You've been framed

On the power of the dominant frame and the temptations of Zombie Capitalism

Last week as I was preparing for my first conference presentation in three years on the topic of a counter-narrative to the anti-ESG and anti-woke backlash (at the very special Sun Valley Forum, thank you Aimée Christensen), I spent a lot of time revisiting cognitive linguist George Lakoff’s work on the use of framing in political discourse. How, I wanted to understand, has the backlash been able to gain so much traction so quickly, just when it seemed the wind was finally at our backs? And more importantly, what are we going to do about it? 

Lakoff makes the case that we view everything in our lives through a set of mental frames. Frames are more than words; they are a complex network of associations that exist in our minds, formed through experience and our values. But the way they work is often invisible to us, so a dominant frame just appears to us as normality. It’s a bit like the apocryphal David Foster Wallace parable about fish: “Two young fish are swimming along and they meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says “Morning, boys. How’s the water?” The two young fish swim on, and then one of them looks over at the other and goes “What the hell is water?”” (You can read the whole speech here). Water is such a dominant frame to the young fish that he doesn’t even realize he’s surrounded by it. 

Viewed through the lens of frames, we can understand that shareholder capitalism is our water. It is a frame forged in the fires of Milton Friedman and so established in our modern minds (in the minds of business people, politicians and everyday citizens) that we don’t even realize it’s there - or at least that it is a frame. Said differently, we don’t perceive it as an ideology but instead as the norm in relation to which everything is automatically defined. 

Those of us who are pro-stakeholder capitalism, ESG, the sustainable economy - call it what you will - have been busily trying to establish a new frame, one that has different priorities and offers a different path to prosperity. And in this endeavor we have seen gains. But establishing a new frame is much harder than activating an existing one. We’re not just trying to change minds, but to change brains and how they are wired.

So, applying the concept of framing to our current culture wars, we can understand that the backlash has been able to gain traction so quickly because it activates the dominant mental frame most of us unknowingly have around the economy. The pull of any dominant frame or norm is unbelievably powerful. And to make things more complicated, facts don’t do anything to dislodge them; indeed Lakoff tells us facts that don’t fit the dominant frame simply bounce off. 

So when we see Larry Fink say he’s “ashamed” of talking about ESG issues, reiterating his firm’s commitment to fossil fuels and telling us he’s going to stop using the term “ESG”, that’s the pull of the dominant frame. 

When insurers pull out of a net zero alliance, even as they pronounce homes in California uninsurable because of climate risk, that’s the pull of the dominant frame.

And when we see politicians in Louisiana, Texas and Florida denounce ESG investing as financially immaterial even as they rack up the highest bills in the land for climate-related disasters and their constituents are literally at risk of dropping dead from climate-fueled heatwaves, that’s the pull of the dominant frame.  

Until we have a frame for the sustainable economy that is as compelling and well established in the minds of voters, shareholders, executives and citizens as the shareholder/extractive capitalism narrative is, attempts to move the world in a more sustainable direction will remain vulnerable to attempts to undermine the confidence of doing so on the basis of fiscal imprudence and reassertions of the dominant frame. The new frame is something a lot of folks are working on, including a group to whom I’m very grateful that collaborated on this at Sun Valley Forum under the auspices of Alex Thompson and Eamonn Store. We’ll keep you posted on the outcomes of that process, and would also be very grateful for a connection to others working on this same goal so we can combine forces. 

However the reason I sat down to write this post today is also because I am just so tempted to play a little punchier offense. When I read stories like the one that Texas, Louisiana and Florida are among the states scheduled to be facing heat of 119F this week while, as I mentioned above, also being the states pushing back the hardest on ESG and “woke”, I feel it’s time to call out the delusion under which the pushback proponents appear to be laboring. It is time to call out the dominant frame for what it is: an ideology, and to try new strategies to break the spell among those in its grip. As we engage in the grown-up pursuit of the new frame, and articulating what we are FOR, I also just can’t resist sharing some ideas I’ve been noodling on to de-position the anti-woke agenda in a less mature, “when they go low, we go low” way. 

So here are my three ideas. 

1. Because the anti-E.S.G. crowd’s model of accountability-free capitalism is long dead and sleep walking us into economic and environmental catastrophe, we might term it Zombie Capitalism. Rather be woke than a dead man walking. Perhaps the stars of the hugely successful HBO hit series The Last of Us could be enticed into helping seed this frame.

2. Or, pursuing this route to something harder hitting, we might try Death Cult Capitalism. There’s nothing rational about a mindset that continues to press for climate pollution even in the face of this summer’s devastating climate impacts, especially since the states most vocally opposing E.S.G. are also the states hit the hardest by, and racking up the largest bills for, climate-related extreme weather events. One can only assume proponents are in the grip of an ideological cult that makes them willing to harm their own constituents - and those being almost literally sacrificed on the altar of fossil fuel profits need to be deprogrammed as surely as do any cult members (for more on this I recommend The Persuaders by Anand Ghiridaradas) 

3. A third option is inspired by the anti-ESG thesis that business has no business addressing social and environmental issues. But businesses, like people, are bound by a social contract. They should no more be permitted to pollute and commit harm freely than a person should be able to break the law and harm fellow humans with impunity. We have a term for a person that engages in behavior with complete disregard for the social contract: a sociopath. So it’s time we call the ant-ESG model of business what it is: Sociopath Capitalism

Of course, everything I know about framing suggests that what will be infinitely more powerful is to find that language that helps align the sustainable economy agenda to people’s most deep-seated values, things like freedom, love, family and belonging (in my talk I shared insights from the fight for marriage equality and how that movement embraced these principle to win) and to call people in, not call them out. The last thing we need right now is more division; it’s time to remind each other of what we share in common. And that’s what we’re aiming for with the new narrative. 

But goodness it’s tempting to play hardball.

Ultimately, I believe this Lakoff insight can help: “Political ground is gained not when you inhabit the middle ground but when you impose your framing as the common sense position”. The dominant frame will always seem like the common sense position - and when shareholder capitalism was invented, perhaps it was. But the cracks in the its facade are beginning to show in increasingly dangerous and visible ways. The only common sense position available to us now is the sustainable position. 

We just need the right frame to flip the script. Watch this space.