Book: The All New Don't Think of an Elephant!: Know Your Values and Frame the Debate
Quotes of Book: The All New Don't Think of an
When a political leader puts forth a policy or suggests how we should act, the implicit assumption is that the policy or action is right, not wrong. No political leader says, "Here's what you should do. Do it because it is wrong-pure evil, but do it." No political leader puts forth policies on the grounds that the policies don't matter. Political prescriptions are assumed to be right. The problem is that different political leaders have different ideas about what is right. All politics is moral, but not everybody operates from the same view of morality. Moreover, much of moral belief is unconscious. We are often not even aware of our own most deeply held moral views. As we shall see, the political divide in America is a moral divide. We need to understand that moral divide and understand what the progressive and conservative moral systems are. Most importantly, a great many people operate on different-and inconsistent-moral systems in different areas of their lives. The technical term is "biconceptualism." Here the brain matters even more. Each moral system is, in the brain, a system of neural circuitry. How can inconsistent systems function smoothly in the same brain? The answer is twofold: {1} mutual inhibition {when one system is turned on the other is turned off}; and {2} neural binding to different issues {when each system operates on different concerns}. Biconceptualism is central to our politics, and it is vital to understand how it works. We will be discussing it throughout this book. book-quote
