The Political Mind, Part III (Chapter 2), Chris sayeth:
Anyway, now on to that part I promised you about how real conservatives don't exist, or at least not in great numbers. Towards the end of this chapter, Lakoff gives us the concept of "biconceptualism." This means that some people have both progressive and conservative thoughts -- that is, they dig obedience in some areas of politics, and empathy in others (the two are mutually contradictory, so they certainly can't go together in the same political policy!). Unfortunately for us progressives, most conservatives don't realize they're really biconceptuals. Or as Lakoff puts it, "Many self-identified 'conservatives' have many, many progressive views without being aware of it" (p. 70). That's because these things are all unconscious (that's true, they are), and separate in our brains (that's probably true too), so conservatives never consciously run into contradictions in their thinking, even though they're really mostly progressives. You see, "biconceptualism is simply a fact about brains" (p. 71), and research has shown that we can resolve contradictions unconsciously (he throws in some gratuitous neuroscience here to tell us which regions of the brain neuroimagers have guessed this might, possibly, if we squint really hard at the data, take place in). Oh, and some bullshit about neural binding is in there too. Ugh.
