Calling all pro-empathy freedom voting culture diplomats
Our calling is to use free "speech acts" daily versus hate speech acts.
Welcome back to Pro-Empathy Freedom Voters are the Solution, and a big hello to all free Pro-Empathy Freedom subscribers. We still have room for you as a new paid subscriber to join our Fall one-hour-long Zoom discussions beginning this Tuesday at 6:45 pm Eastern. We’ll convene all Tuesdays in September and the first two in November. We’ll focus on George Lakoff’s Don’t Think of an Elephant: Know Your Values and Frame the Debate. Click the blue button on our website for enrollment information. You still have time to enroll and buy the book. If you'd like to be part of these congenial and stimulating conversations, you can upgrade to paid, and we’ll send you enrollment instructions:
I am a pro-empathy freedom voting culture diplomat and invite you to embrace this calling. I am committed to this description because it reframes politics and business around empathy, the soul of democracy. In daily conversations, I strive to remember to introduce or describe myself this way to anchor my part of a conversation around empathy and social responsibility. After almost nineteen years since I read George Lakoff’s Don’t Think of an Elephant and intentional practice, speaking differently is beginning to feel normal.
Reframing IS social change.1 To paraphrase Dr. Lakoff, thinking differently as culture diplomats requires speaking differently. In his latest FrameLab Substack, Dr. Lakoff reminds us that there are different kinds of speech, in addition to progressive and conservative speech. He wrote, “Some kinds of speech constitute speech acts.2” Speech acts constitute action and contradict the misguided activist notion that thinking and speaking are not acts. We desperately need pro-empathy freedom framing culture diplomatic activism.
Reframing is a social action since all ideas are physically in the human body, i.e., embodied. Ideas don’t exist outside of the human body. For example, ideas leading to commands or expressed desires, questions, declarations, threats, or promises are speech acts that constitute action. For speech to be free speech, according to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the US Constitution, it must be empathy and responsibility-based speech, i.e., speech that protects and empowers humanity to care for and treat one another with respect for their dignity and freedom.
Mafia Donald and his indicted and unindicted conservative accomplices are masters of hateful speech acts. The job of pro-empathy, freedom-voting culture diplomats is to use free speech acts versus hate speech acts daily. Ours is a high calling that is simple but not easy. In addition to our Zoom forums, the Pro-Empathy Freedom Framing Toolkit3 will aid your efforts to speak differently daily - if you use it. Our challenge is to combine our Four Empathy Activities, beginning with inward digestion, with our Culture Diplomacy S.H.O.E.S., an acronym:
S - Show up at public meetings to cultivate empathy
H - Help elected officials cultivate empathy in civic tasks
O - Organize to cultivate empathy in civic tasks
E - Educate about human rights empathy, the soul of democracy
S - Start over each day to publicly cultivate empathy
Lakoff, George, “Introduction - Reframing IS Social Change,” Don’t Think of an Elephant, p xi, Chelsea Green Publishing, Vermont, 2004 and 2014.
Stanford Encylopedia of Philosophy https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/speech-acts/