Elections divide us. There is no way to get beyond that fact. We have to pick sides. I’ve had some interesting conversations with people who I love and respect. Some exchanges have been enlightening but others have been disheartening. I’ve talked to friends that I admired for their character and intelligence, yet I saw the worst side of their personality including some of the most bizarre statements you could ever imagine. I’m sure others have seen the worst in me at times. I'm not happy about what transpired, but I'm learning more about why it happened.


The fallacy of modern enlightenment philosophy is that there is a single right answer to every question. Secular and religious moderns are both subject to this fallacy. Modernity was consumed with a quest for absolute truth. That modern quest slammed head on into the wall of human narratives. There is no way to interpret what we see and hear without seeing the world through the lens of our narratives. This is how our brains work. Our brains associate words with mental images. Cognitive linguist George Lakoff describes this process as “framing”. But our brains don’t stop there. Our brains physically change to accommodate the binding of these frames into common narratives. The electrical pathways between millions of synapse connections physically adapt to arrange memories of the past and projections of the future into familiar patterns. Many of these narratives take the familiar form of victim, villain, and hero roles. Our brains have seen that story so many times in many forms and those roles are so familiar that we can't help placing everything we encounter into these familiar patterns. When we see a movie or read a book we immediately begin to place the characters into those familiar roles. We have empathy for the victim, we are suspicious of the villain, and we long for the hero to save the day. We do this in real life too. We can’t help it. We cast the players in our real life experiences into the same familiar roles and we expect people to cooperate. We expect our victims to be helpless and lovable, we expect our villains to be evil, and we expect our heroes to be noble. Once we’ve cast people into these roles our brains struggle to allow the characters to break out of the roles. Our need to type-cast is why a postmodern movie like “Crash” is so unsettling. It goes against the grain of our desire to keep the actors in character.

Modernity was wrong to assume that providing perfect data would solve the problems with our political debate. There is no getting past our brain's use of narrative. In this election, I’ve fallen victim to the fallacy of modernity. In fact, progressive political thinkers are some of the worst at missing this concept. I’ve entered conversations with the idea that the facts will save the day and my "misguided" friends would see the nonpartisan facts and suddenly change their narrative and adjust their views accordingly. That doesn’t work. Any data that doesn't fit into our neatly packaged preconceived narratives and roles will automatically feel like a lie. We are skeptical of anything that doesn’t fit.
When we meet someone or see a political candidate on TV, our brains immediately place them within one of our available memorized narratives. For the person beholden to the neo-conservative narrative, Barack Obama (the Muslim who pals around with terrorists and hates middle-class white Christian values) could not possibly do anything to help them. When the facts turn out not to fit our narrative it sounds to us like a lie. When lies and propaganda does fit our narrative it sounds like truth. As a result, the political battle becomes less about facts and more about gravitating toward data that fits our narratives.

Conservative politicians have done a much better job of understanding this. They’ve done this by setting the narrative up front and forcing progressives to fight the philosophical battles within their conservative framing stories. This is why we get so frustrated with our friends aversion to facts. Liberals expect everyone to be critical thinkers and actually evaluate the nuance of what is said and base conclusions on historical facts. It is an uphill battle. There is no better example than the narrative of “spreading the wealth”. Somehow, conservative sources have successfully convinced many middle class Americans that THEY stand to loose in the equation even though the data suggests 95% of us are the ones helped in the story and our future is most at risk. The narrative gets cast as the villainous tax man stealing from Joe the plumber to help Jane the lazy immoral welfare mom. Statistics about historical deficits in the Reagan era or disparity of wealth in the Bush era don't matter. There have been very few attempts to recast the narrative as Joe the plumber victimized by the rich political lobbyist villains and saved by a heroic system of justice that has made our nation a great force for prosperity and growth.

I think this happens psychologically because middle class people do not want to see themselves as grouped with “the poor”. We mentally prefer to see ourselves as “the rich” so this narrative simply sells better in middle America. It doesn’t matter what the data is. You can even supply facts (like $250k/yr) but that data doesn’t matter. The roles have already been cast. Why does a lower-middle class plumber in Ohio or a middle-class software entrepreneur in Colorado Springs cast themselves in the same role as Bill Gates and Exxon Mobile? The data doesn’t matter. I guess we all want to be the rich guy, so we cast ourselves in the other role even to our own detriment. The data doesn’t matter. When politicians talk about investing in the kinds of infrastructure that allows a middle class to develop, helps small businesses to compete in a global market place, and separates America from third world nations, it must be a lie or an attempt to help someone else at our expense, right? A character cast in the role of "tax man" can't possible cut my taxes and promote small business, can he? We long for our political opponents to be corrupt so our narrative will play out as scripted. We look for scenes that support the roles in our story. The data doesn't matter.

In the narrative of Wall Street v. Main Street, why does Joe the plumber subconsciously cast himself in the role of Gordon Gecko?