Here George Lakoff has delineated a bipolar split over creation of a consensus definition of “freedom.” I think one problem with Lakoff’s piece is this bipolarity. Apparently, if only the “Progressives” would “reclaim” the conceptual connotations of the words “freedom” and “liberty” then we could “reclaim not merely the words “freedom” and “liberty,” but the ideas that made this a free [sic] country.” But for Lakoff, it’s all in the spin, not in the substance. He ends with the giveaway line: “To lose freedom is awful; to lose the idea of freedom would be worse.”

Well, to believe freedom ever existed in this country seems symptomatic of having “lost the idea of freedom” somewhere back in the pie graph.

Of interest in this article is the reference to cognitive redefinition:

“The mechanism of redefinition [of words like “freedom”] is cognitive. It is in our brains. We can’t see it. Freedom is what cognitive scientists call an ‘essentially contested concept,’ which means there will always be distinct and disputed versions of freedom that are inconsistent with each other. There is no single, universal, and objectively ‘correct’ meaning of freedom. There is a single, uncontested, but limited, core meaning of freedom that we all agree on. But that is the limit of consensus. Progressives and conservatives have different value systems that extend the uncontested core in opposite directions.”

Although Lakoff blows the whole discussion, arguing his point from one side of an artificially bipolar debate, “redefinition” is one of the tools of propaganda and enculturation used to colonize minds with things like “belief that the Regulatory System offers remedies to communities under corporate assault.” Redefinition is a powerful tool for reshaping the thoughts brains think with the words they are given to think with. Changing the connotations attached to words changes the mental outcome of thinking with those words.

Lakoff has failed to check for the camouflaged colonizers in his own head.

Yes, Lakoff’s own redefinition of “freedom” in the context of a bipolarity of ideologies simply masks a bargeful of other deceptions, including the “truth” that all conservatives believe one set of chinchilla-lined “facts” while all progressives swear by a different set of hemp-lined “facts.”

When the facts are too complicated to render any absolute “truths” to suit your needs, it’s helpful to use all deceptions and coercions available to create a social consensus about the “facts” so that an elite of sorts can create the conditions wherein we all walk around in the bubble of some synthetic “reality.”

Lakoff made one point that bore some relationship to facts: a large divide exists over just what that consensus reality should look like. There is no division over the idea that some point of view must be coerced on unwilling minds.

- Posted by BenGPrice@aol.com, CELDF