Established opinion and myths can be both symptom and cause of political crisis

Evidence

[These writers] believed that Field Day could and should contribute to the solution of the present crisis by producing analyses of the established opinion, myths and stereotypes which had become both a symptom and cause of the current situation [between Ireland and the North]. The collapse of constitutional and political arrangements and the recrudescence of the violence which they had been designed to repress or contain made this a more urgent requirement in the North than in the Republic.… The company, therefore, decided to embark upon a succession of publications, starting with a series of pamphlets [in addition to an impressive series of poems by Seamus Heaney, essays by Seamus Deane, plays by Brian Friel and Tom Paulin] in which the nature of the Irish problem could be explored and, as a result, more successfully confronted than it had been hitherto. — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 881

Categorization

• QUESTION: The claim that myths are simultaneously ‘symptom and cause’ of a political crisis is provocative — a mechanism worth unpacking for how discourse reproduces colonial conflict.
• XREF: The symptom-cause dual role of stereotype resonates with Gramsci’s hegemony and with the circular self-reinforcement of orientalist discourse — a tool for the Islamophobia toolkit. — connects to: Crises, real or imagined, drive popular support for nationalist and populist leaders — Erin K. Jenne and Promise Frank Ejiofor, Ethnopopulism and genocidal…, 82; Contemporary political crises stem from denial of systemic truths more than ignorance — bell hooks, Teaching to Transgress: Education as…, 70; Observers fear current politics is re-enacting 1984’s truth-as-casualty dynamics — Lee McIntyre, Post-Truth, 39
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 881