The dialogue about framing the other day leads to an interesting question: How is the sense of powerfulness and actual effective political power, connected with framing?
Let’s consider two imaginary political people:
- An empowered, values-based person who can’t communicate
- A disempowered, internally chaotic person who is an effective communicator
(sorry if these are a bit harsh!)
Progressives currently fall into the first category. They are highly motivated by altruistic morality and feel very confident about it. Yet they speak in ways that often do not trigger passion in voters nor even convey meaning in a clear way.
Repub operatives tend to fall into the second category. They have achieved power by becoming excellent at framing and communicating distorted worldviews with voters and these resonate. Yet internally their reality is a mass of contradictions and moral vacuity.
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Framing is seen by some as a way for Progressives to connect the dots between the moral worldview they do in fact already have, and the way they speak, so that the message gets across to the average American voter.
Yet it’s seen by others as a way for shrewd and unscrupulous operators to successfully foist false worldviews on unsuspecting voters in a quest for power and profit.
Framing in its truest sense would be like connecting every aspect of yourself, from your deepest essence as a person, your raw, basic perception of life itself; to the most detailed, subtle nuances of policy-making; via the vibrant, gut-felt imagery you use in explaining yourself and your politics to voters.
Doing true framing thus involves arriving an internal coherence as a person, and then presenting that coherence in an accessible fashion.
People who criticize Dems often do so claiming that the inability to communicate well at times, accurately indicates a lack of internal coherence.
Dems respond that the apparent simplicity of Repub frames points to a deadly mix of corruption and/or foolishness within.
Observers, like Lakoff, trying to help Dems, respond by saying that although the world now truly is complex and although one must be rather complex to be high functioning in this kind of a world; it’s still possible to bring it all back to really simple, vivid truths, metaphors, images.
You can in fact achieve coherence within and you can communicate it simply to others.
But to do so, you must ditch and unmask the false frames which have overwhelmed our national politics.
Therefore you must understand the underpinnings of the Repub framing model and how it hooks into the American psyche, for example your own psyche.
You must also understand how the words you say and the whole package of reality you represent resonate with the psyche of voters.
In other words, you must learn to acknowledge the deeper levels of how communication actually works.
This is something every wise farmer, rancher, general and even city slicker knows intuitively; it’s a kind of street smarts if you will.
It’s something that is often lost in a hyper complex post-modern world, full of ambiguities, complexities and incomplete projects and conclusions.
We can get so lost in imagining and creating the worlds to come, that we lose track of simple, down to earth human life functions and has from the beginning of history.
So this is about a unique time in history when we must learn to do both, be Renaissance people and down in the dirt mud wrestlers. Are we up for it?
Framing a la Lakoff should be about some deep questioning of premises.
It should go much deeper than simply exposing factual lies in Repub communication or exposing manipulative use of fear-inducing imagery.
It has to be about coming up with simple imagery that expresses well how a person and a nation can actually thrive in the complex world we all face.
You can’t force anybody to attempt such deep questioning of assumptions.
You can’t get there just by playing with words and advertising gimmicks; by reading and studying and writing.
You can’t even just have a conference about it to resolve it all.
Those levels of reframing may not be the issue.
The issue is becoming real and exposing one’s real-ness to voters effectively.
Then you are like a well-built house and you can expose your framing without shame.
It’s no longer a game or an experiment, it’s who you are.
You may already be there in fact, yet just not see yourself clearly, and so not embody it clearly.
So, reframing really has to address your whole underpinning as a person: Who are you really? What do you really value and want? How does that really work in your actual experience? What is the most simple, vivid way you can express that to other humans?
When a candidate can convey this and radiates this in their walk, their talk, their lifestyle, then you have natural effortless framing going on, you have a winner.
