ON THE CHANGING OF VALUES When Your Position Changes, so do Your Values

If Neuro-Semantics and NLP is about anything, it is about change. It has been since the publication of the first book which was sub-titled: A Book about Communication & Change. That’s what got the founders interested in it in the first place—they could not explain all of the changes that were occurring in the Gestalt Class that Richard and Frank conducted.

So when Kamala Harris said that her “values have not changed” my ears perked up. The statement occurred in her interview on CNN with Dana Bash (August 29). She was asked about all of her “flip-flops”—changes regarding a dozen-plus positions. In response, she said “my values have not changed.” Interesting! But now we have a problem. Namely, that statement does not explain how she came about to hold new and different positions (which actually is what ‘change’ refers to) that she did in 2019 when she ran for president against Biden in the Democratic Primary.

Further, since the interview, and also in the debate, no additional information has been given about her changes. In the 2019 primary she promoted a whole set of objectives that were considered “progressive values.” She was for open borders, big government spending, government give-aways, raising taxes, abortion, and she was against fracking, new oil development, tax cuts, etc.

About a month before the interview, seeing how the progressive values put Binden at a disadvantage to Trump, she began reversing her positions. Suddenly, she shifted and now she is for closed borders, building the wall, fracking, tax cuts, etc. Now she is for what are regarded as “conservative values.” Now as a psychologist, trainer, and modeler committed to understanding change and developing models of the change processes and mechanisms, etc., this is fascinating.

Here’s the problem in a nutshell. When you are now for something like building the wall or fracking (as two examples) and previously you were not and these are “conservative values,” you can’t say that your “values” have not changed. They certainly have. That’s because when you are for something, that means that you value it. It means it is important to you. That’s why you speak up for it and urge others to take it on as theirs. All of that describes what we mean by a “value.”

So here’s what we have—Kamala says she has changed her positions, but she says her values have not changed. How does that work? Why would you hold a position that you

did not value or think important? And if you changed your position to “conservative values,” doesn’t that mean that your values have changed?

For argument sake, let’s say that her “values have not changed.” If that is true, then her new proposed “conservative values” now become only an election ploy designed to get votes. That seems to be what Bernie Sanders said about her changes. Yet it is hypocritical and deceptive.

On the other hand, if it is not true and her values have indeed changed, then she would be sincerely promoting “conservative values.” So which is it? If it is the latter, and she changed her values—then two things follow. 1) She lied to the progressive side of her party. That means she wants to keep them as voters even though she has changed, she just does not want to tell them that. 2) Something amazing happened to her after the Democratic Convention, something she has not revealed which led to this tremendous change. But what? What could have convinced her to change her mind that much?

After-Thought Values can and do change—although for most of us they change slowly and generally over years. Yes, there are times when a person has a radical life-changing experience and all of a sudden, the heavens opens up, light shines down on our fallible head, and suddenly we have a whole new way of seeing things. It happens. But it doesn’t happen very often. I wonder what Harris’ light-from-heaven moment was that led to her coming over to the “conservative values” that she’s now proposing?