Post Election Regrets

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?

Your Weekly Address from the President-elect

Wow! What will it be like to have a president that values communication and transparency in government? We've had government leaders who fundamentally thought government shouldn't work. This will be the first change. Government can't work unless our leaders think it should work and our citizens think it can work. Stay up to date with our more open government at change.gov

Why Not Support Marriage?

Keith Olbermann issued a special comment on the recent ban of gay marriage in California. Like Keith, I just can't figure out why anyone wants to limit another person's access to marriage and all it's benefits.

The Power of Narrative

The fallacy of the Modern Enlightenment was that logic, reason, and better information could override our narratives. Modern liberal politicians and theologians assumed that we could educate people right out of their naïve pre-modern narratives. The Modern Enlightenment also produced a conservative movement that thought we could bomb the world until it loved us again. They were both wrong. The New Enlightenment (post-modernism) understands the power of narrative and knows that information and force are both powerless against narrative.

Could the presidential election of 2008 be a glimpse into the future of America’s narrative as an inspirational force in the world instead of an imperial force? Could one election change the way the world frames the American story? In this new age, will religion be seen as a positive influence helping us cast this new narrative or will it continue to be a contributing factor in locking us into older failed narratives?

We live our narrative. The lived story is at the center of modern personality theory. The theory of neural computation, as we shall see later, shows how our brains not only permit this, but favor it. The typical roles played in narratives include Hero, Victim, and Helper. A doctor may not just be a doctor, but a Hero-doctor, saving people’s lives. A housewife may see herself as a Victim-Housewife, victimized by society’s sexism. A nurse may see herself as the Helper to the Hero-doctor. Or as a Victim of sexism in medicine. A president may see himself as a Hero rescuing a victim-nation from a Villain-dictator. Or as a leading a battle of Good against Evil. The roles in narratives that you understand yourself as fitting give meaning to your life, including the emotional color that is inherent in narrative structures.
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We cannot understand other people without such cultural narratives. But more important, we cannot understand ourselves – who we are, who we have been, and where we want to go – without recognizing and seeing who we fit into cultural narratives.

We know from cognitive science and neuroscience that such narratives are fixed in the neural circuits of our brains. We know that they can be activated and function unconsciously, automatically, as a matter of reflex. And just as we – automatically, with out conscious control – Anna Nichole [Smith] and Hillary Clinton and George W. Bush in terms of such narratives, so we see ourselves as having only the choices defined by our brain’s frames and cultural narratives. And we live out narrative choices made for us by our brains without our conscious awareness.
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In a New Enlightenment, cultural narratives will not be gone, replaced by cold, hard reason. Cultural narratives are part of the permanent furniture of our brains. But in the New Enlightenment we will at least be self-aware. We will recognize that we are all living out narratives. It will be normal to discuss what they might be, to raise the question of what influence they have, and whether we can or should put them aside. – George Lakoff - “The Political Mind” p.35-36

The Road To Change

Avid sports fans form strong bonds with their teams. Allegiances to sports teams can span generations and the emotional bonds can often feel as strong as blood relations. You can spot a devoted fan, including me, by the fact that we refer to our teams in the first person. “We Won!” or “We played really bad this week”.

Almost a year ago I remember having a conversation with several of my best friends about what’s wrong with our government and why so many Americans have given up on it. We all agreed that the typical response to the word “government” was to wince (maybe even get a little sick to your stomach). We rarely ever speak about the government in the first person. The more people become disgusted with government, the less interested we all are in making it work and the fewer good people actually want to work in government. Of course, that just leads to a less effective government and that leads to more disgust with the idea of having government “help”. The cycle has been churning for a very long time. The result is that government is no longer “us”. It’s “them”. I can’t tell you how many conversations I’ve heard during the election that addressed the government this way.

So what happens when this philosophy sets in? In my eyes, the Bush administration was the result of almost 30 years of our government leaders teaching us to speak about our government in the third person. I’m sure this idea goes back for centuries, but Ronald Reagan was the first president that actually voiced this to the American people so clearly.

"Government is not a solution to our problem, government is the problem." – Ronald Reagan

That statement helped him win an election and began a wave of change in America. Unfortunately, it’s like McDonald’s telling its customers that French fries are the sole cause for diabetes. There might be some shred of truth behind the claim, but it wouldn’t be good for business. I spent a couple of decades buying into Reagan’s rhetoric. It was drilled into my head in business school. The sport of attacking government has replaced baseball as the national pastime. That attitude and the resulting decades of deregulation and privatization of important government functions that sprang from this philosophy have horribly failed our nation. Now we are in a place where any leader’s call to action or a simple suggestion of sacrifice is labeled “socialism” (or worse). Not only is that a misunderstanding of socialism, it’s a miserably dim view of American patriotism.

My friends and I came up with the idea that we need a public relations firm to sells us on us. We need somebody to sell us on our own ability to work as a team without screwing everything up. We need motivation and a hint of confidence that we could actually change this mess. My friends and I figured that campaign promises come and go, but once in office, politicians rarely attempt to motivate the nation or involve citizens in getting the job done. Maybe politicians refer to citizens as “them”?

One of the reasons I voted for Barack Obama is that I suspected he might actually understand this concept. Yesterday, his transition staff launched a site at change.gov to help us change the way we interact with government. He’s actually planning on extending the kind of grass roots organizational empowerment used in his campaign to involve us in the process of changing the nation. It looks like he’s decided to make sure that when he takes office we all feel like we are part of his transition team. We are going to transition the government together. The site includes important agenda items, information on how a presidential transition works, what staff appointments and accomplishments are being made, and ways we can get involved during and after the transition. The site even includes links to the transition resources that are given to every incoming president’s staff. Is this the start of a more transparent and responsible government? Are you curious?

So here is my challenge to everyone….

Let’s try on the word “we” for a while. Instead of waiting for government to fix itself before we will buy into it, maybe the government needs our buy-in before it could ever get fixed. Why not try? We can always go back to “they”. That’s easy. We can elect Sara Palin or Mitt Romney in 2012 and let them slash and burn what’s left in Washington and rekindle the fire of self-loathing "NO WE CAN'T" politics. But what if we can actually make this work? Wouldn’t that be so much better? Wouldn’t we be in better shape if we had a government we respected?

America Decides to Change

Bravo America!

Moral Politics

UC Berkeley professor of Cognitive Science and Linguistics George Lakoff explores how successful political debates are framed by using language targeted to people's values instead of their support. I'm reading Lakoff's new book "The Political Mind". I'm impressed. No matter if you are conservative or progressive, you will enjoy the book and this talk summarizes the bulk of his important ideas. It is important that we understand this phenomenon in the way our brains work and how that relates to our political discussions.

watch the entire lecture...

Pay close attention to how Lakoff ties this into religion later in the lecture. It is a powerful critique of the shifts in religious thought during the modern enlightenment. I see a direct relationship to the way the Emergent movement has found ways to write a progressive theological narrative without losing post-conservatives on the way.