The Political Mind by George Lakoff is about what cognitive science is learning about how the brain works, and how that relates to how people think politically. The book talks about how understanding is now believed to be a process by which the brain creates and links contemporaneous experiences to one another with neural connections. Repeated “activation” in the mind of a given idea makes it easier for that idea to be activated in future. As a baby you are held by your mother. You experience affection, and warmth. Warmth you will experience on a regular basis, and so it is the more powerful idea (the neurons fire more easily). Therefore, your aunt can be warm, but your coffee can’t be affectionate. We understand everything this way – as linked metaphors created by experiences that happened at the same time. Contradictions, he suggests, materialize in the form of mutually-inhibiting networks of ideas.As an aside, the book ably points out that the rational utility-maximizing individual on which so much of neo-conservative thought is premised is a falsehood, and that in fact human beings are hard-wired for empathy.For politics, the author applies some work from a book he had published earlier about how the progressive and conservative views of the government relate to family structures. Everyone uses the basic metaphor that the government is a family. Conservatives believe that the good family is a “strict-father” family, where there is a clear moral code, obedience to authority, and reward and punishment on the basis of merit. Progressives on the other hand believe in a “nurturing parent” model of the family that has more to do with nurturing and protecting on the part of both fathers and mothers, with more influence on relative equality of power, empathy, and forgiveness.He suggests that these two views are mutually inhibiting. So while you can be conservative with regards to some things and progressive with concern to others, you cannot be both progressive and conservative with respect to any one thing. Your brain won’t fire those neurons at the same time.He suggests that conservatives have been strategically attempting to “activate” thoughts in the minds of Americans that are linked to this conservative “frame”, thereby making conservative thoughts more prevalent in the minds of Americans. To deal with this, he suggests that progressives should be more careful about accepting the premises of questions posed by conservatives, and should tailor their communications to more effectively “activate” the empathic part of peoples’ minds, whether by speaking about specifically progressive ideas, or by speaking about more general ideas in ways that relate them to the progressive frame.To provide an example, the author would recommend that Dion not talk about revenue neutrality with regard to the Green Shift. The premise behind the argument for revenue neutrality is that the government already has enough of our money, and taxes are bad. That’s a conservative way of looking at taxes. You’re activating a conservative frame by touting the revenue neutrality. The progressive way of looking at taxes is that they are a way to help one another accomplish something that couldn’t be accomplished otherwise. So Mr. Dion should be focussing on the values that underly the Green Shift, such as the empathy that people feel toward others who suffer the effects of climate change.He says that it is not enough to attempt to follow what people think, because what people think is affected by the frames that are activated in them by others. Basically, we don’t need to abandon progressivism to adapt to the minds of people, we need to grow progressivism in the minds of people.There you have it. Now you don’t have to read it. Which is good, because reading it wasn’t any fun. It’s was a failed attempt at a pop-psychology text. Not enough of the material is new to this book, it’s just a rehashing of old ideas with new theories. And those theories are only weakly connected. Certainly it may be the case that conservative and progressive frames exist, and are mutually exclusive. But he didn’t go to any length to prove it beyond asserting it as a fact. Plus, the conservative and progressive frames are interesting metaphors for government, but the suggestion that there are only 2 or 3 possible frames for political thought is patently ludicrous. No one suggest that there are only 2 ways of organizing a family that might be thought best. Pretending there are is just adopting the flawed left-right spectrum while layering cognitive linguistics on top to give it credibility.The other thing is that it has no consistency of tone or flow. In one section it is a political polemic, in the next, a treatise on the history of linguistics. And the sections that are political are so partisan as to cast a shadow on the suggestion that these scientific discoveries mean anything real at all. It’s also just trying too hard. The author wants to coin the idea of a “new enlightenment” that goes past old ideas of how the brain works to new ideas of how the brain works. Despite a whole book of efforts, he still hasn’t communicated to me what exactly he thinks the difference would be, except that more people would take his advice.To add to the partisanship, it’s full of rhetorical fallacies that distract from whatever point it is he’s trying to make. He repeatedly insists that America is a progressive country, that America’s values are the values of progressivism, and that the readers need to rescue the United States from conservatism. (The significance of his use of the rescue metaphor is certainly not lost on him.) This is an appeal to authority, appeal to tradition, and historical revisionism all rolled up into one. Maybe he’s trying to practice what he preaches, creating a metaphorical link in the minds of his readers that was not previously there, but I fail to see any evidence for it.I found it a frustrating, distracting read. The information he provides about cognitive science is interesting, but the conclusions he draws from it are false at worse, untested at best. Leave it on the shelf. Read Blink and Made to Stick instead.