The System - Political consciousness

While some people are political junkies, most seem turned off by politics. They have no political consciousness. They have no idea why their lives are configured the way they are or how they got that way.

For average people most of their values and daily lives are shaped by government which dictates every thing from stop and go at the traffic light, to what their kids study in school, to how much and on what items they must pay sales tax.

Michel Foucault called this action of government on people's daily lives as governmentality. Governmentality has a profound influence on one's self concept and one's view of the world that one is living in.

The 60s we called this concept of how government affects the daily lives of people "the system". In postmodern conversations they call it a "discourse". There is a legal discourse, a medical discourse, an educational discourse, etc. Each discourse has a vocabulary unique to it domain as well as certain practices, and certain "officials" who have the credentials to represent the discourse in carrying out its practices and explaining its rationale because of supposedly expert knowledge which that official possesses having been a long time and often certified student of the discourse.

The reason I bring these ideas up on this blog is because it is apparent to me as a psychotherapist that people are not "free" in the sense that we normally use that word. They are caught up in a system or discourse which influences the way they think of themselves, their behaviors, their thoughts and feelings in self censoring and regulating ways. Pointing out these influences, constraints, restraints, contingencies often times is very illuminating and clarifying for people. Helping them negotiate the governmentality which constrains their lives is often times at first threatening and then clarifying.

I believe that the "system" or discourse has big influences on people's mental health. Being caught up in dysfunctional systems can contribute to symptoms and poor functioning and poor sense of well being.

As Tip O'Neil said when he was Speaker Of The House, "All politics are local." And it could be said that all politics are personal although most people are not aware of it, are not conscious of it, they think that that is just how things are, when in fact how things are, evolved over time and are the way they are because of configurations of influences and power in the past.

I am planning on doing a series of posts on this topic but I don't know how to tag these posts. Perhaps for now I will just call them "the system".

This is article #1 in a series on The System.