[lbo-talk] My reply to Katha Pollitt

Wojtek Sokolowski sokol at jhu.edu
Tue Nov 9 10:47:12 PST 2004


C.G. Eastbrook:
> This is the note that I hope was tongue in cheek, if only for your echoing
> of Thatcher's "There is no such thing as society: there are individual men
> and women, and there are families."
>
It seems you do not get my sense of humor. Indeed, it was an allusion to the iron lady's wise crack, but also subverting it by saying "interest groups" rather than "individuals." It is the mico- meso- and macro- thing. The lefties are too marco, and the righties too micro to my taste.

It also seems that you do not get my argument either. There is such a thing as missing the forest among trees. That is why, inter alia, attorneys are asked by the judge if the "panel" is acceptable to them after they accepted individual jurors. The jurorts may be acceptable but the panel may be not. Likewise, individual issues may be acceptable by the package deal espoused by a candidate may be not.

The reason for that is people tend to think in terms of wholes rather than by piecemeal assembling details that form those wholes. That is to say, unlike computers, people understand what is being said or written even though if they do not see or hear some or sometimes most of the words. They have that ability because their minds work by framing i.e. a priori imposing certain scripts or narratives that focus on some details, ignore others, fill in blanks etc. That idea is rather alien to Anglo-Saxon thinking which prefers narrow empiricism and tabula rasa myth, but is quite popular on the Continent.

Therefore, the narrative or the "master script" determines which details are taken into consideration and which are ignored, as well the meaning of the details that are taken into consideration. That is why a person who wants, say, universal health care, may repeatedly vote against universal health proposals. In the former case, he may see it through the frame of his own health needs, in the latter - through the frame of government interference in his private life.

This is why human behavior seems so "irrational" - for the narrow-minded rational choice perspective at least - and why providing the proper master narrative is so important in politics and in every day life as well. Dinosaur populists from the New Deal era simply do not get it. They still think of politics in terms of rat-choices made by a perfectly rational individuals.

Wojtek



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