The Thom Hartmann Reader

by Thom Hartmann

  But I also discovered that even these teachings had been turned by the younger culture into machines, mechanistic steps and rituals to be manipulated to suit the purposes of those in power, into do-this-and-you’ll-get-that-result formulas.

  We had kept the information, but we’d lost the wisdom.

  This loss of wisdom has led to terrible human suffering in our past and has set up potentially severe difficulties in our future.

  The early colonists of the United States were fond of the Calvinistic notion that those who won in battle or commerce did so because it was manifest destiny or the will of their god. This rationalization satisfied their consciences as they slaughtered the natives who already occupied the land that the colonists had “discovered” and as they bought, sold, and used human slaves—as had their younger-culture dominator predecessors all the way back into the earliest records of human history.

  It’s clearly a story of younger, immature cultures interested in themselves (like any immature entity) to the exclusion of the larger community in which they live. The view was well articulated by Aristotle and Descartes. It holds that those who survive are, ipso facto, better suited for survival. By this logic it follows that those who conquer, who destroy, are superior; otherwise they wouldn’t be around to write the history books.

  Further, because better machines make better conquerors, a culture that views the entire universe and all of life as a machine will make the best machines and thus be the best conquerors.

  Unfortunately for our culture, this works only in a world of abundant resources. When human populations and their needs outstrip the resources available to them, this cultural viewpoint most often leads to war and famine. If our standard way of interacting with the world is to dominate and subdue it, our first response to other peoples’ competing for resources is to dominate and subdue them too.

  Older cultures, on the other hand, view living things as interrelated and interconnected. The world, in the words of an Apache medicine woman I met, “flows from the web of life.” The earth is alive, and all humans are a part of its life, not separate from it. And the valued skills are not machine-building or conquest but love, mercy, forgiveness, and a connection to the power of life.

  In a younger culture, consciousness means thinking, considering with a purpose in mind.

  In an older culture, consciousness touches an experience beyond thought that has to do with being, with the way we are—the power of life.

  From The Prophet’s Way by Thom Hartmann,

  © 1997, published by Inner Traditions International.

  Framing

  From Cracking the Code: How to Win Hearts,

  Change Minds, and Restore America’s Original Vision

  Every word evokes a frame.

  —GEORGE LAKOFF

  WITH STARTLING REGULARITY, EVERY MONTH OR TWO SOMEONE will call in to my radio program with a very specific story about why they oppose gun control. The story nearly always goes like this:

  A friend of mine was shopping at the supermarket, and when she came back from shopping she found a black guy (it’s always a black guy) trying to break into her car. As she walked up to her car, he pulled a knife on her. Fortunately, she always carries her gun with her. She pulled her gun out of her purse and he ran away. That’s why we need guns.

  That’s a very powerful story. So every time I hear it, I say, “Wow, that’s a powerful story. Tell me more. Who is your friend?” And the caller will say, “Well, actually, it didn’t happen to my friend; my friend told me the story about someone else that he knows.” Turns out, the caller doesn’t actually know anyone who pulled a gun on a carjacker in a supermarket parking lot. The story is not a personal story at all. But it has such power, even as a friend-of-a-friend story, because it’s a story that gives us a way of understanding an issue.

  There are other stories about gun control. In my case, it really is a personal story.

  My best friend in high school, Clark Stinson, went off to the army during the Vietnam War. He came home for the Christmas holiday after basic training and told me how much he hated the army and the prospect of going off to a war he didn’t believe in. He was feeling really depressed, went to a gun shop, bought a gun, put it in his mouth, and blew the back of his head all over his bedroom wall. If he hadn’t been able to get a gun so quickly and easily, he might have been able to get help and still be with us.

  Here’s another gun control story, synthesized from several articles in the paper over the past few years:

  A family in our community just suffered a terrible tragedy. The father was a gun owner who forgot to lock his gun safe. His five-year-old son had a friend over, and they found the open safe. The man’s son took out the gun, and the boys decided to play cops and robbers. The gun was loaded, and the boy ended up shooting his little friend.

  All of these stories are persuasive. They all have strong visual and kinesthetic elements and appeal directly to our feelings, and feelings always come first in our decision-making.

  When we probe the stories deeper, the handgun-control story has the advantage of being true.1 I’m not saying that someone, somewhere didn’t pull a gun on a carjacker. I’m sure that has happened, and the National Rifle Association probably issued a hundred press releases about it. But easily available handguns do lead to an increase in suicides and an increase in deaths of innocent bystanders. For example, one in six parents say they know a child who accidentally shot him- or herself with a handgun. Guns kept in the home for self-protection are 43 times more likely to kill a family member or friend than to kill in self-defense. And suicide is nearly five times more likely to occur in a household with a gun than a household without a gun.2

  Handgun ownership makes a society more dangerous. A Montreal-based gun control group, for example, uses a statistical comparison between the United States and Canada to bolster the case for increasing gun control in both countries:3

  The US has a higher rate of gun ownership, particularly of handguns, than any other industrialized country in the world. Approximately 40 percent of US households have firearms and it is estimated that there are more than 200 million firearms owned, one-third of them handguns. In Canada, it is estimated that there are approximately 7 million firearms, only about 450,000 of them handguns. Approximately 18 percent of Canadian households have firearms. Rates of homicide without guns in the US are only slightly higher than in Canada whereas rates of homicide with guns are much higher. This suggests that the availability of firearms is a critical fact in the high US homicide rate.

  Truth is always the most powerful form of persuasion, and it offers the most useful and durable (ecological) frame.

  Framing John McCain

  The conservatives had a hard time going into the 2008 election. None of the Republican frontrunners was a dyed-in-the-wool abortion-hating, war-loving, welfare-bashing, corporatocracy supporter—at least not reliably and all at the same time. Unlike the Democrats, who tend to encourage debate among their candidates, the conservatives began in May 2006—two years before the election—to push potential frontrunners toward particular, uniform, conservative views. They wanted to code their communications from the very first moment of the presidential campaign.

  One target of this early effort at political persuasion was John McCain. McCain was reliably pro-war and anti-abortion, but he seemed to have some trouble supporting the wealthiest 1 percent of all Americans. Outrageously, McCain had voted to retain the estate tax for estates over $5 million. If someone dies and leaves more than $5 million to heirs, McCain actually thought it was a good idea for their rich children to pay taxes on the money they’re getting by accident of birth that exceeded the first 5 million bucks. The conservatives—who care a lot about people who have $5 million at their disposal—were not happy with McCain. So, when McCain was running to retain his Senate seat back in 2006, they created an ad just for the conservative blogosphere designed to get McCain to change his mind.

  The ad is a masterpiece of f
uture pacing, incorporating trance techniques to push McCain into a future in which he will vote against the estate tax. It ties those techniques together with a strong frame to code its message.

  Here’s how the ad goes:

  [picture of John McCain smiling]

  “American family business owners and farmers are counting on John McCain …”

  [a white flash, like a camera flashbulb, then a picture

  of a man holding a boy against a blue sky]

  “counting on McCain to protect the jobs they create and the legacy they leave their children …”

  This is a very friendly opening, designed to establish a rapport with McCain and with McCain supporters. Americans, families, farmers—all “are counting” on McCain. That suggests they will support him, but the emphasis is on what he does in the future.

  The flash that comes between pictures is almost unnoticeable. That fast flash is designed to help put McCain supporters into a learning trance. It registers on the unconscious while the conscious is trying to process the words and the images that are more readily visible. The brain has to focus harder to get the visual process going.

  [Flash, then a picture of the Chicago Sun-Times against a black

  background with a quote from McCain circled. The visual submodalities

  change quickly as the image is shown far away, then

  brought close. The auditory submodalities shift as the music

  changes and becomes darker, even dirgelike. For some the visual/

  auditory connection may suggest a funeral announcement and

  evoke a powerful kinesthetic feeling/response of dread.]

  “counting on John McCain to keep his promise and show the leadership he’s known for …”

  Now the insistence on the future grows stronger. He’s made a promise, and the question is whether he will keep it. The modality changes to kinesthetic.

  [No flash here—the image changes at a slower pace to a dark

  blurred-out picture on a black background. The picture—

  which may not be consciously recognized the first time one

  sees the ad—depicts mourners carrying a casket in the rain,

  with the logo www.nodeathtax.org in white in front of it.]

  “counting on him to cast the deciding vote to end the IRS death tax forever.”

  Here, finally, is the promise. It’s a promise to “end the IRS death tax forever.” Go back to Newt Gingrich’s anchor words. What words could trigger negative emotions more strongly than “IRS” and “death”? Nothing, perhaps, except “IRS death tax.” Here those very powerful words are themselves anchored in death both visually—through the black background established in the previous shot and the barely visible funeral picture—and auditorily, through the music. McCain is thrown into the future of his promise. What we’ve been counting on him to do is end this terrible thing, the IRS death tax.

  Notice the many different ways the ad simultaneously is working to create a trance. Aside from the intermittent flashes, the ad shifts submodalities from auditory to visual to kinesthetic. The effect is that by the time this final, dramatic picture shows up, the viewer must focus very hard to figure out what is happening onscreen. By now most viewers will be deeply in a learning trance.

  Notice also that this image gets the viewer to key in particularly on the words death tax in the URL www.nodeathtax.org. At the unconscious/emotional level, the viewer won’t pick up the negative no and will unconsciously read only death tax and shudder.

  [The ad flashes again, a flash that is longer and brighter.

  The picture then goes back to the exact same image the

  ad began with—an image of John McCain smiling.]

  “Ask John McCain to keep his promise and vote to end the death tax.”

  Now that the viewers are in a learning trance, they are taken back to the start of the ad, as though the rest of the ad never happened. In this trance they are given a task in the immediate present and the near future: “Ask John McCain to keep his promise.”

  At the same time, the ad uses future pacing to throw McCain and his followers into the future. He must keep his promise because all of his supporters will be counting on him. The emotional/irrational mind will “understand” that he was smiling at the beginning of the ad because he kept his promise. That’s the future we can imagine. Now, the ad says, we have to go back and make sure that future happens.

  [Picture of McCain smiling zooms in, so his face is closer to us.

  On top of the image are the words Tell him it’s important….]

  “Tell John McCain it’s important.”

  [Picture of McCain smiling zooms in more, so he is even closer.

  On top of the image are the words Tell him we’re watching….]

  “Tell him we’re watching.”

  [Picture of McCain zooms in again, even closer. On top of

  the image are the words Tell him we’ll remember….]

  “Tell him we’ll remember.”

  This is pacing used both to create a trance and to modify the future. The visual effect of the same picture zooming in, closer and closer, enhances the trance that the viewer is already in. In this trance the viewer is given more commands. The commands appear to be directed to McCain (“Tell him”) but are also directed to the viewer: “remember.” The ad wants viewers to remember how McCain votes on the estate tax and to base their support on how he votes. And, as a powerful and useful side benefit, it directs viewers to emotionally anchor the “IRS death tax” with powerful negative states for their own future.

  The ad is a direct attempt to change the future by modifying the behavior of a candidate—and the electorate. The target of the ad was John McCain himself. If McCain votes against the tax, he will get support. If he votes for the tax, viewers will “remember” and vote against him. The outcome is assured by the ad itself, which has put its viewers into a trance and directed them to take those steps—including the viewer named John McCain, who is imagining all those other people out there looking at him and wondering about the … er… size of his vote.

  Just in case you are interested, the ad worked. The ad appeared in May 2006. On June 8, 2006, John McCain voted to bring bill H.R. 8, advocating abolishing the estate tax, to a vote.

  Framing Your Worldview

  If all that the “death tax” ad had done was use future pacing to throw McCain and his supporters into a future in which he supported abolishing the estate tax, it would have been effective. If the ad had done that and also put viewers into a learning trance so they would “remember” how McCain voted, it would have been effective. Both those effects, however, would have had a direct political impact only on John McCain. The ad would have been a powerful tool to change McCain’s vote and no more.

  But this ad did something more. It told viewers how to think about the estate tax. It told them to “remember” that the estate tax is an “IRS death tax.” That’s a powerful frame.

  We experience the world through our senses. We remember through pictures, sounds, tastes, and touch. We then sort those sensations through our feelings. That’s the brain’s folder system. It’s not easy to distill the very complex world around us down to these very simple elements, but that’s what we have to do because that’s how the brain works.

  We move from complexity to simplicity by using frames.

  A frame is a simple way of understanding a complex set of feelings and sensations. “My family” is a frame I use to think about the people with whom I have a very particular kind of deep and complex relationship, largely based on love but also on interdependence and mutual support. The frame doesn’t actually tell other people anything about who is in my family. I may think my family includes only my wife and children, or I may think of my family as an “extended family” that includes my mother, my in-laws, my siblings, and so forth. It may even include deceased relatives, like my father and my grandparents. For some people “my family” includes people who are not related to the
m by blood or marriage—they have become family by virtue of close and lasting ties.

  A frame won’t tell you about any particular content. If we speak of the frame “my family,” it won’t tell you who I think is in my family, and it won’t tell me who you think is in your family. What a frame will disclose, however, and very powerfully, is how to think about a certain set of people. When people say, “My dog is a member of my family,” we understand immediately the strong feelings those people must have for their dog. They don’t have to explain those feelings at all. They just have to use the word family and we get it. That’s because “my family” is a frame we all understand at a visceral level, even though its content is highly variable.

  Politics is all about frames. When I was in high school, the debating instructor would talk about the importance of framing an argument. He’d say, “How do you frame an argument? What position are you taking? How is that position—that frame—constructed?” He knew that once you’ve defined a frame, you’ve colored or changed the meaning of everything that is contained within that frame.

  Democrats have finally gotten wise to the power of framing, largely through the work of George Lakoff, a linguistics professor and the author of Don’t Think of an Elephant: Know Your Values and Frame the Debate. Before Lakoff, Democrats thought that the best way to frame an argument was to describe the argument as accurately as possible. They thought that you convinced people by talking about content. What Lakoff taught them—and what the conservatives already knew from having listened to people like Newt Gingrich and Frank Luntz and Karl Rove—was that what matters is our feelings about the content. Remember: feeling comes first.