INTRODUCTION Brain Change and Social Change

    Radical conservatives have been fighting a culture war.  The main battlefield is the brain.  At stake is what America is to be.  Their goal is to radically change America to fit the conservative moral worldview.  The threat to democracy and all that goes with it.
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    American values are fundamentally progressive, centered on equality, human rights, social responsibility and the inclusion of all.  Yet progressives have, without knowing why, given conservatives an enormous advantage in the culture war.  The radical conservatives seek and have already begun to introduce: an authoritarian hierarchy based on vast concentrations and control of wealth; order based on fear, intimidation, and obedience; a broken government; no balance of power... control of ideas through the media; and patriarchal family values projected upon religion, politics and the market.
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    Social change is material (who controls what wealth),  institutional (who runs what powerful institutions),  and political (who wins elections).  But the main battlefield of the culture war is the brain, especially how the brain functions below the level of consciousness.
    Progressives have accepted an old view of reason, dating back to the Enlightenment, namely that reason is conscious, literal, logical, universal, unemotional, disembodied, and serves self interest.  As the cognitive and brain sciences have been showing,  this is a false view of reason....(T)his view   about the nature of reason has stood in the way of an effective progressive defense and advancement of democracy.  Progressives have ceded the political mind to the radical conservatives.

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     There is a problem with the Enlightenment, though, and it lies not in its ideals but in the eighteenth-century view of reason.  Reason was assumed to be:
Conscious--we know what we think;
Universal--the same for everyone;
Disembodied--Free of the body, and independent of perception and action;
Logical--consistent with the properties of classical logic;
Unemotional--free of the passions;
Value-neutral--the same reason applies regardless of  your values;
Interest-based--serving one's purposes and interests; and
Literal--able to fit an objective world precisely, with the logic of the mind able to fit the logic     of the world.

    If this were right, politics would be universally rational.  If the people are made aware of the facts and figures, they should naturally reason to the right conclusion.  Voters should vote their interests;....But voters don't behave that way.  They vote against their obvious self interest; they allow bias, prejudice, and emotion to guide their decisions;....Or they quietly reach conclusions independent of their interests without consciously knowing why.  Enlightenment reason does not account for real political behavior because the Enlightenment view of reason is false.
    Take the old dichotomy between reason and emotion.  The old view saw reason and emotion as opposites, with emotion getting in the way of reason.  But...this Enlightenment view is utterly mistaken.   Instead, reason requires emotion.  People with brain damage that makes them incapable of experiencing emotion or detecting it in others simply cannot function rationally.  They cannot feel what decisions will make them--or anyone else--happy or unhappy, satisfied or anxious.
    In the political arena...emotion is both central and legitimate in political persuasion.  Its use is not an illicit appeal to irrationality, as Enlightenment thought would have it. The proper emotions are rational.  It is rational to be outraged by torture or corruption....If your policies will make people happy, then arousing hope and joy is rational.  If the earth itself is in imminent danger, fear is rational ....     But if you stop at conscious reason and emotion, you miss the main event.  Most reason is unconscious!  It doesn't look anything like Enlightenment reason.(My bold.)
    And virtually all of it matters in Politics.

Previously we may have thought: "Well, Korzybski told us this,"  but now Lakoff really starts to be informative.  He starts dealing with the nexus of brain, mind and thought and shows what brain science has found since the 1960s, when he studied under Chomsky, and how it has transformed political discourse  to the disadvantage of progressives.

     INTRODUCTION (Continued)

   You think with your brain.  You have no other choice....Thought-all thought-is brain activity.
   Of course you have no direct way of inspecting how your brain works....We know that we do not know our own brains.
   On the other hand, most of us think we know our own minds. This is because we engage in conscious thought, and it fills much of our waking life. But what most people are not aware of , and are sometimes shocked to discover, is that most of our thought-an estimated 98 percent-is not conscious....It is called the cognitive unconscious, and the scientific evidence for its existence and for many of its properties is overwhelming.  Unconscious thought is reflexive-automatic.  Think of the knee reflex...Conscious thought is reflective, like looking at yourself in the mirror.  If all thought were conscious and reflective, you would know your own mind and be in control of the decisions you make. But since we don't know what our brains are doing in most cases, most thought is reflexive, not reflective, and beyond conscious control.  As a result, your brain makes decisions for you that you are not conscioulsly aware of . (My bold)

   He then proceeds to show the consequences of the brain being part of our body, or being embodied in human anatomy.  

Morality and politics are embodied ideas, not abstract ones, and they mostly function in the cognitive unconscious-in what your brain is doing that you cannot see.
   Why does the embodiment of mind matter for politics?  There are three reasons, none of them obvious.
   First, what our embodied brains are doing below the level of consciousness affects our morality and our politics-as well as just about every aspect of our social and personal lives-in ways we are not aware of.  Deft politicians...take advantage of our ignorance of our own minds to appeal to the subconscious level. Meanwhile, honest and ethical political leaders, journalists, and social activists, usually unaware of the hidden workings of the mind, fail to use what is known about the mind in the service of morality and truth.
   Second, the forms of unconscious reason used in morality and politics arae not arbitrary.  We cannot just change our moral and political worldviews at will.  There are patterns of moral and political thought that are determined by how we function with our bodies in both the physical and social worlds.
   And third, the embodied aspects of mind, as we shall see, connects us to each other and to otehr living things and to the physical world. It is this that ultimately determines what morality and politics should be about.  This is how reason really works.  It is the opposite of what most of us were brought up to believe.      
   We have reached a point where our democracy is in mortal danger-as is the livability of our planet.  We can no longer put off an understanding of hwo the brain and the unconscious mind both contribute to these problems and how they may provide solutions.