The use of the label "Cartesian" probably means a lot to you, but to me it just means a one-sided lop-sided view of the world that rests on the ignorance of out-moded dualistic thinking models. People can't even agree on what "cogito ergo sum" is supposed to mean.

You said, "In my words, one of his main points was that the new understanding of the brain is that reason is not separate from emotion/passion or frames that are created and physically located in the brain."

First, the idea that reason and emotion are not separated is nothing new. Second, I didn't hear "physically located" but even if he said those words, what he means is that patterned neural activity takes place in locations in the brain, not like something is physically stored in a cupboard.

The frames are the contextual memory complex correlates that are a combination of metaphor and reason and emotion and all three are anchored in relation to how the five senses are processed in the neural pathways.

Carl Jung talked about all this 100 years ago using a different psychological language and the neuro-scientists are just now catching up using their own language. Most neuro-scientists don't even realize that they are rediscovering form their own imperial POV what Jung already discovered from his experiential, phenomenological, and empirical POV.

If you look at the living psyche you have to look at it as a whole. When you look at the physical body, sure you can say the circulatory system is separate from the muscular and skeletal systems. But there is no circulatory system without the heart and the heart is a giant muscle, and all the muscles are fed and breathe by the circulatory system as it disappears and merges into the muscles with the arterial capillaries and reappears again in the veinal capillaries, so only in our analytical imagination can we "separate" the circulatory and muscular systems. In the living body they can't be separated. The same with the living psyche, we can use the imagination of analysis to separate reason and emotion, but in the living psyche there is no way to literally separate reason and emotion.

Now you say, "He argues that Democrats, who have an 18th Century Cartesian view that reason is separate from feelings, fail to realize that voters don't simply analyze the facts and make their decision; instead they perceive the facts through their pre-existing frames."

First, as I listen to the segment Lakoff never mentions the "18th Century" or "Cartesian view." What he says is, "The old view of reason is just false. We really reason in terms of frames and narratives and metaphors and things of that sort." What he means by "the old view" is the old illusion that people have had for thousands of years that reason is separate from emotion and that reason can triumph over emotion. This illusion goes way back before René Descartes at least to the Hellenic Greeks. As a naive view of the psyche it is analogous to the old naive views that the earth is flat and the sun goes around the earth.

You would like to argue that reason is separate from emotion but it is just the naive argument of the person who stands on the earth and points to the sun and says, "See, the sun is moving, not the earth." You admit that "what the voters are doing is actually using reason and emotion together" yet you assert without any logical or observational basis that that very togetherness is an illusion. Sorry, that doesn’t fly. Whether reason comes with a "heavy dose" of emotion and passion or a light dose, it always comes with a dose. Once one recognizes this fact of the psyche, the conclusion inevitably comes to the fore that reason and emotion are not separate.

Okay, so even though Decartes isn’t the source of the naive view that reason is separate from feelings, Lakoff does indeed point out that voters don’t simply analyze the facts and that they (we) perceive the facts through our pre-existing frames. Here’s where Lakoff gets interesting.

Cenk asks, "How come the Republicans get this and the Democrats don’t?"

Lakoff says there are two reasons together. First, he says, "The Republicans come out of a business environment where they use marketing, and for the past 35 years they have been marketing their ideas day after day to the public very effectively." Second he says, "The Democrats have nothing like this. They don’t have this system at all. ... and part of the reason is they still believe in the old view of reason, they still believe that if you just tell people the facts they will reason to the right conclusion. They see framing often as just spin. But spin is the use of framing by a fraud to try to cover up. Effective communication is the use of framing by someone who is honest and knows what he is doing. "

That is excellent framing by George! The important question is this: "Is marketing essentially spin or framing?" This is the point that Lakoff doesn’t make in this interview and I haven’t read his book to know if he addresses it there. The importance of this question is what helps explain the Democrats general aversion to the type of marketing that the Republicans do. In other words, there is something inherently and emotionally distasteful (i.e., negatively emotional) about marketing as it is done by both Republicans and the major corporations of today. So Democrats are right to feel reluctant to adopt Republican techniques for marketing their framing. Why is that?

Because marketing is essentially propaganda and propaganda is essentially marketing. If you read Chapter Six of Adolf Hitler’s book Mein Kampf you will find that after WWI Hitler was reviewing and comparing the ability of getting public support for the war by the Germans as contrasted to the British and the Americans. Hitler specifically acknowledged that it was capitalist marketing and advertising techniques in the war propaganda used by the British and Americans that the Germans leaders lacked any knowledge or use of in their failure to capture the imagination and emotion of the German public.

Here’s where the interplay of reason and emotion come in. Though reason is not separate from emotion and vice versa, the point of healthy living is to have them in a balanced state of disequilibrium and equilibrium, much as our walking depends on a balanced state of becoming unbalanced to lean forward with one step and becoming balanced again by the following step to again become unbalanced to lean forward and become balanced again, etc. Like the two legs working together to lose and regain balance reason and emotion work together to move us forward psychically. In marketing and propaganda both the whole goal is to reduce the influence of reason to the greatest minimum possible and to increase the emotion to greatest maximum possible.

Here are three important quotes from Hitler which are part of the primer of effective marketing:

(1) "The people in their overwhelming majority are so feminine by nature and attitude that sober reasoning determines their thoughts and actions far less than emotion and feeling. And this sentiment is not complicated, but very simple and all of a piece. It does not have multiple shadings; it has a positive and a negative; love or hate, right or wrong, truth or lie never half this way and half that way, never partially, or that kind of thing."

(2) "The function of propaganda is, for example, not to weigh and ponder the rights of different people, but exclusively to emphasize the one right which it has set out to argue for. Its task is not to make an objective study of the truth, in so far as it favors the enemy, and then set it before the masses with academic fairness; its task is to serve our own right, always and unflinchingly...."

(3) "The receptivity of the great masses is very limited, their intelligence is small, but their power of forgetting is enormous. In consequence of these facts, all effective propaganda must be limited to a very few points and must harp on these in slogans until the last member of the public understands what you want him to understand by your slogan. As soon as you sacrifice this slogan and try to be many-sided, the effect will piddle away, for the crowd can neither digest nor retain the material offered. In this way the result is weakened and in the end entirely cancelled out...."

These are the lessons that the Republican propagandists have learned so well. The "tax and spend" and "small government" slogans, for example, are used just as Hitler described how slogans should be used. The power of forgetting that Hitler speaks of is what Gore Vidal calls the United States of Amnesia.

Now what we naively think of as the separation of reason and emotion, is really the "sober reasoning" that Hitler describes. Sober reasoning is not a reasoning divorced from emotion but a reasoning informed by emotion while not being overwhelmed by the emotion. All marketing and propaganda, whether done by a Hitler, Madison Ave., or the Republicans is precisely intended to overwhelm reasoning with the use of emotional imagery.

Since one emotion can counteract another, the Republicans have not allowed the imagery of returning dead bodies at Dover Airbase to be seen by the public to prevent the emotions that would be raised by those images counteracting the emotions of unreasoning "patriotism" that the Republicans are able to stir up by constant use of images of threat to the U.S. such as the repeated references to 9/11, terrorism, etc..

Lakoff says he is trying to educate people about the difference so we "can distinguish spin from honest framing." The problem is that knowing the difference doesn’t mean that we want to adopt spin, or marketing as it is euphemistically called, and do marketing and political propaganda like the Republicans do. The key is that Democrats are half-assed about it. They have an intuitive understanding why the Republican marketing techniques are slimy, but they haven’t embraced the alternative, and so Democrats exist in a limbo where they weakly emulate the Republicans without fully embracing the alternative.

What is the alternative? It is clear in quote number (1) above by Hitler. It is not falling into playing the black and white, positive and negative, love or hate, right or wrong frame game. It is arguing and standing up for multiple shadings. Or as indicated by quote number (2) above it is to uphold and proclaim as the higher good the weighing and pondering of the rights of different people. To make that objective study of the truth even and especially when it favors the so-called enemy. Or as denoted in quote number (3) is it to honestly try to be many-sided.

The alternative frame that the Democrats have failed to appreciate and have been unable to communicate is the one that explains why being many sided is preferable to being one-sided. Why having multiple shadings is better than portraying things in black and white. Why weighing and pondering the rights of different people is superior to calling the different people the enemy.

This alternative frame was the actually frame of mind of our founding fathers in the age of enlightenment. This was the context that led to the belief in reason as the superior function over emotion. Now within the context or frame of the Age of Enlightenment it makes sense because the frame provides the context why, for example, having multiple views is better than being one-sided. Today however, we live in a society totally immersed in advertising and the single most important frame of advertising, that is of marketing propaganda, is that multiple views are wrong. Advertising exists not for the purpose of weighing and pondering the qualities of a product and how the product fits the buyers need, advertising exists to sell the slogan so that the buyer will not weigh and ponder but will instead be receptive to the emotional urge to buy because it is the right thing to do.

It is the marketing model, so clearly described by Hitler, that has been sold to the public through advertising and has become the ubiquitous frame for modern society that has changed why the role of reason made sense in the Age of Enlightenment but no longer does in the Age of Advertising. When people have time to weigh and ponder ideas, are inquisitive and want to investigate the multiple sides of a thing, are tired of the monotony of ideas and are exhilarated by the many shadings of an issue, the place of reason in the decision making process makes a lot of sense. But when you have to "buy now" there isn’t room for reason to have its natural function. It is the primary role of marketing to hamstring the natural function of reason.

Lakoff says that Democrats have a false view of reason that keeps them stuck on interest group politics that assumes people vote rationally on the basis of their self-interests. This is what I call the limbo of Democratic politics. The Republicans sell self-interest effectively and the Democrats don’t know that self-interest can’t be sold as the be-all and end-all if reason is given its due. Lakoff says that by identifying the needs of various interest groups and trying to sell a better answer to those interest groups the Democrats aren’t providing anything that adds up to a movement, that is, a general view of what progressive thought is, and that progressive thought starts with empathy and caring about others, not just about oneself. That’s true.

But here is where Lakoff loses me just a little. He says "the conservatives did something right, they started their think tanks with the idea of conservatism in general and then applied it throughout." Actually they did no such thing. They started with the emotion of conservatism in general and then applied it throughout. There is no general "idea" of conservatism, because as we have seen, conservatism relies on hiding the idea behind emotion. Or to put it another way, the idea of conservatism is the circular reasoning of the self interest of conservatives. If you want to join our club of self-interest then you too can call yourself a conservative.

Lakoff goes on to say when Democrats try to build think tanks they get issue by issue experts who then don’t come together on a general idea. They also don’t have what is called cognitive policy. The Republicans have a set of ideas with a strategy for getting those ideas out in public and they have institutions for doing it. But Lakoff overlooks that their so-called "ideas" are nothing more than slogans. They are one-sided, black and white ideas. Those are ideas overshadowed and overwhelmed by emotion.

The Democrats, he says, don’t have a cognitive strategy for changing people’s minds. He says the Democrats don’t understand that every policy has a moral idea behind it that makes it right and that the public must have the same moral ideas in order to know that the policy is intuitively right. Lakoff doesn’t seem to be giving due importance to the fundamental purpose of marketing as making all moral ideas into black and white ideas. That is, to make all ideas into slogans. The strategy that is missing is the one that would attack and undermine the very foundations behind marketing and the Age of Advertising by destroying the effectiveness of slogans and advertising. Democrats can’t get to that cognitive strategy because they don’t actually believe in it. Democrats actually believe in marketing just like the Republicans do, and that is the underlying and encompassing frame of capitalism that the Democrats will never abandon and which make the Democrats and Republicans merely two-wings of the same party.

In other words, Lakoff is asking Democrats to stop thinking like Democrats. At some point any Democrat who thinks Lakoff is on to something will come to an emotional identity crisis: can they continue to be a Democrat?

Lakoff says "the words that the Republicans use are fitting their frames, and each frame is part of a bigger system, and they have gotten their system out there. Their big ideas about government, about national security, about taxation and the market. Their ideas are out there. They have a system and once the system is there they can have nice little phrases that fit the system." Here Lakoff fails to discern that the so-called "big ideas" of the Republicans and their "nice little phrases" are the same thing: slogans. There is no "big idea" in conservatism that is not just a slogan. Their "system" is nothing more than what Hitler described as "exclusively to emphasize the one right which it has set out to argue for." That is not a system of big ideas it is a system of marketing. The very notion of marketing is anathema to big ideas.

Lakoff says the Democrats don’t have their system out their, but that is not entirely true, because the Democrats actually buy into the Republican system even if they don’t buy into the Republican frames. What is that system? It is marketing itself. Asking Democrats to establish a cognitive strategy of big ideas is only guaranteed to fail because it demands that Democrats have big ideas and having big ideas means you can’t abide by the propaganda techniques of marketing. Asking Democrats to adopt alternative slogans for their marketing campaign can be effective but it will not amount in any alternative big ideas or even a progressive world view. It will only mean that the Democrats gain power in the market place by selling better slogans.

Can the Democrats sell the slogan that multiplicity is better than black and white? That weighing and pondering issues is better than being right or wrong. That loving your enemy and appreciating their differences is better than attacking the enemy to defend yourself? I don’t think that they can and still maintain their identity as Democrats.