Metaphors, Flakts and Action Illusion

My wife frequently quotes Fire, Women and Dangerous Things to me as well as Metaphors We Live By. I used to find it a little startling to cope with over the cornflakes, but I’ve become hardened after years of lively bed-time discussions on topics such as the applications of stereolithography to topiary design. Anyway, one of the things that I’ve learned about the author is that Lakoff believes that, contrary to received wisdom, we do not necessarily act in accordance with our best interests. We adopt metaphors that match our belief system and try to adapt our actions to match that system even when those actions go against our self-interest. Lakoff uses this to explain the U.S. phenomenon where predominantly blue-collar states consistently vote Republican although the financial policies of that party are typically contrary to their own well-being.

From my own experience, I wonder why there is so much reluctance to embrace metaphors concerned with well-being and personal happiness that extends beyond hedonism. One possible explanation of this is the (to me) recent discovery of the useful flakt.

Timothy Nolan coined flakt and defines it as “a measurable, demonstrable reality that the great majority of people refuse to acknowledge”. Nolan uses it to discuss the flakt that despite the belief to the contrary, “Socialized medicine has been tried in the United States, and it has proven superior to health care supplied by the private sector”.

I now realise that there is a lot of flakt-busting in The Moral Consequences of Economic Growth. And I regularly encounter flakt resistance when discussing Happystance at the dinner table.

A lot of people argue that they don’t have any time to practise happiness or resilience. Yet, there is a lot of desperate busy-ness in modern life that does not add much to anyone’s quality of life and can actively work against our health, longevity and well-being. Like the following quotation, it does seem as if there is a lot of activity to identify something outside the self that offers a panacea to the distress or discontent that is driving the search.

The unhappiest people I know these days are often the ones in motion, encouraged to search for a utopia outside themselves. - Pico Iyer, The Global Soul

Copyright 2006, Tony Plant Happystance Project