Pro-empathy voters and candidates must reframe "issues" as "duties of care" to UNITE.

Welcome back to my second Freedom for People First post at cwatts.us. I appreciate you. Empathy is the soul of democracy and crucial for expanding freedoms for all. I encourage you to make empathy (care) central to constant public discourse. All Aboard the 3:12 Empathy to Freedom Train is on page 8. Listen to Hidden Brain Innovation 2.0: The Influence You Have to learn how effectively you could expand our freedoms.

Annual paid subscribers are promised a complimentary copy of George Lakoff's The Political Mind. I appreciate the paid subscribers in Bolton Valley, VT, and Kettering, OH.

I live in rural Ohio, where the Putin wing of the GOP threatens everyone and everything we love. As you know, I apply what I've learned from George Lakoff and Empathy Surplus Network USA to advocate for progressive candidates, especially President Joe Biden, Senator Sherrod Brown, and Ohio House Minority Leader Allison Russo. Your support and engagement are crucial in this advocacy. I'm also a proposer of CARE Education. You can help with this cause by becoming a proposer.

The "Duty of Care" first appeared as a moral responsibility in English law in 1760. In a caring society, the duty of care is a necessity rather than an aspiration.

Progressives believe that empathy is the soul of our democracy and foundational to every person's freedoms. We believe the ideal America is a nation of strong, diverse communities of nurturing families caring for each other in all walks of life. That caring ideal mainly includes our public government, which defines what's legal and what's not through politics and weaponizes the enforcement of all laws for the common good. That's why we give law enforcement officers access to weapons.

The Legal Dictionary says, "A duty of care is the legal responsibility of a person or organization to avoid any behaviors or omissions that could reasonably be foreseen to cause harm to others. For example, an accountant owes a duty of care to correctly prepare a customer's tax returns to minimize the chance of an IRS audit. Similarly, manufacturers owe a duty of care to consumers to ensure that their products are safe for public use."

Consequently, the progressive moral mission of the government of, by, and for people is to protect and empower the duty of care for everyone, mainly the governed. The conservative moral mission of government is to limit protection and empowerment of the duty of care only to the extremely wealthy.

Caring for each other is a duty, not an issue. Let's make it a "cognitive policy."

In Chapter 11, Cognitive Policy, of The Political Brain, Dr. Lakoff says, "It is time to give a name to the practice that conservatives have engaged in for the past five decades, but progressives have not. The practice is cognitive policy." Cognitive policy is the policy of getting an idea into normal public discourse, which requires creating a (physical) change in the brains of millions of people."

For example, Ohio General Assembly members in the Democratic Caucus have started using PEOPLE FIRST as a cognitive policy. They should use it more so that it appears in news reports along with their focus on care.

In the June 3, 2024, edition of The Center Square, J.D. Donaldson quoted Ohio House Minority Leader Allison Russo using CARE as a cognitive policy, "(Foreign money) was always about extremists' continued assault on citizen-led ballot initiatives because they could care less what the people want. Extremists have always only cared about what they want, and all they want is absolute power, no matter its corruptive cost." Whether intentional or unconscious on Minority Leader Russo's part, let's hear more of it.

Replace "ISSUES" on candidate websites with "DUTIES OF CARE."

All of our progressive "issue silos" can be united by calling them "DUTIES OF CARE." Conservatives are against ALL of our DUTIES OF CARE because their care is limited to billionaires and billionaire wannabes. Conservatism's limited government means care is limited to billionaires only or fundamentalists only, etc.

By reframing issues with DUTIES OF CARE, we can make empathy/care central to constant public discourse. According to science, repetition of this cognitive policy physically changes human brains, even in brains that don't care. If our opponents physically hear us, their neural pathways for care are physically activated whether they want them to be or not.

The brain mechanism for this is metonymy.

Dr. Lakoff says in Chapter 9, Confronting Stereotypes: Sons of the Welfare Queen, of The Political Brain, "Here's how Metronomy works: within a single frame (duties of care), there are certain fixed associations. In the frame for a restaurant, the customer is seated at a table and orders a dish. This creates an association between the customer and the table and the customer and the dish. Neurally activating the idea of the dish or the table can activate the idea of the customer via the association. This allows one waitress to say to another, "Table 6 wants his check," or “The hamburger with fries left without paying." "

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#GoEmpathySurplus, Chuck