Activism, by Olavo de Carvalho

This series of six newspaper columns by Olavo de Carvalho was collected in this order in the book “The Minimum You Need To Know So As Not To Be An Idiot”.

“The Fundamental Choice” discusses the stark contrast between spiritual traditions, which value individual life purpose and virtues, and revolutionary ideologies that derive meaning solely from the fight for future societal changes, often causing present harm.

“Psychology of Fanaticism” dissects Victor Frankl’s traits of fanaticism, focusing on fanatics' loss of individuality, contempt for others' individuality, and a black-and-white perception of others as allies or enemies, which erodes recognition of others as unique individuals.

“Still on Fanaticism” further delves into fanaticism, illustrating how fanatics overlook others' personal goals and values, seeing them only through the lens of their party’s objectives, and denying individuals the right to self-definition.

“Sacred Causes” warns of the pitfalls in attributing ultimate value to movements or causes, arguing that individuals often use these as proxies for personal validation, leading to a sacralization of the contingent and the potential moral degradation of humanity.

“The Leftist Paradox” critiques socialist ideologies and practices, attributing them to leaders' emotional deficiencies and unrealistic ideals. Olavo notes the irony that socialist regimes often enact more brutality than the capitalist systems they criticize and condemns manipulative tactics like “asymmetric warfare.”

“The Religious Authority of Evil” links destructive historical events and lack of moral integrity to influential left-wing figures and organizations. Olavo argues that the shift in the historical sense from the 14th to 17th centuries, leading to a deceptive concept of perpetual instant, justifies crimes committed for a hypothetical future society and functions as a malevolent force.

• 1. Spirituality vs fanaticism
• The fundamental choice
• Psychology of fanaticism
• Still on fanaticism
• 2. Models vs behaviors
• Sacred causes
• The leftist paradox
• The religious authority of evil

1. Spirituality vs fanaticism

The fundamental choice

O Globo, August 12, 2000

For Christianity, Judaism, Islam, and all the spiritual traditions of the world, each human life has a purpose, a meaning that remains largely invisible to those around, revealing itself gradually to the individual, and only becoming fully clear when that life, once concluded, can be measured on the scale of supreme perfection, supreme wisdom, and supreme holiness. This scale is essentially the same for all times and places and becomes known through the examples of saints and prophets—in Christianity, the example of God incarnate. The fundamental human problem is to discover the means for each person to approach this unitary ideal through the variety of symbolic and doctrinal expressions, as well as through the contradictions and mutations of life itself.

For modern revolutionary ideologies, individual life has no meaning and only acquires some significance through its participation in the struggle for the future society. The attainment of this goal will serve as the measure for evaluating individual actions. Once the goal is achieved, everything that has contributed to “hastening” it, even sin, fraud, crime, and genocide, will be redeemed in the unity of the final meaning and therefore considered good. Whatever contributes to “delaying” it will be deemed bad. Ultimately, good and evil boil down to “reactionary” and “progressive.” However, as there is no predetermined deadline for the salvific denouement, “hastening” and “delaying” carry ambiguous meanings that alternate according to the contradictions of historical movement. A despot, a tyrant, the epitome of reaction for their contemporaries, may retroactively become progressive if it is discovered that they unknowingly contributed to accelerating a process. In another phase, the judgment may reverse, depending on new interpretations of “delay” and “acceleration” relevant at the time. Louis XIV, Ivan “the Terrible,” Robespierre, or Stalin have shifted back and forth between heaven and hell several times.

The models of conduct for the spiritual individual form a stable pantheon, an acquired civilizational heritage where each individual can seek inspiration to act well, regardless of prevailing convictions in their time and environment. In contrast, the models of the revolutionary are shifting entities that hold no value without the approval of contemporary consensus. Joan of Arc and Francis of Assisi could be saints against collective authority, but no one can make a revolution against the revolutionary consensus.

From the spiritual perspective, the goal of existence is for each individual to seek perfection in the present life, doing good to flesh-and-blood people who can respond and judge whether it was a genuine good or a false good that brought harm. In the revolutionary outlook, what matters is “transforming the world” and benefiting future generations, regardless of the harm it may cause to the current generation. The recipient of the good is absent and cannot judge it, except through their self-appointed representatives, precisely the same self-appointed benefactors.

In the traditional view, the examples of perfection are plentiful and meticulously recorded in sacred books and the testimonies of believers. On the other hand, the perfect society has never existed, and the only model available to us is a future hypothesis, whose idealized description is usually vague, allegorical, or completely evasive.

“Everything that rises must converge,” said Teilhard de Chardin. The study of comparative religions reveals the profound unity and coherence of the great traditions concerning essential virtues. That is why Jewish prophets serve as models of perfection for Christians, Hindu sages for Muslims, and so on. In the revolutionary sphere, the more a person embodies their own ideology perfectly, like Lenin and Stalin, Hitler and Mussolini, the more odious and abominable they become to followers of other parties. At most, there can be mutual jealous admiration for those who wish to appropriate the enemy’s talents to more easily destroy them. There is no virtue outside of party loyalty.

The virtues of the spiritual person are explicit and defined, with identifiable conceptual content: piety, generosity, sincerity, etc. The revolutionary virtues are occasional, utilitarian, and instrumental. In Max Scheler’s terminology, the ethics of the religious are “material,” aiming at specific conduct and actions; the ethics of the revolutionary are “formal,” reduced to a generic equation of ends and means. Therefore, the spiritual person, knowing the concept of right conduct, can guide themselves, doing good according to their conscience without having to follow anyone. In contrast, the revolutionary can only be in the right conduct when acting according to the “correct line” of the revolutionary movement as formulated at each stage by leadership and assemblies. The possibility of independent conduct is null and self-contradictory.

There is no possibility of agreement between the ethics of the great spiritual traditions and the revolutionary mindset of any kind. One day, each person will have to choose. Those who evade the inescapable inevitability of this choice, trying to beautify revolutionary ideologies with phrases borrowed from spiritual traditions, do so because, in truth, they have already made their choice. As Simone Weil said, being in hell is to mistakenly imagine that one is in heaven.

Psychology of fanaticism

Jornal da Tarde, November 21, 2002

Victor Frankl described the fanatic through two essential traits: absorption of individuality into collective ideology and contempt for the individuality of others. “Individuality” is the unique and irreplaceable combination of factors that make each human being a singular exemplar. Some individuals have more differentiated individualities than others. The more differentiated, the less they can be reduced to general typologies and the more they require understanding in terms of their personal formula. This is most evident in the works of great artists and philosophers, not to mention saints and prophets. The creative personality only partially fits into general categories such as “style of the era” or “class ideology,” which social scientists have invented to speak about indistinct human averages, but which mediocre scholars insist on applying as straitjackets to anything beyond the norm.

In this insistence, disguised and socially esteemed, fanaticism, as defined by Frankl, reveals itself. Much of today’s “social science” is nothing but the cutting of individualities according to the measure of standard mediocrity. Antonio Gramsci, who limited the role of human beings to agents or patients of class struggle, excluding the uncategorized as aberrations or archaeological residues of earlier stages of the same struggle, was, in this sense, a genius of mediocrity and a high priest of fanaticism. The word “fanatic,” applied to the founder of the PCI, may seem insulting and unacceptable to those who, like good mediocrities, only understand “fanaticism” in the vulgar and quantitative sense of frenzied exaltation. True fanaticism, however, is entirely compatible with a serene demeanor and often carries convincing signs of “moderation.” The fanatic doesn’t need to be irritable, nervous, or hydrophobic. He is so attuned to the collective ideology that it suffices as a channel for expressing his feelings, experiences, and aspirations, leaving no gap, no chasm, which differentiated individuals often see open between their inner world and the universe around them. He thinks and feels with the party, loves and hates with the party, desires with the party, and acts with the party. Anything in his being that escapes this mold is unimportant or sick. In our time and country, this attitude has taken on a grotesque aspect, marking the final surrender of the soul: the militant grafts the party’s acronym onto his baptismal name, becoming “Joãozinho do PT,” “Mariazinha do PT.” Not even the old “Partidão” went that far. Party affiliation is no longer a simple critical and conditional approval of certain political ideas; it has become the structuring factor and the vital essence of the personality itself, which, without it, would collapse like an empty sack. The naming and defining function, once reserved for families, professions, and regions, now belongs to the party.

At the same time, affiliation gives the fanatic a location and a point of support in the external world. Through the collective ideology, he integrates so well into the world that he never feels isolated and strange, except for the brief interval necessary to regain a sense of his party mission and place in history, throwing away with disdain the moment of “morbidness.” Never displaced in this world, he aspires to no other world except in the form of a chronological future to be realized in this same plane of existence. Nothing anchors him more deeply in temporality, in the historical, than his rejection of the present, against which he proclaims, “Another world is possible,” meaning precisely that this is the same world as soon as it is subjugated by his party. Kant, with involuntary irony, called the spirit of revolution “worldly wisdom.” The compression of the infinite into the finite could not be more explicit than in the verse of the communist poet Paul Éluard: “There are other worlds, but they are in this one.” Couldn’t it be more explicit? Yes, it could. Gramsci already preached “the total mundanization of thought.” In this sense, the fanatic lacks the solitude, depth, and threedimensionality typical of those “in the world, but not of the world.” On the contrary, he may “not be” in the world, but with all the intensity of his being, he “is” of the world.

In an upcoming article, I will show how this makes the fanatic incapable of perceiving the individuality of others.

Still on fanaticism

Jornal da Tarde, December 5, 2002

The second trait of the fanatic personality, as pointed out by Victor Frankl, is contempt for the individuality of others.

The structure of individuality manifests primarily as a hierarchy of life goals, varying in each human being. What is essential to one is secondary to another. However, all goals somehow reflect a universal value that can be recognized and appreciated by those who do not share them. I may not necessarily want what you want for yourself, but I recognize that wanting it is good for you. The man who desires wealth appreciates the one seeking knowledge; the seeker of knowledge respects the one pursuing artistic perfection, happiness in marriage, political success, and so on. The same person can simultaneously or successively pursue different objectives, each of them expressing the same underlying values in the current situation. For the fanatic, there is only one authentic goal: the goals of his party or sect. The others are worthless in themselves, becoming good or bad according to their alignment with or deviation from those goals. For instance, consider charity. For those who cherish it, charity is, in itself, the goal, the value, and the supreme criterion for actions. For the fanatic leftist, it is a meaningless symbol, acquiring positive or negative value depending on its political use. At one moment, it may be condemned as bourgeois individualist illusion, while at another, it may be praised as the ultimate virtue of the citizen, depending on whether it appears as an autonomous alternative or as a social practice integrated into the leftist strategy, as seen in the “Betinho Campaign.”

However, if you persist in reaffirming your own criteria independently of the service or disservice they may render to the political goals he has in mind, the fanatic must ignore you as irrelevant or classify you as an enemy. Acknowledging your vital objectives as independent is simply out of the question. Such recognition would reduce the sacred political ideal he cherishes to a mere vital value among others, and this is precisely what he cannot admit under any circumstances. Hence, he is incapable of understanding others in their own terms. He has to translate them into the language of his own ideal, that is, reduce them to friends or enemies of the party, and judge them accordingly, no matter how ill they fit into this prefabricated mold.

As a result, the personal intentions of the victim vanish entirely. For example, if you are against socialism for moral and philosophical reasons that have nothing to do with the interest of the “dominant classes” the socialist claims to combat, it doesn’t matter. To him, you are an ideologue of the dominant classes. And if you respond that what is at stake for you is something completely different, he won’t listen. You are already categorized, and categorizing you is the most courtesy he can grant to someone who, in his eyes, only serves that purpose.

2. Models vs behaviors

Sacred causes

Commerce Diary, January 17, 2012

It is a natural impulse of human beings to escape the narrowness of personal and family routine to venture into the broader universe of history, where they feel that their life transcends and acquires a “higher” sense. The most banal and coarse way to do this, accessible even to the mediocre, incapable, and scoundrels, is to join a political party or a “cause”, that is, to engage in some group selfishness embellished with pompous words such as “freedom”, “equality”, “justice”, “patriotism”, “morality”, or “human rights”. These words can represent some substantive value, but not when the individual gains from them all the value they can have, instead of filling them with their own personal substance. The most criminal illusion of modernity was to persuade men that they can be ennobled by identifying with a “cause”, when in fact all causes, as names of abstract values, only acquire concrete value through the nobility of the men who represent them. The depth of degradation is reached when some “causes” are so valued that they seem to infuse virtues, automatically, into any vagabond, fraudster or bandit who agrees to represent them. The very word “virtue” comes from the Latin vir, viri, meaning “man”, denoting that it is a quality of the individual human being and not of general abstract ideas, no matter how beautiful and attractive their names may sound.

There is no greater evidence of this than Christianity itself, which, before being a “movement”, a “cause”, an institution or even a doctrine, was a flesh-and-blood person, the person of Our Lord Jesus Christ, from whom, and only from whom, everything that came afterwards in the history of the Church acquires any validation it can aspire to.

When taken as the maximum or sole measure of good and evil, the “cause” acquires the prestige of sacred things and becomes an object of idolatrous alienation. Now, to a greater or lesser extent, this happens with all, absolutely all the political, social and economic causes of the modern world, without exception. Communism, fascism, feminism, black identity, the gay movement, sometimes liberalism itself, or on a smaller and local scale, the Workers' Party (PT, in Brazil), do not admit any greater virtue than adhering to their cause, nor a more heinous sin than fighting against it. For the activists, “good” is anyone who is on their side, “bad” is anyone who is against. It is a judgment of last resort, against which one cannot plead, not even as a mitigating factor, any more universal value embodied in a concrete person. Although all these movements are historically located, making no sense outside a strict chronological limit, the moral judgments based on them come with a claim of atemporal universality, abolishing even the sense of cultural relativity: for the enraged feminists, male authority is odious at any time, even in those times when the harshness of economic conditions, natural dangers, and the threat of constant wars made any flirtation with sexual equality unthinkable.

Even more: the public effort made in favor of the “cause” is such an absolute and definitive criterion of judgment, that, once satisfied, it exempts the individual from practicing in their personal life the very virtues that the movement claims to represent. To allege, for example, that Karl Marx instituted in his home the strictest class discrimination, excluding from the family table the illegitimate son he had with the maid, is considered a “mere” argumentum ad hominem that proves nothing against the exalted value of the Marxist “cause”. Similarly, Mr. Luiz Mott¹ is praised for his fight for gay marriage, although he boasts of having slept with more than five hundred men, that is, he has no respect for the institution of marriage, be it hetero or homo. Mutatis mutandis, the most obvious personal virtues of the adversary become irrelevant or despisable compared to the fact that he is “on the wrong side”. Morally speaking, Francisco Franco, Charles de Gaulle or Humberto Castelo Branco, men of exemplary personal integrity, were infinitely superior to Fidel Castro or Che Guevara, serial killers of their own friends, not to mention Mao Tse-tung, a compulsive rapist. But which communist would admit to seeing in this detail a sign, even distant, that the nobility of the cause he defends might not be as absolute as it seems to him? Even the virtues of martyrs and saints mean nothing, compared to a high position in the party.

When I say that this phenomenon translates the sacralization of the contingent and provisional, I am not speaking figuratively. Mircea Eliade and, following him, practically all historians of religion define the “sacred” as everything that is attributed ultimate value, a sovereign and insurmountable judgmental authority, immune, in turn, to all judgment. To the extent that they take adherence or rejection to their cause as the final and irrevocable criterion for judging human conduct, the movements I mentioned above become grotesque caricatures of religion and morality, and by their mere existence already produce the moral degradation of the human species to the level of simply politically opportune criminality.

The leftist paradox

Diário do Comércio, August 7, 2006

Consciously experiencing the historical time in which our existence unfolds is a privilege, a duty, and a right of individual intelligence, which does not reach its fullness except by absorbing and integrating the tensions and mutations of the greater environment around it. Since the beginning of the 20th century, this right has been denied to several generations of human beings, induced to live a fictitious history in the parallel world of ideological militancy and to cross existence in complete ignorance of the real factors that determined their destiny. The socialist illusion consists not only in an error of prediction regarding the final objectives. If it were so, it would merely be the tragic end of noble existences. But the false expectation about the future already falsifies the present life: it permeates the entire biography of each activist, tinging every one of their acts and thoughts, even the most intimate, personal and seemingly unrelated to political struggle, with farce and self-deception.

One only needs to study the lives of Marx, Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Guevara, Fidel Castro, Yasser Arafat (or their intellectual acolytes, the Sartres, Brechts, Althussers, and tutti quanti) to understand what I am talking about: each of these men who held the destinies of millions of people in their hands was an emotionally deficient person, chronically immature, incapable of starting a family, bearing an economic responsibility, or maintaining normal personal relationships with anyone. In compensation for the moral abortion of their lives, they created the pompous idealization of the “revolutionary” (that is, themselves) as the incarnation of a superior type of humanity, adorning the total existential lie with a touch of kitsch aesthetics.

They are not characters of tragedy. The essential rule of tragedy is the absence of guilt. The tragic hero cannot be below circumstances, cannot be a perverse, a weak, an idiot unable to bear his own life. He fails because he clashes with the superior demands of an invisible cosmic order. His only crime is not being superhuman in a situation that imposes superhuman challenges. But realizing the intrinsic fallacy of the socialist promise is not a superhuman challenge.² It is an elementary duty of any average intelligence willing to examine the matter objectively. Those who shy away from this examination, transferring to parties, movements, or “public opinion” the responsibilities of their individual conscience, thereby renounce the dignity of intelligence and devote themselves to a stubborn and futile struggle against the structure of reality. This involves a mix of adolescent vanity, gnostic rebellion, and that satanic pride that is almost an automatic compensation for existential cowardliness. All this is regrettable, but it is not tragic: it is grotesque. There is no tragedy in the failure of socialism: there is only a bloody farce.

The model of the leaders and intellectual idols is repeated, in an unlimited series, in the lives of activists, sympathizers, and “fellow travelers,” eventually spreading among the general public. The endless resentment against parents, the destruction of family unity, the hatred of the moral demands of religious traditions, the desperate search for sensations through drug consumption, the childish demand for the “right to pleasure”, the transformation of eroticism into a ladder of egotistical demands that starts with feminist protest and culminates in the open apology of pedophilia and incest, the spread of pedagogical techniques that encourage juvenile delinquency - all of this is the expanded projection of the lifestyle of the “great revolutionaries”, spread throughout society to the point of no longer recognizing itself as such, and transfigured into a system of “ethical” obligations, the basis for judgments, accusations, charges, and blackmail.

At the heart of everything is the hatred of reality, the refusal to bear the weight of existence, the gnostic dream of transfiguring the order of things through psychotic self-exaltation and magic tricks like “vocabulary reform.”

It is no wonder that the politics produced by these people is a living contradiction, an immense entropic machine that grows through self-destruction and intoxicates itself with vain glory in the contemplation of its own defeats. No capitalist exploitation, however “wild” they labeled it, managed to starve crowds as vast as those that perished during the state control of agriculture in the USSR, Mao Zedong’s “Great Leap Forward”, or socialist experiments in various African countries. The “struggle against poverty” continues to be the main moral pretext for socialism, but the truth is that socialism’s greatest contribution to victory in this struggle would simply be to cease to exist. Likewise, the inflamed protest against any anti-socialist violence is a persistent leitmotiv of left-wing discourse, but no right-wing regime ever killed, imprisoned, or tortured as many left-wing activists as Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, or Fidel Castro. It’s a simple matter of doing the math. If socialists had a shred of respect for their own human rights, they would go back to their homes and let the good old bourgeois democracy protect them against the suicidal temptation to implement socialism.

Similarly, when leftists start talking about “peace”, prudence would suggest that they start stocking up on food in the basement for the next war their leaders are plunging them into at that very moment. The pacifist movement led by the Communist parties of Europe in the 1930s was a trick conceived by Stalin to give Germany time to rearm with Soviet aid and destroy the “bourgeois order” of the old world.³ Millions of French idiots shouted at rallies and waved little white flags without realizing that this was a passport to the slaughterhouse. The treaties that, responding to the clamor of a whole generation of young enragés, ended the fighting in Vietnam in 1972 gave a free pass for the communists to invade South Vietnam and neighboring Cambodia and kill three million civilians there — four times the total number of civilian and military casualties of the war.

Those who see in George Orwell’s newspeak nothing more than an advertising trick conceived by Machiavellian leaders to induce stupid militants to accept war as peace, tyranny as freedom are mistaken. These Machiavellian leaders have no control over the process, which, with rare and inevitable exceptions, ends up dragging and destroying them in the midst of their victims. The self-destructive paradox is at the center of every militant soul because it is at the very root of the socialist movement, which is born from the Gnostic aspiration to suppress the physical world and condenses in Hegel’s absurd proclamation: “Being, in its indeterminacy, is nothing” — a pathetic confusion between discourse and existence, destined to have the most monstrous intellectual and historical consequences. Pure newspeak already makes its ostentatious presence in Engels' formula, “freedom is the recognition of necessity”, which inspired so many false self-accusations in the Moscow Trials and whose ultimate meaning, of truly demonic irony, appears with glaring clarity in Bertolt Brecht’s comment: “If they were innocent, they deserved to be condemned even more.” Brecht, in fact, was the same man who cynically summed up the essence of socialist morality: “Lie in favor of the truth.” Try doing that and, of course, you’ll never stop lying.

Some usual rules of Leninism illustrate this cynicism in daily practice: “Foment corruption and denounce it” and “Accuse them of what you do, insult them with what you are” wonderfully summarize the history of our PT, which grew by the discourse of moralistic accusation at the same time that it was setting up a corruption machine of pharaonic dimensions, next to which the old thieving politicians begin to look like schoolboys guilty of stealing gum.

It was inevitable that, over time, the self-negating forma mentis of the leftist movement would crystallize into a simple, even naive strategic formula, which due to its very simplicity would be easily and profitably applicable, reproducible on a global scale by simple automatism.

This strategy, whose name is now openly proclaimed by Mr. Hugo Chávez, is “asymmetric warfare”.

It consists, as Jacques Baud explains in La Guerre Asymétrique ou la Défaite du Vainqueur,⁴ in transforming military defeats into political victories through a psychological ruse: to grant one side, under edifying pretexts, the unconditional right to all crimes, all brutalities, all baseness, and disarm the other through paralyzing moral demands.

What neither the practitioners nor the passive collaborators nor the victims of this ruse seem to realize is that it carries within it the definitive proof of the moral superiority of the adversary at the very moment it accuses its alleged crimes and iniquities. It’s clear: if the accused weren’t morally sensitive, conscientious, scrupulous, it would be impossible to inhibit them by appealing to their ethical duties. And, if the accuser were in turn open to these same duties in the plan of his own conduct, he would feel equally held back by scruples and there would be no asymmetry at all. It is precisely the fact of being exempt from the moral obligations demanded of the enemy that gives the practitioner of “asymmetric warfare” the strategic advantage of his position. It is essential for the success of this ruse that the accusation discourse always be made by the guilty against the innocent, by the criminal against the victim. The public and the totality of passive collaborators used as echo chambers for indignant moralism do not even remotely realize this, but the fact is that, the more vehement the accusation, the greater the malice of the accuser and the more irrefutable the proof of his crimes. The asymmetry consists precisely in this.

A didactic example, drawn from the war between Israel and Hezbollah, appears in the contrast between the attitudes of the two sides with respect to civilian casualties. While in Western media Israelis are condemned as monsters because they accidentally killed thirty civilians in a bombing, in Islamic countries the deliberate killing of Israeli civilians by Hezbollah’s missiles are celebrated as meritorious acts. If the reader doubts it, see the documentary at http://pmw.org.il/bulletins_Aug2006.htm020806.⁵ Terrorists know that the so-called infidel, sinful nations have moral feelings, while they themselves, the saints, the chosen ones, have none and do not need to have any. Their morality consists only in the blatant glorification of their own crimes — and it is this that gives them victory in “asymmetric warfare”.

Other even more eloquent examples are in the photos⁶ that illustrate this page. Taken at a march of Palestinian militants in London, they were sent by writer Bella Jozef, a Brazilian Jew living in England, to her friends in various parts of the world, and ended up in my mailbox. While many in the Jewish community themselves feel inhibited from publicly wishing for Israel’s victory, preferring to give timid and generic speeches in favor of “peace,” these photos show the true face of radical Islamic ideology. The Western media, collaborating in the “asymmetric war,” hides this to give terrorists a more human face and create, at the very least, a misleading impression of moral equivalence. The inscriptions on these posters say it all⁷. What the “other possible world” consciously promises humanity, under the most sublime pretexts, is a new Holocaust, of colossal proportions, and the liquidation of everything we know as freedom and human rights.

The religious authority of evil

Diário do Comércio, January 29, 2007

At this moment, the leadership of PETA (People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals), an extremely hypocritical NGO that, in the name of animal rights, speaks horrors about people who eat meat, wear fur coats, or go to the circus, is being sued for the slaughter of thousands of cats and dogs. The organization’s employees collected the animals from public shelters, claiming they would find families to adopt them. The shelter staff never doubted the agents of a famous and politically correct institution. However, days later, the PETA men were caught dumping the corpses of 14,400 animals in a vacant lot, in garbage bags. Read the full story at www.petakillsanimals.com.

Also, at this moment, the remnants of the Khmer Rouge, the genocidal organization led by the infamous Pol Pot, are being tried by a tribunal in Phnom Penh, Cambodia, after all the “compassionate” UN did to free them from such inhuman embarrassment. These terrorists came to power with the help of millions of American and European young militants who, manipulated by a network of leftist organizations and an army of arts and literature “pop stars,” marched “for peace” in the sixties under beautiful idealistic and humanitarian pretexts, forcing the US to abandon a victorious war, leave South Vietnam, and leave the way open for China-armed communists to invade that country and its neighbor, Cambodia. The final result of this massacre: three million civilians killed, more than three times the total casualties of the war. Read the full story in Triumph Forsaken. The Vietnam War, 1954-1965, by Mark Moyar.⁸

The parallel between the killing of animals and that of human beings is not accidental: in both cases, an appealing discourse condensed into impactful slogans and repeated ad nauseam by the media covered a gang of sociopathic murderers, criminalizing those who opposed their macabre plans and turning innocent citizens into accomplices of the worst in the world. The ideological foundation, in both cases, is the same: the revolutionary inversion of moral sentiments, the imposition of evil in the name of good.

Educated in the principles of relativism, which became fashionable when I was a teenager (although today’s teenagers believe they are the first to become aware of it), it took me a long time to discover through experience—and had immense difficulty admitting—that there are very good people and very bad people in the world, separated by an irreducible abyss. Nowadays, anyone who proclaims loudly the existence of this difference, which is evident in daily life, is immediately accused of “dualism.” But that is just one more inversion, as historically, dualism consists of equalizing good and evil as principles, neutralizing the difference of value that separates them. And I am not cowardly enough to refrain from stating things as I see them, out of fear of a pejorative label whose falsehood is revealed in the very semantics of the term.

Even more painful, however, was discovering that all the master-thinkers and political leaders who embodied the ideals pompously trumpeted by leftist intellectual activism—all of them, without exception—undeniably belonged to the second category. Whoever studies the lives of each of them will discover that Voltaire, Diderot, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Sade, Karl Marx, Tolstoy, Bertolt Brecht, Lenin, Stalin, Fidel Castro, Che Guevara, Mao Zedong, Bertrand Russell, Jean-Paul Sartre, Max Horkheimer, Theodor Adorno, Georg Lukács, Antonio Gramsci, Lillian Hellman, Michel Foucault, Louis Althusser, Norman Mailer, Noam Chomsky, and all the rest were sadistic individuals, compulsive liars, cynical opportunists, vain to the point of insanity, devoid of any higher moral sentiment, and of any good intention, no matter how minimal, except, perhaps, in using noble words to name the most despicable acts. Many of them committed murders personally, showing no remorse. Others were rapists or exploiters of women, vile oppressors of their employees, aggressors against their wives and children, and some were even proudly pedophiles. In short, the pantheon of universal leftist idols was a gallery of moral deformities that would envy the list of villains in universal literature. In fact, among the characters of Shakespeare, Balzac, Dostoevsky, and other classics, there is none that compares, in malice and cruelty, to a Stalin, a Hitler, or a Mao Zedong. One of the reasons for the permanent crisis of the “novel” genre in the 20th century was precisely the fact that real evil surpassed the imagination of fiction writers.

On the other hand, the representatives of conservative or reactionary currents, as I discovered with even greater surprise, were almost invariably human beings of high moral quality, attested not only in the integrity of their intellectual work, where none of the monstrous frauds perpetrated by Voltaire, Diderot, or Karl Marx can be found, but also in their daily lives and under the most rigorous tests of existence. Hardly will you find any shameful chapter in the biographies of Pascal, Leibniz, Bossuet, Donoso Cortés, Joseph de Maistre, John Henry Newman, Edmund Burke, Vladimir Solovyov, Nikolai Berdyaev, Alexis de Tocqueville, Edmund Husserl, Ludwig von Mises, Benjamin Disraeli, Russel Kirk, Xavier Zubiri, Louis Lavelle, Garrigou-Lagrange, Joseph Maréchal, Victor Frankl, Marcel De Corte, and so many others. On the contrary, their lives were overflowing with examples of greatness, generosity, courage, and humility. Even those who admittedly sinned, like Dostoevsky, Winston Churchill, Charles de Gaulle, Ronald Reagan, or Maurice Barrès, never boasted about it like Rousseau or Brecht, let alone tried to cover up their shame with an ingenious web of self-flattering lies, as Voltaire and Diderot did. To take the comparison to its ultimate consequence, even the most notorious reactionary dictators, Franco, Salazar, and Pinochet, with all the political crimes they committed, maintained in their personal lives a standard of morality incomparably higher than that of revolutionary tyrants. At least they didn’t order the killing of their closest friends and comrades in the struggle, like Stalin, Hitler, and Fidel Castro, nor did they rape underage girls like Mao Zedong did.

Please don’t misunderstand me. There are, of course, a good number of scoundrels among right-wing writers and especially politicians, and we will easily discover them if we broaden the spectrum to include those of medium and small stature. But in a comparison between the most influential figures from both sides, it is impossible not to notice the moral superiority of the rightists and the complete absence of a single morally good type among leftists: they are all bad, without exception.

As I accumulated readings and knowledge of the biographies of the authors I read, I could no longer escape the conclusion: it was impossible for the moral character of these two groups not to be reflected in their ideas in some way. After all, ideas are not Platonic forms floating abstractly in eternity. They are acts of human intelligence, reactions of flesh-and-blood people to concrete situations, and expressions of their desires, fears, and ambitions.

There was, on the other hand, the Gospel test: the fruits. The ideas of the great revolutionary gurus had produced nothing but devastation and death everywhere, to proportions never before seen throughout human history and not even remotely comparable to any harm that might have resulted from conservative ideas. The French Revolution alone killed ten times more people in one year than the Spanish Inquisition did in four centuries. Taking stock— and, ad argumentandum, even excluding Nazism from the revolutionary tradition to which it unequivocally belongs—the regimes inspired by the ideas of these gurus surpassed, in absolute number of victims, not only the total of previous massacres in all known civilizations but also the death rates recorded in all the epidemics, earthquakes, and hurricanes of the 20th century. Even if we were to look at the reactionary thinkers only for the evil they might have caused voluntarily or involuntarily, their deeds, as a whole, could never compete, not even remotely, with this cosmic plethora of the bloody and macabre that is the curriculum vitae of the masters of revolution.

If ideas born from deformed souls proliferated into disastrous consequences, it would be absolutely foolish to insist on seeing this as a mere accumulation of coincidences, which in itself would have to be the coincidence of coincidences, the most inexplicable mystery in human history.

Of course, it makes no sense to refute ideas by alleging the poor human quality of their authors. They must be examined on their own and subjected to the test of reality, not morality. However, it also makes no sense to confuse the critical examination of the consistency and factual truth of ideas with an understanding of their historical significance, the role they play in unfolding events. In the latter case, the simple, obvious assertion that the bad intentions of wicked men generally produce evil effects is widely confirmed by the examples cited, and this confirmation has little or nothing to do logically with the problem of whether these intentions were realized through philosophical-scientific errors or through truths placed in the service of evil. In other words, the radical condemnation that the works of these men deserve from a moral point of view is independent of the logical criticism of the partial or total truth or falsehood of their theories, and this is independent of that. I am warning this because I know that the usual clever ones will inevitably appear, claiming that I am refuting theories through ad hominem arguments—a claim that has nothing to do with the subject I am discussing here.

However, all of this does not mean that, outside any intention of moral judgment, those ideas have not already been thoroughly examined from a logical-critical point of view, nor that they have fared well in the examination. Theories like Rousseau’s “social contract,” Marx’s “surplus value,” Lukács' “possible consciousness,” Max Horkheimer’s “authoritarian personality,” etc., have already turned into atomic dust in the critical laboratory and now only survive as exemplary chapters in the history of universal pseudoscience. There is no need for any ad hominem argument to destroy what is already dead.

What is almost inevitable is that the view of such intellectual misery combined with the moral baseness of intentions and the catastrophic nature of the effects will eventually raise the question: how was it possible for ideas so inconsistent, so malicious, and so disastrous to acquire the moral authority they still enjoy in nominally more educated sectors of the population?

The answer is lengthy, and I can only provide it here in an abbreviated form.

The origin of the phenomenon dates back to the mutation of historical sense that occurred during the messianic revolutions I mentioned in the previous article. Until then, the structure of historical time was generally understood, in the West, according to Augustine’s distinction of the “two cities.” For Augustine, only the spiritual history of humanity—the history of creation, fall, and redemption—had true unity and meaning. However, this meaning was fulfilled in the Final Judgment, in a supratemporal realm located beyond material history: the unifying nexus of history was in meta-history. Beneath the spiritual narrative, though, unfolded the social, political, and economic history of humanity. This history acquired some sense as it was ambiguously and problematically linked to the history of redemption. But considered in itself and in isolation, it had no form, unity, or meaning: it was the chaotic succession of empires and castes, efforts and defeats, sufferings, and follies of humanity in its unending struggle for bread, shelter, security, and above all, power.

This lack of unity is empirically evident: entire civilizations were born, grew, and perished without any contact with each other, leaving traces that were only unearthed millennia later, skipping over many intermediate civilizations and cultures. Furthermore, historical continuity does not automatically follow the biological succession of generations. It depends on cultural transmission, which is tenuous in itself and often interrupted by wars, invasions, natural disasters, and simple forgetfulness. The thread of purely human history is not continuous; it is punctuated by death. Hence, until today, all attempts at a “philosophy of history,” seeking to unite the whole of human experience on Earth into a unified vision and a sense of totality, have miserably failed. It is almost tragicomic that the recognition of this failure in the second half of the 20th century has caused so much astonishment and despair. In the 5th century, Augustine had already shown that any totalizing view of material history is condemned from the start, at the very least because history has not yet ended, and no one from within it can perceive it as a whole or encapsulate it in a finished logical scheme. Each new “end of history,” proudly announced by philosophers, is just another chapter in the ongoing history, which contradicts and denies it. From all that I have studied on the matter, the inevitable conclusion is this: Augustine had a much more realistic view of the historical process than Vico, Hegel, Karl Marx, Comte, and all the rest. If we disregard some more recent works that heavily drew on Augustine (for example, those by Christopher Dawson and Eric Voegelin), The City of God is still the best book on the philosophy of history.

During the period between the 14th and 17th centuries, the rise of national empires disrupted the medieval balance and spread ambition for easy gains, corruption, immorality, wars, banditry, and disorder everywhere. Desperate and convinced they were acting in the best interests, several monks, preachers, and theologians believed it was time to end the chaos and forcibly establish the kingdom of God on Earth. Notice that the Church itself had never aimed so high, merely tending to the gardens of the City of God amidst the confusion and suffering of the City of Man, giving to God what was God’s and, at most, providing some spiritual assistance to Caesar in his earthly affairs. The separation of powers between Church and Empire formed the very basis of medieval consensus, which crumbled the moment each small Caesar sought to have his own empire and even his own church. In response to the collapse of the Christian order, the ambition of many religious leaders and thinkers rose even higher than that of the Caesars: above the tangle of new kingdoms, the world was meant to swiftly witness the global reign of Christ, the New World Order, Novus Ordo Seclorum, an expression dating back to one of those radical reformers, the pedagogue John Amos Comenius (1592-1670). Among them were sages and madmen, saints and criminals, brilliant organizers, and furious disorganizers. Their collective action consisted of taking the whip of divine justice into their own hands and attempting to hasten the Final Judgment. However, the world was still so far from the perfection they aspired to that they saw no other means to achieve their ideal within an acceptable timeframe other than through violence and an even more complete anarchy than the one they were reacting against. The Lutheran Reformation, arising in the wake of this avalanche, ultimately became the counter-movement that halted the revolution and allowed Christianity to survive in some areas where it threatened, four centuries in advance, to reduce itself to a kind of liberation theology, with enraged priests preaching permanent revolution and the general killing of the rich. But all around, the seeds of revolt continued to germinate, condensing into new ideological formulations and sporadically erupting here and there in occasional massacres until the major explosion of 1789 in France.

However, all these formidable successions of political and social effects were nothing compared to the indelible mark left by the advent of messianism on the imagination and culture of European peoples. In an instant, the vertical axis of history turned upside down. The general transfiguration of the world, the advent of the kingdom of Justice, which the Bible and Augustine placed in a spiritual supratemporal realm beyond history, was pulled into history itself, becoming, in the imagination of revolutionaries, the next chapter in the succession of times, to be forcibly produced through social and political action. Yet, the end of times, reduced to a fraction of time destined to pass and disappear like any other, preserved, due to the ideal content projected into it by revolutionary hope, the prestige of eternity. It was as if that special fragment of time was destined to freeze, to be snatched away from the realm of generation and corruption, like a picture fixing the image of the moment forever. Eternity as such, the simultaneous presence of all moments, as defined by Boethius, the eternity that encompassed time and of which, according to Augustine, time constituted the moving image, disappeared from the Western imagination, replaced by the impossible aspiration for perpetual instant, crystallized in the air.

This change was a total and radical rupture of European culture with the structure of time, which means: with the structure of reality. Precisely at the time when the progress of natural sciences began to provide more precise observations and measurements of material data around, intelligence became incapable of articulating them with the order of the real. Hence, the pathetic contrast between the increasing quality of scientific research and the proliferation of puerile philosophies, built upon patent contradictions and impossibilities, and as ambitious in their aspirations as they were naive and devoid of the slightest critical sense when laying the clay foundations of their supposedly eternal constructions. The myth of perpetual instant lies beneath Kant’s “eternal peace,” Hegel’s “end of history,” Rousseau’s “plebiscitary democracy,” Comte’s “law of the three states,” the scientific-materialist ideology of “progress,” and, of course, the Marxist theory of history as a class struggle destined to lead to the splendor of the proletarian millennium. However, to lie beneath means to be invisible. None of these philosophical concepts critically examine the perpetual instant. If they did, they would see it as utterly nonsensical. It is not a “content” of these philosophies; it is the unquestioned, untouchable premise upon which they stand, unconscious of its presence, like castles built upon a bottomless pit.

Thus, the entire modern experience of historical time was determined by the omnipresent and invisible authority of a cretinous illogic. Protected simultaneously by the sacred cloak of its religious origin, the myth of intratemporal apocalypse gained even more strength by becoming, through the ideologies of progress and revolution, the ultimate tool to destroy established religion. With eternity replaced by the hypnotic image of perpetual instant, God and the Final Judgment could no longer be conceived except through the messianic expectation of “social justice” to be established in the world through systematic genocide.

That was how the ideology of the most shameless and brutal rose to the heights, not as a religion, but as divine authority itself. This change so profoundly affected the Western imagination that even religion itself did not escape its influence. The confusion between eternity and perpetual instant, draped as “theology of history,” permeates all Catholic thought that led to the Second Vatican Council and, through it, acting from within in partnership with external enemies, destroyed whatever authority of the Church it could.

Today, billions of people worldwide, regardless of their beliefs and ideologies, can no longer conceive good except in the form of a future society, sin except as opposition to the advent of that society, and eternity except as some kind of “social justice” (conceptions vary) to be achieved in the perpetual instant of the following century, the next millennium, or who knows when. However, as moments pass and the future never arrives because it continues to be future by definition, no one can look back and confess the heinous sins and crimes committed to reach it. The invisible cult of perpetual instant not only tacitly absolves killings, genocides, horror, and inhumanity of revolutionary regimes but also gives all activists in the world a license to oppress and kill indefinitely, always in the name of the hypothetical beauties of an impossible future.

This is the intrinsically anti-human and diabolical force that drives masses to serve evil in the name of good.

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1. Editor’s Note: Luiz Roberto de Barros Mott is an anthropologist, historian, and researcher, founder of the Bahia Gay Group.↩

2. Editor’s Note: See "Who invented Brazil?", in the Revolution chapter of this book.↩

3. Read the classic Stalin’s War, by Ernst Topitsch.↩

4. Paris: Éditions du Rocher, 2003.↩

5. Editor’s Note: The documentary is no longer at the indicated address, but there are various videos with similar snippets on the same Israeli research institute Palestinian Media Watch’s Youtube channel: http://www.youtube.com/user/palwatch.↩

6. Editor’s Note: The photos are not present in this book. The author already describes them in the sequence and the next note will complement his description.↩

7. Editor’s Note: In the photos, the inscriptions on the Palestinian demonstrators' posters read: “Massacre those who insult Islam”; “Behead those who insult Islam”; “Slay those who insult Islam”; “Exterminate those who slander Islam”; “Butcher those who mock Islam”; “Be prepared for the real Holocaust”; “Freedom go to hell”; “God bless Hitler”; among others.↩

8. Cambridge University Press, 2006.↩