By Tom Crompton on February 24, 2010

Real reason and false reason: where progressives fail

This piece from Common Dreams provides a great and condensed overview of Lakoff’s political thought, and how it’s rooted in an understanding of neuroscience. It provides an account of why progressive political argument fails when it relies on logic and neglects the importance of emotion.

Tom Crompton

About Tom Crompton

I'm Change Strategist at WWF-UK. For five years I headed WWF-International's Trade and Investment Programme (working on World Trade Organization issues, for example). While I was (and still am) convinced that international trade policy is crucially important in sustainability terms, I was frustrated by the glacial pace of change on this agenda - and the fact that even those trade negotiators I got to know who were personally quite 'radical' nonetheless felt impotent in a system where there was so little political space to pursue the changes that are needed. This led me to ask how organisations like WWF might begin to work to help create the political space for more ambitious change. What leads to more vocal expressions of public concern about sustainability issues? What motivates people to bring more pressure to bear on their elected leaders? These questions led to work with social psychologists and political scientists, and the publication of a series of reports: "Weathercocks and Signposts: the environment movement at a crossroads" (2008); "Simple and Painless? The limitations of spillover in environmental campaigning" (with John Thogersen, 2008), and "Meeting Environmental Challenges: The Role of Human Identity" (with Tim Kasser, 2009). These pieces of work culminated naturally in our new report, "Common Cause".
  • santiago Gowland

    Sorry to have taken almost a year to come back. I was surfing the web and crashed this gate again and saw comments from Jules, Tom and Alaistair… all very interesting. The issue is complex obviously. And that’s why it’s interesting. The landscape is full of contradictions like the one Tom pointed out between Dove and that particular ad from Axe. But I am still convinced that we are ushering into a new era of marketing where a new space for brands is emerging. Brands that are able to untap consumer democracy and tackle global challenges that very few NGOs, Nations or Multilateral organizations can tackle alone. These challenges require the creation of new market mechanisms; the development of new ways of doing business; the convergence of values and economic motivations. The Marine Stewardship Council that Unilever developed together with WWF and others is a good example where you need companies, NGOs, governments and, the most important ingredient: “conscientious consumers”. When these actors join up you can see a snow ball effect shifting a paradigm.
    There are plenty of examples of brands contributing to raise awareness and inspire changes in behavior for good.
    Let’s get together for lunch and discuss these issues. My email is tatgow@gmail.com if you are interested to spend an hour or so reflecting on this. Jules, John, Tom, let me know if you are interested.
    Santiago