This series of three 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”.
“Desire for Knowledge” reflects on the human desire for knowledge. Initially skeptical of Aristotle’s statement about this inherent desire, the author later realizes that it applies not only to Brazilians but to human nature in general. Olavo observes the prevalent disdain for knowledge in Brazilian society and highlights how even the wealthy and prosperous exhibit a lack of interest in learning. Through personal experiences abroad, Olavo discovers individuals from various social backgrounds who show genuine curiosity and humility in seeking knowledge. The article emphasizes the importance of fostering a culture that values knowledge and encourages a thirst for learning.
“The Power of Knowledge” discusses the process of acquiring knowledge and emphasizes the importance of experience, trial and error, reflection, and self-examination in gaining understanding. Olavo criticizes the belief in mystical revelations and sudden intuitions as insufficient for true knowledge. Instead, he advocates for rigorous self-reflection, intellectual honesty, and a willingness to question and doubt. The article asserts that the desire for knowledge is inherent in human beings and argues against the dismissal of objectivity and the prevalence of subjective ideologies. It calls for a comprehensive understanding of intelligence and its role in personal and social development.
“Without Witnesses” discusses the significance of personal introspection and authenticity. Drawing from Albert Schweitzer’s experience as a child, Olavo highlights the importance of self-awareness and moral consciousness. He argues that genuine moral awareness can only be achieved through solitary self-reflection, devoid of external surveillance. The article explores the role of religious practices, such as the examination of conscience, in nurturing moral consciousness and laments the decline of such practices in secular culture. Olavo emphasizes the need for inner examination, self-judgment, and personal responsibility in developing an authentic moral conscience.
Desire for Knowledge
Diário do Comércio, January 10, 2011
“The desire for knowledge is natural to human beings.” When I first read this opening sentence of Aristotle’s Metaphysics over forty years ago, it seemed like a gross exaggeration to me. After all, everywhere I looked—whether in school, with family, on the streets, in clubs or churches—I found myself surrounded by people who had no interest in knowing anything, who were perfectly satisfied with their crude ideas about everything, and who considered the mere suggestion that their opinions would be better if they knew a little more about the subject to be an insult.
I had to travel extensively around the world to realize that Aristotle was referring to human nature in general and not just to Brazilians. In fact, the most conspicuous trait of the minds of our compatriots was a sovereign contempt for knowledge, accompanied by a neurotic reverential fear of its external symbols: diplomas, positions, media exposure.
This characteristic was observed in all social classes, and it was even more pronounced among the rich and prosperous. Any ignoramus who had inherited a factory, a media company, or a block of stocks from the stock exchange considered themselves an Albert Einstein mixed with Moses and Lao-Tzu, born ready and instantly qualified to pontificate on all human and divine matters without the slightest need for study. If they had read something in the latest issue of Time or The Economist, then there was no stopping them: their certainties soared to the clouds, motionless and solid like bronze statues—always accompanied, of course, by the customary skeptical disclaimers about certainties in general, without the individual noticing the slightest contradiction in that. If the foreign weeklies were missing, an editorial from Folha filled the gap, providing unshakable truths that only a pedant addicted to studies would dare to challenge.
From these brilliant minds, I learned unforgettable lessons: communism has ended, left and right do not exist, Lula is a neoliberal, the Amazon is the lungs of the world, Brazil is a model of democracy, the French Revolution established the reign of freedom, the Inquisition burned one hundred million heretics, guns are the efficient cause of crimes, global warming is an indisputable fact,1 cigarettes kill people from a distance, drug trafficking is produced by a lack of money, whales are evolved hyenas, and the São Paulo Forum is a club of old people without any power.
If I had continued to listen to them, today I would be the dean of the Superior War School or perhaps a senator of the Republic.
Far from Brazil, I encountered nurses, shopkeepers, and construction workers who, upon learning that I was the author of philosophy books, widened their eyes with curiosity, bombarded me with questions, and listened to me with the devoted attention one would give to a prophet descending from the heavens. Incredibly, I observed similar interest and humility among industrial and financial magnates, media and political figures. Even university professors, a group immune to cognitive temptations in Brazil, showed a desire to learn something.
Aristotle was right: the desire for knowledge is innate. It was Brazil that had failed to instill in its children an awareness of human nature, preferring to replace it with a grotesque imitation of infused wisdom.
The Power of Knowledge
O Globo, August 4, 2001
“Test everything; hold fast to what is good,” advises the apostle. Experience, trial and error, constant reflection, and revisiting one’s path—these are the only means by which a person can, with God’s grace, acquire knowledge. This cannot be done overnight. “Veritas filia temporis,” says Saint Thomas Aquinas: truth is the daughter of time. Do not come to me with mystical inspirations and sudden intuitions. They do exist, but even they require preparation, effort, humility, and time. Even Christ, at the peak of agony, posed an unanswered question. Why would we, who are only children of God by delegation, have an innate right to immediate answers?
Learning is impossible without the right to make mistakes and without a long tolerance for doubt. Furthermore, one cannot navigate amidst controversy without granting both sides initial credibility without reservations, without fear, without the slightest inward bias, however hidden it may be. Only then will the truth eventually reveal itself. The true man of science always bets on all horses and wholeheartedly applauds the winner, regardless of who it is. Impartiality is not disinterest or cold detachment; it is a passion for the unknown truth, a love for the very idea of truth,2 without presupposing its content in each particular case.
There is nothing more foolish than the general conviction of our learned class that impartiality does not exist, that all ideas are preconceived, and that everything in the world is subjectivism and ideology. Those who proclaim such things only prove their total lack of experience in scientific or philosophical investigation. By not valuing their own intelligence—because they have never put it to the test—they rush to prostitute it to the first belief that impresses them, and from there, with insane arrogance, they deduce that everyone does the same. They do not know that a total commitment to the power of knowledge blocks, in advance, all partial bets on preconceived truths. If what is at stake for me, in the moment of investigation, is not the thesis “x” or “y,” but the value of my own cognitive ability, it matters little whether “x” or “y” wins: all that matters is that I, as a bearer of the spirit, emerge victorious. No pre-existing belief, no matter how sublime its content, is worth that moment when intelligence recognizes itself in the intelligible. Those who have not experienced this do not know how much more intense, luminous, and lasting human happiness is compared to all animal joys.
Unfortunately, the intellectual class is full of individuals who know only the external apparatus of intelligence—the logic, memory, feelings, each valuing one or another of these instruments more, depending on their personal inclinations—but have no idea what intelligence itself is, intelligence as the power to know the real. It is astonishing how the very power that defines the activity of these people—the intellect—can be despised, ignored, repressed, and ultimately completely forgotten in the daily practice of their nominally intellectual pursuits. The cult of reason or feelings, sensations or instinct, blind faith or “critical thinking” is nothing more than the superstitious residue left in the depths of the dark soul when the sense of the unity of intelligence behind all these partial operations is lost. Intelligence, in fact, is not a specific function or faculty; it is the expression of the entire person as the subject of the act of knowing. Intelligence is not a tool, an aspect, or an organ of the human being; it is the human being itself, considered in the full exercise of what is essentially human in it.
Once, in a debate, I was asked how I defined intellectual honesty. Without hesitation, I replied: it is not pretending to know what you do not know or pretending not to know what you know perfectly well. If I know, I know that I know. If I don’t know, I know that I don’t know. That is all. To know that you know is knowledge; to know that you don’t know is also knowledge. Intelligence, ultimately, is nothing more than the commitment of the entire person in the exercise of knowing, through a free decision of moral responsibility. Hence, it is also the foundation of personal integrity, both in the ethical and psychological senses. All neuroses, all psychoses, all mutilations of the human psyche can ultimately be summarized as a refusal to know. They are a rebellion against intelligence. Revolts against intelligence—thus, in their own way, psychoses—are also the ideologies and philosophies that deny or artificially limit the power of human knowledge, subordinating it to authority, social conditioning, the approval of academic consensus, the political ends of a party, or worse, subjugating intelligence itself to one of its operations or aspects, be it reason, feeling, practical interest, or anything else.
Of course, for each specific domain of knowledge and life, a particular faculty stands out, although without detaching from the others: logical reasoning in the sciences, imagination in art, feeling and memory in self-knowledge, faith and will in the search for God. But without intelligence, what are each of these functions or the mechanical juxtaposition of all of them but a refined form of fetishism? What is an imagination that does not understand what it conceives, a feeling that does not see itself, a reason that reasons without comprehending, a faith that blindly bets without a clear vision of the reasons for belief? They are fragments of humanity, thrown into a dark basement where the blind grope for traces of themselves. Any “culture” built upon this will never be anything more than a monument to human misery, a macabre sacrifice before idols.
Only intelligence, embraced as an ontological status and the highest duty of the human person, can establish the foundation of culture and social life. Therefore, there is no forgiveness for those who, making a living from intellectual professions, degrade and humiliate it. Every time one of these individuals shouts, in whatever language or under whatever pretext, “Down with intelligence!” it is always the chorus of demons echoing from the depths of the abyss: “Long live death!”
Without Witnesses
O Globo, July 22, 2000
We must unmask ourselves to achieve that inner authenticity of a culture in which we may one day recognize ourselves and feel fulfilled.
J. O. de Meira Penna
Albert Schweitzer, in “My Childhood and Youth,” recalls the moment when he first felt ashamed of himself. He was around 3 years old, playing in the garden. A bee stung his finger, and he burst into tears. The boy’s parents and some neighbors came to his aid. Suddenly, young Albert realized that the pain had subsided several minutes ago, yet he continued to cry solely to gain the attention of the audience. Schweitzer recounted this incident as a septuagenarian. He had a fulfilled life, a great life as an artist, doctor, philosopher, and a devoted Christian soul dedicated to helping the poor and the sick. But he still felt the shame of that first deceit. This feeling had traversed the years, deep in his memory, tugging at his conscience with every new temptation of self-deception.
Note that no one around him had noticed anything. Only young Schweitzer knew of his shame; only he had to answer for his act before his conscience and his God. I am convinced that experiences of this kind—acts without witnesses, as I usually call them—are the only possible basis on which a person can develop an authentic, rigorous, and autonomous moral consciousness. Only someone who, in solitude, can be rigorous and just with themselves—and against themselves—is capable of judging others with fairness, instead of being swayed by the shouts of the crowd, the stereotypes of propaganda, or self-interest disguised as moral pretexts.
The reason for this is self-evident: a person must be free from all external surveillance to be certain that they are looking at themselves and not at a social role—and only then can they make a completely sincere judgment. Only the one who is self-mastered is free—and no one is self-mastered if they cannot even look, alone, into their own heart.
Even the most frank conversation and spontaneous confession cannot replace this inward examination because, in fact, they are only valuable when they are expressions of it, not passing outbursts induced by a casually stimulating atmosphere or vain sincerity.
Furthermore, it is not only the moral dimension of consciousness that develops through this confrontation—it is the entire consciousness: cognitive, aesthetic, practical. It is both an approximation and a distancing: it is the solitary judgment that creates the true intimacy of a person with themselves and also creates the distance, the inner space in which lived experiences and acquired knowledge are assimilated, deepened, and personalized. Without this space, without this personal “world” conquered in solitude, a person is merely a conduit through which information enters and exits—like food—transformed into waste.
Now, not all human beings have been blessed by Providence with spontaneous perception and accurate judgment of their own sins. Without these gifts, the yearning for justice perverts into projecting blame onto others and “rationalization” (in the psychoanalytic sense of the term). Those who did not receive them by birth must acquire them through education. Moral education, therefore, consists less of memorizing lists of right and wrong and more of creating a moral environment conducive to self-examination, inner seriousness, and the responsibility of knowing what one did when no one was watching.
For two millennia, such an environment has been created and sustained by the Christian practice of the “examination of conscience.” Similar practices exist in other religious and mystical traditions, but none in contemporary secular culture. There are psychoanalyses, psychotherapies, but they only function in this sense when they retain the religious reference to personal guilt and its redemption through confession before God. And as society becomes de-Christianized (or, mutatis mutandis, de-Islamized, de-Judaized, etc.), this reference dissolves, and clinical techniques tend to produce precisely the opposite effect: abolishing the sense of guilt, replacing it either with a selfish hardening mistaken for “maturity” or with a self-complacent, deflated, and cad-like adaptability mistaken for “sanity.”
The difference between religious technique and its modern substitutes is that the former synthesized, in a single dramatic experience, the pain of guilt and the joy of complete liberation—and this is something “secular ethics” cannot do precisely because it lacks the dimension of the Final Judgment, the confrontation with an eternal destiny that, by giving this experience a metaphysical significance, elevated the yearning for personal responsibility to the heights of a noble soul, a nobility of soul that the externals of “civic ethics” cannot even dream of.
For two centuries, modern culture has done everything in its power to weaken, stifle, and extinguish in the soul of each individual the capacity for this supreme experience, in which self-consciousness is demanded to the fullest, and in which—and only in which—a person can acquire the authentic measure of the possibilities and duties of the human condition. “Secular ethics,” “citizenship education” is what remains on the outside when inner consciousness falls silent and when a person’s actions no longer mean anything beyond infringements or obediences to a code of conventions and casual interests.
“In ethics” there, is pure adaptation to the external, with no other intimate resonance than that which can be obtained through the forced internalization of slogans, clichés, and rallying cries. “Ethics” there is the sacrifice of conscience on the altar of the day’s official lies.
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Editor’s note: Regarding the farce of global warming, see the text “Finally” in the chapter “Revolution,” especially item 6 and the note contained therein.↩
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Editor’s note: Regarding the idea of truth itself, see “Spirit and Personality,” the last text in this book, in the chapter “Study”; and for a more detailed analysis, see “The Problem of Truth and the Truth of the Problem,” an appendix to the Seminar on Philosophy held on May 20, 1999, available at the link: <http://www.olavodecarvalho.org/apostilas/problema_verdade.html>.↩
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