This series of four 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”.
“Spirit and Culture: Brazil and the Meaning of Life” discusses the relationship between spirit, culture, and the current state of Brazilian culture. It emphasizes the importance of the impulse for knowledge and the sharing of that knowledge with others as the highest and noblest aspiration of the human soul. It argues that Brazilian culture has not contributed any original cognitive experiences to the world and is considered peripheral in the spiritual history of humanity. The article criticizes the spiritual lethargy and lack of originality in Brazilian culture, attributing it to the influence of decaying foreign cultures and the disregard for spiritual values. It concludes that true nationalism and the desire for Brazil to become a great power should be rooted in a genuine cultural and spiritual foundation.
“Pride in Failure” discusses the importance of language, religion, and high culture as enduring components of a nation, even when its historical duration comes to an end. These elements, which serve humanity as a whole, contribute to a nation’s success in the material and practical field. Olavo argues that a people’s cultural and intellectual capital, developed through language, religion, and high culture, is a crucial factor in achieving economic and political primacy. The article highlights examples from various nations to support this claim. It also criticizes a narrow materialistic mindset that prioritizes immediate needs over spiritual and intellectual growth, attributing it as a structural cause of failure. Olavo suggests that embracing language, religion, and high culture as essential foundations can lead to prosperity. However, the article laments that some societies, including Brazil, have succumbed to the pride of failure, where intellectual indolence and a lack of cultural capital have hindered progress and condemned them to perpetual ruin. The article concludes by questioning the future of such nations and suggests the need to prioritize language, religion, and high culture over immediate material gains.
“The Origin of National Stupidity” discusses the apparent contradiction between the intelligence of Brazilian children and the lack of intelligence among Brazilian university students. Olavo argues that this phenomenon is a result of a general problem with the organization of knowledge in Brazilian society rather than solely blaming the government. They highlight the importance of cultural organization in fostering intelligence and emphasize the need for a historical perspective and a strong foundation in education. Olavo criticizes the chaotic visual environment, the superficial dissemination of cultural information, and the misguided cultural reforms that prioritize fleeting trends over enduring values. They believe that importing the entire historical legacy and spreading lessons from diverse cultures will preserve and develop the intelligence of the Brazilian people. The article concludes by condemning the false liberation and dependence on media and fashion, seeing them as crimes against cultural development.
“The Source of Eternal Ignorance” discusses the degradation of Brazilian culture and the lack of awareness among the country’s business, political, and military elites. Olavo argues that the concept of “culture” in Brazil is misunderstood and primarily associated with arts and entertainment, neglecting its role in cultivating intelligence, maturity, and responsibility. The disappearance of high culture in Brazil goes unnoticed, as the elites rely on newspapers and television for their information, failing to engage with books that shape political debates in the United States. Olavo highlights the consequences of this ignorance, as the Brazilian elite forms misguided opinions about international and local affairs, leading to strategic decisions that weaken the country. The article also emphasizes the deception surrounding Barack Obama’s image, as Brazilian elites were unaware of critical investigations into his past, resulting in a distorted perception of his political stance. The lack of exposure to alternative viewpoints and critical literature further contributes to the perpetuation of ignorance among the Brazilian elite.
Spirit and Culture: Brazil and the Meaning of Life
First New Year’s Meditation
Olavodecarvalho.org, December 31, 1999
Sometimes, from the obscure depths of the human soul, buried in passions and terrors, arises an impulse to free oneself from the dense confusion of time and rise to a point where it is possible to see, above the chaos and storms, pleasures and pains, a glimpse of cosmic harmony or even, beyond that, a fragment of light from the secret transcendent order that - perhaps - governs all things.
It is the highest and noblest impulse of the human soul. From it are born all discoveries of wisdom and science, the very possibility of organized life in society, order, laws, religion, morality, and even, through refraction, the creations of art and technique that make earthly existence less painful.
No other human desire, no matter how legitimate, can dispute its primacy, for it is from it that all acquire the nobility they may have, and therein lies the ultimate criterion for the difference between the human and the subhuman (or anti-human), and consequently, beyond all vain controversy, the key to the distinction between good and evil. Good is what elevates us to the consciousness of supreme order and meaning; evil is what distances us from it. The First Commandment has no other meaning: “Love God above all things.”
It so happens that this fundamental impulse corresponds to another, derived but no less strong: the one that leads the person who has glimpsed order and meaning to desire to share with other humans a bit of what they have seen. There is certainly no greater benefit that can be done to a fellow human being than to show them the path of spirit and freedom, through which they can rise to a condition that, as the Psalmist said, is only slightly inferior to that of angels. This is, essentially, the concrete form of love for one’s neighbor: to give the other person the best and highest of what a person has obtained for themselves. We love our neighbor to the extent that we raise them to the level of angels. We do harm to them when we lower them to the level of animals, either through mistreatment or excessive affection.
In these two demands is contained, as Christ said, the whole law and the prophets.
To the great scandal of pedantic relativism, which would like to convince us of the general discord among culturally accepted values in various societies, the universality of this double commandment is one of the most evident facts in world history.1 There is, in fact, no civilization, no matter how remote or “barbaric,” that has not valued, above all other virtues and human motivations, the impulse for knowledge and the teaching of the “one necessary thing.” The universal prestige of the priesthood - in the broad sense that Julien Benda gave to the word “clerc,” which includes the present class of “intellectuals” - is the most patent sign that, behind all apparent confusion of languages, humanity as a whole is fully aware of a hierarchy of values that, if questioned, would immediately suppress the very possibility of questioning, since one cannot question knowledge except in view of a higher knowledge.
In addition to general observations, which are obvious enough to only need to be explicitly mentioned in situations of uncommon disorientation and confusion, I would like to provide some more specific developments related to the historical existence, on the one hand, of culture and civilization - considered on a general scale - and on the other hand, to the present catastrophic situation of Brazilian culture.
Regarding the first point:
- Although the ascending impulse I mentioned is always the same, universally, the movement of donation and sharing that follows it must necessarily take the form of the existing channels of communication in a historically given society: language, symbols, values, etc. Thus, in the study of the higher manifestations of spirituality, one can always observe this dual direction, which on one hand attests to the convergence of the paths traveled by spiritual individuals worldwide (“everything that rises converges,” as Teilhard de Chardin said), and on the other hand, the inexhaustible plurality of the forms assumed by the testimonies incorporated into the cultural heritage: texts, artworks, laws, etc.2
Every phenomenon of inner ascension, without exception, always begins with an isolated individual - who, in the course of their journey, is led to isolate themselves even more from the community in search of the necessary condition of spiritual concentration - and is completed with the radiation of part of the knowledge gained, initially in a discreet circle of companions or disciples with the same disposition for isolation and concentration, then in increasingly larger circles, encompassing communities, societies, and entire civilizations.
In the process of radiation, memory and record come into play. Initially transmitted orally and sustained by the presence and example of the master, the teachings soon find their way into records, often in the compact form of laconic sentences or allusive and symbolic narratives - or graphic representations, or melodies - which will constitute the radiant nucleus around which culture will form over time. This can range from simple imitative repetitions of the original forms to a multitude of intellectually relevant developments. In any case, it is a fate of human constitution that the reproduction of the internal and psychological conditions of learning, which depends solely on the free initiative of future learners and can only be stimulated but not determined by culture, never keeps pace with the speed of proliferation of cultural creations that reflect the initial inspiring nucleus in increasingly distant, faded, indirect, and finally inverted ways. What began as a direct intuition of supreme order ends as a debate among ignorant and blind individuals crushed under tons of material records rendered incomprehensible.
These three moments reflect, in the microcosm of human history, the three gunas or “basic movements of the cosmos” mentioned in Hindu doctrine: sattva or ascending movement, rajas or expansive movement, and tamas or descending, degrading, and “entropic” movement. Rajas is born from sattva just as the Second Commandment derives from the First. The third moment arises from the second when it becomes autonomous and loses its root in the first: when human love for humanity no longer aims to elevate it above itself but is limited to desiring and pleasing it, love degrades into flattery, flattery into manipulation, and manipulation into hatred. In the end, it becomes impossible to distinguish one from the other, and the deepest point of deception is reached when the crude and brutal, rebellion and fanaticism, are socially accepted as manifestations of the “authentic,” when they are merely the result of a long sedimentation of errors and a condensation of all past idolatries. The same applies to the intellectual sphere: when teaching and culture no longer transmit the original inspiration but replace it with the idolatrous worship of historically accumulated forms (which can take the form of dry dogmatism, aestheticism, social formalism, etc.), there remains the possibility of a reconquest of inner meaning, but the proliferation of cultural creations itself, illusorily taken as wealth, makes this increasingly difficult, and ultimately, the accumulation of blind spots condenses into a cluster of fundamental errors - a “Satanic revelation” - which, precisely due to its compact, obscure, brutal, and impressive nature, is illusorily taken as a liberating discovery. It is a curious and tragic example of this inversion that a “philosopher” has come to explain history in terms of economic organization, as if economic organization were to emerge out of nothing, as if it could sprout directly from the animal substrate of man, as if it were not a reflection and byproduct of man’s elevation towards the perception of cosmic order - a clear demonstration of the superficiality of their intellects.
One striking characteristic of the entropic period is that the administration of a vast and growing collection of cultural records requires the formation of a class of literates for whom this legacy, considered in itself and independently of any reference to its inspirational sources, becomes the object of study and devotion. Special techniques are created for this purpose - bibliography and bibliology, philology, historical criticism of documents, structural analysis - and these techniques in turn accumulate to the point of constituting a cultural universe in their own right. Some may aim for the mere preservation or reconstruction of the documents, others for their “interpretation” based on different eras and ideologies, others to elucidate their internal structure, etc. All of them are oblivious to the central problem: ensuring that the examiner has the inner condition to rise to the original experience from which the document is a record. This condition is presupposed or left to the chance of greater or lesser personal talent. It is completely outside the investigative and educational process, which is thus entirely focused either on the records themselves or their circumstances, on what surrounds them. Demonstrating proficiency in mastering these techniques becomes the essential criterion for selection and evaluation in intellectual life, and the resulting deviation of discussions into countless minor and irrelevant aspects produces the creation of new and new techniques, making intellectual life a senseless display of strength and, ultimately, leading to the emergence, as an inevitable reaction, of techniques to destroy techniques and to prove the absolute insignificance of documents.
Regarding the second point, that is, the current situation of Brazilian culture, the following must be emphasized:
In five hundred years of existence, the culture of this country has not provided the world with a single record of original cognitive experience. Our contribution to the understanding of spiritual meaning is strictly null. There is not a single symbol, concept, idea, or essential word pertaining to knowledge that has been discovered by a Brazilian and has become part of the world’s cultural currents. Our entire “cultural production” consists only of extensions and echoes of records absorbed from foreign cultures. In this sense, our culture is strictly “peripheral” in relation to the spiritual history of the world. Therefore, it is peripheral in a very different sense from the one this word has in the jargon of leftist academism (Celso Furtado, Fernando Henrique Cardoso, etc.), where center and periphery are economically determined, giving rise to a grotesque theory that identifies the spiritual center of the world with the center of economic power - a theory that is itself peripheral, in the sense I give to the term.
As we entered the course of history at a time when the cultures that served as our sources were already in an advanced state of entropic decomposition, losing sight more and more of their original intuitions and solidifying into a formalism from which they now desperately seek to escape through the general decomposition of forms (like a man who, tired of trying in vain to understand a book, starts tearing it apart in the hope that its physical decomposition will yield its quintessence), the entire history of our culture is that of an echo of an echo, a shadow of a shadow. We all know this and we are ashamed of it. We try in vain to alleviate this bad conscience by placing the blame on the economic sphere (which is already a reflection of an illusion, thus doubly peripheral), or by clinging to quantity and declaring that the volume of irrelevant and repetitive production is proof of our “creativity.”
Considering our five centuries of history, the physical extent, and the population size of this country, the nullity of our spiritual contribution is an astonishing phenomenon, unparalleled in world history. The disinterest, the spiritual lethargy of Brazilian culture, and the imprisonment of national intelligence within the sphere of immediate economics are signs of a pettiness of soul that has never been observed on such an impressive collective scale. If there were true academic scholars among us, this would be a matter of concern and debate. But our academic life is itself a reflection of this phenomenon, which thus escapes its field of vision: our literate classes lack the strength even to become aware of their own spiritual poverty.
Not even in the religious domain, which is where spiritual search finds its easiest and most natural support, have we recorded a single experience that would attest to a direct, albeit brief and fleeting, contact between a Brazilian and the cosmic meaning of life. Our “religiosity” is peripheral and imitative, the residue of the decomposition of extinct cults or copies of pseudo-religions invented in Europe or the United States.
It is precisely for this reason that every nationalist ideology among us has been simply reactive and opportunistic since it cannot be founded on nonexistent spiritual values. The haste with which our people adopt foreign habits and ways of speaking, even giving their children English or French names, demonstrates the profound indifference of the populace toward a culture that has nothing to say to them about the meaning of life and that, at most, provides them in popular music, football, and carnival with the means and occasion to numb themselves, through senseless noise, against the senselessness of life. Therefore, our nationalism cannot consist of a genuine love for the homeland, except within narrow circles - for example, in the Armed Forces or in old families of high-ranking public servants - whose community history is linked to the struggles for the political formation of Brazil, and therefore they love their creation. There may also be a certain love for the homeland in the direct observation of certain spontaneous virtues of Brazilian society, but instead of being reinforced at the level of educated culture, this observation is contradicted there by the force of sophisms of impressive artificiality (produced, to be sure, at the behest of the Ford and Rockefeller foundations, but by people who, on the other hand, being leftists, fervently believe themselves to be nationalists and anti-American, which is enough to attest to the frivolous superficiality of their intellects). Beyond that, nationalism in Brazil consists only of anti-American resentment - motivated more by the repressed guilt of the literate class than by objective complaints, although those exist - and has no authentic cultural foundation.
Any national aspiration to become a “great power” with such a null cultural basis is doomed, in advance, to either failure or to a success that, if achieved, will become a scourge for humanity, compelled to bow before the brute force of new barbarians who do not even have a proper sense of orientation in the history in which they blindly interfere.
All patriotism here is an investment in an imaginary and merely possible country, only rudimentarily foreshadowed by the spontaneous popular virtues I mentioned, which, moreover, rapidly dissolve under the impact of the destructive discourse that now serves as morality among our literate classes. Anyone who wishes to contribute to making this country a reality has only one path to follow: to fight for Brazilian culture to connect with the central and enduring sources of spiritual knowledge, so that the experience of spiritual vision enters our horizon of human aspirations and, once obtained, bursts forth, with the power of original intuitions, a whole world of imitative and peripheral forms, generating a new life.
The rest is pure agitation without purpose.
Pride in Failure
O Globo, December 27, 2003
O world, thou choosest not the better part!
George Santayana
Language, religion, and high culture are the only components of a nation that can survive when it reaches the end of its historical duration. They are universal values that, by serving all of humanity and not just the people from which they originated, justify being remembered and admired by other peoples. The economy and institutions are merely the local and temporary support that the nation uses to continue living while generating the symbols in which its image will remain when it no longer exists.
But if these elements can serve humanity, it is because they have served the people who created them eminently. They served them because they did not only reflect their preferences and idiosyncrasies, but rather a happy adaptation to the order of reality. We call this adaptation “veracity” — a supremely transportable value. The creations of one people can serve others because they carry within them a truthfulness, an understanding of reality — especially human reality — that extends beyond any specific historical or ethnic condition.
Therefore, these elements, which are farthest from any economic interest, are the only guarantees of success in the material and practical field. Every people strive to master the material environment. If only a few achieve success, as Thomas Sowell demonstrated in “Conquests and Cultures,” the difference lies primarily in “cultural capital,” the accumulated intellectual capacity that the mere struggle for survival does not provide, which can only be developed through the practice of language, religion, and high culture.
No people has ascended to economic and political primacy and then devoted itself to higher interests. The opposite is true: the affirmation of national capabilities in those three domains precedes political and economic achievements.
France was the cultural center of Europe long before the grandeur of Louis XIV. The English, before seizing the seven seas, were the supreme providers of saints and scholars to the Church. Germany was the radiating focus of the Reformation and subsequently the intellectual center of the world — with Kant, Hegel, and Schelling — even before it became a nation. The United States had three centuries of devout religion and valuable literary and philosophical culture before embarking on the industrial adventure that propelled them to the summit of prosperity. The Scandinavians had saints, philosophers, and poets before coal and steel. The power of Islam, then, was entirely a creation of religion — a religion that would be inconceivable without the powerful and subtle language in which the verses of the Quran were recorded. And it is not unrelated to the fate of the Spanish and Portuguese, rapidly relegated from the center to the periphery of History, that they achieved success and wealth overnight without possessing an intellectual initiative comparable to the material power they acquired.
However, the experience of millennia can be obscured to the point of becoming invisible and inconceivable. It is enough for a people with a narrow mentality to be confirmed in their materialistic illusion by a petty philosophy that explains everything through economic causes. Believing that they need to solve their material problems before tending to the spirit, such a people will remain spiritually shallow and will never become intelligent enough to accumulate the cultural capital necessary to solve those problems.
Crude pragmatism, superficiality of religious experience, contempt for knowledge, reduction of intellectual activities to the minimum required to secure employment (including university), subordination of intelligence to partisan interests — these are the structural and constant causes of the failure of such a people. All other alleged explanations — foreign exploitation, racial composition of the population, large estates, the authoritarian or rebellious nature of Brazilians, taxes or tax evasion, corruption, and a thousand and one errors attributed by the opposition to the present governments and by those governments to the past governments — are merely subterfuges with which a provincial and debased intellectual class avoids confronting its own share of responsibility for the state of affairs and avoids telling a childish people the truth that would make them adults: that language, religion, and high culture come first, prosperity comes later.
As L. Szondi said, choices determine destiny. By choosing the immediate and the material above all else, the Brazilian people have dulled their intelligence, narrowed their consciousness, and condemned themselves to perpetual ruin.
The despair and frustration caused by the long succession of defeats in the struggle against economic ills resistant to all treatment have, in recent years, reached a melting point where the sum of negative stimuli Pavlovianly produces the masochistic inversion of reflexes: the intellectual indolence that we were ashamed of has been embraced as an exalted merit, almost religious, a translation of evangelical love for the poor within the framework of class struggle. Unable to achieve success, we have established the pride of failure. After this, what remains for us but to abdicate our existence as a nation and resign ourselves to the condition of being a UN outpost?
The Origin of National Stupidity
Bravo!, December 1999/January 2000
Repeatedly, a phenomenon has caught the attention of foreign teachers who come to teach in Brazil: why are our children among the smartest in the world and our university students among the dumbest? How is it possible for a gifted human being to, after fifteen years, become an imbecile incapable of constructing a sentence with a subject and a verb? It is easy to blame the government and engage in another round of empty talk destined to end, like all the others, in a new extortion of official funds.
It is difficult to admit that such a general problem must have general causes as well, meaning that it does not belong to that class of obstacles that can be removed through official action, but to that other class that only we ourselves, the people, the “civil society,” are capable of facing, not through public mobilizations of superficial enthusiasm, but through the slow and stubborn convergence of millions of anonymous actions, far from the blurred eyes of our vain sociology.
Now, the most obvious condition for the development of intelligence is the organization of knowledge. Our intellectual energies are more easily mobilized around a few highly hierarchical core interests than in a dispersion of scattered points of attention like mosquitoes in the air. Distinguishing the important from the irrelevant is the initial act of intelligence, without which reasoning can do nothing but flounder on misconceptions. However, if each person had to accomplish this operation on their own, reducing the totality of the available data in the physical environment to a quintessential framework of their own invention, millions of lives would not be enough for them to obtain even a beginning of orientation in the world. Culture, permeating society and resulting from successive filtrations of accumulated experience, readily provides each human being with a framework of essential points of interest, so that the individual only needs to make a second cut within this showcase, in accordance with their personal interests.
When I say that culture is permeated in society, it means that the selection of important points is reflected in the organization of cities, public monuments, architectural style, museums, theater posters, the press, discussions among educated people, the twists of everyday language, the shelves of bookstores, and last but not least, educational programs.
Whoever disembarks in any country in Europe or some in Asia already obtains, through an initial examination of this showcase, a clear vision of the most enduring points of interest, which constitute a kind of background of cultural reference, distinct from the more current and momentary points of attention that are superimposed on this background without obscuring it.
Just by walking through the streets, the citizen can see the landmarks that situate him in a precise place on the historical map, from which he can measure how long things have lasted and their greater or lesser importance for human life.
If he looks at theater posters, he notices that certain plays are being restaged this year because they are restaged every year, while others that had some success last year have disappeared from the repertoire. Just this is enough for him to acquire a sense of the difference between what matters and what does not.
Upon entering any bookstore, the contrast between the shelves where the same essential titles are always on display and those where the latest releases take turns shows him the difference between the written heritage of permanent value and the bookselling business with high turnover.
In school, he knows that he will learn certain things that his parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents also learned, and others that are new and may disappear from the curriculum in the next generation.
Everything, in short, in the plastic and verbal environment contributes to the individual effortlessly acquiring a sense of hierarchy and orientation in historical time, culture, and humanity.
In Brazil, this does not exist. The urban visual environment is chaotic and formless, cultural dissemination seems calculated to make the essential indistinguishable from the irrelevant, what emerged yesterday to disappear tomorrow assumes the weight of millennial realities, educational programs present opinions as definitive truths that came with the latest trend and will disappear with it. Everything is an infinitely confusing superficial agitation where the ephemeral seems eternal and the irrelevant occupies the center of the world. No human being, even a genius, can navigate this “wild jungle” and emerge intellectually unscathed on the other side. Abandoned in the midst of a chaos of indistinguishable values and counter-values, he gets lost in a dense web of idle doubts and elementary misconceptions, forced to reinvent the wheel and rediscover gunpowder a thousand times before moving on to the next item, which never arrives.
In this environment, the diffusion of intellectual novelties, instead of fostering intelligent discussions, can only act as an entropic and dispersing force. There is nothing more disheartening than an intelligence without culture, unprepared, naked, and wild, nourishing itself with the latest “come-and-go” and spewing forth a succession of idiotic questions where the pretentious sophistication of reasoning is supported by the grossest ignorance of the foundations of the subject. Add to these ingredients the youthful arrogance stimulated by the demagogic flattery of the media, and you have the average formula for the Brazilian university student. It is impossible to argue with them. When a mind so deformed begins to raise objections in a discussion, their cultured and well-intentioned interlocutor, if not very forceful in the use of the rod, is necessarily at a disadvantage: who can defeat a tenacious debater who, confident in the apparent formal correctness of their reasoning, is shielded by their own ignorance against the perception of the falsehood of the premises? There is no room for argument with someone like that. There is only room to transmit the missing information to them—to educate them, in short. But precisely, they will not let you educate them because the ideology of the pompous rebel instilled in them since childhood makes them think that humiliating a teacher is more beautiful than learning from them. That’s how an intelligent child becomes a foolish debater, forever immunized against any knowledge of the subject under discussion.
The idiotic objections certainly arise from a healthy impulse. There is no more notorious sign of philosophical intelligence than the ability to perceive contradictions, the sensitivity to the presence of problems. Brazilians have that in excess. Contrary to the commonplace notion that we lack a vocation for philosophy, I would say that we are the most philosophical people on the planet. The proof of that is our sense of humor. Like philosophical questions, humor arises from the perception of logical or existential incongruities.
But what fate awaits the young thinker who, engaged in philosophical debate, finds himself deprived of a historical perspective, a vision of the evolution of discussions, and knowledge of the status quaestionis? Even in the sweet hypothesis that, by natural instinct for restraint, he refuses to engage in sterile argumentation and prefers to lock himself at home to reason alone, he will never progress beyond being a crazy speculator, a new Brás Cubas vainly searching for solutions that have been found a thousand times before, polemicizing with the shadows of his own mistakes, exhausting himself in sterile questions and attempts to prove the impossible. Ultimately, tired and frightened of a solitary immersion that risks leading him only to the asylum, he will adhere, out of mere self-therapeutic instinct, to the most readily available standardized discourse. A membership card from the PC do B [a political party] will give him a sense of returning to his human condition. And there is nothing more dangerous in the world than an idiot persuaded of their own normality.
Such is the destiny of the majority of our young intelligence.
Anyone aware of these things cannot fail to admit that they are the inevitable consequence of our incapacity or refusal to absorb the historical legacy of Europe and the world. The more we “free” ourselves from a past that would give meaning to our intelligence in terms of historicity, the more we become slaves to an invasive present that disorients and weakens us.
In this sense, the movements of “liberation” and “independence” that severed our ties with European roots have only freed us from the very foundation of our self-defense, leaving us defenseless and foolish at the mercy of the disturbing contingencies of the media and fashion. They stole the map of the world from us, leaving us lost in the middle of a desert where we must always restart the journey over and over again, only to reach nowhere. They deprived us of the sense of hierarchy and proportion, making us slaves to tainted debates and idle conjectures that prevent us from thinking or acting.
To offer a people this kind of false liberation is, in my view, on the scale of great crimes, on the scale of cultural genocide. And it is not surprising that, amid so many hesitations and misunderstandings, no one is capable of perceiving the obvious connection between this type of “modernizing” initiative and the catastrophic state of a culture that surrenders itself, however minimally, to international media rape without any reaction. It is not surprising that no one notices the complicit—secret but indissoluble—link between the fetishism of stereotyped independence and the reality of growing dependence.
So, do not ask me what I think of Mários, Oswalds, Menottis, Bopps, and all the rest, as well as their current cultists and disciples who, dismantling the language under morbidly artificial and pedantic pretexts, deliver it defenseless into the hands of those who turn it into the trash bin for the detritus of media English. And do not ask me, in public, to give my opinion on any other importers of cultural novelties who periodically reshape Brazil in the mold of the latest trend.
This type of dazzled cultural reformer, without an authentic universal vision of things and driven only by the itch for novelty, when not by the desire to épater le bourgeois, sets out to destroy values that they do not understand. They are the most pernicious plague that can befall a culture in formation, leading it to destroy the very foundations upon which it was beginning to rise and replacing them with only ephemeral pseudo-values whose rapid replacement will increasingly open, beneath its feet, the endless abyss of idle doubts and idiotic questions.
If we want to preserve and develop the intelligence of our people, instead of crumbling it into sterile chatter, what we need to import is not novelty—it is all of History, all of human past. We must spread through the streets, posters, monuments, bookstores, and schools the lessons of Lao-Tzu and Pythagoras, Vitruvius and Pacioli, Aristotle and Plato, Homer and Dante, Virgil and Shankara, Rumi and Ibn 'Arabi, Thomas and Bonaventure.
Anyone who, before strengthening youthful intelligence with this kind of nourishment, disturbs and weakens it with indigestible novelties is nothing less than a molester of minors, a spiritual rapist. And if they do it for political or commercial reasons, the crime is aggravated by the vile motive.
The source of eternal ignorance
Diário do Comércio, July 27, 2009
For years, I have been trying to draw the attention of our business, political, and military elites to the phenomenon of Brazilian cultural degradation, but I don’t believe I have succeeded in making them see the real extent of the problem—partly because the elites themselves are its first victims, and there is nothing more difficult than making someone aware of their progressive unconsciousness. It’s like trying to stop a fall in mid-air.
From the outset, the word “culture” already evokes the wrong idea in the minds of this audience. “Culture,” in Brazil, primarily means “arts and entertainment”—and arts and entertainment, in turn, boil down to three functions: giving a lot of money to those who produce them, entertaining the masses, and serving as a sounding board for political propaganda.
The expectation that culture should also make people smarter, more serious, more mature, more responsible for their actions and words, is an expectation that disappeared from the national consciousness long ago. If an artist fulfills the three functions mentioned above, nothing more is demanded of them, not even to secure the label of genius. It took an Irish writer (Edna O’Brien) coming to the Paraty Festival to inform Brazilians that Chico Buarque de Holanda is not part of literature. They would have never realized this on their own. In university literature courses, thousands of theses are produced about Caetano Veloso and Chico themselves, while first-rate writers who have already been consecrated by time, such as Rosário Fusco, Osman Lins, or José Geraldo Vieira, are ignored, not only by students but also by professors. Even the Brazilian Academy, nominally entrusted with maintaining the high standards of national literature, no longer knows how to distinguish between who is a writer and who is not. The hypothesis that gentlemen like Luis Fernando Verissimo, Paulo Coelho, and Marco Maciel are writers would never occur to anyone qualified, let’s say, to reasonably understand a poem by Eliot or perceive the difference in scope between Claudel and Valéry, that is, someone who has at least an approximate idea of what literature is.
High culture has simply disappeared from Brazil—it has disappeared so completely that no one even notices its absence.
How can I make people see the seriousness of this issue when, not being part of the literary and artistic circles themselves, they receive ready-made judgment criteria from them in matters of culture and, by following them, believe they are in line with the highest international standards? How can I show the politician, the businessman, the military officer that each of them is being deceived by subintellectual usurpers and trapped in a disabling mental framework?
Perhaps an example can help. I don’t know a single member of our elites who does not have opinions about American politics. The basis for these opinions is what they read in newspapers and see on TV. However, the basic instrument of political debate in the US is the book, not the newspaper article, the TV commentary, or the radio interview. Not a single political idea or proposal arrives in mass media before it has been formalized in a book, setting the boundaries of a debate that, under these conditions, is always relevant and clear. Furthermore, not a single one of these books is not responded to by other books in a short period, condensing and simultaneously deepening the discussion instead of limiting it to superficial reactions of the initial moment.
Now, these books are practically never translated or read in Brazil. If someone reads them, they must keep it a secret because I never see them mentioned in our media, either by the usual commentators or by the enlightened academics that the editors-in-chief take as their gurus. As a result, the elite that trusts journalistic channels as their basic source of information ends up being systematically deceived. Not only do they form incorrect opinions about the international scene, but based on them, they wrongly diagnose the local situation and make disastrous strategic decisions that only weaken them and make them more subject to the whims of the ruling gang on a daily basis.
Just to make the example even clearer: anyone who has read, in addition to Barack Obama’s autobiographies, the investigations into his past life conducted by Jerome Corsi, Brad O’Leary, and Webster Griffin Tarpley (anti-Obama for heterogeneous and incompatible reasons) knew in advance that if elected, he would use the prestige of the American nation itself to support radical anti-Americanism both within and outside the US; that in the Middle East, this would mean withholding support for Israel and accepting Iran as a nuclear power without resistance; in Latin America, elevating Hugo Chávez, the FARC, and the São Paulo Forum to the status of supreme arbiters of continental politics. Since no one in Brazil has read any of this, what has become ingrained in the public’s mind is the vision of Obama as a moderate progressive, something like a new John F. Kennedy or Martin Luther King. In the US, with the help of the complicit mainstream media, Obama deceived half of the electorate. In Brazil, he deceived the entire public opinion. Now, those who were deceived can only retroactively mitigate the embarrassment of their deception through a new deception, persuading themselves that if even the American government supports Hugo Chávez, he is not as dangerous as he seemed…
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Translator’s Note: “At the beginning of the 20th century, there were a series of anthropologists who traveled the world taking censuses of the customs and practices of various places. When they noticed that what was prohibited in one place was obligatory in another, they concluded that all norms were culturally relative. This was especially popularized in the world by Margaret Mead and Ruth Benedict. They were so successful that nowadays, this conviction of anthropological relativism is regarded as a dogma: all morals are culturally relative. It is at least curious that no one has ever made the following counterpoint: point out to me a society where murder is legitimate. Or point out to me a society where marriage is prohibited. Or point out to me a society where any form of knowledge is forbidden. Simply put, such societies do not exist. This means that beneath the accidental variation of norms here or there, there is an infinity of universal norms that have never been contested by any civilization or culture. The list of permanent rules and norms is infinitely larger than the list of variable norms. This means that these anthropologists, based on their limited accidental experience of having known one or two communities, generalized it to the entire human species, so that the total view of humanity is reduced to the tiny scope of consciousness of two or three anthropologists who have seen a few things” Olavo de Carvalho, “Educação Liberal,” lecture on October 18, 2001, in Rio de Janeiro, available at: [http://www.olavodecarvalho.org/palestras/2001educacaoliberal.htm].↩
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See the four detailed footnotes in the original article at the link: http://www.olavodecarvalho.org/textos/brasil.htm.↩
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