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What are the dangers? Castells himself thinks about it. He wonders:
'what would happen if emotions and feelings were what decide, as a last resort,
the way in which politics and power in general build the meaning, and therefore, the behaviour
to determine the action that later is rationally decided?'
What would happen if we admitted that politics is based on those mental states and emotions,
and not on other things?
My reply is that we would keep doors open to what we call 'neuropower'.
That is, we would keep doors open to a reversal which would take the field of politics
to the field of mental states.
This is why Sennett's sentence is becoming more important.
Politics is no longer a fight or a conflict, but an activity of the brain.
As we saw the first day, now it is a brain what thinks, decides, knows, reminds, lies, etc.
Politics has been left out or disconnected from the cultural, social and economic conditions
that define life in common; they are mental states.
For this reason, Sennett's sentence has now more sense, at least for me.
From the suppositions of neuropolitics, we can interpret that the individual's mismatches
in relation to the political system -consisting of depressions, anxieties, compulsions,
addictions, phobias, etc.- instead of being helplessness reactions
in view of certain material and social conditions, instead of being the result of helplessness
of not being able to change an external situation,
become mismatches of the electrochemical mechanism of the brain.