Don't Think of an Elephant! Know Your Values and Frame the Debate: The Essential Guide for Progressives

There is no such thing as a self-made man. Every businessman has used the vast American infrastructure, which the taxpayers paid for, to make his money.

You can't understand Twenty-first-Century Politics with an Eighteenth-Century Brain.

People do not necessarily vote in their self-interest. They vote their identity. They vote their values. They vote for who they identify with.

What have been called “women’s issues” are freedom issues. 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.

One of the fundamental findings of cognitive science is that people think in terms of frames and metaphors […] The frames are in the synapses of our brains, physically present in the form of neural circuitry. When the facts don’t fit the frames, the frames are kept and the facts ignored.

If you believe in the eighteenth century view of the mind, you will look and act wimpy. You will think that all you need to do is give people the facts and the figures and they will reach the right conclusion. You will think that all you need to do is point out where their interests lie, and they will act politically to maximize them. You will believe in polling and focus groups: you will believe that if you ask people what their interests are, they will be aware of them and will tell you, and will vote on it. You will not have any need to appeal to emotion---indeed, to do so would be wrong! You will not have to speak of values; facts and figures will suffice. You will not have to change people's brains; their reason should be enough. You will not have to frame the facts; they will speak for themselves. You just have to get the facts to them...

Progressives are constantly giving lists of facts. Facts matter enormously, but to be meaningful they must be framed in terms of their moral importance.

Taxation is paying your dues, paying your membership fee in America. If you join a country club or a community center, you pay fees. Why? You did not build the swimming pool. You have to maintain it. You did not build the basketball court. Someone has to clean it. You may not use the squash court, but you still have to pay your dues. Otherwise it won’t be maintained and will fall apart. People who avoid taxes, like corporations that move to Bermuda, are not paying their dues to their country. It is patriotic to be a taxpayer. It is traitorous to desert our country and not pay your dues.

If you have cancer and you don’t have health care, you are not free. You are probably going to suffer and die. 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. When states turn down funds for Medicaid, that is a freedom issue – both for people who are being denied health care, and for everyone else to whom a curable disease can spread when health care is denied to a significant number of the people they interact with everyday.

Discrimination is a denial of freedom.

What is taxation? Taxation is what you pay to live in a civilized society- what you pay to have democracy and opportunity.

Our parents invested in the future, ours as well as theirs, through their taxes. They invested their tax money in the interstate highway system, the Internet, the scientific and medical establishments, our communications system, our airline system, the space program. They invested in the future, and we are reaping the tax benefits, the benefits from the taxes they paid. Today we have assets-highways, schools and colleges, the Internet, airlines-that come from the wise investments they made.

Systemic causation, because it is less obvious than direct causation, is more important to understand. A systemic cause may be one of a number of multiple causes. It may require some special conditions. It may be indirect, working through a network of more direct causes.

It is a common folk theory of progressives that ‘the facts will set you free.’ If only you can get all the facts out there in the public eye, then every rational person will reach the right conclusion. It is a vain hope. Human brains just don’t work that way. Framing matters. Frames once entrenched are hard to dispel.

when a company (say, General Motors) or a city or state says to its employees that it cannot “afford” to pay pensions, they are engaging in theft and the thieves should be prosecuted

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. Why?

Wealth correlates with certain forms of freedom, like the freedom to acquire goods, or to travel, or freedom of access to certain cultural events, and so on.

We’ve seen that 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. That is no accident, since your family life has a profound effect on how you understand yourself as a person.

When you think you just lack words, what you really lack are ideas. Ideas come in the form of frames. When the frames are there, the words come readily.

Women are human beings and have a right to control their own bodies. When that is denied, they are not free.

When a political leader puts forth a policy or suggests how we should act, the implicit assumption is that the policy or action is right, not wrong. No political leader says, “Here’s what you should do. Do it because it is wrong—pure evil, but do it.” No political leader puts forth policies on the grounds that the policies don’t matter. Political prescriptions are assumed to be right. The problem is that different political leaders have different ideas about what is right. All politics is moral, but not everybody operates from the same view of morality. Moreover, much of moral belief is unconscious. We are often not even aware of our own most deeply held moral views. As we shall see, 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. Most importantly, a great many people operate on different—and inconsistent—moral systems in different areas of their lives. The technical term is “biconceptualism.” Here the brain matters even more. Each moral system is, in the brain, a system of neural circuitry. How can inconsistent systems function smoothly in the same brain? The answer is twofold: (1) mutual inhibition (when one system is turned on the other is turned off); and (2) neural binding to different issues (when each system operates on different concerns). Biconceptualism is central to our politics, and it is vital to understand how it works. We will be discussing it throughout this book.