The All New Don't Think of an Elephant!: Know Your Values and Frame the Debate

by George Lakoff

I believe that such knowledge can lead to positive social and political change. Why? Because what goes on in people’s brains matters.

Frames are mental structures that shape the way we see the world.

When you argue against someone on the other side using their language and their frames, you are activating their frames, strengthening their frames in those who hear you, and undermining your own views.

Thinking differently requires speaking differently.

Frames are ideas, not slogans. Reframing is more a matter of accessing what we and like-minded others already believe unconsciously, making it conscious, and repeating it till it enters normal public discourse. It doesn’t happen overnight. It is an ongoing process. It requires repetition and focus and dedication.

This has led many progressives to the view that the facts—alone—will set you free. Progressives are constantly giving lists of facts. Facts matter enormously, but to be meaningful they must be framed in terms of their moral importance. Remember, you can only understand what the frames in your brain allow you to understand. If the facts don’t fit the frames in your brain, the frames in your brain stay and the facts are ignored or challenged or belittled.

And soon the Democrats are using tax relief—and shooting themselves in the foot. It is remarkable. We have seen Democrats adopting the conservative view of taxation as an affliction when they have offered “tax relief for the middle class.” They were accepting the conservative frame. The conservatives had set a trap: The words draw you into their worldview.

The strict father model begins with a set of assumptions: The world is a dangerous place, and it always will be, because there is evil out there in the world. The world is also difficult because it is competitive. There will always be winners and losers. There is an absolute right and an absolute wrong. Children are born bad, in the sense that they just want to do what feels good, not what is right. Therefore, they have to be made good. What is needed in this kind of a world is a strong, strict father who can: • protect the family in the dangerous world, • support the family in the difficult world, and • teach his children right from wrong. What is required of the child is obedience, because the strict father is a moral authority who knows right from wrong. It is further assumed that the only way to teach kids obedience—that is, right from wrong—is through punishment, painful punishment, when they do wrong.

When the good children are mature, they either have learned discipline and can prosper, or have failed to learn it. From this point on the strict father is not to meddle in their lives. This translates politically into no government meddling. Consider what all this means for social programs: It is immoral to give people things they have not earned, because then they will not develop discipline and will become both dependent and immoral. This theory says that social programs are immoral because they make people dependent.

You do not need to ask for a permission slip if you are the teacher, if you are the principal, if you are the person in power, the moral authority. The others should be asking you for permission. That is what the permission slip phrase in the 2004 State of the Union address was about. Every conservative in the audience got it. They got it right away. Two powerful words: permission slip. What Bush did was evoke the adult–child metaphor for other nations. He said, “We’re the adult in charge.” He was operating in the strict father worldview, and it did not have to be explained. It is evoked automatically. This is what is done regularly by the conservatives.

Here is the hierarchy: God above man; man above nature; adults above children; Western culture above non-Western culture; our country above other countries. These are general conservative values. But the hierarchy goes on, and it explains the oppressive views of more radical conservatives: men above women, Christians above non-Christians, whites above nonwhites, straights above gays.

What does nurturance mean? It means three things: empathy, responsibility for yourself and others, and a commitment to do your best not just for yourself, but for your family, your community, your country, and the world.

And you have a responsibility—you have to take care of the child. Since you cannot take care of someone else if you are not taking care of yourself, you have to take care of yourself enough to be able to take care of the child.

In addition, all sorts of other values immediately follow from empathy, responsibility for yourself and others, and commitment to do your best for all.

There are still other nurturant values. • If you want your child to be fulfilled in life, the child has to be free enough to seek and possibly find fulfillment. Therefore freedom is a value. • You do not have very much freedom if there is no opportunity or prosperity. Therefore opportunity and prosperity are progressive values. • If you really care about your child, you want your child to be treated fairly by you and by others. Therefore fairness is a value. • If you are connecting with your child and you empathize with that child, you have to have open, two-way communication. Honest, open communication. That becomes a value. • You live in a community, and that community will affect how your child grows up. Therefore community-building, service to the community, and cooperation in a community become values. • To have cooperation, you must have trust, and to have trust, you must have honesty and open two-way communication. Trust, honesty, and open communication are fundamental progressive values—in a community as in a family.

All six types are examples of nurturant parent morality. The problem is that many of the people who have one of these modes of thought do not recognize that theirs is just one special case of something more general, and do not see the unity in all the types of progressives. They often think that theirs is the only way to be a true progressive.

Thiiiiiiiis.

It is only in the wake of the 2008 Obama sweep that the radical conservative Tea Party movement has split from the previously unified conservative movement. The progressive world has not caught up. And what is worse is a set of myths believed by liberals and progressives. These myths come from a good source, but they end up hurting us badly. The myths began with the Enlightenment, and the first one goes like this: 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 we know from cognitive science that people do not 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.

The progressive (nurturant parent) moral system maintains a delicate balance between the empathy and the personal well-being systems. At its core is empathy for others and the responsibility to act on that empathy, but it is modulated by the proviso that you can’t take care of anyone else if you’re not taking care of yourself. That is, it centers on empathy and includes both personal and social responsibility. The conservative moral system centers on the well-being system—on personal responsibility alone, on serving your own interests without depending on the empathy of others to take care of you and without having empathy and responsibility for others. There are nuances, but this gets at the heart of the difference.

America has worked as a democracy because enough Americans have taken responsibility for each other—that is, for the nation—using their government to provide public resources for all, enough and of the right kind to provide decent private lives for most of our citizens. Understanding this requires noticing and appreciating those public resources, appreciating the civil servants who provide them, and understanding that we as citizens take on the responsibility, both through paying for them and providing political support.

The private depends on the public. Public resources make private life possible.

True even if many seem to prefer to ignore it.

It is a fact that the private depends on the public—perhaps the most central fact of American democracy—and yet strict conservatives either can’t see it or see it as a form of immorality so fundamental that it must be defeated at all costs. This is a major part of what is driving the divisiveness of our country and the conservative move to make our government dysfunctional. It is behind the conservative moves to privatize as much of government as possible: to privatize education, public health, public safety, water resources, regulation of business practices, much of national defense, and on and on.

Since the 1970s, the concept of taxation has shifted from the source of needed, and often revered, public resources to the idea that taxation is a burden—an affliction in need of “tax relief.” The constant talk of taxation as an affliction and a burden has led biconceptuals to “switch” to viewing taxation as a burden rather than something that makes our private lives possible or that creates a base from which corporations prosper.

Can progressives turn this around? Yes, but not without serious conscious commitment. The president and every progressive candidate, office holder, and public figure of any kind can start now: say it right, over and over. Connect the private-depends-on-the-public concept to something that conservatives will understand: freedom. Public resources allow for freedom in case after case, opening up all kinds of opportunities in life. It is the freedom that public resources afford that make them central to democracy. Saying it right—and saying it over and over—is advice that can be applied to issue after issue.

Conservatives have come to own the words freedom and liberty. These words weigh heavily in the conservative vocabulary. These words are among the most powerful in our politics because of the centrality of the concept of freedom to democracy. Conservatives have no right to that ownership.

I particularly like the last sentence of this.

The conservatives won the framing war of 2009, and it helped strengthen the nascent Tea Party movement as Tea Partiers were deployed to go to town meetings around the country that summer and repeat government takeover, death panels, and Obamacare. If the president had understood the conservative framing tactic, he could have undercut it in a simple way. He could have adopted the same two moral issues, Freedom and Life, from a progressive perspective. If you have cancer and you don’t have health care, you are not free. You are probably going to suffer and die (a Life issue). If you are in a car accident and suffer multiple injuries and don’t have health care, you are not free—you may be disabled for life, or die. Even if you break your leg, do not have access to health care, and cannot get it set, you are not free. You may never walk or run freely again. Ill health enslaves you. Disease enslaves you. Even cataracts that rob your vision and can easily be healed by modern medicine will enslave you to blindness without health care.

Whether at the level of pre-school, K–12, or higher education, the conservative move is to reduce or end public education—as part of the move to end public resources in general. Education is a freedom issue. But that is not now being said in public discourse. Without education you are not free in many, many ways. Education tells you about the world and the possibilities in life. If you don’t know what is possible, you cannot even set goals. Education isn’t just about filling your head with facts; it’s about teaching you to think, to notice, to be critical, to act rationally, to be practical, and to get access to facts for yourself. Education gives you skills, the ability to do things you couldn’t do otherwise. Yes, educated people have more economic potential—and money can make you free in many ways—but the freedom education offers goes well beyond money. It opens the possibilities for connections to the natural world, for an aesthetic life, for a life of ideas, for an understanding of what is going on around you, and for an understanding of yourself. And it gives you the knowledge and the opportunity to be a productive citizen, to contribute to your own freedom and the freedom of others via political and social engagement.

Re: education

Framing the truth at the deepest moral level matters. What have been called “women’s issues” are also freedom issues, and these have not been adequately framed as such. In general: • Body control. The right of human beings to control their own bodies is a freedom issue. • Respect. The right of human beings to be treated institutionally with respect as a human being is a freedom issue. Women are human beings and have a right to control their own bodies. When that is denied, they are not free. Control over a woman’s body arises in a wide variety of cases:

Re: women's rights

Workers are profit creators. Conservatives like to speak of wealthy company owners and investors as “job creators,” that they “give” people jobs, as if they just create jobs as gifts for people who are out of work. That is nonsense. The truth is that workers are profit creators, and that no one gets hired unless they contribute to the profit of owners and investors. It is basic truth. Workers are profit creators. But who says it? How many times, if any, have you heard that truth? It is an important truth; it reframes the issue of jobs from the perspective of the contributions of those who work.

In capitalist economic theory, employment is a transaction in which the employer buys the labor of the employees and the employees sell their labor to the employer. Hence the term labor market. It is assumed in economic transactions that both will seek the best deal. Unions create the best deal for the resource-employees. Unions function to equalize the power of the company over the employee. Short of outsourcing, companies cannot function without any resource-workers at all. If the company is unionized, then all the workers as a group have bargaining power that a solitary worker does not have. The alternative—taking whatever the company offers to the individual—might well be called corporate servitude or wage slavery. As the power of unions has declined, the wages of resource-workers have not gone up in thirty years. Over the same time, the wealth of wealthy investors and corporations has skyrocketed without more being produced.

Re: unions

Interestingly, Citizens United is not directly about corporate personhood and does not depend on that general metaphor. It depends instead on two other metaphors. • Money Is Speech • Nonpersons Have the Right to Speech These two metaphors form a logic: People have a right to as much speech as they want. Since money is speech and nonpersons have the right to speech, it follows that nonpersons have the right to spend as much money as they want on elections. This 5-to-4 vote by a conservative court was politically motivated. Corporations have much more money to spend on political campaigns than do unions. This ruling gives a huge amount of money to conservatives and hardly any to progressives. Speech, as we have seen, is not just sounding off. If framed and targeted carefully, Citizens United allows conservatives to change the brains of biconceptuals, and win a lot of elections for conservatives and move the country radically to the right.

Re: Citizens United ruling

Conservatives like to rail against “government” as taking away their liberty. But government by corporations probably does far more to take away such “liberty.” Government by corporation is a major unframed reality. It is systemically linked to the runaway accumulation of our wealth by the very wealthy. Because of the systemic effect of runaway personal and corporate wealth on our politics, both are systemically linked to the threat of global warming to the future of our planet, and to the fundamental split in our politics that is systemically threatening democracy in ways that are not obvious, and are therefore also unframed in public discourse.

Re: Corporations as government

Reporters have an obligation to notice when they are being taken for a ride, and they should refuse to go along. It is a duty of reporters not to accept such a situation and not to simply use right-wing frames that have come to seem natural. And it is the special duty of reporters to study framing and to learn to see through politically motivated frames, even when those frames have come to be accepted as everyday and commonplace.

I believe that progressive values are traditional American values, that progressive principles are fundamental American principles, and that progressive policy directions point the way to where most Americans really want our country to go. The job of unifying progressives is really the job of bringing our country together around its finest traditional values. But having those shared values, largely unconscious and unspoken, is not good enough. They have to be out in the open, named, said, discussed, publicized, and made part of everyday public discourse. If they go unspoken, while conservative values dominate public discourse, then those values can be lost—swept out of our brains by the conservative communication juggernaut. Don’t just read about these values here and nod. Get out and say them out loud. Discuss them wherever you can. Volunteer for campaigns that give you a chance to discuss these values loud and clear and out in public.