intercept, 25 June 2016 The exact opposite appears to be true. The Sun, Daily Mail, Express, Daily Telegraph, Sunday Times and Sunday Telegraph were all in favour of Brexit. Counting the dailies (not the Sunday
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It’s interesting to note, however, that prior to the US election, Greenwald, Julian Assange and others claimed that with a media and establishment “united against” him, Trump wouldn’t be permitted to win. Those are Julian Assange’s actual words (in an interview with John Pilger, 30 October 2016): “Trump would not be permitted to win”.
Incidentally, Greenwald’s quote, in full (my bold emphasis), was: “The U.S. media is essentially 100 percent united, vehemently, against Trump, and preventing him from being elected president”.
These binary political tropes/frames, which I once found valid enough for high-level commentary, now look indurated – they seem inadequate for making sense of the fast-moving fractal-like chaos and complexity evident in 21st century political culture.
The emerging digital, decentralised media and politics make disruption and destabilisation easy to achieve. This appears to be the Pandora’s Box of 21st century politics. As Bruce Sterling (author of The Hacker Crackdown and pioneer of the cyberpunk genre) puts it, these modern disruptive movements are “fatally easy to assemble”, “electronically rapid”, “spontaneous and therefore rantingly demagogic, unprepared for power, and tend to be poorly thought-through. Their political results are generally awful.”
Political “populism” seems insidious when it tends towards the ideological – specifically, ideology which blames a single group or class for social and economic disasters. (“Blame it on the immigrants”; “it’s the welfare layabouts”; “No, it’s the elites; it’s the Liberal Establishment; it’s the corporate media…”). Steve Bannon’s populism took the form of blaming the media (Bannon famously said to writer Michael Lewis that, “the real opposition is the media. And the way to deal with them is to flood the zone with shit”). To argue against such populism, one must expose the hyper-generalisations
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“[P]olitical discourse is now a formulaic matter of preaching to one’s own choir and demonizing the opposition. Everything’s relentlessly black-and-whitened. Since the truth is way, way more gray and complicated than any one ideology can capture, the whole thing seems to me not just stupid but stupefying.” — David Foster Wallace, interviewed in The Believer magazine, November 2003
Jaron Lanier, the Silicon Valley critic of the big algorithm-based platforms, put it even more bluntly: “Social media is turning you into an asshole”. He was referring to how quickly political discussion on social media degenerates – which, incidentally, recalls Timothy Leary’s famous aphorism: “the only intelligent way to discuss politics is on all fours, since it all comes down to territorial brawling in the end”.
“Social media is biased, not to the Left or the Right, but downward. The relative ease of using negative emotions for the purposes of addiction and manipulation makes it relatively easier to achieve undignified results. An unfortunate combination of biology and math favors degradation of the human world. Information warfare units sway elections, hate groups recruit, and nihilists get amazing bang for the buck when they try to bring society down.” – Jaron Lanier, Ten Arguments For Deleting Your Social Media Accounts
What kind of linguistic forms are we talking about? Implied “all” claims – overgeneralisations regarding classes of people – seems to be one of the worst. This type of overgeneralising forms the semantic basis of bigotry and hate speech, as it reduces human beings to mere units of group identity. Amplification of implied “all” assertion is one of the ways in which social media algorithms statistically reinforce the most extreme aspects of political ideologies.
In other words, we no longer ascribe predicates to certain individual members of a group – we ascribe predicates to a group, an abstraction. As Robert Anton Wilson put it, “Once one leaves pure mathematics, the ascription of predicates to groups always introduces fallacy.” Wilson added that stupid prejudices in general (racism, sexism, etc) consist, “in logical terms, of ascribing predicates to groups”. And if the point doesn’t seem clear or emphatic enough, he also supplies a quote from Nietzsche: “To ascribe predicates to a people is always dangerous”.
As Jaron Lanier puts it, “This is an epochal development. The version of the world you are seeing is invisible to the people who misunderstand you, and vice versa”. It isn’t pluralist – it’s metaphoric narrowness, but everyone is getting a different form of narrowness, shaped to their monitored online proclivities. As a final word, Lanier warns us that this reduced awareness of other people’s mediatised worldviews leads ultimately to social division and conflict.
In the UK, the Conservatives constantly repeated the phrase “tough on crime” and always accused the left of being “soft” on crime. And it worked, because people would then see the issue in terms of strength versus weakness, which favoured the conservative positions of tougher prison sentences, “zero tolerance”, etc. John Major, the former Conservative Prime Minister, advocated “more condemnation, less understanding” – with “understanding” framed as weakness in the context of crime prevention.
As Robert Anton Wilson once put it, “most ‘work’ in this age is stupid, monotonous, brain-rotting, irritating, usually pointless and basically consists of the agonizing process of being slowly bored to death over a period of about 40 to 45 years of drudgery.” (From Wilson’s introduction to Undoing Yourself, by Christopher S. Hyatt, 1986).
