Daniel J. Sundahl
I suspect that my true “political consciousness” began around the months surrounding mid-1963 to mid-1964 and for reasons you, my patient reader, I hope can understand and share. Can my awareness of what came across the airwaves and was broadcast in black and white on our family television be likened to an emerging “political consciousness?”
An Emerging Political Consciousness
I’ve been thinking this political season about my own political consciousness. I know it’s a state of mind based upon my awareness of politics and assumes I’ve developed a personal concept of my political identity.
I also own a concern with the lack of political prudence these days, which seems to have digressed into a blood sport, and “free speech” into a bludgeon.
Perhaps it’s always been that way with political passions fomented by faction and an odd understanding of free speech removed from common law.
I must have been at some time politically unconscious, which is a term coined by Frederic Jameson, with whom I have differences. His thesis is that political problems are not only consciously, but unconsciously, felt.
Which would seem a paradox until we read how Freud argued there are three levels of mind, one of which is an area of repressed feelings, memories, habits, and so on, but which play an important role in influencing behavior, including political behavior.
Maybe so.
Why, though, do I have such negative thoughts, if not anger, about the political square these days, and a belief that political behavior at large has become self-defeating, and that most “politicians” have compulsive behavior problems left over from childhood behavior problems?
Perhaps they’ve accessed too much of their unconscious mind, and the result is daily “screeds”… that sound we make when scraping our finger nails across a chalk board.
Self-interest seems to be the rule, » Read More
https://theimaginativeconservative.org/2024/09/emergence-political-consciousness-week-boys-state-daniel-j-sundahl.html