People do not necessarily vote in their self-interest. They vote their identity. They vote their values. They vote for who they identify with.
Metaphor is thus imaginative rationality.
Deeply embedded in conservative and liberal politics are different models of the family. Conservatism, as we shall see, is based on a Strict Father model, while liberalism is centered around a Nurtura...
What have been called women’s issues are freedom issues. Body control. The right of human beings to control their own bodies is a freedom issue. Respect. The right of human beings to be treated instit...
How can conservatives love their country, love their system of government, love the founders of their government, but resent and often hate the government itself?
What is meaningful are not the words, the mere sound sequences spoken or letter sequences on a page, but the conceptual content that the words evoke. Meanings are thus in people’s minds, not in the wo...
Opponents of abortion use the word baby to refer to the cluster of cells, the embryo, and the fetus alike. The very choice of the word baby imposes the idea of an independently existing human being. W...
If you have cancer and you don’t have health care, you are not free. You are probably going to suffer and die. If you are in a car accident and suffer multiple injuries and don’t have health care, you...
If the facts don’t fit one’s worldview, one of several things can happen: • The fact may be changed to fit your worldview. • The fact may be ignored. • The fact may be rejected and possibly ridiculed....
Conservatives have, at least since the 60s, seen their system of values under attack—from feminism, the gay rights movement, the ecological movement, the sexual revolution, multiculturalism, and many...
Again, as with creating a nurturant family life, it would be unreasonable to expect that creating a nurturant society should be easy or quick. One must be patient and ready to deal with frustration. A...
There is nothing inherently metaphoric about such claims of basic experiential morality as Health is good, It is better to be cared for than uncared for, Everyone ought to be protected from physical h...
But compare this with the Environmental Protection Agency. The EPA has not just a practical mission but a moral mission—safeguarding the environment, which includes choosing a moral view of the enviro...
A serious appreciation of cognitive science requires us to rethink philosophy from the beginning, in a way that would put it more in touch with the reality of how we think. ... Unless we know our cogn...
One can be both free and economically secure while leading a totally meaningless and empty existence.
Our ordinary conceptual system, in terms of which we both think and act, is fundamentally metaphorical in nature.
One way for progressives to counter such hidden agendas is to discuss them openly. We need to get beyond how conservatives are framing the issues publicly and point out their real goals. And
1. Why should poor conservatives vote against their financial interests? Because they are voting their moral identities, not their pocketbooks. They are voting for people who believe in what they beli...
Charles Fillmore has observed (in conversation) that English appears to have two contradictory organizations of time. In the first, the future is in front and the past is behind: In the weeks a...
Another example of how a metaphor can create new meaning for us came about by accident. An Iranian student, shortly after his arrival in Berkeley, took a seminar on metaphor from one of us. Among the...