Open Integral

Edward Berge

I’ve often quoted George Lakoff’s work (with Mark Johnson) in The Philosophy of the Flesh. He has a new article at the Huffington Post about returning to democracy after the recent events in the news. Read the entire piece, which is a call to action at this link. Here are some excerpts:

Which would you prefer, consumer choice or freedom? Extended coverage or freedom? Bending the cost curve or freedom?

This is exactly what Frank Luntz advised conservatives to say. They have repeated it and repeated it. Why has it worked to rally conservative populists against their interests? The most effective framing is more than mere language, more than spin or salesmanship. It has worked because conservatives really believe that the issue is freedom. It fits the conservative moral system. It fits how conservatives see the world.

The Democrats have helped the conservatives. Their pathetic attempt to make any deal to get 60 votes convinced even Massachusetts voters that government under the Democrats was corrupt and oppressive, not just inept, but immoral.

All political leaders argue that they are doing the right thing, not the wrong thing, that their policies are moral, not evil.

Conservatives understand this, liberals tend not to. Conservatives know a morality tale when they see it: Greedy Wall Street bankers, who have cost people their homes, their jobs, and their savings get billion-dollar bailouts from the government, while those honest hard-working people get nothing. Corruption. Oppression. A threat to freedom.

The conservatives are winning the framing wars again — by sticking to moral principles as conservatives see them, and communicating their view of morality effectively. In the 2008 election, Barack Obama ran a campaign based on his moral principles and communicated those principles as effectively as any candidate ever has.

But the Obama administration made a 180-degree turn, trading Obama’s 2008 moral principles for the deal-making of Rahm Emanuel and Tim Geithner, assuming it would be “pragmatic” to court corporations and move to the right, in the false hope of bipartisan support. A clear unified moral vision was replaced by long laundry lists of policy options that the public could not understand, and that made ordinary folks feel they were being bamboozled. And in many cases, they were.

Even the language was a disaster. Liberals thought that conservatives would like consumer choice. That’s why they used “public option.” As Harry Reid said, “It’s public and it’s an option — a public option.” But what did a conservative hear in the words “public option?” Say “public” and he hears “government.” “Option” is a policy-wonk term, from the language of bureaucracy. Say “public option” and the conservative hears “government bureaucracy.”

The results of deal-making in the name of pragmatism have been considerably immoral, as documented thoroughly by progressives like Drew Westen, Matt Taibbi, Robert Kuttner, and many others. Advice on what to do instead has not been lacking from other progressives. Advice is all over the blogs. Guy Saperstein is an excellent example.

We progressives are long on factual analysis, critique, suggestion — and ridicule. Rachel Maddow is one of the best, and her popularity is well-deserved. What’s more fun than ridiculing Tea Party-ers, Sarah Palin, Glenn Beck, and the like, by showing the factual errors, the flaws in their logic, and the cruelty of their positions.

But we have been dealt a triple blow. A year of failed deal-making by our side, the Tea Party win in Massachusetts, and worst of all, the 5-4 Supreme Court decision to turn our democracy into a corporate plutocracy. This is serious.

Democrats still have the presidency and a majority in the House and Senate, but the momentum is on the conservative side. Their victories in the framing wars have inevitably led to a crucial electoral victory and to a Supreme Court death threat to democracy itself, framed as free speech.

Democrats have electoral power, but progressives have not created an effective movement to take advantage of that power.

Conservatives…don’t believe that government should serve public needs, that instead government should be privatized and shrunk to fit in a bathtub, as if governing would disappear with government. But governing doesn’t disappear when government shrinks; instead corporations come to govern your life — like HMO’s, oil companies, drug companies, agribusiness, and so on, with accountability only to maximizing profit, not to public needs.

Edward Berge

Corporate capitalism had a huge victory today by buying the Supreme Court (now known as the Supreme Corp, the conservative majority, anyway), who ruled to remove all corporate political financing restrictions. Now corporations are free to literally buy whatever they want with unlimited funding of political ads. But this is how capitalism works, so should we be surprised? I’m really looking forward to seeing the “integral” spin on this one. That is, if they don’t just ignore it as irrelevant, which is more likely.

The argument in favor of this travesty is that corporations are “people” and thus have rights of free speech, which include freedom to contribute money to candidates of their choice. This will make an integral spin especially problematic, since corporations are in the lower quadrants and thus not “dominant monads,” i.e., people with consciousness. Thus the corp should not have the same rights. For those of you with memberships to IL etc. please forward such integral spin here for our consideration.

Fight back at www.savedemocracy.net

Here’s another link to voice your opposition: http://my.barackobama.com/FairElections

This led to further discussion of the Gaia Integral Postmetaphysical Pod in the Integral Capitalism thread. Here are a few excerpts:

Nickeson said:

Edward, do you think Harris in his essay Thoughts towards in integral political economy was in any way influenced by Marx’s Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844? It has been 40 years since I read that little volume, but I recognized some distinct parallels. If I recall correctly he had an idealized semi-utopian vision there which was dedicated toward the humanistic, self-realization of the individual worker and thus the society at large. It was not too much different than the visions of the early anarchist thinkers. The problem that all of them have is the assumption of a highly advanced, fully industrialized, wealthy political economy as their basis. Later it became axiomatic for Marx that the worker’s revolution had to take place in a nation of advanced industrialization or else the sought for redistribution of wealth would just be a redistribution of poverty that would have a “trickle up” effect from the lumpen into the central government.

I said:

Harris is obviously influenced by Marx, and from knowing Ray he is also influenced by those early anacharists. And yet he is integrally informed so he adds to those theories while not being strictly limited to them.

And yes, all of this revolution of the masses does presuppose a relatively ample economic surplus brought on by the industrial revolution. Yet this revolution is not communist but rather democratic. It’s a fight to introduce democracy not only into politics but into business. Capitalism is not a democratic economic system and is not by necessity wed to our democratic political system, although we can see how it is corrupting that political system by such as the recent Supreme Corp ruling. And capitalism is not by necessity wed to the industrial revolution but one could argue it’s a holdover of feudal aristocratic governance applied to the new forms of market economy that emerged with industrialization. As I said in the spiritual commodity thread, using Wilber using Marx, the economic base advanced much more quickly than the societal worldview, with the latter trying to impose its view on the new economic structure.

Perhaps it’s time for the view to catch up to the economic base? We know that democratic businesses, like credit unions for example, are a very competitive and viable alternative to for profit, capitalistic banks. Same with worker-owned businesses. And these alternatives also create surplus that does not have to go to rugged individualistic shareholders as profit but can be redistributed to members and communities for more beneficial social purposes. Harris ideas about distributing such surplus on each level under the prime directive seem integrally apropos here. All of which seems more suitable expressions of democracy wedded to markets than the aristocratic capitalism currently in power.