Changing The Frame

 

George Lakoff, a Professor of Cognitive Science at UC Berkeley, argues that we all see the world through brain structures he calls frames:

Those brain structures are called “frames.” If the facts don’t fit your frames, the frames stay; the facts are ignored, belittled or attacked. The facts alone won’t set you free.

All words are defined relative to largely unconscious cognitive frames. Hearing a word activates and strengthens the frame. If I say “Don’t think of an elephant!” you will think of an elephant. Arguing against, or negating, frames just helps the other side.

Politicians understand  how important it is to sell their frames to voters. And, for the last thirty years, conservatives have managed to effectively frame issues to their advantage. However, the conservative frame is rooted in denial:

Conservatism means denying a central truth: that private life and business depend on public resources. Indeed, it means destroying public resources and maximizing private control and private gain. It means putting public health in private hands, making everyone pay through the nose for maintaining their bodies. It means destroying unions. Unions are about freedom, freedom from corporate servitude and wage slavery, freedom from unsafe working conditions, and the freedom in later life that comes from fair pensions, which are delayed payments for work done earlier in life. It means destroying nature for private gain, not public benefit.

Progressives see the world through a different frame:

[Progressivism] means caring about others as well as taking care of yourself, and it means working through the government to provide public resources for all. Private business and private life depend on public resources — roads, bridges, sewers, an electric grid, satellite communication, public schools and research universities, public health and national health care, public safety, and on and on. The private depends on the public, both in business and private life.

Canada has always been about

kindness, warmth, hospitality, co-operation, community and what goes with all that, including public education, health care for all, a love of nature and care for the environment, a welcoming of immigrants, a respect for native peoples, an aversion to war. As an American, those were the values that I and other Americans associated with Canada. The centre has been empathy – caring and acting on that care.

Canadians have traditionally seen their country through a different frame than the one Mr. Harper  espouses. The next election will be all about changing the frame.

Rejecting The Frame

In the last six years, the Harper Conservatives have been very good at defining the terms of debate. That is, they have set the premises of those debates, and the opposition parties have accepted those premises.

Their first -- and  overriding -- premise was that trickle down economics works. They continue to hold to that premise, even though thirty years of evidence has proved that the benefits of rewarding the rich have not trickled down to those on the bottom rungs of the ladder. In the last election, they argued that coalition government was illegitimate because it would require cooperation with the Bloc Quebecois -- even though the Harrperites had proposed such a coalition to topple the Martin government.

Now they argue that Canada's Pension system is "unsustainable." The term is the prime minister's. But two days ago, Bob Rae rose in the house and destroyed that premise.  There is indeed a crisis. But the problem is not that pensions are unsustainable, he said. The problem is income inequality:

Yes, there is a crisis. The prime minister’s answer to that crisis is to make the rich richer and make the poor poorer. Conservatives have no problem saying that they will split incomes for middle-class families. They have no problem granting a significant advantage to people by doing that income splitting, but they have a serious problem with respect to the social justice of the people who are making less than $30,000 or $40,000 a year. That is the problem they have and that is where we have to say, yes, everyone wants prosperity, but we want prosperity to be shared. We want the prosperity to be sustainable, but we want that sustainability not to be applied and supplied on a selective basis.

The Conservatives will deny that Canada has a problem with income inequality. For them, it is a simple fact of life. But what they accept as a fact does not have to be accepted by all parties. In fact, the Conservatives are in denial. They have a record of ignoring facts. Mr. Rae has signalled that his party does not accept income inequality. One hopes that the NDP will also send a similarly strong signal on the subject.

Things will only begin to change in Canada when the opposition parties begin to define the terms of debate.