SENTIENT TIMES February/March 2005

Reframing Is Social Change

Thinking differently requires speaking differently

By George Lakoff

Frames are mental structures that shape the way we see the world. As a result, they shape the goals we seek, the plans we make, the way we act, and what counts as a good or bad outcome of our actions. In politics our frames shape our social policies and the institutions we form to carry out policies. To change our frames is to change all of this. Reframing is social change.

You can’t see or hear frames. They are part of what cognitive scientists call the “cognitive unconscious”—structures in our brains that we cannot consciously access, but know by their consequences: the way we reason and what counts as common sense. We also know frames through language. All words are defined relative to conceptual frames. When you hear a word, its frame (or collection of frames) is activated in your brain.
Reframing is changing the way the public sees the world. It is changing what counts as common sense. Because language activates frames, new language is required for new frames. Thinking differently requires speaking differently.

At present, there is only one progressive think tank engaged in a major reframing enterprise: the Rockridge Institute (rockridgeinstitute.org). It is new and growing. Rockridge brings together cognitive scientists and linguists with social scientists to reframe the full range of public policy issues from a progressive perspective. Rockridge research is nonpartisan and is published openly on its Web site. This book uses and extends that research.

It is by popular demand that Don’t Think Of An Elephant!, where the following material is excerpted from, is short and informal. It is meant to be a practical guide both for citizen activists and for anyone with a serious interest in politics. Those who want a more systematic and scholarly treatment should read my book Moral Politics: How Liberals and Conservatives Think (second edition).
Don’t Think Of An Elephant! was written and published in time for the 2004 election. But it has become even more important since then. The exit polls revealed what this book predicted, that moral values were more important than any particular issue—more important than terrorism, the war, the economy, health care, or education. Progressives came together in that election like never before in recent history. What united them in their gut, what told them that Bush was immoral, was their own progressive values.
It is vital—for us, for our country, and for the world—that we stay united. It is our values that unite us. We must learn to articulate those values loud and clear. If the Democrats are to win in the future, the party must present a clear moral vision to the country—a moral vision common to all progressives. It cannot just present a laundry list of programs. It must present a moral alternative, one more traditionally American, one that lies behind everything Americans are proud of. Don’t Think Of An Elephant! is written in the service of that vision.

What Unites Progressives

To approach what unites progressives, we must first ask what divides them. Here are some of the common parameters that divide progressives from one another:

• Local interests
• Idealism versus pragmatism
• Radical change versus moderate change
• Militant versus moderate advocacy
• Types of thought processes: socioeconomic, identity politics, environmentalist, civil libertarian, spiritual, and antiauthoritarian.

Programs are a major problem for attempts at unity. As soon as a program is made specific, the differences must be addressed. Progressives tend to talk about programs. But programs are not what most Americans want to know about. Most Americans want to know what you stand for, whether your values are their values, what your principles are, what direction you want to take the country in. In public discourse, values trump programs, principles trump programs, policy directions trump programs. I believe that values, principles, and policy directions are exactly the things that can unite progressives, if they are crafted properly. The reason that they can unite us is that they stand conceptually above all the things that divide us.

Ideas that Make Us Progressives

What follows is a detailed explication of each of those unifying ideas:

• First, values coming out of a basic progressive vision
• Second, principles that realize progressive values
• Third, policy directions that fit the values and principles
• And fourth, a brief ten-word philosophy that encapsulates all the above

The Basic Progressive Vision

The basic progressive vision is of community—of America as family, a caring, responsible family. We envision an America where people care about each other, not just themselves, and act responsibly with strength and effectiveness for each other.
We are all in the same boat. Red states and blue states, progressives and conservatives, Republicans and Democrats. United, as we were for a brief moment just after September 11, not divided by a despicable culture war.

The Logic of Progressive Values

The progressive core values are family values—those of the responsible, caring family.
Caring and responsibility, carried out with strength. These core values imply the full range of progressive values. Here are those progressive values, together with the logic that links them to the core values.

Protection, fulfillment in life, fairness. When you care about someone, you want them to be protected from harm, you want their dreams to come true, and you want them to be treated fairly.

Freedom, opportunity, prosperity. There is no fulfillment without freedom, no freedom without opportunity, and no opportunity without prosperity.

Community, service, cooperation. Children are shaped by their communities.

Responsibility requires serving and helping to shape your community. That requires cooperation.

Trust, honesty, open communication. There is no cooperation without trust, no trust without honesty, and no cooperation without open communication.

Just as these values follow from caring and responsibility, so every other progressive value follows from these. Equality follows from fairness, empathy is part of caring, diversity is from empathy and equality.

Progressives not only share these values, but also share political principles that arise from these values.

Progressive Principles

Equity. What citizens and the nation owe each other. If you work hard; play by the rules; and serve your family, community, and nation, then the nation should provide a decent standard of living, as well as freedom, security, and opportunity.

Equality. Do everything possible to guarantee political equality and avoid imbalances of political power.

Democracy. Maximize citizen participation; minimize concentrations of political, corporate, and media power. Maximize journalistic standards. Establish publicly financed elections. Invest in public education. Bring corporations under stakeholder control, not just stockholder control.

Government for a better future. Government does what America’s future requires and what the private sector cannot do—or is not doing—effectively, ethically, or at all. It is the job of government to promote and, if possible, provide sufficient protection, greater democracy, more freedom, a better environment, broader prosperity, better health, greater fulfillment in life, less violence, and the building and maintaining of public infrastructure.

Ethical business. Our values apply to business. In the course of making money by providing products and services, businesses should not adversely affect the public good, as defined by the above values.

Values-based foreign policy. The same values governing domestic policy should apply to foreign policy whenever possible.

Here are a few examples where progressive domestic policy translates into foreign policy:

• Protection translates into an effective military for defense and peacekeeping.
• Building and maintaining a strong community translates into building and maintaining strong alliances and engaging in effective diplomacy.
• Caring and responsibility translate into caring about and acting responsibly for the world’s people; world health, hunger, poverty, and ecology; population control (and the best method, women’s education); and rights for women, children, prisoners, refugees, and ethnic minorities.

All of these would be concerns of a values-based foreign policy.

Policy Directions

Given progressive values and principles, progressives can agree on basic policy directions. Policy directions are at a higher level than specific policies. Progressives divide on specific policy details while agreeing on directions. Here are some of the many policy directions they agree on.

The economy. An economy centered on innovation that creates millions of good-paying jobs and provides every American a fair opportunity to prosper.

Security. Through military strength, strong diplomatic alliances, and wise foreign and domestic policy, every American will be safeguarded at home, and America’s role in the world will be strengthened by helping people around the world live better lives.

Health. Every American should have access to a state-of-the-art, affordable health care system.

Education. A vibrant, well-funded, and expanding public education system, with the highest standards for every child and school, where teachers nurture children’s minds and often the children themselves, and where children are taught the truth about their nation—its wonders and its blemishes.

Early childhood. Every child’s brain is shaped crucially by early experiences. We support high-quality early childhood education.

Environment. A clean, healthy, and safe environment for ourselves and our children: water you can drink and air you can breathe. Polluters pay for the damage they cause.

• Avoid the usual mistakes. Remember, don’t just negate the other person’s claims; reframe. The facts unframed will not set you free. You cannot win just be stating the true facts and showing that they contradict your opponent’s claims. Frames trump facts. His frames will stay and the facts will bounce off. Always reframe.

• If you remember nothing else about framing, remember this: Once your frame is accepted into the discourse, everything you say is just common sense. Why? Because that’s what common sense is: reasoning within a commonplace, accepted frame.

• Never answer a question framed from your opponent’s point of view. Always reframe the question to fit your values and your frames. This may make you uncomfortable, since normal discourse styles require you to directly answer questions posed. That is a trap. Practice changing frames.

• Be sincere. Use frames you really believe in, based on values you really hold.

• A useful thing to do is to use rhetorical questions: Wouldn’t it be better if … ? Such a question should be chosen to presuppose your frame. Example: Wouldn’t it be better if we had a president who went to war with a plan to secure the peace?

• Stay away from set-ups. Fox News shows and other rabidly conservative shows try to put you in an impossible situation, where a conservative host sets the frame and insists on it, where you don’t control the floor, can’t present your case, and are not accorded enough respect to be taken seriously. If the game is fixed, don’t play.

• Tell a story. Find stories where your frame is built into the story. Build up a stock of effective stories.

• Always start with values, preferably values all Americans share like security, prosperity, opportunity, freedom, and so on. Pick the values most relevant to the frame you want to shift to. Try to win the argument at the values level. Pick a frame where your position exemplifies a value everyone holds—like fairness. Example: Suppose someone argues against a form of universal health care. If people don’t have health care, he argues, it’s their own fault. They’re not working hard enough or not managing their money properly. We shouldn’t have to pay for their lack of initiative or their financial mismanagement. Frame shift: Most of the forty million people who can’t afford health care work full-time at essential jobs that cannot pay enough to get them health care. Yet these working people support the lifestyles of the top three-quarters of our population. Some forty million people have to do those hard jobs—or you don’t have your lifestyle. America promises a decent standard of living in return for hard work. These workers have earned their health care by doing essential jobs to support the economy. There is money in the economy to pay them. Tax credits are the easiest mechanism. Their health care would be covered by having the top 2 percent pay the same taxes they used to pay. It’s only fair that the wealthy pay for their own lifestyles, and that people who provide those lifestyles get paid fairly for it.

• Be prepared. You should be able to recognize the basic frames that conservatives use, and you should prepare frames to shift to. The Rockridge Institute Web site (www.rockridgeinstitute.org) posts nonpartisan analyses of frame shifting. Example: A tax cut proponent says, We should get rid of taxes. People know how to spend their money better than the government. Reframe: The government has made very wise investments with taxpayer money. Our interstate highway system, for example. You couldn’t build a highway with your tax refund. The government built them. Or the Internet, paid for by taxpayer investment. You could not make your own Internet. Most of our scientific advances have been made through funding from the National Science Foundation and the National Institute of Health—great government investments of taxpayer money. No matter how wisely you spent your own money, you’d never get those scientific and medical breakthroughs. And how far would you get hiring your own army with your tax refund?

• Use wedge issues, cases where your opponent will violate some belief he holds no matter what he says. Example: Suppose he brings up abortion. Raise the issue of military rape treatment. Women soldiers who are raped (by our own soldiers, in Iraq, or on military bases) and who subsequently get pregnant presently cannot end their pregnancies in a military hospital, because abortions are not permitted there. A Military Rape Treatment Act would allow our raped women soldiers to be treated in military hospitals to end their rape-induced pregnancies. The wedge: If he agrees, he sanctions abortion, in government-supported facilities no less, where doctors would have to be trained and facilities provided for terminating pregnancies. If he disagrees, he dishonors our women soldiers who are putting their lives on the line for him. To the women it is like being raped twice—once by a criminal soldier and once by a self-righteous conservative.

• An opponent may be disingenuous if his real goal isn’t what he says his goal is. Politely point out the real goal, then reframe. Example: Suppose he starts touting smaller government. Point out that conservatives don’t really want smaller government. They don’t want to eliminate the military, or the FBI, or the Treasury and Commerce Departments, or the nine-tenths of the courts that support corporate law. It is big government that they like. What they really want to do away with is social programs—programs that invest in people, to help people to help themselves. Such a position contradicts the values the country was founded on—the idea of a community where people pull together to help each other. From John Winthrop on, that is what our nation has stood for.

• Your opponent may use language that means the opposite of what he says, called Orwellian language. Realize that he is weak on this issue. Use language that accurately describes what he’s talking about to frame the discussion your way. Example: Suppose he cites the “Healthy Forests Initiative” as a balanced approach to the environment. Point out that it should be called “No Tree Left Behind” because it permits and promotes clear-cutting, which is destructive to forests and other living things in the forest habitat. Use the name to point out that the public likes forests, doesn’t want them clear-cut, and that the use of the phony name shows weakness on the issue. Most people want to preserve the grandeur of America, not destroy it.

• Remember once more that our goal is to unite our country behind our values, the best of traditional American values. Right-wing ideologues need to divide our country via a nasty cultural civil war. They need discord and shouting and name-calling and put-downs. We win with civil discourse and respectful cooperative conversation. Why? Because it is an instance of the nurturant model at the level of communication, and our job is to evoke and maintain the nurturant model.

Those are a lot of guidelines. But there are only four really important ones—Show respect; Respond by reframing; Think and talk at the level of values; Say what you believe.

Excerpted with permission from Chapter 8 & 10 of Don’t Think Of An Elephant! Know Your Values and Frame the Debate, published by Chelsea Green Publishing, PO Box 428, White River Junction, VT 05001; (802) 295-6300;.chelseagreen.com. See the October/November ’04 issue of Sentient Times (SentientTimes.com) for Chapter One: Framing 101: How to Take Back Public Discourse.

Not too long ago, George Lakoff was relatively unknown. He was famous in academic circles and favored by a small group of progressive and media insiders who grasped the implications of his genius. But Lakoff was clearly a rarified taste, like a great reserve of pinot noir that few people drank.

But not anymore. George Lakoff is on the road to fame and renown, read and listened to by presidential and congressional candidates, leaders of major national groups, and increasingly, the average American. His new book, Don’t Think Of An Elephant! Know Your Values and Frame the Debate, from which the following piece is excerpted, is the next big step in presenting Lakoff and the science and art of framing.

Lakoff’s growing influence and acceptance has happened for several reasons. First, in 2000, progressives and independents suddenly found ourselves in a nightmare. After the Supreme Court gave the election to George W. Bush, Republicans were in charge of virtually everything. But in our hearts we knew that their ideas were far out of the mainstream and things were totally out of whack. We found ourselves living in a country where what was considered extreme just a decade ago was now national policy. How could this have happened?

When we tried to figure out what had occurred, the one person who had the best explanation, who knew all along that the radical right-wing transformation was underway, was George Lakoff. Lakoff provided the narrative that made the most sense, and the research to back up his analysis. He reminded us how, over a period of forty years, the radical right and its rich patrons had invested many hundreds of millions of dollars in think tanks, young talent, spokespeople, and communications capacity that had essentially transformed the language of American politics. And when you control the language, you control the message, and the corporate media does the rest.

Lakoff knew better than anyone else how and why this transformation had happened, and more importantly, what could be done about it. He took it upon himself to become the pied piper of media framing—how we have to be cognizant about how we communicate, the words we choose and the framing we evoke, at all times. Progressives have been under the illusion that if only people understood the facts, we’d be fine. Wrong. The facts alone will not set us free. People make decisions about politics and candidates based on their value systems, and the language and frames that invoke those values.

And that may answer the question of why many people seem to be voting against their own interests. Their values—strict authoritarian values in the conservatives’ case—are what motivate them to enter the voting booth.

We now understood how terms like “tax relief,” “partial-birth abortion,” and “death tax” were invented by the right to invoke frames and dominate debates. Even our allies were using language invented by the conservatives, shooting themselves in the foot every time. An important element of understanding framing is that you can learn a valuable aspect in thirty seconds. If nothing else, if we all can understand the lesson of “Don’t think of an elephant”—that attacking our opponents’ frame reinforces their message—we will have taken a giant step forward. Our job is to frame our own values, vision, and mission, and to avoid attacking theirs because if we do, it only keeps their ideas in the forefront.

Readers of Don’t Think Of An Elephant! Know Your Values and Frame the Debate are part of a growing community of people who better understand how to move forward and communicate more effectively. But the book is just the first step. Language and framing is all about metaphor, and while the basic precepts are easy to grasp, reclaiming the language requires some serious thinking and lots of practice. Don’t Think Of An Elepahant! is the field guide which can help us start framing our messages and vision for the future.

And, dear reader, if you care about social change, part of your job is to be a “viral marketer” and help spread the ideas in this book. Buy ten copies and give them out to friends, family, and allies in working for change. If we are serious about changing our country, if we are going to take it back from the right-wing fundamentalists, then this book is a great place to start. For no matter who is president in 2005, the struggle will go on. The right has a long head start, but we can catch up fast. And if we do it right, our lives will never be the same.
- Don Hazen, Executive Editor of AlterNet

When I teach the study of framing at Berkeley, in Cognitive Science 101, the first thing I do is I give my students an exercise. The exercise is: Don’t think of an elephant! Whatever you do, do not think of an elephant. I’ve never found a student who is able to do this. Every word, like elephant, evokes a frame, which can be an image or other kinds of knowledge: Elephants are large, have floppy ears and a trunk, are associated with circuses, and so on. The word is defined relative to that frame. When we negate a frame, we evoke the frame.

Richard Nixon found that out the hard way. While under pressure to resign during the Watergate scandal, Nixon addressed the nation on TV. He stood before the nation and said, “I am not a crook.” And everybody thought about him as a crook. This gives us a basic principle of framing, for when you are arguing against the other side: Do not use their language. Their language picks out a frame—and it won’t be the frame you want. Let me give you an example. On the day that George W. Bush arrived in the White House, the phrase “tax relief” started coming out of the White House. It still is: It was used a number of times in this year’s State of the Union address, and is showing up more and more in pre-election speeches four years later. Think of the framing for relief. For there to be relief there must be an affliction, an afflicted party, and a reliever who removes the affliction and is therefore a hero. And if people try to stop the hero, those people are villains for trying to prevent relief.

When the word tax is added to relief, the result is a metaphor: Taxation is an affliction. And the person who takes it away is a hero, and anyone who tries to stop him is a bad guy. This is a frame. It is made up of ideas, like affliction and hero. The language that evokes the frame comes out of the White House, and it goes into press releases, goes to every radio station, every TV station, every newspaper. And soon the New York Times is using tax relief. And it is not only on Fox; it is on CNN, it is on NBC, it is on every station because it is “the president’s tax-relief plan.” And soon the Democrats are using tax relief—and shooting themselves in the foot.

It is remarkable. I was asked by the Democratic senators to visit their caucus just before the president’s tax plan was to come up in the Senate. They had their version of the tax plan, and it was their version of tax relief. They were accepting the conservative frame. The conservatives had set a trap: The words draw you into their worldview.

That is what framing is about. Framing is about getting language that fits your worldview. It is not just language. The ideas are primary—and the language carries those ideas, evokes those ideas. There was another good example in the State of the Union address in January. This one was a remarkable metaphor to find in a State of the Union address. Bush said, “We do not need a permission slip to defend America.” What is going on with a permission slip? He could have just said, “We won’t ask permission.” But talking about a permission slip is different. Think about when you last needed a permission slip. Think about who has to ask for a permission slip. Think about who is being asked. Think about the relationship between them. -George Lakoff

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