[It's worth a read to get all the gems in this interview. Here's one to give you an idea [he basis his theories [the concepts of Hypocognition and Bi-conceptualism] on an idea he got from anthropologists researching suicide in Tahiti] ......note that this aligns with the essay in Post #1. ]
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".....Another topic you address—more prominently than I recall in the past—is the moral foundations explanation for the way that conservatives have organized themselves so successfully over the past several decades while progressives have not.
Actually, that was there as early as “Moral Politics,” back in the mid-’90s. It’s way back there in chapter 9—but, it’s hidden in chapter 9, it’s not on page 1. It’s something that I needed to say more prominently. In the strict father family–and by the way you see the strict father family in the Adrian Peterson case, right now, it’s so obvious, that even the district attorney that indicted him says in Texas, every family has a right to discipline their child any way they want, but there are limits that the community imposes. It’s right there, straightforward in that case. There in the strict father family, the highest principle is the unquestioned authority of the father; we see it with Ray Rice, you know. It’s right there. Unquestioned authority of the father.
What does that translate into, when you map it onto conservative politics? It’s the unquestioned authority of conservatism itself. That is, the system can’t be questioned, just as the family system can’t be questioned, and the authority in it, so the authority in the system itself can’t be questioned.
What that means is that if conservatives come up with some idea that might be useful to everybody, or at least better than other things that they’ve had, and Obama comes out and says “Okay, let’s go with that idea,” they will vote against it, and they will have to vote against it for moral reasons. And the moral reason is exactly that moral reason—namely, to help Obama is to hurt conservatism. They can’t do that, so they’ll vote against it.
Right. And then the logic Obama is working under?
Obama is assuming he can bring people together, or he just has to use whatever authority he has—which is probably true. He should’ve known better than to think that he could convince strong conservatives to abandon that fundamental principle of conservatism. What was happening before was that he had more moderates to work with.
What is a moderate? A moderate is… a moderate Republican is somebody with partly progressive views on certain issues, and up until the Gingrich revolution you have lots of moderates. Starting with Gingrich, you had his idea to get rid of the moderates through elections and primaries, to have more conservative people out there, getting rid of moderates, and that has happened. They did it. And the result of that has been a disaster.
Now there’s another major idea that is in this book, that wasn’t in there in 2004, that has to do with the fact that you not only have two moral systems, but there is a test that shows that one moral system fits what’s true about the world and the other does not. And that’s a big deal. I hadn’t really thought that through back in 2004, but one of the things that Obama particularly has said and that all progressives intuitively know, even if they don’t say it, is that there’s a difference in the view of democracy between conservatives and progressives.
Progressives see democracies as having citizens caring about each other, acting through their government, to provide public resources for everybody. Those public resources allow businesses to function; you can’t function without sewers and roads, these days without computer scientists supported by the NSF, or satellite communications supported by the government and so on, all of these public resources that are out there, are absolutely necessary for business to function. And presumably, to have decent lives you need health care, you need clean air, you need water safe water, safe food, all these things. That’s what public resources are.
And the person who has best expressed that is Elizabeth Warren. Now when Obama tried to express it right after Elizabeth Warren was successful at it, he messed it up. He said, if you build a business you didn’t do it—”You didn’t build that”—and that was a mistake. He just didn’t have a script. He just went off by himself, and he could have come back the next day and set it right, but he didn’t. He didn’t say it right; he abandoned the whole idea. What a terrible, terrible mistake that was. Because that idea is true and obvious and needs to be repeated all the time. And almost nobody aside from Elizabeth Warren ever says it. But it’s out there, it’s behind all the issues, and the point of it is that those public resources permit freedom, they allow you to be free to start a business, they allow you to be free to be healthy and have health care—health care allows freedom; you have cancer and you don’t have health care you’re not free. Having safe food allows you to be free to eat, not worry constantly about whether you’re going to be poisoned.
This is crucial in our society and it’s absolutely central, it needs to be said every day and that’s the next mistake. The Democrats think they only have to worry about messaging during an election. Messaging is constant. Why? Because it’s what changes people’s brains. It is what gets those ideas out there. And it will only get out there if the right moral system is already in the brain. With bi-conceptualism, you strengthen something that’s already there in your brain. And not only that, it has to be something that is true, that you can see. That’s the point of this. If you say these things, there’s an obvious truth, right out there, that can be seen if they’re said over and over. If they’re obviously false, that people can’t see, then they won’t be accepted...."
[Excerpt on Hypocognition:]
"....Hypocognition is a very big deal. There is an assumption that we have all the concepts we need. We can express anything we want, and this is there, officially, in a lot of Anglo-American philosophy—it ‘s called the principle of expressability. It says that we have all the concepts we need, because concepts are assumed to come right out of the world, in an Aristotelian fashion: The world gives us our concepts, we have all the concepts we need, and therefore we can express anything in natural language using those concepts, because words just express concepts.
All of that’s false. Words don’t express concepts that way, concepts aren’t like that, etc., and the principle of expressability isn’t true. What’s important here is that we don’t have all the ideas we need, and reflexivity is one of them. Hypocognition itself is an idea that we need.
I learned about it from anthropologists, that there was a study in Tahiti where an anthropologist who had studied clinical psych[ology] went there to do a dissertation, and decided to try to find out why there were so many suicides in Tahiti. What he discovered was that there was no concept of grief and no way to deal with grief virtually in any way. Instead, when people experienced grief, when a loved one died, or something horrible happened, people assumed that devils were after them, or they had an incurable disease, and they committed suicide. So this is important, that we have an understanding of who we are, and what our mental life is like, and our emotional life is like, and so on—and how to deal with it. That’s extremely important right now. We need a better idea of what our political life is like, and how to deal with it.
So that better idea would include the sorts of things that you’re talking about—the fact that politics is fundamentally moral, and so on. Right, and what those moral systems are......."
[Oh, here's a pertinent bit about Bi-conceptualism]
"....Bi-conceptualism is really important for changing of ideas. If you have those systems, you can strengthen one and weaken the other and it works by ordinary neural mechanisms. That is, once you realize that these are neural systems, that they are mutually inhibitory, that each inhibits the other, that strengthening one therefore weakens the other, you can then say something very important. If you’re talking to somebody who is not a progressive, not a Democrat, who might be a moderate Republican–somebody who is a moderate, who is mostly conservative, but partly progressive, in certain ways–what you want to do is strengthen those progressive views. The reason is this: When you strengthen one progressive view—or one conservative view, either way—what you do is strengthen the moral system.
The reason for that is that in the brain, there’s a hierarchy of frames, which is there in neural circuitry. When you strengthen something lower in the hierarchy that implies strengthening things up higher in the hierarchy, which is the way that neural system works. So that is why conservatism has come as far as it has in the last 30 years. The conservatives have been using their language, getting it out there on all the issues, and progresses have done the opposite.
The reason for this is really interesting, because progressives think that they have to speak to the other guy in the other guy’s language. You’ve got to speak their language for them to understand it. It’s exactly the wrong way. Because as soon as you use conservative language, it activates conservative frames, which activates the conservative moral system, which strengthens it, and weakens your own. That is four steps of causation, and that is one of the reasons why I start talking about systemic causation, because the brain is a neural system, just as an ecological system and financial systems are systems......"
A quote linked in Post #13, from source below:
“......The reason for this is really interesting, because progressives think that they have to speak to the other guy in the other guy’s language. You’ve got to speak their language for them to understand it. It’s exactly the wrong way. Because as soon as you use conservative language, it activates conservative frames, which activates the conservative moral system, which strengthens it, and weakens your own. That is four steps of causation, and that is one of the reasons why I start talking about systemic causation, because the brain is a neural system, just as an ecological system and financial systems are systems......”
That quote is the nugget.
Rush Limbaugh was telling us this week that Progressives and their ideology don’t take a huge hit when they lose elections, they keep on spreading their message (MSM and Big Education) and growing their base. BUT the Left knows (and so MUST we) that when Conservatism is pushed (tell the electorate what you stand for), it wins the day!
Thank you for the finest example of Ronald Reagan’s sublime wisdom in noting liberals “know so much that isn’t so.”
Professor Lakoff (rhymes with wack off), you're in a fantasy world. Name one time that Obama agreed with a conservative idea and said "Okay, let's go with that idea." [insert Jeopardy theme song]. Bzzzzzzzt! Times up. It hasn't happened. One of Obama's most repeated lies is that he wants to work with Republicans or that if they have a good idea, he'll use it. Obama has met with McConnell twice in 6 years. That's all you need to know.
And all McConnell needs to know, but McConnell too is so dense that he can't learn a thing about the guy he's dealing with.
Michele Bachmann has reported that the GOP will do nothing about the amnesty and Obama's lawlessness. Nothing. The GOP officially has no ideas, so Obama doesn't have to make the choice to adopt the GOP's ideas.