http://www.theguardian.com/sustainable-bus...green-marketingI thought this was interesting. Of course it plays into my own view that we are mostly influenced by "stories", but it purports to show that this is true because of the way our brains are structured. To some extent is is consonant with Kelly's construct theory, of which I am also a fan.
The interviewee maintains that political discourse works through the fact that our views are subtly determined by our moral positions. How policy is perceived depends on how words relate to an existing framework of morality. Rather depressingly he concludes that facts will never win hearts, minds, or policy arguments. Though depressing it seems clear to me that this is demonstrably true in many many cases.
The piece is subject to further comment here:
http://thoughcowardsflinch.com/2014/11/12/...koff-seriously/as applied to the immigration panic in the UK at present.
It is charged that the left have failed to understand what Lakoff is saying and has ceded the moral framework to the neoliberals: and this seems to be true. In the past the process ran the other way and the establishment of the welfare state was framed in just the same way: a moral narrative underpinned the principles: it could do so again. But it isn't because the frame has been built over many years by an ideologically aware neoliberal movement. The left has no appreciation of the importance of language in this sense, it it is persuasively argued.
How the zeitgeist changes has long exercised my and this contributes some insight, already vaguely felt, but here made explicit
