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”.
“Poverty and Coarseness” criticizes the attitude of society, particularly the middle and upper classes, towards poverty and the poor in Brazil. It highlights the hypocrisy of individuals who give paternalistic advice but fail to provide practical help. Olavo argues that true education and respect should be shown to those in need, rather than treating them as inferior or undeserving. He emphasizes the importance of individual acts of kindness and genuine human interaction in addressing poverty.
“Learning from Dr. Johnson” reflects on the test of a civilization’s greatness based on its treatment of the poor, quoting Samuel Johnson. Olavo criticizes society’s inclination to delegate the responsibility of caring for the poor to the state, emphasizing the need for direct engagement and compassion. He contends that true freedom and genuine acts of help come from individuals, not bureaucratic systems. He urges people to confront poverty with empathy and personal involvement, rather than relying on abstract solutions or neglecting the plight of the poor.
“Rights and Poverty”, an excerpt from "Two Notes", discusses the moral obligation of the rich to help the poor. It argues that while the rich have a moral responsibility to assist the poor, it does not imply that the poor have a “right” to be helped. The article highlights the relativity of obligations and the universality of rights, emphasizing that the lack of means to help the poor does not make it illegal or criminal. It criticizes the notion that a society with poor individuals is inherently unjust and challenges the idea of a social debt that can be repaid to a single individual.
“A Parallel between Eric Voegelin and Lula”, an excerpt from "A Classic and a Parallel", draws a comparison between philosopher Eric Voegelin and former Brazilian president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva. It describes Voegelin as a renowned philosopher who remained humble despite his academic success, while Lula, born poor, acquired aristocratic tastes as he ascended the political ladder. The article highlights the different paths individuals take to rise in society and suggests that Lula’s transformation may reflect a discrepancy between his proletarian background and his newfound wealth and status.
Poverty and Coarseness
Bravo!, July 2000
In this country, you can’t ask for a job or borrow money from an acquaintance without them immediately assuming a paternal attitude, giving you advice, scolding you, calling you irresponsible, careless, and soft in the head. And be grateful to God if they do it in a jovial tone and don’t turn the subtle humiliation into an overt massacre. After the scene, they leave satisfied, with a sense of duty fulfilled, and consider themselves exempt from finding you a job or lending you money. And you? Well, you leave broke, unemployed… and guilty.
That same person is capable of, on the same night, hosting a dinner and taking utmost care to ensure that the table setting and seating arrangement strictly adhere to the rules of proper etiquette.
A sure sign of barbarism in a society is the excessive attention given to conventional signs of good manners and the disregard or ignorance of the basic principles of coexistence that constitute the very essence of good manners.
The barbarian, the savage, can memorize the rules and imitate them in front of those who think they care about them. But they don’t grasp their spirit, they don’t realize that they are just a guidebook of kindness, attentiveness, and goodness, which can be discarded as soon as one learns the true meaning of being considerate, attentive, and kind.
My father was a relaxed man who would sometimes receive visitors in his pajamas. But he would address every beggar who approached him on the street as “sir,” and without him saying a word, I learned that a person in difficulty needed more demonstrations of respect than those in normal situations. The more respectful, careful, and scrupulous each person should be with a friend who, overcoming the natural resistance to showing inferiority, comes to ask for help! This elementary rule is systematically ignored among our middle and upper classes, especially by those who consider themselves the most cultured, the most civilized, and—God help us—the greatest friends of the poor.
I am horrified when I see someone shoo away a parking attendant as if they were a dog, and I have never seen anyone do it with the ease, aplomb, and clear conscience of a left-wing intellectual! In the 1960s, it was said that helping the poor individually was “bourgeois alienation,” sentimental opium, a substitute for the saving revolution. Forty years have passed, the saving revolution did not come (where it did, the poor became even poorer), and two generations of the needy have tightened their belts even more in deference to the revolution’s priority. But I don’t know a single communist militant from my time and milieu who isn’t financially secure, who doesn’t flaunt the acquired financial security as a sign of triumphant maturity, thanks to the patronage of the political mafia that still dominates the job market in the press, advertising, higher education, and the publishing world.
Today they no longer need the revolutionary pretext to shoo away parking attendants. Their discourse has become official. City councils and state governments warn us, with pious posters, not to give alms. Yes, individual charity is on the decline. The fruits of human kindness should not go directly into the pockets of the needy; they should go to NGOs and government agencies, supporting employees and directors, financing political movements, paying for rent, administration, advertising, and transportation, so that in the end, well, at the very end, if there’s anything left, it becomes soup for the poor, in front of the cameras, for the glory of Saint Betinho.
Some people in this country are disgusted by official corruption. Well, I am disgusted by official charity.
There are still those who say, “But if you give money, the person will drink it on the first corner!” Well, let them drink! Once they have it in their hands, the money is theirs. Do you want to educate the poor “for citizenship” and start by denying them the right to spend their own money as they see fit? Do you want to educate them without first respecting them as free citizens who, tormented by poverty, have the right to get drunk just as much as a bankrupt banker would, mutatis mutandis? Do you want to educate them by imposing the humiliating lie that their poverty is a kind of inferiority, a biological deficiency that renders them incapable of managing the three or four reais they were given as alms? No! If you want to educate them, start with the most obvious: be polite. Say “sir,” “madam,” ask where they live, if the money they were given is enough to get there, if they need a sandwich, medicine, friendship. Do this every day, and in three months, you will see that man, that woman, rise from their miserable condition, straighten their spine, fight for a job, and succeed.
In truth, the barrier that prevents poor and beggars in Brazil from having a better life is less economic than social. Let’s do a test. How much does a chicken cost? Roasted, with stuffing. Five reais at most, usually less. So, a beggar begging for alms in any of the major Brazilian cities can afford to eat at least one chicken per day, if not two, and still have money for transportation. To give you an idea of how wealthy and generous a country where this is possible is, try this comparison. When Franklin D. Roosevelt launched the New Deal, one of the main objectives of the ambitious economic plan was announced on the radio as follows: “Ensure that every family in this country has a chicken on their table each week.” Did you hear that? A chicken per week for four or five people. At the time, it seemed like an almost utopian ideal. Well, we are in a land where old helpless women crawling the streets eat a chicken per day, where street children beg for alms in front of McDonald’s to complete the price of a Big Mac with fries every three hours, where hungry babies exhibited by their weeping mothers wear disposable diapers, where houses in impoverished neighborhoods have satellite dishes, and garbage pickers communicate with their partners via cell phones.
On the other hand, let’s do another test: take a dirty and ragged person, give them a lot of money, and have them enter a clothing store—not even an elegant one, just any store—to buy a suit. They will be shooed away. And if they shout, “I have money!” they will end up at the police station, with a spotlight in their face, having to explain themselves very clearly, unless they are forced to slip “something” into the sergeant’s hand.
The same poor person who can eat a chicken per day has to eat it on the sidewalk, with the dogs, because they don’t have access to the places reserved for human beings. It’s true that you, the restaurant manager, feel uncomfortable putting a crippled and smelly person in the midst of your distinguished customers. But don’t you see that sending them to eat on the street is even more impolite? At least feed them in a discreet corner, talk to them about the difficulties of life, offer them a shirt, a pair of pants.
Be polite, damn it! Because if you, who are well-employed and well-dressed, have the right to be rude, what kind of politeness can you expect from the poor? If one day, tired of being kicked, they tell you to go to hell, you can’t say they lack a sense of proportion. And don’t give me that story of “if I treat one beggar well, the next day there will be a line of them at my door.” That may be true in isolated cases, but not in the final calculation: if all restaurants treat beggars well, soon there will be more restaurants than beggars. Count the beggars and restaurants on Avenida Atlântica and tell me if I’m not right. And that doesn’t even take into account the bars and bakeries.
The Brazilian middle and upper classes are becoming a stupid people who cry out against poverty amidst abundance because each one refuses to use their resources to alleviate the misery of those within their reach, and everyone waits for a magical solution that will instantly change the overall situation. They suffer from extreme platonism: they believe in the existence of a general entity, endowed with its own metaphysical substance, independent of the particular cases that make it up.
That’s why when Collor’s propaganda came up with the idea of “don’t vote for Lula because he will force every wealthy family to adopt a street child,” I said to myself, “Damn, if that were true, I would be glad to vote for Lula.” I only believe in people helping people, one by one, not in the Platonic magic of “structural changes,” the pretext for revolutions and killings that always result in more poverty.
In truth, those who believe in them make a mistake even in naming the general problem. When, revolted by the Brazilian people’s misfortune, we cry out “hunger!” something is amiss in our perception of social reality. Most of the time, what is lacking is not food, not money: it is people understanding that poverty is not a stigma, not a dishonor; it is something that can happen to anyone, and no one can free themselves from it with money alone, without the psychological reinforcement of an environment that helps them feel normal again and, in short, a member of the human species.
Among the cultural causes of poverty, the main one is not found in the poor: it lies in the lack of education of others.
Learning from Dr. Johnson
Diário do Comércio (editorial), March 21, 2007
Dr. Samuel Johnson, a marvelous writer and an 18th-century predecessor of modern conservatives, said that the definitive test of a civilization lies in its treatment of the poor. In his time, no one had yet come up with the brilliant idea of getting rid of them by handing them over to the care of the state bureaucracy. Even if this idea is not put into practice, it is already a test: it shows that society doesn’t know what to do with the poor, doesn’t want direct dealings with them, and would prefer to reduce them to yet another abstract, invisible, and odorless item in the state budget. It finds this more hygienic than reaching into its pocket when they ask for a handout and infinitely more palatable than having to engage in conversation with them when they have the audacity to strike up a conversation on the street with His Excellency the taxpayer. In fact, the modern citizen desires to shirk all responsibilities onto the State: they don’t want to protect their home but to be protected by the police; they don’t want to educate themselves to educate their children but to hand them over to technicians who will turn them into politically correct robots; they don’t want to decide what to eat, drink, smoke, or not smoke: they want the medical bureaucracy to impose the ready-made prescription; they don’t want to grow, become aware, be free and responsible: they want a paternal state to carry them on its lap, against which they can still throw a tantrum, stomping their feet in defense of their “rights.” The State smiles, because it knows that the more rights it grants to this idiot, the more laws are promulgated, the more employees are hired to enforce them, the more bureaucratic offices are created, the more taxes are collected to feed them, and ultimately, the smaller the margin of freedom for millions of fools laden with rights.
This civilization has already condemned itself: composed of selfish and cowardly brats, it is incapable of defending itself. At the first stronger blow from the communists, the radical Islamists, or the self-proclaimed rulers of the world, it kneels down, renouncing millennium-old loyalties and readily offering to transform itself into whatever the new boss desires.
Not everyone, of course, accommodates themselves so well to this delightful agony. There are still true men and women, capable of acting on their own, without the intermediary of the state, proud of their freedom. They know that true freedom has nothing to do with “rights” granted by the cunning bureaucracy. They know that freedom comes from the heart and depends on deeply rooted inspiring symbols in the culture of millennia. When approached by a beggar on the street, they know they are not faced with an administrative problem. They don’t run to hide under the skirts of bureaucracy. They see the beggar as an equal temporarily fallen, deserving as much care and attention as they themselves would in similar circumstances. They don’t hesitate to give the unfortunate person some money, to talk to them, sometimes to take personal responsibility for lifting them out of their wretched condition, giving them work, shelter, advice.
Society has condemned itself when it turned its face away from beggars, dreaming of turning them into an administrative equation. Only true men and women can save it from ultimate abjection. I have no hesitation in including Mr. Fausto Wolff among them. He is stupid, conceited, and a communist, but thanks to the good influence of his wife, he is becoming a decent human being. Just look at what he wrote in Jornal do Brasil on January 2nd:
My wife carries ten reais in coins in her purse to give to the boys who ask her for money to eat. The other day, she told me a story that moved this old granite heart of mine. A five-year-old black boy asked her for money to buy bread. She said to him, “Of course, my dear little boy.” The boy’s eyes filled with tears. He walked away and quickly returned, asking for more money, but in truth, what he wanted was to hear her say that he was dear. Soon, others approached just to hear loving words and feel like human beings. In ten years, will they be setting buses on fire?
That’s it, Mrs. Wolff! If all Brazilian women teach their husbands this, a smile of hope will shine on the faces of millions of children in this country.
Rights and Poverty
[in: Two notes]
Diário do Comércio, January 8, 2013
Thomas Sowell said: “I have never understood why it is ‘greed’ to want to keep the money you have earned, but not greed to want to take somebody else’s money.” Mutatis mutandis, the moral obligation that the rich have to help the poor, even when taken in an absolute and uncompromising sense, never implies that the poor have the “right” to be helped.
Every right that one person has implies obligations for someone else, but not every obligation that weighs on someone generates rights for anyone else.1
The reason for this is simple and self-evident: every moral or legal obligation is relative because it is limited by the availability of means, while a “right,” once established, is universal and unconditional. Once it is decreed that the poor have the “right” to state or private aid, the mere lack of means to help them becomes automatically something like an illegality or a crime, and the whole society, the poorer it is, will deserve more and more the label of criminal, so that the poverty of some will be a kind of merit and that of all, an abominable offense. If this sounds too concise, analyze it and you will see that it is correct.
From the failure to understand this obviousness stems the monstrously perverse notion that a society with poor people, or many poor people, is an "unjust society."2 In principle, and in the light of reason, every moral or legal obligation is conditioned by the golden rule of law: Ad impossibilia nemo tenetur, “no one is obliged to do the impossible.” For this reason, the obligation to help the poor does not give them any right to demand it. The absurdity of this demand becomes clear in the delirium of Luís da Silva in the novel Anguish by Graciliano Ramos: “There are creatures I can’t stand. Bums, for example. It seems to me that they have grown a lot, and, approaching me, they won’t beg, they will shout, demand, take something from me.”
And Luís da Silva is not a fearful bourgeois facing the revolt of the unfortunate. He himself is a resentful pauper, without money to pay the rent. Only in the world of hallucinations is poverty, in itself, a source of rights.
In the past, even Marxists understood this. They believed that the industrial proletariat had the right to expropriate the bourgeoisie not simply because they were poor, but because they were the material creators of social wealth. The horde of unproductive wretches, the lumpenproletariat, only deserved their contempt. It is the obvious: no one becomes an “exploited” simply by being without money. To be exploited, one must first produce something and then be unjustly deprived of it. Since the proletariat refused to join the revolutions, the theorists of Marxism promoted the lumpenproletarian scum to the status of universal creditor and bearer, ipso facto, of the intrinsic authority of the moral virtues lacking in the rest of society. From there, it is a short step to deifying delinquents.
From insensitivity to these facts comes the notion of “social debt.” Any candidate who proposes their election as the payment of a social debt is, with all evidence, a charlatan from whom nothing good can be expected. If the debt exists and is social, it can never be redeemed by payment to a single individual. The very fact that this individual presents himself as a symbolic creditor, heir, and living summary of several generations of injured interests already shows that he is a swindler, as he neither accepts symbolic payment nor has a way to pass on the effective payment to the deceased creditors whose credit he unjustly appropriates.
Every voter in their right mind should think about this before voting for individuals like Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva or Barack Hussein Obama. But as soon as poverty becomes a source of “rights,” it is inevitable that the careerist devoid of merits of their own will invest themselves with imaginary prerogatives derived from the poverty of others, imposing themselves as the sole recipient of the “social debt”—a swindler elevated to the second power.
A Parallel between Eric Voegelin and Lula
[in: A classic and a parallel]
O Globo, June 7, 2003
Eric Voegelin was one of the greatest philosophers of the 20th century. His work Order and History, in five volumes,3 synthesizes and organizes, in a global reinterpretation of history, a vastness of knowledge almost unimaginable, from Egyptian inscriptions to the latest developments in law, economics, and linguistics. It surpasses Hegel, Spengler, and Toynbee combined. Coming from a poor background, Voegelin went hungry to study. He remained a simple man, out of place in fancy environments. At the height of his academic glory, he wore worn-out suits, smoked cheap cigars, and had no class whatsoever in the consumption of wines: he drank the good and the bad, unable to distinguish between them, falling asleep embarrassingly after the first glass. He often forgot to cut his nails, yellowed from smoking. His colleagues said he was “an intellectual aristocrat with proletarian tastes.”
Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, president of the largest country in Latin America, was born poor and, throughout a career of spectacular political successes, changed his habits. He learned to appreciate fine wines, select the best cigars, appear in public with polished nails, and wear Armani suits, indistinguishable in everything from a wealthy born rich person. At the height of his worldly glory, he boasts of not knowing how to speak English, but in his speeches in Portuguese, nothing is left except grammatical errors. He is an intellectual proletarian with aristocratic tastes.
There are many ways for a pauper to rise in life. Each one, as they ascend the social ladder, gathers the goods that, in their poor days, seemed most desirable to them. And each victorious individual is surrounded by admirers who deserve them.
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Editor’s note: For a detailed analysis of the concept, see the text “What is Right?” by Olavo de Carvalho, lecture from the Philosophy Seminar on September 22, 1998, available at the link: http://www.olavodecarvalho.org/apostilas/direito.htm.↩
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Editor’s note: See the section “Society vs. Guilt” in the chapter “Revolution,” especially the article “Just Society.”↩
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Editor’s note: All published in Brazil by Edições Loyola, São Paulo, under the title Ordem e história, with the first three volumes (“Israel and Revelation”; “The World of the Polis”; “Plato and Aristotle”) in 2009, and the last two volumes (“The Ecumenic Age”; “In Search of Order”) in 2010.↩
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