Progressive, conscious journalism promotes social empathy.

Welcome back to my eleventh  Freedom for People First post at cwatts.us. I appreciate you. Check out my updated ABOUT THIS SITE page. This post is in preparation for a Zoom forum I'm attending 08/05/2024 at Empathy Surplus Network USA. I'm applying what I learned in Chapters 4, 5, and 6 of Your Brain's Politics: How the Science of Mind Explains Our Political Divide.

Now is also the time to check out Indivisible's new conversation tool, Neighbor2Neighbor, and engage our Democratic neighbors and celebrate Kamala's endorsement by our beloved POTUS.

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. Consider joining the PROJECT CARE TEAM to help me find legislative sponsors for CARE Education in your state.

THANK YOU. I am amazed that some of you read everything I send you. Please consider a paid subscription. If you do, I'll send you a complimentary copy of George Lakoff's Your Brain's Politics: How the Science of Mind Explains Our Political Divide. 

Cruel slavery or caring freedom is on the ballot at every level this election season. Conservatism and progressivism are centered around social dominance or social empathy, respectively. (1) Cruel-wing conservatism promotes culture war, and care-wing (2) progressivism promotes culture diplomacy. Because if you don’t care for anyone but yourself, democracy and freedom for all make no sense.

Wehling and Lakoff

Promote science-based communication in Your Brain's Politics

Too much media still features cruel-wing (3) social dominance worldviews. Too many well-meaning progressives still think their unframed facts will set us free. Fact-checking progressives must share their findings framed around social empathy—our mutual and legal duty to care for each other’s freedom. (4) “Otherwise (the facts) will be ignored,” writes Lakoff. 

When care wing progressives repeatedly, openly, and honestly make social empathy central to our daily public discourse, we accomplish two things. First, we physically activate social empathy brain circuitry in every brain that hears us. At the same time, we physically inhibit social dominance brain circuitry in those same brains and link our facts and policy to our moral worldview of social empathy. (5)

Secondly, and more importantly, if enough of us publicly engage daily, our hearers/readers, says Lakoff, “will give priority to the worldview that public debate evokes more strongly in their minds.” (6) In the case of progressives, that would be a caring worldview rather than a cruel one.

Recently, the National Association of Black Journalists (NABJ) did a poor job of exercising conscious journalism. (7) Granted, they can be applauded for their well-meaning courage. Nevertheless, despite their courage, NABJ didn’t advance a progressive worldview because conscious journalism isn’t taught anywhere in the USA. 

Consequently, they gave a 34-count convicted felon and rapist running for President a social dominance platform at their recent convention. In the aftermath, the earned media they received for several days advanced conservatism’s social dominance bias by not constantly using Lakoff’s TRUTH SANDWICH that calls for REFRAMING the story from a social empathy worldview.

America’s ideal of strong, diverse communities of nurturing families caring for each other’s freedom needs promoting. More people need to be encouraged to commit to the duty to care for each other’s freedom. “We shouldn’t be surprised that the goal of Strict Father childrearing is to make children strong and tough, while Nurturant Parent childrearing  strives to make children nurturers,” writes Dr. Weiling. (8)

“Yes,” Lakoff responds. “You see how these moral differences take us back to the question: ‘When your infant cries at night, do you pick him up?” Progressives, regardless of political party, pick up their crying infants. True conservatives do not. The progressive's job is to make empathy central to constant public discourse.

#GoEmpathySurplus

Chuck

NOTES

(1) Wehling, Elisabeth, Your Brain’s Politics: How the Science of Mind Explains the Political Divide, Chapter 4.1 The Physiology of Two Concepts: Social dominance and social empathy, p. 60, Imprint Academic, UK 2016.

(2) How do we normalize the care-wing frame over the left-wing frame? By using it.

(3) How do we normalize the cruel-wing frame over the right-wing frame? By using it.

(4) IBID., Lakoff, George, Chapter 5.4 Facts Need Frames: The Nonsense of Purely Factual Communication, p. 75-76.

(5) IBID., Lakoff, Chapter 6.6 Values to be Mindful of: Conservative and Progressive Worldviews, p. 88.

(6)  IBID., p.89

(7)  IBID., Chapter 9.2 The Custodians of Conceptual Freedom: Conscious Journalism., p. 120.

(8)  IBID., Wehling and Lakoff., p. 64.