Years ago I was listening to a radio program where a climate scientist was being interviewed on someone’s show and they were taking questions from the audience. The first person to call in said, “No way. It doesn’t matter how much data you have. Climate change is not real.” It was clear that no amount of data was going to change her mind.
Information alone can’t change how we think, how we perceive or what we believe. But metaphor operates BELOW our words. It works at the level of FEELING and how we perceive the world. When we feel differently, we perceive things differently… and when we perceive differently, we think differently.
Our current bitterly divisive political climate sorely needs new metaphors.