George Lakoff - How to Frame Yourself: A Framing Memo for Occupy Wall Street

George Lakoff is both an important theorist of linguistics and consciousness (his work with metaphor is seminal) and an astute political thinker. Fortunately, he devotes significant time to both interests.

In this article from his Huffington Post column, he looks at the #OWS movement and the concept of framing. He offers some very important ideas on how to frame the movement to become successful - hopefully someone will listen to him, unlike the DNC who fired him for telling them how to defeat GWB in 2000.

Here is one of his thoughts:

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.

And here is the beginning of the article.

How to Frame Yourself: A Framing Memo for Occupy Wall Street

George Lakoff: Author, The Political Mind, Moral Politics, Don't Think of an Elephant!


I was asked weeks ago by some in the Occupy Wall Street movement to make suggestions for how to frame the movement. I have hesitated so far, because I think the movement should be framing itself. It's a general principle: Unless you frame yourself, others will frame you -- the media, your enemies, your competitors, your well-meaning friends. I have so far hesitated to offer suggestions. But the movement appears to maturing and entering a critical time when small framing errors could have large negative consequences. So I thought it might be helpful to accept the invitation and start a discussion of how the movement might think about framing itself.


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.

Read the whole article.