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”.
“A Chapter from Memories” is a personal reflection on the author’s childhood experiences and the challenges he faced while growing up. The writer recounts a particular incident from his early years when he struggled to understand and confess sins during a religious ceremony. Later, he reflects on the discrepancy between the reality of his inner self and the societal expectations he felt compelled to conform to. The author points out that many people hide their true selves behind stereotypes and pretenses to fit into society. He criticizes Brazilian society for its lack of genuine connections and for valuing appearances over authenticity. The passage delves into the complexities of human existence, individuality, and the difficulty of genuine communication in a society that often settles for superficiality.
“Dead Horses” discusses the prevalence of insincere and fake characters in Brazilian literature and society. The author argues that many individuals in Brazil adopt a false consciousness, creating a culture of pretense and avoidance of reality. Brazilians engage in public debates where discussions are based on superficial names and signals rather than genuine understanding. The article highlights the pervasive use of collective condemnation of certain things, even without a proper basis, as a way for individuals to seek approval and solidarity. The author also criticizes the dominance of certain historical narratives and their association with moral values, resulting in a society where being normal is prohibited. The article concludes with a metaphorical comparison of Brazilian debates as a series of futile kicks in a cemetery of dead horses, representing the endless cycle of pretense and insincerity.
“The Hysterics in Power” discusses the author’s disturbing experiences with individuals who have adopted group or ideological stereotypes, losing touch with their genuine personalities. These people become hypersensitive to opposition and blind to reality, often occupying leadership positions within emotionally charged groups. The author attributes this transformation to strong emotional group unity, leading to the decay of individual consciousness and intuitive intelligence. They criticize leaders of various movements, like leftists, LGBT activists, and feminists, for embodying this hysteric behavior. The article emphasizes the importance of imagination and empathy for healthy dialogue and civilized coexistence, warning that a society with many hysterics in power can lead to deteriorating relationships and an increase in lies, dishonesty, and crime.
A Chapter from Memories
Diário do Comércio, June 23, 2008
Allow me, dear reader, to begin this article with an episode from my wretched life, from which I hope to draw some conclusions of general interest.
As soon as I arrived in this world, a strange lung infection delayed my official entrance for seven years, reducing me to a state of feverish and delirious unconsciousness, from which I only emerged on the day of going to school, although my detractors say I never left that state.
Clad in my school uniform, I appeared outwardly like the other boys, but inside, I was like a baby, simple-minded as a little bird, completely ignorant not only of sins but of everything else.
As the school was a religious institution, the teachers read me passages from the Gospel that moved me to tears. But then, through a logic that eluded me, they deduced and assigned me the task of confessing my sins, of which the only one that occurred to me, in my despairing poverty of knowledge, was the original sin. Concealing as best as I could my radical misunderstanding of the situation, I entered the line for the confessional, hoping that everything would become clear when my turn came. But that’s when it got worse. From behind a semi-invisible curtain, an unidentified priest asked me, “Have you done nasty things?”
I had no idea what those nasty things could be, but whatever they were, they seemed to be common to all of humanity. So, just to be safe, I replied, “Yes.” And I already felt relieved by my success in this initial test when the priest pressed on, “With boys or girls?”
Now he got me, and I was terrified. How could I suppose that this mysterious and unknowable offense was committed with both sexes? Not wanting to give in, though, I declared firmly, “With both.” Having done that, I was released to the lighter part of the service, which involved praying ten Our Fathers and ten Hail Marys, something I already did regularly without having to go through that preliminary embarrassment.
Several months passed before I received any reliable information about the nature of those nasty things. Even after being informed, I continued to doubt that people actually did those things, which seemed utterly senseless and tedious to me. Having arrived late in a world full of stimuli and challenges, I couldn’t conceive that anyone would waste their time “doing nasty things” instead of engaging in more substantial activities like playing marbles, pretending to be Roy Rogers, or going to the matinee to watch Tom & Jerry cartoons.
Later, I was told that some boys engaged in an exercise called “switching,” but since I never saw any of them doing it, I remained skeptical, pretending to believe it all so as not to displease anyone and not to seem even stranger than I felt. Those nasty things, if they indeed existed, must be the concern of grown-ups, those boring people who only talked about dull subjects—debts, illnesses, housekeeping, corrupt politicians, thieving soccer referees—and, to top it off, thought it was normal to eat broccoli instead of ice cream. What charm could there be in their filthy doings was completely beyond my grasp.
When I finally understood what it was all about, I admitted that there might be some interest in it. However, another phenomenon caught my attention, and this was far from amusing: reflecting on the experience of my first confession, I discovered the immeasurable and bottomless abyss that can exist between the reality of our soul and the standardized images we are called upon to personify in society—images by which others recognize us, call us by our name, and through repetition, we eventually come to believe in them, suffocating the memory of our actual experience and replacing it with a convenient arrangement of appearances, which, in turn, fit so well with the needs of daily communication that we end up thinking they are the true “self.”
At this point, the part that remained nameless in me didn’t completely vanish. Excluded from the world of language, it became my personal repository of ghosts, unconfessed fears, unspeakable shames, and incommunicable sensations.
During my period of illness, I experienced more pain and suffering than most boys my age could even imagine. It was a whole dark, oppressive, closed-off universe. Above all, it was incommunicable. I could see the anguished faces of my mother, father, and uncles, trying to take my pain upon themselves but only able to observe it from the outside, helpless and tormented in vain. Everyone goes through a similar experience one day, whether through illness, poverty, madness, abandonment, or imprisonment. My difference was that I encountered this dark side of life before knowing anything else. When I emerged from that hell, everything around me seemed so interesting, so beautiful, so enticing that the idea that someone might get bored to the point of seeking an extra source of delights seemed simply implausible to me. I didn’t know about sex, and in my fascination with everything else, I couldn’t imagine that anyone would need it (everything I later read about childhood sexuality seemed utterly absurd to me). But the strange conjunction of premature experience of human suffering with radical ignorance of elementary facts of physiology made me a living incongruity, like Lao-Tse, who was born old and gradually became a baby. Of course, I wasn’t the only odd one in the universe. Later, I discovered that each human being has something radically different inside, a private enclosure that language can hardly penetrate. Although it constitutes their most intimate and personal existence, it will be completely ignored by those who think they know them. The richness and interest of human interaction lie in using stereotypes as mere entry tickets into that enclosure, discarding them as soon as we delve deeper into the other’s soul. But how could we do that when everything around us invites us to embody stereotypes more and more diligently, with an increasingly perfect imitation of sincerity, until we end up believing they are us?
Human societies can be compared—and judged—by their success or failure in transforming common language into an instrument for genuine encounters between human beings. From all I have seen and lived afterwards, I concluded that Brazilian society stands out for its complete lack of interest in doing so, for its complacent accommodation to a coexistence based solely on stereotypes. This is what the Count of Keyserling, that astute observer, noticed when he said that while in other countries, people only imitate what they want to become in the future, Brazilians content themselves with imitation as such, excelling in it to the point of forgetting that it is possible to be something in reality and ending up believing that the only thing to expect from life is success in pretense. It’s no wonder that the work of our greatest fiction writer is a gallery of pretenders, hypocrites, and clowns unlike anything seen in the world. In Machado de Assis, the only sincere character, the only one who speaks to himself and tries to understand himself and others, Counselor Aires, ends up living in prudent and secluded isolation. That explains much of our politics.
In my case, the confession, which should have been the most intimate encounter of inner conscience with the all-seeing observer, turned into a complete mismatch between the routine of a bored confessor and the mental confusion of an ignorant boy. Pope John Paul II hit the nail on the head when he said that Brazilians are Christians in sentiment but not in faith. There is no faith without inner life, but that inner life begins with the entrance into that closed and dark enclosure and the effort to communicate the incommunicable. Brazilians find that too distressing, and seeking relief in easy familiarity, they end up becoming their own stereotype.
Dead Horses
O Globo, February 17, 2001
If it is true that novels, short stories, and plays reflect something about the psychology of peoples, we Brazilians should seriously pay attention to the following fact: no literature in the world is as abundant with insincere and fake characters as ours. Practically the entire gallery of characters created by Machado de Assis, Lima Barreto, Graciliano Ramos, Arthur Azevedo, Marques Rebelo, Nelson Rodrigues, and many others consists of small frauds, weak and unprincipled, for whom existential lies have become a second nature.
They are not conscious liars, Machiavellian, or demonic. We don’t have an Iago or a Verkhovensky Jr. (the evil revolutionary from Dostoevsky’s The Demons). They are rather personalities with feet of clay, erected upon false consciousness, deviating from the focus of attention. They instinctively slide away from reality, as if afraid to know themselves, to suddenly encounter the image of their own inner misery. Timid and elusive, they incessantly adorn themselves with verbal masks, the exchange of which fills nine-tenths of their waking lives. The remaining tenth—when it reaches consciousness—is secret and repressed anguish that dare not speak its name.
In Lukács' typology, which distinguishes between characters who suffer because their consciousness is broader than the environment they live in, and those who cannot grasp the complexity of the environment, Brazilian literature has created a third type: those whose consciousness is neither above nor below reality but beside it, in a world entirely made of rhetorical fictions and histrionic affectations. In any other known society, such a type would be condemned to isolation. They would be considered eccentric. In Brazil, on the contrary, this is the dominant type: pretense is widespread, the escape from reality has become an instrument of social adaptation. However, in this case, adaptation does not mean efficiency, but rather accommodation and complicity with the general deceit, which produces widespread inefficiency and chronic failure, leading to seeking relief through new performances, either of revolt or optimism. As they conform to Brazilian society, their soul drifts away from reality—and vice versa. Having one’s head in the clouds, systematically giving things false names, living in a state of permanent disconnection between perceptions and thoughts is the normal state of Brazilians. The realistic, sincere, direct, and efficient person in words and actions becomes an isolated type, odd, someone to be avoided at all costs, and gossip circulates about them from afar.
My friend Andrei Pleshu, a Romanian philosopher, summed it up: “In Brazil, no one is obliged to be normal.” If it were only that, it would be fine. This is the tolerant, easy-going Brazil that prefers moral laxity to the risk of unjust severity. But beneath the surface lies a fearsome Brazil, the Brazil of mandatory chaos, rejecting order, clarity, and truth as if they were cardinal sins. In this Brazil, being normal is not only unnecessary, it is prohibited. In this Brazil, you can say that two plus two equals five, seven, or nine and a half, but if you say it’s four, you will feel the fire of resentment or the ice of contempt in the looks around you, especially if you insist you can prove it.
Without taking these aspects into account, one cannot understand any public debate in Brazil. When a Brazilian complains about something, it’s not necessarily because it genuinely bothers them. It may not even exist. They just wish it did and that it was bad, to highlight the goodness of the person condemning it. All they want is to create an impression that has little to do with the subject they are talking about. It’s all about themselves, their need for affection, applause, and approval. The topic is a mere pretext to subtly and elegantly make an appeal that, in direct and frank language, would expose them to ridicule.
This psychological ruse is based on provisional conventions, improvised by the media and gossip, which point to public condemnation of several things that are good to criticize. It doesn’t matter what those things are. What matters is that their condemnation forms a “topos,” a common ground: a place where people gather to feel good through speeches against evil.
For instance, a person may not know what transgenic organisms are, but they caught a glimpse in a newspaper that they are bad things. Even better, things with a bad reputation. By speaking against them, the citizen feels the same as everyone else and briefly breaks the isolation that humiliates them.
This solidarity in pretense is the foundation of Brazilian social interaction, the gelatinous pillar upon which a culture and millions of lives are built. In other places, people generally discuss things that exist, and they discuss them because they noticed their existence. Here, discussions start from mere names and signals, immediately associated with values, with good and bad, despite the complete absence of the things being discussed.
For example, you won’t find a single history book that does not condemn the “official history”—the history that celebrates the greatness of the nation while omitting the miseries of class struggle, racism, oppression of indigenous people, and male chauvinistic exploitation. We search in vain for a copy of that so-called “official history.” There are no courses, books, or institutes of official history. Everywhere, in written works, in children’s schools, and in academies of older people, the focus is only on the misery of class struggle,1 racism,2 oppressed indigenous people,3 and male chauvinistic exploitation.4 For four decades, the militant history that opposed official history has become hegemonic and taken over completely. If there is any official history, it is the one they have created. But without an official history to combat, it loses all the charm of conventional rebellion, revealing the white hairs that mark its identity as established neo-officialism—bloated, repetitive, and senile like any academism.
So, should I flog a dead horse? Not exactly. It itself is a dead horse. A dead horse that, to avoid admitting it’s dead, kicks another dead horse. The entire “Brazilian debate” is a series of kicks in a cemetery of horses.
The Hysterics in Power
Diário do Comércio, December 12, 2012
One of the most disturbing experiences I have had in life is to realize, again and again over the years, how impossible it is to speak to the heart, the deep consciousness of individuals who have traded their genuine personality for a group or ideological stereotype.
No matter what you say, even if you show them the most obvious and glaring realities, nothing touches them. They only see what they want to see. They have lost the flexibility of intelligence, exchanging it for a fixed system of repetitive emotions triggered by an insane reflex of group self-defense.
Initially, it’s not exactly an exchange. The stereotype is adopted as a covering, a sign of identity, a password that facilitates the subject’s integration into a social group and, liberating him from his isolation, makes him feel more human. Then, the progressive identification with the group’s values and objectives replaces direct perceptions and original feelings with a schematic imitation of the group’s behaviors and mental gestures, until the concrete individuality, with all its irreducible mystery, disappears under the mask of collective identity.
This transformation becomes practically inevitable when the unity of the group has a strong emotional basis, as happens in all movements founded on a sense of “exclusion,” “discrimination,” and the like.
Of course, I am not referring to actual cases of political, racial, or religious persecution. A simple reaction to an objectively dangerous state of affairs does not imply any deformation of personality. On the contrary, the more exaggerated and unrealistic the group’s complaints are, the more easily they provide the militant with an Ersatz of personal identity precisely because they have no other substance except the very emphasis of the discourse that conveys them.
Corresponding to the desensitization of deep consciousness is a surface hypersensitization, a fake susceptibility, a predisposition to feel offended or threatened by anything that opposes the group’s will.
During this process, it is inevitable that the numbing of individual consciousness brings with it a decrease in intuitive intelligence. Lesser intellectual capacities, purely instrumental ones such as verbal or mathematical logical reasoning, may remain intact, but the living core of intelligence, which is the ability to grasp at a glance the meaning of direct experience, is completely ruined, sometimes forever.
From there on, any attempt to appeal to the inner testimony of these people is doomed to failure. The experience they have of lived situations has become opaque, covered by dense layers of artificial interpretations whose power to express group passions serves as a hypnotically convincing substitute for direct perception.
The individual “feels” that he is expressing direct reality when his speech coincides with the standardized emotions of the group, with the desires, fears, prejudices, and hatreds that constitute the intersection, the geometrical point of the group’s unity.
The cruelest of all is that, as this process accompanies pari passu the progress of the individual in mastering group language, precisely those most damaged in their intuitive intelligence end up standing out in the eyes of their peers and becoming the leaders of the group.
A high degree of moral imbecility coincides there with the perfect representation that makes the individual the ultimate spokesperson for the group’s interests and, to the same extent, clothes him with an aura of perfectly fictitious moral and intellectual qualities.
I don’t know a single leftist, petista, gay rights activist, Africanist, or feminist leader who does not correspond point by point to this description, which, in turn, corresponds to the classic picture of hysteria.
The hysteric doesn’t feel what he perceives but what he imagines. When the gay rights speaker points out the presence of a hundred or so homosexuals among 50 thousand homicide victims as proof that there is an anti-gay violence epidemic in Brazil, it is evident that his natural sense of proportions has been replaced by the rhetorical hyperbole of group discourse, which, in the theater of his mind, passes for a genuine reaction to direct experience.
When the American wife, armed with legal instruments to destroy her husband’s life in five minutes,5 continues to complain about women’s discrimination, she evidently does not feel her real situation but the imaginary drama consecrated by feminist discourse.
When the most pampered and shielded president in our history whines that he has taken more lashings than Jesus Christ,6 he literally cannot see himself: he sees a fantasy character created by party propaganda and believes that this character is him. All these people are hysterical in the most exact and technical sense of the term. And if they don’t feel the reality of their immediate personal situation, how could they be sensitive to the appeal of a truth that does not reach them directly but through the words of someone they fear, hate, and can only see as an enemy to be destroyed?
The root of all dialogue is the nimbleness of imagination that freely moves between opposing perspectives, like a theater spectator who feels, as if they were his own, the emotions of each of the conflicting characters. This is also the basis of love for others and all civilized coexistence.
The presence of a large number of hysterical people in high positions in society guarantees the deterioration of all human relationships, the uncontrollable proliferation of lies, dishonesty, and crime.
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Editor’s Note: Regarding class struggle, see “The Religious Authority of Evil” in the chapter “Militancy,” “Dreaming of the Final Theory” in “Science,” “Academic Charlatanism in Action,” and especially the section “Marxism & Charlatanism” in “Intelligentsia,” along with the chapters “Socialism,” “Revolution,” and others, as the topic is recurrent in this book and the author’s work.↩
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Editor’s Note: Regarding racism, see “Academic Charlatanism in Action” and “The True Black Culture” in the chapter “Intelligentsia.”↩
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Editor’s Note: “Official history says that cannibalism here was only practiced by a few tribes. I don’t know. But many others practiced—and until recently—population control by burying unwanted children alive. With the arrival of FUNAI (National Indian Foundation), this custom was gradually abandoned, and the tribes started to grow. Many of the Indians who now shout against the ‘white invaders’ would have been buried as excess population if the damned Western civilization had not violated the integrity of indigenous cultures, teaching them that killing children is not a decent way to reduce expenses. If it itself, however, is unlearning this lesson, regressing to the point of accepting as normal and respectable the barbaric customs it once helped eradicate, it is normal that it rapidly loses the moral authority it had over the Indians and now listens to them with their heads down, hearing the most extraordinary absurdities.” Olavo de Carvalho, “João Ubaldo e o besteirol,” comments on the text “O besteirol dos 500 anos” published by João Ubaldo Ribeiro in O Estado de S. Paulo on April 23, 2000—http://www.olavodecarvalho.org/textos/ubaldo.htm. In reality, according to Australian journalist Paul Raffaele, who was in the southwest of the Amazon recording a documentary for his country’s TV, infanticide is still happening in certain Brazilian tribes, with the tolerance of the Federal Government. The denunciation, from December 2012, can be seen at this link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b67BsXvZHuM. According to the Atini Movement - Voice for Life (www.atini.org), around twenty indigenous ethnicities still practice infanticide. Also, see the documentary “Breaking the Silence” by filmmaker Sandra Terena at this link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MBjDOqfQlio.↩
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Editor’s Note: Regarding the alleged male chauvinistic exploitation, see the entire chapter “Feminism.”↩
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Editor’s Note: See “The Technique of Seductive Oppression” in the chapter Feminism.↩
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Editor’s Note: “My body would be more beaten than the body of Jesus Christ after so many lashings,” said Lula in a speech on July 23, 2010, during Dilma Rousseff’s presidential campaign event in Garanhuns-PE, referring to the alleged criticisms he received throughout his government.↩
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