My take on framing

I guess labels can be troublesome. I concur with most of what you say, but you think through it in a very different way than I do. I think what you are describing IS bi-conceptualism. I think you are correct that we (opposing camps of thought Libs vs. Cons) have shared values, however, when we share those values, it is because one side crossed to the other camp - but just for that one little thing. For instance, you will not find even the most conservative family asking their 3 year old to earn their keep in the house (at least not seriously let's hope), the reason why is because they are nurturing their child, a conservative could say that they are investing in their own personal future (of the family, for their old age).

You won't find a liberal person that thinks it is fair for a dark skinned (or any color of skin) person to get hired for a high wage then goof off while the rest of employees work hard for low wages. Many Progressives would say, 'fire em, just like a strict father would blast a lazy rebel, however, the Progressive argument is an appeal to fairness and equality.

I think every issue can be pushed to recollect a favored way to relate to it, and that favored way could push to Conservatism or Liberalism.

Also, note that what you are saying has no strings tied to it (the -isms), are all manmade organizational or ideological constructs. The issues are real for all to experience (war, food, elections, media, social programs). You are correct in that you will never find a conservative anarchist.

I think of it more like debate club where you study an issue and then at the last minute they tell you which side to take. For most "issues", you can take a side and argue it convincingly if you know how.

I don't think so with waht you ar saying about the camps. I see that as bi-conceptualism, as when a progressive supports very storng immigration laws

isolationism, but that's different from shared values which can't be called either conservative or progressive. Feeding you kids could be considered as a conservative value as being responsible, and if they do it only to invest in their future, like they would feed livestock, then that's not really conservative, but something else. Conservatives are not exactly anti-nurturing, but they do have a differetn way of raising a child. They think being tough is good for the child, based on their beleifs of what the world is like and how the child will have the best chance of surviving. Isn't that nurturing of a sort? Yes -- we can be trapped by the words and concpets -- and our own frames.

A conservative anarchist? (I don't think I said there were none.) That would be someone who thinks everyone should be totally responsible for themselves and there should be no laws except law of the jungle: extreme social darwinism. You see this is in the right wing libertarians, and the warlords. Of course those people imagine that THEY will be the winners. Anarchists don't necessarioy believe in no laws, and most don't -- usually one hears that from the youngsters who don't understand what it means, and from those in power who want to distort the meaning of the word to justify their power. But "no chiefs" or "no hierarchy (at least as people with a permanent higher position)" is really the defininition of the word, and that leaves a lot of leeway in what alse an anarchist might believe.

Another aspect of bi-conceptualism, however, is "What, never?!" -- a deviation from the extreme. My own anarchistic thinking is that sometimes temporary hierarchy, like delegating authority to a meeting facilitator is useful (but that function can be rotated); like respecting the authority of an expert in a field; like society being able, by consensus, to form a police force (with mechanisms for review and making changes if there is abuse). So my anarchism falls into a "Well, hardly ever" category.

The majority of "conservative: fathers (or mothers) are not always strict, and they also have nurturing aspects. It's a radial category -- but has some validity nonetheless. Yet, there are also the shared values, like not starving your kid no matter how naughty he is -- that's insanity. Even the neocons (who are crazy) didn't starve their kids.

The danger is too much polarization, and not recognizing shared values (shared by most everyone). The labels are useful shorthands, but the reality is an unfathomable number of individual reactions based on brain ciruitry and chamistry, on experience and conditioning, and myriad pathways olong which ideation can occur. The only true description of society is every neural reaction of all people at all moments in a giver time period (and there are likely quantum-like uncertainties there also). What we need to do is guess at the odds of how many people will react in some given way to a situation presented. One powerful tool is "focus groups", of course -- impirical studies where you sit people down and experiment on them, and you don't even need to know why they react as they do -- just know that they do. That's pretty much what Luntz seems to do -- "say Washington, not government", he says in his play book. We can guess why people react differently, and talk about how "big government" is a meme but "big Washington" is not -- but statistically it doesn't matter.

I can imagine social forces and "the pubic will" as a collective mind of interactions among individual brains, but where they are all part of a vast network something like one huge computer -- and where to draw lines between everyone, goups, and individuals is not clear to me. dividing people up as liberals and conservatives, however, seems intrinsically dangerous and deceptive. Handy, but it's so easy to get carried away with it, and terribly difficult to understand once one gets a bit under the surface.

I've started reading some about social (or symbolic) interactionism ( http://www.cdharris.net/text/blumer.html ).

"Symbolic Interactionism rests on three primary premises. First, that human beings act towards things on the basis of the meanings those things have for them, second that such meanings arise out of the interaction of the individual with others, and third, that an interpretive process is used by the person in each instance in which he must deal with things in his environment."

A frame, then, is part of an interactive process with others who you are in contact with. (And that explains how a nation can shift it's ideology and frames in response to propaganda). It's a nice bit of thinking, which I have yet to explore very thoroughly, but seems worth doing.

Following along this line, imagine we are like Star Trek's Borg Collective

but with most of our communication ines down. That is, a collective mind (with each of us a few cells in the collective brain, trying to figure out what the rest of the brains is doing). A frame is not a purely individual thing -- that is, it is not a property of an individual although individuals can tap into a frame and identify with it. Successful reframing entails, to a greater or lesser extent, changing the identity of the target individuals as well as implanting the structures and cognitive mechanisms of the new frame into their individual minds. (That can be difficult -- have you ever tried to teach someone algebra or how to operate a computer?)

Can the collective mind go mad? Here is an interesting article about that. The American collective mind seems to have gone through a schizoid episode, which we may, hopefully, be recovering from.

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article13099.htm

The Madness Of George W. Bush
“The Jungian analysis by Paul Levy, of Bush and the culture which maintains him, reaches deep into the American psyche. It should be studied and digested by everyone. If the citizenry would recognize that Bush's egomania is acting out a national illness, we would all be saner. If the US could integrate the "shadow" which Bush projects upon "the axis of evil," perhaps we could achieve world peace and start to solve global problem. A MUST READ.” Carol S. Wolman, MD, Board Certified in Psychiatry

By Paul Levy

05/18/06 "Information Clearing House"

[...]

Nuance you have, but nuance they don't (meaning the general American audience). Only a tiny portion has a consciousness about their deep framing no matter what their political stripe. One idea that was pushed in the MSM after the election is the idea of centrism and somehow tied that to the need for majority Dems to take a couple steps to the center and govern from there. That is the imagery that pops into my (somewhat aware) mind when you talk about shared values. I guess that is why I see a need to use caution to label it as such especially when trying to inform interested framers. I would need to expressly make a distinction that "centrist" thinking is not the same thing as shared values.

I do strongly agree that if you took the population of the US as a whole, we probably agree on much more than we disagree, we DO have a lot of shared values. In my opinion and what I learned from the Lakoff discussion of it, Bi-conceptualism is simply choosing from that menu of shared values and reminding the listener of the stories that emphasize the progressive values like responsibility, community, opportunity, fairness, empathy (as opposed to conservative values of individualism, authoritarianism, tough love, obedience through fear). The point is that we all relate to all of these values somehow (thus they are shared), but when you hear a good story that is strongly strict father or strongly community oriented, your spirit gets rallied to one side.

This is why cons made such a stink about the cartoon film Ice Age. It's an innocent enough film about cute funny animals, but the pressing doom is melting ice. They pull together as a ragtag, mismatched (multiethnic) community to conquer their adversity, which is their world getting warmer, melting ice, pulling them away from family, causing imminent danger. However, everyone can leave feeling warm fuzzies with their kids (it ends happily ever after) no matter if they voted Republican or Democratic. Look at the flip side, Hansel and Gretel are all about disobeying their parents, overindulging on sweets (naught children!), and therefore - nearly getting eaten (and maybe in the original they actually get eaten?) by a witch. At the end of this story, Libs and Cons are in agreement, those kids should have listened and obeyed. Some might even say, they asked for it. And yes, even as a liberal parent I sometimes rule by fear, I tell my children scary stories in hopes it will cement some mechanism that will later serve to protect them (...and that's why you should never go with an adult that you don't know...).

One problem I see happening in these discussions is taking things into an even more nuanced, academic, inaccessible realm. Amongst ourselves discussions are fine, but I guess I find myself trying to take the ideas to a more universal, easily accessible level. On that level, I think shared values could easily be mistaken for the current so-called wisdom of centrism which is a term that has been drilled lately.

I like the term common ground to describe the cooperation as long as the issue is being framed from the Progressive perspective. (We all want access to a clean, healthy, natural space with our families. - Progressive perspective)(The prosperity of America is due to our thoughtful harvest of our natural riches and the ingenuity of our hard working people. - conservative perspective)

Again, I think our differences in thinking are pretty nuanced and maybe a matter of how we process information and seek clarification. I am just at a stage of wanting to get on with communicating effectively to the person with a jr. high reading level.

I agree we need to have messages easily understood by the "un-nuanced", but that can be difficult. It makes me think of trying to draw likeness of someone: it's hard to do, and it is not clear what is important or what is wrong when a drawing does not look the subject. Yes, general proportions and such matter, but I have played around with photoshop and distorted features and came up with "Jimmy run over by a steamroller" in which the features are grossly distored but still looks like Jimmy. Yet, it is very easy for most people with no artistic knowledge to see when a portrait is off ("Oh

that's supposed to look like Jimmy") -- and also to see when the that mysterious essential quality is captured, even not knowing how or why.

I suspect good framing is like that: it "works" but it's hard to put it together. The brain does very complex processing which we are not aware of. A five-year-old can run, catch a ball, speak and understand language -- but try to figure out how make a computer do that -- understand just how the kid does that!

We may need to have a uge amount of knowedge and skill to create a simple but effective frame. I know I've often heard some right-wing frame and thought: that's wrong! -- but it took a fair bit of thought to understand why it was wrong. Some time back one of the radio propagandists said of peace activism "War brings peace. Every peace was preceded by a war." That's true -- but it's wrong -- but just why and how to explain it, and reframe? That took some thought. How do you do it without getting into causality, correlation, cycular process, and other esoteric stuff? You can't -- you need that theory for a framework and then have to reduce it all to simple phrasing for the junior high reader. (Such as saying "Yeah -- and rebuilding a nice new city area follows a tornado, so I guess we need more tornados...",... to hit one pathway, "So getting the flu is good because afterwards you don't have the mumps anymore? Mumps causes good health?!?", in a somewhat different approach -- and neither of those are as effective as I like.) You could say "The sun comes out after a storm, but the sunshine isn't casued by the storm", but that feeds the idea that war and peace are natural and unavoidable cycles, and you don't want to feed that. That may be subtle, but it's there and can work badly over time, like a slow poison. It feeds the idea tha "man is hopelessly evil" -- the original sin meme.

Like you comment about Kennedy knowing the ideas and speech so well that he sounded authentic -- he was authentic -- the "rehearsal" and preparation was extenive that the "performance" was good. That's what I think all the nuanced thought and analysis does for us -- like the long-practiced master portrait artist who can turn out a good likeness with seemingly no effort at all.