Go here to read the report online or download the PDF and share it with your friends.

I hope this is helpful for bringing the Occupy Movement closer to those legislators who can directly implement policy goals that align with critiques made by OWS throughout last year.

Here’s to a 2012 that transforms American politics for the better!

Sincerely,

Joe Brewer
Director, Cognitive Policy Works

And now, as we enter the new year, I would like to share how I see the changing landscape of strategic action as informed by my knowledge of political frames and complex pattern formation.  The ideas presented below are meant to help shed light on the underlying forces of change that have given Occupy its core strengths up till now and to prepare change makers around the world for larger impacts in 2012 and beyond.

Before discussing the political frames that gave Occupy its strength, it will be helpful to be sure we are all on the same page about what they are and how they function in society.  Briefly stated, semantic frames are the conceptual structures that allow us to make sense of the world around us.  They are:

1. Physically wired into our brains as patterns of neural connectivity;
2. Emergent patterns that arise when our bodies interact with the world around us;
3. The roles, relationships, and inferential logic of human thought.

In everyday terms, a semantic frame is the intuitive logic that shapes what we understand the world to be moment-by-moment.  They tell us what is real and knowable and how to behave appropriately in social settings.

An example from everyday life is the frame of despair.  We can all relate to the deep anguish experienced when in a state of despair.  Yet we may not be aware that it makes sense to us as a kind of spatial logic, built on the conceptual metaphor of An Emotion Is A Spatial Container.  We tend to see it as something we reside in for a period of time, then come out of later when conditions have changed.  This logic allows us to treat our emotional experience as a place we reside in for a fixed period of time.  The frame is part of our bodily experience.  And it allows us to make sense of what is happening around us.

Of course, there are many semantic frames of relevance to students of politics and culture.  A vitally important example analyzed by the linguist who brought frame analysis to the political world, George Lakoff, is the use of military language to describe the invasion of Iraq as an unending war.  Despite the fact that the “Iraq War” only lasted a few weeks (culminating in the capture of Baghdad in early 2003), our political leaders and media figures continued to deploy a frame of war to characterize what would more accurately be described as an ongoing occupation.  Note how the logic of occupation is profoundly different from that of war:

• During an occupation the use of military tactics to resolve issues tends to fail.  Diplomacy and political solutions are what is needed to resolve conflict;
• During an occupation the death of civilians is an unacceptable loss of innocent lives.  Civilian deaths are seen as unavoidable “collateral damage” during a war;
• During an occupation the role of politicians is to be humanitarian leaders, elevating human security in the region impacted by conflict.  Politicians become military leaders during times of war and often seek consolidation of war powers that restrict civil liberties at home and abroad.

The selection of a war frame goes much deeper than the choice of words.  Expectations are shaped by the choice of frames, with consequential impacts on the actions of those involved.

So when we talk about the strategic frames at play in the Occupy Movement, we are honing in on the competing interpretations of reality that shape large-scale societal behavior.  Frames arise in response to intense emotional experiences as we seek to comprehend them.  And they influence how events unfold as we live out the comprehensions evoked by them.

With this view of frames in mind, let’s see what the Occupy Movement has created in the last few months.  Obvious to casual observers are the two slogans of the movement — We Are The 99% and Occupy Wall Street.  I’ll begin with them and then share some subtleties of the environment from which they sprang.

Language of the 99% draws a line in the sand.  It divides our social world into the haves and the have-nots.  The conceptual structure is simple enough — one container with the minimal number of elements juxtaposed against another with the maximal inequality relative to the total amount.  If there are 100 dollar bills, the most unequal distribution that leaves both parties with something in their hands is $99 for one and $1 for the other.  The emotional significance of this arises from the logic of extreme inequality implied by this juxtaposition.  If one group has almost everything, the other is left with nearly nothing.

This is the emotional logic that has encouraged the mainstream media to talk more about wealth inequality and social justice since Occupy began.  The 99% frame evokes a maximal inequality that resonates deeply with the lived experiences of working-class people in the US and around the world.  I’ll come back to the significance of this lived experience in a moment.

The power of the Occupy frame is two-fold: (1) It is a verb that represents action taken by one who has power to influence the world, and (2) it demarcates an abstract spatial location that is scalable.  The significance of the first feature should be clear — to feel one’s personal empowerment by taking action and claiming a space is deeply moving.  One who can stake a claim to space has power.  And that power gives them a sense of control over their destiny.  This is the underlying motivator for collective action that has captured the imaginations (and bodies!) of protestors around the world, from Tahrir Square to Zuccoti Park.

The second feature is what allowed OWS to go viral and spread across the globe.  The demarcation of abstract space, when overlaid on top of real-world physical locations, is a recipe for unconstrained growth.  More simply, it is the act of claiming a space that offers a feeling of empowerment.  While one physical location was claimed in a New York City Park, the concept of occupation could be generically applied to all physical spaces.  This is why protestors in other cities were inclined to claim the OWS brand and stake out their own turf.  And, just as the emotional experience of despair is conceptualized as an abstract space, the Occupy frame allows anyone and everyone to claim cultural turf by occupying democracy, love, citizenship, compassion, freedom, politics, and more.

The broad flexibility of the Occupy frame gives it a fractal nature.  It applies equally well from the small scale (Occupy Oakland) to the very large (Occupy Humanity).  In mathematical terms, the concept is “scale free” and nonlinear.  It can grow to fill any cultural container because its conceptual core is abstractable and pliable.

Taken together, these two frames offer a conduit for emotions to flow and actions to congeal.  They are the linguistic building blocks that convey a deep sense of injustice along with clear notions about what can be done about them — namely to reclaim public space and take back the political discourse on behalf of the citizenry.

The foundational frames of 99% and Occupy help us understand why the movement has spread so far so quickly.  Yet they do little to convey why it is that the wave of global change is happening now.  To understand this we’ll need to dig deeper into the lived experience I alluded to above.

Several additional frames have been at play in the lived experiences of people.  They are the cultural soup from which the bubbling broth of transition has risen.  Critical to the movement have been the following (and likely quite a few more):

Going back at least to the 1999 World Trade Organization protests in Seattle, there has been an increasingly recognizable convergence of environmental and social justice issues with critiques of corporate dominance over mainstream culture.  The convergence involves many distinct social movements that have grown together, slowly at first, and then rapidly accelerating in the last decade.

A compelling story emerged in the early part of 2011 as populist movements exploded onto public consciousness in what is now referred to as the Arab Spring.  One dictatorship after another fell as activists brought the power of social media to non-violent organizing  in countries long known for abuses of power by those in charge.  This created a feeling of momentum for OWS when it first appeared on the scene.

Consumer culture itself has become a catalyst for social innovation through the subversion of blind consumption.  Recent years have seen the rise of a new mode of interaction with cultural media as consumers began to produce what they choose to consume.  Everything from Wikipedia to YouTube, American Idol and the blogosphere, all capturing the spirit of co-creation that has emboldened the younger generation to create its own cultural artifacts — including the social movements springing forth from its collective consciousness.

The historic campaign of Barack Obama brought with it a meteoric rise of hope and empowerment for those who participated in the first ever prosumer political campaign.  Yet this was followed shortly after by a bursting of the bubble as global financial markets collapsed and the machinery of national government proved impotent to address systemic threats, especially those of a global nature.

Public confidence in authoritative institutions — especially large banks, big companies, and national governments — has been dropping precipitously for years.  As a whole, we no longer believe in centralized power structures and are moving away from them in every area of public life.  This trend has decoupled the populace from political parties, dominant market ideologies, and the enchantments of extreme opulence that no longer seem graspable.  The symbolic meanings that rose with a sense of legitimacy for these cultural artifacts have been tarnished beyond repair by corrupt leaders and manipulative media voices.  As we stopped looking to these sources for leadership, a vacuum appeared that the Occupy Movement moved into and filled.

One set of frames doesn’t displace another unless the former no longer provides a robust sense of meaning.  The younger generation was fed a life story that worked well for their parents, but doesn’t make any sense for their own lives.  The story I’m referring to is the narrative arc with distinct stages — get an education, choose a career, get married, buy a house, raise children, then retire.  The global economy has many dysfunctional structures in it that make this story untenable.  And thus the key ingredient of revolution was cultivated as educated youth were not able to make the institutions of society work for them.

Taken together, this backdrop of life experience has made the status quo into a quagmire of malaise in whicy people could not see themselves.  They began to search for new and more robust forms of meaning, only to realize that the game has been rigged against them.  So when talk of the 99% sprang forth there were plenty of ways it could speak to the discomforts people felt in their daily lives.

As we look to the future nothing is certain.  The Horizon of Ignorance remains impenetrable, yet strategic actions remain to be taken.  I recommend that leaders in the movement consider the following as you prepare for your next steps:

1. Weigh the pros and cons of operating within existing political systems.  Don’t simply join with an established political party and hope that change will come from within.  Here in the U.S. we have a number of structural forms of corruption that make elections a questionable path toward renewal.
2. Seek out structural changes that last beyond your years.  If indeed the political and economic levers are broken (which I’ve become convinced they are), it will be necessary to create new rules for the game.  Whether this is a Constitutional Convention to alter the political DNA of government or new legal structures for corporations that include environmental and community impacts, it will be new structures (perhaps built on top of the old) that offer a possibility for different governing dynamics to emerge.
3. Use language to evoke progress.  Just as the linguistic frames of Occupy have tapped into deep feelings of unrest, there is a need to consciously introspect about the words you use to articulate your vision of a better world.  The existence of semantic frames tells us that language shapes what we take to be real, so choose wisely and strategically.
4. Focus on the lived experience.  You’ve already been doing this with your General Assemblies as a way to experience grassroots democracy firsthand.  Look for other ways to activate a sense of shared responsibility and empowerment that encourage more people to get involved in the process.
5. Create prototypes for the new economy.  If you’re not already aware of it, take time to learn about the exploding social sector where terms like social benefit company and social entrepreneur are revealing a middle road between false dichotomies.  It is in this realm of rapid innovation where new business models, community organizing principles, and social technologies are being prototyped for the new economy.
6. Learn about the governing dynamics of economic systems.  You’ll need to see the changes that are happening around you in order to understand exactly how the old systems are broken and participate in the design of their replacements.  (I’ve written a short primer here that will help get you started.)
7. Think bigger than you are now.  You’ve come this far when few believed it possible.  The early 21st Century is in some respects ahistoric in that we are experiencing unprecedented levels of rapid change and dealing with new challenges that go well beyond the complexity of anything that has come before.  This is the time for audacious visions!

I hope this overview is insightful for you and that it inspires you to get involved (if you haven’t already) and to be emboldened to do more.

In solidarity,

Joe Brewer
Seattle, WA

You can learn more about my work on the applications of cognitive science to political, economic, and philosophical issues by looking around this website.

Oh and please forgive my mis-statement about the law of commutativity 6 minutes 30 seconds in… I meant to say that if preference for A is greater than B then preference for B cannot be greater than A. Psychology research in the 70′s showed that this math rule is violated by framing and priming effects.

It’s a trap.

When Luntz says he is “scared to death,” he means that the Republicans who hire him are scared to death and he can profit from that fear by offering them new language. Luntz is clever. Yes, Republicans are scared. But there needs to be a serious discussion of both Luntz’s remarks and the progressive non-response.

What has been learned from the brain and cognitive sciences is that words are defined by fixed frames we use in thinking, frames come in hierarchical systems, and political frames are defined in moral terms, where “morality” is very different for conservatives and progressives. What lies behind the Occupy movement is a moral view of democracy: Democracy is about citizens caring about each other and acting responsibly both socially and personally. This requires a robust public empowering and protecting everyone equally. Both private success and personal freedom depend on such a public. Every critique and proposal of the Occupy movement fits this moral view, which happens to be the progressive moral view.

What the Occupy movement can’t stand is the opposite “moral” view, that democracy provides the freedom to seek one’s self-interest and ignore what is good for other Americans and others in the world. That view lies behind the Wall Street ethic of the Greedy Market, as opposed to a Market for All, a market that should maximize the well-being of most Americans. This view leads to a hierarchical view of society, where success is always deserved and lack of success is moral failure. The rich are the moral, and they not only deserve their wealth, they also deserve the power it brings. This is the view that Luntz is defending.

Referring to the rich as “hardworking taxpayers” ignores the fact that a great percentage of the rich do not get their wealth from making things, but rather from investments in other people’s labor, and that most of the 1% are managers, not people who make things or directly provide services. The hardworking taxpayers are the 99%. That is not the frame that Luntz wants activated.

But Luntz is not just addressing his remarks to Republicans. He is also looking to take Democrats for suckers. How? By choosing his frames carefully, and getting Democrats to do the opposite of what he tells Republicans. There is a basic truth about framing. If you accept the other guy’s frame, you lose.

Take “capitalism.” It arises these days in socialist discourse, and is seen as the opposite of socialism. To attack “capitalism” in this frame is to accept “socialism.” Conservatives are trying to cast progressives, who mostly have businesses or work for businesses or are looking for good business jobs, as socialists. If you take the Luntz bait, you will be sucked into sounding like a socialist. Whatever one thinks of socialism, most Americans falsely identify it with communism, and will reject it out of hand.

Luntz would love to get Democrats using the word “tax” in the conservative sense of taking money from the pockets of hardworking folks and wasting it on people who don’t deserve it. Luntz doesn’t want Democrats pointing out how private success depends on public investment — in infrastructure, education, health, transportation, research, economic stability, protections of all sorts, and so on. He doesn’t want progressives talking about “revenue” which is defined in a business frame to mean money needed for any institution to function and flourish. He doesn’t want Democrats talking about the rich paying their fair share for the massive amount they have gotten from prior investments in a robust public. Luntz would love to lure progressives into talking about government “spending” rather than investments in education, health, and infrastructure that will benefit most Americans.

He doesn’t want progressives pointing out that corporations govern our lives far more than any government does — and for their profit, not ours. He doesn’t want any discussion of corporate waste, or military waste, which is huge.

Luntz would love to have Democrats talking about “entrepreneurs,” which evokes a Republican view of the market as a tool for self-interest. His proposal to discuss “job creators” instead hides the fact that the business community has not been hiring despite record profits. He certainly does not want discussion of outsourcing and minimizing pay for work, which leads corporations to eliminate or downgrade jobs and hence keep wages low when profits are high.

Hidden behind his proposal to substitute “careers” for “jobs” is his attempt to appeal to young people just out of college and grad school who expect more — a profession — not just a mere “job.” But of course, corporations are downgrading positions away from professional careers and more toward interchangeable McJobs requiring minimal ability and with minimal pay and benefits.

Luntz is right about not saying “sacrifice.” He is right that most Americans are already hurting more than enough. They want a viable present and a future for themselves and their children and grandchildren. He is right to suggest “talking about how ‘we’re all in this together.’ We either succeed together or we fail together.” But that is the opposite of conservative morality. It is the progressive view of a moral democracy that all of Luntz’s conservative framings contradict. It is an attempt at co-opting the progressive moral system, because the Occupy movement is showing that it is an idea of democracy that makes sense to most Americans. And it is an attempt to take Obama’s strongest moral appeal away from him.

Unfortunately, Luntz is still ahead of most progressives responding to him. Progressives need to learn how framing works. Bashing Luntz, bashing Fox News, bashing the right-wing pundits and leaders using their frames and arguing against their positions just keeps their frames in play.

Progressives have a basic morality, which is largely unspoken. It has to be spoken, over and over, in every corner of our country. Progressives need to be both thinking and talking about their view of a moral democracy, about how a robust public is necessary for private success, about all that the public gives us, about the benefits of health, about a Market for All not a Greed Market, about regulation as protection, about revenue and investment, about corporations that keep wages low when profits are high, about how most of the rich earn a lot of their money without making anything or serving anyone, about how corporations govern your life for their profit not yours, about real food, about corporate and military waste, about the moral and social role of unions, about how global warming causes the increasingly monstrous effects of weather disasters, about how to save and preserve nature.

Progressives have magnificent stories of their own to tell. They need to be telling them nonstop.

Let’s lure the right into using OUR frames in public discourse.

About framing: It’s normal. Everybody engages in it all the time. Frames are just structures of thought that we use every day. All words in all languages are defined in terms of frame-circuits in the brain. But, ultimately, framing is about ideas, about how we see the world, which determines how we act.

In politics, frames are part of competing moral systems that are used in political discourse and in charting political action. In short, framing is a moral enterprise: it says what the character of a movement is. All politics is moral. Political figures and movements always make policy recommendations claiming they are the right things to do. No political figure ever says, do what I say because it’s wrong! Or because it doesn’t matter! Some moral principles or other lie behind every political policy agenda.

Two Moral Framing Systems in Politics

Conservatives have figured out their moral basis and you see it on Wall Street: It includes: The primacy of self-interest. Individual responsibility, but not social responsibility. Hierarchical authority based on wealth or other forms of power. A moral hierarchy of who is “deserving,” defined by success. And the highest principle is the primacy of this moral system itself, which goes beyond Wall Street and the economy to other arenas: family life, social life, religion, foreign policy, and especially government. Conservative “democracy” is seen as a system of governance and elections that fits this model.

Though OWS concerns go well beyond financial issues, your target is right: the application of these principles in Wall Street is central, since that is where the money comes from for elections, for media, and for right-wing policy-making institutions of all sorts on all issues.

The alternative view of democracy is progressive: Democracy starts with citizens caring about one another and acting responsibly on that sense of care, taking responsibility both for oneself and for one’s family, community, country, people in general, and the planet. The role of government is to protect and empower all citizens equally via The Public: public infrastructure, laws and enforcement, health, education, scientific research, protection, public lands, transportation, resources, art and culture, trade policies, safety nets, and on and on. Nobody makes it one their own. If you got wealthy, you depended on The Public, and you have a responsibility to contribute significantly to The Public so that others can benefit in the future. Moreover, the wealthy depend on those who work, and who deserve a fair return for their contribution to our national life. Corporations exist to make life better for most people. Their reason for existing is as public as it is private.

A disproportionate distribution of wealth robs most citizens of access to the resources controlled by the wealthy. Immense wealth is a thief. It takes resources from the rest of the population — the best places to live, the best food, the best educations, the best health facilities, access to the best in nature and culture, the best professionals, and on and on. Resources are limited, and great wealth greatly limits access to resources for most people.

It appears to me that OWS has a progressive moral vision and view of democracy, and that what it is protesting is the disastrous effects that have come from operating with a conservative moral, economic, and political worldview. I see OWS as primarily a moral movement, seeking economic and political changes to carry out that moral movement — whatever those particular changes might be.

A Moral Focus for Occupy Wall Street

I think it is a good thing that the occupation movement is not making specific policy demands. If it did, the movement would become about those demands. If the demands were not met, the movement would be seen as having failed.

It seems to me that the OWS movement is moral in nature, that occupiers want the country to change its moral focus. It is easy to find useful policies; hundreds have been suggested. It is harder to find a moral focus and stick to it. If the movement is to frame itself, it should be on the basis of its moral focus, not a particular agenda or list of policy demands. If the moral focus of America changes, new people will be elected and the policies will follow. Without a change of moral focus, the conservative worldview that has brought us to the present disastrous and dangerous moment will continue to prevail.

We Love America. We’re Here to Fix It

I see OWS as a patriotic movement, based on a deep and abiding love of country — a patriotism that it is not just about the self-interests of individuals, but about what the country is and is to be. Do Americans care about other citizens, or mainly just about themselves? That’s what love of America is about. I therefore think it is important to be positive, to be clear about loving America, seeing it in need of fixing, and not just being willing to fix it, but being willing to take to the streets to fix it. A populist movement starts with the people seeing that they are all in the same boat and being ready to come together to fix the leaks.

Publicize the Public

Tell the truth about The Public, that nobody makes it purely on their own without The Public, that is, without public infrastructure, the justice system, health, education, scientific research, protections of all sorts, public lands, transportation, resources, art and culture, trade policies, safety nets, … That is a truth to be told day after day. It is an idea that must take hold in public discourse. It must go beyond what I and others have written about it and beyond what Elizabeth Warren has said in her famous video. The Public is not opposed to The Private. The Public is what makes The Private possible. And it is what makes freedom possible. Wall Street exists only through public support. It has a moral obligation to direct itself to public needs.

All OWS approaches to policy follow from such a moral focus. Here are a handful examples.

Democracy should be about the 99%

Money directs our politics. In a democracy, that must end. We need publicly supported elections, however that is to be arranged.

Strong Wages Make a Strong America

Middle-class wages have not gone up significantly in 30 years, and there is conservative pressure to lower them. But when most people get more money, they spend it and spur the economy, making the economy and the country stronger, as well as making their individual lives better. This truth needs to be central to public economic discourse.

Global Citizenship

America has been a moral beacon to the world. It can function as such only if it sets an example of what a nation should be.

Do we have to spend more on the military that all other nations combined? Do we really need hundreds of military bases abroad?

Nature

We are part of nature. Nature makes us, and all that we love, possible. Yet we are destroying Nature through global warming and other forms of ecological destruction, like fracking and deep-water drilling.

At a global scale, nature is systemic: its effects are neither local nor linear. Global warming is causing the ferocity of the monster storms, tornados, floods, blizzards, heat waves, and fires that have devastated huge areas of our country. The hotter the atmosphere, the more evaporated water and the more energy going into storms, tornados, and blizzards. Global warming cannot be shown to cause any particular storm, but when a storm system forms, global warming will ramp up the power of the storm and the amount of water it carries. In winter, evaporated water from the overly heated Pacific will go into the atmosphere, blow northeast over the arctic, and fall as record snows.

We depend on nature — on clean air, water, food, and a livable climate. And we find beauty and grandeur in nature, and a sense of awe that makes life worth living. A love of country requires a love of nature. And a fair and thriving economy requires the preservation of nature as we have known it.

Summary

OWS is a moral and patriotic movement. It sees Democracy as flowing from citizens caring about one another as well as themselves, and acting with both personal and social responsibility. Democratic governance is about The Public, and the liberty that The Public provides for a thriving Private Sphere. From such a democracy flows fairness, which is incompatible with a hugely disproportionate distribution of wealth. And from the sense of care implicit in such a democracy flows a commitment to the preservation of nature.

From what I have seen of most members of OWS, your individual concerns all flow from one moral focus.

Elections

The Tea Party solidified the power of the conservative worldview via elections. OWS will have no long-term effect unless it too brings its moral focus to the 2012 elections. Insist on supporting candidates that have your overall moral views, no matter what the local issues are.

A Warning

This movement could be destroyed by negativity, by calls for revenge, by chaos, or by having nothing positive to say. Be positive about all things and state the moral basis of all suggestions. Positive and moral in calling for debt relief. Positive and moral in upholding laws, as they apply to finances. Positive and moral in calling for fairness in acquiring needed revenue. Positive and moral in calling for clean elections. To be effective, your movement must be seen by all of the 99% as positive and moral. To get positive press, you must stress the positive and the moral.

Remember: The Tea Party sees itself as stressing only individual responsibility. The Occupation Movement is stressing both individual and social responsibility.

I believe, and I think you believe, that most Americans care about their fellow citizens as well as themselves. Let’s find out! Shout your moral and patriotic views out loud, regularly. Put them on your signs. Repeat them to the media. Tweet them. And tell everyone you know to do the same. You have to use your own language with your own framing and you have to repeat it over and over for the ideas to sink in.

Occupy elections: voter registration drives, town hall meetings, talk radio airtime, party organizations, nomination campaigns, election campaigns, and voting booths.

Above all: Frame yourselves before others frame you.

My friend and fellow observer of global patterns, Timothy Rayner, describes the Occupy protests as a “swarm movement”, suggesting that we may be in the midsts of an unprecedented pattern of self-organization that wasn’t possible before the internet.  I am inclined to agree with his core thesis and want to suggest that we are observing what complexity researchers call self-organized criticality, defined in the following way:

A point at which a system changes radically its behavior or structure, for instance, from solid to liquid. In standard critical phenomena, there is a control parameter which an experimenter can vary to obtain this radical change in behavior. In the case of melting, the control parameter is temperature.

Self-organized critical phenomena, by contrast, is exhibited by driven systems which reach a critical state by their intrinsic dynamics, independently of the value of any control parameter. The archetype of a self-organized critical system is a sand pile. Sand is slowly dropped onto a surface, forming a pile. As the pile grows, avalanches occur which carry sand from the top to the bottom of the pile. At least in model systems, the slope of the pile becomes independent of the rate at which the system is driven by dropping sand. This is the (self-organized) critical slope.  Read more…

I wrote about this a few weeks ago when describing the importance of phase transitions for the study of social change.  We have passed a tipping point (also called a critical threshold, inflection point, regime change, or paradigm shift) and the patterns are changing quickly.  Pressure has been growing for years now with the following trends indicating that the status quo is increasingly unstable and therefore unlikely to persist much longer:

• Growing income inequality in the United States and around the world;
• A shift from investments in productive capital (e.g. manufacturing) toward financial capital (e.g. making money off of money — derivatives, hedge funds, etc.);
• Ongoing unemployment and widespread economic insecurity since the 2008 financial meltdown;
• The collapse of a particular life narrative that builds from childhood to college to career and homebuilding and culminating in retirement.  This life arc no longer feels viable to the mainstream youth generation;
• Increasing awareness about and severity of environmental damage, especially that having to do with global climate disruption;
• Decades of decline in public confidence regarding government, corporations, and the banking system;
• Rapid depletion of many raw materials that now drive innovation in life cycle design for new products;
• Emergence of popularity for social entrepreneurship, novel corporate forms for promoting social good, and mainstream business strategy incorporating sustainability at top management levels.

These trends (and many more) suggest that the old models for building civilization have become obsolete.  It is now a mainstream view that our government is fundamentally corrupted by corporate influence.  And we are beginning to see the capacity for the younger generations (both Gen X and Millennials) to develop and deploy technologies for mass mobilization.

So what does self-organized criticality have to do with the Occupy Wall Street movement?  In a word — Everything.

This is a movement that has no elevated leader.  It is not making demands to authorities with decision-making power in the old institutions.  It is being organized locally by each group and built as a fractal pattern of small groups setting plans through general assemblies, orchestration of networks of groups through hub websites (like the one at Occupy Together linked to above), and coordinated branding through meme propagation of the “We’re the 99%” slogan.

The key thing to keep in mind about self-organizing systems is that their unfolding dynamic is the source of group intelligence.  There are no puppeteers pulling the strings.  It isn’t possible to orchestrate nested networks in a centralized manner.  Instead what we’re seeing is the emergence of structure and social order through the conversations themselves, starting at the small scale and spiraling upward.  Occupy Wall Street is a swarm that — like a flock of birds or school of fish — has burst into action as individuals finding resonance with one another only to discover that a coherent group flow has emerged.

I cannot say how far this movement will go, although the trends just mentioned suggest that monumental change is imminent.  If this doesn’t lead to fundamental change, it will at least be part of the gathering momentum for future attempts to be more bold and effective.  If you are cheering Occupy Wall Street onward (or concerned that it may unseat you from a comfortable position in the old political order), you’ll want to familiarize yourself with the laws of self-organization and swarm behavior in order to grasp what is going on.

For my part, I’ll continue to shed light on the dynamics at play to assist in our global transition toward social justice and sustainability… fluttering along as part of the swarm!

But what of deep history?  Why must we understand the origins of the universe, evolution of stars and planets, and geologic forces in order to grapple with contemporary social issues?  The answer — to be succinct — is that only such a broad backdrop will reveal the landscape for potential action today.

We must understand how complexity arises from simplicity if we are to build resilience into the fabric of our world.  Resilience itself is a form of complexity and cannot emerge through intended design without knowledge of the fundamentals.  Similarly, we must be mindful of the systems at play in shaping how human communities arose and which historic problems our biological evolution solved in order to keep us robust as a viable species selected for survival.  This is how we will know which physical and cultural environments are best suited to sustaining our existence in this rapidly changing world.

This point runs especially deep now as we grapple with the first attempt to live within our means as we reach planetary limits on vital resources like water, land, food, and energy.  Only when we dig deep into hominid history will our true nature be revealed.  And it is vital that our knowledge be tested systematically with rigor (and an eye toward overcoming our own internal biases) if we are to manage the transition from an epoch of economic growth spanning more than 10,000 years (stemming from the birth of agriculture) to one of dynamic equilibrium that spirals around a sustainable mean in perpetuity for countless generations to come.

So what IS deep history?

Deep History is the study of root causes and primary origins.  It is the unravelling of layers throughout time that reveal vital transitions in structure and flow.  And it is the perspective of striving for holistic integration of knowledge.

A sampling of topics explored by researchers of deep history includes:

• How life sprang forth onto the cosmological stage and what the likelihood is that it emerged more than once;
• Why our planetary climate remains buffered within a relatively narrow set of boundaries across the history of the Earth, along with the implications of human-caused climate disruption for threatening all life on our fragile planet;
• Where humanity sits in the grand scheme of living things in the universe;
• How stellar explosions made possible the organic chemistry of living systems;
• How cultural, religious, and political systems arose from innate potential in the human species that stands unique in the animal kingdom;
• Whether humans have the capability to deploy cultural evolution in order to overcome biological tendencies to deplete resources and threaten long-term residency in damaged ecosystems.

All of these questions have now been partially answered.  Yet more synthesis and integration is required before we know enough to say whether sustainability is truly a viable option for our species.  And this is why we need MANY MORE people grappling with deep history.  There is much work to be done and time is of the essence.

I’ve already set firmly on this path of inquiry and am now more than 15 years in.  It became evident to me that studying the sciences of the Earth would be vital, so I soaked up all I could learn in my graduate program in atmospheric sciences.  And all of my emphasis on cognitive science and social systems is part of the weaving process of integration necessary before it is even possible to suggest that an answer to the sustainability question exists.

So what are you doing to contribute?  Have you got a piece of the puzzle that needs to be shared?  Let’s work together to create the foundation we’ll need to build a bridge to sustainability.  This is what my call for a new field — Human Interface Design for Global Systems — is all about.  The work of putting the puzzle together must now be done.

I am looking for strategic partners, fiscal sponsors, and organizational hosts to share in the work that must be done.  Together, we can answer ultimate questions and map out the path to a thriving world.  On our own, we will remain divided and impotent against the giant forces shaping our future world.

So what do you say?  Are you with me?

Along the way, we helped incubate new engagement and communication tools with non-profit partners in the United Kingdom (as reported in Common Cause and Finding Frames). It has been such a pleasure serving progressive unions, environmental groups, advocates of universal health care, and urban planners along the way.  

And in the last year, we turned to crowdfunding as a means to collaborate more closely with our supporters, culminating in the release of the Progressive Strategy Handbook and two forthcoming manuals on Crowdfunding for Social Movements and Large-Scale Behavior Change.

All of this has been in preparation for a new level of impact.  I am excited to share with you my plans for taking these humble foundations to a whole new level.  This video explains it all:

My vision is to bridge the gap between the study of large-scale human behavior and the study of Earth’s changing systems.  This is the work I set out to do almost ten years ago (learn my full story here).  I am looking for collaborators, financial sponsors, and connections to forward-thinking academic institutions to enable this work to continue.

When I launched Cognitive Policy Works, my hope was to design and deploy next-generation best practices for political communication, advocacy, policy development, and economic planning.  Progress has been made on all fronts.  And now it is time to step up my game.

I would love to hear your thoughts about this.  Where do you see yourself fitting in?  What would you like to see accomplished?

In solidarity,

Joe Brewer
Founder & Director
Cognitive Policy Works

Terror meant everyone should be afraid of terrorists. Throughout the Midwest the predictable happened. A highly memorable event raises one’s judgment of the probability that it will happen to them. All over America people started being afraid of terrorists. Bush asked for and got unlimited war powers and the Patriot Act.

From 9/11 on, the American people have been subject to conservative intimidation by framing. I’ve now written five books explaining how framing works in the brain and what citizens could do about it – Moral Politics, Don’t Think of an Elephant, Whose Freedom?, Thinking Points, and The Political Mind. The books were based on results from the cognitive and brain sciences on how reason about social and political issues really works — primarily in terms of morally-based frames, metaphors, and narratives, and only secondarily, if at all, in terms of policy, facts, and logic. Those books were widely used by Democrats in the 2006 and 2008 elections — and they helped.

But since the 2008 election, conservative intimidation of the electorate via framing has come back big time, with no adequate Democratic defense against it. With a Democratic president in office, Democrats, both citizens and office-holders, turned their attention to policy and logical, fact-based arguments for the policies. In response to the president’s health care policies, conservatives attacked on the moral front, choosing two moral values from their value system: freedom (“government takeover”) and life (“death panels”). Knowing well that morality trumps lists of policy details, lists of facts, and logic, conservatives won that framing encounter, and have kept winning. Why? Because people, using their real reason, normally think unconsciously in terms of morally based systems of frames, metaphors, and narratives.

Since the 2008 election, America has returned to post-9/11 conservative intimidation by framing. The intimidation does not use violence. It uses media. When conservatives, using their moral system, are able to frame the main values that define public discourse, the media follows suit, because that is how “mainstream” public discourse has been defined. The media, encountering more conservative language, picks up on that language and uses it. Since conservative language evokes conservative frames and values, which are carried with it, the media (liberal or not) winds up helping conservatives. Even arguing against conservatives, liberal pundits in the media first quote what they say. Liberals in the media help the conservatives by quoting their language, even to argue against it.

In the post-2008 return to 9/11 style intimidation by framing, conservatives have been winning. They have protected banks from financial regulation, health insurance companies from government insurance, and corporations from serious environmental regulation. They have successfully attacked the very idea of the public — public education, employees, unions, parks, housing, and safety nets.

Here’s how public intimidation by framing works.

The mechanism of intimidation is framing, not just the use of words or slogans, but rather the changing of what voters take as right as a matter of principle. Framing is much more than mere language or messaging. A frame is a conceptual structure used to think with. Frames come in hierarchies. At the top of the hierarchies are moral frames. All politics is moral. Politicians support policies because they are right, not wrong. The problem is that there is more than one conception of what is moral. Moreover, voters tend to vote their morality, since it is what defines their identity. Poor conservatives vote against their material interests, but for their moral identity.

All language activates frames in the brain. Conservative language activates conservative frames, which activate conservative moral worldviews in the brains of those who hear the language. The more those frames are activated, the stronger the conservative moral views get in people’s brains.

When Democrats are intimidated into using conservative language, they help conservatives, even if they are arguing against them. Here’s why. The main voters you want to affect are the bi-conceptuals, those who are conservative on some issues and progressive on others; that is, those who have both conservative and progressive moral worldviews, but on different issues. They are sometimes misnamed as “the center,” “independents,” or “moderates.” But they do not have any single overriding worldview. Instead they have two. Given the way brains work, the activation of one worldview will inhibit the other worldview. The more one is activated, the stronger it gets and the weaker the opposite one gets. The worldview that is most activated by the public discourse they hear will most likely govern how they will vote. What activates one worldview versus another? Framing. Conservative language activates conservative frames, which activate conservative worldviews. If Democrats use conservative language, even to argue against it, they are just helping conservatives.

To a large extent, Democrats don’t understand this. They think that language is neutral and that reason works by logic. If you just tell people the facts and reason logically, everyone should be convinced. But they aren’t, because language works by framing and by brain mechanisms. Framing is just the normal way people think and talk. Conservatives tend to understand this. They avoid using liberal language. They frame issues very carefully to fit their goals. Democrats need to do the same — avoid using conservative frames and instead frame the issues with their own values.

This takes a lot more than just a list of policies. Appropriate policies are vital, but lists of policies in the absence of a clear moral basis for them will always be ineffective in public discourse. Progressive have a clear moral basis for their policies, but they fail to discuss it. Democracy is defined by a simple morality: We Americans care about our fellow citizens, we act on that care and build trust, and we do our best not just for ourselves, our families, and our friends and neighbors, but for our country. Americans are called upon to share an equal responsibility to work together to secure a safe and prosperous future for their families and nation.

The conservative consolidation of power violates this most basic of democratic principles. It replaces social and personal responsibility with personal responsibility alone. It approves of the government over our lives by corporations for their own profit, and hence sees government by, of and for the people as immoral and to be eliminated.

The conservative move to defund government is a means not an end. What conservatives really want is to run the country and the world on conservative principles: to control reproduction (no abortion); to control what is taught (no public education); to control religion (conservative Christianity); to control race and language (mass deportation of Hispanic immigrants); to guarantee cheap labor (no unions); to continue white domination (no affirmative action); to continue straight domination (no gay marriage); to control markets (eliminate regulation, taxation, unions, worker rights, and tort cases); to control transportation (privatize freeways); to control elections (institute bars to voting).

The good news is that it doesn’t have to be that way. It is possible for Democrats to learn how frames, narratives, and brains really work. It is possible to take moral stands, with all policies backed up by a single moral vision. It is possible to awaken and strengthen the progressive worldview already present in swing voters who are partly progressive as partly conservative (called “independents,” “moderates,” and “the center”). It is possible for Democrats to say what they believe and win, without giving in to intimidation tactics.

But the longer we wait, the more damage the conservatives do. Ten years is already too long. It is time to end the era of conservative intimidation that took hold on 9/11.

I believe this cannot happen within the framework of our current government, its constitutional limitations, and the resulting two-party system entirely corrupted by money.

I believe this can happen, indeed must happen, by exercising our natural, self-evident rights of sovereignty as one people.

Here are two quotes that make this point and provide a lead in to the rest of my essay:

“This country, with its institutions, belongs to the people who inhabit it. Whenever they shall grow weary of the existing government, they can exercise their constitutional right of amending it, or their revolutionary right to dismember or overthrow it.”

Abraham Lincoln in his First Inaugural Address

“Behind the ostensible government sits enthroned an invisible government owing no allegiance and acknowledging no responsibility to the people. To destroy this invisible government, to befoul the unholy alliance between corrupt business and corrupt politics is the first task of the statesmanship of the day.”

Theodore Roosevelt, April 19, 1906

Professor Drew Westen wrote an article on Huffington Post about the coming election that gained the attention of Professor George Lakoff.Westen’s article is called: What Created the Populist Explosion and How Democrats Can Avoid the Shrapnel in November.

Professor Westen makes great arguments about what Democrats should have done, and should do, to better serve the American people and help their party do better in the upcoming elections. I like it. AND he provides no evidence whatsoever that the leaders of the Democratic Party intend to do what he recommends, despite the good polling sense it would make. And that is the crux of Westen’s failure—he doesn’t deal with their lack of motive, mislabels who their “base” is, and so misses the ultimate cause of the problem of American political corruption whereby we have a huge chasm between public policy and public opinion.

Professor George Lakoff’s Commondreams article in response to Westen’s is called Moral Leadership and the Myth of ‘Centrist” Thinking.

I agree with Lakoff’s article about Professor Drew Westen’s article. Lakoff’s citing of the lack of a moral argument (on top of Westen’s policy argument) is right on. AND Lakoff’s critique article, like Westen’s, is good as far as it goes, but . . .

Lakoff ALSO misses key concepts that matter.

Both Lakoff and Westen make the profoundly erroneous assumption that the “base” of the Democratic Party consists of progressive-minded voters. This is false. Their base consists of major corporations and the rich people they spawn. President Obama raised $750 million for his campaign, over two-thirds of which came from large donations. Our politicians want the money.

THE PRIVATE MONEY is a moral problem and a policy problem. For both of those reasons stated by Lakoff and Westen respectively, the money is a proximate cause of the corruption of our government. But the money in the US system is not the ultimate cause of the corruption. The ultimate cause is the Constitution and how the American people interpret it. The US system is on the extreme end of the spectrum when it comes to private and corporate money influencing elections and candidates. Here is an amicus brief stating the details across democratic nations. In a modern, healthy, multi-party democracy, there are remedies to this sort of problem. New parties can rise up. Politicians can be recalled and replaced. Referendums can make new restrictive laws. Governments can be restructured. Constitutions amended or rewritten. But in the US, our national Constitution and how we interpret it precludes these options. The situation is much like a family with a sick child which is unwilling to agree to obvious medical treatments for some moral or religious reason. The child stays sick or dies, because obvious remedies are precluded. So the Constitution and its interpretation are the ultimate causes of our corruption. And constitutional causes, especially ultimate causes, require constitutional solutions.

Why constitutional solutions? Because the four daily-operating, policy-vetoing bodies, in the cumbersome, antiquated, 18th century balance-of-powers design, are all bought-and-paid-for conservative, corporate, plutocratic bodies: the House, the Senate, the Presidency, and the Supreme Court.

The House is the best of the four, and is awful with lobbyists swarming all over it like flies laying eggs of money. The other three are also controlled by the corporate plutocrats running the nation. The Senate is the most disproportionate legislature among mature “democratic” nations where a Wyoming resident has about 70 times the voting power of a California resident. The purchase of the Presidency requires hundreds of millions of dollars from rich private individuals and corporations. And the Supreme Court is a creature of the vastly overpowered Senate where a group of senators representing as little as 25 percent of the nation can veto any nominee.

Now what prevents this system from being remedied? Simple. The American people have lost their sense of the basics of government that led to the creation of our nation and other democratic nations.

To wit:

Americans have lost a sense of the inherent right of revolution to “alter or abolish” government enshrined in the Preamble of the Declaration of Independence.

Americans have lost a sense of popular sovereign rule inherent in the Preamble of the Constitution whereby “We the People . . . do ordain and establish” the constitution and its governmental design. Obviously, whatever the people, as one people, ordain and establish, by majority rule, can re-ordain and re-establish to suit us.

Americans have lost a sense of amendment by majority rule. The states have had 233 state constitutional conventions to modernize their constitutions along many progressive lines, especially the right of the democratic majority to make decisions and the right of amendment to alter government via initiative, referendum, and conventions. Look at Montana’s Article 14 amending process and imagine if Americans asserted such rights for our nation’s governmental designs, rights, and limitations, to amend our Constitution. Look at the amending processes of the states, which have adopted over 150 new constitutions and over 12,000 amendments.

Our problems stem from corruption of money controlled by an illegitimate minority who rule both parties. That statement deserves an article in Duh magazine. That in turn means the base of both parties consists, not of the people who vote for them, but of a certain illegitimate minority the people—the rich, who determine who gets to run for office among the two parties. This illegitimate few are the money givers. The election king-makers. The plutocrats. They act in their own interests to hijack the system in a financial coup. Citizens, only about half of whom even bother to vote are not the base of either dominant party. We the people are hostages of the system and haven’t thought our way out of our predicament. It is a situation clearly explained by Thomas Ferguson’s investment theory of elections in the US.

This corruption problem would be easily solved if we Americans believed in our right of revolution; our right of assembly and referendum for amending our Constitution; and our right for the democratic majority to fashion government according to what suits our idea of good, representative, accountable, non-corrupt governance.

But since Americans, including progressives like Lakoff and Westen, don’t quite grok these ultimate basics of democratic governance, they are left dealing with proximate causes and short-term non-solutions—solutions like the one both Westen and Lakoff agree on: suggesting Democrats pay attention to the base (who isn’t their base)—citizens, while they themselves are bribed by the rich. Politicians won’t pay attention to the needs of regular citizens. They pay attention to who pays them to stay elected and maintain the plutocracy so they can be players in it.

Americans could, if they chose, assert their right to assemble to craft constitutional, structural fixes; put those fixes to a national vote of the American people; and declare them amendments to our government via a new, modified Constitution. What might such a new constitution or suite of amendments accomplish?

We could declare corporations have half of their boards of directors made up of elected employees as Germany does. We could decide that money is not speech, and in fact undermines one-person-one-vote. We could decide that the Senate and House merge into one body that is accountable to the people and take away the presidential veto. We could decide that we want a multi-party system with full public financing of elections, like Germany, New Zealand, Finland or Sweden. We could decide to put some of our best university professors in Congress in fields of political importance like Ireland does. We could make our amending process like Montana’s—easy for the majority to alter our government as we need to, in order to have a government that is a mirror of the people, so as to make public policy and public opinion match. We could do all of these things and more, as governments in Europe and New Zealand have been doing for decades, if we knew our rights as citizens. These are remedies from the Declaration of Independence, from the Preamble of our Constitution, from Amendments 1, 9 and 10.

Yet neither Lakoff or Westen even elude to these obvious structural, constitutional causes or solutions. And these ideas have been exhaustively presented by these authors and books for many years: Sanford Levinson (Our Undemocratic Constitution), Doug Amy (Real Choices, New Voices, The Case for Proportional Representation), Daniel Lazare (The Frozen Republic and The Velvet Coup), Bruce Ackerman &  James Fishkin (Deliberation Day), Akhil Reed Amar (For the People), Larry Sabato (A More Perfect Constitution), Steven Hill (Fixing Elections, 10 Steps to Repair American Democracy, and Europe’s Promise), Christian Fritz (American Sovereigns), and John Dinan (The American State Constitutional Tradition).

I conclude by saying the problem and the solution are each rooted in consciousness. The political consciousness of liberty and justice requires the assumption that We the People, the democratic majority, have the right to alter our form of government as we see fit, whenever we choose. New Zealanders did this in the 1990s and created a multi-party system from a two-party system. Why do they have rights to alter their government to their liking that Americans don’t have?

The basic idea was written quite clearly in 1776 in the Virginia Declaration of Rights, still in the Virginia Constitution in Section 3:

“. . . when any government shall be found inadequate or contrary to these purposes, a majority of the community has an indubitable, inalienable, and indefeasible right to reform, alter, or abolish it, in such manner as shall be judged most conducive to the public weal.”

And again by Jefferson in 1816:

“This corporeal globe, and everything upon it, belong to its present corporeal inhabitants during their generation. They alone have a right to direct what is the concern of themselves alone, and to declare the law of that direction; and this declaration can only be made by their majority.  That majority, then, has a right to depute representatives to a convention, and to make the constitution what they think will be the best for themselves.” –Thomas Jefferson to Samuel Kercheval, 1816.

What is so difficult about this? This is a simple, basic, powerful idea whose time may be coming soon.

This sort of constitutional change, by the will of the democratic majority, leading to both structural and dynamic improvements, would be a revolution of consciousness by the American people to turn our corporate, militarist, totalitarian plutocracy into a modern democratic-republic government.

The only question is how bad will it have to get before American progressives wake up and lead the way towards ultimate solutions.

In Star Trek Generations, Captain Kirk meets Captain Picard. While recruiting Kirk to help save the universe, Kirk responds to Picard by saying: “I take it the odds are against us and the situation is grim . . . sounds like fun.”

Let’s rise up, despite the odds, despite the grimness of the situation, for all is at stake, and it might be a lot of fun!

*   *   *

P.S. I’ve written another article about mission and vision for a new, rising People’s Congress, an institution that could be the means of exercising the sovereignty of the American people to alter our government towards being a more perfect union. The link to that article ishere.

This guest article is written by Kelly Gerling and was originally published on September 3rd, 2010 at Progressive Revolution.