Audiobook8 hours
The Political Mind: Why You Can't Understand 21st-Century American Politics with an 18th-Century Brain
Written by George Lakoff
Narrated by Kent Cassella
Rating: 3.5 out of 5 stars
3.5/5
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About this audiobook
In What's the Matter with Kansas? Thomas Frank pointed out that a great number of Americans actually vote against their own interests. In The Political Mind, George Lakoff explains why.
As it turns out, human beings are not the rational creatures we've so long imagined ourselves to be. Ideas, morals, and values do not exist somewhere outside the body, ready to be examined and put to use. Instead, they exist quite literally inside the brain-and they take physical shape there. For example, we form particular kinds of narratives in our minds just like we form specific muscle memories such as typing or dancing, and then we fit new information into those narratives. Getting that information out of one narrative type and into another-or building a whole new narrative altogether-can be as hard as learning to play the banjo. Changing your mind isn't like changing your body-it's the same thing.
But as long as progressive politicians and activists persist in believing that people use an objective system of reasoning to decide on their politics, the Democrats will continue to lose elections. They must wrest control of the terms of the debate from their opponents rather than accepting their frame and trying to argue within it.
This passionate, erudite, and groundbreaking book will appeal to readers of Steven Pinker and Thomas Frank. It is a fascinating read for anyone interested in how the mind works, how society works, and how they work together.
As it turns out, human beings are not the rational creatures we've so long imagined ourselves to be. Ideas, morals, and values do not exist somewhere outside the body, ready to be examined and put to use. Instead, they exist quite literally inside the brain-and they take physical shape there. For example, we form particular kinds of narratives in our minds just like we form specific muscle memories such as typing or dancing, and then we fit new information into those narratives. Getting that information out of one narrative type and into another-or building a whole new narrative altogether-can be as hard as learning to play the banjo. Changing your mind isn't like changing your body-it's the same thing.
But as long as progressive politicians and activists persist in believing that people use an objective system of reasoning to decide on their politics, the Democrats will continue to lose elections. They must wrest control of the terms of the debate from their opponents rather than accepting their frame and trying to argue within it.
This passionate, erudite, and groundbreaking book will appeal to readers of Steven Pinker and Thomas Frank. It is a fascinating read for anyone interested in how the mind works, how society works, and how they work together.
Author
George Lakoff
George Lakoff is Goldman Distinguished Professor of Cognitive Science and Linguistics at the University of California, Berkeley. He is the author of the New York Times bestseller Don't Think of an Elephant!, among other works, and is America’s leading expert on the framing of political ideas.
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Reviews for The Political Mind
Rating: 3.6197183309859153 out of 5 stars
3.5/5
71 ratings6 reviews
- Rating: 2 out of 5 stars2/5There are some interesting scientific insights in the book but the the examples used to nerrate them and the political commentry is extremely one sided and does not give a balanced analysis. In my view this undermines the value and ligitimacy of the book overall, but like i said the scientific insigts are interesting.
2 people found this helpful
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5My takeaway theory from this book is that the brains of the 2 demographics that the author labels conservative and progressive are different, and neither the twain shall meet.
Conservative brains are hardwired with “frames” and “metaphors” embedded in their neurons that are formed by the ‘strong father’ view of parenting and child raising. The progressive brain is similarly wired but grounded in the nurturing & empathetic style of parenting.
The first half of the book is a gallant attempt to demolish the moral value of the conservative brain - that, it is claimed, is based on a superseded Enlightenment understanding of reason and rationality.
Thus the author positions himself squarely in the postmodern philosophical camp that rejects the idea of universal ideas and objective truth based on reason. That mindset under review by the author is commonly understood to have arisen from that historical revolution in thinking called the Enlightenment.
The author cannot provide any proof of the objective truth of his moral - and therefor political - value judgements, because, as most philosophers agree, this is not possible. There is no objective basis for moral judgements, so we must rely on either commonsense (that not all of us posses) or faith in a higher authority.
The only way us ordinary reasonable readers can accept his anti-conservative theory to be correct & true, is by acceptance of his authority as an highly productive & influential academic expert linguist like Noam Chomsky.
There is no place in his book for a higher authority for moral truth and moral judgements other than what arises from his and his university colleagues’ brains & study in his field of neuroscience and epistemology.
Never the less, it is a great book for every intelligent conservative thinker & voter to read, just so that they can better understand the intellectual underpinnings of the postmodern case against them, based on how our brains are said to work.
For this reader, the weakness of this academic and polemical tome was the sweeping generalizations about the nature of the conservative brain, and the nature of the progressive brain for that matter.
It seems to put forward the view that our political views are more innate, as opposed to having been formed by external factors such as ideological or religious indoctrination, or even our cultural upbringing.
I understand his book was written during the George Bush era in the aftermath of 9/11. So, what does he mean by conservative ? Many conservative brains, like those of Ron Paul or Jordan Peterson for example, abhor the political neo-conservatism of George Bush Jr and his band of New American Century fanatics that led to the militarism & the Iraq war.
Another comment about the book is that it is really two books. The first half contains a fair amount of anti conservative polemic that one would expect from a person who suffers from TDS (Trump derangement syndrome) . But the second half of the book is way above our heads, discussing his academic & scientific research into neuroscience, cognition & epistemology.
The second part of the book is non-political - as science should be. I feel this latter section is aimed at establishing his authority so that we are more inclined to accept his anti conservative (i.e., leftist/progressive) subjective polemic in the first part of the book.
I would give this book 5 stars. That is because it provides a perfect antidote to hubris and arrogance on the conservative side of politics. And by the same token, would explain the same characteristics on the progressive/leftist side of politics.
The fundamental scientific question the book raises seems to be about evolution.
Is the Darwinian view that evolution is about struggle, competition and survival of the fittest actually correct?
Or is empathy and cooperation the guiding principle for human evolution & survival?
These questions are probably heavily reductionist, and the answer is, more likely than not, somewhere in between. But does it really matter? - Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5This is a pretty good read with some pretty good cognitive science research. It was nothing ground-breaking but the information was good. As someone who is a progressive, it's a bit sad to not really see it applied, 4 years after the book comes out.
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5I was drawn to this book mostly because I knew of the author’s reputation as a cognitive scientist and as someone who was known for spelling out how cognitive science overlaps with, and largely explains, many of the phenomena that we recognize as falling along the left-right spectrum of political ideologies. And Lakoff certainly does offer some insights into how thinking occurs, and what in particular is unique about the way we think about political issues.Lakoff’s main idea, which should be apparent to anyone who watches endless hours of cable hours in rapture as I do, is that whoever controls the narrative frames of a debate controls the issue itself, and therefore always wins. How is this the case? Lakoff says that our view of rationality is largely, and erroneously, informed by the Enlightenment, which assumed it was conscious, universal, disembodied, logical, unemotional, value-neutral, interest-based, and literal. He shows several reasons why almost none of these are actually true. For example, we make decisions, to help others perhaps, that don’t actually maximize our own self-interest, and that are tied up with value and emotional content. He claims that Democrats - very often with a grating, whiny tone - remain stuck in this view of rationality. Because of this, they are still in the habit of trying to lasso the facts, build charts and models, and explain why Republicans are simply wrong on many of the issues. Lakoff claims that this just isn’t enough. Evidence, reason, facts, and figures won’t win debates, he claims. But Republicans have learned how human reason really works – that it is in fact couched in tropes, metaphors, emotional phrases and associations – and they use them to their advantage in shaping political issues and talking points. Republicans just couch the issue in the terms that will helps them (their “narrative frames”), and then repeat that frame over and over again until it sticks in the minds of the public. Once stuck, it’s difficult, but not impossible, to dislodge. But doing so would just be a matter of finding the right frame that speaks to your political basis, and saying it repeatedly.For example, conservatives have controlled the ideological frame regarding the “war on terror” for the last decade, and therefore they control many of the issues that we associate with “homeland security” (another phrase unused unquestioningly, according to Lakoff, that plays into Republican and neoconservative hands). Instead of accepting the frames of questions like “Do you think we should continue to fight the war on terror, or pull out?” or “Should middle class tax cuts be extended, or should they get a tax hike?” the issues need to be reformulated to emphasis what Lakoff thinks are the values of liberals and progressives: fairness, equality, and government accountability. In other words, re-frame the issues in such a way that benefits your own positions. And then repeat that framing. Over and over and over and over again – because, according to him, that’s the only way you’re going to win the debate.There are a lot of problems with this book, though. With an objective-sounding title like “The Political Mind: A Cognitive Scientist’s Guide to Your Brain and Its Politics,” I didn’t really want any of Lakoff’s partisan comments. I knew before opening the book that he’s a committed liberal (many of my own sympathies, too, are very much left of center), but he spends too much time demonizing one political perspective, glorifying another, and too little time providing details and supporting evidence for the claims that he’s making. I feel that this saps the book of almost all of its credibility. In order to have a book be a powerful explanatory tool, instead of a passing as a fat pamphlet for the Obama campaign, it should stick to the facts of the matter accompanied, perhaps, with some reasonable inductions, predictions, and details of methodological practice. Calling President Bush a “traitor” (which he actually does) accomplishes nothing. Furthermore, it made me realize more and more as I read it that this book is simply an example of what he was talking about: a successful example of framing issues in an advantageous way. Of course, he would be the last person to actually bring that to the reader’s attention. I think the book may have suffered from being written for too popular an audience, too. It seems that the political potshots were filler for an audience who was more eager to see their opponent trashed than to actually read something about how cognitive science can help us better understand how we think metaphorically about political issues. I came really close to giving this two stars, which I almost never do, but thought there were a couple of insights that salvaged it from being a total loss, so I opted for three stars instead. For someone interested in this topic, I suggest looking elsewhere.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5An unabashedly liberal book, written to liberals on how to make liberalism more politically effective. Even so, if you can get past that (and it’s ultimately fatalistic worldview) and focus on the cognitive science Lakoff writes about, it's fascinating and very helpful in teaching how God made our minds. The neurological insight definitely provides a scientific case for better empathy, which would equip evangelists to help convert people’s political, religious, or economic ideologies.
- Rating: 1 out of 5 stars1/5Disappointing. The Greening of America meets The Language Instinct and the offspring is ugly.